The Companion Read online

  I get the interview back on track, telling her my father is a professor emeritus which is true, but which basically means he’s retired and is a bit of an asshole who still likes to call himself a professor, like those Wing Commander blue-blazer-and-cravat types who live in tea-shop villages in England. Now it’s her turn to be real impressed. Suddenly she’s asking how would I feel about coming up to sit with Ed ‘for a spell’.

  And words are standing out on their own, which isn’t good.

  I need to listen to complete sentences.

  She gives me the address slowly and carefully as if she were talking to a ten-year-old, and it feels as if I’m walking into a new future as I descend the steps of the subway my heart is lifting, which is nice – it’s been heavy and low for a while – which reminds me, I hate that Eleanor Mc Evoy ditty ‘Only a Woman’s Heart Can Know.’ I mean, did you ever hear such sexist shite in all your life? You really think men my age living in hostile, incredibly expensive cities don’t have hearts that sink like suns particularly as beautiful, kind-looking Asian women walk by dripping in jewellery with fat baldy bastards trailing after them, grinning like pumpkins at Halloween?

  The young black dude with the starched white shirt in the glass booth says nothing as I slide my crumpled dollar across he slowly slips the token into the wooden bowl made smooth by tens of thousands of similar transactions. When I say ‘thank you’ he nods, smiles and holds up the novel he is reading: The Philosopher’s Dog. Don’t ask me why, but I get the old fluttery sensation in my chest; it’s as if he’s part of some elaborate Christopher Nolan movie (Memento) where everyone’s trying their level best to reveal these incredibly important clues, except I haven’t a breeze what they’re all banging on about. It’s like the time I passed a phone ringing steadily in the street near my building, I swear to Christ I could hear it all the way up the stone stairs even as a slow train trundled past I was thinking, Hey, maybe it was for you. How the fuck do you know it wasn’t?

  I suppose what I’m saying is, if you allow your mind to bend a little then the possibilities are infinite and endless whereas if you decide it’s all logical and ordered and things like that simply cannot happen then you’re ruling out all kinds of magical stuff. For instance: when I was a kid, I found a blue plastic bottle down on the beach. Wrapped up watertight inside was a handwritten letter from some decrepit old dear in Australia. I remember my father telling me not to get my hopes up high when I was writing her back. To be fair, he let me sit in his office, a major fuckin’ deal, he even helped compose the letter, listening to classical music, drinking overly diluted Miwadi.

  Six or seven weeks later when a brown paper parcel arrived at the door he had to admit I had more faith than he did. Meredith Baxter was the name of the lady and she was nearly ninety, with incredibly bad spidery writing. Meredith had sent me a boomerang – not one of those imitation ones that never come back – but a real one made of hard black wood with little white drawings of birds and snakes on. Her letter explained how it was the genuine article, how she’d seen an Aborigine boy the same age as me hunt with it.

  Took quite a while, maybe even months, but in the end I could make that yoke land smack-bang in the middle of my palm. I remember it took some vestige of me with it as it travelled through the air. Seriously, my blood used to hurtle forward with the delight of flight; it’s much the same sensation you get when you see your dog hunting down a big pale hare in the dunes.

  When my father pitched it into the sky, however, we both knew it wouldn’t make the same singing sound, we both knew it wouldn’t come thwacking back. Why? ‘Cause he’d already admitted defeat. And you’d be amazed, or maybe it’s appalled at how many times we do that especially as we shake someone’s hand or gaze into their eyes for the very first time.

  When the black guy says, ‘Watch the closing doors’ his voice is gentle, almost like a friend giving advice. I really wish there were more people like him using tannoys, bullhorns and public address systems in the city sometimes it’s as if there’s this constant barking effect going on in the background. Christ, imagine what it’s like living under the commies with no peace or quiet as you sit on a park bench there’d be some demented lunatic telling you through a loudspeaker how wonderful your life was, how extraordinarily fuckin’ lucky you were to be living and working in Vietnam, Cambodia or Estonia. And you’d have no choice, none whatsoever; you’d just have to carry tiny, homemade pliers concealed about your person at night and to go out snipping and clipping the carelessly dangling wires. Well, maybe you wouldn’t, but I definitely fuckin’ would.

