The Companion

by Lorcan Roche

  Where I can get lost. Where I can feel at home.

  ‘Stop. Fuck’s sake. Stop.’

  ‘Please. Stop.’

  ‘You made your fuckin’ point, pal. Stop.’

  I did not stop.

  Instead, I fell from a great height on Blue Eyes’ barrel chest. I took his fat knacker neck in my hands and squeezed slowly I started really concentrating. And I didn’t let go, I couldn’t let go, even as they pulled and punched, even as they were kicking me in the kidneys screaming his name at the top of their scorched lungs I didn’t let go completely, no, my hands did not stop what they were doing.

  Until the silver keg was raised, like a new moon dawning.

  Pagan, I worshipped for a moment before it fell I hoped and prayed it was the end. Of this, my fake civilization.

  Then there was the hospital, and the ignorant, Indian doctor asking what I had done to make the men so very, very angry.

  I told him I had simply been myself.

  My father. Refusing to sit in the plastic orange chair. Drawing the ringing curtains briskly asking me was I proud of myself. Again.

  No Lucozade or grapes, Dad? No get-well card or After Eights?

  And yes, my mother, sitting with me, holding my two good fingers. And once again it was too easy to tell the truth to someone who wasn’t there.

  What else do I need to tell you, what else do you deserve to know?

  That for a while there had also been the miracle of the actress talking and dancing after making love in her Portobello house to Lou Reed’s ‘Transformer’. And I was transformed. I was free from my mother’s dying, dishonest room, from the inheritance of doom and the expectation of family failure.

  Then there was me, becoming first confessional, telling her stupid, stoned things I should never have admitted about school and swimming coaches and city shrinks and country doctors and thin-ribbed kids behind bicycle sheds, and slow country boys with cigarettes waiting for their whole world to turn.

  Changing rooms.

  Me telling her about Ma, our songs, and our garden growing brighter and greener than anyone else’s in Wicklow.

  Telling her about Mother’s Day, and Ritual, telling her about the mirror in the morning.

  Swallowing hard. Waiting for her judgment.

  The actress holding me like the American woman who does not exist, her holding me and telling me it was OK, let it out, let it all out.

  What precisely am I supposed to let out? What exactly is my soul supposed to secrete?

  Then me becoming obsessional, turning up, uninvited, at her casting sessions with red roses and yellow sunflowers, Good luck,

  I know you’ll get it, no one is as beautiful as you.

  Me texting her. Morning. Noon. And night. Closing in on her, choking her air, her space, her light. Knowing I was doing it, feeling myself, watching myself.

  Not being able to stop.

  Then there was her smiling reluctantly instead of laughing openly, her nodding patiently. Her, walking away on Dollymount Strand and not looking back even when I willed her with all my fuckin’ might to turn and say: It’s OK, you can try again, just try a little less harder.

  The rank insult of her spitting pips and laughing with my mother in the lilac room, and later the heel of her hand upon my stomach and the fake concern we reserve for people we’ve already left miles and miles behind. ‘You’ve grown too thin, you really need to stop worrying Trevor.’

  How? How do you stop something you’ve been doing from day one?

  The theatrical Judge said the bouncers had possibly ‘o’er-stepped the mark’, my considerable physical presence notwithstanding. Then he turned his attention to me, he swallowed and said, ‘However, your retaliatory behaviour clearly emanated’ – which is a word for a smell, isn’t it? – ‘from some dank, abhorrent place,’ that I clearly was to be feared and not be trusted, that I had showed no restraint, had demonstrated no control. That in my blind fury I had extended towards these men not one single ounce of compassion, not a shred of human pity.

  And we were back in school, and he could have saved himself a lot of time and said, Look, look at the sheer bloody size of you.

  I needed a lesson taught. Pause for effect. A custodial sentence he feared would simply unleash whatever darkness I had buried in my heart. He had read carefully the letters from the doctors, the school, the Probation Service; these had greatly informed his decision. Pause for effect. This was a person who needed to be restored to society, not removed from it, this was a person who had lost his will and his way. But who still had something to offer.

