Somebody Loves Us All

by Damien Wilkins

  Yet things had perhaps entered some new phase. The bathroom fall she’d had a few months ago had seemed to disturb her children greatly. Even Margie had phoned from Canada. For a week or so afterwards, Stephanie had stayed away. ‘I don’t want you scaring the girls with that ghastly bandage on your head. You look like a pirate or a loony.’ Normal service quickly resumed. Steph wanted her as often as ever now, needed her to get through each week, gave her jobs, gave her the girls.

  And Paddy? He had come warily closer, she believed, with a kind of curiosity, a sense maybe that time wasn’t infinite between them, not that he said anything to indicate this. He’d asked her to go over the same story several times. She’d got up in the middle of the night, feeling sick, and she must have passed out. And then what? She woke up, cold, on the bathroom floor. How long had she been lying there? Not long, she thought. She cleaned up the blood. Cleaned up the blood! he said. What was it, a murder scene? Then what? I went back to bed, she told him. I’d put a dressing on the cut. Had she used disinfectant? Had she phoned her doctor at once in the morning? Was she feeling all right now? He wanted to know everything about it. But he seemed to be asking something else too, along the lines of, What phase are we in now?

  Not long ago she’d answered the door of her old house to Paddy and Helena in her gaming headphones. She was also wearing a microphone hooked over her ear. At once she saw it was a mistake. One’s children were too easily disturbed.

  ‘What are you, a call centre now?’ said Paddy.

  ‘Sorry, I’m playing,’ she said. She’d been in the middle of a session and had forgotten the time. That was easy to do. It meant nothing.

  Helena asked about the headphones.

  ‘You feel more engaged wearing them,’ she said. ‘You’re trapped in their sound world. All the senses are heightened.’

  ‘How often are you on this?’ said Paddy, disapproving.

  ‘Every day,’ she said. What was the point in lying?

  She played Cushion, an odd game that was half-billiards, half a strategy test involving nineteenth-century diplomacy. You did deals on behalf of your country—sometimes you were at war, sometimes peace—and then you played your opposition in real-time billiards. That was the odd part. Two games really, joined, and without total success, and yet it was addictive. Cigar smoke drifted across the screen as you were taking your shot. The sound effects suggested drinks being poured, a strange spurting, which she’d worked out belonged to the soda fountain. You were building an empire, or losing it. It was impossible to explain. Her avatar was Cleopatra, which was also outrageous.

  ‘What is an avatar?’ said Helena. ‘It sounds amazing.’

  Her guests pretended to be interested for a while and then thankfully the conversation moved on.

  The scenarios in Cushion were loosely historical and Teresa was very good at it. Recently, she’d beaten someone in Belgrade who then sent her a message written in, she guessed, Serbian. The inserted smiley was a face with a penis being pushed in and out of its mouth. She’d annexed his country. The message board was normally a clean, polite place. Obscenities were quickly removed. But this one hung around for days. Finally she posted: At first I thought it was only your mind that was small. The next day Belgrade was gone.

  Could someone with dementia do all this?

  There’d been more from Pip on Skype: Why do people MOW THEIR LAWNS? Pip was struck by things. The cousins had not seen each other since Pip’s last visit more than ten years before. They were planning a reunion and Teresa had promised to come to her, to see Palmerston North in all its glory. Pip had written: What is wrong precisely with GRASS?

  Teresa began to type an answer and then stopped, changing her status to Not Available. She couldn’t risk it. Her jaw was still, more or less, wired shut.

  She knew what she had now. Bang.

  The French dictionary was in the Whitcoulls bag and she put the bag in a drawer in her bedroom and lay down on her bed. She couldn’t remember taking off her shoes. She knew what she had.

  The ceiling was a set of exposed wooden beams, like the powerful skeleton of an ancient ship. The building was a converted factory and it still carried some sense of machinery, conveyor belts, men and women looking at things for dreadful hours, pulling flawed items from the procession and tossing them in reject piles. Indeed it had been a shoe factory. Sometimes when the lift doors opened and air came up from the shaft, there was the scent of glue, new laces. She imagined it.

