The Companion

by Lorcan Roche

  I say nothing, just step carefully towards the bed. Ed looks up. The whites of his eyes are yellowed, as if someone was religiously dropping iodine down in there while he slept. He is so helpless it’s impossible to remain angry, so I wink and let him know I’m here to protect him, not to do him harm.

  He exhales, it is hot and foul, but I feel him relax a little, so I spin round like a housewife with a bundle of laundry who hears a love song on the radio that she used to dance to years and years ago.

  Dana says, ‘Whoa, take it easy, please be careful,’ but he just laughs and a little piece of his lank hair sticks out in the playground wind he says, ‘It’s. OK. I feel. Safe.’

  And that word is like a code, it’s magic and all of a sudden you can see pettiness slink out of the room, its tail between its legs, its pointy ears pinned back completely.

  I put Ed on the bed, like a package at Christmas.

  Dana explains how his bones retract during the day, she shows me how to bend them back without hurting him but I’ve done all this before at the Clinic especially when we went on this long drive to the Cliffs of Moher and they all wanted to get as close to the edge as they could to scream obscenities into the howling wind that swallowed their words, and some of their cares as well.

  Afterwards we all went to the pub to get locked, except a lot of them had severe pains in their necks so I had to rub them and they were like children looking for chair-o-planes at a party – me too, me too, me too – all except Dalek who was too busy doing his demented grin at a table full of tourists; that little fucker had evil enough in his eyes to make fat people leave hot food behind on a very cold day.

  Dana can see I know what I’m doing, more importantly she can see I could never hurt anything so pitiful and small. As she backs away she smiles at him and says, ‘Looks like the big Irish guy might know a thing or two, Ed. Maybe we got lucky this time, huh?’

  He smiles and closes his eyes as I lift him under his shoulders to raise him up on his pillows my fingers establish that his ribs are the same size as worn-out pencil nubs, just as easy to snap.

  Despite everything she said Dana genuinely seems to like Ed but maybe it’s just pity she feels, not that there’s anything wrong with that, some people these days can’t even muster up that much.

  Without saying anything she leaves us alone and there is no pause, none whatsoever, he says, ‘Sorry. Man.’

  I nod, fluff his pillows and try not to breathe in as he breathes out.

  ‘It’s OK, Ed. No biggie.’

  ‘No. I need. This. To. Work.’

  ‘So do I, Ed.’ Which is true.

  ‘I was. Being a. Dick.’

  ‘It’s OK. I know what you were thinking.’

  ‘You. Do?’

  ‘She’s very beautiful.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Like a Princess. In a fairy tale.’

  He smiles. The gums are bloodless.

  ‘I think. She. Might. Like you.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d be a bit afraid.’

  ‘Of. Hurting. Her?’

  ‘No, Ed. Of being hurt.’

  This is the best thing I could’ve said, he blinks twice like a man in solitary exposed to a sudden bright light then he says ‘I know. What you. Mean,’ but how could he? Ed is sick and small, he’s never been used by someone who conveniently (for them) confused physical strength with the emotional kind. And Ed has never watched someone on a windswept beach whisper, I’m sorry, I’m really, really sorry, then walk away without looking back, not even fuckin’ once.

  Ed says Dana is the only one apart from his mother that has stuck with him. Then he closes his eyes; he is dead to the world, with his waxy candle skin I wish he wouldn’t do this.

  Eventually he speaks: ‘I dream. Of dying in her. Arms. That’s my fucking. Fairy. Tale.’

  It’s OK. I’m used to melodrama from people in chairs so I say nothing, just wait until he opens his eyes again. Then I smile patiently and say I can think of much worse ways of buying it, ‘How about Ellie lying bollock naked on top of you, eating a giant pepperoni pizza, watching a really long, subtitled French fuckin’ movie?’

  He laughs, a bit of single-barrel snot escapes and the thing with this job is you can’t make a big deal of little domestic accidents, so I take a tissue, trap it like an insect, then throw it in the paper basket. It’s a nice shot, right in without touching; isn’t it funny how a pointless thing like that can make you feel good again?

