Somebody Loves Us All (33 page)

‘He got out and helped us with the bike. One of the dogs jumped down, did one mad circuit around the truck, and jumped back up again.

‘“You girls aren’t in trouble, are you?” he said.

‘“No,” said Teresa. “My aunt lives here.”

‘“What’s her name?”

‘“Polly.”

‘The lie was so swift I almost believed it myself. Maybe she did have an aunt here. Was I also related to her?

‘“Polly?” he said.

‘“Do you know her? Polly Purvis?”

‘“Purvis? There’s Purvises from Bucknell’s Bay but not any Polly.”

‘“Different ones must be,” said Teresa.

‘“Polly Purvis,” repeated the Maori guy, moving back to the cab of his truck.

‘Once the truck had gone, I biked back as fast as I could to the walkway but there was no sign of the French woman. A few of the houses now had lights on, most had their curtains closed. The lane went on for some time and I biked the length of it but Genevieve wasn’t there. I went back to Teresa.

‘What had we been imagining would happen once we reached civilisation? We’d imagined telling our story to the police. And for that, we needed Genevieve. Without her, what did we have? A man runs out of petrol and borrows a bike to get some. For that, we vandalise his car and take off with his girlfriend, or whatever she was to him. We required her terror, her evidence, her foot in the cast. Without her, we were the ones in trouble with the police.

‘Then we imagined Duncan out on the dark road, having biked ten miles, lugging the petrol, looking for us and for his car, trying to piece it together. If he had gone out there, what would he then do? Bike back most likely, another five miles. The man was somewhere in this town, furious, having lost everything.

‘It was hard to believe that the nightmare was continuing, that the nightmare had a place in broad daylight. But of course, yes, it does.

‘We had to get out of the place as fast as possible. We decided to risk going to the bus station though we figured there was a chance he’d be waiting there for us. He wasn’t. And there was an intercity bus for Rotorua that left within the hour. We didn’t know where that was. “Hot pools!” said the man behind the counter and we nodded. We bought tickets and waited in a playground near the station. I remember there was a concrete tunnel for kids to crawl through and we lay down in this, at either end, our heads almost touching, our legs dangling out the ends as the town slowly woke up.

‘When we heard the bus start up, we ran across to it and got on. We’d already been able to store the bike and our panniers in the luggage bay after buying the tickets. We pulled the little curtains across our window and slumped down in our seats and I think we were asleep or unconscious before we left Turangi.

‘The rest of the trip, well, I can hardly remember it, Paddy. I was keen to abandon the whole biking thing and catch another bus to Auckland but your mother said she thought we should complete what we set out to do. It didn’t make sense to give up now. In Rotorua we bought a second-hand bike at a garage sale just down the road from the hostel we were staying at. Teresa rode this.

‘I remember we were horribly lost riding into Auckland and finally got another lift with a postal truck to the North Shore, bikes in the back, right to the door of my mother’s relative. You know I’ve forgotten her name. She was very nice, an old woman, rather bemused to have us and not at all sure how to treat us, whether as children or adults. She settled for children, which
actually was lovely. We had lemonade in her back garden under a fig tree when we arrived and she put out a bowl of lollies in our room. There were soaps in the shape of animals on our beds.

‘It was so lush, tropical almost. Like something kept from us. Hot at night. It was then I think I had the idea of leaving, leaving the country for good. I think so. Not because of what had happened but because of this place we’d come to. I had a sudden strong feeling of what might be possible or impossible. I woke up, I think. I thought suddenly, Wellington was boring. I don’t know my motives. Some have them perhaps.

‘One day we caught the ferry to Waiheke Island and I saw Teresa leaning her hand over the edge of the boat as we moved out into the middle of the harbour. I could tell she had something in her hand. She caught me watching her and she opened her hand to let me see what it was. As she did so, the object tumbled into the water, sinking from sight at once. It gave me a fright to see it happen. It was the part from the man’s car that she’d ripped out in the forest that night.

‘In Auckland, we never spoke about what had happened to us or what had not happened to us. We went home after a week of lemonade and lollies. We took the train back to Wellington. I went down to Otago a few weeks after that, by which time your mother had started doing her secretarial training. We never spoke about it again, ever.

