She gave one of her French shrugs: who gives a shit. He was beginning to like Camille. Her clothes were almost dowdy: a long, shapeless greenish dress, without a belt, sleeves that puffed out girlishly, sandals. Her skin was colourless, as if she spent all day inside. Her hair was pulled back in a harsh knot.
The band started playing. It was the first time Paddy had heard them. Once or twice Lant had invited them to the gigs at the last minute, his way of ensuring they could never make it. Or, as in the case here, he’d become vague about the details: were they even playing? He wasn’t so sure.
They sounded all right, pleasantly folky, competent and well-rehearsed. Lant’s violin ran under the music sparingly, tastefully. It was hard to know what the fuss was about with his nerves—but Camille had said she would have been the same. The guitarist sang and Lant and the bassist provided very passable harmonies. Paddy had never known Lant could sing. His face changed when he sang, it grew appealingly earnest. The first song got loud applause. Two parents started dancing carefully with each other in a kind of waltz as the second song started. Some of the kids whistled at the dancing couple and then stopped. It was a mild evening, windless and with a dusky light softening the sharp outlines of the school’s silvery roofs. A few more couples joined in the dancing. Helena was suddenly beside Paddy. She smiled at him and kissed him on the cheek. She put her bag down and they held hands, watching Lant’s band and the dancing parents. He felt a tremendous warmth spread through him. Camille had been pulled away by her son towards the food.
Paddy glanced behind and saw that in the shadow of the school’s only tree, one of the boys who’d been circling the netball pole was now making figure eights through the hopscotch markings. He rode the same path each time, waving the bike through its route with the smallest movements of his body weight. There was something dreamy about the scene. He was in his own world. Boys led demented solitary lives. We turned and turned and made our paths on the concrete playground under the tree at dusk while our parents danced and forgot us. Every father, every man who is not a father, would recognise himself in that boy. There’s no one else around, no one watching except me. And yet he’d connected himself to the rest of the evening by finding in his movements the rhythm of the music. He was cycling to Lant’s band, weaving in and out, making the shape of his eight, moving to the lines of the bass, turning on each special guitar strum, as if they’d worked it all out beforehand, boy and bike and band.
It might have been a film Paddy was watching, complete with soundtrack. Did the thought arrive before or after he saw Dora and Medbh? They were standing by a classroom door, behind the tree. Medbh was pointing a small digital camera while Dora talked into her ear, directing. They were filming the boy on his bike. It annoyed Paddy a little. The boy hadn’t given his permission. Paddy thought of Iyob at Helena’s language school.
He looked back at the band, intent on regaining that pleasure. Lant was handling a nice little solo. While he played he looked different somehow. The position of the chin, his concentration, his slightly pursed lips, gave his face this serious solitary aspect Paddy had never seen before. It was not that he was simply hoping to get through it without a mistake. He was better than that. The other band members had stepped away to let everyone see Lant and his instrument. He quickened the attack with his bow, playing faster runs with equal smoothness. The drummer and the bass player were grinning at each other. Paddy and Helena and everyone watching understood this moment to have become successful in ways the musicians themselves had perhaps not anticipated. It was a concert in a school playground but it was also something else. Was this what Camille had meant by the arts? The pain of art. Lant played on, utterly absorbed. Here was the reason he’d been so ambivalent and cagey about them attending the band’s performances. It wasn’t that he was worried about any sloppiness or them not enjoying the thing or the chance of seeing him make a fool of himself, at least not in the way that might be imagined. Music required of Lant absolute commitment. Nothing was held back. There wasn’t a trace of irony. There wasn’t any space for his usual battery of tricks and deflections. He was afraid of Paddy seeing him like this. He was lost to himself in a moment of devotion as powerful and unthinking as the boy riding figure eights behind them. As he played he couldn’t account for himself.
Beside Paddy, Helena squeezed his hand and they exchanged a look of delighted surprise, which meant exactly this: who is that on stage?