  How, he wondered, did ‘three hundred and fifty hours community service sound?’

  I said it sounded like an awful lot of hours considering what I’d already been through in hospital, but he just looked over at the bouncers, their broken bones, the ludicrous sticks they carried in their bandaged hands.

  He called me up to the bench, he cupped the curved microphone with his hand, he said, ‘You need to wake up to the facts here, Trevor Comerford, a man has been brought to within an inch of his life,’ which I thought was a very good description of what had taken place.

  Then he waved me back with his pale hand, and out loud he asked me to promise I would never appear before him again and I let out a nervous laugh because of course I was thinking of Kirk and the transporter room.

  And that was how I fetched up at the Clinic. And The Captain was right to wonder what I had done to end up in a creaking, leaking shed at the edge of the world with a load of helpless hopeless people, and no letters after my name, and no halfway plausible stories about how I’d managed to arrive there.

  7

  For a while the Clinic provided a kind of healing, and a peaceful growing inside, a balancing.

  Act.

  But like the Committee said when they fired me, I didn’t know where to ‘draw the line’, I didn’t know where to stop, which really was a crying shame because the class had loved me. And I had loved them back with all my confusion and all the pieces of my broken heart.

  Then she died, and I had to ask myself all over again, how, how do I stop the tadpole-thoughts increasing?

  By way of a nailed-shut door? By donning a pair of unopened Nikes? By running away? By way of a formula delivered with fake enthusiasm by a man with a carefully modulated, over-educated voice? With a country doctor’s pat on the knee? With a nod and a wink? With breathing exercises and visualization, with trees, roots and water flowing? With a bitter pill swallowed in the turning morning, ‘Take it with your juice and cereal, better still take it with your vitamin C.’

  No. I will take it staring straight at myself in the mirror, thanks all the same. I’ll let that action dominate, let that image set the tone for the day and the month and the year to come asunder. That will be the theme music for a life of trying too hard to decipher which feelings are real, which are imagined, which memories are to be trusted, which whisperings, which voices, which chemical choices, which lies.

  What?

  Did you really think the voices that drift across my sky like rain-clouds, did you really think they tell me just the names of faded movie stars, forgotten TV serials?

  They undermine me.

  They knock me down in my sleep they roll me over like a clumsy drunk I am very nearly awake as they de-construct me then attempt to rebuild me, hastily, except one of them will always snidely, cruelly disagree, disavow. And that is how they allow the door to niggling Doubt to be kept ajar in your head at night you get so uptight before you drift off, so pent up anticipating the moment when they crash dreams and sack joy, when they plunder and tear asunder your unwound strips of possibility.

  And that is when you find yourself dwarfed, awake, heart thumping beside a foaming fountain beneath looming bank buildings where booming, ordinary decent people sit.

  And manage to fit in.

  Yes. Of course there are days of plain sailing, days off from yourself, days when your sneaker laces don’t suddenly snap
‘cause your feet have been sweating so much, when even the ordered-in food you consume tastes uncommonly good and the sound of children laughing in the park becomes, frankly, inspirational.

  When Dana’s footfall in the hall costs you nothing, not even a casually destructive thought.

  When you are granted respite, when you earn a reprieve, when you can enjoy all these.

  Music as you walk, run, and exercise; evenings alone in your little room with a good book; the gentle hand of the waitress as she leans in to pour; nights when two cold beers will suffice, no whiskey, no subway, no staring; weekends when you leave the bag of weed to one side, when you laugh along with the warm audience at the cinema, when you don’t lie awake, when you fall asleep happy you’re making a difference.

  When things are normal, maybe even mundane.

