‘DVD holder.’
‘4.4 feet in height.’
‘In metric please Tom.’
‘Of course, silly me. Height 134 centimetres, width 30 centimetres.’
‘Amazing. What a talented young man. A gift like this can open up doors in so many places.’
The possibilities seemed endless, surveying for road works, design – exterior and interior – architecture. But when Tom tried to rediscover his talent a couple of weeks later he found that his gift was the intermittent kind, the type which afflicts so many people, such as only being able to sing well when husky with the flu and only having a talent for darts when a particular level of drunkenness is reached. Tom couldn’t say that his interest in measuring began on finding that chair but it was heightened, his awareness of dimensions and diameters, his consideration of proportions and balance, symmetry, and what comes with this is an awareness of disproportions, misalignments and the knowledge that the world is weighed down with seemingly endless imperfections.
Tom’s chair faces the sole window in his bed-sit, a window which Tom believes was probably an afterthought for the architects. It is small and gullet-height, a position which would force a person to bend when standing or stretch when sitting on your average seat. There is an apartment block next to Tom’s building, half empty or half full depending on what way you look at things. A lane, about seven feet in width, separates the two buildings and a large window in the opposite building faces Tom’s small one.
Tom likes to stare across and think.
There is always a light on in that room opposite his, exposing semi-painted walls and shelves holding the weight of numerous tins and cloths and a scrunched dustsheet. The highest shelf slants at an angle and the cans of paint and varnish stand on the lowest end, long ago drawn into that position by a combination of gravity and lack of friction on the smooth surface. There have been times where he has stared at that shelf for so long that he would begin to feel that it wasn’t the shelf that was slanted but everything else. Tom has never seen anyone in that room. Not once. And he has recently been thinking about this and in a way it is beginning to taint the joy of his chair and his window because that room in the opposite building is starting to feel like some kind of shrine to the loneliness which surrounds his life.
Tom’s building is a series of identically drab corridors, the atmosphere perpetually damp, the brown carpets laden with a design that can often be found on the cardigans of old men in rest homes or on socks found in shops where old women still buy socks for their husbands. The walls are the colour of latté and nothing has been painted for as long as Tom can remember. Tom only ever sees the owner, Mr Reilly, when he is paying his rent once a month or when the owner is repairing something near the entrance or near his bed-sit.
He is a lump of a man, a dough-like impression to his skin. He wears cords which hang half-way down his arse, dragging his underpants with them. He has a thick Northern accent, nasal and incomprehensible to Tom, and conversation with the man seems more like a series of high-pitched yelps than sentences and Tom finds himself nodding a lot in his presence and trying to end the conversation with long bouts of silence accompanied by polite smiling.
Foreign tongues rattle from behind hollow, wooden doors in the evenings and throughout the day Japanese students leave and return, quietly going about their business. Tom finds the Japanese girls beautiful, the word ‘enchanting’ rises to mind even though this is the type of word that Tom finds a bit flowery and makes him think of tacky period dramas with lots of big hair and cleavage and farm boys that are played by actors in their mid-thirties. But ‘enchanting’ does sum up these Japanese girls, they are quiet and graceful, swanlike even, in the way they duck their heads to the side when he meets their gaze.
And they always smile at him. It’s nice to have a stranger smile at you, he thinks, it makes you remember that the world isn’t all bad.
It is difficult to sleep in his building. The inner walls of his bed-sit are thin. There are frequently bumps in the night. He’s not exactly sure what they are. They could be caused by the old man next door, Mr Walters, continuously getting up because of his weak prostate or it could be the movement of Mrs Walters, his wife. From the bathroom on the landing he can hear them some evenings, talking over the constant murmur of the television, random announcements, speech that needs little words, communicating as much through what is unsaid as what is said. Sometimes, usually when he has been drinking, he likes to listen to them, leaning against the cold tiles in the bathroom, the scent of lemon and bleach filling the space, the air outside clicking the vent on the upper wall. Exterior sounds intrude through that vent. There always seems to be a dog barking. And there are always voices in the distance, kids, their hollers and their laughter.
Tonight his neighbours are watching something funny. The man laughs continuously, deep and weighty. Tom imagines it spreading through the walls like heat. She never laughs. Or if she does it is too low for Tom to hear. But he imagines that she usually sits and dreams and offers a little smile when her husband looks in her direction, more of that silent communication.
I’m still with you, love. I’m still on your side.
Tom leaves the bathroom when the cold becomes uncomfortable and he flicks through the stations on his own TV until he finds the programme they are watching. And he forces himself to laugh at the times when the audience laugh. And he imagines they are in the room with him.
But an hour later, when the television is switched off and there is quiet, Tom begins to feel a weight, a weight that he has been feeling a lot recently. It appears in the place where chest and stomach meet, heavy, slightly painful as if he is holding his breath just a fraction longer than he should be. It grows heavier as the evening rolls on and his mind returns to events that happened earlier that day as it often does when he has had a bad one. And he is drawn back into a situation which happened in the canteen in work.