When he was thirty-eight, Paddy’s father had surgery to remove varicose veins. Shortly after this, he bought a second-hand bicycle from a work colleague. These two facts must have been related though at the time Paddy wasn’t interested in putting them together. Paddy was eight or nine years old. The veins were not something he remembered thinking about though he did have an image of his father peeling off a tight sock-like bandage from his leg while sitting on the edge of the bath. The bandage was pale pink, skin-coloured he supposed. Paddy’s mother had to wash these special vein socks and they’d be hung on the washing line. This disgusted Margie, who would later develop the same problem in her legs.
Paddy however was interested in the bike, which had originally come from London. The work colleague had been English. The bike looked a little like a Raleigh Twenty, with smallish wheels and an angled frame, except that it had a clip on its central shaft that allowed the bike to be undone and carried in two parts. At the time, no one had seen anything like this. When later Paddy went to England and Europe, he saw these bikes everywhere though he never saw them taken apart.
His father now began riding to the Lower Hutt train station and taking the bike to work. On the platform, he’d unclip the bike and tuck both parts under his arm. Probably there was no need for him to do this since there was a special compartment at the back of the train for bikes. He could have stored his there. When Paddy had caught the train back from Gorzo’s bowling lanes, he’d thought about all this. But Brendan stepped into the carriage with his bike under his arm. He did it, according to Paddy’s mother, because he was a show-off. Much later, when Paddy considered his father in these years, he didn’t disagree with this and yet he also thought there was something else. His father had wanted to meet people, yet he needed a prop. He was basically a shy man. His parents shared this. His mother didn’t need people but his father did. Or rather his mother needed his father to meet people for her, she relied on that. Her shyness was the blunt variety, the sort that worked upon over time came to look like self-reliance, or was self-reliance. Whoever visited their house, unless it was family, came as the guest of Brendan first. These were the people she called ‘your father’s friends’.
He’d always unclip the bike while waiting on the platform at both Lower Hutt and Wellington, for the return journey. He made sure that as many people as possible witnessed the bike becoming two pieces. Without seeing it for oneself it was difficult to grasp the oddness and unnaturalness of this parting, wheel from wheel, front from back. In time there were bikes that folded through a hinge and of course people regularly transported bikes by taking off the front wheel, but his father’s bike, with its complete bisection, remained in his mind as a one-off. He’d seen it done many times of course and it still made an impression. No wonder people came up and talked to his father. They asked where he got it and was it available in New Zealand and had it ever come undone while he was riding it. No, the clip was secure.
He worked in the Records Office of the Wellington City Council, about a ten-minute bike ride from the station. At work, apparently he unclipped the bike and stored it in a cupboard. He’d completed a library diploma and was in charge of the housing section dealing with requests from homeowners who wanted to learn about their houses or who needed original plans for renovation work. It was where he’d first met Teresa. She’d brought in her elderly father, who was interested in getting a copy of the original drawings of their old Miramar house. He wanted to frame the best drawing and hang it on the wall of the Naenae house. The story was Teresa had booked, or almos
t booked—the story wasn’t definitive—her passage to Rhodesia, where she planned to live with Pip, her cousin. Brendan prevented her escape.
Paddy didn’t imagine his father ever went for recreational rides in his lunch-hour—was this ever done back then? The bike was solely to get from A to B, and of course to provoke the sort of casual contact with strangers his father enjoyed.
At his father’s funeral, when they were having cakes and drinks in the church hall, his mother was approached by a man she didn’t know. Paddy was standing nearby, behind his mother and with his two sisters in a tight group, a huddle. They were all trying to hide. Their family group of four occupied the smallest space possible. They’d spent almost an hour in the room, though it felt like days, trying to find the best place to be, or not to be. Having tried to disappear into a corner, where it turned out they became highly visible and caged, they’d moved to an awkward space in the narrow gap between the two food tables. They fingered the edges of the white tablecloths and longed to lie under the tables, hidden from view.
The man said he was very sorry to hear about Paddy’s father and he hoped she didn’t mind that he’d come to the church but he’d got to know Brendan a little over the past few years as a fellow commuter.
