The Companion

by Lorcan Roche

  She talked and I listened intermittently; overblown descriptions of shrines in India where you could enjoy fantastic veggie food, wats in Thailand where blind people gave travellers incredible foot massages, vine-clad temples in the sweltering jungles of Laos where, at break of day, Buddhist priests in purple robes chanted mantras that moved your very soul.

  I nodded and smiled and every now and then said, ‘Wow.’

  At five past eleven when I couldn’t take it any more I walked over to the jukebox to play ‘Ring of Fire’ for the second time and that was when she quietly and almost sadly asked me could she crash at my pad, just for one night. No strings attached.

  I thought about it, right in front of her, letting her see doubts mount behind my eyes then I heard a darker than normal voice say, She’s used you, feel free to use her – that’s what everybody else here does.

  And that’s exactly what I did: I used her, over and over again, until it was time to stop pretending to be asleep, time to get up and stretch Ed out and empty his bedpan and hold his quivering electric toothbrush and watch the gums leak and bleed and wash his thinning hair and bend the plastic straw towards his sad, cracked lips.

  Suddenly in the middle of it all I began to miss her sorely, my clamouring Australian girl.

  And I realized that I was closing myself up, that all my small love was going in the direction of a dying man, that I could be bigger, better.

  That I could be less alone. That I had disliked her simply because she had retained her enthusiasm. In spades.

  When I raced back to my room, she’d left ten dollars and a hastily scribbled note upon my neatly made-up bed: Thanks for the beers Trevor, I thought I had no change last night but found this in the arse pocket of my jeans. This will sound weird – but here goes … There is no need for a guy like you to be so lonely, you have an awful lot to give (I don’t mean it that way, well I do).

  Then three ‘x’ marks, and a lipstick kiss to seal the bargain.

  Her name was Karen; she could have been my friend.

  That evening when I came into the kitchen Dana was sitting alone, waiting. She said, ‘I’m really glad you’re here, Trevor.’ Then she left a pause. ‘I need you.’ Pause. ‘To stop me eating all of this’ and she brought my eyes down to the blueberry pie on the plate before her.

  After she kissed the air beside my cheek and left I was going to use her fork, I mean I had it in my hand when I thought Oh, come on man, that’s really overdoing it.

  She’s changed her makeup, she’s using real dramatic eyeliner like Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders or Elizabeth Taylor when she was playing Cleopatra. It draws you in; you’ve no choice but to admit defeat as you look into her unswerving, unnerving eyes you realize, This is someone completely and utterly sure of who they are, someone who does not deal with doubt on a daily basis.

  I freely admit I’m frightened by really confident people especially when they’re not that fuckin’ bright: Do you remember earlier when I said she was a disturbingly beautiful creature?

  Ellie is kneading pastry in the kitchen, shaking her head, laughing, ‘When I start out here, that fat bitch expect me to save coupons an’ redeem them at the check-out, as if I was on welfare, not Madison. White people. Rich people. Shit, rich white Jewish people.’

  I’m not really listening. There is glistening in the air as she sprinkles castor sugar, I see my mother and I baking, making this excellent snowscape on top of our last Christmas cake.

  The whole family is stranded. There are faithful huskies, sleds, the whole shebang. I am Roald Amudsen or maybe Scott of the Antarctic or Shackleton in my parka. An icy wind howls as they beg me for oranis, oranis – they all have desperate scurvy on their mouths – then one of the ugly sisters points slowly to a badly built igloo. Hell hymn, hell hymn. My father is inside shaking like a leaf with serious icicles in his beard he can’t even lift his frozen fuckin’ head to say, Thang od you heah.

  I transport them home on my stout wooden ship, except they lose half their acid tongues on the voyage, which means they’re not able to speak properly, just these Down Syndrome nnnffffgg kind of sounds, which unfortunately means they won’t ever be able to interrupt me again. And I’m afraid the old fella will no longer be able to puff on his pipe like a prick and say, And what precisely is your point, Trevor?

