The Companion

by Lorcan Roche

  She says, ‘I see’, when it’s obvious she hasn’t a clue what I was talking about.

  ‘So, you like bloodthirsty women?’

  ‘The dance is called ‘The Dance of the Seven Veils’. It’s not easy for an Irish girl to do. Very Eastern, very exotic. Actually Ken Russell made a weird movie called Dance of the Seven Veils.’

  ‘Don’t you mean Kurt Russell?’

  ‘Eh, no.’

  Jesus, we’re in trouble here.

  ‘But the girl, the actress, she pulled it off?’

  ‘Yes she did. I went backstage and I left her a note, and when the show finished a few weeks later, she rang me.’

  ‘Wow. What did you say? In your note.’

  ‘I told her that when I was watching her up there on the stage I forgot my name, my problems, my nightmares, even the fact that the bloke in the seat behind me was sucking boiled sweets.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And you never know with a really good actress, because say you’re dancing to Lou Reed’s “Transformer” and she smiles up, it always feels like a performance, plus in the scratcher you’re never really certain, you know all that You’re the one Billy-Bob.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Midnight Cowboy. When Jon Voight’s character is in the scratcher with his girl …

  ‘What’s “scratcher”?’

  ‘The sack. Bed..’

  ‘Oh.’

  There’s another pause.

  ‘So, what happened with you and the actress. Salomé?’

  ‘I became confused by her. And in the end I felt she took something from me. We were on this beach and I was building a sandcastle and …’

  ‘But are you sure it was love?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because a year after it ended I met her on the street and she put the heel of her hand on my stomach, she said I’d lost way too much weight, and the spot where she touched me, it burned for a week.’

  She picks up her white wine, then stops the glass at those perfect lips.

  ‘I guess that proves it then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve never been in love.’

  She tells me about this one guy, a really dark, handsome, super-successful endo-fuckin-crinologist in a Jewish hospital where she works three and a half days a week. They dated for a while but all he could do was talk about himself, his 911 Porsche and his turbo-charged career.

  She goes quiet for a while then she looks over at me, she has a weird glint in her eyes.

  ‘I never burned when he touched me. Sometimes, I used to feel quite cold. Like he was, I dunno, dipping me in ice.’

  There’s a strange sensation in my balls and toes and just behind my ears, it’s if someone is whispering shit I can’t quite understand and I can see the old Mayo man in the twilight of the pub he’s like a soothsayer this time the lips beneath the grey moustache say, Now me bucko, it’s over to you, make sure she burns when you touch her, make sure the whole hayloft goes ripping up in flames and I’m thinking, Take it easy old-timer, for fuck’s sake, but at the same time I’m thinking Dana is one of those women who says one thing and means another one entirely.

  No. Maybe not.

  It seems nothing really is going to happen, but that doesn’t mean I can’t pretend as I walk her home I put my arm around her. She doesn’t come any closer, but she doesn’t exactly move away either and when we get to her house I’m thinking Fuckit, might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb so I try to kiss her gently she puts three little fingers on my chin to prevent me.

  I’m about to apologize when she stands on the steps of her building and starts to kiss me back; her tongue darts to and fro in my mouth, sharp and silver, like tungsten.

  When my eyes are fully closed, I hear this old woman’s asthma voice rattle, ‘You guys make a perfect picture, I wish I had my camera.’

  When I open them, there’s this shrivelled old bag with blue hair and an ancient blue poodle, she just keeps standing there with her tobacco-stained teeth she smiles and says, ‘You two ever have kids, they’ll come out just right!’

  She says this while her hairdo-dog tries to crap, except it’s so decrepit it can’t, which I think is hilarious, but Dana doesn’t even smile at the woman, she just stares into my eyes and naturally I have no idea what she is trying to tell me, so I just kiss the top of her head instead.

  I’m wondering what will happen as the old lady slips away talking to her dog when Dana takes my hand and leads me up the surprisingly steep stone steps.

  Straight into the fairy tale.

  I thought it would be all Japanese and minimal, but it’s very 1950s Americana; the bedspread is like something from Little House on the Prairie. There are all these ancient dolls with cracked porcelain faces on high-up shelves they stare down balefully. In the corner, a Balinese puppet hangs uselessly; it’s as if the dolls had him executed for saying something stupid like I love you.

  The bed has the crispest, cleanest sheets you’ve ever been pushed backwards on, and I’m thinking: Man, I’m actually going to hear her singing in the morning. She sits up on my chest, when she pulls her sleeveless top over her head her hair tumbles down, it is like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life.

  I ask her one hundred times ‘Is it OK?’ and she whispers in a really soft voice ‘It’s more than OK, Trevor, it’s more than OK.’

  I can feel her slowly open herself up, like a flower.

  Then I feel her hot breath hard in my ear, this time when she speaks it’s like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, you know the bit where she goes, ‘Your mother sucks cocks in hell’.

  She rasps: ‘Fuck me harder, Trevor. I’m not a little girl, fuck me harder.’

  It’s weird for a minute I come to, when I open my eyes the room is bathed in blue, it looks terribly cold. The Balinese puppet smiles and says, Relax an let go bro’.

