The Companion E-Book

Lorcan Roche

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

Trevor, a film-school dropout from Dublin, signs on as companion to Ed, a rich, wheelchair-bound New Yorker. A bizarre, mutual-dependency pact is ignited and an odyssey into the mind of an off-kilter, rambunctious Irishman begins. The Companion tells a story of obsession and control in which the dynamics of love and patience are tested to breaking point and beyond. Upbeat, defiant, dark and morally ambiguous, it sifts through family secrets and lies, and discloses the survival codes of Manhattan. This Irish take on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest develops into one of those rare, perversely elegiac novels that lodge in the mind. Long after the last page has been turned.

Leseprobe

THE COMPANION

Lorcan Roche

THE LILLIPUT PRESS DUBLIN

TO MY WIFE NICOLA & OUR DAUGHTER PIPER

Contents

Title PageDedicationBOOK ONE12345BOOK TWO1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526BOOK THREE1234567891011121314Copyright

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 BigBrother/ 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, youshould endeavour to respond. On the contrary, it will not be a wasteof a subway token and will not involve your faith in humanity furtherbeing 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 wasa 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. Thisis 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 ofPoetry 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 contend 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 bunnyguy, nut nore bed id too gig for nore, nore mody, end nore nore bandsgluck like hay hay hay hay be hone on. By Doctorfrankin time. In abotch 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 the 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.

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’sHeart 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 foryou. 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 cannothappen 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, geethanks, 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 deadright there, Trevor. It’s not healthy to have no real focal point to theday, 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 andThe 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’tlaugh, 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 side, 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?

Speaking of which, right now she’s using her pink pig ones to draw mine down towards the V of her Diana Dors negligée and I’m getting a crick in my neck from not looking. It’s as if I’m in an episode of Batman and one of my arch-enemies has produced this huge magnet to try and draw me in, nnnnghnooo.

‘Eh, I’d like to meet Ed now, if that’s OK with you?’

‘Don’t you want to know how much the position pays?’

I tell her it’s obvious she has a lot of love for her son, and she says ‘yes’ in this little-girl-lost voice. Yes. Then I say it is abundantly clear that she wants him to be happy at the end of his tragically short life.

‘Yes, ah most certainly do.’

‘You want someone who is physically strong, but who has a kind heart?’

‘Ah’ll settle for nothin’ less.’

‘You want someone mature and responsible?’

‘Yes.’

‘Someone sensitive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Someone with a high intelligence quota, just like Ed.’

‘Yes.’

Then I leave a pause – it’s a brilliant one altogether – and finally I say, ‘Well Ma’am, in that case I’m sure the position pays exceptionally well.’

And you can see by the way El Grosso Fuckin’ Piggo is narrowing her eyes and flaring her thick, square nostrils that she’s suddenly not quite so sure what to make of me. And because she is no longer in complete control she looks past me towards the open door and says in a real dismissive way, ‘I’ll let him know you’re coming.’

And all of a sudden she no longer sounds like Blanche du Bois, in fact she sounds exactly like the permanently pissed off cow I share an apartment in Astoria with who constantly leaves these little notes lying around all the time. I’ll tell you something for nothing, if you find one of them first thing in the morning it can ruin your entire fuckin’ day even if you have what I like to call a Victor Mature voice saying, Don’t let it get to you, pal. You have your health, youhave your whole life ahead of you, it’s just a scrap of paper with somesexually-frustrated cow’s squiggly fuckin’ writing on it.

Miss Piggy picks up this antique little phone by the bed, it was probably in the apartment from day one, and already I can hear another one tinkling down the corridor. It takes an age for him to answer. Then finally she says, ‘Ed, hi, it’s your mother.’ Well whoelse was it going to be, Naomi fuckin’ Campbell?

She sighs as if me and her had been at it hammer and tongs, and says, sigh, ‘The Irish boy is on his way,’ sigh, as if I’m no longer present. I thank her and tell her it was very nice to have met her, but she’s lost all interest; her hand is already reaching for the remote. And as I’m walking out the door and down the narrow corridor I realize I’m doing my breathing exercises which means I must be on the verge of getting angry. The reason I reckon is sheer bad manners.

Old sow never even bothered to ask me my name.

2

Inhale. Hold. Now, let the negative energy out.

That’s better.

People are like clocks or musical compositions – they all have different rhythms. And although at times I jabberwock (i.e. talk way too quickly for my own good) my basic rhythm is kind of slow. Think cello or oboe. As a result, as a consequence, when things start spiral-staircasing downwards, when other men stand there with their traps open catching flies, it really isn’t that difficult for me to step in and assume control. Or what looks like it.

Example, when I was in India we had this driver with a bandage over one eye and yellow pus seeping out from under it – fell asleep and got bit by a tree spider, I’d say – and he had this infant on the front seat beside him, quite beautiful actually, with black mirrors for eyes and silver bracelets on little ankles that jingled when you picked him up and tried to stop him from crying, which was exactly what this lovely, incredibly healthy-looking older American woman was doing. You could see she was doing OK, no problemo, but that didn’t stop old Gunner Eye from looking over his shoulder every two fuckin’ seconds, no matter what was coming at us.