  Ma just laughs and points the rolling pin and says that I’m headed straight for trouble or for jail. Then she joins in creating icing-sugar storms and impassable ridges as she scatters tiny bananas and lemons plus the odd plastic orange she smiles and says, ‘There. Some vitamin C to cure them of their scurvy.’

  Every Mother’s Day, if she wasn’t above in the bed, we’d head into town and drink cheap Chilean wine, then a truckload of Irish coffees which she always made them remake because she absolutely hated if the cream didn’t sit stiffly on top, like a priest’s collar. But other than that she was very easy-going.

  We’d drink until we hadn’t even got bus fare, then we’d agree about everything under the sun, especially the fact that she should’ve had an affair while she had the chance, and her back was still up to it. And we’d agree that the rest of the family took themselves terribly seriously, that they may have had bucket-loads of letters after their names but they were boring bitches, really bad dressers. And we’d concur – that was our code because that’s what he’d say after someone made a point: I concur – that our Pater familias was a dry old shite in love with the sound of his own affected voice – I concur – and that at the end of the day he was a pointy forehead bastard with not much of heart, little or no romance and a really stilted, wilted wig of an imagination, plus a tolerance level towards the less-educated, less-informed, less like him that bordered on non-existent.

  She’d laugh and tell me I really was my mother’s son, that I had blacksmith blood, that my poor endangered-species father had never fully recovered from the sheer bloody size of me when I’d been born, that my ugly sisters had been very worried about her having me because it was very late in her life and the labour had gone on and on for days and nights because I’d done my best to hide inside like Otto in The Tin Drum, that when the doctor finally pulled me out with his forceps and slapped me on the arse I’d fixed him with a look as if to say – Try that again, pal and I’ll bite your fuckin’ ear off.

  Me and Ma, we’d get so loud in restaurants we were often asked to ‘please think of the other diners’, which we’d always take as our cue to order another round of Irish coffees. And they’d say, ‘Sorry, enough is enough’ and we’d be asked to leave politely and end up not paying for half of what we’d swallowed.

  Quite a few times, ‘one or other of them’, as my Mother referred to my sisters, would have to drive all the way into town to pick us up because word had got round that my mother would sometimes up-chuck in the back seat and Dublin taxi drivers would generally refuse point-blank to ferry us. So, one of the ugly sisters would arrive and we’d be sitting on steps somewhere, maybe the Lord Mayor’s Mansion or the Shelbourne Hotel, and you should’ve seen the puss on them in their boring, economical little cars – you’d swear they’d been mortally fuckin’ wounded.

  We’d just sit in the back seat laughing, holding hands, sometimes singing ‘Fairytale of New York’ even though it wasn’t Christmas: ‘You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot, Happy Christmas my arse, I thank God it’s our last. And the boys of the NYPD choir still singing “Galway Bay”, and the bells are ringing out …’

  I think of her whenever I hear church bells pealing I think of her singing and staring Death straight in the face, laughing at the absurdity of it all. And I wonder where she found the courage and I hope I’ve inherited her gift for picking up the pieces of a shattered life, her gift of carrying on regardless, her tired head held high, her unstinting heart worn out on her sleeve.

  She didn’t have a great voice but that didn’t stop her, not for one minute and sometimes she’d laugh so much she’d start to cry. Then I’d join in, I mean,
what else are you supposed to do when you’re sitting in the back of your sister’s Toyota Starlet with someone you love who is fading away in front of you and you’re drunk as a skunk but not quite drunk enough to say what you’re really thinking?

  Of course if you wanted to you could just continue driving as if nothing was happening, in fact you could stick a shaking, classical tape in the dash and not look in the rearview mirror once, which is exactly what my oldest sister did. And you should realize it wasn’t exactly a quick jaunt to Wicklow, in fact before they put in motorways – and ripped the whole place apart – it used to take more than an hour to get there and if you just sat in the back listening to Ma humming with your eyes closed it was weird, because soon as you opened them you’d always see a dead hedgehog or a squished fox by the roadside, three or more carrion crows alighting.

