The men kept a steady and superior course, bumping harmlessly into each other as they walked. Lant’s boots made a different sound, a sign that he was moving his feet in some new way. They hit the ground with an odd flappy noise as if the soles had come loose from the uppers. Paddy realised this was drawing attention to them. A few people across the street had stopped to watch. Then Paddy was aware of footsteps coming from behind them and a raised voice. Someone’s after us, he thought. This was what the people were watching, some interesting disturbance safely removed from them. ‘Who is it?’ said Lant. His head was hanging down, the cigarette stuck on his lip. They were both quickening their steps.
‘Keep moving,’ said Paddy.
The voice was closer now. ‘Hey! Hey!’
They were travelling as fast as they could without breaking into a run. But why not run? Because they thought they could escape this without showing that they were even aware of it. Paddy’s mind went back to other pursuits where Lant was involved. They’d run from parties before, jumped fences in Naenae holding LPs they’d tried to put on—Never Mind the Bollocks in a very brown disco house where they knew no one—and another time from some cops who’d happened upon them urinating in an alley probably not far from this same spot. The good old days.
‘Stop! You guys!’
Lant was breathing heavily beside him. He took the cigarette out and spat something from his mouth.
‘Hey!’
‘Wait on,’ said Paddy.
‘Jesus,’ said Lant.
‘Wait a moment, Lant.’ Paddy took his arm and made him stop suddenly. They almost fell together.
‘Guys!’ The voice was with them.
They turned.
‘You forgot this.’
It was the barman. He held out Lant’s violin case. Lant reached for it rather blindly, almost doubled over. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very kind of you.’
‘All right?’
‘We’ve had a wonderful evening, thanks.’
Three men, breathing heavily.
‘Who’d you think I was?’
‘No one,’ said Lant. ‘We just have very guilty consciences.’ Somewhere he’d lost his cigarette. He looked for it for a while, muttering to himself, and then gave up.
Another group went past. The girls didn’t look older than sixteen. One of them was saying, ‘Just the idea of him with someone else makes my skin crawl.’
Lant said to Paddy, ‘First you feel flattered to hear something like that because you think they’ve sort of trusted you with it. Then you realise you only heard it because you were invisible to them. They speak because they don’t see you. Girls don’t see us any more.’
Paddy said, ‘Please tell me that you’ve not just thought of that now.’
‘Knowing it, even for years and years, doesn’t prevent it from being a recurring pain.’ He took a few more paces. ‘I’m struggling with the fact that my normal partner is now a woman of almost my age.’
The almost was good. It was a joke. But Paddy didn’t want jokes. He said he didn’t feel that way at all about women. And as he spoke, he believed it. Did Lant believe him? Probably not. Fuck Lant.
But Lant stopped for a moment. He looked at Paddy. ‘I respect that,’ he said. He appeared to be sincere.
They walked on towards the corner of Dixon Street and Cuba Mall, where they were to part company. Lant lived in the top storey of a house he owned in McDonald Crescent, a few minutes away. He rented out the bottom of the house to a physiotherapy clinic and received free sessions in return for letting them use the space in front of his garage for client parking. The physio, he said, was what got him through the first months of cycling. He was speaking about it now. Paddy knew all of this and didn’t want to hear it again. He also said the physio was good for post-violin playing since he often got a sore neck, which shouldn’t happen but his technique was rusty. He’d have to see them tomorrow if he could. Was Paddy still sore from the ride to Lower Hutt? No, Paddy told him. He said he couldn’t believe Paddy had gone out there solo first time. What did it feel like honestly? Good, said Paddy. They were walking more slowly than before and Paddy had the sense that Lant wanted to delay their arrival at the corner. He’d moved into the sentimental phase of the evening and Paddy, longing for his bed and feeling hostile towards his friend, was not with him.