It had been lunch-time. He was eating ham sandwiches, brown bread neatly buttered, cut diagonally so they formed triangular shapes. There were two other people at the table. Claire Doyle, a beefy woman with short hair who has Cup-a-Soups every day for her lunch and who shields the cup with her free arm whilst eating. And Laura O’Driscoll, a woman with straight ginger hair and a face so pale it accentuates any slight blemish or mark on her skin. Her arms are sapling-thin and her form is shapeless except to those who consider a straight line a shape. She works in the packaging department, had a brief affair with one of the forklift drivers and is a friend of someone who Tom had problems with in the past.
Tom knows that she doesn’t like him. She isn’t one to conceal it either but at lunch there was nobody speaking at the table and sometimes Tom can’t help but fill in the silences. He had been talking and carefully opening the tinfoil on his sandwiches, laying it flat so there were no folds in the foil and rotating the sandwiches so that the line separating the triangular sandwiches was perpendicular to his frame on the chair. The topic he was discussing was cheese and in particular a type of cheese in Sardinia which contains living insect larvae.
‘They’re little white worms from the Cheese Fly,’ he explained, bit into his sandwich, chewed and swallowed before continuing. ‘The cheese that they eat is in a solid state but when the worms excrete the cheese it takes on a soft form. Then the locals eat this soft cheese. It’s important that the worms are still alive when you eat them though.’
‘Why are you saying this?’ Laura snapped, pushing her sandwich away, a cheese sandwich.
Tom cocked an eyebrow and quietened.
‘I’m trying to eat my poxy lunch,’ she said, her pale face glowing at the cheeks. ‘And you’re going on about maggots.’
‘I’m just saying,’ Tom said.
‘You’re always just saying stuff. For God’s sake. I’m sick of you just saying stuff.’
Her voice was rising all the time and with it attention from the others in the room. It was then that Tom sensed its approach, the w
eight. It begins with the standing of hairs on his arms and a phantom heaviness on his scalp. It comes on him like the slow building of a thunderstorm and in the cases so far this feeling has always been accompanied by a buzzing which seems somehow both distant and yet only a fingertip away and fair enough, Tom has since mulled it over, there always seems to be an actual object buzzing in the room when the sensation starts but it is more than the actual buzzing. Because the buzzing has never been as loud as it has been the last few weeks. He is sure of this.
Initially Tom tried to ignore it but Laura’s whole demeanour was making it worse because she had this face on, this wounded expression, as if Tom had mortally offended her with his talk on flies. Tom understands that it is not a true expression. No, it is more like the demeanour of someone at a funeral who doesn’t know the deceased, this effort of portraying a look that they know people are expecting. But it was the attitude of the other workers in the canteen which unsettled him more.
They were angry.
At him.
He was sure of this, even though they couldn’t possibly know what had actually occurred at the table.
‘I can’t even sit here and eat my lunch without you just saying something,’ Laura continued.
The buzzing had amplified.
Tom looked around the canteen.
Reflective, rectangular counters.
Dark, imposing, cube-shaped rotary ovens.
Flat wooden trays with short metal grooves.
That fridge.
That great big bloody catering fridge near the window. It was buzzing.
And someone else had noticed it. A canteen worker, a man with a tawny beard, fat-cheeked, long white smock and his hair squashed in a brown hairnet. He gave the fridge a push and the noise stopped for a couple of seconds before starting again.
‘Why don’t you look at me while I’m talking to you?’ Laura demanded.
Tom felt sick. There was embarrassment and anger, building and growing.
And the fear. There was certainly fear and he would ask himself later what exactly he had been afraid of.
The bees?
Was it the bees? The bees that he suddenly believed the fridge was full of, thousands of them, crawling over each other, directionless, confused, just crawling and buzzing and making each other angrier. He followed the movement of the canteen worker as he approached the fridge again. His hand lifted to open the door and Tom felt this sudden lift in his chest.
Don’t.
Don’t.
The worker’s hand was at the handle.
He was pulling it downward
Jesus Christ.
And Laura O’Driscoll’s face was red and her mouth was moving so fast that it seemed to shiver because she was on a roll now and whatever was happening in her life, every bad thing that had occurred to her that day or that week, was suddenly the result of Tom and she was going to let him know. Boy, was he going to know.
And Tom looked from her shivering mouth to the fridge again.
He sensed the movement from within, the sound of rapid wings growing louder.
Some of the bees must be lifting, he thought, and he envisaged them forming a shape like in the cartoons, the dotted shape of a hammer in the air.
Three bees deep. Thousands of bees wide.
Bzz
Bzzzz
Bzzzzzz
He held his breath.
And he watched the hand pulling at the handle.
Watched the door opening.
No. No. No.
Heard the fierce noise.
Bzz
So loud it vibrated painfully on the eardrum.
Bzzz
Heard the tone loop higher and higher.
Bzzzz
Saw the fridge rattle on stumpy legs.
Open wider.
Bzzzzzzzzz
And then stop.
Suddenly.
An eerie silence following.
There was no swarm of bees. Not one single creature came from the fridge.
When Tom turned to face Laura again his vision was blurred. The sweat on his back had a stinging heat. He stood up and stumbled toward the door from the canteen. The walk was the unbalanced feeling in his head and the view of entertained faces.