  The straw bending towards his cracked, smiling lips; weights steadily racking up in the Y; The New York Times stacked neatly in the lobby, a carefully folded copy left for you on his tilted desk by Jerome because one of the residents is away; his massive mop leaning, the polished floor gleaming; the steaming, rain-released city running alongside you laughing like a friend introducing new side-streets, new sights, new smells, showing you somewhere you might sit and sip Colombian coffee, somewhere you might relax and read Empire magazine, somewhere you could spend a peaceful hour. Or two.

  Your mother’s voice, warm, smiling: Tomorrow, Trevor, you can come back here, tomorrow, it’s true you know, you can easily be happy two days in a row.

  8

  Silence is easier in winter things are naturally falling asleep.

  Ed asks about my father, so I tell him, ‘Well, he’s the sort of guy who notices details but misses The Big Picture,’ like when I was a kid and they’d take me out for a drive in his Jaguar and he’d be pointing out all the different trees and clouds and rock formations, using words like deciduous, cumulo-nimbus, and fissure when I was only fuckin’ five. And when we got back there’d be this informal examination on ‘What We Saw Today’ and he’d sigh out loud and say to my mother that clearly I’d inherited her powers of recall, not his.

  Then there would be dark mutterings about the poet and the prison. I think. But I don’t really know.

  But here’s the thing: I can remember the moods in that car vividly. I remember the music. I can recall the smell of leather, and any sweet words that passed between my parents in the front. I can still see the curious way he looked at me in the rearview.

  Most of all, I recall how he put his hands on my shoulders as we stood in a clearing in the woods at Lugnaquilla: I remember thinking how delicate his tremulous fingers were, almost like he were playing music on me, not distractedly pulling at the stitching on my T-shirt.

  Stop Dad.

  Stop undoing me, stop pulling me asunder, you’re making me feel like I am made of straw.

  The pier at Greystones, walking with my mother and father slowly. Her entire weight compressed in her hand holding mine.

  Her picking steps carefully, him picking words in the same slow, halting way whenever we encountered his college cronies: ‘And this – this monstrosity – this is the blacksmith’s grandson.’

  He could just as easily have said, This is Trevor, this is my son.

  9

  Washing his hair carefully – the roots these days don’t seem able to take the pressure of the hose, even with the heavy brass tap screwed halfway back.

  ‘You know if you wanted …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I could get you a red-head.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I could pay her.’

  ‘A. Hooker?’

  ‘Hooker. Escort. Companion. Who gives a fuck?’

  ‘What. About. My. Folks?’

  ‘What about ‘em? We’ll sneak her in some night when your Dad isn’t here and your Mom is watching one of her gameshows.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘A red-head. In a nurse’s uniform.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry, Ed. Schoolgirl?’

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘If you like. But first time out, I’d go for the blowjob.’

  He reaches out, he takes a hit from the inhaler which sits like a talisman on the side of the bath. He can no longer even wank without a wheezing attack taking over.

  ‘You. Speak. Ing. From. Ex-perience?’

  ‘There was a guy in the Clinic who, well, let’s just say he had become sexually-frustrated because his girlfriend had left him after this pretty horrific accident on a farm, and he asked me would I get him a hooker.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And, it cost me my job.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She came to the chalets at the Clinic. She was doing her thing, but there was this other little guy in a wheelchair, he hid in a corner of the room under a load of coats and I guess he started making noises or jerking off or something. Anyway, the hooker spotted him or heard the motor of his chair whining and she started screaming her lungs out, so they called the night watchman in and there was this big Lieutenant Columbo-style investigation and …’

  ‘Did it. Take long?’

  ‘The investigation?’

  ‘No. Did it take. Long. To. Find. The. Right. Person?’

  ‘Yes. It did’.

  A pause. He flicks the water with his crooked fingers, three times.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Some of them are just these hard-hearted people who the world has been pretty cruel to, and they don’t exactly have a lot of milk of human kindness left. But if you look long and hard, you can nearly always find a nice one.’

  ‘A whore. With a. Heart?’

  ‘It’s possible, Ed. Someone gentle.’