But why hate Lant? For fucking with his mind about his mother? Because of the National Party? The violin incident and the chasing barman was nothing, a laugh. Paddy thought again of the time when Lant had lied to the Catholic junior doctors about his work, fooling everyone with his emotional speech. Could it be that he resented him for that still? But Paddy admired him for it too, sort of. Maybe his disenchantment had a plainer source: the coloured alcohol he’d poured into his system. Paddy wasn’t used to it and it had poisoned him. Toxic was a good word for his state.
Lant stopped for a moment, moving the violin case from one hand to the other. ‘Whenever I’m feeling lonely or a bit depressed,’ he said, ‘I go downstairs and sit in their waiting room until an appointment comes free.’ They were back on the physio stuff.
‘Sounds good.’
‘Then you feel the hands on your body, and that helps.’
‘Yep.’
‘Not sexually. I mean, Bruce is like this short, ex-hockey rep guy.’
‘You don’t fancy him.’
‘No, and Rae, his wife, she’s …’
‘Not your type.’
He stopped again in the street and turned to face Paddy, fully exasperated. ‘It isn’t about that, Patrick! Can you be serious for a moment? Listen, it’s about human contact.’
‘I understand. It’s about physios in the basement.’
‘Oh, you’re a cunt.’
‘I know I am.’
Lant regarded Paddy with hostile disappointment and Paddy saw that he’d succeeded in giving him a portion of his own temper. Paddy walked on. At the corner, as a precaution against any sudden embrace, Paddy made sure he kept a few feet away from him as they said goodbye. There seemed little danger now, Lant was stewing. Paddy could do nothing about his own mood and he felt sorry about it standing with Lant early in the morning but that made it worse. Anyway, neither of us will remember these details tomorrow, he thought. They nodded at each other and turned away.
‘Au revoir!’ Lant called out as Paddy walked off. Was it spite or solidarity? Paddy couldn’t tell.
The Mall was deserted except for two buskers standing in the doorway of a shop playing acoustic guitars. They looked like students and they were singing, of course, ‘American Pie’. They’d opened a guitar case to collect the money. Paddy didn’t want to get too close to them so he was unable to see whether there was any money in the case. There was no one else around. Staggeringly pointless. He thought at once of the two Catholic junior doctors years ago. It was a song he’d always hated, the song of bores who saw in the interminable lyrics special meanings, deep symbolism. The buskers sang with the sort of pretentious emotionalism, the whiny pleading that this song always drew from its converts. Maybe they were med students. They threw their heads back as they sang, giving each other little looks of encouragement. They weren’t real buskers, they only did this after they’d had a few drinks and on deserted streets, hoping to be seen by one or two people so they could claim it as a great night. They must have been aware of Paddy though they showed no sign of it. He counted as an audience, as part of their ‘great night’, which made him resent them viciously. What he hated most was the idea that this pair was actually Lant and himself. Hadn’t they too entertained the same idea—to sing on the streets at night? He was sure of it, and sure they hadn’t done it. Even more strongly now he felt the desire for his bed and to be close to Helena’s sleeping body. He wondered again about his mother and a useless alcoholic irritation gripped him. Perhaps it was in his power, in his range, to therapise her, just as the fuckwit Paul Shawn had said.
The city had grown unlikeable or Paddy was unlikeable in the cit
y—one of the two. He was moving quickly, wishing for a sort of invisibility, keeping his head down. He was Sam Covenay, he was.
He thought in a rush of sentences. You need to see life as a story with meaning. But you impose this meaning on the world. Thus spake Susan Neiman in Moral Clarity, recently in from Amazon. This need was crucial to human dignity, ‘without which we hold our lives to be worthless’. He’d written out the stickie earlier that day. Cf FAS? he wrote. Could his mother hold firm to her dignity? What was her story now? Contingency came a-knocking one morning on her new apartment door, where Paddy had placed her. Teresa opened the door and said, ‘How do you do?’ He thought in one moment, she’ll be all right, and in another, but what will all right look like?