  Once when we were tumbling out of the car Ma fell over in the black ditch mud and lay there in white linen shrieking laughing, looking up at the stars. I lay down beside her while my oldest sister started ranting about the damp getting in on her mother’s bones, pneumonia, fecklessness, duties and responsibilities.

  I picked my moment carefully.

  I grabbed her wrist, hard, and pulling her in and down where my mother could not hear I said, ‘Don’t fucking dare talk to me about responsibilities, you ugly bat. How about holding your dying mother’s hand some night for more than twenty fuckin’ seconds?’

  And the force of it stunned her, forced her to step backwards with her mealy mouth hanging down, like a ripped cloth.

  Then my father came shuffling out in his pipe and slippers and lifted Ma up in his arms, and that’s when my sister bent over. And under a blanket of twinkle-twinkle stars she poured black poison into my ear, telling me I might have been my mother’s son but I was not my father’s, I was not of the same blood as any of them. But I just threw back my head onto the clay and said, ‘Well, maybe that explains why I’m the one breaking his bollocks laughing and you’re the one with a face like a melted fuckin’ Wellington. Maybe that explains why I’m as big as a house and strong as an ox with everything tight and in the right proportion while the three of ye are stunted cunts whose arses hang down the back of your fat knees like cow’s fuckin’ udders.’

  And it was as if the stars had formed a crown of silver thorns on her bitter twisted head she said, ‘Speaking of stunted dear brother did you ever for a moment wonder why we’re all so academically gifted and you’re, well, something of an intellectual pygmy? Did you never think it incumbent upon yourself to find out what sort of creature your father actually was?’

  Stars were near, her voice was miles away.

  8

  Twinkle stars. The poisoned question pricking my cold, damp flesh.

  Of course I fuckin’ thought about it; in fact there nearly always existed in my head the possibility that my mother had become so rigidly bored by my egghead father that she’d had a fling with a former IRA prisoner-cum-poet at a party in my father’s poxy university, that the prisoner-poet may have had some issues around authority drugs and isolation, which would be perfectly fuckin’ understandable. That maybe I inherited some stuff that my old man – and quite a few other people I’ve encountered along the way – didn’t feel too comfortable with. And maybe my mother told the country doctor and maybe even the calm-voiced shrink, maybe that’s why they called me a counter-revolutionary and treated me like a fish out of water and advised me to do breathing exercises as if I had fuckin’ gills, not lungs. Maybe that’s why they encouraged me to do the sifting thought thing, to keep a notebook, not to be afraid when exercise and meditation and breathing in and out slowly didn’t work, not to feel defeated or deflated just because I needed a pill – but that maybe swallowing it in front of the mirror wasn’t such a good idea, maybe I should just keep them in the fridge, like vitamins, take them with some juice or cereal. And to be careful not to construct a mountain out of a molehill – an unfortunate image because in my mind I was condemned forever to burrow up into the light.

  Maybe is my least favourite word, though I admit it is unusually powerful. You can spend years and years on maybe.

  By the way, as regards being an academic pygmy I got honours in English (A), Irish (A), Latin (A), Greek (A), German (A), French (B) – and that was only because I didn’t bother with the stupid accent in the orals.

  And when I applied to Dun Laoghaire Film School the interview board said my 22-minute short about my family was, without doubt, the funniest thing they’d ever seen, that the voice-over (me!) was very Sunset Boulevard meets The Waltons, that some of the drawing-room scenes where family and friends sat around drinking port having pretentious discussions about politics and philosophy ranked alongside such anti-family classics as Sybil. And then another one nodded and said, ‘Five Easy Pieces’ and then another nodded and said, ‘Crumb’, and this last one was younger and sexy with spiked-up hair and she smiled at me as if she understood every frame, every reference. Still smiling, she put away her manila folder and she said my mother – who really played it up for the camera – must have been very beautiful when she was young.

