The Companion

by Lorcan Roche

  So I would stop lying on her bed in the morning, talking to thin air.

  So I could fully appreciate and comprehend the reality of the fact that our mother was dead. And would I stop going into her room at night, please? It was driving their father mad listening to me wailing like a banshee; if necessary, they’d bolt the door shut and hire a handyman to hammer the bloody thing tight, alright?

  I didn’t argue. I didn’t even speak. I just began to squeeze her thin, long voice and her ugly mouth with one hand, hard. And I used my cold palm to cover the poison hole, and she couldn’t breathe or make any animal sound, and it was a good thing for her, and a good thing for me too I suppose, that the bouncers had broken three fingers on my right hand because now I was using just my thumb and two other stiff fingers on my weaker left.

  And I could feel her jaw-bone, mandible, its socket unhinging, and I could watch her eyes grow round and white, like table-tennis balls.

  One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand, four, one thousand, five, one thousand, six, one thousand, seven, one thousand, eight, one thousand, nine, one thousand, ten, one thousand, eleven, one thou-

  She knocked over a vase cleverly, it smashed, loudly, it brought the other two running, they screamed for her and became winged creatures up on my back and in my hair, tugging. And then my small father came running.

  And when I saw the look in his eyes, I let go.

  I have never felt such shame, and I suppose that’s why I cried so much on the plane, not just because of my mother, but because it had ended badly with my family, to put it fuckin’ mildly. And you may think you can cut ties, you may think you can just pack a suitcase and walk through departures, sayonara – but it’s not that simple.

  Family stuff sticks. Family stuff whispers. Family stuff is where the Doubt begins. And never ends.

  I sent her flowers through Interflora the day after I arrived and a long, long letter, trying to explain. Everything.

  I wrote the word sorry at the end of every paragraph – I even cut out the letters, like a serial killer would, and stuck them on the last page. She never wrote back. But then I didn’t provide a forwarding address, just a hotmail account. It’s funny, isn’t it, when you’re receiving a list of messages you’re back to being a child again? And before you open the little golden envelopes on screen you’re full of hope, then your heart sinks. Because all you have to read, all you have to look forward to, is junk mail, info on cheap flights and a hastening school reunion.

  Ed has the brave face on today, it reminds me of that Beatles song ‘Eleanor Rigby’ –wasn’t she the one had a face in a jar by the door?

  I haven’t looked at him properly for weeks I’ve just been going through the motions, sleepwalking, swapping one Simpsons video for the next, one untouched tray for another.

  His skin is seal-grey and oily, it’s as if he is suffering from some untreated tropical disease. Believe me, you don’t want to know how bad his breath is.

  We have nothing to say to each other, even when we watch his favourite episode, the one where aliens run for President, nothing.

  When it finishes he stares at the screen and while the video begins to automatically rewind, he says, ‘Why. Don’t you. Take the. Evening off? Go shopping. I’m sick of. Looking. At you. Wearing the, same. Shit.’

  He does this high false laugh, except it catches in his throat, then he kind of gives in for a while he says nothing, just stares down at the carpet.

  A monumental pause after which he asks for his headphones.

  I believe it will be easier in winter it will be normal to turn inwards, to be quiet and bare, like trees.

  I never know what to buy in shops these days nothing ever seems to fit properly and when assistants say ooh that looks really nice, the insincere fuckin’ smile on their face makes me think of jackals, or laughing hyenas.

  Around Bleeker and Canal it’s worst. The geeks who work in vintage clothing stores think they’ve a God-given right to rip back the curtain, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and sometimes you’re only halfway through putting on the fluorescent blouse they’ve forced into your hand, then whoosh, they’re standing there with their pupils, purple hair and snot-green shirts saying, ‘If you want my opinion’ – which I don’t – ‘you’re the sort of guy could really pull off that whole Midnight Cowboy retro look.’ And you are not sure if you’ve actually said it, not sure if the words have uncoiled from the corner of your mouth, Hey, do us both a fuckin’ favour – put your eyes back inside your head, pull the curtain, and get the fuck back behind that fake-antique cash-register, OK?

