He nods and unlocks the door. Angela bolts to the next flight of stairs and scans upward and around like a threatened meerkat before entering the bed-sit.
She assaults the room, kicks the door which hides the boiler, pulls the bedclothes onto the floor, shoves the set of drawers so they knock against the wall. She crouches and checks under the bed.
‘What have you done with him?’ she asks.
‘I haven’t done anything with him.’
‘He’s not answering his phone or anything. Jesus,’ she snatches her phone from her handbag and stares at the screen. ‘Where the fuck is he gone? Where the fuck is my husband?’
‘I don’t know. I thought he went home last night.’
‘You must know. Someone must know. What time did you leave the pub?’
‘I left at half twelve but I don’t know about Karl. I didn’t see him leaving.’
‘So he was still there when you left?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you trying to cover for him or something?’
‘No.’
‘You’re doing a terrible job of it, ye know.’
‘I’m not trying to cover for him. I don’t know whether he left because I didn’t see him leave.’
‘He just disappeared?’
‘Kind of. With my watch.’
‘What?’
‘He has my watch.’
‘My husband is gone and you’re worried about your watch.’
‘Well, if you find the watch there’s a good chance you’ll find your husband.’
She grips her hair tightly and presses her teeth into her bottom lip so the skin fades to white.
‘Jesus Christ, where is he? What happened?’
‘The last I saw of him was when he was at the bar waiting to be served. He might have gone to the Gents then.’
‘After he got served?’
‘He didn’t get served.’
‘Was he too drunk to get served?’
‘No, nothing like that. The place was busy. He was waiting for a bit at the bar but then he went to the Gents. Or I think he went to the Gents. He went through the door that leads to the Gents but when I checked the toilets about ten minutes later there was no sign of him.’
‘Davey told me he didn’t see him leave either.’
‘You spoke to Davey?’
‘Yeah, he gave me your number and your address. I have that other fella’s address too.’
‘Jimmy?’
‘Yeah, so don’t think you can hide him there.’
‘We’re not hiding him anywhere,’ Tom says. ‘I don’t know where Davey got my home address from. People from work shouldn’t have access to your home address.’
She widens her eyes in disbelief and paces the room.
‘Last night,’ she says. ‘Did any of you even think it was strange that my husband just disappeared?’
She stops beside Tom’s chair, the one which faces the tiny window.
‘Everybody was pretty drunk,’ Tom says.
‘Yeah, I’m getting that feeling all right. Jesus, you lot really are useless.’
She bends down and looks through the window, frowns, turns to him again and to the binoculars that hang around his neck.
‘What’s with the binoculars?’ she asks. ‘No wait,’ she holds her hands up. ‘I don’t want to know.’ She looks at the phone again. ‘I’ll head over to Jimmy. I bet he’s hiding there.’
She hurries towards the door.
‘Probably,’ Tom follows her, removing his notebook and pen from his pocket as he does.
‘He’s a fuckin’ eejit,’ she says. ‘Wait till I get him.’
‘He is,’ Tom agrees.
‘He’ll wish he really had vanished.’
‘Look,’ Tom says. ‘When he turns up will you give him this?’
Tom scribbles a short message on a page in the notebook, rips it out and folds it in half.
She takes it from him and unfolds it.
‘Karl,’ she reads. ‘Ring me about the watch as soon as you can.’
She looks from the notebook page to Tom and back to the page. She shakes her head.
‘I need it back as soon as I can,’ Tom explains.
‘Why did you give him your watch in the first place?’
‘He was showing us a trick.’
She nods her head knowingly and steps outside the bed-sit.
‘It’s a magnet,’ she turns as Tom is closing the door. ‘That’s how he stops the watch. He uses a magnet on his keys. Christ, he’s so predictable. He probably showed the trick to half the people in Bradley’s last night.’
‘In the Alpha Bar,’ Tom corrects.
‘What?’
‘The Alpha Bar. The place in the Manhattan Hotel.’
