All Names Have Been Changed (10 page)

I stood up and clasped her shoulders. The force of her emotions. A shaft shot out of her into the heavens, another down to the molten core of the Earth. I felt the true magnitude of her, caught a glimpse of her dimensions. All I can compare it to is how certain places, certain historical sites, connect you to the events that unfolded there centuries earlier. It is a poor comparison, but it is all I can offer. It is the closest I can get. She raised her face. I placed my lips on her tear-stained cheek, and then I kissed her mouth.

Footfall on the stairs – we pulled apart. They were
coming to take her back. Guinevere wiped away her tears, and I returned to my seat. We turned our expectant faces to the door. It was Aisling who burst in, noticing nothing. ‘It's finally stopped raining,' she announced.

The rain had stopped alright, but the north wind had picked up, and it cut right through to the bone. I stood around Mountjoy Square for the guts of two hours, waiting for someone to come home and let me in. My keys were in the ashtray on my desk, my jacket slung over the back of the chair. I shouted through the letterbox and pumped the doorbell like a Morse code button, but the building didn’t rouse from its darkness.

I took another turn around the park to keep warm. The wind roared overhead in the crowns of the trees like an ocean liner powering towards me. On the far side of the square I was grabbed from behind and shoved into the railings and wet shrubbery. A flash of metal as something sharp was thrust into my face. I blinked to get it into focus. A blade? No. It was a hypodermic needle.

‘Give us yer fucken wallet,’ I was instructed in a flat Dublin accent. The man held me up by the scruff, as if impaled on a pitchfork. He banged me against the railings. ‘Now!’

‘Okay, okay,’ I said, reaching into my back pocket. I held up my wallet. ‘Here.’ The needle was withdrawn and my collar released. Laughter. I turned around. It was the knacker from the flat downstairs. I recognised his white runners.

‘Classic,’ he said, slotting the needle like a pen into the breast pocket of his leather jacket. ‘Ya shudda seen yer face.’ He nodded at my wallet. I was still holding it up. ‘Put yer money away,’ he told me grandly, as if I’d been insisting on buying him a drink and he wouldn’t hear of it. He rubbed his palms together. ‘Aw, I was crackin me hole.’

I didn’t respond. Couldn’t. The world had stopped at the sight of that flash of metal, and it hadn’t fully started up again.

‘Wha?’ he demanded, interpreting my silence as criticism. ‘Fuck’s sake, relax, it was a joke.’

‘A joke,’ was all I said, and gently enough at that, simply repeating the word, explaining to myself that I was no longer in danger – that all it had been was a joke! – but he marched right up and bared his teeth in my face as if I’d insulted his mother.

‘Joke!’ he shouted in rage, jaw clenched, tendons pulsing. His body, I knew without laying a finger on it, would be as hard as nails under that tracksuit, and not because he was strong but because he was pinched, sucked protectively around the pit of his stomach to the point of concavity.
Joke
was an instruction, not an observation, meaning, in effect,
laugh.
Laugh, he was shouting into my face,
laugh
you
prick,
or
else.

I laughed. He joined in as if I’d cracked the joke and it was a job well done. ‘Giz,’ he said, extending his hand, and then proceeded to walk me home in high good humour, as if the pair of us had been out on the lash. ‘Ya shudda seen yer face,’ he kept saying all the way around the square, shaking his head in amused recollection, though Giz patently hadn’t seen my face, on account of it being shoved in a bush.

His head swivelled from side to side when he walked, as if crossing a busy street. It seemed part of his gait. It made no difference where he was, indoors or out. He did it while climbing the stairs to his flat, checking left, then right, left, then right, perpetually on the lookout. The condition was chronic, and contagious. Soon I was checking my back too.

He unlocked his door and switched on the lights. ‘Go on ahead,’ he instructed me. ‘Be witcha in a minute.’ I couldn’t find the right words to decline and stepped inside. He shut the door behind me.

There were no books on his bookshelf. I ran a finger along the spines of his collection of video nasties, which was extensive. He was urinating noisily down the corridor. There didn’t appear to be a bed in the room. Looked like he slept on the couch. No sign of my bike, either, that I could see. My hair was still wet from the shrubbery. I found a leaf snagged in it, which I tucked into my pocket, I don’t know why. Scared of offending him, I suppose; scared he’d decree the leaf accusatory on some level, a reproof for what he’d done earlier. Hard to tell what would set him off.

I raised a corner of the grey wool blanket which was nailed over the sash window. Giz had a fine view of the square, for all the good it did him. His communion photograph was displayed on top of three television sets, stacked high in the alcove like a totem pole. I took the picture down to examine it. The standard-issue cloudy-sky backdrop, brown and gold cardboard frame – there was an identical one of me at home on the mother’s sideboard. The seven-year-old Giz was dressed as a miniature man in a three-piece off-white suit. Black shirt, white tie, red rosette, hands pressed together in simulation of
prayer, a rash of blotchy freckles across his nose. The camera had caught him with his eyes squeezed shut. A new set was drawn on his eyelids in red marker, crooked like a Picasso. The toilet on the landing flushed. Giz entered the flat and plugged in the two-bar heater.