Paddy wasn’t sure whether his mother really understood what he meant. She wasn’t capable of much more than a poor imitation of nodding on that day, or for a long time afterwards. It was ghastly to see it. Her head seemed barely stuck on. It was not an exaggeration to say they thought it might simply fall off. His sisters had the same feeling about this because he talked to them about it years later. ‘Like a wooden head at a fair, a clown’s head that you toss balls into,’ said Margie.
Their mother may have believed she was nodding properly but she lacked the control and her head wavered around on an elastic neck. She gave the man the same unfocused wandering nod and tried to smile and move him on; her hand fluttered briefly as if waving at an insect. The man had never met Teresa before and may have thought this was more or less how she always appeared. He certainly missed her hand gesture. Or he may simply have felt the pressing need to say what he’d come to say regardless of the reception he was getting. He told her that Brendan had been known to everyone on the 8.13 into town and the 5.43 back. These numbers seemed to Paddy incomprehensible. He thought they were connected with money. There had been a lot of talk over the preceding days of money, of mortgages and interest rates. His mother’s beloved older brother, Graham, was a lawyer. More or less, he moved into the house at that time, then he died too, delivering what Paddy came to see as an almost fatal blow to her. He thought that for many years Teresa was scarcely alive though for their sakes she did a sometimes-frenetic impersonation of a living being. She went back to work as a typist. She drove them around to their sports games on weekends. She talked to their friends. It wasn’t until they’d all left home that Paddy thought she began to recover, if that was the word.
During this period, among the children, the threat was often made that one day, without warning, they’d be off to live in Africa. Margie was especially good at tormenting her sister with this. Pip, the mythical cousin, had come back for the funeral and was seen in private conversation with their mother—conversations that stopped the moment anyone came near. Apart from Graham, Pip seemed to be the only person Teresa could cope with. They overheard a fluency in their mother’s voice, laughter even. What could she be laughing about except some crazy scheme to leave all this misery behind? Yes, their futures were being plotted, and more or less, they’d wake up one morning in Africa, every aspect of their lives changed.
Pip had given each of them books connected with Africa as presents, which they refused to open.
Paddy saw his mother blink and try to remain fixed on the man, their father’s commuter friend, who continued to talk. Finally the man seemed to have finished. There was a pause and he looked around, searching for some excuse to leave her. He didn’t know anyone else of course and he seemed stuck. Teresa was incapable of making any of the usual noises of goodbye. She’d spent all this time hardly saying a word to anyone despite the fact that she’d been approached by almost everyone at the reception. They were two adults, marooned. He turned back and said, ‘So what will happen to the bike now?’
‘Happen?’ said his mother, shocked.
‘Where will it go? Who will get it?’
‘Who? Him.’ She pointed at Paddy with a sort of violence. ‘He’ll get it.’
Nothing previously had been said about his father’s bike. Paddy was certain his mother had been panicked into making this declaration. Perhaps she thought the man himself wanted it, or thought that he was entitled in some way to it as a keepsake of all the good times he’d had with their father on the trains between Lower Hutt and Wellington.
The man looked at Paddy approvingly. ‘Good,’ he said. Then he shook Paddy’s hand with great firmness and moved off through the crowd.
As it turned out, Paddy found the bike very awkward to ride. He wasn’t that much shorter than his father yet the distance between the seat and the handlebars was a little too great, forcing him to sit forward on an uncomfortable angle or to pedal while standing and use the seat only when coasting. It also had just three gears and its small wheels made it a tiring bike to ride up even low hills. There was something else. Boys at school liked taking it apart, which was a pain. But they also paid attention to it in a slightly mocking way. They were not like the adult commuters on his father’s train. They regarded the bike as freakish and strange and something to be attacked. It was impossible to lock securely since there was no way of threading a chain through the clip. Often Paddy would discover the front half only of the bike still locked to the bike rack; the other half would be hidden around the school—in a classroom cupboard, in a bush, or once, hanging in a tree down by the stopbank of the Hutt River.
