All Names Have Been Changed (11 page)

Glynn spoke at length during the lecture he delivered to – ah, how can I be expected to remember the where and the when of it? All I’m good for is parroting variations on Glynn’s words, in this instance his description of his love not just for the physical world but for the world of physics. I’d nodded my head in fierce agreement before I’d even heard what the man had to say, that is the class of fool I was then. It was no less than tribal. Glynn was a country I’d have borne arms to defend. Show me where the cudgels are kept, and I will take them up for you.

Physics delineated the natural world from a standpoint that was new to him, Glynn told us almost shyly, not being a man of science, here amongst a hall of them – he gestured at the audience at this juncture. Earlsfort Terrace, I have it now. I was halfway through my engineering degree. That’s why the girls weren’t there. Few women, if any, were present that evening, and it sort of took the wind out of Glynn’s sails, sort of knocked out his stuffing.

He’d stepped up to the lectern on the hangman’s platform and cleared his throat more than once before commencing, a man summoned to give an account of himself. I was sitting on my own in the back row of the
lecture hall, looking down on him from a steep incline. Long thin planks ran the length of each row by way of a desk, into which various names and dates were inscribed, including my name, including that date: the night I first saw Glynn in the flesh.

The invisible forces acting upon the human psyche was his topic, as seen from the perspective of the creative mind. It was neither the time nor the place. Physics lent him the methodology and terminology to explain those forces which were working upon us when nothing appeared to be happening, Glynn explained. He made reference to that old school textbook staple, the balanced see-saw, for the love of God: not motionless because it was at rest, but because two equal turning forces were acting against one another. He paused and looked around the hall to allow this to sink in. The example might have impressed a class of junior-freshmen English students, but it was never going to constitute the revelation to the School of Engineering that it evidently constituted to Glynn. How thoroughly he had miscalculated the situation; so it seemed at the time. Someone in the audience sighed. Staff members were out in force. What joker had deemed it appropriate to invite a novelist to address an engineering faculty in the first place?

‘This is not wood,’ I remember him proclaiming, rapping the wooden lectern with his knuckle for dramatic effect. ‘This is energy in a static form.’ He had not the slightest clue what he was talking about, it was obvious, but still he made the effort, undeterred, striving to forge a link between his world and ours – the burden the artistic imagination is cursed with.

Load, thrust, potential energy, torque, he continued,
throwing about words and ideas he found attractive but didn’t understand. All of them tearing us this way and that, he went on, exerting pressures on the body that were invisible to the naked eye, so that even though he was being hurled around the Earth’s atmosphere by centripetal force, still he was accused of sitting around on his backside all day doing nothing. Glynn all but winked, earning himself a low ripple of laughter for his efforts, a low rumble of gruff amusement.
Sitting
around
on
your
backside
all
day
doing
nothing.
I don’t know why he felt obliged to poke fun at the writerly endeavour, his life’s work, on that occasion. There were plenty happy to do it for him, and plenty more happy to listen. Oh Glynn, did you have to make it so easy?

Despite having imposed a liberal interpretation upon forces which did not sustain a liberal interpretation, and despite his flawed grasp of the laws governing the universe, I still kind of knew what Glynn was stabbing away at down there in his oblique, unscientific, analogical way, a diagram of a rotary wing from a previous lecture chalked on the blackboard behind him. Questions were invited from the audience, but none were forthcoming, and the applause that closed the event was by no means ardent.

It is almost certain that I was alone in that lecture hall in experiencing a moment of enlightenment. I wanted to speak up to let Glynn know that at least one of those blank faces lined up before him had grasped something of what he’d been trying to communicate to us that night, but I didn’t budge from my back-row entrenchment, and the department head led him away. Physics, Glynn mistakenly believed, had equipped him with the vocabulary to depict something else entirely, something
that wasn’t physical at all, or quantifiable, or even describable, but which he still, despite these multiple impasses, managed to evoke in his novels. Here we run into representational difficulties of our own.

Glynn was onto something ideational, something the audience before him lacked the curiosity to understand, it being a phenomenon of no interest to the practical mind. There are extrasensory faculties at work that cannot be adequately explained. It is not my intention to sound so portentous. Stare at someone hard enough and they will feel your gaze. Keep staring, and they will turn around to identify the source of it. Glynn perceived those forces that whirred about us, and whirred us about, when we appeared to be at rest. He saw those pulsations spooling from our fingertips like dragonflies through the air. It is difficult to explain. I have a memory of a walk I took along a country lane. It was late May, or early June, one of those still, momentous evenings brimming with promise, when life finally seems on the brink of commencing and all is yet to play for. Meadows unrolled on either side as I descended into the valley, the seed heads of the wild grasses tipped gold in the setting sun. I had nowhere to be that night.

