Helena put down the magazine. For this, she needed all her attention. ‘What part of my body do I prefer not to show? To whom? Give me a context.’
‘No, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps when you look in the mirror.’
‘Easy, my neck.’
‘Your neck? What’s wrong with it?’
‘Come on.’ She touched it as if it were sunburned.
‘No, really, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Your neck looks fine to me.’
‘Hey, I’m its owner.’
‘One careful lady owner,’ he said.
‘As is where is. Some wear and tear. Highly motivated vendor.’
‘Can the buyer collect? Because I’m interested.’ Paddy ran the backs of his fingers down from her ear to her shoulder. ‘I love your neck.’ She closed her eyes and smiled. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Whatever’s the problem here?’
‘Stroke it and it says, “I like that.” I mean, it works fine as nerve endings, as pleasure centre. As a stand-alone neck, it’s a disaster. It leaves my shoulders from the wrong place.’
‘From here?’ He gently kneaded her left shoulder with his knuckles.
‘You make a good case for it.’
‘As pleasure centre.’
‘Right.’ She gave a loud moan of delight, only half-faked. ‘So much tension. Stupid work. Helena hating the school.’
‘No, it’s temporary, the school, I mean.’
‘Temporary for now, yes. But next time? Probably this is the future too.’
He thought about her success, none of it assured, in total admiration. Having returned in a hurry from Germany in the wake of a nasty split from Max, and needing anything to keep going, she’d become a part-time gardener for a landscaping firm while her daughter was in school. Her CV was the very imprint of will-power. She’d started organising the staff roster and had then discovered a talent for business management. From there she’d managed a café in a garden centre, then a horticultural wholesaler where she bought an interest in the company with money she got after her father died.
There was all that German literature, The Magic Mountain and the verse dramas, but she insisted it was by chance she’d moved from plants back to words.
She’d once had a contract to provide indoor plants to businesses—dentists, lawyers, banks, and a language school. She’d struck up a friendship with the director of the school, also a Germanist, who was about to retire. He offered her friendly terms to buy into the franchise. Now the language school was part of a national network in which she had a financial interest and she was on the board of the governing body. The vital connecting strand throughout these moves was an instinct for investment. Helena had always made sure of something more than salary.
She claimed to have had a lot of luck and to have known good people but she was the person good people wanted to know, that was itself a singular gift. Yes, the future probably did look like this: a bad back, the chewing of grey biscuits, rising at night as if being murdered in her sleep. Yet she loved her school and was proud of it and would never give it up.
Paddy had met her when he was invited to give a seminar for Helena’s staff based on a series of his ‘Speech Marks’ columns. These had dealt with English as a second language from mainly a physiological perspective. The title of the seminar was ‘I Can’t Get My Tongue Around It’. Naturally, this was always mentioned in the story of their courtship.
He continued his one-hand massage. She turned towards him and they kissed, the People crackling between them. He moved his lips to her neck.
‘You don’t have to keep kissing it,’ she said. ‘There are other places, you know.’
One thing with Helena he always marvelled at was that sex was normal, without being attached to an idea which announced smugly, this is normal, get over it. He knew from her German days she was used to nakedness. Swimming naked in lakes et cetera. And she was ahead of him in this. But it hadn’t become dogma. Clothes were good too. Once he referred to her magic mons, and she laughed but there was no question of this sticking, or becoming the starter in a private jokey vocabulary. She inspired him somehow with sex. She was extremely attentive and nothing was dutiful. This was modelling of a very high order. She let him see straightforwardly how sex enhanced her mood, her spirit. Its effects could belong in the realm of ordinary life, and not be confined to the near-dark, or comic release. Once you got over your shame at the woeful inadequacies of the CV you carried there, you felt waves of gratitude for learning this! A torrent of humble joy! He remembered telling her he still felt that it was a bit flattering from the male point of view to be involved in the female orgasm. She shouldn’t take this the wrong way but there wasn’t much to do. He was laughing as he spoke. Great to watch though, she said. Always, he said. And I could say the same thing about the male orgasm, she said. They talked about penetration, which seemed to him to change the rules, involving her in ways that were, um, inescapable. But clitoral stimulation, she said, didn’t feel ‘outside’. I’m in a pretty extraordinary space, almost like a house, when that happens. There’s a, don’t laugh, a staircase, a bunch of steps I go up. Thank god I don’t recognise it as any place, not my family home or anything. Stairway to heaven, he said. Now that would be flattering yourself, she said. It was the sort of disquisition he’d never had before. Solo’s not the same, he told her. Ditto, she said.
She said, why do we say he performed oral sex on her? You perform Gilbert and Sullivan. Does one expect applause having done it?
I feel like clapping, he said.
‘We’re done,’ he told Sam, with a sharp snap of his hands on the desk.
The boy flinched at the noise. Paddy had never done this before and he regretted the cheap trick of it at once. Stupid to try and scare them out of hiding. He thought of Lant’s advice of pulling the boy up by the ear. ‘Same time next week.’