  ‘Yes. She was.’

  And then I was told, and not for the first time in life, that the college had Great Expectations of me. And I said I’d do my best to fulfil them but already I felt weighed down by the dead, lead weight of their anticipation.

  And outside the interview door, and all along the echoing corridors, everyone looked so shiny, new and dependable that I immediately was rendered unreliable and worn, and my socks were wet with sweat.

  And there were so many snappy dressers and pert, efficient types with demanding part-time jobs in production houses and advertising agencies and you could see they were always going to manage, could see they were always going to cope calmly, thrusting forward in the marketplace, so purposeful and bold. And I could see them installed already in expensive restaurants being uppity with foreign staff, see them networking, watch them chin-wagging, flirting and exchanging derivative screenplay ideas with Neil Jordan – ‘Interesting, yeah, ‘specially in view of the whole, you know, cross-dressing post-colonial thing’ – and Jim fuckin’ Sheridan – ‘Ah jay-zus that’s fuckin’ marvellous altogether, it re-moinds me of when I was a chisler in Sheriff Stree’ an’ we had this TV aerial on the roof of our tene-ment …’

  And by the time I got to the bus stop my palms were panicked and sticky, and my heart was racing. And that’s when they all began to pass me in air-conditioned Walter De Silva-designed Alfa156s, astride their polished Piaggios and classic Vespas.

  One of the young women that buzzed by in her private, dust-free air-stream had silky blonde hair flowing out on the breeze like a commercial.

  And a backpack made to look like a fluffy sacrificial lamb.

  I wanted to throw a rock at her helmet.

  Her head.

  And that was one of the few times my mother and I argued when I got home she pulled her hair – please Ma, stop – and she screamed that I was a defeatist, that I was writing myself into the role of a loser when the truth was I had more fire and imagination in my head, more passion in my soul than anyone she’d ever encountered and would I ever cop on and stop beating myself up simply because I had to swallow a few sirs – and she always got the initials wrong – or occasionally visit a head-shrink, for Christ’s sake did I not understand there were people out there crippled by depression, people unable to get up in the morning, people who couldn’t run or swim or speak, or even formulate the most basic thoughts that were racing round their poor, unfortunate heads, people who literally couldn’t function as part of the community. I needed to get some bloody perspective, I needed to see I was genuinely talented, and I was going to throw it away, and for what?

  That was one of the few times she didn’t let me speak or defend myself, one of the few times she said she was sick to her back teeth of listening to my self-pitying rigmarole, one of the few times she just asked me to please close the door behind me, pleas
e think of her, please try to grant her a little bit of peace. Because the truth was she was at the end of her tether worrying and she wanted, no she needed to know that before she died I was going to be even vaguely happy and settled and working at something I was good at, entertaining people, making them laugh. Not making them sick with worry and everlasting doubt.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ma. Please look at me.’

  My hand upon the door handle, clumsy. Paw.

  Most of the time however Ma did have this way about her; seriously, she could weave a spell around you, transforming, taking one feeling and turning it with gentle questions and advice, into another feeling altogether.

  Small, everyday miracles, the softly whispered work of mothers sick and strong.

  But others manage it too: I remember right after the episode on the beach where the actress I really liked walked away, saying, ‘This just isn’t going to work, sorry.’ She was carrying a little plastic bottle of Ballygowan, the green label began to glow and fade the way the Tardis does in Dr Who and I know it sounds stupid but I felt she’d lifted something vital from my insides and that’s when I stopped going into college for a time.

  And I don’t know why but I’d stopped running with the dog, I used to just walk slowly on my own trying to figure the whole thing out, and everything appeared tattered, worn.

  And one morning in November there was this ghost of a fog hanging from branches of trees in the park and I felt I was disappearing, and that no one would notice. And then suddenly the warden appeared in his blue uniform, his little stick raised.