The lane below curved around an outcrop of rock and disappeared out of sight behind the grove of flowering whitethorn which had so strongly scented the evening air. I sensed the presence of a small party of people on the other side, making their way up the hill. I had caught a strain of laughter on the air, gaiety, a thrumming. As I rounded the corner into the shadows of the grove, I prepared to encounter faces on the other side. The other side, however, was bare.

I paused in the middle of the lane in confusion. The
shafts of sunlight piercing the dun shade quivered like plucked strings. That thrumming was everywhere; the valley, the meadows, the hedgerows, on the breeze. The whitethorns were loud with the drone of bees, but it was more than that. Something had been interrupted.

This wavering, I propose, approximates on some level to the condition of being Glynn – living with that swarm of nascent activity alongside you, that charge of potential energy, that flux. I am applying scientific terms to artistic ends, using the technique propounded by the master. Except that upon rounding the corner, instead of almost encountering them, as I almost encountered them, Glynn saw the faces of the people in his path, their colourful clothes, their longing for each other revealed in their gait, desires divulged by subtle tilts and inclinations. Sometimes they even took him with them, off on their summer adventures. Where did they all disappear to? Into which Kavanagh poem?

The world, when I picked up Guinevere’s hand and led her out of the sun-pink workshop, was not the same place it had been that morning. There was a before and an after. We saw not just pavement, city and sky, but future tenses swirling around us. The wet surface of Dame Street glinted silver as we emerged from the Arch, blinding Guinevere with the glare. I shielded her eyes with my hand before leaning in to kiss her.

I picked her up outside City Hall and twirled her in the air. Guinevere Wren was no weight at all. She laughed, her coiled hair streaming out behind her, and I realised I could not be happier. It was not possible to be any happier. She was the difference between the sun shining and not. ‘Put me down!’ she shrieked, but I couldn’t bear to. Though I’d walked that street a thousand times without
her, our first walk together would eclipse all previous walks. I knew that even as the journey was unfolding. Dame Street would never be detached from my memory of walking it, practically running it, hand in hand with Guinevere. She was taking me to her room.

The sky seemed terribly high up later that day as we lay on our backs looking out at it from her tangled bed. The rush of air had gone to our heads. It was deep blue and dotted about with small white scudding clouds. They were perfect clouds, spot on, I couldn’t have asked for better. Round, plump,
flocculent,
the kind you’d like to fall asleep on. A tear had formed in the corner of Guinevere’s eye. It was the most beautiful tear I had ever seen, an absolute credit to her. I didn’t know whether to mention it or not. A butterfly had once closed its wings to me, barely a butterfly any more then, really, no better than an old brown leaf. I’d nudged the thing with my foot, expecting it to flutter away and reveal its pretty colours once more, but the tiny scrap clung tightly to the path and my boot destroyed it.

The tear swelled and spilled down Guinevere’s cheek. I turned back to consider the panorama of sky. It took all my restraint not to try to prise her open. I wished I knew more about types of clouds, about the atmospheric conditions necessary to sustain those small white pillowy ones. And I wish I’d known more about the conditions necessary to sustain Guinevere. I never thought to ask.

It had started again, as if the coming together of Guinevere and I had tipped a scale, setting some vast rusty mechanism grinding back into motion, unleashing those turning forces Glynn had discoursed upon that evening in Earlsfort Terrace. He was writing once more. A heart that had been still a long time contracted and squeezed out a beat just as we’d given up on it. Glynn was a master of cliffhanger timing.

The discovery was made the following Wednesday. Guinevere had deemed it inappropriate that she and I arrive at the workshop together, so I had been dispatched ahead. We had kissed goodbye on the doorstep of the labourer’s cottage she rented in the Liberties. She shared it with a theology student who was never there but who showed up in the dead of the night to move beer cans around as proof of his existence, in case she stopped believing in him. On the windowsill of the cottage next door was a pot of leggy geraniums, the stalks brown and segmented like earthworms. A child’s small bike had been abandoned two doorsteps up, the back wheel still spinning and the front door ajar, leaking a smell of institutional cooking onto the cul-de-sac, which was called a square though it was no such thing, just two rows of terraced redbrick cottages truncated by a wall.
Guinevere and I had spent the week in bed.

Her face had a newly hatched moistness without make-up. She was wearing a powder-blue dressing gown and not much else besides. I could tell, from the way she kept tightening the knot on the belt, glancing up and down the length of the cul-de-sac, that she felt exposed standing out on her own doorstep, an animal that had strayed onto open ground. ‘Cold, isn’t it?’ she asked me.