‘You, Paddy, are the first person I’ve ever told. I never even told my husband.’ She smiled at him and brought her shoes together with a soft click. ‘Fini.’

They sat without speaking for some time. Pip looked drained. Paddy told her he was immensely grateful she’d come all this way to tell him the story. It was remarkable. It was also mysterious, he said.

‘Yes!’ she said.

She looked at him expectantly, as if hoping that he might say more. Might he have an opinion on their behaviour? What had
been the proper way to react to their situation? How would he have handled it? He could condemn them even, she seemed to be urging with this look. He understood Pip was fully prepared to be punished somehow. When she saw his hesitation, there was a flash of disappointment in her eyes. His recoil briefly hurt her. She’d set everything out so carefully and he was withdrawing. Did Paddy, the figure she’d thought of writing a fan letter to, really have nothing more than this?

‘I didn’t know any of it before,’ he said.

She smiled at him, nodding. His statement struck his own ear as not-very-interesting on a major scale if interpreted as filial bleat: why’d my mother keep it to herself? The longest story Teresa had ever told had lasted in the telling probably about two or three minutes. She didn’t speak a lot, in general. Her favourite reading was thrillers. She despatched them five-a-week. She spoke, a little, in thriller mode. In compressed units that eschewed personal feeling. But he was guessing here. He’d not read much in the genre.

But what could he say now?

Pip said something about being very young at the time.

There was that.

‘Bit of a shaggy dog story, sorry,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The
point
of a shaggy dog story is its shagginess. Too much psychology in yours, too much tension.’

‘But not many bodies, dead bodies I suppose I mean.’

‘Pleased about that,’ he said.

‘And now I feel—’

‘What?’

‘Disloyal. Your mother should have been here, to help, to correct. Lots of things I’m sure I got wrong. Probably you should get her version first before you come to any conclusions. Conclusions about what, I don’t know.’

Nor did Paddy. He was held by another something. It was approximately this: he thought the story of their bike trip wasn’t over somehow. It went on. It was still in progress. This was its impossibility and its delicacy, moral delicacy. And the ingenious
notion that the French woman Genevieve could be connected with the sounds now coming out of Teresa’s mouth was another instalment, instalment was the wrong word. Interpretatively depleted, he thought the following: if Pip’s effort was proof of something it may have been only this: that the cousins had never stopped telling each other the story of the man they met that night who terrorised them and who went off on one of their bikes and was never seen again.

Anyway, it was all he could think of, and scarcely in language. He was stunned.

Then randomly: by what whisker had Teresa, as a young woman, not ended up in Africa?

There were great-looking strawberries in the bowl.

Pip realised the impasse in front of them. Without Paddy really noticing, she’d left the sofa and was in the kitchen, preparing the lunch things. She’d fallen back into her role of kindness and service and invisibility. It wasn’t her role, she was built this way. He went to help her and they chatted about the best roadside places to buy fruit and vegetables outside Levin. She talked about Palmie. She’d lost her letterbox one night to students or someone.

When everything was ready, he went next door to get his mother. There was no reply when he knocked and he’d forgotten his key. He went back to his own place and rang her number. After a while his call went through to her message. Paddy had told her to expect a knock at around 1pm. The session with Pip had taken them past that. He hadn’t said anything about seeing Pip before the lunch. As far as his mother knew, the knock on her door meant Pip had arrived. Perhaps she was dozing. He used his key to open her apartment and he called out her name. There was no response and no sign of her inside. The things from their tea earlier that morning were on the kitchen bench unwashed. Paddy had the feeling nothing was different from two hours before when she’d been wearing her dressing gown. Her bed was unmade, clothes were draped over the back of an armchair. He stood in the middle of the sitting room and became aware of
an electrical hum. It was coming from the computer. The screen was off but the tower, which sat on the floor, was on, as if either she’d been on the computer and switched the screen off or she’d changed her mind about it and having started it up hadn’t gone through with it. Why was he thinking like the police? In thriller mode.

Pip suggested that maybe Teresa had grown tired of waiting and had gone out to get a little treat for the lunch. Paddy noticed her handbag and her car keys on the hall table, though it was possible she’d taken her purse, which he couldn’t find. ‘Maybe she’s just gone for a walk,’ said Pip.

