Somebody Loves Us All Read Online Free Page B

done this to me,’ her mother said at the window, ‘but at least he has the decency to treat them well.’ Then she took Teresa’s hand and held it tightly. The neighbour’s children were entering the chicken coop, bending their heads. ‘How dark they are and him so pale!’ The fantasy was cruel, hard on everyone, but it was also clearly interesting to her mother, a spectacle she hadn’t anticipated. She found life immensely surprising, until of course she didn’t. In her cupboards, which had once been full of home baking, chutneys, bottles of preserved fruit, there was only white bread, salt, pre-washed potatoes, mayonnaise mix in a packet. They discovered she was only eating things that were white in colour because of the dangers of what she called pigmentated food. Someone was telling her about this, a man she described as having a silken beard, bare feet and a stopwatch around his neck. Naturally no such figure existed in Naenae. She didn’t speak boastfully about this phantom, but shyly, with a strange girlish smile on her face.
    Was this what Teresa had coming? But then again, she didn’t have a voice in her head, she had a voice in her voice.
    She typed back to Pip, who was not online: Dear African Night Owl, all is fine. Teresa sent it before she realised she’d not replied to the line about Palmerston North. Her cousin would want something witty back, that was their style. She looked at the screen. No wit was in her, only a pressure at her temple, like a thumb. She went back into the bedroom and dressed quickly, as if something depended on it. Why wasn’t there time for a shower? She put on deodorant. She had an urgent sense that she needed to be ready.
    Although she had no appetite, she poured yoghurt onto cereal, chopping half a banana on top. For the time it took to eat this, through an old trick, she prevented herself from thinking. You imagined a white wall being painted, white on white. An odourless paint. The painting was important—the even sweep ofthe roller—otherwise you began to see writing, which led back to thoughts. She held it. In this blank space she hoped to return her mind to its normal routines, shaking off the foreignness that was only some ephemeral condition, the smudge that sleep had made of reality. Was she even properly awake? Then she couldn’t hold it any longer. And the banana tasted like a banana and the yoghurt she poured in was wet and cold. There was instantly something grassy on her palate.
    Once in Lower Hutt on High Street she’d been approached by a woman in her sixties wearing a tee-shirt that said across the chest: AIRBAG inflation on impact. Incredibly, the woman, it turned out, was from France. She was nice, very polite, cultured, with perfect wavy white hair. Her handbag carried exquisite scrollwork on its strap, the body of the bag kept elegantly plain. Could Teresa tell her where the art gallery was? They’d walked to the Dowse together, stopping to name the trees, admiring the fountain. Fontaine, she said. She loved the montagnes. Willow, said Teresa, pointing. Weeping Willow. The woman tried it and then they both laughed.
    She thought about languages. She had learned shorthand, if that counted as a language. The name alone gave it away, as though the writer’s tool had become a claw. Men spoke and as fast as it came out of their mouths, you stitched it to the page. Pip, she remembered, had wanted to be taught a few words; she was training to be a dental nurse and hoped to write rude things about the dentists who bullied her, who rubbed against her as they looked inside mouths. ‘See here,’ they said. She wanted to write such things in their presence, smiling and looking meek in the Pip way.
    Pip’s return to New Zealand had made Teresa think a lot about things she’d hardly considered for decades. Moving house too. Moving moved things, she thought.
    Of course some people thought shorthand was magic, like spells inscribed on ancient tombs, secret