  I have a thing about voices. I mean, let’s face it, in the grand scheme of things they’re incredibly important and whereas I may not have been first-up in the queue in the Good Looks Department, my voice is unusually easy on the ear and, apart from my hands, nearly always the first thing strangers remark on.

  The summer after I left school I worked in a factory in Germany and every morning when I went to the U-Bahn there was this woman’s voice that used to smoothly announce, ‘Gleis zwei, bitte zuruck blieben’, which means Platform two, please stand back. Nothing to get too excited about, obviously, but it was a real nice voice, calming, and pretty sexy too. After a while I used to quite look forward to hearing her say it so eventually I went searching for someone in a position to tell me who in the hell she might be.

  As you can imagine, however, Germans – especially Germans working underground all day – aren’t exactly the most romantic people on the planet. In fact, they all looked like fuckin’ moles with walrus moustaches attached, and they just brushed me aside pretending they couldn’t understand my fabrike deutsche, telling me as they frog-marched me out like a shoplifter, that it was just a tape, not a real person.

  I have to say, if the same thing happened in Napoli instead of Stuttgart, the dusty old blokes in uniform would have taken it upon themselves to hunt down the studio where she’d made the original recording and I’d have gotten her number, phoned her up and had a nice long chat, maybe even met up for a glass of cheap Chianti. And it wouldn’t have mattered what age she was or how many chins she had; no, what mattered was on the day she was asked to lean in towards the microphone she’d put a bit of herself into it, she was probably smiling, maybe even flirting with the sound engineer, daydreaming of somewhere with warm clean sand she could bury her painted toenails in. It’s the same with cooking by the way – put a little bit of love in, it always tastes much better.

  Train doors hiss and crack open in New York sometimes it really is like an episode of Star Trek; you never know who the fuck is going to make his or her entrance. This time, it’s the turn of a greasy guy in a stinking combat jacket who starts hollering he’s a Gulf War vet, how the passsengers have no choice, they have no fuckin’ choice, they have to cough up some goddamn money, if it wasn’t for him and brothers like him they wouldn’t be sitting there reading their papers and devouring their celebrity magazines, they’d be reading the fucking Koran, they’d be down on their knees praying to Allah eating falafels, baba ganoush, all sorts of bugs and shit. He keeps shoving this chipped styrofoam cup into their hot flushed faces; you can see they find it completely overwhelming. They scramble around in their purses bags and wallets like little rhesus monkeys, some with black faces. For his part, he looks like a big ape all hunched up, even swinging from pole to pole – all he’s missing in his fist is a bright yellow Chiquita banana.

  Here he comes, right up to me, and what does he do? He shoves the begging bowl at me screaming. ‘You have no choice man, you have no fuckin’ choice.’ This guy’s breath would flatten a horse, Christ almighty.

  I fan the foul air in front of my face and he steps back a fraction to repeat the line, only not so loud. Isn’t it weird how a tiny little gesture can change absolutely everything? The wind is out of his sails now he tries to do this bad thousand-yard stare, except one of his eyes starts getting bigger as if someone has an invisible straw in his ear which they’re blowing softly and
steadily. The iris in his yellowed old eye is ringed by a creamy-coloured corona, it’s all flecked like Donegal tweed and it’s clear the guy’s liver is shot, probably his pancreas as well. He blinks the big bad wolf eye three times then shuffles away leaving behind a really nice stink, gee thanks, bro. You can see some of the people who handed over their hard-earned cash are pissed off all of a sudden he doesn’t look quite so big or brutal.

  The sound of the subway’s steel wheels is strangely soothing, probably because I’m going somewhere specific, and I’m sitting there trying to remember the names of British prog-rock bands: Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes, with the beginnings of a grin growing due to the fact I’m experiencing one of those excellent tapocketa-pocketa moments where you’re not afraid to see yourself in a brighter future. And I’m nodding away thinking, Yep, you’re dead right there, Trevor. It’s not healthy to have no real focal point to the day, now is it?

  The doorman is West of Ireland, looks a little bit like Samuel Beckett, another scribbler I’m not exactly head over heels about, but for a little guy he has a good grip and a straight gaze. At least it isn’t one of those ones that peer into you and try and figure out what you’re made of, as if people have a clue just by fuckin’ looking.