They waited another ten minutes. Then he told Pip that he’d have a quick look for her and it would be good if she could stay in his mother’s apartment in case she came back. He gave her his mobile number and took the lift down to the street.

It was normal for him to let a week, ten days, two weeks even go past, without knowing where his mother was and what she’d been doing. They lived in the same region, under the same weather, and this was enough for Paddy, if not to have certainty, then to be able to imagine her routines, her days and her nights, that is if he chose to. He saw her in their old house. He saw her folding the gardening mat and brushing at her knees. Later, it was at the computer, doing her stuff. It was as thoroughly complacent an adult son’s purview as they come.

One time they’d met by chance at a supermarket in town and both felt a shyness, as if they’d secretly arranged to bump into each other. She’d been in Wellington for some reason and had decided to do her grocery shopping. They looked in each other’s trolleys and made comments about what was there. His mother reached into his, picked something up and read the back of it. Okay, she said. Interesting. A great current of intimacy went between them through this simple, meaningless act of reaching into his trolley. It was terrific to have come across her like this, to stand in a public place and for no one to know that she was his mother and he was her son. It was as though they existed at the heart of a grand conspiracy. See you by the fish. I never buy the fish in these places, she said. Too pricey? Exactly, and the looks on their faces. Whose faces, the guys selling them? No, on the fish.

Anyway, Stephanie was in contact almost every day and she’d keep Paddy informed.

Invariably, at some point in the period of not seeing her or hearing his mother’s voice, he’d experience a sharp feeling of loss. There was often a connection between this feeling and his poor long-dead father. The prompt might be that Paddy had come across something his father would have been interested in, a minor thing. A book for sale, the demolition of a house. And he’d have the urge to call the old place in Lower Hutt. Sometimes it wouldn’t concern his father at all. It was her alone he needed and whom he’d tried to summon and couldn’t. That was crucial, to be unable to imagine her. It was a strange ache, a kind of despair. Was he being a child to react like this, or a sentient being? The feeling was that he’d forgotten what she was like and what he was like with her. The moment she answered the phone, his mind was at rest. Here she is. Here we are.

Perhaps the three of them—Paddy and his two sisters—despite their differences, were all somewhere along the same scale. Stephanie had once told him that if a day went past without making contact with their mother, she felt terrible and lost. ‘Like the day didn’t really happen, Paddy.’ Margie could last longer than any of them, months, years in fact, but that was exactly what she savoured, the sensation of being outcast on a daily basis. Pocketbook psychology, not Lant’s: she took strength from her feeling of exclusion and courted it through a series of imaginary rebuffs. The facts: messages that were left for her she claimed never to have received. Things sent to Vancouver went missing in the post. Margie refused to get Skype, rarely sent photos, then complained her boys were growing up unnoticed by any of them. Two gangly Canadian boys who said they liked to fool around in
boots
, sailing boats. They were extremely tall but was anyone interested?

Outside his building, Paddy looked both ways down the street. To find that he had the task of looking for his mother in the city they’d helped persuade her to shift to, this gave him a sudden moment of fright. Which direction to go in? The lunchtime crowds were still out. Bodies moved along the
pavement. What were her habits? She had none. There hadn’t been time to establish routines. She’d recently bought a pair of shoes with Helena from a shop around the corner and, for no other reason than to start moving, this was where he headed.

She wasn’t a missing person.

Almost immediately he became aware of someone walking alongside him, keeping pace. Paddy started walking faster and the person kept up. He glanced across. He knew him of course. The figure was all in black. Black sneakers, black jeans, oversized black sweatshirt. He walked with his hands in his pockets, head slightly bowed, letting the dark hair fall over his face. He should have been in school. Paddy kept moving, even faster now, and his companion had to take his hands out of his pockets. Glancing down again, Paddy saw the scribbles on the back of one hand as it swung awkwardly. The large feet fell without rhythm on the footpath, as if he might trip up, and the breathing had started to struggle. Paddy slipped quickly between two people and accelerated away. The figure was trying to get past but the gap had been closed by people coming the other way and Paddy heard him grunting, breaking into a jog now to catch up. They’d reached the corner of the Mall, where Paddy stopped suddenly. There was almost a collision. They were outside the shoe shop, standing side by side, looking at the window display of women’s summer sandals. His pursuer’s chest was heaving and he was swallowing hard.

