by Lorcan Roche
He yawns artificially, then waves his stiff wrist on the handle of his chair, like a crash test dummy after a simulated car crash as if to say, Hey man, all of this is nothing really, just a minor detail. But in those weak, watery eyes he can’t conceal a single, shallow emotion; you can see straight off the bat Ed is a very poor liar.
Then again, you would be too if you didn’t get out in the real world very often.
It’s not going to be easy looking after someone rich and spoiled like Ed. It’s never that easy looking after anyone, though personally I believe looking after yourself is hardest. I mean, you know exactly what your brain and body demand, you know exactly what not to give them, yet for some strange reason it’s really fuckin’ hard to nourish them consistently. It’s like keeping goldfish: if you empty too much of the dried fly stuff on the surface you think, What the hell? but then you come back to find the fuckers belly-up and bloated with these little ropes of spiralling shite dangling from their fish asses so they look like underwater balloons someone suddenly let go of.
Sockets was particularly pleasant and easygoing, but even with him you could see occasional doubt sprout. He’d wake up, stretch and call out my name. There’d be a tiny bit of fear in his voice, and I’d say nothing, then he’d call out my name again. ‘Oh, Mister Bigman?’ And there’d be an increase of anxiety in it, he’d maybe sniff the air or wait a moment before calling out again. And this time there’d be an element of desperation in it. ‘Mister Bigman, my friend, I know you are there hiding’ and still I’d say nothing. Finally, I’d laugh out loud and say, ‘Over here, Sockets, you baldy blind bastard.’ Or maybe I’d say, ‘Hey, Sockets. No point sniffing around for me when all you can smell is your own fuckin’ parsley breath.’
Or I’d say nothing at all, just wait, and eventually throw something at him, maybe a pebble, or my big flat sandal. It would hit him on his little Malteser head, boink, and he’d smile, a huge big electric thing, like neon. ‘I knew all along you were there, my friend. I knew all along because, you see, I have more than a degree of faith in you.’
He banged on about Faith, Hope and Charity quite a bit, but he was a good friend, which means he didn’t judge. Sometimes when I got plastered on cheap beer or stoned out of my tree and began to wail like a fool, or if I got angry about my family and started roaring abuse at the stars, he’d calm me down, make up a nice soft bed beneath a Bunyan tree, maybe even place some special lineament or herb on a tiny little pillow that he carried in his bundle.
‘Thanks, Sockets. You’re a gentleman and a scholar.’
It was quite easy waking up all hungover and ashamed the next day beside a blind peasant who would later be pulling like a goat on the rope when he got panicky on a crowded, sticky street. You certainly felt less self-conscious than you would if, say, you’d made an ass of yourself at an after-hours party in the Village full of designers, writers and poets with vintage clothing and pneumatic Eastern European girlfriends with perfect skin, remarkable English. And astonishingly cold lips.
To be honest, the only thing I didn’t like about Sockets was the way he’d hunker down in the dirt to take a light brown dump, right in fuckin’ front of me. But then again he wasn’t the only one in India who was fond of doing that.
India wasn’t exactly all fun and games and a lot of people might be envious of me, you know, out there in the big wide world travelling around with my knapsack on my back; but the truth is it can get pretty lonely and there are plenty of days you’d pay a lot of cash to have a proper conversation, no flowery eighteenth-century English, no false laughter from someone looking for a tip, no repeating the most simple, elementary things, over and over again.
Like your address – as if they were ever going to visit.
We don’t realize it, but we have quite a lot of space in the Western World, and it can be quite hard when everyone insists on standing with bits of themselves rubbing off you in post office, railway and bus queues, and you have to remember they’re all wearing the sheerest of cotton, and let’s just say not everyone had the same standards of hygiene as Sockets.