  Waking on Sunday then, with Saturday lost, and having looked into the bowl, Teresa finished her tea and picked up her fallen shoes, pairing them in her wardrobe. So finally she knew what she had. It was a tumour pressing on her brain, and the tumour had a French accent. Bonjour tumeur! The set of circumstances that had resulted in her selling up and moving house to be near her son and the rest of the family could be understood in this light. She wanted to die in their arms, the opposite of animals. This was the human mechanism’s command. She didn’t feel in control.

  5

  ‘Know what?’ said Paddy, pointing out the door of his office. ‘I really like keeping my bike in the hallway.’

  The boy made no reply and failed to look where Paddy was pointing.

  How could those wheels have supported him? But he’d been on them already, around the block before breakfast, and he’d come home in one piece, quietly exhilarated he had to admit, keen for more. He thought about telling this boring story.

  The bike’s spokiness, its dream of escape—had the boy even noticed? Maybe these thin bits of metal, the chain, made Sam Covenay think of his braces? For a moment, Paddy was tempted to put the question. But he didn’t. His tactic was indirection. This was his simplest rule. Don’t ask questions and never address a statement to the patient’s face, client’s face, person’s face, come on. Speak into the air above and around and beyond. This was to create a roomful of speech, to avoid making communication an urgent business between two people, with all the attendant stresses—that could happen later.

  The boy had been to a psychologist, two sessions, and then refused to go back. But he kept turning up here, and Paddy kept filling the air.

  ‘I mean it’s not going to last, that arrangement,’ he said. ‘I’m in a grace period. Soon I’ll have to put the bike in our lock-up. A sad day that will be, but necessary. Goodbye bike.’

  Today, even more than in most sessions with Sam, Paddy was struggling. He felt flippant, and a mild bullying instinct took hold. He was even facing the potential erosion of his own precious rules. It had been such hard and unrewarding work. ‘My guess is you don’t ride a bike,’ he said. ‘I see you being driven everywhere by your mother. She does that for you, it’s not taking advantage when she offers. I see you in the back seat, is that right? Even when there’s space up front, you’re in the back, chauffeured, looking out, like a person of importance, like a prince.’

  Sam made no response. There was not even the defensive stiffening in his muscles to betray him. Bit by bit he was training himself to be fully absent.

  The boy was dressed in black jeans, black school shoes, and a heavy black sweatshirt—always. If the backs of his hands sometimes appeared, they were invariably decorated in elaborate homemade scrollwork. Paddy did not imagine the pen pressing with any force into his skin—the touch and detailing was too fine—and he’d said as much to the Covenays, who naturally were worried this was a precursor to self-harm. More likely self-display, Paddy thought, part of the hide-and-seek of his current condition. Now you see me, now you don’t. You think I’m a dead person, then here are creations of that morbidity. Behold my marks. Yes, there was a small skull sometimes visible. The tongue of a snake. Heavy metal dreams.

  ‘Communicating with his father?’ asked Angela. She meant the picture-framing business, that the pictures were directed back somehow there. Yet Alan Covenay appeared sympathetic and tender towards his son. No evidence of detachment. There were photos of them together, bent over a painting. ‘I was teaching him go
ld-leafing,’ the father had explained. It was often the case that one looked in vain for cause. Sam was self-created, his own artwork. The parents, any parents, always nod when Paddy tells them such things but they are not in agreement. Having it as their fault gives them at least a starting point. They are almost always guilty and ashamed. He understands the mechanism. To accede to visiting someone like him is a defeat for them. Deep down they do not believe in me, he thought. That speech should have a therapy seems bogus. They’ve read the Internet forums denouncing my sort, my science. They come armed. Deep down, it sometimes seems, they do not believe in their child, and he hardly blamed them.

