A Model Partner

by Seery, Daniel;

  In the mornings, before the bar opened, his grandfather would listen to an old transistor radio. It was covered in oil, the aerial snapped and the front casing cracked to reveal a single speaker inside. He kept the sound at a low level so the voice of the presenter or the newsreader would be continuously lost to the slightest external noise. He would huff angrily when this happened and Tom would wonder why he didn’t just increase the volume on the radio.

  One of the mornings a chirpy presenter’s voice was replaced by a haunting tune. Tom’s grandfather had been rolling a cigarette and he stopped suddenly, the tobacco in a small heap in the centre of the cigarette paper and his fingers gripping each end.

  ‘That’s her song,’ he said and he slowly leaned toward the radio.

  ‘Who?’ Tom asked without thinking.

  His grandfather frowned, shook his head. And Tom felt embarrassed. After a moment Tom stood, shoved his hands into his pockets and made his way over to the radio. The voice was wavering, the notes high for a man. It made Tom think of an American Cadillac for some reason, ice-cream sundaes and drive-in movies. Perhaps the song had been used in some film about the fifties in America that he had seen. Or perhaps it was merely a song that sounded like it should be in one of those films. He wasn’t sure.

  ‘I never heard Nan sing,’ Tom said.

  ‘No,’ his grandfather shook his head. ‘She never sang.’ He redirected his attention to his hands and began to evenly spread the tobacco along the cigarette paper. ‘She had a shite singing voice. Really shite. But she liked to listen to the song.’

  He shaped the tobacco into a neat line and skilfully tucked the opposite edge of the paper backward before swiftly rolling the end closest to him in a forward direction. He licked the gummed edge and gave it one final neat roll. ‘She said that we danced to it one time,’ he continued. ‘I can’t remember. But if she said it then it must be true. You take after her that way, don’t ye?’

  Tom widened his eyes questioningly.

  ‘You’re good at remembering stuff, aren’t ye?’ his grandfather asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tom shrugged.

  ‘Don’t be shy about letting people know what you’re good at. Jaysus, it’s easy enough for them to see the bad.’

  His grandfather lit the cigarette and they remained quiet until the song finished. Tom thought of how his grandmother would always have the radio on when she was ironing, a mound of clothes beside her and a cup of tea on the counter. He saw her in his head, smiling, lost to her own thoughts, and he imagined the scent of the steam and the fabric heating as she swept the iron from right to left across the board.

  Over the next couple of days Tom would regularly consider the song on the radio. He began to feel he should take note of it in some way.

  ‘What song?’ his grandfather asked when Tom brought it up again.

  ‘The one you told me about the other day,’ Tom said.

  ‘I can’t remember the name,’ the old man muttered.

  His grandfather stared out the window for a time. Tom wasn’t sure if he was trying to recall the song or if he was thinking about something else. When he didn’t respond after a couple of minutes Tom went and sat on his bunk.

  ‘I’m heading across for a couple,’ his grandfather eventually nodded his head in the direction of the pub. He stood and stretched his arms before opening the door. He paused before exiting.

  ‘You’re all right, aren’t ye?’ he asked without looking in Tom’s direction.

  Tom paused before answering. The question had caught him unawares. If it had of been evening and if his grandfather was settled maybe he would have given a different answer. But the door was open and his grandfather had one foot out and Tom felt there was only one answer to give.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, tensing, a part of him wanting his grandfather to push for a different answer.

  But he didn’t.

  ‘Good,’ he said and climbed from the rear.

  Tom had an early night that evening, partially waking to the sound of his grandfather’s clumsy and unsteady return. When he woke in the morning there was a piece of paper on the table, a mug weighing it down. On the paper his grandfather had written the words ‘Only the Lonely’ and the name of the singer, ‘Roy Orbison’.

  Their stay in the Fortress car park ended the following night with his grandfather flopped over the steering wheel of the truck, the engine running. He was muttering to himself, repeating something about an orchard that he robbed as a kid. He would often revisit his youth when drunk, recount stories from those days, colouring the tales with wistful enthusiasm and talking as if life after his childhood was just a weak shadow. He had two pals as a kid, Byrner and Goosey, and they usually weaved their way through each story. His grandfather supplied little detail on their appearance and always referred to them in a collective sense in that ‘they’ were a gas laugh and ‘they’ were great at scaling up trees and you should have seen ‘them’ do a little bit of this or you should have been around when ‘they’ did a little bit of that. Tom would draw his own mental images of the pair, imagining Byrner as a round character with a small cap and a grey uniform a couple of sizes too small and Goosey as a tall skinny lad with a snotty nose and the sleeves of his jumper so long they almost trailed the ground. Tom isn’t sure if he stole this image directly from a comic he had been reading when he first heard his grandfather’s stories or if the image is one of his own creations.

  Judging by his grandfather’s stories life seemed to work on the general principle that poverty equated to happiness. The less you owned the better the time you were having.

  Shoes! What the hell do you need shoes for?

  We were so poor that we could barely afford to breathe.