Then in one fluid movement Sam wheeled off the chair and was out the door of the office. When Paddy reached the front door, Sam was there waiting for him to open it, a bit like a dog looking to get outside. It was part of the regime that Paddy controlled entrance and egress. Sam was catching a bus home today because Angela was busy—she’d phoned before the session. They were standing near the bike.
Paddy couldn’t finish like this.
They were both aware that this session had been marked by something new and not altogether pleasant on Paddy’s part: aggression, a weird current of malice. Chill. ‘I might go for a ride later,’ said Paddy, his hand on the doorknob. It was untrue. He needed Lant with him. He was still self-conscious in his shorts and his shirt and his jacket on those trembling, thin rims. In his shiny blue helmet. Then there were shoes that clipped directly onto the pedals. These could prove a special humiliation.
Upright it was more difficult for the boy to hide himself. He had his father’s height. His features were smudged though. The acne was so inflamed as to present almost a second mouth. They’d tried dermatologists, medication. His lips bulged slightly with the concealed architecture. He looked quickly in the direction of the bike, then back again at the door. The action was accompanied by a sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh. A flash of braces. It was easy to imagine his contempt for Paddy and his bike. ‘See you then, Sam.’ Paddy opened the door and he ducked through it, passing so close to Paddy in his hurry that their shoulders touched.
Paddy watched him scoot off down the corridor in the direction of the stairs. He wouldn’t take the lift since that meant further confinement, the possibility of human interaction. Sam Covenay was a shifty dark person, moving erratically. Flight aged him, filled him in. Had one of their neighbours opened his or her door at that moment it would have been to guess that a middle-aged homeless man was loose in the building. He was someone to be reported.
Then it occurred to Paddy something might have just happened a few seconds before. Sam had engineered the physical contact at the door. There’d been room to get by him. Paddy had stepped back to allow him a safe exit, that is, o
ne without collision, without touch. But the boy had carefully, accidentally, made sure of this connection. He’d not barged Paddy either. He’d brushed him, a delicate action.
At the end of the corridor Sam was gone. Paddy looked at the door to his mother’s apartment for a few moments, thinking he should check. Just knock and say hello. That was allowed by the rules surely. Then there was a noise. The door was opening. Medbh stepped out. Our girl.
‘Hello, Paddy,’ she said, ‘what are you doing lurking in the corridor?’
It was Medbh’s first day at his mother’s. Now she was coming to cook for them. It had been Medbh he’d been listening to; his mother had been talking to Medbh. He’d forgotten. ‘I was just seeing off Sam, one of my people.’
‘The boy who doesn’t speak?’
‘Well, okay,’ he said.
‘And by the look on your face, I’m not supposed to know that, am I? How do I know that?’
‘How do you know that, Medbh?’
‘Well, I don’t know the kid’s last name.’
‘Thank God for confidentiality.’
She walked over to him. ‘Moving right along, I’d like to cook eggplant parmigiana for you, Paddy. And also, time allowing, a beef and beer casserole. Is that too wintry? It doesn’t feel much like spring anyway. Helena was going to leave out the recipe. Promise I won’t ask whether there was any progress on the case which I know very little about involving a person who recently left the building.’
‘Promise I won’t express relief at being able to experience finally the give and take of normal conversation.’
He let her in the apartment.
‘Nice bike,’ she said.
6
Lundi. Teresa looked out the window. She’d woken at the proper time. The radio was on. No more about the truck drivers. They’d made their snail. Oil prices stayed up but were predicted to fall. The apartment building wasn’t moving, the windows were soundless, though she could see down at street level an advertising sign billowing, the giant picture of a car inflating and deflating. She asked her tumour what the word for wind was: vent. The vent blew and blew. Le vent souffle aujourd’hui. She tossed the dictionary back in the drawer.
In the shower she spoke English aloud and it came back to her as something else, as if she was being translated on the radio—she heard two parts.
At the computer she felt a sharp loss. She was missing Cushion, her game. Cleopatra. But she’d lose. In her current distracted state, clever people, and even the not-so-clever, would take advantage of her. Her empire would be endangered by obscene inhabitants of Belgrade and she’d be wiped out.
Self-disgust almost made her rush out of the apartment at that moment. What was she hiding from? What was the point?
Standing near the front door, she heard Helena leaving for work and a little later someone arriving at the apartment. This would be Paddy’s first patient. She waited a few minutes until she was sure he would have turned off his phone and then she sent him a text. She explained about missing the weekend with Steph. The bug had gone on and on. She was a lot better now but would lie low for a while longer. Love to H. Review this week? Good luck, knock ’em dead. It was two texts.
Her mobile bleeped. Steph again. Teresa had already replied to the first volley of messages. The Wairarapa had been good, not as good as it could have been with you know who, but good. Girls fine, tired. Sleeps today. Last night a late one.
She sent a quick one back. Kisses to my sweet puddings! Too soon to come. Will call later. Sleep angels. You too.
Desk. Cup. Keys. Coat-hanger. Goat hanger? Gert? She was back in Moore Wilson’s. Carpet. Electric jug. She walked around the apartment touching each object as she named it aloud. Paper towels. Photograph. Ironing board. Ironing board. She was touching this last thing with her toe but she reached under the bed and pulled it out, set it up, and then tried. Ironing board, she said. It would not come. You, she said to the ironing board, I hate.