‘I know where the fuckin’ Alpha Bar is,’ she says, her cheeks turning red. There is a vein in the centre of her forehead. Tom can almost see it pulse.
‘That bastard.’
She storms from the landing and stomps down the steps.
Tom closes the door. His phone begins to vibrate. He removes it from his pocket.
Watch, Karl
The reminder flashes on the phone.
Watch, Karl
Tom walks to the library in an effort to shake off his hangover. Two young staff members work there most Saturdays, a slight girl who wears hippy-type summer dresses all year round, has an unusually short fringe and goes by the name of ‘Ell’. Tom guesses it is a shortened version of ‘Ellen’ or ‘Ellie’ but really it could be short for any number of names. The other staff member is Nigel, a stocky man who wears his mop of ginger hair to the side and tends to lean toward the hairy-jumper look. Tom thinks of him whenever RTÉ’s Nationwide is focussing on farms in Ireland, which it so often does.
They are an interesting pair, seeming to get excited about the simple things in life, the fact that they might have had the same cereal for breakfast or that they share a particular brand of toothpaste.
‘Do you know what I hate?’ he heard Ell say once. ‘I hate the way that when you are having a nice dream, ye know,’ she likes to fold her arms and arch her back when she has something worthwhile to say. ‘And the alarm clock wakes ye.’
Nigel nodded his head like one of those bobble-headed dogs kept in the rear window of cars.
‘And then you can’t remember what you were dreaming about,’ she continued. ‘And then you spend the whole rest of the day trying to remember the dream. I hate that.’
‘I hate that too,’ Nigel shook his head. ‘Jesus, yeah I hate that all right.’
Tom approaches the counter and asks Nigel if the library stocks any books relating to body shape.
He then straightens the books on the counter so the edges are lined up while Nigel checks the PC. After a minute the library assistant points him in the direction of healthy eating and diets.
Tom browses the shelves, picks four interesting books, one by illustrations alone, two by contents and one merely because he likes the image on the front, a hamburger with facial features chasing a man.
When lunches go bad!
He begins to read but it isn’t long before he comes across a problem. There is a common description in the books whereby three of the four body types are related to fruit shapes, banana, apple and pear. He finds it difficult to visualise these. He finds it much easier to replace the images of fruit with numbers. The banana shape becomes the number one, the top-heavy apple shape becomes a nine and the bottom-heavy pear shape becomes a six. While the hourglass body shape becomes a number eight.
The shapes are now easier to visualise but soon the four numbers begin to scroll through his head and he begins to think of handwriting, how most people write letters and numbers differently and how one person’s number six will be wider than another person’s, how the curve of a number may be shorter or a base may be longer. And he begins to panic and starts to believe that the whole exercise of picking an ideal body shape is as pointless and random as a kid picking his fa
vourite number.
Em, hi, I’m Tom and my favourite number is six, my favourite colour is blue and I like running from one place to another and jumping over stuff, and if that stuff moves then I like it even better and if there is water near the stuff that I’m jumping over then that is really great. Or if there is muck near, that is cool. But not worms, I don’t like worms. They have no eyes.
And the sheer weight of the number of possible varieties within the four body-shape categories makes him feel as if there is a weight on his chest and he has to force himself to inhale deeply a number of times in an effort to calm down.
Eventually he composes himself.
He returns to the book.
He flicks through the pages, stopping when he spots a significant detail. He reads how a major model association in Britain recommends that their models should have a ratio of around 34-24-34 and he thinks how strange it is to have a standard for humans, especially as, unlike a lot of the creatures on this planet, human beings seem to be so utterly different to each other.
34-24-34
Bust-waist-hips.
34-24-34
In order to visualise these dimensions he draws a rough sketch of a figure with scaled-down proportions. It doesn’t help him much but a thought gradually emerges from his sub-conscience. It is one of those wobbly ones at first, the type that could just as easily lose its shape and collapse under itself, drain off to somewhere out of sight. But Tom gives it a moment. And then it starts to solidify, gradually becoming something he might be able to pick up and run with.