  ‘All I ask Ed, is that you make an effort, OK?’

  And it’s weird because that’s exactly what my old fella used to say, All I ask is that you make a bit of an effort, Trevor – except of course that wasn’t all he asked, as a matter of fact in the end all he asked was that I steer well clear and stop asking questions, the answers to which I was not emotionally equipped to deal with.

  Nice mellow mood in the room now it’s time to go out to the hall and fetch Alan White; he opens one eye to watch me leave.

  Low moans and elongated groans down the corridor the mother’s door is closed, inside her voice there’s a terrible nasal whine: ‘That’s too much, stop I said, didn’t you hear me, Jesus Christ, don’t you understand plain English?’

  I’m wondering, is Il Judgo-Perverto bent over in there with some hot wax dripping, or maybe a blow torch stuttering blue flame with a Zorro mask on when I hear Dana’s patient voice: ‘Relax, please. Breathe out on the effort, that’s right, once again, up two-three, gently, down two-three.’

  See sweat gather in the grooves of those grey elephant knees, see Dana use surgical gloves and palmfuls of talcum to get a purchase on the hanging folds of flesh.

  See Dana walking, alone.

  See Dana at home. She is standing with hot water hitting her head, hard, it’s running down her face, fast, and with all the steam rising in the cabin it’s impossible to tell if she is crying.

  Then again maybe Dana’s the sort of bird, like Carrie in Sex and the City, who strolls home after a hard day’s work thinking, Mmm, I wonder what kind of clutch bag would go best with my new Jimmy Choos?

  He still has just one eye open when I return, ‘What. Is. It?’

  I’m thinking, Well, it’s not the Book of fuckin’ Kells? But I just tell him it’s a record I bought from some guy in the street, but at the same time I’m wondering, Why the hell am I leaving out the word ‘black’?

  He shifts his shoulders like a woman moving an invisible bra strap. He gets his arms ready to hold the LP and when I tell him Alan White used to be the drummer with Yes, he is completely lost for words.

  His nose twitches like Hazel the Rabbit from Watership Down, so I scratch it, very lightly.

  ‘Thanks, Trevor.’

  ‘No problemo, Ed.’

  He asks ‘How much was it’ and I say ‘It’s a present’ and the poor fucker lies there grasping it as if it were a Matisse, then he looks up, smiles and darts his doe eyes the direction of the sound system. ‘Over there. Please.’

  I take the record from him and place it on the turntable carefully; I can feel him boring holes in my back, which is tight and tired from all the politeness and performing.

  I sit on his bed. He nods and closes his eyes. We are both hoping the music will work some kind of spell.

  Fair play to Squatting Man, the record really is in nice nick, the needle stays lovely and steady except it feels like we’re waiting for Yaweh or Charlton Heston to talk to us through the speakers you can hear this crackling coming, then at last it starts up, and it’s not bad actually it has quite a bit of life in it and an excellent chorus in one song, ‘Don’t you know you’re a radio, when you get a good reception, you begin to glow.’

  Ed opens his eyes slowly, he swallows as he looks at me, guilty as hell, so I smile back as if to say, It’s OK man, you’ve given me a very good reception, can’t you see me glowing away?

  But he’s not the type to beat himself up for very long. Then again Ed doesn’t have much time to waste on regret or human pom
p and ceremony.

  We listen to one whole side without a word which is good since there’ll be an awful lot of downtime in this room.

  I stand up. I’m halfway across the room when he whispers, bit like Don Corleone, ‘It’s. OK.’

  ‘You sure?’ I turn. He nods.

  ‘I’d like to. Keep. The. Other. Side. Till later.’

  A grey, brave little smile, those cardboard teeth rotting in his head, my feet moving, my hand extending …

  Now the needle lifting …

  BOOK TWO

  The hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place.

  Isaiah, XXVII

  1

  June/July/August

  Days slide by, wisps of cloud scudding across the windows of darkly mirrored ’scrapers.

