Free Somebody Loves Us All by Damien Wilkins Page A

braces. They’d talked about it, or he’d talked. He’d been forced to wear horrible little rubber bands that he had to take out whenever he ate. His sister Margaret would scoop them up, fire them at Stephanie. Someone will lose an eye! said their mother. Probably it wasn’t until he was in his twenties that Paddy started smiling again with his open mouth. There were dark grooves on a couple of his lower front teeth. Even now it took a conscious effort to part the lips. He’d shared this. The boy had heard it. Big fucking deal.
    Most annoyingly, the braces hadn’t done much good. All that pointless suffering! This he didn’t say.
    Paddy had stopped speaking. Together they listened to theapartment. It was windy again outside and the building made its periodic, far-off droning sound, a sort of architectural sigh from its lower reaches as the northerly banged into the neighbouring block and into them again, moving down the alley five stories below where they sat. At ground level you’d be able to hear the recycling bins scraping along the footpath. November. They couldn’t ever hear traffic though they were in the middle of town. It was one of their selling points to Teresa. And the drug dealers were very handy too.
    The permanent bass note, a deep throb, tuned almost to some vibration in the chest, was provided by the amenities carried through silvery insulated pipes visible in the building’s corridors. At night you could almost believe you were on a vessel moving steadily through the water. He said this aloud also. He tried poetry, because why not?
    An image came to mind—a very clear picture of another boy, years before, lying in bed, very stiff, partially paralysed in fact, scarcely able to move his head even, but raising an arm and opening and closing the fingers of one hand. Of course it was Jimmy Gorzo. His hand was somehow his mouth, expressive in ways his mouth couldn’t yet be. That had been the first week of treatment. The moaning, and then the fluttering of hands. Paddy didn’t think Sam Covenay, moving zilch, had much to do with producing this image of Jimmy. Paddy had Tony Gorzo again in his brain. Where was his friend? What accounted for his failure to call?
    He was listening hard. What for—the phone?
    Very faintly through the wall today Paddy could just make out his mother’s voice, or someone’s voice in his mother’s apartment. He wondered how the weekend had gone. Stephanie’s three girls were little, very short, and though they were perfectly formed, always with pigtails, always sunnily in dresses, three girls made of jam—pink-cheeked, sweet-natured, always sticky, you could have bottled them—they yet had the capacity to ravage the emotions as completely as any such trio. The three dwarves, Lant called them. Take the gin, Paddy had told her.
    He tried again to decode the sounds from next door. Perhaps Teresa was on the phone. Or perhaps they were listening through the wall to her radio again; it seemed too pure for the TV, which he didn’t think she had much interest in anyway. ‘Can you hear that?’ Paddy asked Sam. It was, after all, the boy’s fault. He amplified any signal. You strained and strained to hear—something. Paddy thought again about Jimmy Gorzo hating the silence of the hospital room and complaining that his brain was growing dull. He needed sounds. Paddy too was growing dull.
     
    Thirteen years ago Jimmy Gorzo, Tony’s only child, had fallen off a quad bike while at a beach party somewhere up in Northland. Fallen on sand, as Tony liked to repeat. The stuff, he said to Paddy, they have in a sandpit, where little kids play. Tony had never got used to this indignity. ‘They tell me packed sand is as hard as concrete but this was a dune. His mother’s still combing it out of his hair ten, twelve weeks after the accident.’
    When Paddy got to work with him, Jimmy had already spent a few months in the Spinal Unit at Burwood. He’d broken his back, which fortunately