A Model Partner

by Seery, Daniel;

  ‘The truth is the truth,’ Tom says.

  ‘The truth is what you believe.’

  She quickly finishes off her cake.

  Her handbag rings.

  She lifts it onto the table, a fat, purple bag which resembles a ruffled pillow. She clumsily clacks the catch open and spends the next twenty seconds or so rummaging inside before locating her phone.

  ‘Yeah,’ she answers.

  Someone on the other end talks. To Tom, the voice sounds like a long groan. She grunts a couple of times before twisting away from the table slightly.

  ‘What? Now?’ She arches her thin neck. She has the look of one of those antelopes that Tom often sees on TV, the moment when they catch the scent of a lion, that initial confused moment which precedes the instinctive urge to run. ‘Thanks for the short notice. No, really, I mean it, thanks for completely fucking up my evening.’ She hangs up, returns the phone to her bag. ‘Look, I have to go,’ she takes her coat from the back of her chair, bends her arm behind her a couple of times before successfully finding the gap for the sleeve. ‘That was my husband. He wants to see me about something.’

  ‘You’re married?’ Tom asks.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she says and offers a crooked grin. She fastens her bag. ‘Don’t worry, this doesn’t count as an affair or anything. Some kind of yang crap isn’t going to come back and haunt you. You can rest easy tonight,’ she closes her coat. ‘Sayonara.’ The high heel of her left shoe angles precariously to the side as she wobbles from the restaurant.

  Tom is left with an uncomfortable awareness of the empty space across from him and the realisation that she has not left any money.

  He’s not sure about honesty but kindness, he thinks, is going half on the bill.

  Tom takes the bus home. He rests his head on the window so his nose is partially flattened against the glass and the engine vibrates through his skull and rattles his teeth. There are pretty women at bus stops along the way but he is in no mood to analyse their features. He closes his eyes for a rest and when he opens them again he is almost at his stop.

  He leaves the bus.

  The breeze feels nice on his face. He wishes it would spin him up into the air and carry him to some other place, a faraway place. Japan maybe, a land where the women smile at strangers.

  Tom stops.

  There are two people talking outside his building. A woman and a man, Maureen Hill and that policeman that stopped him when he was out with his camera, Garda Harry.

  Why are they talking to each other?

  Is it something to do with him?

  Tom kneels down at the edge of a laneway and pretends to tie his shoelace.

  He stays that way until Harry walks away from the building.

  Maureen Hill has a piece of paper in her hand. She looks from the paper to Harry as he departs. Back to the piece of paper before plodding through the doors and into the building.

  Chapter 16

  Tom’s grandfather would collect things from the side of the road. He would stop the truck at skips and go through the contents, keeping whatever he considered to be worth keeping. He retrieved a couple of half-decent wooden stools and a three-legged table in Malahide. In Blanchardstown he discovered an old atlas of the world, the pages yellow and rippled from damp. He found a painting in Swords, this ugly portrait of a gargantuan woman wearing a plain black dress. To Tom, she looked like the mother of a boy who had attended the same primary school as he did, Norma Gillespie. So Tom named the picture just that, Norma.

  Norma was covered in greenish grime when they found her, so Tom’s grandfather cleaned the surface using a Jiffy cloth and a bowl of watered-down bleach. It was impossible to tell if the colours of the painting were diluted after this as they had never seen it in its original state but the cleaning mixture did leave long, sprawling marks along the wooden frame and white streaks at the edges of the painting. His grandfather was convinced it was worth money so he wrapped it carefully in a sheet and kept it safe behind the driver’s seat in the front cab. When drunk sometimes he would take this portrait out and examine it. In a way it became a symbol of the life he could be living.

  One time, Tom asked him why he didn’t just hang the painting up in the back of the horsebox. ‘Because then I wouldn’t see it any more,’ he replied and slowly wrapped the painting in the sheet.

