After they’d come home, Bridget said to him, ‘We’re talking to people, having a conversation, and I turn around and you’re perfectly still, paused, what are you doing?’
‘Am I?’ he said. He was drunk.
‘Yes, what are you doing?’
‘Listening?’ he said.
‘For what?’
‘For what’s being said.’
‘I think you’re listening to something else. You’re listening to how it’s being said.’ She resented his occupation, felt it gave him a spurious excuse to sit back while she did all the work. This was how she conceived of the social world, as labour. He thought she had a point.
‘What and how,’ he said. ‘They make up speech.’
‘How? How is easy. Is she excited, is she mad, is she this or that? You can get that straight away. But you stand there, stunned.’
‘I wasn’t aware of it. I’ll try to be quicker.’
‘And maybe don’t tell people what you do.’ She was sober; she’d driven home, changing gears with an aggressiveness that should have prepared him for this.
‘Really?’
‘Speech therapist. Everyone starts speaking funny.’
‘More correctly?’
‘More something. You may as well say hygiene inspector.’
‘Then what do people do?’ He was fascinated by her, how closely she’d watched him, and this after long periods when they seemed barely to notice what the other was doing. Was this, in the end, what marriage became—harmless ignorance and then a shattering act of intense surveillance? You? I share my life with you? Had she seen him outside with the dog? Of course she was the person whom he’d hoped to tell about Jimmy Gorzo and found himself unable to; it was the same now.
‘They think you’re dirty, unclean. Say you work with kids.’
‘They might think at a kindergarten.’
‘Right,’ she was nodding thoughtfully, ‘that you abuse kids in your care.’
‘They’d think that?’
‘If a man says to me he works at a kindergarten.’
‘He’s automatically a paedophile?’
‘What does he look like?’
‘I don’t know, normal?’
‘Anyway, just talk more, less listening. No one likes a listener.’ She stared at him. ‘I feel you’re doing it again right now.’
‘What?’ he said.
‘Listening.’
How had it happened that he was married to a mad person? He must have been mad too. Finally it had been the dog that had tired of the game with the tennis ball, wandering off across the dark lawn to its kennel and letting out a grand sigh when it settled—an astonishingly human sound, he thought. He and Bridget deserved each other and he wouldn’t find anyone else. Slipping, he searched for the image of himself that Tony Gorzo had proposed in the hospital car park. It appeared and then it was gone. He had gifts and then he didn’t. He looked at his wife. ‘No, no, I promise. I haven’t heard a word you’ve said.’
Here was the issue. He’d discussed it with Lant. We don’t memorise, we memoirise, exactly the sort of word play Bridget couldn’t stomach.
At Sam Covenay’s fourth session they’d tried music. Paddy had asked Sam to bring along whatever he liked. They plugged in Sam’s iPod. For an hour they listened to a sort of thrash, high male voices, lots of guitar solos. Paddy offered the odd comment, leaving spaces for anything Sam might like to say. Paddy was honest. He said when something excited him and when it was awful. ‘Basically,’ he said, ‘I hate falsetto, except maybe in a black soul singer. Al Green, do you know him?’ The session was the same as the others, a zero return. Not a hair on the boy’s head moved while his favourite stuff belted out and while this sad grasping talking moron said stupid provoking things.
Strictly he should have moved Sam Covenay on after the first month, sooner, towards other realms of assistance. But Sam wouldn’t see anyone else, his mother Angela said. He liked coming to see Paddy. He’s said that to you? he asked her. No, she said, but she could tell. And he was always ready to go. Sometimes he was waiting for her in the car.
Paddy had heard her husband call her ‘angel’. ‘Do you have the car keys, angel? I haven’t got them.’ Automatically it seemed she’d reached across and touched the pocket of his trousers. ‘Okay,’ he said, smiling. ‘I found them.’ Angela and Alan. Paddy had watched their drama with the keys, lasting about four seconds, the first time they came to the room and he thought it exceptionally moving. A sort of nothingness to it that gripped him and rather alarmed him at the same time. To what was he attaching his emotion? He had the thought that these two adults seemed more interesting suddenly than their poor familiar son. Why couldn’t they stay and let the boy sit in the car?