‘That’s funny,’ I said to him, ‘my eyes were shut in my communion photo too.’ I don’t know why I said this. It wasn’t true.

‘I made a hundred and eighty quid that day,’ he said. ‘How’d ya get on yerself?’

‘I don’t know. Twenty, I think.’ More like half.

This pleased him. ‘Retard.’

A plastic bottle in the shape of the Blessed Virgin stood on the windowsill. Her crown screwed off like a toothpaste cap. She was half full of holy water that had gone fibrous with age. On the floor was a tin of beans, one of sweet corn, and a box of Coco Pops – food that came in pellets and didn’t need to be cooked – all lying empty on their sides. Under the table was a Scalextric set. One link missing.

Giz swiped a section of the sofa clear of crisp packets and bedclothes and indicated that I should sit. I didn’t disobey. He pulled up an armchair and set about rolling a joint. This procedure demanded his full concentration and most of mine. We did not speak for the duration. A religious ritual might have been under way. His nails were bitten so close to the quick that his fingertips ballooned over them, tiny bald scalps. Homemade black dots tattooed his knuckles, the workmanship poor. He took a lump of gum out of his mouth and placed it on the table where it sat like his brain; small, grey and chewed.

There was a whirring sound in the corner followed by
a mechanical clunk. We were plunged into darkness. The electricity meter had run out. ‘Fuck!’ Giz shouted,
‘fuck!’
He kicked the coffee table and something hit the floor. The bars of the plug-in heater glowed like a Sacred Heart. I scooped a palmful of coins out of my pocket and picked out the five-pence pieces as best I could see them in the residual light.

‘Here,’ I said, holding them up, stacked like gambling chips, but he was already out of the armchair, knocking things over in his wake. ‘I’ve more upstairs,’ I added for no good reason. There was no disguising the fear in my voice.

Giz crossed the room in silhouette and grabbed something from the shelf. It glinted orange in the dying light of the heater. He climbed onto a chair and got to work on the electricity meter, ratcheting away at it as if jacking up a car. The glow from the heating elements was fading rapidly, as was the outline of Giz. He expanded towards me in the darkness, loomed inches from my face.

The lights flickered on again. Giz shrank back to his regular dimensions, angry and compact. He cast the butter knife aside and jumped down from the chair, sighing like a man knocking off the night shift. I began to laugh, with relief I believe. I had seen strange forms in the dark.

The two-bar heater began to hum convivially once more, resuming its interrupted conversation. Giz picked up the ball of chewing gum and put his brain back in. ‘Where was I?’ he asked, standing hands on hips over the conjoined Rizla papers. He sat down and bent to his work again, childlike in his absorption. I watched him at his labours.

Somewhere along the line I stopped fretting about
how to get out of there and settled into the couch as the joint passed between us. The buzz and fizzle of the two-bar heater was the very sound of cosiness. I pointed at the section of ceiling that supported my bed. ‘There’s my bed,’ I told him, as if introducing Giz to a member of my family. ‘And that’s my desk.’ I indicated the space by the far window.

Giz screwed his eyes up against the smoke. ‘I know.’ Of course he knew. He’d broken in once. Nothing to steal, but buckled the door, scribbled his name on the wall. ‘Here, d’ya wanna buy a Sony Walkman?’

‘You’re alright, thanks.’

He nodded as if he couldn’t blame me.

‘Tell us,’ he said later, ‘how’s your book?’

He made it rhyme with
puke.
He’d sunk so deeply into the armchair by then that his knees – cobalt blue and shiny in the silky tracksuit – were higher than his chin. A muscle in the hollow of his jaw flexed.

‘Me buke,’ I repeated, testing the pronunciation, trying it out for myself. When had I told him about me buke? He was holding the flame of a match to the tip of his cigarette but couldn’t get it to ignite.

‘Giz.’

‘Wha?’

‘Wrong end.’

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and saw that he’d been trying to light the filter. He held it up for my inspection. ‘Wrong end,’ he told me, then we laughed for, I don’t know, an hour. His shaved cuttlebone skull. It was a head-butting head.

When the doorbell rang downstairs, an hour or so again after that, Giz went to the window and raised a corner of the blanket to look out. He cursed when he
saw who it was and pulled on his leather jacket. ‘I’m expectin a client,’ he told me, and I nodded to indicate that was fine by me and shoved up on the couch. It took a few moments to cop that Giz was throwing me out. ‘Aw, slick,’ I said, like he’d outfoxed me fair and square in some game of wits we’d been playing. I hauled myself to my feet. It was cold out there on the sagging corridor. For some reason, we shook hands before parting.

A full forty-eight hours elapsed before the north wind finally dropped. The flag mounted over Front Arch collapsed, flayed and crucified upon its pole. The sun shone fiercely throughout the day. I do not remember it faltering for so much as one second. The flash floods had receded, leaving tidemarks of detritus behind. We had gathered upstairs in House Eight in advance of the first workshop of the year.