  Anger lies fallow just beneath the surface it could easily turn to rage.

  Why am I so angry? Is it because I am growing old with Ed, is it because some essential part of me is expiring at exactly the same rate that he is slowly curling up? Is it because my hopes, my dreams, lie crumpled round his pedals?

  Is it because I came to save him and realize now I cannot save myself?

  Fight it.

  I need to think of something positive: There was a nice black lady today in a travel agent’s; she had a smile that lit up her eyes, I really can’t stand it when people grin with just their teeth, it happens quite a lot in New York, especially in restaurants. And what I’d like to know is, why do they always prick up their little plucked ballerina eyebrow and ask just one? as if there’s something wrong with you, I mean maybe my wife died in childbirth, maybe I’ve just woken up from a five-year coma and don’t know where my buddies are, maybe I’m happy sitting on my own with my black diary and my iPod, OK?

  Maybe I choose to be alone. I don’t, but the possibility should be permitted, the way it is for the very rich, very beautiful and very vain who waltz through New York and through Life, without ever being accosted by some snotty, accusatory cow – Just one?

  I best tell something nice and balanced about the old man. One white Christmas when he’d invited one of his professor friends over I’d gotten the two dweebie, bossy kids — who instantly assumed they were smarter than me — to have a snowball fight outside.

  I placed hard smooth rocks inside the snowballs, took careful aim, missed once, then skulled the older of them, stretching him flat on the laughing snow. See how smart you are now, Cedric.

  After they drove away, he called me into his study. He had this amazing sound system, speakers in every corner – Bosë I think – and he puts on Bach’s ‘Cello Concerto’. We sit and listen. After a while it begins to open staked stuff inside my chest, reverberating down and along the echoing chambers, unlocking and slowly sliding open warped, medieval drawers. I can’t stand it any longer, I start to cry. And I can only ever remember this happening once, he calls me over and hugs me gently he says he will always love me, no matter what. Then he tells me with tears in his smiling eyes that I am a monster, a terrifying unruly, uncivilized beast, a half-man and he asks me What are you? And I tell him I am a monster, a terrifying unruly uncivilized beast, a half-man and I add the word satyr to impress him, and we laugh.

  Together. In the book-lined study with that magnificent music washing over us.

  Next day, he winked at me over dinner when one of my sisters was banging on about how well she’d done in some school debating contest. But about a week after when one or other of them won a medal for reciting a poem about some dead Indian — ‘Hiawatha’ by Longfellow, I think – he went back to not noticing me.

  Old habits die hard. In parents. And in children.

  18

  At home buying shoes or sneakers was a real ordeal; there was this one shop on the quays in Dublin called ‘Heathers’ and although they sometimes stocked my size, their styles were the kind favoured by lesbians with elephantiasis, thick-necked country priests and aromatic middle-aged hillwalkers who wore shorts in winter. In city sport stores I always felt like a freak, especially when some smart-ass sales assistant would shout Does this come in a 15? so as the whole shop would stop, and stare.

  Here it isn’t an is
sue, the sales-guy doesn’t even blink when I state my size and squeeze down into the little chair.

  There is something familiar about him as he smiles he opens the box, fluffs up the noisy pink paper, and asks, ’So, where you from?’

  ‘Dublin.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘You haven’t lost the accent.’

  ‘No, thank God.’

  ‘How long have you been out here?’

  ‘Three years. I go home at Christmas though. For good.’

  ‘Fair play.’

  ‘How ’bout you?’

  ‘I’ve been here a few months now. I’m nearly at the end of my contract.’

  ‘You in construction?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I was thinking you looked incredibly strong. So, what will you do when the job’s done?’

  ‘I think I’ll do some travelling. Head out west. Maybe buy a bike.’

  ‘What kind?