  The stories would vary in setting, the Tolka river, hitching their trousers up and catching slippery pinkeens with a bucket, Cabra, stone fights with other lads, chasing the cars on O’Connell Street, sliding on the ice in winter on Marlborough Street. Depending on his humour the stories would sometimes veer onto his later life, dances at the North Strand and films in the picture house in Fairview. But when he was really drunk the story was always the orchard, a place that he had robbed with Byrner and Goosey when they were about twelve. It was as if that scene with the lads was his default setting and any time his mind was overpowered by the drink he would seek safety in that orchard.

  There was always this feeling of falseness for Tom when his grandfather reached a deep state of drunkenness, the impression that he was acting out the part of another man because he was always so different to his normal self. He even looked different, his eyes taking on this wild look, like a creature that is being chased or cornered. When Tom saw this expression on his face he knew there was little reasoning with him and that it would be best to agree with everything he said and hope that tiredness would overtake the drunkenness. Anger might only be a misconstrued sentence away in this state so when his grandfather tried to fit the key in the ignition of the truck Tom just watched him. And when he succeeded on his third attempt Tom remained silent. When his grandfather turned the key and started the engine Tom waited it out, praying he was only kidding around.

  ‘I have to go home,’ his grandfather spoke through clenched teeth. He could barely lift his head from the wheel.

  ‘We are home,’ Tom replied softly.

  His grandfather just shook his head.

  It wasn’t the first time Tom had been in a vehicle with him drunk. It mostly happened in his younger days when his grandfather owned the Cortina. It wasn’t an abnormal occurrence so Tom didn’t think much of it. Later in life he would consider how he never believed that anything bad was going to happen. There might be the odd grab of the seat if a foot is too heavy to the floor or there might be a sudden intake of breath if the sign passed is a little bit closer to the vehicle than usual, but mostly there is a confidence in the fact that accidents always happen to other people.

  His grandfather had never tried to drive in a state this bad. />
  The truck stuttered forward like a reluctant dog being pulled on a lead, small bounces along the earth, whining at the mistreatment of its owner. He reversed the truck and somehow managed to aim the front of the vehicle in the direction of the road. It was as much out of instinct as it was out of awareness because most of the time he was looking at Tom while he did it and for the times he wasn’t his eyes were at the same level as the steering wheel. His upper body rotated with the gear-stick as he moved it into first and they slowly made their way toward the car-park exit. Tom was immediately aware that their course was slightly off-kilter and that they were heading straight for a pillar to the right of the exit. Their sluggish pace gave plenty of time to change course and even today Tom remembers looking from the pillar to his grandfather on a number of occasions in the time it took them to get to the pillar, waiting for him to stop joking around and rectify the direction.

  ‘The pillar,’ Tom said a couple of metres in front of the wall. His grandfather’s movements were slower than the vehicle and he only managed to change direction slightly before they connected with the wall. It was possibly the slowest car crash that has ever occurred, Tom thought, after the truck jolted to a halt and the engine stopped suddenly.

  ‘Oops,’ his grandfather said. The expression on his face would have been comical if Tom had not been terrified. His grandfather then lay back on the chair and was asleep in seconds.

  The next morning they checked the truck over. There was a dent at the front and some scratches from the collapsed wall. It was minor aesthetic damages though and the engine started first time. They left before the owner arrived to see the state of the wall.

  Tom was glad to see the back of that place. In some ways he wished they had ploughed through the rest of the building before they left. But it was easier to have this notion of bravery in the sobering light of day. The first leg of their journey had come to an end, like all things that come to an end, Tom would muse some years later. They don’t come to an end because you are enjoying them or they have a nice conclusion, they come to an end because it is their time to die and because they have run their course. This is why so many memories have the shadow of disappointment hanging over them. Even the best memories lead up to the bad. And even the darkest memories can take on a deeper tone.

  Chapter 9

  After the library Tom visited shop after shop in the city centre, sniffed around the mannequins on display, scrutinised the details to see if any would suit his needs. They all bore similarities, frame-wise, in that they had an insect-like slenderness and were ghostly pallid. Tom found some with heads and some without, some with hands removed and others which were merely upper torsos, a jacket or shirt draped over them and a pair of trousers tied to the centre to give some idea of an outfit. He made excuses for not choosing each one, blaming height or flimsiness or lack of appendages and limbs. Eventually he decided to give his cousin Pete a call.

  Pete is a relation on his father’s side, a side of the family that Tom has seen little of in the last two decades, and if he is being honest, little in the years leading up to that point. But there was a period in Tom’s youth when his grandmother felt it was important that Tom keep in touch with his father’s side of the family. So she began to invite some of his relations up to the house for dinner, the odd weekend, mostly on Sundays. Tom’s Uncle Ted was the only one to take up the offer, and even then it was probably the notion of a free meal which enticed him to the house rather than as a support for family ties.

  Pete and his parents would arrive in the afternoon. And, just as the doorbell rang, Tom’s grandfather would say that he was going for a lie down and trample upstairs. But he wouldn’t sleep. He would sit on his bed and read true-crime magazines, chain smoke Players and only come back down when their muffled goodbyes reached him from the hall and the front door closed behind them as they left.