Ahead of him a man stepped out of an entranceway carrying a stack of long cardboard boxes. He was adding these to an existing pile on the footpath. A yeasty blast of air came from inside. It was a bakery. The man was wearing a paper hat and an apron. He was re-entering the place as Paddy passed and he gave Paddy a quick look and then glanced at the boxes on the footpath. He seemed to be sizing up whether or not Paddy presented a threat to the boxes. They must have contained something—bread or pastries—which were to be delivered to cafés for the day’s trade. He’d decided Paddy was harmless because he closed the door.
A part of Paddy wanted to repay the man’s scrutiny by scooping up one of the boxes. Not that he was hungry at all. Paddy looked in through the window and saw him moving behind a counter into a back room, which was well lit. Just as Paddy was about to move off, another figure appeared near the counter, also wearing a hat and apron. He first thought it was a boy. The figure bent down then moved back into the lit space and he saw that it was a woman. She opened an oven and slid a large tray out before disappearing from view for a moment and when he saw her again, she was carrying another tray that she put in the oven, closing the door. At this point she took off her hat and ran her fingers through her hair, itching her scalp. She looked straight out at the street, past the counter to the window where he was standing. It was Camille, the French mother from school.
Mon Dieu a French baker!
He wasn’t sure whether she’d seen him. Maybe the light on inside hid him because she showed no sign of being watched. He moved his head slightly and she peered in his direction, trying to work things out. She stepped a few feet into the bakery, into the shadow, still looking towards him. Could she recognise him from where she was, or would she think he was just some strange man cruising the streets, pressing his face against shop windows, hoping to spook people? She turned her head slightly and said something to the man Paddy had seen with the boxes. From outside he couldn’t hear anything. The man appeared by the counter. There was still time to walk off before he was recognised.
He realised what this was like. It was like watching a silent movie. A French silent movie.
Paddy raised his hand and smiled. Hello, he mouthed. Finally she came towards the door, still looking. The man was talking to her but she was obviously telling him not to worry, she knew this figure at the window.
Camille opened the door. ‘Hello?’
‘Paddy Thompson,’ he said. ‘We met at the school thing today, yesterday.’
‘Yes? Hello.’
The man still waited by the counter. He made a gesture, checking with her that everything was all right before moving into the back room again.
‘I just looked in and saw you.’
‘I work here.’
Paddy looked inside the bakery. The glass cabinets were empty but there were handwritten signs fixed to plates. They were all in French. He must have passed the place before but he’d never been in. It was quite new. ‘Is that your husband?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s French?’
She seemed to agree with this. ‘Pierre,’ she said.
Pierre! ‘It’s an early start. Hard work, I imagine.’
‘Yes,’ she said. She was puzzled and wary.
‘Okay.’ He started to turn away, suddenly exhausted at having to do the work of talking to this woman.
She scrunched up her cap in her hand. At once she seemed to have changed her mind about him. ‘Yes, when I was at the school and meeting you, I was just woken up. I was not so good. It was very early morning for me. Now I’m better. I’m alive, you know.’ She gave a little smile. ‘And then I had to go. I was taking Thierry to his friend’s. But what are you doing on the street? An emergency, I hope not.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I was at a bar with a friend. No emergency. You remember the violinist from the band?’
‘From this band at the school? Of course. I liked them.’
‘I’ll tell him. We were celebrating. It went on a bit longer than we were expecting. Sorry for interrupting your work.’
‘No because we don’t see many people, it’s a change.’
‘Not many of your friends drop by at three or four in the morning to say hello.’
‘You are the first.’
‘Maybe we could meet again some time.’
She studied him. ‘Sure. If I see you at the school maybe.’
‘It may sound strange,’ he said, ‘but I’d like you to meet my mother.’
‘Okay,’ she said. She took everything in complete earnestness. See the drunk person’s mother, why not.
Pierre came to the door with more boxes and they let him past. Camille then spoke to him very fast in French, explaining about Paddy. He shook Paddy’s hand, saying quite sternly, ‘Pleased to meet you.’ He was only a little taller than Camille, olive-skinned, stocky, with strong forearms. He smelled of sweat. They spoke together again, something about the boxes, Paddy thought, and then Pierre went back inside.
‘Attendez, wait. He wants to give you something to eat,’ said Camille.
