The Companion

by Lorcan Roche

  Speaking of which, right now she’s using her pink pig ones to draw mine down towards the V of her Diana Dors negligée and I’m getting a crick in my neck from not looking. It’s as if I’m in an episode of Batman and one of my arch-enemies has produced this huge magnet to try and draw me in, nnnnghnooo.

  ‘Eh, I’d like to meet Ed now, if that’s OK with you?’

  ‘Don’t you want to know how much the position pays?’

  I tell her it’s obvious she has a lot of love for her son, and she says ‘yes’ in this little-girl-lost voice. Yes. Then I say it is abundantly clear that she wants him to be happy at the end of his tragically short life.

  ‘Yes, ah most certainly do.’

  ‘You want someone who is physically strong, but who has a kind heart?’

  ‘Ah’ll settle for nothin’ less.’

  ‘You want someone mature and responsible?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Someone sensitive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Someone with a high intelligence quota, just like Ed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then I leave a pause – it’s a brilliant one altogether – and finally I say, ‘Well Ma’am, in that case I’m sure the position pays exceptionally well.’

  And you can see by the way El Grosso Fuckin’ Piggo is narrowing her eyes and flaring her thick, square nostrils that she’s suddenly not quite so sure what to make of me. And because she is no longer in complete control she looks past me towards the open door and says in a real dismissive way, ‘I’ll let him know you’re coming.’

  And all of a sudden she no longer sounds like Blanche du Bois, in fact she sounds exactly like the permanently pissed off cow I share an apartment in Astoria with who constantly leaves these little notes lying around all the time. I’ll tell you something for nothing, if you find one of them first thing in the morning it can ruin your entire fuckin’ day even if you have what I like to call a Victor Mature voice saying, Don’t let it get to you, pal. You have your health, you have your whole life ahead of you, it’s just a scrap of paper with some sexually-frustrated cow’s squiggly fuckin’ writing on it.

  Miss Piggy picks up this antique little phone by the bed, it was probably in the apartment from day one, and already I can hear another one tinkling down the corridor. It takes an age for him to answer. Then finally she says, ‘Ed, hi, it’s your mother.’ Well who else was it going to be, Naomi fuckin’ Campbell?

  She sighs as if me and her had been at it hammer and tongs, and says, sigh, ‘The Irish boy is on his way,’ sigh, as if I’m no longer present. I thank her and tell her it was very nice to have met her, but she’s lost all interest; her hand is already reaching for the remote. And as I’m walking out the door and down the narrow corridor I realize I’m doing my breathing exercises which means I must be on the verge of getting angry. The reason I reckon is sheer bad manners.

  Old sow never even bothered to ask me my name.

  2

  Inhale. Hold. Now, let the negative energy out.

  That’s better.

  People are like clocks or musical compositions – they all have different rhythms. And although at times I jabberwock (i.e. talk way too quickly for my own good) my basic rhythm is kind of slow. Think cello or oboe. As a result, as a consequence, when things start spiral-staircasing downwards, when other men stand there with their traps open catching flies, it really isn’t that difficult for me to step in and assume control. Or what looks like it.

  Example, when I was in India we had this driver with a bandage over one eye and yellow pus seeping out from under it – fell asleep and got bit by a tree spider, I’d say – and he had this infant on the front seat beside him, quite beautiful actually, with black mirrors for eyes and silver bracelets on little ankles that jingled when you picked him up and tried to stop him from crying, which was exactly what this lovely, incredibly healthy-looking older American woman was doing. You could see she was doing OK, no problemo, but that didn’t stop old Gunner Eye from looking over his shoulder every two fuckin’ seconds, no matter what was coming at us.

  And then I heard it. Like a record on the wrong speed, a 45 on 33, whispering, like Ray Winstone or maybe Bob Hoskins. Oi, this is it Clever Trevor, this is one of those fucking situations. And the voice is sort of sing-song, but very reasonable and calm, and it says that the fucking towel-heads never fit new brake pads on any of their fucking vehicles and if they do, they probably fit the fucking wrong ones, now he has my attention.

