Somebody Loves Us All Read Online Free Page A

collecting the unsold bread from a supermarket to distribute to shelters as part of a church charity group. The crime belonged anywhere, Pip had said. It was mindless. She continued to love the people, the country, and she had stayed on. In the early Rhodesian days, there’d been the letters. Come, wrote her cousin, come, come, come. She described the streets, the things she’d seen in the markets, the local gardens, the giraffes ‘mooching in the trees’. ‘The dusty pink of the sunsets.’ ‘The blackness of the blacks.’ She was swimming in a friend’s concrete pool. The friend kept frogs to eat the pupae of the mosquitoes. Okay, then maybe I will. They’d both devoured Sally in Rhodesia . That book lit the fire.
    How am I? Teresa wondered. Well, different, that was clear. When she looked in the mirror, she seemed the same. She spoke into her reflection and saw it. Her lips came forward and the muscles at the corners of her mouth were tight. She was acting. Her mouth felt sore. Her tongue was tired, which was a very strange sensation. The fatigue was astonishingly local.
    It was Novembre, too, which she also pronounced perfectly, as far as she could tell, but how did she even know that much, that it was correct? The girl chasing the mercury around her wicker bedspread was monolingual, an ignoramus when it came to such things, though a student eventually of typewriters and foot-controlled dictaphones. You pressed down under the desk and a man’s voice spoke in your ear. Dear Mr Peters.
    She’d caught it from the radio ? Maybe she was crazy and this was a sign, a symptom. She hadn’t been waiting for it exactly, yet she knew she was now only five years younger than her motherhad been when that mind, without pity on its owner, crumbled, admitting the barefoot dietician with the silken beard and the stopwatch.
    In her eighties, her mother had grown to believe Teresa’s father was secretly in love with the young Samoan woman next door and these were his illegitimate children coming through the hedge. He gave them eggs from his hens.
    One afternoon, a few months before her mother died, Teresa had stood beside her as they watched from the window her father, a retired teacher, carefully handing the eggs to a young boy and girl. Her parents lived in a state house in Naenae. The wind flew against the high hedge at the rear of the property, turning it silver for a moment before switching it back. The leaves were glossy on one side and thick. They tempted you to touch them, and then they disappointed you somehow. Beyond the hedge, and through a little opening in the branches, there was barren public land that sloped down to a concrete waterway patrolled by stray cats. Teresa had always felt this place to be particularly desolate and despairing, though when they visited, her children often played there, if it could be called playing. You followed the waterway in one direction and came to a sports field which, in winter, smelled of rotting vegetation due to poor drainage. If you headed north instead, wading in the motionless shin-deep water, eventually you reached a culvert sealed off with a metal grill. She imagined in a flash her children swallowed into the darkness of the tunnel. Weeds and rubbish caught against the bars. She’d accompanied the kids once, Paddy walking in gumboots in the water, the girls on the grass. Lift your head and above the culvert you saw the hillside cemetery, the sun striking its tilted plane, where both her parents would one day be buried. Near the edge of the concrete waterway she’d almost stepped on the body of a dead rat. The hair on the body was brushed the wrong way. She’d scooped up Stephanie in her arms before she got a good look and jogged up to the line of hedges, calling to the other two who were bent over it. At such times she felt excessively widowed—widowed again and again,moment by moment, that it was ongoing and not a single event in the past.
    ‘I can’t believe he’s