The Companion

by Lorcan Roche

  I wanted to. I wanted to scream, Is he or is he not my fuckin’ father? but the words got trapped and nothing came out except my milk-sour, anxious, adolescent breath because my stomach was in a state of high anxiety, had been for quite a while.

  I ended up seeing this gentle old country doctor in a rambling house full of Buddhas, plants and stone statues way up in the Wicklow hills. He told me I reminded him of a giant turtle from the South Seas – he even promised to help me come out of my shell. It was pretty embarrassing having to jerk off into a little specimen jar and have the contents sent off to a lab in Dublin. I had stored up a lot of this stuff (not sperm, but notions, ideas, doubts) and I just couldn’t stop talking; during the vow of silence my voice had changed register and it sounded awesome, really heartbroken, like Iggy Pop on a bad day.

  He listened sometimes he’d smile and nod, and I’d smile and say it was OK if he wanted to laugh, that I found it all kind of ludicrous too. I told him I’d taken the not-fitting-in concept and basically run a bit too far with it. In the end he would just laugh his thick wool socks off, especially when I talked about my sisters and my old fella.

  He said comforting things to me, that it was a great gift to be able to make people laugh and that on a more serious note it was perfectly acceptable to think strange thoughts about family and authority figures, look to Aristotle; that he would be very surprised indeed if any single notion that entered my head was not a notion that some other fine young man, or indeed some nice young lady, was not having about his or her father, or piano teacher, or swimming coach. And that if I didn’t enjoy the swimming, I should give it up altogether, throw in the towel, because doing things we don’t like creates internal strife that could lead ultimately to repressed rage. But actually I did enjoy it because in and under the water I was in my element, I could feel my massive hands pulling like oars on a galley full of slaves and with each stroke I drew ahead of the competition, with each kick of my clown feet the distance between me and the rest of the world both lengthened and diminished.

  I was the one in control, breathing.

  And I didn’t feel odd, disjointed, or distorted. In fact, sometimes I felt quite beautiful, like a porpoise or a white dolphin.

  And before you go and say there’s no such thing you should read up a bit on your sea- and ocean-going creatures because there are white dolphins in the Amazon; the most amazing thing about them is they’re born completely blind.

  It was the gentle old country doctor with the yellowed cellophane holding his specs together, the crooked smile and the tiny glass of golden whiskey at his patched elbow who encouraged me to start devouring the same books my family did, to ‘level the playing field’. And it was he who told me that my opinions were just as valid as theirs, but if I wanted to be a ‘true counter-revolutionary’ (here he winked and I knew she’d told him and we’ll get to it later) then I had to get stuck in again, become a part of things, that too many young Irish men sat on the fence with their inherited fears and ancient, inferiority complexes only to become permanent ‘hurlers on the ditch’.

  Actually, he had quite a few good phrases such as ‘you’re talking pure tarmac now’ and ‘I think the rainwater’s getting in again.’ Anyway, in his own quiet undemanding way he really urged me to show them what I could be. And I did start studying after that and it was amazing the way my grades began to soar, not in every single subject, fair enough, but in enough to make my egghead sisters think twice before they began to blow trumpets at the dinner table.

  It didn’t put paid to their embarrassing pictures in the Wicklow People however. And when I explained to them that they should exercise a bit of restraint on the old PR front they just looked at me aghast as if I had no right to even utter the word restraint. I explained to them that I could’ve had my mug shot in the local rag every other week since I was constantly winning medals and cups for swimming, even setting the odd Inter-Provincial record, but I mean, after one or two stories the readers get the message, don’t they?

  The oldest one, she just smiled and said that winning ‘trinkets’ for mere sporting achievements – as opposed to earning distinctions for academic excellence – was, well, so Bolshevik, ‘rather like comparing chess to draughts, or the construction of the Pyramids at Giza to the erection of a rudimentary bungalow in Cavan,’ or some such patronizing shit.

  Then I’d have this excellent Jimmy Cagney voice in my head urging, Why don’t ya shove dat baked potato into her noisy gob an’ seal it shut foreva?