I was starting to feel undone. I mean, there was always someone pointlessly beating some oddly shaped drum, or blowing into something that looks like a bugle but sounds like a nanny goat screaming. I remember one searingly hot day when I got lost and stopped to look at my guidebook I was surrounded suddenly by all these smelly little mahogany people who seemed to have their own fan club of oversized horseflies and gnats. Their carved hands were all over me, pulling at the book, breaking its spine, and how the fuck could they help me when none of them could read or even speak fuckin’ English?
I let out this roar. ‘Get the fuck away!’ It frightened even me, and everything seemed to suddenly go quiet, as if God had hit the volume button on his remote control in the sky all colour leached from the orange sun. Bangra music from clapped-out taxis was suddenly snapped off. People scattered. Black birds with red beaks flew silently from dead trees.
And I knew it was time to go somewhere, and just put the head down.
I’d been at this moon party in Goa, which was probably quite beautiful 500 years ago, and I’d been smoking charras, this Indian shit, without much of a buzz coming on when all of a sudden I felt incredibly ill at ease, not just the old dry mouth and rapid heartbeat which we all get, but this terrible lead weight attaching itself to the heartstrings, as if loads of Lilliputians had clambered into my chest with ladders, ropes and mallets and were hammering and heaving my heart down into my boots. Except that I was in my bare feet.
This white South African Rasta man with cheap beach tattoos was trying to pass me a bottle of hooch and I hated the way it felt when he touched me, repeatedly. So I told him to stop and he said he was just trying to be neighbourly, and I told him to shag off back to South Africa and try to be neighbourly with some black people for a change. And my feet seemed suddenly to be made of clog wood and they looked like big puppet attachments and I was scared stiff to look at my hands.
It was all a bit much, the bassline of the music ripping into me, all these skinny Aussie and English women with their eyes closed gyrating in the MTV moonlight, and I started running, really pumping the thighs hard. After an age, I found a place behind a rotten old rowboat where there was no one smoking, or fucking, or sucking bits of each other, or drinking hot beer, or rolling spliffs, or splitting up for the fourth time in two weeks.
I lay down and looked up into the 2D sky – cheap pyrotechnics and unconvincing shooting stars – and I heard teenagers laughing behind the black scudding clouds, like Beavis and Butthead. I sank into the sand.
And the sinking feeling, it stayed with me, clung to me, hung around me like a smell, the feeling of the world being some kind of perverse joke, a grotesque, ridiculous fuckin’ cartoon. And I went on the move again, holding onto tickets and chits on bockety trains and lurching buses in places no one ever inspects such things, basically because I felt I had to prove I’d paid in to the horrible, universal fun fair.
When you’re feeling like that, you invite short breath and illness, and you try to breathe in and out through your nose because it has little seaweed hairs that can stop dirt and foreign bacteria lodging in your sore throat. And you can’t relax around other people, especially ones with huge coldsores on their lips jabbering in foreign tongues, you always feel you’ve misplaced something, your hands keep flying in and out of your pockets, like yellow cuckoos.
And the best thing you can do is to check yourself in somewhere that used to be a palace or the home of some Raj, somewhere with air con and satellite, proper toilets that you don’t have to squat over, and intelligent staff who whisper and avert their eyes, who sleep on little mats outside your huge teak door, who check on you night and day, who make mint tea without being asked, who close doors gently.
And just wait it out. Patiently.
Except the thing was, by some freak coincidence – and this is hundreds maybe even thousands of miles from the lurching bus – w
ho the fuck is staying in the hotel? Only the hippy American. She spies me with the manager one morning and starts sending notes up to my room, and baskets of overripe fruit. I detest bad manners, so I make one brief public appearance.
She invites me to swim with her in the pool, which sort of brought me back to life. Then she insisted on buying me dinner and I can’t really remember what happened except I drank way too much and began talking up a storm.
