The Companion

by Lorcan Roche

  Then all I remember is being punched and bundled out into a wet lane, black boots and shoes raining.

  And finally, an empty Guinness barrel being dropped from an impossible height.

  Because there was no way, no way these round little men could suddenly be so tall.

  It took a long time for someone to come along, and I lay there, oozing like a goldfish flicked from the bowl by a cat.

  The first thought that came into my head was straight out of a Sam Peckinpah Western: I will never, ever go down again, I don’t care how many of them there are.

  The second thought was of my poor mother.

  I was nine days in Cappagh Hospital. They broke my nose, three fingers on my right hand, the little finger and index on my left. They dislocated my jaw, damaged my spleen and ruptured something in my inner ear, which means I have a balance issue that comes and goes, like a ghost, without warning. It hurts to fly. And I can’t dive, though I can snorkel, which I love.

  But the main thing is, they took something away. Despite my size, I was never the type of guy who swaggered or shaped down city streets, but up until then I had also never, ever looked away from other men.

  Now I do.

  And I hope when I look down it is going to be enough, that whoever is staring and daring me will allow this acquiescence to suffice.

  And only someone who has been knocked and kicked and screamed at, only someone who has felt the blows move across his body like rain on an already watery bog, only someone who has had something taken from the clay will fathom.

  I will never go down again.

  The worst part was sitting in his study conspiring to lie to her, inventing a story he would tacitly back up, of slippery tiles, concussion, cold compresses, concerned nurses.

  He barely nodded.

  The worst part was taking the awkward story up the stairs with her tray, and flowers plucked from her garden, painfully.

  The worst part was listening to myself: ‘Ah it wasn’t that serious Ma, really I stayed there because at the end of the day it was more convenient, you see there was a real need for them to assess the hand injury on an almost daily basis because of the threat to, you know, my swimming career …’. And how they had to show me special physio exercises … ‘And how was the dog while I was gone Ma, had the lunatic with the lawnmower been around again, had the butcher kept scraps, I wonder will I move that rhododendron bush Ma, what do you think, would it be better off getting a bit more shade, jesus how the devil are you Ma, come on, how are things, any small sign of improvement, your hair looks shinier?’

  She smiled and lied back just as proficiently, ‘Everything’s fine, son, just fine.’ Then she said she’d missed me, she’d been very worried, she would like to have visited but it was deemed out of the question by you-know-who. The doctor too had ruled against it. The legs. The back. The bloody balance gone.

  ‘Must be a family trait, Ma. Mine’s terrible too, though the tiles were very slippy.’

  She smiled and held her hand out, feebly. My heart was racing at the pace of our dishonesty. I could see in her worn-out eyes that she knew I’d lost it again, knew from the bruises, from my voice, and from the way I was fidgeting and sitting down and standing up too quickly, and letting go of her dried-out hand, and stopping too far from the bed, and talking, talking far too much. She knew. That it was something in my head that had snapped, not just the bones in my hands.

  ‘I tried to break my fall and failed, Ma. The orthopaedic surgeon said I was lucky, it was quite a weight that impacted on the bones, lucky I didn’t snap the wrists completely, lucky too the bench I hit my head off was made of soft wood, not steel or concrete.’

  Talking pure tarmac. Rolling it out in hot waves sticking to my tongue, the roof of my mouth, my furiously blinking eyes.

  ‘It’s good to have you back, son. But why don’t you lie down for a while? You’re pale as a sheet and you have the black rims back. It was probably hard to sleep in a public ward, was it?’

  ‘Yes Ma, it was a bit.’

  We lie to protect. We lie to inure. To keep on going we have to lie.

  14

  Naturally, there was a big palaver made and my old man had to call in all kinds of fuckin’ favours from newspaper proprietors to keep the story out.

  And he reminded me that we had ‘already had to move house once because of a similar escapade when two small boys had been hospitalized with broken ribs and smashed hands because I’d leapt up and down on them like, like …’

  And I’m thinking, Like Donald bloody Sutherland in Day of the Locust.

