Sometimes when Tom visited their house he would find their father in an upside-down position in the sitting room. Mr Daly suffered from a hernia. The whole idea of it made Tom feel ill, the notion that the man’s insides were trying to escape to the outside through a tear in the stomach lining. The doctor had advised Mr Daly that due to the fact that it was a low tear he might find some relief in sitting upside-down. Tom would walk into their sitting room at times and find Mr Daly’s nether regions at eye level, the man with his head on the floor and his arms anchored on both sides. The days when he was wearing only a pair of pants were the hardest ones to forget.
Their sister Patricia was twelve years old, a young twelve, a shaggy-haired thin girl who would bound about the place looking for missing hairclips or socks or any number of clothes items that she had worn on some random day for some random occasion which she expected her mother to have remembered. Tom didn’t envy the fact that they had siblings and he didn’t. Their relationship just seemed to be one long brawl. Their mother, after reading some tip in a women’s magazine, carried a little bell around with her. She would walk up behind the kids when they were arguing and rattle the bell continuously until they’d stop. Her husband would cringe if he was near, each jingle sending him one step closer to the breaking point. Tom wasn’t sure that he could have survived an environment with such fierce competition. What happens to people who don’t compete in an environment like that? Are they just forgotten about? Is the weaker side of the world littered with the fallout of those sibling relationships? At least if you are on your own you can claim that you had nobody to learn from. If you have siblings you can merely admit that you were the one who lost.
Tom and J.P. were quite similar in their social and physical attributes, which meant they had experienced a lot of the same things growing up: the humiliation at being picked last for the football teams, the depression of being ignored by most girls and the bitterness of being outside the many clubs or societies that other kids were part of. They were more dreamers. They would sit around, smoking cigarettes, listening to punk and alternative music, waiting for the world to change in their favour. J.P. was frustrated with life, mostly about the fact that there were so many women on the planet and he wasn’t with any of them. If a couple of nice girls ever walked past when they were out he would encourage Tom to follow, offering a running commentary on their physiques and which one he was going to let Tom have.
‘They’re mad for it,’ he’d say. ‘All women are mad for it.’
He never plucked up the courage to say anything to the girls, even though he knew most of them from school. And if they ever came over to talk, J.P. would stare at the ground and then act sulky afterwards as if his shyness was somehow their fault. In Tom’s mind they only seemed to use J.P. as a vessel to get to his brother in any case. They paid little attention to Tom, apart from early on when the knowledge that he was from Dublin created some mild interest. On a number of occasions they commented on his tics. He overheard one of the girls refer to him as ‘Blinky’ once and he knew that this was what they were calling him behind his back.
There was one girl who was the exception to the rule though. She was a cousin of the lads and she wasn’t like the other girls.
She always had time for Tom.
He met her two weeks into his stay in Rossboyne.
‘This is Sarah,’ J.P. had said in a tone that didn’t come close to the fanfare she deserved. ‘She’s my cousin.’
‘Hey there,’ Tom waved quickly before bowing his head and shoving one hand deep into his pocket.
‘Sarah McCarthy,’ she offered her hand and smiled, a smile that he would come to see every time he closed his eyes, the smile of someone who seemed genuinely pleased to know him.
Chapter 21
Mr Grundy is happy to see Tom. He displays this happiness by perching a pink wafer biscuit on the saucer beside Tom’s cup of tea.
‘There’s plenty more where that came from,’ he nods to the biscuit and winks.
Tom thanks him and sips his tea.
‘So what’s in the box?’ Mr Grundy asks.
The scratching of claws against cardboard hasn’t stopped since Tom entered.
‘A cat,’ Tom says. ‘He’s a good one too.’
‘Give us a look,’ Mr Grundy moves over to the box and Tom lifts the flap at the top. ‘What makes him a good cat?’
‘What usually makes a good cat?’ Tom asks.
‘If they’re clever, I guess. And friendly.’
‘He’s all of those things.’
Mr Grundy laughs. ‘Looks like a cheeky chappie to me,’ he picks the cat up and holds him head-high so they are face to face. ‘Oh yeah, he’s a cheeky chappie by the looks of him. Frank Grundy knows a cheeky cat when he sees one.’
He places the cat on the ground and teases him with the sleeve of his coat. The cat swipes at the material.
‘Do you want him?’ Tom asks.
Mr Grundy doesn’t reply immediately. He gently pats the kitten on either side of its face. The kitten playfully rolls on its back and swipes its paws at Mr Grundy’s hands.
‘Why?’ he eventually asks.
‘I don’t want him.’
Mr Grundy picks the cat up and brings him close to his chest. The cat curls up against the heat.
‘Is that all?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tom shrugs. ‘I guess I thought you might like a bit of company.’
Mr Grundy walks to the window and looks out. The cat seems happy in his arms.
‘You’re a good lad,’ he eventually mutters and walks towards the door. ‘I better get this fella a blanket to sleep on.’ He moves into the hall and clumps upstairs.
Mr Grundy returns a few minutes later minus the kitten.
