They knew each other’s secrets, or a number of them. He’d once cheated in a university exam. She’d been a rampant shoplifter for almost a year when she was sixteen, connected, they both agreed, to her father’s death.
She project-managed everything, including him. He thought of himself as one of life’s foot soldiers. This allowed him to take a back-seat role.
What else? He had a weakness for punning. Her planet had banned it.
Children were an issue, sort of.
Midwinter, he recalled, they stayed at a bach. He was still at the hospital then. She was thirty-four, a kind of accepted Significant Number. On the near-deserted beach they came across a boy using a broken-off car aerial to repeatedly hit a large piece of driftwood. He held up the driftwood and lashed it again and again. Paddy said, That’s something you wouldn’t see a girl do. Earlier they’d been passed by a team of riders, all girls, on horses, in their policeman-type hats, ponytails out the back, trotting along the sand. The horseshoe marks went along the tide-line. Hello, the girls said.
I would, said Bridget, looking at the boy. I’d do it.
The whole weekend they’d discussed having children, pros and cons. It was a working bee type of weekend to clear this up. They’d known couples who’d split up on the question, or who’d been saved by it. But for them the vexedness was quite mute, or characteristically bungled. If she fell pregnant, he said, he wouldn’t mind. And how was this going to happen exactly, she asked. Did he mean, she said, if the contraception failed? Or something more active, along the lines of not using any?
They’d had a bottle of wine at lunch, very unusual, and they were both in a good mood, teasing, gentle. The bach had a television fixed to a shelf so high it gave you a sore neck. The bed wore sacking. The poorness of the accommodation had made them relaxed. They’d both agreed on that walking in. They were both against its meanness, united. Their companionship had always flourished unpredictably though it tended to require a third-party target.
He said that if it happened, pregnancy, he’d be very happy. If what happened, she said. He found he was maintaining ‘pregnancy’ as key signifier as opposed to ‘our child’. Then, he said, what do you think? Shine the bulb in your eyes for a moment, what would you like to happen?
After a while she said, I’m thirty-four now. I’m not on the dark side yet.
And despite this being in direct contradiction to earlier conversations, he let it go.
Ah, moment deferred. Time for a walk. They both were deep in scarves and gloves. She had small blue gumboots for walking on sand. She held his arm. They’d been together for almost nine years, having met in a corporate indoor soccer team for which they’d both been ring-ins on a night the team recorded an apparently rare win. She was tall and strong and showed decidedly unatrophied skills in scoring several goals. He was far more anonymous. Afterwards the team had celebrated at a pub. As newbies they sat together. She had two-thirds of an MBA done. Among his group any sort of economic activity, even that phrase, was incomprehensible, Muldoon-associated. He spoke to her as to a visitor from outer space, a sporty businessy woman with a mean left foot; or he was the alien. When he spoke she stared at him as though he had something in his teeth. He went home. Three days later he received a gift in the mail: a tiny soccer ball. No note. He couldn’t think who would have sent it except the organiser of the team who’d called him in, some sort of thank you for that, which seemed excessive. A couple of days later, another gift: a referee’s whistle. He rang his contact in the team, who denied it. Then he told Paddy that someone had asked for his address, the girl who’d played for them, Bridget.
The idea that he was being pursued produced conflicting emotions. Partly it was the Groucho Marx line about not wanting to belong to any club that would have me as a member. More strongly, the aphrodisiacal effect of flattery. Or simply that of curiosity. He wondered about her body. She was almost his height. Previously he’d observed the four-inch rule or whatever it was.
The boy thrashing away on the beach didn’t look their way even though they were the only people visible. The horses had evaporated. He worked that aerial.