  By Nathanael West.

  And he’s droning on in his incredibly world-weary voice that it was in my nature to disappoint and to disport myself– did ya ever hear the like? – on the streets of the Capitol as a savage, a thugee, a throwback. He’s banging on about the half-man, half-beast thing again, and how a leopard cannot change its spots and it was unlike him to mix his metaphors and I was thinking, Well, which am I? Half-man, half-beast, leopard with spots, leopard without? And maybe that’s the moment I decided to see people as animals, because clearly that’s how my father saw me.

  Actually, sometimes I don’t see them as animals, I see them as monsters. And once, when I went to a Francis Bacon exhibition in Dublin I started running from painting to painting pulse racing, it was as if he’d been inside my head: there they were, all of them, my sisters with their twisted mouths bragging and dragging the evening on, and on; my father sideways and half hidden in the scribbled corner, silently criticizing; my Jesuit swimming-coach counting down the seconds; my demented next-door neighbour with the lawnmower, screaming. There was even a Steven-Berkoff-type bouncer with a shaved head, I swear to fuck I didn’t know where to look. And you know when MTV reporters ask celebs who they’d like to meet, well I’d like to meet Mr Bacon, I don’t care if his father caught him dressing up in his mother’s clothes. In fact, I’d like to have sat for one of his paintings; I’d like to have had acknowledged, formally, the monster deep inside.

  For the record, I’d also like to meet Jesus, Judas, Lucifer, Dante, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Shakespeare, Milton, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, Conrad, M.P. Sheil, Jung, Preston Sturgess, Frank Capra, Johnny Weissmuller, Ma, Gene Rodenberry, Charles Bukowski – though I think we’d have ended up fighting – and Laurie Lee. Bruce too.

  Anyway, when it came to court the old judge with the ludicrously theatrical voice said the doormen had behaved like animals, my considerable physical presence notwithstanding, and that the beating they’d administered was cowardly and low. I had the right to defend myself, of course, but it was possible that in my anger I had ‘o’er stepped the mark’ and he waited for me to nod in agreement, but I didn’t, fuck him.

  I said I had just wanted to go home.

  At the back of the courtroom someone in a shiny shellsuit laughed, probably because one of the bouncers was modelling a steel triangle on his flattened nose, he looked a little bit like Hannibal.

  Lecter, not the guy who crossed the Alps, obviously.

  These days I don’t really feel up to sitting in the kitchen listening to another of Ellie’s Sermons on the Mount, so I spend a lot of time in my tiny room, alone.

  She seems to know I’m a little bit low so she nearly always leaves a freshly baked pie or a hero sandwich under a starched white cloth, plus a funny little note: All work-outs and no play makes Clever a dull boy or The way to a white man’s heart is thru his gettin’ bigger belly or Hot pie, when you gonna ask me out on a hot date?

  Sometimes, I’m sitting there enjoying the sweetness of berries, the bitterness of cloves and the childish calmness of milk and I’m thinking, I wish my head were just a little bit emptier, a little less busy, when I hear Dana’s steady footfall along the hall.

  I close my eyes, all the better to see her.

  Her back arches a bit because her perfect ass is held so proud and high, she also has a strange habit of clenching her fists loosely as she wa
lks towards his mother’s room – she’s like a little warrior preparing to do battle.

  I’m rarely if ever easy in myself, but the days that Dana is around I feel like a fraud changing my T-shirt three times, putting on more aftershave.

  What difference will it make? She hardly knows you exist anymore.

  15

  I should exit the sweltering city for a while I should bob and float on the sea, I used to love that feeling of suspension, of being held like a gift, a white and green offering to the blue sky, smiling.

  I’ll ask Ed for a day off. He’ll say yes, partly because he’s so low himself, partly because he knows I need the time, partly because we’ve nothing left to say to each other these days we just sit like stones in air-conditioned silence.