  For two weeks they moved from one side of Dublin to the next, his grandfather drinking his way through the insurance cheque. Tom would potter about each town on his own, checking out the shops with very little interaction with anyone else. He would chain-smoke in sheltered spots or find a secluded area of greenery and sit for hours with only himself for company. His grandfather wasn’t immune to the depressed quality of the trip. He pulled the truck close to a ditch one evening after they had been on the road for about half an hour. He sat facing forward for a time without speaking. Tom stared at the dash. He knew that something was on his grandfather’s mind but he didn’t want to have to deal with another problem. Just as he didn’t want his grandfather to ever utter the truth about this business of travelling around Dublin in a horsebox as if they were somehow trying to outrun the grief. Everything had changed but through their silence Tom still clung on to the hope that they were getting back to some essence of normality. Even in madness he was trying to find some footing. He didn’t need his grandfather openly admitting that there was no point to it. He needed that hope.

  ‘I miss her,’ his grandfather eventually spoke, continuing to look straight ahead.

  Tom reddened with embarrassment. He could have said that he missed her too, that it is a normal thing to miss someone who has died. But he didn’t. He said nothing. And after a short period of silence his grandfather climbed out of the cab, found a gap in the growth that hugged the edge of the road and disappeared into a field, out of Tom’s sight. The radio crackled midway between two bands. Tom listened to that static until his grandfather returned.

  Some days later, his grandfather, obviously stressed by how quickly his money was dwindling, decided it was wasteful to be moving around Dublin in a truck without earning some money out of it. He got chatting to a builder in a pub in Santry who explained that the merchants were always looking for trucks to deliver to building sites and private houses. He explained that Tom’s grandfather just needed to turn up at the builder merchants when they were handing out the dockets in the morning and the lads in the warehouse would load his truck. Tom’s grandfather thought this was a great idea. So he set about cutting the rear off the box on the back of the truck.

  He got a loan of an industrial-type saw. Tom couldn’t take his eyes off him when he was using it, waiting for the slip of a hand and the loss of a limb. His grandfather removed the whole flat piece at the rear of the box. He then cut the piece in two and reaffixed the rear using large hinges to create two doors. Due to a slight misalignment the doors were difficult to close and there were gaps along the join that allowed cold air to enter freely.

  When he turned up with the makeshift delivery truck at the builder merchants they refused to load the truck, warning Tom’s grandfather that it was a danger to other road users and to anyone in the truck.

  ‘Your granda’s off his head,’ one of the warehouse lads had said to Tom. ‘Really off his head.’

  ‘He’s going through a bad time,’ Tom said.

  ‘Going through a mad time more like it.’

  His grandfather was getting worse. He would wake at night. Tom would hear the creaking steps on the wooden floor, feel the cool draft of air as he opened the door. He wasn’t sure where his grandfather went on those nights. Tom would imagine him hunched over, trudging through field after field or standing rigid in the darkness, staring up at the stars, waiting for a sign maybe, something that might show him the way to go. Tom would doze when he was gone and wake to the sound of the door opening on his return and the scent of the world outside which he carried on his clothes.

  Late July brought the hard rain. It was unrelenting.
It exposed the fact that the truck was less waterproof than it used to be. The water got in through gaps at the upper edges of the makeshift doors. It ran along the dips in the planks, up to the beds. The mattresses acted as sponges. Things became squelchy and the nights became cold. They were forced to sleep in the front cab, which was slightly less draughty and damp but very cramped. Tom soon realised that there is a difference between mental depression and physical depression.

  One night his grandfather came up with a plan. He told Tom that there was an opportunity to make some extra cash while they moved from one spot to the next by knocking into houses and asking the tenants if they needed any rubbish disposed of. He gave a rough figure of what to charge, something from five to twenty pounds, depending on the load. When Tom asked what constitutes a five-pound load his grandfather held both arms out and said, ‘About this much.’