If only I had a body to work on.
Not a real body, of course, a model of some kind that he could play around with.
It would make the whole process easier.
There are options. Not a great deal of options, true, but there are definitely options out there.
Chapter 8
The truck was parked at the end of the street near a trodden and dejected green. The neighbours would stand in clumps, folded arms and dark faces, complaining about the leaking oil and the space it was taking up. Some were disgusted with the mere existence of such a vehicle. Tom’s grandfather would watch the truck from the front room, each evening a long silent vigil. If Tom tried to talk to him he would grunt at the boy and wave him off. On occasion his grandfather would rush to the door, his shirt open to reveal the greying hair on his chest and bark at children who he viewed as a threat to the truck. Then he’d hurry back into the front room to his old position at the window, all the while muttering under his breath about the uselessness of parents and the unruliness of kids in modern times.
During the daytime he worked on the truck, mainly repairing the boards in the box on the rear. He was more like his old self when working, scooting around the floor, cursing at his tools and at the boards if they didn’t fit nicely, at the nails that would bend when hit at the wrong angle. He was more aware of Tom’s existence at these times and he would give out about the state of Tom’s room, telling him to get a box to store his things in. Sometimes he would comment on one of Tom’s many developing ticks, like Tom’s need to continually grind his jaw from left to right or his compulsion to frequently scrunch his eyes together in a forced blink.
‘You’re doing that thing with your eyes again,’ he would say. ‘Stop doing that thing with your eyes. I don’t like it.’
His grandfather added a sleeping compartment for himself in the rear directly above the truck’s cab and a bunk for Tom beside. He also constructed a wooden counter on the left-hand side, fitted a stove next to it, the chimney of which funnelled up through a hole in the roof section. He had purchased a second-hand generator from a scrap yard to provide electricity for light and appliances. This generator was loud enough to rattle teeth and to cause temporary tinnitus; loud enough to let the people in a mile radius know when they were making a cup of tea. Candles quickly became the preferred choice for light in the box.
Tom would ask his grandfather where they were heading to and he continually received the same answer.
‘We’re hitting the road,’ he’d say. ‘Seeing the world.’
There was adventure in this statement, a landscape of possibilities, the chance to dream. Tom would lie on his bed, hands tucked behind his head, and imagine that he was going to be the one to drive the truck. He imagined stranded girls hitching on grassy verges and tattooed, leather-wearing musicians heaving their gear into the back.
Rock and roll, brother. Rock and roll.
The end of the school year neared and the days grew longer and one evening Tom returned from the library to find his grandfather in the back garden, his face flickering from orange glow to shadow with the movement of fire. There was a bottle in his hand and a low mound of items beside his feet, pieces of broken furniture, music tapes and books. Panes of glass jutted from the ash at the outer edge of the fire, flames licking the sides, glass that once covered photographs of Tom and his grandfather, of his parents and his grandmother.
‘It’s time we cleared the place out,’ his grandfather said.
‘Is that all our stuff?’ Tom asked.
His grandfather didn’t reply.
Tom slinked back into the house and upstairs, only to find that his bed was no longer there.
Two weeks after the fire in the back garden, the first week in June, and his grandfather told him they were ready to go. Tom helped load the horsebox with the last of their supplies and climbed into the cab. The broad window offered expansive views. There was a magnet of St Michael on the dash, a Yankee flag behind the seats and stickers on the door advertising Bandag tyres, a cartoonish image of a blonde woman provocatively sitting on a pile of tyres, wearing a pair of tight jeans, her opened waistcoat only concealing a fraction of her breasts. Tom would glance at her when he thought his grandfather wasn’t looking.
The engine started first time. It vibrated through Tom’s body. His grandfather allowed it to rumble for a good five minutes, frequently pressing his foot on the clutch, allowing air to leave the system. Eventually he eased his left foot slowly off the clutch and with equal pressure and speed pressed his right foot down on the accelerator.