  Out here in Coney Island the slack oily water looks like it would suck you down and hold you under, like a crazy lover who will never let go. The boardwalk groans under the strain of impossible dreams: Instant Romance; New Beginnings; The Past Being Left Behind.

  We lie back to view the photo-exhibition being curated behind our knock-off sunglasses: on top are rows of kitsch ’50s photos of people laughing, swimming and holding hands. These are titled: What We Expect on Our Days Off.

  Underneath lie garish, Parr-ish images of overflowing garbage pails; fat kids with crumpled stomachs licking runny ice-cream on uncomfortable, bumpy towels; an harassed traffic cop waiting to let loose on a loudmouth Italian wearing a Playboy baseball cap; see him hanging down and out of an incredibly red Camero; a snow-white woman with a prancing-stallion tattoo on her veinless arm, drinking from a bottle; see her suck smoke in, then warmly wash it down with an inherited, male grimace.

  These images are captioned: The Reality of What Unfolds.

  Everywhere the eye is under day-glo attack. Everywhere the ear is assaulted by the din of other people’s portable rap. Fifty Cent boys smoke huge, cartoonish spliffs while their heavily pregnant girlfriends ease into the viscous water. As one of them drips back up the beach towards her smoking crew she stops the sun from shining on me, and when I look up as if to say, Please move, she announces for all the world to hear: ‘The fuck you lookin’ at, you ugly mothafuckah?’

  Her male companions spring up in the sand like black and tan weasels sniffing the salt air for trouble.

  I say nothing, do nothing. I put my sunglasses back on, try to look the other way. When I take off my shirt and start to rub sunscreen on, one by one the young punks stop staring. And when their screeching, Macy Gray girlfriend tells them to ‘do somethin’ ‘bout the big white mothafuckah still starin’,’ one of their number shoves her down in the sand he spits, ‘Shut the fuck up, bitch, he ain’t the only mother starin’, now put them watermelons away for the day!’

  We are extras in a dreary, low-budget movie about nothing in particular; dreams fading, crude expectations leaking, like oil, from an accidentally overturned barrel. Director and cinematographer have moved on without telling us we are superfluous to the story. And so we are stuck staring, not at each other, because nobody really wants confrontation, but at the flat dull sea.

  As a child I used to drive my parents to distraction on holidays I’d regularly refuse to leave the seaside. In my head I was convinced it was an amusement ride, that someone in the sky was going to pull the plug then the sea and its wonderful sound effects would shortly fade away.

  I look around now, I’m thinking, Wish someone would pull the fuckin’ plug here. It’s like that scene in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle says, ‘Some day, a red rain is gonna come an’ wash the scum away.’

  All of a sudden a sweating, egg-shaped man selling hot dogs from a squeaking cart says in a fake-friendly voice, ‘What’ll it be buddy, the works?’

  Egg Man starts squirting obscene amounts of mayo, mustard and ketchup in squiggly lines along a flaccid dog I have no intentions of eating the perspiration running down from his brow is soaking into the off-white tissue in his hand. I can’t resist, I have to say, ‘You talkin’ to me, huh, you talkin’ to me?’ Except I don’t get the accent right, I don’t sound one little bit like Bobby de Niro, I sound like a Chinese guy who’s had too much to drink.

  The hot-dog vendor picks up his cart and moves away, squeaking like a gigantic mouse he says he doesn’t want no trouble, he’s ‘just trying to feed his family, is all’.

  On the standing-room-only, rocking-horse train to the city, a prune of a black lady with horrific, dyed-blonde hair swings her plastic sack up on the worn hot seat beside her.

  Without taking her red-brown eyes off me she opens her legs wide, pulls down her laddered tights and floods the seat, then the carriage floor.

  Yellow despair, edging towards tired mothers and feral children in open-toed sandals.

  16

  Last night at a downtown place called The Ear Inn they had an open-mic night for poets.

  I had my diary with me, I decided, fuck it, I’d have a go.