‘Asleep,’ he says and nods in the direction of the room upstairs. He sits down and sips on his tea.
‘What happened to your face?’ he asks Tom.
‘A woman slapped me.’
‘Ah Jaysus, Ted Grundy knows all about getting slapped by women. Sure there wasn’t a day that went by where I wasn’t getting slapped in the face by a woman. I’d have to ask them to slap the other side sometimes, just to even it out.’
Tom nods without smiling.
‘What happened, son?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘The only place where it’s ever complicated is in there,’ Mr Grundy taps his head. ‘You remember that.’
Tom leans back on the chair and places his two hands on top of his head.
‘I guess I’m just tired, ye know. It’s this business with the agency. It’s taking up so much of my time. I don’t know why I started it.’
‘Do ye know something,’ Mr Grundy points at Tom. ‘You sound like an Indian without a horse, do you know that?’
‘I don’t get you,’ Tom shakes his head.
‘You sound like an Indian without a horse,’ Mr Grundy repeats.
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘Sure I’m telling you what it means if you’d wait for two seconds.’ He takes his mug in two hands and sips it, keeps it in front of him as he speaks. ‘All right, picture the scene. It’s North America, fifteen-hundreds. Horses haven’t been introduced to the Indians yet but they still have to catch bison in order to survive. Can you imagine how fast a bison can run?’
‘I’d say about thirty-five or forty kilometres an hour.’
‘Is that a guess?’
‘I think I remember seeing it on a documentary about bison.’
‘You ever seen one about Indians?’
‘There’s not that many documentaries about Indians.’
‘You’re right. There’s plenty of programmes about murderers. Christ, you can’t turn the television on without being harassed by a murderer. And do you know what I’ve noticed. It’s always the same fella doing the voiceovers, ye know, the kind of voice that used to be on chocolate ads. When have bloody chocolate ads been replaced with murder? I just don’t get it at all.’
He takes a sip of tea, looks up. ‘What were you saying?’
‘Indians,’ Tom says.
‘Yes. Indians. Without horses. All right, this is the deal. They could catch the bison two ways. They could try to catch a beast moving at forty kilometres an hour on foot or they could try the Piskin method.’
Tom shakes his head to indicate that he has never heard of it.
‘This is where the Indians built a V-shape out of branches and rocks and big old tree trunks, about a mile long. Then they’d lure the bison in, trapping them in the end of the V-shape. They could pick them off at will after that.’ He places his cup on the small table beside. ‘You see, Tom. You’re running around, chasing these woman that are too fast to catch. You should be just waiting for them to come to you.’
‘What makes you think they’ll come to me?’
‘Because that’s the way the world works, Tom. The right one will come to you. That’s if they haven’t already been.’ Mr Grundy looks to the photo of his wife on the mantelpiece.
Tom finishes his tea and places the mug on the table.
‘I have to go,’ he says.
Mr Grundy walks him to the door.
‘Does he have a name?’ he asks. ‘The cat?’
‘No.’
‘Any ideas?’
Tom shakes his head.
‘I suppose it doesn’t matter with cats,’ Mr Grundy says. ‘The damned things never come when you call them in any case.’
Tom can’t sleep. He sits in his neighbours’ bed-sit, a series of cuttings on the table, different facial characteristics taken from magazines and copies of his photographs. He thinks of police shows, of how composite production techniques are used to create an image of a face in an effort to find a criminal. He has discovered how easy it is for errors to occur. The alignment of the mouth, a slight difference in the eyes or the nose, and the face takes on a completely different likeness. He recalls once reading about how a military veteran in the US with no record or previous trouble with the law was convicted of raping and murdering a nine-year-old girl and sentenced to death sometime in the early eighties. The sole piece of evidence tying him to the crime was his likeness to a composite face which the police released to the public. He had been placed in a photo line-up and witnesses identified him as the murderer.
Nine years later, DNA implicated the real murderer. He looked nothing like the composite which was released to the public. So the real murderer looked nothing like the composite but the innocent man did. It shows that there are more complexities to the art of recognition than people truly understand. There are in-built instincts and traits which cause attraction and identification and which affect how one person would be deemed more trustworthy than another, more kind, more suited to be a partner.
Tom scans the images and wonders what effect his face has on others, negatively or positively. Evolutionary psychologists claim there are biological reasons for attraction and there are cues that people see in faces which indicate how good a partner they will be.
‘What does my face say about me?’ he asks aloud. ‘Are there no cues in my face? Am I cue-less Shatner?’
Tom carefully selects the features for his ideal partner from the cuttings, full lips, a thin pointed nose, grey-blue eyes which he has taken from a photograph of a model, not as striking as the eyes of the woman from the apartment across the way but close enough. He places them on a sheet of paper. They look odd on the page like this, he thinks, like the kind of image a serial killer might send to the police as a warning, the type with headline cuttings too. The simplest of statements can look ominous with this technique.
Tom accidently bumps off the sheet and the eyes slide upwards. It gives the face a kind of fearful expression. He instantly thinks of Fiona, of how frightened she looked when he was being thrown out of the hotel.