  Ed reversing the electric chair left, and right, showing me where everything is; his Simpsons’ tapes stacked in order of preference; his voice-activated pocket recorder into which he intends to dictate the story of his ebbing life, which he never will; his VHS and DVD movies arranged by mood, not title; his alphabetically-arranged albums and CDs; his pills and prescriptions, his atomizers, dehumidifiers, vaporizers and decongestants.

  His bedpan, his bendy straw.

  His porno mags.

  How to recharge the batteries for the chair, how to operate the breathing-machine, how to sterilize it and the mask attached pro-per-ly pro-per-ly134

  , how to zip-lock the plastic curtain round his bed into the floor so the area gets turned into an emergency oxygen tent.

  How to entertain him. How to keep him alive.

  His voice, in time to the motor of the chair, ‘Cut my. Food. In. To. Smaller. Pieces. Whirr. Bend the. Straw. Towards me. Whirr. Please hold the. Pla-stic beaker. Steady. Help me. Whirr. In. And out of the bath. It’s import-ant for you to. Stand out. Sssside. The door. You know. People can drown. In. Less than. Four inches.’

  While he bathes he keeps calling out my name, like a lamb at Passover. But I’m always there like a sentry I am always waiting to wrap him in the wonderful white towels that arrive, as if by magic, every single morning.

  Ed says the Scottish guy used to just walk away and watch TV. More than once the water went stone cold. Have I any idea how useless and completely powerless he felt, just sitting there, like a plastic fucking duck?

  When I tell him I would never do that, never, he just nods his chin towards his concave, completely hairless chest. It will be some time before he believes in me.

  2

  I’m still on four days a week, which is ideal. In fact, it’s the way the whole wide world should operate because people would have more time for families, funerals, friends (if they had any), pets, hobbies, exercise, sketching, diary-writing, poems, spring-cleaning and rooting through skips on Madison marvelling at what bored, rich white people hire Puerto Ricans to toss out.

  Behind white dusk masks they glare, envying my hazy, lazy days.

  I’m generally just strolling around the whirling city, picking things up in shops and putting them carefully back down again, like a good tourist should, when I get this thick Bronx voice in my head telling me to visit St Patrick’s, probably because Rain on Me Baby suggested it in her own inimitable way. And like an advertising jingle for a discount electrical store the notion gets stuck in my head and it won’t go away, so fuck it.

  There’s this priest there. He’s pretty good looking and let’s face it most of them are desperate-looking yokes with red scaly skin and white crystallized dandruff on their collars, and if they weren’t priests what would they – or could they – be?

  Grifters? Pyramid salesmen? Con artists?

  Anyway, he seems pretty popular in that a lot of people are hovering around him all listening and nodding intently. Then he calls them his children and gives them a group blessing, which I have to say I find kind of offhand and lazy.

  He sees me staring. He smiles and I nod.

  ‘Welcome, my son.’

  Which is a line from a Pink Floyd song, isn’t it? ‘Welcome my son, welcome, to … the Machine.’

  ‘Thanks, Father.’ Then I look away.

  ‘I’ll be hearing confession now, if you like?’

  ‘I think I’ll just say a few prayers, thanks all the same.’

  ‘No sins?’

  ‘None worth wasting your time with, Father.’

  ‘You’re Irish?’

  ‘Uhuh’

  ‘You probably have some ancient sins on your soul, you sure you don’t want a quick fix?’

  ‘Pretty sure, thanks all the same.’

  ‘Would you prefer to just sit and talk?’ Which you have to admit is a pretty clever question, I mean I’ve already told the bloke I’d prefer to just say a few prayers, but priests are fishers of men and clearly I’m not going to be the big one that got away.

  ‘Yeah. OK.’

  Turns out this guy is a Jesuit, which is definitely the best kind of priest, very philosophical and normally able to look at things from unusual, maybe even skewed perspectives. He’s a good conversationalist, and a good listener also, and in America it’s rare to find both qualities available in the one person so I’m no longer in such a hurry to depart the scene.