  I mean, you’ve seen ‘em, Trev, Indian mechanics. Hunkered down on the side of the road, roll-up in one hand, iron bar in the other. Tell me, what are they always fucking doing?

  I don’t know. What are they always doing?

  What they’re always doing, Trev, is beating the shit out of some vital fucking bike, car, or let’s-fucking-face-it, bus component. Now, as you’ve already clocked, our driver has only one eye in his head. The baby is distracting him, as is the fucking hippy American bird who, to be fair, is only tryin’ to fucking ‘elp. But the thing is, Trev, if you was sitting up a bit closer you would hear the unmistakable, not to mention highly fucking unwelcome sound of metal on metal. So, what you have to do now is ask yourself a question.

  He leaves a pause, quite a tense neck one, and I have to ask, What’s the question?

  Do you or do you not like being alive?

  He laughs and I’m out of my seat, walking up the aisle of the lurching bus, listening and nodding as he follows.

  See, it doesn’t fucking matter how many times he’s thrown orange flowers or brass farthings out the fucking window. Because truth is, mate, you fucking like being alive, right?

  I have to admit, there’ve been a few times when I wasn’t entirely convinced that I liked being alive all that much. But we all feel like that from time to time, right? I mean, they’re just moments or moods, or maybe they’re seasons …

  Earth to fucking Trevor. Would you like to ask the audience? Maybe phone a fucking friend?

  I’m at the very front now, the driver is looking up at me with his one good eye and yellow pus really is seeping. The baby is screaming and the American woman isn’t helping anymore because she’s crying too, her tears falling on the baby’s face. I put my hand on the driver’s shoulder and it sinks a bit, like a plunger in a coffee pot, as if he is very, very tired. Then I tell him as calmly as I can that maybe it’d be best for all concerned if I took the wheel, just for a little while.

  There’s always that moment, when you don’t know if what you’re doing is rational or right, when the universe stops spinning and the gods stop playing snakes ’n ladders with our lladro lives and they lean forward wondering if he’ll scream into my face, Get back to your seat you big, bloody, stupid-looking foreigner!

  Except he just smiles up as if he too was aware that Death, or its first cousin, Permanent Disfigurement, was waiting around the next bend. He lifts his bare black foot off the accelerator (did you ever notice how brown-skinned people have jet-black feet?) and he starts grinding down the hurting gears, nodding his head from side to side. ‘Yes my friend, you can take the wheel now, but only just for little while.’

  We stop. The peace is glorious. The American woman is saying ‘Thank God’ over and over. Thank God. Thank God. I fire up the bus gently. The steering wheel is huge and sticky from his pink, sweating palms, and it really is a piece of shit this bus. And Bob Hoskins was right, there are practically no brakes, and the huge red speedo needle is hopping all over the place, so nice and easy does it.

  This other more modern bus, which was honking at us from behind, overtakes in a red cloud of cough dust and the American woman comes up and kisses the top of my head softly. ‘Thank you, whoever you are.’ She says she was praying for someone to act, to intervene, that she was convinced we were all going to die, but that God had answered her prayers.

  That’s when I tell her to keep on praying because we have no brakes worth talking about and there’s a big steep hill up ahead. She la
ughs and says, ‘OK, I’ll get back to work, I think I may have Him on the line.’ And before she turns to sit back down she asks me my name and where I am from, and I tell her. ‘Thank you so much, Trevor from Ireland.’

  Then she asks me ‘Are you a believer?’, and I say out loud for the whole bus to hear, ‘Yes, I most certainly am.’ And I’m sitting there, driving the big old creaking wreck, happy to be alive, but at the same time I say to myself quietly, I know He’s up there all right. I know it because I can feel Him. Watching. Judging. But not fuckin’ participating.