And then I heard it. Like a record on the wrong speed, a 45 on 33, whispering, like Ray Winstone or maybe Bob Hoskins. Oi, thisis it Clever Trevor, this is one of those fucking situations. And the voice is sort of sing-song, but very reasonable and calm, and it says that the fucking towel-heads never fit new brake pads on any oftheir fucking vehicles and if they do, they probably fit the fuckingwrong ones, now he has my attention.

I mean, you’ve seen ‘em, Trev, Indian mechanics. Hunkered downon the side of the road, roll-up in one hand, iron bar in the other. Tellme, what are they always fucking doing?

I don’t know. What are they always doing?

What they’re always doing, Trev, is beating the shit out of somevital fucking bike, car, or let’s-fucking-face-it, bus component. Now,as you’ve already clocked, our driver has only one eye in his head. Thebaby is distracting him, as is the fucking hippy American bird who, tobe fair, is only tryin’ to fucking ‘elp. But the thing is, Trev, if you wassitting up a bit closer you would hear the unmistakable, not to mentionhighly fucking unwelcome sound of metal on metal. So, what you haveto do now is ask yourself a question.

He leaves a pause, quite a tense neck one, and I have to ask, What’s the question?

Do you or do you not like being alive?

He laughs and I’m out of my seat, walking up the aisle of the lurching bus, listening and nodding as he follows.

See, it doesn’t fucking matter how many times he’s thrown orangeflowers or brass farthings out the fucking window. Because truth is,mate, you fucking like being alive, right?

I have to admit, there’ve been a few times when I wasn’t entirely convinced that I liked being alive all that much. But we all feel like that from time to time, right? I mean, they’re just moments or moods, or maybe they’re seasons …

Earth to fucking Trevor. Would you like to ask the audience?Maybe phone a fucking friend?

I’m at the very front now, the driver is looking up at me with his one good eye and yellow pus really is seeping. The baby is screaming and the American woman isn’t helping anymore because she’s crying too, her tears falling on the baby’s face. I put my hand on the driver’s shoulder and it sinks a bit, like a plunger in a coffee pot, as if he is very, very tired. Then I tell him as calmly as I can that maybe it’d be best for all concerned if I took the wheel, just for a little while.

There’s always that moment, when you don’t know if what you’re doing is rational or right, when the universe stops spinning and the gods stop playing snakes ’n ladders with our lladro lives and they lean forward wondering if he’ll scream into my face, Get backto your seat you big, bloody, stupid-looking foreigner!

Except he just smiles up as if he too was aware that Death, or its first cousin, Permanent Disfigurement, was waiting around the next bend. He lifts his bare black foot off the accelerator (did you ever notice how brown-skinned people have jet-black feet?) and he starts grinding down the hurting gears, nodding his head from side to side. ‘Yes my friend, you can take the wheel now, but only just for little while.’

We stop. The peace is glorious. The American woman is saying ‘Thank God’ over and over. Thank God. Thank God. I fire up the bus gently. The steering wheel is huge and sticky from his pink, sweating palms, and it really is a piece of shit this bus. And Bob Hoskins was right, there are practically no brakes, and the huge red speedo needle is hopping all over the place, so nice and easydoes it.

This other more modern bus, which was honking at us from behind, overtakes in a red cloud of cough dust and the American woman comes up and kisses the top of my head softly. ‘Thank you, whoever you are.’ She says she was praying for someone to act, to intervene, that she was convinced we were all going to die, but that God had answered her prayers.

That’s when I tell her to keep on praying because we have no brakes worth talking about and there’s a big steep hill up ahead. She laughs and says, ‘OK, I’ll get back to work, I think I may have Him on the line.’ And before she turns to sit back down she asks me my name and where I am from, and I tell her. ‘Thank you so much, Trevor from Ireland.’

Then she asks me ‘Are you a believer?’, and I say out loud for the whole bus to hear, ‘Yes, I most certainly am.’ And I’m sitting there, driving the big old creaking wreck, happy to be alive, but at the same time I say to myself quietly, I knowHe’s up there all right.I know it because I can feel Him. Watching. Judging. But not fuckin’participating.

As an adolescent I became convinced that God had taken an instamatic photo of me when I was still a womb-wet newborn. It was still developing as He was passing it round to his cronies and they began asking So, Yahweh, what’s the Grand Plan for this fellow? when one of them, probably a Protestant, smudged me with his thumb.

Then, as the Proddy handed back the photo, God stared blankly at the square of paper he was holding and declared: Noplans in hand, boom-boom!

It’d be funny if God turned out to have a really shit sense of humour and everyone in Heaven avoided him and his awful after-dinner jokes.