  We start to chew the fat about God, Death, Fate and Pre-Destination and he tells me he finds me a very unusual, intelligent and well-read young man, which is probably over-egging it. Anyway, we get to talking about intelligence. I explain to him how I believe there are several specific and unrelated types.

  There’s academic intelligence, which really isn’t worth a whole hill of fuckin’ beans, and I tell him for proof all you have to do is look at my family, and he says, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, Father, I guess I mean that any one of us can start up their own dusty little library and fill their head with pithy quotes and witty bon-mots and Wildean epigrams but, like, what’s the point if you have shite taste in clothes and music and no friends that you’d want to be seen out in public with?’

  He nods diplomatically and says for me to continue, so I do.

  I tell him there’s emotional intelligence, the kind that allows you to keep love alive and be aware of the needs of others and to take into consideration duties and responsibilities that go beyond the norm, whatever the norm is. I mean, to be honest, sometimes after a hard day at the Clinic particularly when Dalek and The Captain were acting up I didn’t always feel like marching up to my mother’s room to listen with intent, or to change her sheets that used to get rightly soaked from night sweats and the side-effects of the cocktail of drugs she was on, or to hand wash and hang out her nighties and knickers.

  But you see, I knew it was the sort of daily detail my old man and my sisters would neglect, and let’s face it when you’re dying you shouldn’t have to worry about the fuckin’ laundry now should you?

  I tell him all this, and he seems genuinely interested, so I explain to him how emotional intelligence allows us to subjugate ego and he smiles and nods and inside his head he’s probably saying something to himself in Latin. Then I say that emotional intelligence is the most valuable kind because it enables us to make sacrifices and all of a sudden he’s nodding enthusiastically the way priests do when you even mention the word sacrifice, because basically they like to remind the rest of us that their whole life has been one big, long one.

  Then I pause and say, ‘Of course Father, there’s also criminal intelligence which really shouldn’t be underrated either.’ And I tell him that people who spend a lot of time figuring out how to rob insurance companies and bypass security systems in vaults and release non-toxic sleeping gas through air vents in banks are also pretty fuckin’ resourceful, like George Clooney and Brad Pitt in Ocean’s Eleven (not Twelve, which was a bag of shite).

  He nods. And this time he doesn’t tell me to continue, so we sit there for quite a while.

  He tries to do the staring into your soul thing, really peering into my eyes so I close them and wait. Eventua
lly it’s his go.

  He explains that intelligence is like a mirror. The first reflection we see is that of ourselves; then, with maturity and a degree of self-sacrifice we see how others might perceive us. And finally, with His grace, we see how God sees us. And that moment is a revelation, that moment is an epiphany because we see our soul rising; it is our moment of passing and our moment of becoming, and we enter the Light and are assimilated into God’s infinite wisdom and understanding.

  I’ve got this weird thing about mirrors, I can’t help it. I start laughing and it’s the high-pitched one I told you about earlier. He looks hurt for a second like a dog that’s been shouted at for bringing muddy paws into the dining-room. He asks why am I laughing? I tell him I’m trying to imagine what my family back home might see when they peer into the proverbial looking-glass. He asks me what I believe they see, and I tell him I haven’t the fuckin’ foggiest so he asks me how I ‘envision’ them and that’s the way he talked and you shouldn’t hold it against him, a lot of Jesuits spend too much time with their blackhead noses stuck in out-of-print books.

  ‘Well Father, they’re like this awful, pseudo-intellectual circus act with spontaneous bursts of applause for clever little quips in Latin, or sharp inhalations of breath, oooh, if someone scales new heights in analysing the way, say, Beckett’s time as a beret-wearing member of the French Resistance helped to inform his assault on the conservative forces that dominated European theatre.’

  ‘I’m a fan of Sam. I must admit I’d never considered it like that before.’

  ‘No, Father. Don’t go down that road. It’s all bolloxology.’

  ‘I see. Go on. Your family is a circus act?’

  ‘Well, all families are circus acts when you think about it, but yes mine in particular seems to fit the bill. My father is the ringmaster and my sisters are these little performing ponies, you know those miniature brown ones with yellow manes?’