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘No, but he will bring it. You can’t refuse. He’s from Bosnia first. Can’t refuse. You’re lucky he doesn’t want to give you something to drink. Do you know rakija?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’ She laughed and then he laughed.
‘Okay. Pierre doesn’t sound very Bosnian though, the name.’
‘When he comes to France, he changed it. When he came to France. Change the name to make things easy.’
‘When was that?’
‘After the war, you know.’
His mind was so bleary he couldn’t think for a moment which war Camille meant. The war with Serbia.
‘Who is your mother?’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘No, I mean, you want me to meet her?’
‘Yes! If you could, that would be great. It’s difficult to explain, sorry.’
Pierre was heading back their way, carrying a small square box. ‘For you,’ he said and gave Paddy the box.
‘That’s very kind! Merci!’
Pierre shook his head, it’s nothing. Paddy looked at the box. It was sealed with a simple fold of cardboard flaps. He wasn’t sure whether or not he should open it. The three of them looked at each other.
‘You can see,’ said Camille. ‘It’s fine.’
‘Yes?’ said Paddy. ‘Open?’
‘Open,’ said Pierre.
But Paddy could hardly move his fingers to lift the flaps. He felt shaky and uncertain, as if anything might happen to him outside the bakery of these near strangers. A huge wave moved through his entire body. It was a definite physical feeling starting at the backs of his ankles and passing along his legs, up his spine and ending at his ears—the sudden release that could come from massage. Lant’s point after all? But it was also more than that. Here was the emotion too, that he’d denied Lant and which shook him and which hadn’t been released even yet but was held, trapped, as if he’d just prevented himself from sneezing. Was this hidden from his companions by the half-dark? He fumbled with the lid. The box opened and there was a single pastry, a thing of obvious delicacy and skill, two different-sized balls, the smallest one on top covered in a coffee-colour
ed icing. It was architecture, clever and witty, artistic even. He’d never had a sweet tooth. The thing was astonishingly pointless to him, and that was suddenly affecting too. All that effort.
‘It’s la réligieuse, you know it?’ said Camille.
He shook his head.
‘Also you can call it the nun. Here is the body and then the head.’ She pointed. ‘Oh. I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You have these—’
‘Tears!’ he said. ‘Yes. Strange person that I am.’
Pierre was staring at him, then at the pastry.
‘Sorry for this,’ said Paddy. He was holding the box and he couldn’t wipe his face. He was powerless to do a thing, his cheeks wet. He was half-blinded and he felt the box being carefully removed from his hands.
‘Come inside,’ said Camille.
‘No, no,’ Paddy told her, wiping at his eyes and at his nose. ‘I’ll be fine. I’m so sorry.’
Pierre spoke in French or Bosnian or something to Camille. ‘He says,’ she said, ‘maybe he could bring you something else, not this one. People are not so often upset with his baking.’
Paddy laughed. He was feeling better, less shaky. The immense rogue wave had crashed on his head and he was still standing upright. He gestured that Pierre could hand him back the box. Paddy was muttering something about work pressures and family issues. He tried to make a joke of it, telling them he wasn’t réligieux at all. Camille bent close to hear but he wasn’t making much sense. He thanked them again. He shook Pierre’s hand and said goodnight. ‘Bonne nuit,’ he said, not at all sure this was the correct French for the occasion. Maybe this what you said to a child who was going to bed? Sweet dreams. Camille took his offered hand and drew him down towards her. In his confusion he thought she wanted to say something to him and he turned his ear to her mouth. In the confusion she kissed him there, on his right ear. He had an image of Sam Covenay kissing his mother outside their apartment, the careful proffering of cheeks, the lightest touch of faces. Had he practised this? Paddy had seen it and then he’d forgotten about it but it was remarkable. Better than this bungled thing. I need to see the Covenays again, he thought. More unfinished business. They have my picture after all. ‘Thanks,’ he said. He was walking off, full of blue liquid, carrying his box, his little building, his sculpture of sugar, his edifice of mainly air.
Somebody Loves Us All Page 25