  As an adolescent I became convinced that God had taken an instamatic photo of me when I was still a womb-wet newborn. It was still developing as He was passing it round to his cronies and they began asking So, Yahweh, what’s the Grand Plan for this fellow? when one of them, probably a Protestant, smudged me with his thumb.

  Then, as the Proddy handed back the photo, God stared blankly at the square of paper he was holding and declared: No plans in hand, boom-boom!

  It’d be funny if God turned out to have a really shit sense of humour and everyone in Heaven avoided him and his awful after-dinner jokes.

  Anyway, I always felt I was the unnecessary part that rattled in the box after the gift had been assembled. I was forever breaking things accidentally and if I played with other kids who occasionally came to visit – the sons of other professors, say – they ended up getting injured or knocked over backwards with their thick glasses half on. Then there were the muted whisperings behind closed doors about my lineage, and the age gap between me and my ugly sisters, not to mention the fact that we resembled one another in the way that chalk and fuckin’ cheese do.

  And I admit I definitely spent way too much time alone as a kid, and a dog and a boomerang are not compensation enough for a yearning that would well up inside whenever we went out driving and passed estates where ordinary boys built tree houses and dreams with their determined, earnest little posse of friends.

  I was equally convinced as I grew up that all my doubts, fears and uncertainties about who and what I really was, all my endless worries, were trapped in my wide, stupid, frontier of a face where nothing could be even thinly disguised. I hated looking at myself in mirrors especially first thing in the morning, and nothing ever fitted in department stores. I suppose that’s how I developed my compulsive hatred of neat, perfectly turned-out shop assistants and the way they always made me feel blurred, vague. Like in the original Star Trek when they’re bringing Kirk or McCoy or Lt. Uhuru back on board and the transporter device starts acting up and you get the coming and going, that awful fading and re-animating, and you don’t know whether they’re going to make it off the doomed planet in time. Well you do, but you don’t.

  When I was thirteen or fourteen there was an incident behind the school shed and I believe that’s the time I stopped speaking for almost a year. I say believe because I find memory very confusing altogether, especially family and childhood stuff, what I refer to as the tadpole material of our lives, the untrustworthy messy fuckin’ frog spawn. I mean, let’s face it, it’s way too easy for anyone with any brand of an imagination or any kind of emotional problem to selectively edit or sneakily rewrite events to suit their own complicated agenda, their therapeutically, pharmaceutically recreated version of themselves, just like a little dictator. And even if you get some professional help years later, it’s sometimes impossible to go back to the original pond because it’s been left high and dry, bereft of any teeming, telltale clues. Hey, maybe you’ve filled it in and built a Happy Family theme park over it.

  I’d be reluctant to say that my silence had to do with just one particular thing, with the rich kids screaming in the school shed, my skin erupting violently, or my voice breaking at the boy scouts’ crackling fire. It was more a feeling of sands shifting within, of creaking components rearranging themselves, of various voices competing for the microphone in my head; and then one part – the soft, malleable child part – falling away slowly, like a lunar module. And the other adult part failing to attach itself to the rocket ship right away.

  Prolonged, elastic panic. What seemed like years of waiting for heart and brain to desist, hiss, and finally slow down. I shot up and sprouted out. My feet and hands seemed to acquire a will and a rising, threshing temperature all their own. I was at least three times stronger than any boy my age, at least as strong as any man my size. You may think that’s an immediate advantage, but it isn’t, because no matter what happens, no matter how many of them wait, like jackals, outside the changing rooms grinning, no matter how many of them snap open your metal locker and throw your personal shit, your diary, your drawings all over the floor and you’re picking up the wet pages of your soggy life, it’s always a case of but look at the sheer bloody size of you. You’re constantly in the wrong. You’re an animal a tyke, a throwback.

  To what, Dad?

  I’d seen my first porno pictures where there was all this spunking up on tits and faces, what they call the money shots, and in the shiny magazines the sperm was Moby-Dick white. I’d been whacking off a lot, I mean, what else do you do after school when you’ve been moved down the country and you don’t know a single soul except the local doctor with his little leather bag, the priest in the confessional and the butcher who gives you scraps for your dog? So, I used to beat my meat. A lot.