There was a scene he thought of, from the pivotal hotel night duty period. It was the morning and Bridget was going to work just as he was coming home. They met in the kitchen where he was hesitating in front of the cereals. Paddy said that it was hard to know what to eat and this gave her an opportunity to renew the attack. But why say ‘attack’, these were reasonable questions. He was a parody of male inconstancy. Years later when his sister, Stephanie, was left by Paul Shawn, Paddy experienced a shudder of knowingness. He hated Paul and the situations weren’t the same at all and Paul’s behaviour was far worse than his own since it involved small children and boundless and ongoing deceptions, but he recognised himself somewhere in that mess. Paddy had a sense of the mechanism at work. Was he having a crisis? Bridget asked. Was he seeing someone else? Was he losing it? Was he taking Vitamin C? He looked pasty, she said. He looked dreadful. He smelled of hotel.
‘What does it smell like?’ he said. It seemed the only part of the conversation that he could enter safely.
‘Air,’ she said flatly, ‘air conditioned air. Tell me when you’ll quit. Give me a timeline for this crisis at least, so we can plan.’
The shift-work made Paddy even more sharply her opposite. States of mind that were interestingly dreamy then oddly particular had begun to affect him. Sometimes he felt on his head for a cap he wasn’t wearing. He had to repeat the action a few minutes later. He believed he was wearing glasses and reached to take them off. He said to Bridget, ‘Have you ever seen in movies from twenty, thirty years ago, how they walk along the corridor of a hotel at night and everyone’s put their shoes out?’
‘No,’ she said.
He could see his reverie was almost physically painful for her but he went on. He was sure they’d watched these movies together. Part of his Pygmalion phase perhaps. He’d rented the videos and sat on the sofa, her feet in his hands. She always had sore feet, his Eliza. ‘It was a common practice. Perhaps someone came and shined them in the night, it was a service offered. But there are those scenes in movies, showing neat pairs of shoes outside each door. Someone walks along, trying to figure out who’s behind each door from their shoes.’
‘What’s the relevance to you wasting your life? You’d like to shine shoes now?’
‘No but I find that a very powerful and moving image somehow. The empty shoes of those sleeping guests.’ He had other things he wanted to say but she cut him off.
‘I don’t know if you’re even awake right now.’ She peered into his eyes. ‘Why is your hair all grey? Where is your hair gone?’ She was studying him up close. ‘Patrick,’ she said, with a sudden and sincere curiosity, ‘why do you hate me so much?’
This was the cue for them both to burst into tears. Simultaneously they gave way to an unacknowledged grief, which was both surprising and obvious. Oh yes, this. This pain. Their marriage had become a question circling each of them in isolation. Paddy saw the question as a particularly vicious and persistent creature, bird-like but not a bird. It comes and sits on our heads, he thought. It investigates our skulls with its beak-like implement. First it’s my turn, now it’s her turn. You’re never unaware of the other person’s torment but there are intervals of reprise in your own. You mistake this for contentment. For now you are okay. Don’t you realise that soon she will be watching you, equally paralysed, equally fearful, the creature, like something Peter Jackson could toss off in his lunchbreak, sitting, where else, on your skull. Obviously the ideal marriage would be something else, with fewer horned ghouls.
They stood together in the kitchen, not touching, shaking with sobs. He smelled his work-shirt: nothing. He felt gratitude to Bridget for finally putting some clarity into their lives, gratitude and loathing. Paddy didn’t go to work the next day. They sat down and Bridget produced a piece of paper on which she’d written an outline of arrangements for the sep
aration. Paddy felt both excited and bored looking at this piece of paper, as if they were planning a holiday. Yes, he saw the need but he just wanted to be there. Of course they changed their minds the next day—they had to stay together and see this through. They had to. Why exactly? She suggested they both make lists of the reasons they had for continuing to be married.
His list was 1. All we’ve shared. 2. All we might share. He was stuck after that, unhappy. It read very sentimentally. He wanted to add further items such as, My penis fits you, which was drawn from her verbatim account one night. Compliments were nice. He had a number 3. It was, Love question mark. He’d written it out like that. At the last minute he decided against presenting such a hideous piece of equivocation. Also not entered: 4. My need not to disappoint my mother. A great heaving sense of dejection and failure went through his bones when he considered having to announce to Teresa the end. This was separate from and even counter to any actual evidence that his mother would regard the matter with a similarly heavy heart. Yet it was like walking home with a bad school report. You looked into the Hutt River and imagined being swept away. You saw and felt all this even though you were a grown man.
