Somebody Loves Us All Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the orange juice.
    It felt to her as though she was wearing a headband that had slipped down across her forehead; this was sweat she realised, putting the back of one hand there. I’m so hot! She was coming true, she thought, putting it to herself as strangely as that. The way she spoke to herself in her head was just a little out, a little off. Coming true to that thing she’d thought of earlier—did she mean that? She was herself as a young girl, so foolishly affronted by the thermometer stuck into her mouth, she bit down on it. The shock she’d engendered in her poor parents. They were older than her friends’ parents, almost the previous generation, whichgave their relationship a tone of—what?—care rather than love? But that seemed unkind. They were attentive, peaceful, bemused mostly. Her father had chosen her mother when she had few prospects—she was thirty-four—and they’d eloped to avoid a wedding in which the couple would be congratulated by a lot of doubters and smirkers, as her mother had once told her. ‘They thought I’d have one sort of life,’ she said. ‘No one thanks you for proving them wrong.’ Teresa remembered holding her mouth open for her mother to pick the pieces of soft glass off her tongue. Bloodless. Then her father, quick to recover, was pulling back the blankets to chase the mercury around the bed. ‘It’s the devil to catch!’ he said, grinning at her. ‘Help me, won’t you?’
    Her mother had left the room. ‘I won’t help wilful children,’ she said.
    Wilful? This hurt. Because she was not wilful and that was why her mother had said it, she thought, to establish a line everyone considered was very far away. Somewhere in the remote distance such a person, strange creature, existed, but not here. Her father finally scooped the little pool of grey matter into his palm. ‘Got you!’ Its moving surface like a mirror but also like the backing of a mirror, flashing light and dulling it at once. No, she was not wilful. Yet could a single act, one event, cause everything to change?
    ‘Toxic,’ said her father sadly, leaving the room.
    She was toxic, she thought for a moment, poisoning their simple eloping lives. They’d nursed her through the rheumatic fever. She was better.
    At the solicitors’ office, she saved the fare for the ship, which took almost a year. And then she was saving some more, for living expenses and emergencies, though Pip said she could walk into a job in Salisbury no problem, be earning well soon after she strolled down the gangplank, if that was what it was called. Pip would come to Cape Town; she’d be waiting on the dock, and then they’d travel up together. Yet Teresa discovered she liked saving, the act itself. And as she became aware of her cousin Pip growing more expert in her new country, more casualabout its astonishments, not as detailed in her letters—fewer giraffes—Teresa felt less inclined to go. She’d be starting from so far behind. Thinking about how much she’d have to learn was a great disincentive to begin on that process, she discovered. Pip would have to be her teacher, which hardly mattered, she knew, it was just that she felt she’d done enough learning. She was impatient for life to begin, not for everything to begin again. And then towards the end of the second year of successful saving, she met Brendan.
    Finally, at the apartment building, Teresa stood in front of the lift, her arms incredibly tired from carrying the bags of shopping even though the bags didn’t contain much, or any more than she was used to. She must be sick, she thought. Just then she became aware of two people standing beside her, a woman and a boy. They too were waiting for the lift. The woman caught her eye and smiled. The boy was looking at his feet. Suddenly Teresa turned away, pushing through the doors to the stairs with her shoulder. She had five flights. The stairs were a light well and sunshine fell on her blazing head. She began the