‘There really is something wrong with him,’ he heard Laura say as he was leaving the canteen. It was followed by a low grunt of agreement from Claire Doyle followed by the noise of soup slurping from a spoon.
Tom prepares for bed and turns out the light. He thinks about how he looked scrambling from the canteen. He considers how people in work view him in general and he thinks about people, about how the damage doesn’t always show even when the pain exists and how loneliness can be like a disease, spreading and eating away at you and everything that is close to you. He recalls the words of Martha from the agency, her questions on his ideal woman. And at three in the morning he reaches a decision about something that has been going through his head a lot recently, on something which relates to his past, at a time which he believes was his happiest, that thin sliver of light sandwiched between heavy darkness.
Yes.
He stretches before cupping his hands behind his head.
I will do it.
I will try to find her.
And he leans over the side of the bed and stretches blindly until he finds the pen which he knows is there. And he pats the ground gently with his fingertips until he hears the crackle of paper which is to the left of the pen and he scrawls the words as a reminder for the next day and as an indication that it is a decision and not something that has fallen from his dreams in the night.
He writes blindly.
I will do it.
I will find Sarah McCarthy.
Chapter 3
One of Tom’s earliest memories is standing on the outskirts of town, the sky filling with gold and tangerine as the sun dipped and the rumble and groan of machinery as the landscape was shoved and altered to make way for a factory. It took eight months to build and when completed it was a bricked cube structure with hard, lumpy, porridge-coloured walls, wide rectangular windows and an unmarked car park. Initially it was home to a plastics manufacturer but they went bust in the late eighties. Printalux stepped in and took the place over then, a multinational company which initially dealt with commercial printing but has since moved on to the manufacture and repair of domestic and office printers. As a kid, Tom would never have expected that one day he would end up working as a service technician in the factory. Certainly not for fifteen years.
The factory is generally a quiet place to work, aside from the constant buzzing of electrical equipment and the frequent traffic of people to the desk beside his, a desk manned by Dave Roberts. Dave is from a middle-class family, wears hooded tops and baggy jeans, calls himself a revolutionary, an agenda he picked up in college before dropping out in his second year. He spends his breaks in his car smoking joints and eating salt-and-vinegar crisps.
Dave’s desk reminds Tom of an old magic trick, the one where someone tries to remove a tablecloth from under a number of items without the items moving. Only Dave’s desk is the trick when it goes horribly wrong.
It is Karl Wallace’s turn to stop at the desk today. There is something late-nineties about his appearance, the goatee beard and the hair brushed forward. It somehow makes him look more dated and out-of-the-scene than someone who had a sixties, or seventies-era style, possibly even more than someone from the Middle Ages, Tom thinks. Tom isn’t sure if the word ‘friend’ would describe his and Karl’s relationship as kids. They did form part of the same group but while Karl was comfortably at the heart of everything, Tom was clinging on to the outer rim.
For the past week Karl has been trying to round up people to head to the Alpha Bar on the quays in honour of Jimmy Byrne’s upcoming wedding. Jimmy works in the finance department. As does his wife-to-be, Clarissa, an overweight woman with a deflated-football look to her face. She keeps a photograph of a miniature terrier on her desk
and circulates emails relating to animal cruelty from time to time. Jimmy, her husband-to-be, is a lanky-limbed, horse-faced man with taut, almost translucent skin on his face. Everything about him screams laziness, his slow midland drawl, his laborious walk, his extra-long toilet breaks and his marathon-length eating of sandwiches at lunch. They’ve been seeing each other for the last five years and broke the news of their wedding some weeks before.
Tom is half listening to their conversation while he trawls the internet. The note that was beside his bed when he woke up this morning is now tucked in his pocket.
He types the name ‘Sarah McCarthy’ into the search engine. The computers are slow in here, infuriating, the hour-glass image flashes. Tom tries to recall what Sarah McCarthy looked like. He repeats her name in his head and he tries to form an image of her. But her face is one which he can’t fully grasp. It has a faded quality, diluted in some ways. The hair is almost there though, the colour of teak and long, wavy. He gets a flash of an expression too but it is gone as quickly as it appears.
‘Come on Dave. It’ll be one last fling for Jimmy,’ Karl says.
‘No man, I don’t think I can make it.’
‘We need a group.’
‘I don’t know,’ Dave scratches his collarbone.
‘You know what’s wrong with you,’ Karl says.
‘What?’
‘You need a midlife crisis.’
‘What are ye on about?’
‘If you had a midlife crisis you’d be only dying to hit a trendy club like the Alpha.’
‘Fuck off.’
The webpage slowly ripples up the screen, stalls momentarily before settling. Tom scans the list of options that appear, mainly social networking links, a couple which Tom knows are dead-ends straight away and one link to a tuba player based in Scotland. Tom clicks on the tuba player link, just in case; a lot can happen in two decades. The social networking site shows photographs. He scans the images, imagines what she would look like today and quickly realises that Sarah is not one of them.
That’s not my Sarah.
A Model Partner Page 2