They went to compare lists, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. Except Bridget had come to her senses again. She’d not gone through with hers. His list was the sole list. The situation was horrific, perfect. She looked at his list and then he reached for it and screwed it up.
More than two years before they split up, when he told Lant about Bridget’s episodes of illness and the lack of any discoverable cause, Lant said at once, ‘I think it’s you, Card.’
‘Me?’ said Paddy.
‘You make her sick.’
Lant stood outside the little curtained cubicle in the bike shop while Paddy tried on bike shorts. He handed Paddy different sizes. When Paddy walked out, he said, ‘How do they feel? Are you ready to take on the world in those shorts?’
‘They’re padded in the groin area,’ said Paddy. ‘And behind.’ They were pleasant, like nappies, though that sort of contact made you also feel a sudden desire to urinate, or the fear that you just had.
Then Lant reached inside the waistband and tugged unhappily. ‘Too big,’ he said. ‘Why do we all want to hide our bodies?’ He waved at Paddy’s large teeshirt.
‘The obvious reasons,’ said Paddy. Lant was lean, with the physique of someone sick or extremely fit. When he was drunk, he smoked. He was no paragon. His genes covered more of his faults than Paddy’s did. Both his parents were tall and bony. Paddy’s father had been heavy, his mother was medium. Paddy thought he just looked normally comfortable, normally fattish. A person on a professional salary sits in a chair for twenty-five years, what is the surprise.
Lant made him buy hugging bike shirts as well, and a thin, vented wind-jacket in racing blue that tapered longer at the back. When Paddy bent forward on the bike he wouldn’t be exposed in the kidneys. Clever little jacket. There was also a pocket back there, a pouch.
Later the bike shop riding analyst showed Paddy video footage on his computer of a middle-aged man trying to ride a bicycle. It was a side-on view from a fixed camera, with a fixed bike. Oddly, it was in black and white, or grey—the man was grey, his skin was a lighter grey than his clothes. There was a flickering quality to the image. He looked as though he was biking in the 1920s. ‘See his head position?’ said the analyst. Paddy did. ‘Wrong. He should relax his neck.’
‘I see.’
‘See his shoulders? Wrong. He should be looser there.’
‘Yes,’ said Paddy.
‘Look at his elbows now.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘He should tuck them in, is he a duck?’
‘A duck?’
‘Waddle waddle.’
‘No,’ said Paddy.
‘What does he have wings for?’
‘Tuck them in,’ said Paddy. ‘He should.’ For a moment he forgot who the duck was. He was the fucking duck.
‘What about his foot position?’ said the analyst.
‘Wrong,’ said Paddy.
It was exciting to be inducted like this, in duck-ted, to feel a new world appear on the horizon and to be told of its harshness, its standards, its strange customs, the language they spoke there. The provisions carried their own allure. There was much to buy. They were going on a big journey. Who was worthy? The challenge was invigorating, draining. The bullying was called for, totally. Lant was beside Paddy, observing, shaking his head, making sounds of disapproval at the video, which the riding analyst had now paused.
‘At the top of his pedal motion, he should be here.’ The analyst clicked his mouse and a horizontal line appeared superimposed on the video. The biker’s foot was hopelessly raised above this line. ‘In this angle,’ said the analyst, ‘he’s losing about twenty percent of his power.’
‘That much?’ said Paddy.
‘People are always surprised.’ The analyst peered once more at the frozen screen. ‘So, the head, the shoulders, the elbows, the feet. Apart from that,’ he said, ‘the bike is perfect for you.’
‘And what about the shorts?’ said Lant, unable to resist. ‘Are we happy with the shorts?’