  I close my eyes. I let go.

  And that’s when she starts to mutter, ‘That’s it, fuck me like a woman.’ She’s really riding me now she is hurting me with her nails digging into weird places behind my knees she starts to scream as I lift her clean off the bed she draws her hand back to slap me, except, when she sees me staring up, she just smiles down, lazily.

  And pulls back her hair instead. Her voice is soft and warm when she asks: ‘Did you come with me?’

  ‘No. Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t apologize.’

  She starts to move up and down on me like a practised pole-dancer she is doing it really slowly now she reaches underneath, grabs my balls and squeezes them, hard. With her thumb and index finger she checks to see if the condom is still on properly, then she puts her palms flat on my stomach, she starts to lift herself up and down, up and down.

  She presses the top of my head, she says, ‘I want you to look at yourself going in and out of me, OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  She grips my cock with her pussy now she is asking me, ‘Is that nice? Is that tight?’ and I’m thinking, ‘Jesus christ I’m out of my fuckin’ league here’, but in a nice way, obviously.

  She starts going faster. Then she says, ‘I want you to come now, I want you to come inside me, OK Trevor?’ And because my name is on her lips I have no choice now I start to moan as she shoves her sharpest nail right up my ass. That’s when I explode, fuckin’ hell. And it’s one of those ones that gets ripped from your heart and your legs shake like jelly on a plate and you just know something’s been exposed or stolen, something you were probably trying to hide.

  Strange sensation in my chest, it’s like shutters in a French chateau opening really wide after a war, or a plague. I feel I’ve just learned to breathe properly. Jesus, I wish I could pass this on to Ed.

  I can hear my heart in my ears again the room spins, silver blue and gold.

  She lies beside me laughing. When I open my eyes I realize,

  Aah, I was Dana’s stepping-stone.

  She kisses me on the eyes and forehead, like m
y mother did the last time I saw her alive, except obviously my mother wasn’t saying shit like ‘You fit me perfectly, God, you felt so GOOD inside, you really knew what to do.’

  She bounces up on her hunkers with her pussy open, jesus christ it’s glistening, like a just-opened shellfish.

  She tilts her head to one side and sighs as she stretches her corded arms wide she says, ‘I need to dance!’

  I’ve never been crazy about the word need, especially the way it sounds emanating from her American mouth, which no longer looks so picture fuckin’ perfect. And isn’t it weird the way you can be staring at someone for months and not see the treasonable details? Her lazy tongue, too fat and heavy for her tiny mouth, and the real reason she speaks so little and so very, very carefully; her overarched spine, the knots of which are way too visible like the wooden beads you see draped over cab seats by fat Egyptian drivers; her ribcage way too wide for her body, and which stops her from having a waist; her pencilled-in eyebrows; the pinprick pupils that light upon you now, so cold, so scientific, so thoroughly fuckin’ modern.

  I know by the porno way she arches her pliable back, I know by the sly way she draws men in with her upside-down eyes that Dana has been released from the burden of being old-fashioned.

  My heart is cold. I can’t find the rhythm in the salsa music I’m thinking, I’d rather be uptown with Jerome dancing to a disco beat, or holding Lucia by the warm brown waist, or even kissing the sad WASP girl I used to share an apartment with, fuck it, I’d rather sit alone in The Subway Inn and drink cheap malt, jesus christ I’d rather be at home with with Ed, at least if he came back from the toilets after twenty fuckin’ minutes he wouldn’t keep sniffing through his upturned nostrils saying pathetic shit like, ‘Hey Big Guy, I’ve been looking all over for you. There’s some really neat people I want you to meet.’

  She knows the manicured Latino men with their bottles of Piper Heidseck are watching like sparrow-hawks, so she leans all the way back now, her mermaid-hair scrapes the floor while her bony pussy grinds against me, hard.

  I wish I had balls enough to drop the bitch, right on her coked-up little head.

  Who the fuck says neat anymore?

  At the steps of her building she says she doesn’t want me to sleep over. ‘It’s not a question of like or dislike, it’s just that when people sleep together, it immediately moves into that Zone. Right now, I just need to have some space, right now I need to have some fun OK?’

  ‘Would that be old-fashioned fun?’

  ‘Don’t be angry with me, Trevor, please, it’s been a very difficult year for me.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m a very easygoing type of bloke.’

  I don’t even bother pointing out that I never fuckin’ asked to stay, or that she’s about as far removed from the concept of fun as exhibit-Ed when he’s lying lifeless on his bed sucking on his machine, and mucous crap from his lungs is bubbling up through the pipes, and the museum windows haven’t been prised opened in days.

  What’s the point in saying anything? It was a transaction, she got what she wanted, I got what I deserved.

  24

  Just as I sit down to tell her about Dana, Ellie announces she’s quitting.

  She’s been trying to tell me for quite some time, she says, I don’t really listen anymore.

  Then she does The Sermon on the Mount again. She says I need a holiday, I need to get laid (which you have to admit is kind of funny), I need to do this and that, you’d swear her life was perfect; I mean, I really was on the verge of asking where exactly her kids and her ideal fuckin’ husband were, but I just took a big deep breath and stood up instead. That’s when she took one of my hands in hers.