  Ted was his father’s eldest brother and he looked like his father in some ways, in the photos at least. He had the same blocky frame and the same reddish-brown hair. There were similarities in the face too, the meaty nose and thick lips. Their eyes were different though. Ted’s had a much sterner quality to them.

  Ted worked intermittently, holding down a job for a few months before returning to lengthy periods of drinking and daytime TV. His wife, Maggie, was a secretary in a primary school. Tom always remembers her as a head-shaker, her perm bouncing on her head as she did this, arms folded so she was gripping both elbows, her eyes aimed at the heavens. She was one of those people who could unearth the bad in any event and had a skill for manoeuvring conversation onto the negative things in life. Some of her stories have never left Tom, like the story of a neighbour’s child who lost two of her fingers through the slamming of a car door or the story of how an aunt of hers had been dead in her flat for three days before they found her.

  ‘Her cat had started to eat her, ye know.’ She turned her body away from Tom and Pete when she said this, as if the change in direction would prevent them from hearing.

  ‘She was unrecognisable when they found her. It makes you think, doesn’t it?’

  About what, Tom wasn’t sure at the time, but now, he does wonder what drives a person to focus so much attention on the miserable aspects of life. Perhaps it is the same thing that compels people to watch reality programs about hospitals and cancer and tragedy. Maybe these people feel a sense of relief in the fact that the event is not happening to them, or perhaps the discussion of terrible events is a way of displaying their empathy, the ritual of misery a way of portraying their love for mankind.

  Pete was a whiner of a child. When Tom visualises him as a young boy he mainly sees him with a red, angry face. He was stubborn too, a child who only wanted to do something when someone wanted him to do the opposite. He was skinny and freckled, with dark, straight hair that his mother cut herself. There was a piece of hair at the base of Pete’s nape that he wouldn’t let his mother cut, his ‘tail’. He wore it outside his jumper as often as possible and liked to show how long it was by curling it around his neck so it reached the other side. Tom admired that tail and would ask his grandmother if he could grow one too. She made the excuse that it would only get caught in his tie for school, a tie which was merely a piece of fabric on an elastic band. His grandfather wasn’t so polite.

  ‘Why would you want the back of your head to look like a rodent’s arse?’ he’d ask. ‘Leave the tails to the mice and the rats.’

  Pete didn’t eat as a kid, proper food in any case. On their visit to Tom’s grandmother the boy would fold his arms at the table and refuse to budge until the ice cream and jelly appeared. His mother would make comments about starving children in Africa and carefully transfer his dinner to a bowl which she had purposely brought for this reason. She would claim that Pete was going to eat the dinner when they got home but Tom knew better. Pete had told him once that his mother throws the dinner in the bin as soon as they get home.

  ‘I wouldn’t eat that crap,’ he’d say when they were out of earshot of the adults. ‘I’d rather eat dog-shit.’

  The visits ended after a few months and with it Tom’s link to that side of the family. There has been the odd email over the years, usually with news of a death or a marriage in the family, where they have filled each other in on brief details of their lives. And Tom has seen Pete a couple of times since they were kids. The last time was at the funeral of Pete’s father when they were teenagers. Pete didn’t cry on the day. Or carry the coffin. He spent most of the time after the funeral moping around his parents’ house.

  Tom sat quietly in the kitchen, near the door, listening to the relatives try to outdo each other with stories about how successful their lives were. He watched the kids playing in the back garden. Tom doesn’t usually pay much attention to kids. They are a bit loud for his liking, overly unhygienic and unpredictable at the best of times. On the day of the funeral the kids were charging around the garden, either with complete aimlessness or in a game too sophisticated for him
to comprehend. Their game took them to the furthest part of the garden and to a small area of flowers in the corner, tulips, those flowers that for some reason make Tom think of snooty ladies when he sees them. Pete suddenly came storming from the house with that old boiled look on his face. He ran those children out of the area like an angry bull.

  When they had escaped inside Pete moved over to the tulips. The way he collected the petals which had fallen from the stems of some of the flowers, the way he gently straightened the stem of a damaged tulip and watched it bend forward again when he released it, the way he patted the earth around the flowers, Tom knew that his cousin’s father had planted those flowers and he knew that his cousin wasn’t as heartless as he liked to make out.

  Tom meets Pete at a taxi rank beside the waxwork museum in the city centre, the museum where his cousin has worked security for the past ten years. When Tom rang Pete earlier and explained that he needed a body, Pete didn’t even enquire as to what he needed it for. He just asked how much Tom was willing to pay. Tom said seventy and when his cousin agreed to seventy straightaway Tom wished he had only said fifty.

  ‘You only want the one?’ Pete asks. ‘Because you can have more if ye like.’

  Tom says that one should be enough and Pete shrugs his shoulders as if he couldn’t have cared less either way. They move past the rank, through the doors of the museum into the lobby. Another security guard sits at reception to the left of the door. He is eating a banana. Without speaking he acknowledges their presence by pointing the half-eaten banana in their direction.