Somebody Loves Us All Read Online Free

asked for this to be added to the purchase. They could come in handy in the Wairarapa. Stephanie had sent through photos of the place; there was a long window-seat in the conservatory and she saw the girls kneeling there, drawing pictures while Stephanie and Teresa read their books, drank their weak gins. At a certain point, once the girls were in bed, they’d talk about Paul Shawn, the children’s father, and her daughter would cry silently, without too much passion. Then she’d sleep for twelve hours, waking to find Teresa had given the girls their breakfast and taken them to the park.
    The girl looked up and said, ‘How long have you been in New Zealand?’
    ‘Me?’ said Teresa.
    She held up the dictionary. ‘Your English is very good!’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Teresa. Absurdly, she felt pleased. The girl, she discovered, was grinning in encouragement, hoping to hear more. She turned and left, suddenly shy, a little hallucinatory under the fluorescent lighting.
    I’ve been here seventy-eight years and counting.
     
    That morning she’d woken as usual to the radio news. They were in the middle of a story from France, where truck drivers were going ‘to make the snail’, use their vehicles to block motorways. They were interviewing a truckie. His words were translated. Behind the English, you could still hear his voice. ‘This is ourmessage to the politicians and the oil companies. If you are stuck behind my truck in your limousines, you will smell my farts!’
    She decided, in the abstract at least, she approved of French truck drivers.
    Someone, a spokesperson, sober and measured and dull, was saying how pointless and harmful it was to the economy. Counter-productive. He was French but spoke in English. The behaviour, he said, was a ‘relic’, a rayleek she heard and the drivers were not snails but dinosaurs. Deenosaurs. She thought vaguely of Dean Martin, whom she didn’t have a good handle on. He was different from Frank Sinatra, was he? She saw a thin drunk man in a dinner jacket with a cigarette, smiling at something risqué he’d just said, or was just about to say. Risqué was a French word. She couldn’t think of anything for longer than a second before it headed towards this. Then she drifted back to sleep. When she woke again, it was vendredi. She had the word so far to the front of her mouth that she had to produce it, like the pointed stone of a plum. She said it aloud. She didn’t have a shred of the language, yet here it was.
    Teresa walked to the computer in the dining room, still in her pyjamas, and went online. This at least was normal. She always turned on the computer before doing anything else, going to the toilet, eating breakfast. She went to it as to an oracle. Of course the word meant Friday, and it was: today was vendredi. She said it aloud again, rather nicely. That was interesting again. Perhaps she had known the days of the week after all. Mercredi was familiar, like mercury, which as a girl she’d once had to spit from her mouth, having stupidly bitten a thermometer, a single melted bullet dropping and running through her fingers like something escaping her fever. Both her parents had stood there, unable for a second to comprehend what had happened; the act so far out of the range of her character that for a moment she thought: They don’t know who I am. I could be anyone lying here.
    Skype had opened and she read a chat message from Pip sent late the night before. How are you darling? Can’t sleep. Ikeep having the same nightmare: I’ve come to live in Palmerston North.
    Pip was her cousin, her great and long-distance friend. After a lifetime in Zimbabwe, she’d come to live in Palmerston North. Her husband had been killed, but that was long before Mugabe. Teresa had never met him, a Yorkshireman, only seen photos. David. He had a beard and was the manager on a tobacco farm before moving into the city after some problems. In a robbery, he was stabbed. David had been