  ‘Did you know,’ Paddy said, aiming softer now with the boy, speaking to the far wall, ‘we all get lock-ups in the building?’ He told Sam how there wasn’t much room in theirs and that when they moved into the apartment last year they were combining two households in effect—Helena’s and his. And Helena had a daughter, older than Sam—in her early twenties—but still connected, still with her stuff that her mother lugged around. Paddy paused. Did the boy even know who Helena was? They’d never met. Would he even be bothered to guess? And Dora, here was another name that meant nothing to him. ‘You collect a lot of junk in a life,’ said Paddy. ‘You keep things you have no use for. You give this stuff importance it doesn’t really have.’ He was speaking for the sake of it, to keep himself company. The boy could make you feel sudden bitter jolts of loneliness, unworthiness almost, as if his decision not to talk was a criticism of everyone else’s failure at self-control. The mute were superior and judgemental figures, ungiving watchers of the charade. With Sam, Paddy missed all the people in his life, perhaps even Dora. He thought of the small argument he’d had with Helena when they’d moved in and then he found he was talking about it to Sam Covenay. The kid was right, he had lost self-control. ‘Helena has her daughter’s schoolbooks, her primary school artwork. She hangs on to it. Okay, I get that. But she keeps her toys too. Her dolls and games, everything. I’m not sure why. So she, the daughter, can hand them on to her daughter? Then maybe you make a selection, right? Keep the best items, not everything. Anyway, it all sits down there, behind a steel door. In the dark,’ he said. ‘Like visiting the morgue. That’s where my bike will be. If I can face it.’

  The argument with Helena had had almost no heat in it, coming at the end of their moving day when they’d gone past any snappiness. They were automatons, wandering around with boxes. He wasn’t seriously pressing for a cull of Dora’s old things, and she’d admitted it was probably excessive to travel from place to place so loaded up. But, she said. What? Well, he’d never had to decide anything in this context. Meaning he was childless. Not any more, he told her. It took her a moment to understand he meant Dora. That’s true! She kissed him. You know what they say, he said. A problem shared. She turned away, as if looking for something she’d misplaced, and he understood the joke had flopped. Proceed with caution, oaf.

  And of course the lock-up wasn’t like a morgue. It wasn’t dark. You turned on the lights and the place was ordinary, well maintained, an expanse of smooth concrete, dotted with spots of car oil. But morgues, they were for boys, weren’t they? It was an exciting concept, the dead filed away in drawers, like papers or huge dolls. Skulls and snakes. Heavy metal dreams.

  Sam Covenay saw through this easily, or heard none of it. Impressively, nothing came from him. No sound, no motion, no smell—the last perhaps, for the adolescent male, his greatest achievement. In Paddy’s presence he’d managed to slow his metabolism down to such a rate his body presented with no outward sign of activity. He was inert. A person entering the room might look for his coat on that chair and be surprised to find something animal.

  The boy sat with his mouth full of metal.

  Well, get this, Paddy himself had had braces. They’d talked about it, or he’d talked. He’d been forced to wear horrible little rubber bands that he had to take out whenever he ate. His sister Margaret would scoop them up, fire them at Stephanie. Someone will lose an eye! said their mother. Probably it wasn’t until he was in his twenties that Paddy started smiling again with his open mouth. There were dark grooves on a couple of his lower front teeth. Even now it took a conscious effort to part the lips. He’d shared this. The boy had heard it. Big fucking deal.

  Most annoyingly, the braces hadn’t done much good. All that pointless suffering! This he didn’t say.

  Paddy had stopped speaking. Together they listened to the apartment. It was windy again outside and the building made its periodic, far-off droning sound, a sort of architectural sigh from its lower reaches as the northerly banged into the neighbouring block and into them again, moving down the alley five stories below where they sat. At ground level you’d be able to hear the recycling bins scraping along the footpath. November. They couldn’t ever hear traffic though they were in the middle of town. It was one of their selling points to Teresa. And the drug dealers were very handy too.

  The permanent bass note, a deep throb, tuned almost to some vibration in the chest, was provided by the amenities carried through silvery insulated pipes visible in the building’s corridors. At night you could almost believe you were on a vessel moving steadily through the water. He said this aloud also. He tried poetry, because why not?