  They would split up, his grandfather taking one street, Tom taking one beside. People weren’t interested in their new business venture. Tom got used to suspicious eyes peering from partially opened doors or the shadow of figures behind net curtains. Tom stopped knocking, preferring instead to find some dry spot and smoke a cigarette.

  They received the odd job, disposing of a fridge, old battered cooker, mainly dilapidated kitchen appliances. They wouldn’t go far with the load. His grandfather would take the back roads, find somewhere big enough to park the truck and just dump the appliance in the nearest field. He didn’t believe there was anything wrong with this. To him there was nowhere in Dublin that wasn’t a dump.

  A few days into their venture and his grandfather arrived back to the truck with a wide-eyed, excited expression. He had picked up a job from someone he’d met in a pub, a big job this time, one that would earn a hundred pounds. By this stage there was nowhere in the truck that didn’t feel wet, even the air had the capability to relieve thirst. Tom was grateful for the excuse to move around. The job was in a large back garden, piles of discarded household objects and rubbish, dented paint tins, rotting wood. They got stuck in. Everything was soaked from the rain and everything stank. Balls of woodlice squirmed under the items at ground level and Tom’s fingers regularly felt the ooze of slugs crushed on the underside of the object he was lifting.

  They shoved their own furniture in the back as close to the cab as they could, laid a sheet of clear plastic on the deck and then piled the rubbish onto this sheet until the truck brimmed. Tom was miserable. His hands were slimy, his clothes wet and dirty. Even his insides felt spongy, his chest and his head. He continuously had this vision of a bath, water covered in bubbles and a yellow rubber duck bobbing up and down.

  They drove in silence, the rain beating on the roof of the cab, spraying from the windscreen with each long arc of the wipers. They stopped at a trampled area of grass on a back road. When Tom attempted to get out of the cab his grandfather told him to stay put. He then altered the catch on the seat so it reclined, rocked side to side on the seat until he found a comfortable position and closed his eyes. He would stay in that position until darkness fell.

  The roads seemed smaller in the blackness of night. The corners of the world seemed to move towards you. The thumping of branches against the cab surprised Tom and he would whip his head to the side every time. It was difficult for Tom to get his bearings. It seemed as if they might drive off the edge of the world at any moment and just fall for eternity. His grandfather seemed to know where he was going though. The Bedford curved from one sign-less road to the next, crisscrossing lighted, busier junctions before returning to the blackness.

  Tom saw the wooden sign lit up in the distance. It was only then that he realised where they were.

  ‘We have to be really quick about this,’ his grandfather said as they entered the car park of the hotel next to the cemetery. He spun the vehicle so the rear end of the Bedford was facing the hotel and reversed right up to the door. He was out of the cab quickly and he had swung the back door open by the time Tom caught up with him. His grandfather heaved at the rubbish until it toppled in the direction of the hotel door. He then began to kick it off the back. Tom climbed onto the rear and helped. They pushed and pulled so that the large objects slid from the base. Tom laughed when his grandfather booted a kettle right off the back.

  It was infectious.

  His grandfather laughed too and in the next moment they were struggling to get anything done, they were laughing so much.

  ‘Someone’s coming!’ his grandfather suddenly shouted.

  He ordered Tom to keep dumping while he ran to the front. By now most of the rubbish was off the truck and blocking the hotel entrance. Tom could see a woman on the opposite side, her hands raised to the sides of her head, her mouth a large circle of surprise. The truck began to pull away from the building. Tom had just enough time to heave a small portable television off the back.

  Rock and roll, he thought in his head. And then he was saying it.

  ‘Rock and roll! Rock and fuckin’ roll!’

  Chapter 17

  Tom has too much time to think.

  He has been standing next to the window in his neighbours’ bed-sit for over an hour now hoping to catch the grey-eyed woman leaving her apartment. The strap of the binoculars pinches the skin on his neck. His legs feel tight and the base of his back aches.

