Somebody Loves Us All by Damien Wilkins Page A

dark clothes. Their plastic poster cylinders under their arms. Paddy and Helena had soon created such a stockpile of stories about Geoff and his secret life that it was hard to meet his eye when they bumped into him. His smallest gesture seemed to confirm some detail they’d invented. The way he touched his shirt cuffs when he spoke. His smirk. The bag he carried. They had to stop. But they could still hear him if they tried every Thursday.
     
    Before he started seeing Sam, Paddy set up his usual family meeting, so that everyone knew what was involved. He told them that he was all for speech but that speech took many forms and that elocution was not his business. Amazing how frequently the fathers made a joke about electrocution at that point. One in three, Paddy thought. ‘No putting his finger in the plug socket then?’
    Alan Covenay was not among this number. He’d listened carefully to what Paddy had to say. Towards the end, he’d stood up and patted his pockets, asked his wife about the car keys. The slight mournfulness he carried may have had nothing to do with Sam. In tall men who were drawn to cultural things Paddy had often noticed this air of melancholy, a feeling perhaps that the realm naturally favoured compactness. They didn’t quite fit in their seats. You saw these stooping, guilty figures at the theatre, in galleries, at the orchestra where puckish men skipped around them. Then on his way out Alan Covenay stood in front of the framed cartoon that hung in the office. ‘It’s dropped slightly in the top left corner,’ he said. Paddy stood beside him, looking. He was two inches taller than Paddy. Paddy hadn’t noticed it but he was right about the picture. Inside the frame, the print hung crookedly now. ‘I can fix that for you if you like.’
    ‘Sure,’ said Paddy.
    ‘I could take it now, if you like.’
    Paddy agreed.
    ‘No charge.’ He reached towards the picture, lifted it from its hook with a deft upward motion, and put it under his arm. When he did this, Sam made a quick sighing sound, or a sound of irritation. Had he watched this before? Was it something his father was prone to—walking into strangers’ houses and leaving with the pictures off their walls? Everyone watched Alan straighten the picture hook.
    ‘No charge? But you’ll give me an invoice.’
    ‘He won’t give you an invoice,’ said Angela, more sharply than she’d intended since she at once attempted to recover her tone by mumbling something else about the smallness of the job. It would take Alan minutes. The flicker of annoyance here seemed directed at no one in particular or at everyone. Was she simply thinking of the bigger task they were handing Paddy and that it didn’t seem a fair swap? The difference was Paddy was charging them ninety-five dollars an hour.
    Again from their son came the short breath of displeasure, more like a pant this time. When Paddy looked at him, however,there was nothing on his face but perfect tight blankness.
    And no one had commented on the content of the cartoon, the caricature of Paddy done some years before but recognisable. Perhaps not. They’re leaving with me, he thought. It was not an existential moment. Strange to see his picture exit the apartment though. He seemed to have had no control over it happening. Alan Covenay would have got his picture no matter what Paddy said.
    And then the picture didn’t come back and so much time had gone by that Paddy had begun to think it was now appropriate for the repaired picture to arrive at the conclusion of the therapy. He would give them back their son and they’d return him to him, as it were.
    He was that stuck. And he had the bike to prove it.
     
    He’d told Helena about Sam one night in bed. ‘If he puts his fist through a window at school or pushes his mother against a wall, I could refer him to Lant.’
    ‘Do you think that’s likely?’ said Helena. She was reading People magazine. She had a stack of them in her bedside