  My sperm came out snot green.

  I got it into my thick skull that I was an alien. Yes I know that sounds ridiculous, and it is, but I was fourteen for fuck’s sake. I became converted by the idea that I was not normal, that I was not of this world, that I was in fact a brother from another planet, that as soon as I had sex with a girl all of this would be announced to the world. There’d be this big investigation and international manhunt, they’d find my diaries and capture my confessor and make him talk, and he’d tell them what I said I’d like to do to my sisters, you know the sort of thing, making them drink twenty litres of tepid sea water, wrapping them up in barbed wire, forcing them to roll down steep hills, fast; what I’d like to do to my old fella and his pipe puff, puff and what precisely is your point, Trevor; my piano teacher and her metronome which seemed to have built into it the beat of other boys acquiring friends steadily. Then the beat of feet retreating as I approached.

  They’d put me in this program where I’d be studied and where they’d do that X-File stuff … Bend over, open wide, does this bit come off? Sorry. Jeez Pete, look at this, the guy’s hands are kinda like flippers, let’s put him in the water tank, see how fast he can go.

  And you know that ringing you get in your ears, real high and pure, almost like computer music? Well, I was getting that quite a lot in those days and was convinced it was my old alien buddies trying to contact me, or send me some Pharaoh-coded message that I was no longer able to decipher, having hung around with my pooch for too long.

  In the end it was really unnerving me and I developed a very short fuse and like I said I was becoming embroiled in quite a lot of fistfights and just because you win, or emerge unscathed, it doesn’t necessarily mean you enjoy it. And I used to get physically sick after some swimming races what with the rank smell of chlorine, the bayonet screams of the crowd as you twisted your head up for hot, competition air. Then, afterwards, flip-flop thoughts slapping cold wet tiles: Please, no smart comments in the shower. Please, not another round of carpark fuckin’ aggro.

  I couldn’t take it any longer, the pressure-cooker singing. I couldn’t sleep, which isn’t good for the short fuse either, and eventually I stole into my mother’s room, woke her, and told her what was eating me up.

  When I finished she just laughed her tits off, which I felt was incredibly inappropriate and she said I was perfectly normal, that my father had snot green spunk too and sure wasn’t I here, larger than life, sitting on the bed beside her?

  ‘Aren’t ya a right eejit, Stretch, worrying yourself sick about something as ridiculous as that?’ Stretch was her nickname for me and I hated it as I felt I had been stretched
, maybe a bit too far.

  Ma tried her best but she failed to convince me because as far as I was concerned there was a high probability the old man was not my real father, and we’ll get into all that stuff later. But even if he was, there was a pretty good chance he was an alien too and the alien nation we belonged to were kind of like cats in the way that parents and offspring didn’t really bother to get to know one other.

  You know what I mean: your cat has kittens so you give one to the neighbours down the road outside Mass one Sunday on a velvet cushion, and one year later you have a red lemonade and Marietta biscuit tea party to reintroduce the clan. You have all the little kids from the road come in to watch, you maybe even charge a few pence admission, so what? And you do a speech about families and reunions and there’s unrealistic expectation in the air, very fuckin’ unrealistic. Because right away the mother cat tries to knock the shit out of her own son, hissing and spitting, her electric tail standing up like the pole on the back of a dodgem car.

  Ma was stroking my head, saying it was crazy how I let these things build up inside, fester, but that at least I was talking again. Her voice sounded fake however and she had been an amateur actress in college, she might even have won some silver medals for her performance in Tennessee Williams way back when. But she wasn’t winning any now in her lilac, overdone room.

  When I sat up and looked at her she just smiled and said, ‘What?’ when she knew what I was trying to ask. I kept staring and willing her, Come on, Ma, for fuck’s sake, but it didn’t work because she just smiled and said, ‘What, son? Go on.’