It finished with us back in her room, her holding me, telling me it was OK, let it all out, ‘That’s it Trevor, there is nothing to be ashamed of,’ as if she had a clue what I was babbling about because, as usual, I’d left out quite a lot of background material and quite a large percentage of the truth. We must have sat there for about four hours with her just rocking me and afterwards she told me I needed to have more faith in myself, that I was a very, very good person. But look, if someone thinks you’ve had a hand in saving them from destruction, they’re not going to listen to your stories properly. It’s like when see your girlfriend acting in a play and you won’t admit, you can’t, that it’s total crap and she’s incredibly false, shrill and transparent. You try to pretend that the set is realistic when really it’s fuckin’ laughable and it keeps moving. You can see the other actors getting ready to make their awkward entrance. You can hear them stepping over each other’s lines. And really it’s amazing how easy it is for us humans to kid and cod ourselves, to hoodwink and hide inside holding onto the little bits of so-called truth we need, bite-size, convenient, twisted.
I remember drifting off to sleep in the arms of the American, her stroking my shaven skull, telling me there was no need to be afraid, it didn’t matter who my father was, that I was one of the good ones, ‘one of the truly sensitive ones’.
When I woke she led me into the bathroom where she’d lit a hundred candles and run this really hot bath with scented oils and she sat there on the edge anointing my head, which you have to admit is pretty weird.
She said she knew by looking into my eyes that I was a ‘benign and positive force’. And like I said earlier, people know jack shit by looking into your eyes. Anyway, mine were closed because the oil was stinging, and before that they were full of water from crying, and before that they had goggles on in the pool because you can’t trust Indians with chlorine, and before that they were red from drink and drugs, raw from dust and sleepless nights.
The American bird with the soft, glowing skin was wrong, way wrong. Of course it matters who your fuckin’ father was. Of course it matters how you feel about yourself deep down. Of course it matters if you’re scared.
Especially if you’re scared of yourself.
Ed flicks his hair with his right hand, then eventually his left.
Fly away Peter. Pause. Fly away Paul. Pause.
As he twitches in the chair the fabric of his pale Levis catches and two sweat patches become visible on the black vinyl seat beneath. Jesus, the poor bastard’s thighs are the size of curtain rods.
‘I guess. That’s. It. Then.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’re. Hired. Con. Gratulations.’
‘Thanks.’
‘See you. To. Morrow. Eleven. Bells.’
‘OK. Thanks again. You won’t regret it, Ed. Good luck.’
I stand and he smiles at the size of me, as if I’m some kind of exotic pet. Then he imitates the good luck the way Americans do, turning the phrase around in his mouth like a pebble. You can see he loves having foreign people around, loves the way we speak, we’re probably like little laboratory experiments. As I walk out I hear him pick up the little phone slowly he tells his mother not to take any more calls – he is ‘very, very tired’.
Except, the old sow must still be sore about me outwitting her because in the tiny earpiece I can hear, ‘You sure about him, Ed?’
He pauses before saying, ‘I’m sure.’ She says something else about me but he reminds her how it was she who picked the Scottish fuck, ‘And look what he. Turned out. To be.’
Feels quite strange to be standing out here in the corridor listening to their voices I’m thinking the pair of them are like children with empty tin cans and a length of twine running between the rooms I can almost hear the ghost of a wan, sickly child; as you can imagine, his laughter hasn’t been heard pealing in the longest fuckin’ time.
The door of the Judge’s room opens. He steps out into the corridor, looks at the open door of Ed’s room, then the open door of his wife’s, then to and fro, like someone watching slow mo’ tennis. Each time he turns to the side these loose tent folds of flesh on his neck sway; he’s the real sea turtle eased from its shell. Finally he shakes his weary head once, twice, three times. Then he sighs and steps back in.
Without a single, solitary word.
The cook is in the middle of doing her thing when the little phone rings. She answers it, sighs, and points at a chair. She turns her big, broad back and starts muttering darkly as she produces a willow-pattern plate, piles it high and places it before me.
‘Thank you.’
‘Uh-huh.’