I did not take the hint. She performed a shiver. Her feet were bare on the stone doorstep. Still I would not let go of her hand, tracing my fingertips across her palm, stooping to kiss the faint blue veins lining the inside of her wrist – anything to detain her. I wanted to watch her get ready for class. That’s what I was angling for. I wanted to witness her moments, all of them. Her showering, her dressing, the pinning up of her hair. Whatever it took her to become the Guinevere she presented to us in class – that would be my subject. Not one drop of her time would be wasted were she to spend it all with me. I tried to explain this exciting new project, but Guinevere just laughed, pulling her hand from mine and retreating into the cottage, protesting that she didn’t want to be late.

Aisling was sitting alone at the bottom of the staircase in House Eight, swathed in her widow’s weeds. I clocked her before she clocked me. Sometimes it was hard not to stare at her. Her head hung low between her knees, looking too large, too burdensome, for the pale stem of her neck, which was exposed as if for a beheading. A leather cord was knotted at her nape. Aisling hung weird artefacts around her neck – not the skulls and horns the regular Goths purchased from the wind-racked stalls on
O’Connell Bridge but antique medical instruments, phials of dark viscid liquid, little brass dial things saying Yes or No, mummified bits of Christ knows what. Where did she even find them? They were not from this century. It was an eerie world she went home to, that contained such oddities strewn throughout it, and her harvesting them like toadstools in a forest. There seemed no end to her supply of peculiarities. Amulets, I suppose you might call them. The manner with which she constantly toyed with them, turning them over and over in her left hand as if seeking their counsel, her eczematous fingers spinning like the legs of a spider, imbued them with a sentient status.

Her long hair had pooled between her Doc Martened feet on the linoleum floor, so black it looked synthetic. She often presented herself in alarming configurations, her bones a bundle of sticks she’d tossed into the air and allowed to collapse into a pile any which way. This was done unwittingly, as far as I could tell. It was simply her nature, the casual disregard with which she treated herself. She was more careless with her own person than even Glynn.

You would think we’d have acclimatised to her endless rag-doll positions, the broken-winged bird shapes, but, if anything, they grew progressively more upsetting. Normal girls didn’t sit like that, as if a joint were dislocated, a central sinew severed. The aura of calamity surrounding Aisling didn’t drop its guard for a second. I longed to return to my thoughts of Guinevere. They were a warm bed on a cold morning.

Aisling’s head lashed back when I touched the door handle, as if it were no door handle at all but one of her drifting tentacles. I, for my part, recoiled as if stung. The
two of us looked at each other in momentary alarm, but she relaxed when she saw it was only me. Who had she been expecting?

She stood up, slinging her canvas army bag over her shoulder, and blocked my entrance. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked when she motioned for me to turn around and go back out. I was forever having to ask them what was happening. They were forever having to interrupt themselves to explain. Aisling narrowed her eyes at the sky, deciphering more there than the weather. I foolishly glanced up too, as if warplanes might crest the horizon.

‘It’s Glynn,’ she said. ‘He’s holed up in his office.’

We set off for the Arts Block, the miniature magnifying glass swinging from her neck warping the matter on the other side, an evil eye. It was a bitterly cold afternoon, even for early February. Frost coated the tracts of cobbles still trapped in the shade. Aisling wasn’t dressed for the cold and was soon hunched up against it like a greyhound, all shivering spine.

She offered me an unfiltered Major, and selected one for herself with a suit-yourself shrug when I declined. I couldn’t bear to watch her inhale those builders’ smokes into her tattered lungs. The orangey-yellow nicotine stains on her fingers were a source of pride to her, for some reason. She had brandished them at us one night in the pub, holding them out to be admired like an engagement ring, as if she couldn’t quite believe her good fortune and wanted to share it with us, though they were the colour of old men’s feet. She gave one of her terrible racking coughs, hoarse as the cry of a hooded crow, and so raw that I felt the pain myself. She pressed her palm against her thorax in an attempt to subdue it. This stratagem didn’t work.

The other three were already waiting when we rounded the corner onto the corridor of the English Department, stationed in manneristic postures of stylised concern, a bible scene. Guinevere had somehow contrived to get there ahead of me. Aisling left my side, and they made way for her. The light flooding through the window behind them picked out the folds of their garments, the contours of their bodies. Had they any conception of how striking they looked when placed together in such a formal arrangement, staggered like peaks in a mountain range? They took my breath away. It was to do with their silence as much as anything else on that occasion.

All that was missing from the composition was the big man himself, towards whom the four women were inclined so that it was all about him, and no one but him, though he was not present. You had to give Glynn his due.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked again, my voice an uproar in the church-quiet corridor. They shushed me by waving their hands and putting fingers to their lips, scared I might disturb Glynn, whatever he was up to. He should’ve been in the workshop with us. They seemed to think he wouldn’t suspect they were there, listening at his door in their default state of rapture, but Glynn always knew where to find his audience.