  I knew more about restraint than they imagined.

  Relax, we’ll get to Ed in a minute and he’ll still be there waiting at the end of the corridor, I mean, it’s not like he has a court appointment with Judge Judy now is it?

  And I agree, all this hopping around is tremendously distracting and chaotic; but you see that’s because it’s a human life being laid out here, pal. My life. And I reserve the right to step in and out of my past and present, in and out of my memories and mishaps, like a demented céilí dancer. Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it. Like old Fyodor Dostoevsky says, man gets used to everything: lies mounting; the debt to compromise accumulating as we settle for less and less, especially in ourselves; watching dreams dissipate; watching people curling up and dying; watching people walking away and feeling all manner of things sliding, especially hope and control.

  Yeah, those two in particular.

  Ed’s room reeks of medicine and ethyl chloride, the stuff they dab on your nipples before they pierce you. It also reeks of Death.

  He is incredibly thin, like a communion wafer, and unbelievably pale. David Bowie (circa Low) heroin-chic pale.

  His hair is long, thin and straggly. It makes his already elongated face look like it is in the process of melting, like Swiss cheese, only with eyes for holes. His are weak and watery. He is so frail it is frightening.

  No one at the Clinic was this small (bar Dalek, obviously), and if you insist on an animal it’s a white church mouse with a soft blue rug draped across its knobbly knees.

  ‘Hi. I’m Ed.’

  ‘How’s it going, Ed? I’m Trevor.’

  ‘Mum says you’re. I. Rish?’

  ‘That’s right, yeah.’

  ‘Where. A. Bouts. Are. You. From?’

  ‘Dublin. But my family lives in Wicklow.’

  ‘Wick-low?’

  ‘It’s out in the country. The sticks.’

  ‘The other. Guy who. Was. Works here. He’s from Scot-land.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Maybe you could. Meet. Him. Later?’

  ‘That’d be nice. Thank you.’

  The ‘thank you’ makes him squirm. As he smiles you can see his teeth need serious attention, which means bad breath is going to be an issue, but you can’t blame Ed: you can only question the diligence of the other so-called companion.

  Back at the Clinic I had become obsessed with oral hygiene and initiated a campaign of letters and phone calls to the Eastern Health Board, sometimes as many as twenty a day. It ended with them delivering 150 electric toothbrushes along with a handwritten note: ‘You win.’

  Ed has questions written on a sheet attached to one of those metal clipboards people used to carry around to make themselves look important. His knuckle-hands shake when he lifts it.

  ‘We should. Get. Started.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘How. Many. Brothers. And sisters do. You. Have?’

  ‘No brothers, more’s the pity. Three sisters, all much older.’

  ‘Do you get. On. With. Them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Sorry. Maybe I should’ve lied?’

  ‘No. It’s good that. You. Were. Honest.’

  ‘Yeah, honesty is always the best policy.’ A pause as he scans the questions. He has very few eyelashes left.

  ‘What sort of. Music. Do you. Like?’

  ‘I have pretty varied tastes. What do you like?’

  ‘Rick. Wakeman. Ever. Hear of. Him?’


  ‘Sure. Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I think I still have that one at home. On vinyl.’

  ‘You like. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He smiles, so do I. ‘I really like John what’s-his-face’s voice.’

  ‘An-derson’s.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s very, you know, distinctive. In fact, I genuinely believe “Owner of a Lonely Heart” was a minor fuckin’ classic.’

  See the white church mouse swallow palely, and smile. See the coated, discoloured teeth. Hear the grey gums click, and stick. See the tiny eyelids, which have little blue veins like the ones that run across his mother’s tits, jump. And quiver with delight.

  See me play him like a pin-ball machine he lights up inside. ‘You. Really. Like. ‘’Owner. Of a. Lonely. Heart?”’

  ‘Yeah, I really do.’