  Memories ebb and flow, his grandfather’s swollen, stained hands, his grandmother’s plot, the Bedford, so vivid he can almost smell the dankness of its interior. There is one with Sarah McCarthy. They were on the roller-coaster ride in a makeshift fairground, a fairground which arrived on the outskirts of her home town on a Thursday and disappeared three days later, leaving only flattened grass and the odd wisp of litter stuck in the trees along the ditch beside.

  Sarah had placed her hand on his knee as the cart began to rattle around the small track and for a time Tom was aware of nothing else except that hand, the heat that seemed to envelope his whole thigh, the gentle weight that intensified with each passing second.

  For that short ride nothing else existed. Not the crackling atmosphere. Not the hoots and jeers and the lights and the movement. Not the men who ran the rides with their earrings and scars and strong sinewy arms.

  Just them.

  Tom and Sarah.

  Alone together.

  And it was only when she lifted her hand that the warped music returned and the air from the motor fan on the ride became a heat against his face and brought the smell of oil and candyfloss and popcorn. And the next instant he was standing with unsteady legs and climbing from the cart and those men who ran the rides were collecting tickets again, moving about the rides like ghosts, hooking safety lines across the openings of bowl-shaped cabs or the cages of the big wheel. Everything was as it had been before.

  It saddens him, the idea that memories like these are so rare and fleeting. It seems as if most of his life has been spent patiently waiting for something to happen. And he thinks how strange it is that in replacing his idle patience with the act of searching for Sarah it somehow feels as if she is further away from him than at any time before.

  He can’t think of what direction to go in from here. He can only think of memories. And he can only imagine the emotions of that time, emotions that may have been formed from real events or might merely have been formed from hope.

  He needs to do something constructive.

  He needs a distraction.

  He opens his notebook, taps his pen rhythmically against the counter and tries to picture the woman from the nightclub, the blonde woman. Perhaps a sketch might jog Fiona’s memory, cause some spark of recognition that might lead to the watch. Because maybe if he sorted out the issue with the watch his mind would open up to new ways of finding Sarah.

  It is worth a try.

  His drawing skills are limited, picked up in primary school, encouraged by his fifth-class teacher Mr Evans, a pleasant man who seemed to consist of 60 percent hair, 20 percent jumper, 10 percent cords and the rest a mixture of wrinkles, spectacles
and chalk dust. He had been a builder in a previous life, living over in England in the sixties and seventies before returning to education. He would often refer to the building of a house when educating the children, stating things that contained only a mild hint of sense in them.

  ‘You can’t build a wall without a foundation, O’Reilly. It would be good to remember that, son, before you go and stick chewing gum in someone else’s hair.’

  He believed in a combination of art and music to get the best out of the children and he encouraged creativity through drawing.

  ‘You should always start with the nose,’ he once told Tom. ‘It doesn’t matter how big or small. Sometimes the more bizarre it is the funnier the character will turn out.’

  Tom remembers this as he draws a nose for the woman, a kind of lower-case ‘n’, the kind of nose that the snooty characters had in the comics. He draws the eyes next, two circles with dots in the centre. He spends a moment considering which type of mouth would best convey her features. One small add-on can change the whole expression of the face. A small mouth will match, the slightest trace of a smile, a hidden kind of smile, the type that makes you think that the owner knows a lot more than they are letting on.

  Tom was never that skilful at drawing hair but he tries his best. He stands back when he’s finished and takes the drawing in. It is terrible, cartoonish and amateurish. He tears it from the notepad, scrunches it into a ball and throws it into the bin.

  He tries again, numerous times, but the result never matches the image in his head. Still he continues, keeping an eye on the apartment entrance all the while. He’s not sure how long ticks by, another hour, an hour and a half. Eventually a man appears at the entrance to the apartment block, the partner of the grey-eyed woman. His dark hair is still to the side, shirt buttoned to the top, his blue V-neck jumper replaced with a green one. He is engaged in a mellow stroll, hands deep in trouser pockets and a slow rolling of shoulders, down the street and away from the building.