  ‘And. Good. Looking.’

  ‘OK.’

  Another pause.

  ‘My. Age?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘You’ll need. Some. Ex. Penses.’

  ‘I probably will yeah, I might have to buy one or two of them a drink.’

  ‘You should. Start. Right. Away.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Dry me. Off. Then. We can. Grab. My. Cheque. Book in. Side.’

  ‘OK, Ed. Hold out your arms for me, that’s it. Ooops-a-daisy, there we go, careful now, make sure your feet are on a dry patch, good. We’re going to have to do something about those curly toenails, OK?’

  ‘OK. But. Later.’

  I dry his hair gently; white towels are not a good idea when someone’s hair is falling out. He doesn’t seem to notice, he’s writing the cheque as if he was the head of an elite commando organization.

  He finishes and it sits there for a moment we both stare at his indecipherable signature, aware of the burden of expectation.

  Then I sense it inside, another kind of revolution rising. And it makes me light in my head. It’s happening quite a lot these days: as I knead his bones at night or softly sponge warm water down the blades of his back in the bath he’ll say, ‘That’s really, nice, thanks man,’ and I’ll feel it, the ability to lift spirits.

  And it’s based on communication, isn’t it? On kind words and gestures, a shy eyebrow raised before a game of cards commences, a long evening sigh that tells you, The Simpsons will not suffice tonight you must try harder, you must reach down inside. And it’s about understanding, it’s about divining what the other person truly needs, it’s about slicing open the razor-backed shells we’ve placed in precise rows in our hardened hearts in the mistaken notion that keeping things clam-tight helps us to be focused and hardworking, like that cold cunt Dana. And I know I’m getting carried away, but seriously I’m fuckin’ glowing here man, I’m on fire, and like I said before it fans all encounters along the way.

  Ed feels it too, he looks up at me smiling he says, ‘You. And. Me. Bro. You. And. Fuckin’. Me.’

  There is nothing I cannot do for him now, nothing.

  10

  Out under the sea a sponge is f
illing, carefully. With new-found weight and anchored purpose it begins to dance with the persistent tug of tide.

  It moves left, then slowly right.

  At times you’d be forgiven for thinking it was going to prise itself free from its bed, but you’d be wrong: it has put down strong roots, very strong roots indeed.

  11

  Say the words ‘dystrophy’ or ‘wheelchair’ and most of them start squawking like parrots in a terrifying aviary. Then they’re swinging their loud bags shaking their frightful-looking wigs. Some take the time to explain it’s really not their thing, they stand with their hands on jutting Mick Jagger hips trying really hard to think of someone who just might oblige … ‘Let’s see. There’s that Marcey, yeah she white, used to be a nurse, jus’ couldn’t keep her hand out that medicine cabinet.’ And, after telling you where Marcey lives and where she hangs and what she looks like, they say they haven’t seen her for a while.

  ‘Shit. Maybe Marcey dead.’

  The dangerously thin ones, the lost girls from Ronkonkoma and Syosset, the ones with the Far Rockaway look in their overdone eyes who put you in mind of trapeze artists in a tacky, ailing circus, and whose mouths have lost the ability to produce saliva, these ones say, real slow, ‘No, Mister. I don’t go in other people’s houses. Don’t matter if it’s Madison or the fuckin’ Vatican. That’s how girls like us disappear.’

  After they touch you with a drugged fingertip that slides up your crotch in the manner of a snail, you say ‘No thanks’ and they very quickly get bored like chimps who’ve run out of cheap crockery. And they wave you away down the watching street, their voices like warning bells: ‘Don’t go wasting nobody else’s time with that pervert shit, a’wight?’

  And why do they insist on putting their palms upon you in sticky doorways, why in steam-filled greasy spoons do they stroke your lapel, or your cheek, without first asking permission? And they’re in and out of your pockets, like monkeys in Gibraltar, and you have to keep checking every second or third block, Shit, is the cash still in there burning?