Free Somebody Loves Us All by Damien Wilkins Page B

for him would mend pretty well. He’d also suffered damage to his cochlea, though this wasn’t clear at first. On the first day Paddy met them all, whenever Jimmy tried to speak, his father would start talking over the top of him to cover up the sounds he was making. The boy would moan and point with his hands and Tony Gorzo would say, ‘Hard to believe he was top of his class.’ He took Paddy aside. ‘What we want to know is, is this it? But no one will tell us. Instead we listen to Jimmy making his monster noises.’
    Jimmy’s mother, Ellie, clasped the boy’s hands together and told him everything was all right and to be quiet. His hands flapped, opening and closing, if they weren’t held. Later, Paddy understood these weren’t spasms.
    He was seventeen.
    ‘The first thing I need to do,’ Paddy told them, ‘is to hear Jimmy.’
    ‘You’ll get the idea very quick,’ Tony said. ‘Animal noises, or like he’s been punched in the stomach. Roughly speaking, we think all his sounds refer to the hospital food.’ He laughed and knocked Paddy on the arm. Tony Gorzo had an awful cheeriness about him that at first Paddy mistook for shock; it was actually his way with the world. He punched everyone—everyone except his wife. Perhaps this counted for something.
    ‘We don’t think that,’ said Ellie.
    Jimmy made another noise.
    ‘My wife has developed a system of communication through applying pressure to his hands. It’s not sophisticated. One squeeze for yes, two for no.’
    ‘He responds. He knows. It’s still him,’ she said, growing teary-eyed.
    ‘If he wants to go to university, I don’t think the lecturer will squeeze his hand like that.’
    There was another Jimmy cry, this one longer. He used up all his breath with it, finishing on a sustained high note. His parents looked at him.
    ‘He’s never said that before,’ said Tony.
    Paddy asked for some time alone with Jimmy. On their way out of the room, Tony held his elbow and said, ‘Whatever you can do, we’d be grateful. Even if you could only get him to be quieter with the shouting and carry-on.’
    ‘I think your son is deaf,’ said Paddy.
    Tony nodded. ‘Better than blind, I used to think. Now I wonder. The blind go about their work very quietly, don’t they. Especially with a dog, or just a cane tapping. They’re in the dark, where you have to creep around. We would love to have him whisper these noises, if only that.’
    ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
    Naturally it was the father Paddy wanted to turn down, or turn off. He learned later that Gorzo was keeping Jimmy’s grandmother, who apparently doted on her grandson, fromseeing Jimmy except when the boy could be relied on to be asleep. He didn’t want to upset her.
    Tony Gorzo was a shallow figure, Paddy thought. A man of limited emotions, dealt a blow and unable to rise in any way to meet his family’s suffering. Paddy tried to avoid him as much as possible but it wasn’t easy. Gorzo liked to hold Paddy’s elbow and tell him boastful things about his business. He owned a bowling lane place in the Hutt and a number of rental properties. ‘I rent to the beneficiaries,’ he said. ‘Sickness, dole, solos. People say to me, “Tony, what you doing down the bottom end?” Because they don’t understand the bennies always pay on time because the money comes direct from the government and they’re long-term because they got no place to go.’
    Tony was five feet six, overweight, balding, and with a huge, sputum-producing cough. He smoked thin brown cigarillo-type things that gave off a smell exactly like dog shit. The large oval gold-rimmed glasses he wore provided his face not with an owlish wise look but with the belligerent, peering, reproachful gaze of someone wronged.
    He asked Paddy questions about his job and what he was trying with Jimmy but didn’t seem able to take in the answers. Sometimes he got Paddy confused with the Ear, Nose and Throat surgeon, or Jimmy’s