The Companion Read online

  THE COMPANION

  Lorcan Roche

  THE LILLIPUT PRESS

  DUBLIN

  TO MY WIFE NICOLA

  &

  OUR DAUGHTER PIPER

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  BOOK ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  BOOK TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  BOOK THREE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Copyright

  THE COMPANION

  BOOK ONE

  Don’t believe a word, for words are so easily spoken …

  And your heart is just like that promise, made to be broken.

  Phil Lynott, ‘Don’t Believe a Word’

  URGENTLY REQUIRED: Mature, responsible person to act as Big Brother/ Companion to young man with Muscular Dystrophy. Ideal applicant will be courteous, kind and considerate. Will also be able to lift heavy loads. Keen interest in music, especially British ‘prog-rock’, an advantage. Live-in option available for right candidate. A nonsmoker who speaks English as his first language. Experience pref’d.

  1

  NYC, June 11th

  The ad is in The Voice.

  Then, after a little while, a voice is in the ad.

  Sounds exactly like the bloke who played the evil-baddie in North by Northwest, you know him yes you do, silver hair, real refined, shite, what’s this his name is …?

  Mason, James.

  And this is what James Mason is saying, softly: Trevor, you should endeavour to respond. On the contrary, it will not be a waste of a subway token and will not involve your faith in humanity further being broken. My dear boy, this is for you. Believe me.

  And I do. So I read the ad over and over again. And the chaos of the street retreats as if someone slowly is sealing one of those steel hatches in a submarine, you know the kind where you have to twist a squeaking, rusting wheel. And it’s as if a great weight is being lifted …

  ‘Hey, buddy! Do me a favor – take the paper home. If you have a home.’

  This is not James Mason. No, this is the newspaper vendor, a bag of fifty-year-old bones in a wife-beater vest who thinks he’s real Scorcese. He’s standing there chewing imaginary gum giving his spiky old jaw a right good workout, and he’s making it pretty obvious he’s expecting me to move on, pronto.

  But I’m in no hurry, none whatsoever.

  ‘Hey buddy, it’s free. Ya don’t need to fuckin’ mema-rize it.’

  Do you ever look at people and wonder, Now, if he or she was a bird or animal, what would they be? I do. I always ask myself, real fast: fish or fowl, bird or beast? Maybe they’re doing exactly the same thing, I don’t know. Mostly I think people – especially Americans – are asking, Gee, I wonder what this one can do for me? Make me some more money? Get me over my date rape experience? Clear up any doubts about my false memory syndrome?

  Truth is, you never really know. Dogs have the upper hand. They just go around behind, have a sniff and think, No way. This is one uptight, anal-retentive hound.

  Anyway, the old scrote with the hedgehog stubble, he’d be an ankle-biter of some description, something vulpine and sly that goes around in packs pulling down by the painful tail gnu or gazelle who’ve been separated from their mates in some terrible, blinding dust-storm. Or maybe he’d be something that slithered along on its belly and got made into a belt. Either way, say if I was in Tanzania driving a Land-Rover with big bull bars and he slunk out of the bush like a secret, and I could see his fishing line whiskers all silvered in the headlights – maybe with something not quite dead dangling – there’s no chance I’d lift off the gas, not the fuckin’ slightest. Squish.

  Smiling at people you think are weird or wonderful, or smiling at completely the wrong time, is an excellent thing to do – it really can be quite unnerving.

  I smile at Fox Face who, far as I can see, wears soft little leather gloves because he doesn’t like touching other humans, unless of course he’s got some sort of skin disease. People who handle money all day often get skin complaints. It’s true – money really is dirty.

  He doesn’t return the smile, just wrinkles his evil weasel nose and I’m thinking, Yep, definitely the type that’ll get riled real easy. So I take the corner of the one page I require, hold it up like a doctor with an X-ray and let drop the rest which hits the deck and fans out as if it has a will of its own, like those calendar shots from Frank Capra movies where forty years pass in seconds flat and everyone gets flour fecked in their hair and talc lashed on their cheeks. Naturally, as I walk away he’s screaming blue murder telling me what he’d like to do to me if he was ‘twenny years younga’, yeah right. People like him need to take a long look at themselves in the mirror. Still, they’re good for a laugh and sometimes if you’re not feeling so magnificent you can use them, like stepping-stones, to lighten and brighten your mood. To turn the moment round.

  I met this interesting guy once – well, quite a few times actually – who had this amazing Filipina secretary with a really calming voice. He explained how, with a modicum of effort and imagination, we could devise our own comedies with the rest of the world as unwitting co-stars, hapless extras, how most of us failed to realize how enormously entertaining days could be and that we really didn’t need to sit like toadstools in front of TVs.

  I agree. Wholeheartedly.

  People answering telephones should really be more circumspect and careful.

  The woman who picks up barks at some sort of servant. ‘It’s for me, put it down,’ then she coughs like an outboard engine that’s all backed up and flooded. ‘I wasn’t expecting, splutter, anyone to call. So soon.’