A weak buzzing infiltrates his head.
He stands and walks around the room, humming in an effort to counteract the sound.
It doesn’t work.
‘I can’t take this much longer Shatner,’ he says and massages his temples.
He decides to go for a walk to clear his head.
Tom sees Fiona in the people he passes, her sadness in their bowed heads and her worry in their hunch against the rain. The cold seems to blend with his bones. It is uncomfortable and painful but it helps him to feel that he is part of something real, something bigger than himself and bigger than the problems which have a stranglehold over him. When he nears the hotel his feet are heavy, his body tired.
And his mind awakens to the buzzing again.
Bzzz Bzzz
How long can he go on like this?
He feels as if he’s cracking up.
Will they hear the crack when you break Tom?
There aren’t many people up this end of the city. The weather and the night have driven most of them indoors. The noise of the raindrops is constant.
He stops outside the hotel. There is a sensor on the automatic revolving doors. It causes them to spin slowly. There are reflections in the glass. His reflection appears intermittently, hands in pockets, pale face, staring forwards.
Disappears and reappears.
His face.
His frown.
Eventually the door stops.
After a time Tom begins to wonder if he is even there, in that spot.
He doesn’t enter the hotel. He thinks about Fiona.
The door begins to revolve again as he walks away.
Chapter 22
Sarah’s mother passed away when she was ten.
She lived on a farm with her father, a couple of miles from Ryan’s bar, a low-ceilinged, ancient place that was cold and dark and cluttered.
Her father kept cows. That’s the way he would say it.
‘I keep cows,’ like they were nothing more than a bunch of pansies in the backyard and not the livelihood of the family.
Sarah would completely ignore her father, everything he said, all the questions he aimed at her. And there were a lot of questions. It seemed as if the more she ignored him the more he wanted to find out. It is a gift, Tom thought, to be able to ignore that huge bulk of a man. Thinking back, Tom supposes there was a kind of pretence to the questions on her father’s part, like it was a game being played out, ask and be ignored, vocalise concern but never actually do anything to relieve this concern. Take a turn and wait for the next.
He drove a Lada Samara, her father, a white vehicle with a hard interior and a frame which reminded Tom of a building block on wheels. He drank too much, tending to go directly to the pub on dropping her off and returning home that evening in a drunken state, with or without Sarah depending on whether she could get a lift from her uncle later that night.
She would cook her father’s dinner in the mornings before he left for the pub and he would eat it when he returned in the evenings, sometimes.
‘I just throw things into the food,’ she told Tom. ‘Anything that’s on the floor really. I put some bleach in once. He wasn’t even affected. He’s made of iron my Daddy is. Everything about him is iron.’
They had been hanging around for a couple of weeks when Colm got his hands on a second-hand car, an old Ford Escort with an engine that sounded like a distressed man screaming when put into third gear and a body so rusted and dented it seemed as if it had been chewed up and spat out. After this, Sarah began to hang around with them every day. This suited Tom. He was addicted to her by that stage.
Tom liked to show off when in her company and it thrilled him when she laughed at his antics. He also had this incessant urge to give her things, often drifting into daydreams relating to this, imagining himself wooing her with a massive bunch of roses or inviting her onboard a luxury jet.
Yes baby, this is mine. Let’s go for a ride.
She mentioned that she liked the Smiths one time. In an effort to impress her Tom went on the hunt for information on the band. There was a library six towns over and a bus departed for that town twice daily, eight
in the morning and three in the afternoon. Tom caught the morning bus and gazed dreamily at varying shades of green as the bus grumbled through identical town after town. He imagined wowing her with his knowledge.
The Smiths, yes of course I know the Smiths.
My favourite album? Why, the first one of course. The one with that song, you know, the one about a glove, the one that you like too.
Tom almost missed his stop and had to shout to the driver to let him out. The driver pulled over, leaving barely enough room for Tom to squeeze between the bushes at the side of the road and the bus. He tore the sleeve of his jacket and scratched his hand.
There were no books about the Smiths in the library but Tom found one about the history of rock and roll and one about Cliff Richard. He read a few chapters from the history of rock and roll while a plump, suspicious librarian eyed him over her circular glasses. He didn’t bother with the Cliff Richard one.
Later that evening they went with Colm as he was, in his words, ‘seeing a man about a dog’. He was always seeing a man about a dog. It was his way of saying that he was going somewhere that was nobody’s business. More often than not it was to sell cannabis to some friends.
‘See a man about a dog’ or ‘I don’t give a monkey’s uncle’, he had plenty of phrases that he would use in a joking manner when stoned, imitating some of the people he would meet while delivering the gas with his father. And he’d often use them in the wrong context, repeat the phrase over and over until it made little sense. Tom and Sarah would sometimes join in the joke. But not that evening. No, that evening Tom was in the back seat of the car with Sarah, trying to squeeze all he had learned from The History of Rock and Roll into the conversation. Eventually Sarah stopped him and questioned why he was telling her all about Buddy Holly’s plane-crash in 1959.
A Model Partner Page 18