  He squirms and worms around in the chair; it’s clearly his all-time favourite ditty. And I’m lying through my teeth, obviously, I mean, I hate that kind of turgid, overblown shite. But you’d swear someone had just informed him he could rise up like Lazarus, walk out the door and start a career as a fuckin’ pole dancer. And in his next breathless sentence he calls me ‘man’ and suddenly we’re getting on like a house on fire, except I’m not being me, I’m being this upbeat, hippy-dippy version of me. But that’s OK, we all lie in order to get work or put some food on the table, or achieve some easy sex, and in the grand scheme of things it’s no biggie, now is it?

  Ed has a Pink Floyd poster over his bed, you know the one with the big inflatable pig floating over this industrial chimneystack in Europe, so I think of his mother, obviously. Then I ask, ‘Ever been to a Pink Floyd gig, Ed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’

  There’s a pause as he tries to play it cool, except he can’t. In the end he blurts out kind of high-pitched, ‘You?’

  ‘Just the once, yeah.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Stuttgart.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘Yeah. But it was a long time ago. I was just a kid really.’

  ‘Tell me. Please.’

  In that please, there’s quiet desperation.

  ‘There was this huge wall on stage, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And thousands of people from all over Europe are sitting there smoking dope and dropping Egyptian Eye acid. And next minute this voice rings out – Gilmour, or maybe it was Waters – and it asks, “Is there anybody out there?”’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘And it echoes around the stadium. Is there anybody out there, out there, out there …? The place erupts like a tidal wave and this East Berlin chick with racoon circles painted under her eyes and cropped blonde hair – sorta like Daryl Hannah in Bladerunner – who’d been dancing real aggressively on her sweeney …’

  ‘Sweeney?’

  ‘Sweeney Todd. It means … on her own.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘So, she’s dancing on her sweeney, real fuckin’ firestarter stuff, and she’s freaking out the clogs and sandals brigade.’

  ‘Clogs. And. Sandals. Brigade?’

  ‘Come on Ed, get with the programme. Hippys, man.’

  ‘Hippys. Right.’

  ‘Anyway, she launches herself at me and starts playing serious tonsil hockey until I discover there’s a tab on her tongue, which I swallow, then we trip out together. Sparks fly and static crackles every time we touch. All the bricks in the wall come tumbling down and a guy on stilts with a big Medusa rubber head comes out – he’s the Evil Headmaster – and we sing at the top of our lungs, “We don’t need no education, no dark sarcasm in the classroom, hey teacher, leave those kids alone.”’

  ‘Fuckin’. A.’

  ‘Yeah. And the communist girl is holding my hand up as if I’d won the Grand Prix and she keeps circling underneath, smiling up with these painfully honest eyes and the thing is, you can really be yourself man, I mean there’s no need to pretend.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘Yeah. And you know what’s even cooler?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Next morning when we wake up she puts her hand in under the scratchy bri-nylon pillow and takes out the remains of this fat joint. She lights it, takes this huge toke, ppphhhhhh, then she starts the day off singing, “We don’t need no education,” except her voice is really deep and sexy, you know, from all the horny stuff we’d been doing the night before and …’

  Poor jerky Ed is nodding his head like one of those little toy dogs you sometimes see on the dashes of cars in suburbia and you’d swear he’d been there holding his pink plastic lighter up in the air, impossible, because with his wire-hanger arms he wouldn’t be able to lift a feather, not for more than five fuckin’ seconds.

  But mostly it’s impossible because I’ve never been to a Pink Floyd gig, and because I’ve never shagged any communist girls. And before you go and get all judgmental, what you need to realize is: a companion must be able to paint pictures, must be able to open windows on other worlds, maybe even worlds that don’t exist. Why? Because the one that Ed and his kind find themselves trapped in, like slow-winged insects after summer has slipped away, isn’t exactly a barrel of fuckin’ laughs, now is it?

  I lived with this smiling guy for a bit in southern India, leading him around on a little silk rope while he sang these excellent, ancient songs to passers by.