  ‘A hog.’

  ‘A what?

  ‘A Harley’.

  ‘Wow. You could drive to California. Route 66 and all that.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe’

  ‘I go to San Francisco quite a bit myself.’

  ‘Really. What’s it like?’

  ‘Oh, you’d love it, so you would. You’d really love it’.

  I hate when people who don’t know you tell you that you’d love something, just because they do. I’m trying to avoid his eager-beaver eyes and the pink tissue paper in the cardboard box is the exact same colour as his perma-press tie which is dangling down in his, jesuschrist, he has my heel right up against his crotch, the little fucker is pretending to be tying up the laces but really he’s massaging my foot against himself under the cover of pink, don’t know how the hell I didn’t notice, fuck.

  And this black guy is shaking his massive Afro-head, shit, he thinks we’re two butt-holers getting it on in public I really don’t like when my head is all foggy like this so I tell the little bollox that he’s made a major fuckin’ mistake, except he says ‘No, it’s the right size, it’s a perfect match, just like Cinderella’ and the way he says that word is just too much to bear.

  I’m standing now with one new sneaker on and my sock is wet with sweat and everything is all undone; it’s like the time I got on a roller-coaster at Funderland in Dublin I could barely fit it into the little car, definitely going to topple, so I started shouting, I made them stop the whole thing after just one terrifying circuit. Cheap, chewing-gum mothers and leather-backed fathers were staring, fuck them, I knew in my heart it was going to crash and for days afterwards I scoured the papers to see if there were reports of any fatal injuries, but of course, there weren’t.

  Outside the sweating shop I do my breathing exercises then I start to laugh out loud: Jesus, I must have a sign on my forehead saying – Try your luck.

  A summer-bum stumbles past like a runner in a relay race he picks up the sound-baton and begins to roar with thunderous, rolling laughter. He points his finger at me and nods, then puts the filthy finger to his mouth, ssssh, protecting our secret. Then just as suddenly he disappears.

  I am alone again. That’s when I hear a cold voice telling me to face up to the fact that I am a dickhead, a dip-shit, a ditz, I am to be taken advantage of forever, I am the sort that people teach weird shit to, the type that gets asked to piss on total strangers. I am out of my depth, clutching at straws.

  Drowning, not waving.

  Maybe.

  But I’m alive and I’m strong and I still have some small sense of humour intact and a growing sense of what a ridiculous figure I must cut among the well-heeled, the powerful, the cruelly ambitious, the purposeful, the killers and conmen, the business types who’ve always known exactly where they’re going. Exactly what it takes to get there.

  I have no idea where I’m headed. I see little or no point in planning ahead. I embrace chaos.

  I also don’t feel like working for a while.

  19

  Ed’s mother wants to know what makes me think I have the right to just take whole days off willy-nilly, why yesterday Ed sat all day long in soiled pyjamas and I’m thinking, Yeah – well he wasn’t the only fuckin’ one.

  Except the smell in her room is not piss, it is poison. It is the smell of burnt hope, the stench of extinguished dreams. It is a smell I cannot stand to see her lying there, beached whale, surrounded by all those sticky trays and caramel plates, it makes me sick to my stomach to see her squander Life so wantonly in her filthy fuckin’ room.

  And if you listen hard you can hear Him whispering to himself in corners you can see his manicured fingernails move delicately on an abacus he is calculating how long it will take for gristle to grow like white ivy round her bloated heart, how long it will take for the pump to fail in her ailing blood can you hear the silting cells scream – That’s too much stop, don’t you understand plain English, STOP FUCKING EATING.

  Her foghorn voice is hailing from behind the door, again.

  I tell myself remember, this is his mother, be polite, be respectful, please be very very careful.

  No. I am not going to sit on the side of her bed, tap tap.

  I am not going to fetch the negligée from her bureau; Why thank you.

  I am not going to swap the TV sets around; My, what animal-strength you possess.