Sam had braces, a chin full of acne. To add to the conspiracy against him, he was fair-skinned and his hair, in this light, had a reddish tinge. Angela herself was apologetically freckled—she wore long-sleeved sweatshirts, shoes even on the warmest days. There were women who wouldn’t show their feet—was she one? Was there a connection here? The mother who won’t display her feet, the son who won’t speak? Paddy made a few aimless notes. He remembered seeing his ex-wife Bridget brushing her hair in the bedroom mirror. She was pulling it back with one hand. He said to her that she should wear it like that. What, she said, and then everyone sees my ears?
In a year or so the braces would come off. Sam would grow into his face, his life, as we all did. It was probable that the Covenays were in that small percentage for whom the only action was inaction. This was what Paddy felt when he first met the family—time is a wonderful thing, and patience. He said as much to them. The Covenays of course felt that time had stopped. They looked harrowed. And, against this judgement, Paddy had taken Sam on. Why? To give the parents hope? That seemed unlikely. He treated his job seriously and wasn’t prepared to indulge anyone, not even that deserving pair. So he must have said yes because he considered himself a god—this was Lant’s suggestion. Yet what if it wasn’t success he wanted, and the operation of those gifts Tony Gorzo liked to grant him, but failure? What did it mean to want something in front of you with which you could do nothing?
Surely this was granting Sam’s display of adolescence in extremis a therapeutic potency it hadn’t and couldn’t earn.
Paddy glanced over at Sam now. He couldn’t see his face, just the hair. They had an unspoken—what else—agreement that Sam could assume whatever position he liked. He could sit on one of the chairs, he could lie on the sofa, he could curl up under the desk. He always went for the same chair, the one closest to the door, in front of the cupboard that contained the games and toys used with the younger kids. He’d tried those too, as a way of explaining his profession to Sam. Here is what I do.
Often Paddy stood and moved around the room, finding books off the shelves, shifting papers. It was tactical—to relieve the target of his surveillance—but it also allowed Paddy to get some work done, some other work, non-Sam work.
He took some more notes for his column on the glottal stop.
Of course Paddy hadn’t let the perversity of taking on the Covenay case prevent him from attempting, rightly, to end it. He wasn’t a complete idiot. After a month, Paddy tells Angela that it’s not working and he has real doubts about it ever working. She’s the one who usually delivers Sam and collects him and now he’s already waiting by the lift, ready to go down. They stand at the doorway, talking softly. But she insists something useful is happening. ‘I feel there’s progress with this,’ she says, her eyes locked onto his.
‘Really?’ Paddy says, experiencing a surge of relief that he doesn’t quite know what to do with. He finds himself looking at her shoes, which are running shoes, or rather walking shoes on their way to becoming some sort of sports footwear. They are lime green, with darker green laces. They transmit a kind of health. Angela walks on her toes, he’s noticed, rocking forward slightly. Has this given her feet a bunched look that she wishes to conceal? She likes to stand c
lose when she talks to you. So you can’t see her feet? She’s told Paddy she works part-time at a dry-cleaners owned by her brother and he imagines there’s a faint chemical whiff when she enters the apartment. She’s wearing a pale blue zip-up Icebreaker top and black stretch pants. She could be on her way from or to the gym or Pilates. He can’t inhale because suddenly he thinks this would tell her he was trying to smell her. There’s a brightness to her that seems ready to turn into exhaustion.
‘I think so.’ She pats his arm, rests her fingers on his shirtsleeve. Her hand is hot. She blushes. Her blood is running all over the place.
They both understand she’s merely expressing a hope. She’s not the person in charge. What can she know? Yet he’s genuinely grateful. ‘Thank you,’ he says, almost adding ‘angel’—does he swallow it in time? Sam is holding the lift open for her, one arm reaching inside it as though—okay, as though he’s about to enter a large metal mouth. Back in his office, Paddy adds this to his notes. A lot of what he writes seems fictional, not just in terms of the made-upness but also in terms of images.