Pillow. Moisturiser. Sleep. She couldn’t touch sleep of course but she sounded wonderful saying it. Sleep. As if summoning it, or being summoned by it, she lay down fully dressed on her bed and closed her eyes. Why was she so tired? Because her body was fighting it.
She opened and closed her mouth, moved her tongue around. She thought of the children Paddy dealt with in his work. They got delivered to his door. Was it a door she should knock on and ask for help with her speech? It struck her in a confused instant that somehow they’d brought this on, Paddy and Helena. They’d persuaded her to move into their building, to sell up and come into town, to enter her dwelling by means of a lift. Look at the life you’ll have in the city. What’s the point of staying on in that big house, of living on in Lower Hutt? Which weren’t their words, she knew it.
This was accurate enough: they’d advised her to sell lots of things since where else would it go. The framed maps that had been Brendan’s passionate hobby as a boy, then as an adult, his rather canny interest since it turned out there were collectors desperate for the stuff. Gone. Okay, you needed a good deal of wall space. Plus it was Paddy’s line, that longitude described what it felt like to look at a map, and to be honest she’d not spent much time gazing on them over the years. Still they were there, or had been and they showed an aspect of her existence; they were maps of that much.
Wasn’t it something that two of the maps remained in the family, sent to Margaret’s boys in Vancouver since they happened to show parts of Canada? She’d received no acknowledgement of that consignment, and did not expect it. Oh Margie. If she watched her children as audience, let her have this right, to also dislike some parts of the show.
A man had come from an antiquarian bookshop in Wellington and given her an appraisal on the maps, also quoting on some books Paddy had selected for chucking. She’d trusted Paddy utterly in this, not even bothering to look in the boxes, though now she felt she should have, if only as a tribute to the person who’d thought them at one stage necessary to their life together.
Her children were older now than their father had ever been.
The man from the shop was attractively weary, dejected even, as he moved through the rooms. In his grave attention, he seemed to be giving the objects in her house the sadness they deserved, and she had to excuse herself once to get a glass of water. She’d explained the situation exactly, that it was a great excitement to leave, despite which he persisted in his little grieving manner, stooped and tentative. It was as if he didn’t believe her and that leaving was always wrong. She noticed his shirt, one button undone, had come loose over his belt. Extremely crooked teeth that somehow suggested gentleness. He carried a catalogue and referred to it from time to time, making small notes with a pencil. At the end, he passed Teresa a piece of paper with a sum written on it. She didn’t really know whether it was more or less than she was expecting though the amount was considerable. ‘Good pieces,’ he said in a murmur. Really he was condemning her actions.
‘Thank you,’ she said, again moved and feeling it was all a mistake, or feeling the temptation to renounce what was done. At some point though, ten, twenty years after Brendan, she’d begun to stop considering herself widowed. That was a surprise. And what was she? Something unnamed. No, this antiquarian man didn’t know her at all.
Before this, Helena and Paddy had arrived for a big clean-up session. The result was her house had been chastened. They’d filled their car with boxes of stuff to take to the St Vincent de Paul. These were the things no one would want, he said.
‘Except the poor and the desperate,’ she said.
‘No,’ Paddy told her. ‘Walk into those places now, it’s the middle class you’re fighting with over bargain furniture and vintage clothes. The poor and the desperate shop elsewhere for new.’
Paddy also arranged the sale of the printing press, which had sat idle for decades in the garage, and on which their father made them birthday cards they weren’t allowed to touch with dirty fingers. Brendan had known he shouldn’t have acted wit
h such preciousness in this area but it was the only such area, which drove him mad all the more. In everything else he was carefree, indulgent, irresponsible even. She had to be the disciplinarian, at which she had little talent. Love, he wanted, love all the time, and the ceaseless generation of happiness. In this way, she thought she was more grown-up than he was—and he agreed. ‘You’re the wise one,’ he told her. ‘The sensible one.’ Dying young, however, was a sort of vindication of his way.
Somewhere there was a box of these cards. She insisted to Paddy that each of the children be given a metal mould as keepsake. She was not breaking up any sets by doing this since these were novelty items collected more for fun than anything else. They were the symbols Brendan often used for the children, on gifts. Stephanie got a duck, Paddy a man in a hat, and she put aside a sun for Margie. She thought that when her oldest daughter got around to complaining about the heedless dispersal of precious family things, the lack of consultation, she would present her with this sun. The risk was that Margie would see it as satirical, a sly commentary on her nature, but this was always the risk and on balance it was better to be suspected of mild offence than to appear to have neglected her altogether.
Of course it was ridiculous to blame Paddy and Helena for her current state or to even think that the move had happened against her will. She’d wanted it and badly, it turned out. The great luck of the next-door apartment coming up for sale! She’d had to lie down briefly on her first afternoon there from happiness and shock. Where was everything? The maps. No one was to blame. This was the tumour telling her things that weren’t true about the world. Like the old maps. They were wrong. Whole landmasses were in the wrong place.
Somebody Loves Us All Page 9