  I couldn’t pronounce his name so I just called him Sockets, which seemed fitting because he’d been born without eyes and in their place had these huge, sunken holes in his face. He called me Mister Bigman almost immediately after we’d shaken hands and he’d measured my head with his hot brown mitts.

  Sockets could do weird things with his mouth, little firecracker clickety-clacks of the tongue, ululations, vibrations. He could also open his mouth wide as a hippo. I remember his tonsils well: pink rubber stalactites. I ate what he ate, drank what he drank, and we spilt everything fifty-fifty. (When I was leaving I gave it all back, obviously, secreting it away in his Dick Whittington bundle, though for days after I was worried sick he wouldn’t cop and would let it all drop. Being blind, like.)

  I tell you one thing, for a skinny little bloke he could really chow down and I never saw anyone take such good care of their teeth. They really were snow white. He was forever cleaning and picking at them, and if he wasn’t chewing parsley or mint he was rubbing some powder stuff into his gums. Still, I reckon if you were born without eyes you’d take pretty good care of your remaining bits.

  Sockets was either the best actor I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen some good ones, my mother included, or else he was without doubt the happiest guy I’d ever stumbled across, always whistling or humming or practising his scales, although I really do believe that singing for a living gives you some kind of natural high, increasing as it must the levels of serotonin in the brain, turning dopamine neurotransmitters on like a steady little tap. Take those big, lush opera singers. Divas. They always look permanently post-coital whenever I see a photo of one of them I always think they’d make wonderful wives: great in the sack, incredibly competent in the kitchen, the sort of women who have amazing soft skin, excellent taste in La Perla underwear and who laugh out loud with their rich, musical voices at least one hundred times a day.

  Which, you have to admit, would be really kind of nice.

  Anyway, I used to observe Sockets going about his business, lighting little fires, brewing up, chowing down and humming away in the shade. Eventually I figured if he’s happy, and he genuinely seemed to be, then there was really no good reason why I shouldn’t be. I mean, everyone’s mother dies sometime, right?

  I was being inordinately careful not to bang on about it until we got to know each other better, basically because I think it’s a cliché, you know, ‘Lonely, Befuddled and Bewildered Irish Man Misses his Dearly Departed Mother.’ So, without getting into the whole shebang right this very second, let’s just say that my mother and I got on extremely well, that she was one of those excell
ent people with whom time never drags its heels, one of that rare breed who doesn’t suffer the urge to be all serious and grown up the whole fuckin’ time.

  OK?

  3

  Four days a week to begin with, then he’ll increase it to five, sometimes six, if that’s not too much of a problem. And when the other guy is away, I might also have to do nights. But you know, maybe nights might suit someone like me since they pay more, due to the anti-social as-pect.

  I’m trying not to laugh because I’m thinking, Well it’s not exactly going to be a rave during the day, now is it? And I break out in this big smile, which fades when he says,

  ‘Can you. Start. Right. Away?’

  ‘What do you mean by right away?’

  ‘To. Morrow. Morning.’

  ‘Jesus. Eh, I could make a few calls, but …’

  ‘It would. Mean. A lot.’

  ‘I may not be able to make it first thing.’

  ‘That’s. OK. Takes me a. While. To get. Moving.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Say, eleven?’

  ‘Eleven bells. OK.’

  ‘One. Last. Thing. Do you. Ssss-smoke?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. I can’t be. A-round people. Who. Do.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘My dad will talk. Money. And. Ssstuff. With. You.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘There’s one. Thing. You need. To. Understand.’

  A pause, which he controls by staring at the pedals.

  ‘He’s paying. You. But I. Will be the. One that. Will. Fire you. If. It doesn’t work. Out. OK?’

  ‘OK, Ed, but I see no reason why it won’t.’

  He says nothing; in fact, he seems to be having difficulty operating his neck muscles. Then at last his head rises up, like a snake being charmed from a basket. He looks straight at me. His pupils go big, then suddenly small, like a jellyfish with purple veins out in the cold, grey Atlantic. And if you cross him, he’ll be one of those creatures that rolls up and becomes spiky and impossible to communicate with.