Paddy couldn’t hear the voice through the wall any more. Yet he was sure his mother hadn’t left her apartment; the doors made a distinct rubbery sucking sound when they closed, a little like the door on a new fridge. It was one of the quirks of the building that this sound penetrated. There were five other apartments on their floor. With dedication, one could learn a good deal about everyone’s comings and goings. They knew the architect couple, the Harleys, who lived two along, went for walks in the city at the same time every night: eight thirty. They’d met them once, leaving on such an excursion. The Harleys said they liked to examine buildings reacting to night-light, the moon, the stars, the streetlights. The light from humans, Rebecca Harley said. What light? said Helena. The Harleys looked at each other as if it was a very basic question indeed. Then Geoff Harley, by way of a demonstration, held up his wrist and pushed a button on his watch, illuminating the dial briefly. Okay, said Helena. Rebecca Harley meanwhile had her mobile phone out. She held this up to their faces. Watches and phones, said Paddy, they have an effect on city architecture? It’s a micro interaction, Geoff Harley said.
At one session, in search of a subject, Paddy had told Sam about the Harleys.
This he didn’t tell: On Thursdays Geoff went out alone, a bit later, towards nine. Helena and Paddy had played a game. Where does Geoff Harley go on Thursdays without his wife? To examine buildings some more? Humans? What micro interaction was transpiring? One rule was it couldn’t be sexual, that was too obvious. The Harleys already seemed a little wife-swappy, with their slightly creepy routine, their matching dark clothes. Their plastic poster cylinders under their arms. Paddy and Helena had soon created such a stockpile of stories about Geoff and his secret life that it was hard to meet his eye when they bumped into him. His smallest gesture seemed to confirm some detail they’d invented. The way he touched his shirt cuffs when he spoke. His smirk. The bag he carried. They had to stop. But they could still hear him if they tried every Thursday.
Before he started seeing Sam, Paddy set up his usual family meeting, so that everyone knew what was involved. He told them that he was all for speech but that speech took many forms and that elocution was not his business. Amazing how frequently the fathers made a joke about electrocution at that point. One in three, Paddy thought. ‘No putting his finger in the plug socket then?’
Alan Covenay was not among this number. He’d listened carefully to what Paddy had to say. Towards the end, he’d stood up and patted his pockets, asked his wife about the car keys. The slight mournfulness he carried may have had nothing to do with Sam. In tall men who were drawn to cultural things Paddy had often noticed this air of melancholy, a feeling perhaps that the realm naturally favoured compactness. They didn’t quite fit in their seats. You saw these stooping, guilty figures at the theatre, in galleries, at the orchestra where puckish men skipped around them. Then on his way out Alan Covenay stood in front of the framed cartoon that hung in the office. ‘It’s dropped slightly in the top left corner,’ he said. Paddy stood beside him, looking. He was two inches taller than Paddy. Paddy hadn’t noticed it but he was right about the picture. Inside the frame, the print hung crookedly now. ‘I can fix that for you if you like.’
‘Sure,’ said Paddy.
‘I could take it now, if you like.’
Paddy agreed.
‘No charge.’ He reached towards the picture, lifted it from its hook with a deft upward motion, and put it under his arm. When he did this, Sam made a quick sighing sound, or a sound of irritation. Had he watched this before? Was it something his father was prone to—walking into strangers’ houses and leaving with the pictures off their walls? Everyone watched Alan straighten the picture hook.
‘No charge? But you’ll give me an invoice.’
‘He won’t give you an invoice,’ said Angela, more sharply than she’d intended since she at once attempted to recover her tone by mumbling something else about the smallness of the job. It would take Alan minutes. The flicker of annoyance here seemed directed at no one in particular or at everyone. Was she simply thinking of the bigger task they were handing Paddy and that it didn’t seem a fair swap? The difference was Paddy was charging them ninety-five dollars an hour.
Again from their son came the short breath of displeasure, more like a pant this time. When Paddy looked at him, however, there was nothing on his face but perfect tight blankness.