  ‘Oh. If it’s not convenient I can …’

  ‘No. You have a nice voice, splutter. Where are you from?’

  ‘Ireland.’

  ‘Ed’s father and I went to Ireland on our honeymoon, splutter. That was a long time ago, however.’

  ‘Eh, right.’

  ‘Would you like to tell me about yourself?’

  ‘Well, I’m mature and responsible. I’m also courteous, kind and physically very strong. Plus, I’m really into British prog-rock.’

  ‘Ed doesn’t weigh that much. Sometimes you’d have to be able to lift him. And the chair. Together. Not often though.’

  ‘I’d manage.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you have any experience working with people like Ed, do you, splutter, hon?’

  I tell her how I’d only recently been working at the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin teaching English and Appreciation of Poetry to ‘you know, non-able bodied men and women of all ages, shapes and sizes’. I think maybe she’s going to ask what poets I’m partial to, which is probably what an Irish person would ask, although to be honest they’re getting kind of brusque over there too and everyone’s walking around in Italian suits acting all European and being terribly serious into tiny fuckin’ phones.

  But all she wants to know is what sort of problems the Clinic people had to conten
d with.

  ‘Let’s see. Eh, some of them had MS and related motor neurone diseases. Others had Muscular Dystrophy, naturally. Then there were some Spina Bifidas, plus a whole host of NTDs.’

  ‘NTDs?’

  ‘Neural tube deficiencies.’

  ‘Oh. OK. Ed was right as rain when he was born.’

  ‘That’s good. Well, I mean it’s not good. It’s a pity he was OK and then got sick.’

  ‘Yes it is. It’s a living tragedy.’

  I tell her there were quite a few with Cerebral Palsy and that at least two, if not three, had Freidrich’s Ataxia, plus this one other guy had the quite rare Guillian-Barré Syndrome which, I explain to her, is the disease the dude who wrote Catch 22 caught. She doesn’t seem familiar with the book, however, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t her who worded the ad.

  I’m thinking of all the people in my class, trying to retrace their thumbprint faces – hard, because quite a lot couldn’t lift up their necks while others were screwed down into the chairs all kind of skewed and they looked at you from odd angles. You know when you’re sitting in a Nissen hut with a night watchman somewhere and the coals are burning away in the little primus thing and you can’t really see him properly because there’s a kind of mirage effect going on? Or when you had a perspex ruler and spent the whole school day looking through it? Well, that’s exactly what teaching at the Clinic was like: you might just see someone’s nose and maybe their right eye blurred plus a corner of their mouth drooping, and you had to be real careful about walking around talking because you’d get all this shifting and sighing as they tried to follow you sometimes a tiny flinty elbow someone hadn’t got great control over would fly high and get someone else upside the head.

  I’m thinking of all of the laughs, especially at the start when this one guy Redmond, or Edmond, who had this incredible speech defect on top of a lot of other problems – including a head that was permanently positioned sideways – started rocking like a disturbed creature at the zoo, then screaming eek eek like a fuckin’ bald eagle. I hadn’t a clue what he was trying to say, something about a badly cooked erection until this other one who could decipher him better explained that I never looked at him directly.

  There was this big silence, shite, and all the other ones who felt the same were nodding away in unison yes, yes, yes trying to lift up their flower-pot heads, and I was right on the spot. Glued to it.

  But it’s OK I didn’t panic. I simply said, ‘Yeah you’re right, but there’s a very good reason why I never look at you directly,’ then I left a pause while I tried to think of the reason, and started walking in and out between them fast, causing total fuckin’ mayhem.

  Finally I said the reason was that he, Redmond or Edmond or whatever his name was, was ‘one weird-looking, alien-headed motherfucker who could land a wheel-on part in Star Trek: Voyager any day of the week simply by sending in a Polaroid.’

  They all fell about the place, with two notable exceptions, literally collapsing with laughter. And Edmond started bucking like a bronco, there was even a tear rolling down his sideways face, plus this Pyrenean mountain dog slobber coming out of his permanently wide-open mouth. I went over and tightened his straps as he grinned and drooled, spittle was bouncing up and down like elastic on his chin, so I caught it and wiped it, and the poor fucker was trying really hard to bring his sideways head around and his little arms were coming up with the effort. He said, ‘Newt a bunny guy, nut nore bed id too gig for nore, nore mody, end nore nore bands gluck like hay hay hay hay be hone on. By Doctorfrankin time. In a botch op op op op up a nane.’

  ‘Course all this took him quite some time to say, especially the bit about the botched operation up the lane, but fair play, it was pretty funny especially when I used the same hands to tickle his bony, brittle little body. Anyway, it really broke the ice and I started looking forward to going to work for the first time in my life, even if there were two of them I was going to have major hassle with, you know the type: they won’t laugh at anybody else’s jokes and they sit beside each other every day sniggering, like demented hyenas.

  One of them was this tiny, deformed creature called Dalek; he was only three and a half foot high but made up for it with some serious fuckin’ ’tude. His sidekick was much bigger and was called The Captain. I’m telling you, these two really were a nightmare.