  I am not going to bring English tea from the kitchen, nor faded magazines from the hall, I am not going to help look for the remote control which is always hiding between the sheets.

  Here’s the deal, Miss Piggy: I didn’t sign on as a companion to a woman with a broken leg.

  Or a tenuous grip on reality.

  When I tell Ellie the sort of things I’ve been imagining, manicured nails on an abacus and goateed, Louis-Cyphre types in corners peeling eggshells, she says, ‘Shit, maybe Irish people can’t handle sense, maybe it’s like Red Indians and alcohol, maybe you should stick to The Subway Inn for a while.’ Then she touches my hand and adds, ‘I ain’t always gonna be here baby, you know there’s only so much of this shit a body can take at my age. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re cut out for it neither.’

  ‘What do you mean?

  ‘All them tall-tales you told me from the Clinic always had lots of different peoples in them, what I’m saying is, maybe you need to be Companion to more than one person at a time. Maybe you could do somethin’ else?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I dunno, Clever. Shit, maybe you could teach kids to swim that might be nice for a change, you might meet some pretty mothers poolside.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Gots to be other jobs out there for someone like you, Clever.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  We both know there isn’t.

  She pops me a beer, I sit there peeling the label thinking, This isn’t the worst job in the world, not by a long shot. Anyway, there’s not much time left.

  He is so weak I have to hold the phone to his skin-peeling ear, I can hear his mother planting her little sly seeds of doubt, Who was it authorized this amount of overtime, whisper, whose idea was it, whisper, you know he sometimes stinks of drink, Barney says, whisper.

  Ed says ‘No.’

  Then he looks up at me, and tells her she needs to listen: ‘The. Scottish. Guy. Left. Because of. You. In your. Room.’ He flicks his hair, concentrates. ‘The overtime. Bill. Is your. Fault. Too. You haven’t. Bothered. To run Dad’s. Ad. Again. You should be. Grate-ful. Trevor is. Pre-pared to. Do all this. Ex-tra. Work.’

  This is excellent, he is standing up for me, but also for himself, which is inspiring. ‘Here’s another thing. Mom. I want the. Old mattress in his room. Thrown out. It is too soft for. Him. I. Want. A new. One brought in.’

  He’s on a roll, improvising. ‘I’ve decided to. Up. Grade my. Sound-system. I want the. Old one wired. Up in. Trevor’s. Room. It would be. Great. If you could. Organize that. OK?’

  He’s really mastered the American knack of asking questions that are really sly command
s. And you can hear her, protesting down the line, Why Ed, when did he suggest it, whisper, we have to be careful with people like him, whisper, we have to stick together Ed, remember blood is thicker than water, whisper.

  It takes him a while to get his breath back. Then he just says into the receiver, coldly, ‘Could you. Respect. My dying. Wishes. Please?’

  After he hangs up he laughs so hard I have to stand by with the inhaler, like a fireman. He takes three hits and without even thinking I take one too, this makes him choke and laugh all over again. It is not a nice sound, it is a hacking cackle that releases something old and black inside.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Quit. Looking so. Nervous. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It’s not. Like. I never said it. To her. Before.’

  ‘OK Ed. Cool.’

  But it’s far from cool, it is very fuckin’ dangerous. You see, I don’t want him turning against his mother; if he does that then I am the only thing that stands between him and God knows what if I decide to walk out one night with a ticket in my pocket and my arm raised up, what if I sit into a yellow cab and say, Can you take me to the airport please? I’m going to Montserrat, it’s this island in the Lesser-Antilles, they say the sand is black therefrom volcanoes erupting all the time.

  ‘What’s up. Trevor?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m just a bit, you know, distracted.’

  ‘Talk. To. Me.’

  ‘I’m OK. It’s just …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sometimes, well, it’s all a bit much. You, me. This house.’

  ‘I under-stand.’

  ‘Do you Ed?’

  He looks up, he does the brave little smile. Some of the gums are black now. Wine-gums.