She’s got a little layer of cheese, then breaded veal, then a little layer of ham, then more veal. There are sweet potatoes and yellow corn with tiny red peppers mixed in. Everything is piping hot and it tastes amazing, except she just stands there, staring. She’s one of those people that isn’t in the least bit bothered by silence, and neither am I, save when I’m the only one eating and a jet black stranger is watching.
Finally, after a long pause, she says it’s real nice to see someone enjoy her food but it’s been ages since I’ve had a home-cooked meal and I’m probably shovelling it in a bit too fast. It’s like when you’re in a fancy restaurant and the waiter asks, And how are you enjoying your Dover sole, sir? just after you’ve lobbed in a huge forkful, which is a roundabout way of saying my mouth is jammed and I’m forced to just nod enthusiastically and wave my fork as if to say, Mmm, this really is lovely, yes indeed, absolutely smashing. But all she does is nod her big heavy head and say, ‘Uh-huh.’
After I finish I sigh out loud and tell her there’s a distinct possibility that her breaded veal was one of the finest bits of nosebag I’d ever had the pleasure of. She seems to like the word nosebag. In any event she smiles and says, ‘Nice of you to say so.’
But it’s too casual. So I say, ‘No, I’m deadly serious, you can really fuckin’ cook,’ and she says she knows that already but you can see from the cheshire grin on her big black face that she really likes being complimented.
Then again, I don’t ever remember meeting a human being who didn’t, apart from The Captain who had serious issues about his essays being patronized by a moon-faced, overgrown fucker with no formal training, no letters after his name and no halfway plausible stories as to how he’d ended up with a bunch of freaks and deformed geeks in electric chairs in a creaking, leaking shack at the edge of the fuckin’ universe.
Or words to that effect.
The cook gets me a beer – Red Stripe, Jamaican stuff – plus one for herself. You can see she’s strong because when she flips the lids with the opener tied to her apron she doesn’t miss a beat.
‘So. What you good at?’
I say that I honestly don’t know, which isn’t true because there are a number of things I’m good at such as long-distance swimming and cheering sick people up. When I worked as a DJ on hospital radio after my shift was over I’d stroll around the wards, I swear to Christ some of those rheumatic old farts really and truly adored me. It’s just that I have this rule about blowing your own trumpet, probably comes from overexposure to my sisters: I wish Americans had it too.
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘You gots to be good at somethin’.’
‘Do I?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I’m good at getting into trouble.’
‘Shit, I know that jus’ by lookin’ at you. You jus’ outta the army?’
‘No.’
‘
Jus’ outta jail?’
‘No.’
‘You from Ire-land?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You one of them terrorist-types? Gonna blow the place up? Send Ed and his chair sky high?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe, he say. What you work at last?’
‘I was a waiter.’
‘Don’t look like no waiter.’
‘Really. What does a waiter look like?’
‘Smaller. Neater. Faster on his feet.’
‘Yeah, well, wasn’t exactly my finest hour.’
‘What happened?’
‘A fat guy in a leisure suit clicked his fingers at me.’
‘Shit, I know that deal. You like to get high?’
‘Eh, sometimes. Not really. No.’
‘You some kinda religious freak?’
‘No.’
‘You gonna move in when Scotty leave?’
‘Is he leaving?’
‘Sure is.’
Maybe Ed’s a better liar than I thought.
‘So, you gonna move in?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Why?’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers. Where you at now?’
‘Astoria.’
‘Shit. All them Greeks.’
‘Telly Savalas was born there.’
‘Who?’
‘Kojak. It’s a very old detective series. On TV.’
‘I know it. Ain’t that old.’
‘Well, he plays the baldy lieutenant. With the lollipop.’
‘He a Greek?’
‘Well he ain’t fuckin’ Irish, now is he?’
She laughs – it’s an excellent sound. ‘No. And he ain’t Jamacian, that’s for sure.’