4
When Teresa woke it was dark, early morning, and it wasn’t Friday any more. In fact, it wasn’t even Saturday, which she expected now Friday was gone. Her radio, set on the timer, hadn’t come on because it was too early. Usually she woke to the time pips of the 7am news. But she was wearing her clothes, she realised. This was what had woken her, the feeling of her shirt’s thick sleeves, the touch of cuffs at her wrist, the weight of her trousers on her legs. She was wearing the same clothes she’d been shopping in, when she’d bought the pocket French dictionary and then the sausages and the bread. It felt a bit like someone was lying on top of her. She lifted her head a little—it was all she could manage—and looked the length of her body, a strange view. Just beyond her feet, which were in socks, stood her empty shoes. They were in an upright position. It looked as if they were being worn but not by her.
She let her head fall back again. Her shoulders were flat against the mattress, pinned in place, and she was cold and stiff. She moved a leg and the shoes fell off the bed, striking the wooden floor with a thud. This made her think of Paddy and Helena, next door. Would they have heard? She hadn’t yet gauged which sounds carried and which were mute.
In the toilet her urine was an oaky colour, an extreme concentrate of black tea, as if she’d poured it from a pot. She found herself looking into the bowl, divining. This was clearly a long way from the golden straw her mother used to describe as optimum. Of course Teresa had missed meals and drinks. She drank a glass of water, put on the jug and then she went to the computer. It was dimanche. She couldn’t work it out, how many hours that was, more than thirty-six. She looked it up. Deux jours, almost. Dormir. The screen was too bright for her eyes so she shut it down and went to the drawer for her dictionary. The book was not much bigger than her palm, with a plasticised cover, as though ready to be taken on travels of some kind. She sat in an armchair beside her small lamp and flicked through the pages. Presque. Almost. Presque deux jours. She’d never slept for this long before. She was like a person in a fairytale. And someone had come while she was lying on the bed and put on her shoes and walked around in her place, buying sausages and bread, and of course the travel dictionary. And when Teresa woke up … nothing had changed. It wasn’t over at all. This was the beginning. Because she knew what it was, what she had.
Before she’d fallen asleep she’d put the sausages in the fridge. She remembered this now. All the food had filled her with shame and the box of coloured pens was heartbreaking. She’d texted Steph. She said she’d been vomiting all night, some bug. Bad timing! Sorry to the girls. She was going to bed right now. Go without me. Don’t fret. Go! Yr sick old ma.
Almost at once, the phone rang and Teresa waited until it went on to message. Afterwards she listened to Stephanie. She said that wa
s too terrible and could they do anything? She was always getting sick these days, she had to take care of herself. Well, Paddy was right there so she figured things would be okay. But could she face the drive by herself over that hill? They’d paid the money already and the house was waiting. Could Teresa really not make it, even if she groaned and threw up the whole way, she could have the weekend in recovery mode? But no, if she was contagious, perhaps it was best to lie low. One thing: she wasn’t to get up in the middle of the night and fall over and cut her head open, okay? Loving you, Mummy, she said. Poor old you. Call me when you can on my mobile.
While she was listening to this, Teresa heard her mobile receive a text. It was Stephanie saying she’d left a message. Usually all this connectivity thrilled her. Now it was an assault. Anyway, the text said they would go. The girls had spent all morning sitting in the car, practising to drive over the hill.
Teresa was suddenly tired too, and weepy. Having created the lying situation, her body now seemed ready to make her honest. She did feel rotten. She swallowed a mouthful of bile. All the people she was letting down. Oh girls.
A surge of leaden dullness made her almost fall into the nearest chair. It was as if her senses were closing down, as if some surgery were happening to her while she was still conscious. They were taking out parts of her, the parts responsible for everything and someone was looking at each bit, saying, ‘No, this isn’t it.’ Fault, they were looking for the fault. Maybe it wasn’t a stroke. She was plonked in front of the computer, which for a moment she thought was the television or perhaps the black window of the microwave. One of her neighbours in Lower Hutt had found her elderly husband trying to watch a DVD in their oven. But if this was her mother’s gift, Alzheimer’s, where was the build-up, the misremembered things, the wandering lost in car parks, the secret looks of relatives?
Somebody Loves Us All Page 5