  He asks me what I need to know, so I say what is there to know, and he tells me the husband is a Supreme Court Judge, works a helluva lot. The mother, ‘Well, ya’ll see for ya-self.’

  I ask him about Ed. He says he hasn’t clapped eyes on him in nearly a year. ‘Poor kid wen’ ovah the park last July, or maybe it was August, for some John Lennon memorial thingimmy, got bit by a bee or insect, received some God-awful throat infection. For a while there it was touch and go. Yes indeed, touch and go.’

  Then there’s a pause which happens quite a lot when you meet someone new but it’s nothing to worry about, it’s just time being compressed by unrealistic expectations. He looks down at his shoes which are incredibly shiny, almost as if they were made of patent leather, except they’re not. Then finally he shakes his grey head slowly.

  ‘Poor mite, poor unfortunate little mite,’ except he keeps looking at the floor as if the solution to the mite’s medical problems was written in invisible ink there. Another pause as he raises his eyes up, then he does this little whistle thing like an old-fashioned kettle. ‘Phew. Jesus H. Where’d ya get the hands?’

  So I tell him, ‘From my grandfather on my mother’s side who was a blacksmith and who boxed Golden Gloves for Ireland back in the days when that actually meant something’. And he says, ‘Yeah, when men were men and Yamaha made pianahs.’ I smile, mostly because of the way he pronounced pianos, except he believes I’m marvelling at the sophistry and artistry of his phraseology so he says it again: ‘When men were men and Yamaha made pianahs.’

  Then he reaches up, he puts his arm halfway around my shoulder and pats me twice. When I ask does he do everything twice, he goes, ‘Why do ya ask, kid?’ And, even though there are loads of other examples, I tell him he said the Yamaha thing twice, then tapped me twice, and he says he doesn’t know, Jesus, he’s never thought about it. Maybe I’m right, maybe he does.

  ‘Well, if that’s the case your wife is pretty fuckin’ lucky.’

  He laughs – it’s quite a nice sound really – then he tells me I’m all right for a guy from Dublin, if indeed that is where I hail from, so I say ‘Yes it is’ and with his hand still perched upon my shoulder he walks me to the lift. Before he disappears he says, ‘Just be yourself kid, just be yourself,’ which is kind of weird, I mean, he doesn’t know me from Adam and he did most of the talking.

  The lift guy is a super-creep, says nothing the whole way up, just delivers this oily, fake smile like a weasel in a red jacket, you know the one that hid behind the tree when Pinocchio was on his way into town. When he opens the old-fashioned, wrought iron door to their floor I say, ‘Nice fez!’ then I wait half a second before adding, ‘If you’re into those old road movies with Bing and Bob, ya fuckin’ jackass.’

  Like I said, you should never be afraid to turn the moment round.

  First of all I meet the Judge. If you like, you can put those little titles underneath, you know the ones from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

  Il Judgo is small and neat like an old car he smells of wood and leather. He looks a bit like that real old actor who always smoked cigars and once played God. Burns, George. I say ‘Pleased to meet you’ and in return he says absolutely nothing. He’s one of those people with negative energy, black holes that suck you in, the type you feel less well after talking to, even for just a few seconds.

  He gazes at my chest as if something’s written there in ancient Aramaic then clears his throat, he-hem, to announce in a dead sea scroll of a voice, ‘I hope you’ll endeavour to contribute something constructive to Ed’s, he-hem, existence.’

  And he didn’t say anything to me when I greeted him, so fuck him, I’m not saying anything back, he-hem. He realizes this, turns on his heel, walks into his office and shuts the door sharply a voice down the corridor calls, ‘Is that you hon, is that the Irish boy?’ So I shout ‘Yes it’s me’ and she replies ‘Come on down’, which is what they say on game shows, isn’t it?

  I’m suddenly very nervous which isn’t good because I can get this bird’s wing thing fluttering about in my rib cage and sometimes I need to laugh out loud, except it’s not my laugh, it belongs to a much smaller person, plus it can be quite high-pitched like a bat she shrieks, ‘Wait!’ Then her voice gets calmer as she tells me to stop at the door, please give her a moment.