  I read ‘I Am a Companion to a Boy with Muscular Dystrophy’:

  Dis-distrophy sits

  swelters, frets. Gets het-up in wheelchair heat

  snarled feet tap-tapping metal pedals

  like an inmate

  rapping a tin plate at mealtimes,

  at mealtimes I shovel fork-fuls of food into his

  gob gobbling mouth.

  Then we watch TV, at last we watch TV.

  Sometimes his turkey-thin neck

  and his tape, tapered thighs

  hurt, hurtle

  jerk, jerk, jerky spasms

  down his spastic frame

  sending fits of shudder

  along spider-fine veins,

  splintered waist,

  wall-flower spine.

  I observe these rat, rattlesnake contortions jolt him

  Then wipe the spittle that gathers

  at the elbow-edge

  of his graveyard mouth.

  Then we watch TV, at last we watch TV.

  When I cross the corridor in the evening

  I stand under the scalding shower to get rid

  of the cling-clinging stink

  And I think:

  Why do I never tell him

  how much I feel his pain?

  Then I watch TV, at last I watch TV.

  Tremendous silence afterwards you could hear the coffee machine percolating away in the corner this one black guy in a pinstripe waistcoat stood up and said, ‘I could feel it too man, hey I could feel his Pain, I was there with you, brother.’

  Which would have been perfect, except the fuckin’ eejit overturned half a cup of cold coffee abandoned on the table behind him I could see dirty brown liquid running, like diarrhoea, towards the formica-edges.

  The only slight relief was the silent, communal decision among the other poets to watch the Spanish waitress mop, not to watch me leave.

  17

  The Judge sat with us today perched like Miss Muffet on the edge of the bed. He asked Ed how he was feeling, then nodded and swallowed when Ed said he wasn’t too strong these days. The Judge then said it was most likely the heat and tried to perk things up by asking what the hell we did all day, what sort of oddball music we listened to.

  And that’s when Ed said I should put on Alan White for his father.

  The three of us sat there listening and to be fair to the Judge he joined in as best he could, tapping his foot and nodding his tiny head. Then he said, ‘He-hem, it’s true, in the old days transistor radios really did glow.’ And he told us a story about how, when he was our age, he sat listening to the President talking about war, and duty, how the very next day he signed up to fight, how he was awarded a medal for bravery, how proud his father was when he finally came sailing home.

  He looked straight at Ed, he nodded his sad tortoise head, ‘My father, however, could never have been as proud as I am every day because no one is as consistently brave as you Ed.’ Then he looked at me, ‘Yes indeed, the truth is, he-hem, Ed is the bravest soldier I have ever encountered.’
<
br />   When he stood up – you could see he was thinking of giving Ed a salute before he walked out – he did the he-hem thing one last time.

  I turned to Ed, I thought he would be delighted, but he just sighed, ‘That. Happens. Once. Or. Twice. A year. He comes in. And. Talks about. Me. As if I. Was. Already dead.’

  My father at my mother’s funeral, fish out of water, shaking his head slightly as he listened to the priest droning on about Resurrection, Truth and Light.

  The weight of his dismay.

  How he looked up at me; how, in one split asunder second he made me question everything: the candles, the congregation, their intentions, all the invocations and inventions of religion.

  I was the one who had to shake all the hands, Sorry for your trouble, sorry for your trouble, wonderful woman, I remember she was always singing in the garden with Trevor doing the digging, good man Trevor, may God increase your strength.

  My father couldn’t even bring himself to look at them, so they just touched his coat-sleeve, gingerly.

  And I wished I could comfort him but my sisters had formed a half-circle around him, a membrane, and I couldn’t penetrate his pain, and they never even came to the graveside, the cunts.

  And later, when I returned to the house alone, I didn’t argue when the oldest one informed me that the only reason my mother had been buried amid such pointless mumbo-jumbo, the only reason their distraught father had subjected himself to such a barbaric, philistine ritual, was so I could see her face in the casket.