  The Captain was the only one who could decode Dalek properly and Dalek was forever whispering things in The Captain’s fat ear. Then The Captain would roar his head off like a donkey in the middle of a field and if you said, ‘Do you mind telling the rest of us what’s so hilariously fuckin’ funny?’ he’d say, ‘Sure, no problem.’ Then he’d leave a big pause and you’d say, ‘Well?’ and he’d smile and say, ‘Your stupid-lookin’ potato head’ or maybe ‘Your shiny fuckin’ moon face, alright?’ and he’d wink at Dalek who had this demented grin (bit like the dwarf on Fantasy Island) plus this bizarre light emanating from eyes that looked like they’d been lifted from a curly-horned ram on the side of a mountain in Kerry.

  She’s telling me about Ed’s ‘off-the-scale intelligence quota’ – yeah right – and his ‘special emotional needs,’ which, let’s be honest, each and every one of us has. But I’m not really listening, I’m checking around to see if Fox Face isn’t coming running with a machete or machine gun, you never know in this fuckin’ place. And what I’m really thinking about is the Clinic, and the field trips into the bog where we’d fleece these dozy rednecks in their sleepy village shops, cleaning them out completely.

  We had this contest to see who could shop-lift the biggest item and I was way ahead, having stroked a big roll of tinfoil which just about fit under the long leather coat no one ever believes really did belong to Phil Lynott. Then Dalek and The Captain robbed a turkey, don’t ask me how, stuffing if up the front of an anorak and Dalek was declared the winner on weight plus the fact he had no arms to speak of, just these scary platypus paws which had a puppet-life all of their own. When I pointed out the tin foil was in fact longer, they got together and pulled the bird by its feet and neck until it stretched out like a cartoon, which sounds much easier than it actually was.

  They all wrote glowing reports about the day trip, even Dalek, describing in detail how easy-going I was, how strong I was when I was lifting them on and off the bus, how relaxed and safe they felt in my company, etcetera etcetera. When the Committee called me in sat me down and offered me a full-time job obviously I couldn’t refuse, even if working with a load of armless, legless and sometimes hopeless people wasn’t exactly what I had in mind staring out the window as a kid I used to see myself as some sort of Shining Hero saving people, maybe getting mildly disfigured in the process, possibly even suffering hypothermia like the little Dutch boy who stuck his finger in the dyke (and I mean dam-like construction, not lesbian female, alright?).

  She’s banging on about Ed’s twice-weekly physical therapy, the noble way he endures pain, blah blah blah. But I’m right back in the creaking barna building with its makeshift ramps which used to get all slidey in the rain and I can see his face clearly, and OK I admit he was handsome in a predictable, Gabriel Byrne kind of way. And this is The Captain who’d got both arms right up to the shoulder and both legs right up to the knee ripped off in a thresher in County Carlow, the one who’d been the Star Performer on the local hurling team, and who from the moment I walked in hated me with all his fuckin’ might.

  Isn’t it odd how people’s minds spring so swiftly into action like steel traps, and isn’t it weird how hard it is to prise them back again?

  She begins a fresh bout of spluttering and I’m thinking of the metallic throat noises Dalek used to make, especially after eating his liquidized alien baby food, and of the essay he wrote with the black wand attached to his oily, pimply forehead: what he thought of the Clinic and the other spastics in the class, what he’d like to do to me if he could only become fully-formed for five fuckin’ minutes, incredible shit, page upon fantastic page made all t
he more amazing by the amount of time he must have spent creating it. I mean, his poor neck must’ve been fuckin’ knackered.

  I gave him a B+, said he could’ve tried harder, you could see him and The Captain trying not to laugh when I handed back the homework. I like being able to make people laugh. It’s like that quality of mercy thing, isn’t it?

  Traffic is distracting me. There’s a wino who definitely has fleas. You can actually see his mangy coat moving, and he’s rifling the little silver slot on the phone next to mine which is futile. He’d be much better off recycling cans. And it’s as if he’s reading my mind because there he goes terrorizing a trashcan, mumbling and tumbling shit out all over the sidewalk.

  He comes back to the phone, lifts up the receiver and listens, probably imagining he’s some Wall Street exec in pinstripes with a stiff white collar and the thing is, his eyes are disturbingly blue and clear. Like God’s.

  Flea Man starts bashing the head of the receiver off the shiny steel plate hissing about stocks and bonds, and I know it’s silly, but this makes me inordinately happy because I was right about what was going on in his swamp fever mind in the first place, and I’m probably laughing a bit because she’s going, ‘Hello, what’s going on, hello?’ So I tell her, ‘It’s OK, I’m calling from the street.’ Except she just says, ‘Oh, I see,’ as if I’d just told her I was occasionally incontinent.

  And the banjaxed phone with its blue and yellow circuitry exposed looks like it really might have been sinister when it was alive, and Flea Man might have had good reason to attack it. And I really need to take control so I enquire after Ed’s reading habits pretending to be real impressed, oh really, when she mentions Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul fuckin’ Sartre, two frog writers I really can’t abide.