Something looked different after the storm, we agreed, but not even Faye's keen eye could identify precisely what. The terrain seemed smoother, the edges had gone off things. ‘That tree is new!' Aisling exclaimed, pointing to the great oak behind the Campanile. It was like returning to a childhood room after an absence of years and finding it altered in scale, though you know it to be the same. The room hasn't changed; you have. Our surroundings hadn't changed; we had. The storm had changed us. We had weathered it together. We had come out the other side.

Glynn, too, we found altered. His funny walk was immediately apparent that first class after Christmas, even from a distance. When I say funny, I mean the opposite of funny. There was nothing remotely funny about it. Faye had been sitting by the radiator under the
window when she abruptly stood up and put her hand to her mouth. The novel she had been reading slipped from her lap, landing with a slap on the floor. We crowded at the window to see what had upset her. Faye did not have to tell us. You couldn't miss him. There he was on the far side of Front Square, reeling in our direction.

Antonia folded her arms after we had watched this spectacle for thirty seconds or so. ‘How long has that been going on?' she demanded. She sounded cross with Glynn, as if he was deliberately putting it on to annoy her, testing her patience and pushing his luck. The world was one big trial designed to antagonise her. To this end, no stone had been left unturned.

Nobody answered Antonia's question. Nobody had an answer. It was the first any of us had seen of him that year.

We observed his erratic progress from our bird's-nest vantage, five wan faces behind a pane of glass, five hearts in five mouths. A sentence had formulated in my mind of its own accord, and, once it lodged there, it would not be dislodged. The phrase wasn't one I had consciously composed but seemed rather to arise as a natural accompaniment to Glynn's spasmodic procession, each syllable attuned to the jerky movement which had inspired it:
Something
is
now
broken
that
cannot
be
fixed,
something
is
now
broken
that
cannot
be
fixed.
Uncanny, how precisely it fitted the rhythm of Glynn's gait, as if it were the beat he was dancing to.

The storm had washed the cobbles on Front Square as clean as riverbed pebbles. Glynn's hobble wasn't regular enough to count as a limp, being instead palsied, random and mortifying. Something had happened to his brain, not his legs. He trundled across the cobbles,
perverse as a supermarket trolley, limbs accelerating with no increase in pace. We were used to him drifting along lost in thought, musing in the medium of poetic metaphor.
Something
is
now
broken
that
cannot
be
fixed,
something
is
now
broken
that
cannot
be
fixed.
His actions were timed so perfectly to those words that it seemed he could hear me, or that I was controlling him, or that we, rather, were controlling him, standing up there, agents of fate, drawing him to us, our puppet. ‘I can't bear this,' Guinevere said.

Glynn must have been muttering away to himself, because students were turning around to look back at him in surprise, then smirking to each other. How could we have stopped them, answer me that? How could we have shielded him from their ridicule? Not everyone saw past his faults, as we saw. We saw so far past his faults that we barely saw him at all. We were dying for him up there. That is the only way to describe it. The five of us were dying up there for Glynn, wanting him safe inside with us where he was treasured, no matter what his state. I never loved Glynn more than at that moment, if love is the acute compound of tenderness and anxiety for another that I believe it to be.

Glynn's short journey went on for an eternity. He didn't glance up at the window to check for us. He knew we would be watching. We were always watching. Everyone slows down to gape at car crashes.
Something is now broken that cannot be fixed.
There was no way out of that sentence.

Eventually Glynn entered the shadow of House Eight and cleared our field of vision. It wasn't until he was out of sight that we started breathing again. ‘We're all ballsed now,' said Aisling.

We took our seats at the workshop table and waited for him. Waited and waited and waited. Faye's head was in her hands throughout this period. What was he doing down there? And so quietly too. After an extended interlude of silence from the stairwell, the girls elected me to go down to investigate. I'm sure they heard him calling me everything under the sun before turning on his heel and storming out. You would think I had mortally insulted him. ‘Professor Glynn,' is all I had said, but the sound of his own name proved a step too far. He had swiped the air in fury at it, batted it away like a swarm of bees, telling me that I made him sick, that we all made him sick, that he couldn't stand the sight of us. The whiskey fumes were enough to fell a pony.

I made my way back upstairs and admitted myself into the workshop as unobtrusively as I was able, shaking my head apologetically as if they were a waiting room of expectant relatives and my role was to break bad news. A flamingo-pink disc of a sun was shining at the tip of the Campanile, tinting the workshop windows rose. The sun couldn't, of course, have been shining at the tip of Campanile, not at that hour of the afternoon, not at that elevation, but I distinctly remember looking up to see it suspended in the sky, glowing through the soft haze like something from Miami.

‘I'm sorry,' I told them gravely, ‘I'm afraid he's gone,' and then I took Guinevere's hand in mine without a second's thought. I led her away from there, as if love was a simple thing and freedom was a possibility and an old man's troubles weren't ours. Who did I think I was?