  An image came to mind—a very clear picture of another boy, years before, lying in bed, very stiff, partially paralysed in fact, scarcely able to move his head even, but raising an arm and opening and closing the fingers of one hand. Of course it was Jimmy Gorzo. His hand was somehow his mouth, expressive in ways his mouth couldn’t yet be. That had been the first week of treatment. The moaning, and then the fluttering of hands. Paddy didn’t think Sam Covenay, moving zilch, had much to do with producing this image of Jimmy. Paddy had Tony Gorzo again in his brain. Where was his friend? What accounted for his failure to call?

  He was listening hard. What for—the phone?

  Very faintly through the wall today Paddy could just make out his mother’s voice, or someone’s voice in his mother’s apartment. He wondered how the weekend had gone. Stephanie’s three girls were little, very short, and though they were perfectly formed, always with pigtails, always sunnily in dresses, three girls made of jam—pink-cheeked, sweet-natured, always sticky, you could have bottled them—they yet had the capacity to ravage the emotions as completely as any such trio. The three dwarves, Lant called them. Take the gin, Paddy had told her.

  He tried again to decode the sounds from next door. Perhaps Teresa was on the phone. Or perhaps they were listening through the wall to her radio again; it seemed too pure for the TV, which he didn’t think she had much interest in anyway. ‘Can you hear that?’ Paddy asked Sam. It was, after all, the boy’s fault. He amplified any signal. You strained and strained to hear—something. Paddy thought again about Jimmy Gorzo hating the silence of the hospital room and complaining that his brain was growing dull. He needed sounds. Paddy too was growing dull.

  Thirteen years ago Jimmy Gorzo, Tony’s only child, had fallen off a quad bike while at a beach party somewhere up in Northland. Fallen on sand, as Tony liked to repeat. The stuff, he said to Paddy, they have in a sandpit, where little kids play. Tony had never got used to this indignity. ‘They tell me packed sand is as hard as concrete but this was a dune. His mother’s still combing it out of his hair ten, twelve weeks after the accident.’

  When Paddy got to work with him, Jimmy had already spent a few months in the Spinal Unit at Burwood. He’d broken his back, which fortunately for him would mend pretty well. He’d also suffered damage to his cochlea, though this wasn’t clear at first. On the first day Paddy met them all, whenever Jimmy tried to speak, his father would start talking over the top of him to cover up the sounds he was making. The boy would moan and point with his hands and Tony Gorzo would say, ‘Hard to believe he was top of his class.’ He took Paddy aside. ‘What we want to know is, is this it? But no one will tell us. Instead we listen to Jimmy making his monster noises.’

  J
immy’s mother, Ellie, clasped the boy’s hands together and told him everything was all right and to be quiet. His hands flapped, opening and closing, if they weren’t held. Later, Paddy understood these weren’t spasms.

  He was seventeen.

  ‘The first thing I need to do,’ Paddy told them, ‘is to hear Jimmy.’

  ‘You’ll get the idea very quick,’ Tony said. ‘Animal noises, or like he’s been punched in the stomach. Roughly speaking, we think all his sounds refer to the hospital food.’ He laughed and knocked Paddy on the arm. Tony Gorzo had an awful cheeriness about him that at first Paddy mistook for shock; it was actually his way with the world. He punched everyone—everyone except his wife. Perhaps this counted for something.

  ‘We don’t think that,’ said Ellie.

  Jimmy made another noise.

  ‘My wife has developed a system of communication through applying pressure to his hands. It’s not sophisticated. One squeeze for yes, two for no.’

  ‘He responds. He knows. It’s still him,’ she said, growing teary-eyed.

  ‘If he wants to go to university, I don’t think the lecturer will squeeze his hand like that.’

  There was another Jimmy cry, this one longer. He used up all his breath with it, finishing on a sustained high note. His parents looked at him.

  ‘He’s never said that before,’ said Tony.