Paddy looked at him directly as he tried to recover. He was bent over, his fists resting on his knees. Hair hid most of his face, leaving only a jaw-line of acne, and a pale neck of clear glistening skin. His eyes flicked briefly at Paddy then back to the shop window.

Teresa wasn’t in the shoe shop.

The noise of the bucket fountain made Paddy look in that direction and he set off again, jogging this time. He was followed. The heavy feet, the helpless grunting as if someone was punching him. Paddy skipped between people. Looking back he saw how his running mate went through them blindly, without apology,
scattering the footpath. Paddy heard a few curses. The figure kept his head down and ran.

His mother wasn’t among the people by the fountain. A woman of about her age sat on a bench feeding pigeons, while a young mother waited for her toddler to go down the slide. Office workers ate their lunches perched on the edge of the planters. People smoked, leaning against the streetlight poles.

He arrived beside Paddy, panting, just as the water began to crash from bucket to bucket. Spray hit the tiles near the feet of a couple having lunch from paper bags and they looked down at the damp spots and continued eating. The pigeons lifted a few inches off the ground then settled again.

Paddy was suddenly hungry, with a sick feeling too.

At the noise from the buckets the toddler on the slide had looked around, startled, and begun to cry; his mother was reaching for him but he’d retreated inside the little turret and she couldn’t get him. She took a few steps up the ladder but he screamed at her to get down.

In the corner of his eye, through the open doors of Farmers, Paddy thought he saw a familiar shape, a woman carrying bags, heading for the escalator. At that moment a group of six or seven shoppers came from the doors and he couldn’t get through quickly. When the way cleared, the woman was gone. He took the escalator in large steps, hauling himself up. The black-clothed figure was just getting on it when Paddy was at the top. Lingerie.

He moved among the displays of bras and knickers, searching for the woman who might have been his mother. He had to squeeze past a middle-aged woman with an armful of underwear who gave him a filthy look, as if he’d caught her wearing the things she carried. This was Paddy’s sense too. What was the expression on his face except a strange and heated neediness? He was sweating now, having dressed too warmly for the pursuit, the mad search, the hide-and-seek with his Boy-Man companion, who’d also now entered the lingerie section. Paddy could hear him blundering about, knocking into things. A sharp,
reprimanding female voice was saying something to his follower but by now Paddy was in Toys, which had aisles and was empty. He completed a circuit and headed for the stairs. There seemed to be no down escalator. From far across the floor, the figure saw him just as Paddy went through the fire doors.

At the bottom of the stairs he paused, looking up and down the aisles, trying to see as far back into the store as he could. Menswear, shoes, and further on, homeware. Behind him, he heard his pursuer thundering down the old springy wooden stairs, the heavy noise as he took the last few steps of each flight in a leap followed by a different, more sinister thud as with the full weight of his body he flew out of control against the wall before bouncing off and starting down the next flight. He moved as helplessly and heavily as the water falling from bucket to bucket in the fountain outside. He was the water, its wasteful flow, but he was also the buckets, tipping gracelessly and righting themselves with a clangy jerk.

Jerk was the word.

Paddy stood clear of the entrance to the stairs and the body tumbled forward as if sent down a chute, sliding on the linoleum, gripping a counter full of lipsticks that appeared in front of him, looking around wildly to see where Paddy had gone.

They were twenty metres from the Mall entrance and the figure raised his head towards the street, making a strange move with his nostrils as if trying to sniff a scent. Then his head turned swiftly in the other direction and his nostrils again widened. Which way?

He hadn’t seen Paddy, who was standing still, very close.

The chest rose and fell but the great wildness and heedlessness seemed to be subsiding. He seemed to be considering the street option but was tempted once more by going further back into the store. Paddy hadn’t done that bit, he was thinking, and surely he needed to check there. He peered thoughtfully. He waited with Paddy, still unaware that this was what he was doing. Paddy was a shadow.

His hair was pushed back now off his face in damp strands
and Paddy had his first real look. In two months he’d never had this sort of view. Paddy had allowed him to hide, to sink as low as he wanted to go into his chair, to cover himself by whatever means he needed. Paddy understood that formerly he’d had an impression only, a sketch, a smudge. Here was the original.