  I can hear swishing noises within, maybe curtains being pulled and I’m bending to peek through the keyhole when I remember the last time I did that, so I just stand there staring down at the insistent, thin tracks of a wheelchair. Finally, she tells me all ceremoniously, ‘Come!’

  I enter slowly pinching my legs through the pocket lining, Don’t laugh, ya fuckin’ eejit, don’t laugh. And I don’t, because sitting up in the bed is the fattest female you ever did see, big as a Mac truck, with these huge mammaries hanging out over the top of the crimson duvet like human heads, and I don’t mean Papua-New Guinea shrunken ones either.

  She’s looking me up and down, down and up. Then she pats the bed, sit.

  For a while we just look at each other, which is only natural because she’s the mother and I’ll be protecting her cub, hopefully. I smile and take in her gargantuan size, her long grey hair like the Chewing Gum Chief in One Flew Over, her cold blue eyes, that incredibly mean little mouth. Then I let her examine me as I take in her room.

  Considering all their dosh it really isn’t anything to write home about, all chintzy with too many patterns clashing. It also needs to be hoovered and despite one of those old perfume bottles with the little balloons attached being right by the bed it has a pissy sour smell, which means she’s even lazier than she looks – and no disrespect to fat people, but she looks pretty fuckin’ lazy – or else she has a whole tribe of cats sleeping alongside her.

  There’s a TV on its side in one corner, a TV upright in the middle of the room on a dresser with overflowing drawers, and a third TV on its side in the far corner. She weighs so much that if she lies down in one direction she doesn’t want to have to shift again. Her arms are as big as my legs and I’m not exactly the Road Runner, plus you can see these blue veins twisting like rivers across the terrible topography of her tits. Tossed in a ball on the carpet is a massive pyjama top with these absurd little Pierrot clowns grinning away on it and you wouldn’t believe the nightie she’s just struggled into, Jesus.

  There’s a long pause as she scans the room through my eyes; I love it when silence engulfs you, when it flies into your ears like two kites with old-fashioned tails and paper messages attached which you’d really love to have time to read, and you can hear your heart nice and steady, you can even see her tongue move like some great slow sea creature Jacques Cousteau didn’t know was hidden under the sand.

  Her over-inflated head tilts to one si
de, she swallows and it’s obvious she’s getting ready to make an important speech, like some corrupt old Senator on his last legs. ‘Ed’s nineteen. And he’s a miracle. Doctors been telling us ever since he was seven years old, he had but a year to live. But mah Ed defies them, every second of his precious life.’

  She’s putting on this fake Southern accent and I’m trying not to laugh, stop, because it sounded funny when she said ‘mah Ed defies them’ as if her head defied all the Humpty Dumpty doctors with the boiled-sweet size of it, plus this tickertape title has started running under her Zeppelin boobs: El Grosso Fuckin’ Piggo.

  I get the giggling under control, but for the life of me I can’t stop staring at her melons and I’m wondering was it Charles Dickens, a writer I really like, who called it ‘the attraction of repulsion’?

  She catches me staring and the old bitch rubs one big tit with a blood-red fingernail, lazily tracing the outline of the areola which is the same size as the top of a sandcastle; if you look close enough it even has carbuncle-lumps like tiny seashells you might use as sandcastle windows, that’s how fuckin’ enormous this whale woman is.

  ‘Ed hasn’t got much time left. And, as a consequence, we need someone kind. Ah mean to say, you most certainly look strong, but are you kind?’

  ‘Yes ma’am.’

  ‘’Cause we’ve had some cruel boys here in the past. Selfish, cruel boys who had hard, hard hearts. Do you have a hard heart?’

  ‘No ma’am. I don’t believe I do.’

  She peers into my eyes to see if this is true, then there’s another pause which I also enjoy, in fact the only ones I don’t are the churning windmill ones that occur when you’re unable to make a major decision about your life, or when you’re shagging someone and the pause and the blank stare indicate it isn’t going as swimmingly as you’d like. And what I’d like to know is, why can’t women just tell you what they want instead of trying to communicate like antelope with their darting brows and eyes?