And no one had commented on the content of the cartoon, the caricature of Paddy done some years before but recognisable. Perhaps not. They’re leaving with me, he thought. It was not an existential moment. Strange to see his picture exit the apartment though. He seemed to have had no control over it happening. Alan Covenay would have got his picture no matter what Paddy said.
And then the picture didn’t come back and so much time had gone by that Paddy had begun to think it was now appropriate for the repaired picture to arrive at the conclusion of the therapy. He would give them back their son and they’d return him to him, as it were.
He was that stuck. And he had the bike to prove it.
He’d told Helena about Sam one night in bed. ‘If he puts his fist through a window at school or pushes his mother against a wall, I could refer him to Lant.’
‘Do you think that’s likely?’ said Helena. She was reading People magazine. She had a stack of them in her bedside cupboard. Trash relaxed her and he wasn’t to scoff. Nor was her pleasure ironic. Dora gave the magazines to her after she’d finished with them. It was a vital and ritualistic connection between mother and daughter. They bonded here. Whatever was fraught and difficult and shifting between them seemed insignificant, soluble almost when they regarded the star system, its eternal dilemmas, its alcoholism, its abandoned love children, its surgeries. The relentless sinking of hope. They were briefly lifted. It also meant Helena was free to talk with him while still reading. As she’d pointed out, were she ever to open the 700-page journal of Christa Wolf which Paddy had given her for her birthday in a burst of highbrow Germanic fervour shortly after they got together and which delighted her so much she kept it permanently beside the bed, then all conversation would have to stop.
Sometimes, to prove this, she opened the book at random and read a sentence in German aloud to him. It was like being in bed with someone else.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s possible. I feel so useless with this kid. He sits there in a black heap of unresponsiveness and occasionally I make stupid statements which hang in the room.’
‘But he likes coming and his parents support it.’
‘They might just be clutching at straws.’
‘You’re the best straw there is,’ said Helena. She’d turned the magazine towards the light better to examine someone’s unwanted pregnancy. Paddy could read the headline from his side. Helena studied the photo, shaking her head. Did she believe the pregnancy or not? Often Paddy looked at the People pictures, lying beside Helena
. Even though she’d assured him the candid photos were mostly set up by the stars’ agents, the furtiveness of the famous carried a charge. As they ‘rushed’ from restaurants where they’d been ‘spotted’ or made ‘flying visits’ to ‘anonymous’ suburban shopping malls in big hats and glasses and wigs, their hauntedness seemed real rather than performed. After all, these were not, as a rule, great actors. They couldn’t pretend all that well, could they. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said. ‘I could use that in my advertising. “Looking to clutch at a straw? Ring Patrick Thompson.”’
‘You don’t advertise,’ said Helena. ‘Jeremy Lanting seems premature to me anyway.’
‘Fine, you might be right.’
She flicked over another page. Paddy read the words ‘Rehab Horror’. The thought didn’t flow directly but it came nevertheless. To what extent could it be said that Sam was acting? He came to the sessions so that Paddy could be his audience. ‘Can I ask you one other thing, unrelated,’ he said. ‘What part of your body do you prefer not to show?’ He was thinking of Sam’s mother mostly, of Sam too, Bridget and her ears, but also the general furtiveness of the human race. He was not excluded.
For some reason he was also thinking about the tree full of young tui they’d come across on their walk in Mount Victoria. That was the opposite, wasn’t it. Where you expected hiding, you got display. There was a performance angle, though the birds seemed unaware of being watched, if that were possible. Often a bird’s life had figured as a mind-bendingly anxious business, alertness without rest, the flicking head, the almost ceaseless flight from predation. He was taking as his sample the birds around them, in the city and the hills. No doubt his theory was garbage when you considered—what? Some long-legged creature, wading on a beach at sunset. He didn’t know names. Or an albatross. Anyway, birds had never seemed to him strongly connected with beauty. Careworn, he thought. Small engines of fright, who, when they stopped in trees to recharge, were still charged. They were always plugged in to a current of crisis. They darted around, thinking what next, what next? It was terrible they had to know the present was over, the future was dire. Except these tui.
Somebody Loves Us All Page 8