  ‘Listen to me, Clever: Ed ain’t the only person dying in this fucked-up place, ya hear?’

  But Ellie doesn’t understand, she doesn’t feel it turning.

  25

  When Dana passes me in the corridor she’s like a stoat who’s had you in the instrument of its jaws, but decided to let go.

  She makes a point of touching me on the flat of my stomach; it does nothing but underline the fact that we are not lovers, we are not even friends.

  We are two people who fucked once upon a time now we are moving down the narrow corridor, to where the sick people wait.

  Doors open, doors close, happens all the time.

  26

  September 30th

  Ellie left today.

  When she hugged me I started to cry a little and so did she, then we started to laugh. She told me she was going to miss me, that the only reason she’d stayed so long, and here she raised her voice, ‘In this goddam pig-pen, this shit-hole, this motherfucking hopeless Hell-Hole’, was ’cause of me.

  I told her all about Dana and she said, ‘Shit, that skinny white bitch a real cold-fish Clever, don’t you know you need someone warm, don’t you know you need a woman with soul? Listen to me, there ain’t much hope of meeting her in Ed’s stinky room, now is there? Maybe I’m wrong Clever, maybe she in there right this very second hidin’ under his special bed’, and I’m shaking my head laughing and crying at the same time I’m saying, ‘No, there’s not much chance of that, no, you’re right Ellie.’ Then she said she always right, and she kissed me hard on the mouth, for five seconds.

  And as she walked down the corridor with her pots and pans jangling I realized I was saying no to myself quietly No, don’t go Ellie, don’t leave me here alone.

  And it was as if she could hear me, because she stopped and looked over her shoulder, and she whispered that she’d left some real nice shit in the kitchen. ‘Only use a little bit at a time, Clever cause you ain’t black, OK?’ Then she asked, ‘You sure you goin’ to be OK without me?’ and as she stepped in to the elevator, she laughed out loud and said, ‘Course, you could come wi’ me if you wanted.’

  The elevator guy is talking now, his deep rumbly voice saying he’d miss her too. Big time. And then Ellie, ‘Well you know where I’m going to be at for the next three days and nights, you could come visit, shit, don’t be pretendin’ like that Hector, you been thinkin’ ‘bout me that way for years.’

  Elevator doors closing slowly for the very last time Ellie’s cello laughter playing down and out the ghosted corridor.

  BOOK THREE

  Lies are usually caused by undue fear of men.

  Hasidic proverb

  1

  Fall/Winter

  I hear Ellie’s laughter falling in the corridor sometimes when I’m carrying his OJ or his bedpan. But to be honest, the kitchen in the quiet of an evening is where I experience it most.

  2

  We order in a lot now. Compared with the muck that passes for Irish take-out the presentation is pretty good and the dishes are tasty enough.

  But there’s no love sprinkled in on top, that’s for sure.

  We got Chinese food last night. Ed’s cookie had no fortune inside and we had a good laugh about that. It was nice because the laughter had this restorative power in it and when I put my hand on his head to say it was good to see him smiling again, I could feel it, returning.

  Then his mother rang. She wanted me in her room immediately – the reception on one of her TV sets had gone all fuzzy, she wanted me to swap the sets around.

  You avert my eyes from hers, from her rumpled bed, the Tracey Emin trays. With your back turned, you can hear her hands moving under the sheets: fat, white kittens in a silk drowning sack.

  You try to leave without looking.

  You try not to stare at what the sick bitch is doing right in front of your eyes.

  In the bathroom after, with your face against the cold white tiles, you are telling yourself as you breathe in through your nose and slowly out through your mouth, You do not have to endure this goes way beyond the call of fuckin’ duty.

  She calls me in again, smiling, like a satiated lover. Under the covers her legs remain splayed like colossal tree trunks.

  Baobab.

  The fingers of her left hand are
working away on her nipple while in her right she holds a bar of half-eaten, Belgian chocolate. In her fake Southern accent she asks, ‘Want some?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘No, it’s not. Fetch my negligée. It’s in the bureau.’

  It has to end. Here and now, it has to stop. I speak and watch as the old cunt’s Blanche du Bois impression gets stuck in her throat, a stick trapped in a weir. Suddenly she is an amateur actor at an audition who forgets her lines. Her boneless face wobbles in disbelief, her neck-chin collapses in. Her mouth is open wide, the piggy-eyes blink off and on.

  ‘I’m afraid I will not bring your negligée from the bureau. Nor will I carry tea from the kitchen, nor ancient magazines from the hall. The contract I signed with your husband states categorically that I am not expected to accede to any such requests. For the record, I am a Companion to a Boy with Muscular Dystrophy. I am not a companion to anybody else in this house, or any other house. So, do not, I repeat, do not ever call me into this sick, sordid room again.’

  There’s a pause. I’m not sure I’ve said this. I mean, I’ve been rehearsing it for so long now that it sounds like someone else, but it is me, yes, it is.

  Wow.

  She makes no sound, none whatsoever, just a kind of whimper is all you can hear, like a bulldog that’s been kicked solidly by Bill Sykes in Oliver.