Paddy used the bike for a few months, and then he put it away in their garage. His mother made no fuss at all when she found out. She confessed later that she hated the bike because she’d never trusted the clip to stay in place and had imagined a horrible accident happening to anyone riding it at the time it came apart. When he heard this, Paddy was surprised. Firstly, his mother was mechanically minded and must have known the clip wasn’t dangerous; if it had been, she would have done something about it. Secondly, this was exactly what everyone thought, a conventional idea. It was the sort of thing strangers said to his father at the train station. Paddy had previously considered his mother as different in some uplifting fashion, secretly intelligent, utterly penetrating. A typist but also quite brilliant. But she could be this too, he thought, and not entirely unhappily, she could be quite average, nearly normal.
After Lant’s band had finished, they went to speak to him. He was in high spirits, waving the red silk cloth he’d used under his chin, comically fanning himself. ‘Phew,’ he said. ‘We survived, I think. No rotten fruit thrown. A few walkouts but what can you do?’
He was back. The old Lant. For a moment this felt disappointing, as if Paddy had hoped it would have been possible for his friend to maintain that other intensity. Yet there was something a little sheepish too about him. Helena shook his upper arm and told him how much she’d enjoyed the music and how wonderfully well he’d played. For perhaps the first time, Paddy thought, she appeared genuinely taken by something in his friend. Lant waved this away, said some things about the sound, that the bass was too loud in his ear. The rest of the band was actually deaf, he told them, which presented problems. But this all seemed a bit half-hearted and obviously throwaway. He was aware something had happened and that they’d seen it, which was pleasing, worrying also. They’d uncovered a part of him and that was moving to him—Paddy saw this; it was also causing Lant a sneaking regret. He’d been outed, it seemed. Where to from here?
Unusually for Lant, he now appeared speechless. He looked back at them, grinning and shaking his head. He held his violin up and pointlessly inspected it. As a kind of tribute t
o him, and in friendly contest, they too remained silent. Helena and Paddy were both extremely happy to observe this new Lant trying to fend off their appreciation and understanding. Fortunately for him, a couple of his band-mates called him over and he left them, holding his bow up in farewell.
Paddy turned around and found himself in the line of Medbh’s camera. Dora was with her.
‘Carry on as if we weren’t here,’ said Dora, coming forward and kissing her mother quickly on the cheek. With Paddy, she shook hands, which was their comic routine. The first time he’d met her, he’d shaken her hand, which she’d apparently found odd. She also liked to call him Thompson. Usually they met in the style of business associates or old boys from an English public school. He often said, ‘Pleased to see you again, Price.’ It was a failing sort of levity. They always ran out of it fast and lapsed back into mutual incomprehension.
He’d tried hard at the beginning to earn, if not her friendship, then at least some sort of respect. The truth was he couldn’t understand how Helena had ended up with this person for a daughter. Paddy credited the father. Dora seemed to be waiting for Paddy to be gone from their lives, much as he was waiting for the exit of Paul Shawn. In asserting her rights as Helena’s daughter, she always gave him a clear image of his temporariness. That was how it felt. She was the institution; Paddy was the interloper.
‘Where’s your permit to film?’ he said.
‘You don’t even have a child at this school,’ said Dora.
She’d meant this lightly perhaps but Dora could never quite do lightness. There was always a creeping hostility. The spell of the music had vanished. Lant was packing away his violin in his case and Paddy saw Camille leaving the school grounds, holding her son’s hand. She glanced back in his direction just before she disappeared around the corner of the building, as if she realised she was leaving without completing their conversation. The French were big on greetings and farewells so maybe she was only thinking of observing the forms. Whatever, Paddy was annoyed he’d not had the chance to talk to her further. Somehow the presence of a real French person, even one as un-chic and unsympathetic as Camille, created an indefinable hopefulness. Anyway, maybe most French people or at least quite a few were a lot like Camille. He’d never been to France. The closest he’d come, apart from England, was Northern Italy in his early twenties, just after he’d finished university. Indeed, he’d waited five hours for a train at San Remo to go for a day-trip to the Côte d’Azur. First the train was late, then very late, and then no, he wasn’t going to France.
Somebody Loves Us All Page 22