What struck Paddy was that Sam Covenay really was a child. He was young. To study his face was to know that he was a young fourteen. You needed a view of the eyes to see this and the brow, something incomplete in the set-up, a compression that over time would move, widen, open. The top half of his face was scrunched up. There was not much that seemed knowing here, only a sort of challenge and at the edge of that, the normal things: fear, vulnerability, shame. Paddy had known in the abstract that his patient was a work-in-progress but the physical proof was startling. He’d missed it.

The eyes were pale blue; a swimmer’s eyes almost, he wanted to say, a sunniness and squint that contradicted everything the boy was aiming for. They suggested a history or at least a deep unburiable preference for illumination, for summer, for water. He was not the bucket fountain. He was the sea. Or he was the beach. Paddy remembered now that the Covenays lived on the coast behind the airport, Breaker Bay. One photo they’d brought along showed him there in his togs. You ran from your lawn across the road and you were in the water. He was that running boy. He was the bright kid who wanted to speak. Of course he might also have been the boy with the car aerial punishing the piece of driftwood the weekend he and Bridget had somehow decided, or decided not to decide, about children.

‘Sam,’ said Paddy.

He found Paddy next to him and took a sudden step back. What sort of trick was this? He opened his mouth. He stared at Paddy, his mouth hanging. He had so much to say. For a moment Paddy felt the full weight of that temptation, the voice held there, ready to break. He was on the verge, the teetering brink. Then the boy dropped his head.

Paddy said his name again but he didn’t respond. It was
crushing. Paddy was overwhelmed at having come so close, and now he could sense the boy’s shrinking, the practised retreat, the rehearsed deadness. The boy turned a great lever within himself and came to a halt. It was maddening. Finally too it was boring.

‘I’m looking for my mother,’ said Paddy. At this, Sam’s head shifted a tiny bit. It was if Paddy was speaking to a dreaming dog. ‘It’s very important that I find her. Did you see her? Did you see her come out of our building? If you were waiting outside there, maybe you saw her. You remember my mother, you kissed her cheeks.’

Sam stayed beside Paddy and didn’t move or speak. His hair had fallen forward and through it Paddy saw his ear. It was a small ear that might easily have belonged to a young girl.

‘I’m asking for your help,’ he said. ‘I’m asking because I need it. I’m not asking as your speech therapist. Sam, I’m not your therapist any more. That’s finished. I’m offering your parents a full refund. It didn’t work. It’s over. You win. You get to stay this way, Sam. Congratulations. Now I’m just asking whether you saw my mother. We’re worried. She’s not well and she walked out of her apartment. Maybe you saw which way she went.’

Paddy looked at this delicate little ear for ten or twenty seconds. A few shoppers moved around them but they stayed in their pose. They might have appeared as two store dummies, modelling some very average clothes. This season’s father and son, in greys and blacks.

Paddy leaned very close to the ear and said, ‘Can’t you say something?’

He lifted his thumb and forefinger until they rested alongside the boy’s little ear. ‘Speak,’ he whispered into it. He waited longer, another forty seconds maybe, a minute. It seemed an age to keep his hand in that position. His hand had a slight tremor. When he couldn’t hold it any longer, he took the ear in his fingers, gripping the lobe lightly with no more pressure than an earring. It would have taken nothing to bring the kid to the floor, to have him at his feet in pain. Experimentally, Paddy gave
the ear a few gentle tugs, again without any force. He waggled the ear and stroked it with his thumb. Good dog. Good boy. In holding the ear, his hand was relaxed and steady. It was very tempting. He let it go.

Throughout all this, Sam hadn’t moved. It might have been a plastic ear Paddy had in his fingers, a fake ear. It had been temperature-less.

Paddy walked at a normal pace towards the Mall exit. Sam Covenay waited. Was this particular game over? At the doors, he looked out into the street. And he saw her. Teresa was walking past, very close to where he stood. She carried shopping bags. She walked upright, or rather with the slight forward lean they’d all inherited, a pressing forward. What are you all on the hunt for, Bridget had said. He assessed her. Teresa wasn’t dissolute, unkempt, bag lady-ish in any manner. If she was inward-looking, that was normal too. His mother appeared to be walking home for lunch.