Somebody Loves Us All Read Online Free PDF Page A

code, but not the other girls from the pool. Shorthand was blindingly tedious, though you could use it to communicate to each other about boyfriends,pass notes under their noses. Pip’s instinct was right. It was the language of disenchantment, of hopes up in smoke, which was a phrase that came back to her.
    Come, come, come. You’ll love it here. Oh yes? The mooching pupae, Teresa wrote back, things biting you in the night.
    And who, Pip replied, is biting you in the night?
    They were both virgins.
    Teresa brought her tea into the bedroom and sat on the edge of her bed to drink it. Somehow this was better than being in the kitchen. There was a sort of intimidation still in the newness of the surroundings, in the wonder of it. Me? I live here?
    In the alleyway between their building and the one beside it there were occasionally young men and sometimes a young woman, perhaps a prostitute, involved in some transaction though it wasn’t a furtive thing. If Teresa happened to walk past, they didn’t move off or attempt to conceal anything; they turned and stared at her, but not with hostility. They said, you? Are you also involved?
    She tried to concentrate on the weekend ahead. Stephanie would pick her up that evening and they’d drive over the terrible hill, the three girls in the back, strapped into their car seats. Three dolls in a row. They always had fun. At the top of the hill Teresa would take over the driving while Steph held out bags for the girls to be sick in, and even this had a kind of merriment to it. Isabelle would want to hold her own bag. I’ve done more in mine, Mummy. And coming down the other side, there were the plains, which always made her think of the first explorers, the sunny knobbed expanse beyond the dark tangle of foothills. You breathed out seeing that, and felt pioneering, while also grateful the hard work had been done, the vineyards and cafés in place.
    She packed a few things for the weekend. It was probably strange to be going away so soon after moving in—Paddy had wondered about the wisdom—but Teresa couldn’t disappoint Steph. Of course Paddy wondered about the wisdom of that too. Make sure you get some time for yourself, he told her. Yetshe truly didn’t mind, did not experience it as anything but natural, the maintaining or supporting or doing something with the buoyancy of her youngest daughter, who was excitable and radiant, and who therefore required some solid backing. Teresa was solid. Not to herself of course but she was aware of an effect and part of that was reliability. Yes she would be there when she said she would, and surprisingly some people never managed even this simple thing. And she didn’t mind it at all, the running around, the ferrying, the caring, though not many believed her. But she was also her daughter’s audience and found that sustaining, interesting on a daily basis, as she did all her children’s lives, even Margie, who’d always struggled with her younger sister’s position, actually with any arrangement concerning the family. It was why she lived in Canada.
    Darling Pip, I’m thinking of coming, I am. You know I won’t and can’t and how could I but I’m thinking of it, thinking of you under the mosquito net, among the grasshoppers, among the pink giraffes. Pip had been served first in a shop, despite the queue in front of her. Blacks. The thing is, Pip wrote, you can’t not be served first. The blacks don’t like it if you try.
    Sometimes Stephanie entered the house calling out that she was there, expecting nothing less than immediate attention, and it was as if she’d come home from school for lunch and her daughters were kids she’d befriended on the way. Look who I found. She seemed very distant from them. Stephanie was a great mother and sometimes she desired, understandably, to be free of that, even to be not very good, helpless, lost. Teresa would discover her at the open door of the fridge. ‘I’m totally starving! We all