They were in motion.
Let the adventure begin.
They moved off the street, the engine seeming to inhale in the pause as his grandfather changed gear. The suspension would bounce wildly as the truck reared over bumps on the road surface. There was the sound of something sliding and knocking off the sides of the box as they took corners. Tom hoped it wasn’t his bunk.
Tom’s grandfather’s face changed when he drove, his eyes intense, the skin at his mouth tight with his concentration. There was something bird-like in his expression, a hunting type of bird, one with an acute awareness of its environment. There was also fluidity to his movement, the way he manoeuvred the gears and positioned his arms, a gracefulness, as if he were dancing with the wheel. He was sure and confident, experienced, no pause for thinking, no stuttering, it was one fluid movement into the next as they took the corner behind the shopping centre on the main street and chugged past a dilapidated Esso garage, took the first exit at the large roundabout at the town centre and drove northward.
The engine heaved.
The cab heated.
Tom daydreamed of what was in store.
Down the dual carriageway.
Past the scrap yard.
Left. Left. Right.
Then his grandfather clicked the indicator to pull over. A few yards later and they were stopped in the car park of the Fortress Pub.
‘Sure we’ll hitch here for a bit,’ his grandfather said.
‘We’ve only just started,’ Tom said.
‘I need a pint. And sure,’ he used the tone that he often used when he was in a joking humour, ‘isn’t one place exactly like another when you live in a truck.’
But he wasn’t joking.
The truck would be parked in that car park for the next two weeks.
The Fortress Pub was the kind of place that someone mig
ht open if they had a whole chunk of money to waste. It was built on a dangerous road at the back of the town, too awkward to attract walking customers, and situated on a road too infrequently used to catch passing trade. It was constructed from concrete cinderblocks, the ones on the roof section spaced so the build resembled a castle in the way that a child’s drawing might resemble a castle.
Most of the trade came from the housing estates to the west of the town, young men dressed in bomber jackets, who would arrive in the back of vans or four-door bangers, piled in so tight that they seemed to explode from the vehicle when a door was opened. They would pop pills and drink gallons of cider, dance the night away or beat the crap out of each other in the car park. Tom would sit in the rear of the truck at night and listen to their antics, praying that they wouldn’t go too near the truck. Each thump and Tom would picture someone receiving a kick to the head, each squeal and he would imagine someone screaming for help. The world was a more frightening place when he was judging it by hearing alone. But they never came near the truck. They had quickly got wind of his grandfather’s travel plans. The likes of young working-class men usually have respect for the old. And the eccentric.
The interior of the pub was typical of the time, long cushioned benches with dark, furry coverings. The carpet was tough and the bare walls painted a soulless green colour, not much to look at but it did have toilets and running water which meant they could keep themselves clean, Tom at least. His grandfather didn’t seem too bothered with washing. His grandfather spent most of his time at the bar on his own looking at a small television in the upper corner of the room, regardless of what was showing or regardless of whether the sound was on or off. Tom would sometimes wonder whether he was actually looking at that television and wonder if he would ever be the same again.
Tom didn’t hang around in the Bedford during the day. He usually walked the half-hour trip back to his old estate, trying to keep a nominal amount of normality in his life. He would cut through fields with rotten and discoloured weeds and shrubs, through wasted factory ground piled with rubble and old rusted iron just to maintain the weak link with the lads. Perhaps it was that place, the Fortress Pub, or perhaps it was because it was so early in their move or the fact that the lads didn’t seem bothered that he was no longer living on the estate, but it was the first time that Tom became aware of his insignificance to the group and his insignificance to the world that he had once felt part of. Of all the places they would stop on the journey Tom hated that place the most. There was something hopeless about those two weeks that can often catch Tom off-guard and make it seem as if all his teenage years were like that place, isolated and depressed. Those weeks, as short as they were, can sometimes infect and corrupt all other memories of that time.
A Model Partner Page 7