I hesitated before approaching. There were times, as I went stumbling through their doll’s house, knocking things over in my clumsy wake, smashing their bone china and matchstick furniture, when it seemed I was too big for them. They didn’t know what to do with me. I could read it on their faces, particularly Faye’s, who was smiling that tolerant, sympathetic smile of hers that
I had no liking for when it was directed at me. She could take her benevolence elsewhere. Guinevere was strange and separate once more. I knew that if I took her hand and tried to lead her away from the pack, it would not work this time.

Faye beckoned me over to listen at Glynn’s door. I pressed my ear against it. He could be heard muttering away to himself inside, low-level malcontent grumblings. ‘It’s been going on for hours,’ Faye whispered. She had been about to knock on his door that morning when she’d overheard him. ‘When I eventually did knock, he roared at me. “Feck off, I’m working,” he shouted. We think he’s finally writing the new novel.’
Now
that
the
long
evenings
are
upon
me
once
again,

‘Jesus,’ I said, and the four of them nodded. The last we’d seen of Glynn, he could barely walk. Now this.

‘Blake!’ he suddenly exclaimed. We looked at each other in delight, as if a baby in the womb had just kicked. Even Antonia looked intrigued.

It had long been Glynn’s habit to talk to himself. That was nothing new. He told a reporter once that he was indeed aware of it but made not the slightest effort to censor himself, since he regarded it as a component of the writing process externalised. Glynn was full of fighting talk in interview situations, tending to interpret questions about the creative act as attacks upon it. Sometimes he was right. These occasional unintentional articulations on his part, he informed the journalist, were not the first sign of madness, but rather evidence of what he called his ‘imaginative fertility’, but which another well-known Irish author of similar vintage rechristened his ‘imaginary fertility’. In fairness, he’d been asking for that one.

Fragments of Glynn’s internal monologue regularly escaped his lips when he thought himself alone, or had forgotten we were still there, or knew we were still there but didn’t care, or was trying to impress us with his scope of reference – by us, I mean the girls. So many ideas clamoured for attention in his brain that he can be forgiven if the excess spurted out, like lava. This, however, wasn’t thinking aloud so much as arguing.
‘Blake!’
he insisted once more, in a tone of high exasperation, as if his own company were being wilfully obstinate, which it probably was. We could just see him behind that door, amongst his books and accolades, pacing the length of the room which could never contain him, gesticulating impatiently at imagined opponents. Something was heard to fall over.

The Blake invocation was of central significance. That Glynn based his sixth novel,
The
Devil’s
Party,
loosely around the life of William Blake has already been mentioned. Despite its eighteenth-century setting, Glynn acknowledged in a radio interview that
The
Devil’s
Party
was his most autobiographical work. ‘To date,’ he added tantalisingly.

The radio signal did not broadcast the wink we agreed he almost certainly appended. A great man for the winks, no more than his protagonists, leaving you neither here nor there. Was it all a big joke, or what? Is that what he was trying to tell us? He enjoyed toying with people, pulling their legs, seeing how far he could push them. You could practically hear him gearing up sometimes, cracking his knuckles, flexing his digits, rolling up his sleeves. I do not wish to reduce him to a series of ludicrous traits, merely acknowledge that he had more than a few. Which of us is without flaws? Vanity was
Glynn’s great weakness. No portrait of the man would be complete without a reference to his ego, which he dragged around like a ball and chain. It stunted his progress, begat the funny walk. That’s why he got on so famously with us: we worshipped him, plain and simple.

Of his eight novels,
The
Devil’s
Party
was our favourite, and not just because the main character was a writer. Antonia cited an early minor work,
Gorsefire,
as her favourite, just to be obtuse, but
The Devil’s
Party
was the one she could quote at length, as I lost no time in reminding her. On the inscription page was an extract from Blake’s great prose work,
The
Marriage
of
Heaven
and
Hell:
‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’

A key element of the Glynnian endeavour fell into place while I was sitting out there on the corridor, concerning the iconography of evil. Glynn did not publicly admire Blake because it was safe to – Blake was well dead and therefore no longer posed a threat to his ball-and-chain ego, which, though cast in heavy metal, was as fragile as glass. It is a sorry indictment, Antonia had more than once pointed out to us, that most male writers would rather choke than praise the competition. No, Glynn admired the poetics of Blake for the same reason that Blake admired the poetics of Milton, namely, for its depiction of badness. Milton infamously evoked evil not as a deviation, but as human. The mind of Lucifer was more accessible than the mind of God. It was divinity he found remote.

A distinctive characteristic of Glynn’s work was his use and reuse of the same four rogues throughout the
eight novels. Not half enough has been made of this in the academic domain. Glynn’s protagonists encounter the same villains over and over, from novel to novel, as if trapped on the same carousel. There was Malachy, P.J., the Dogman, Flood. All four featured in
The
Devil’s
Party,
lifted from fifties parish-pump-politics Ireland and transplanted wholesale to Georgian England, unchanged but for their outlandish and anachronistic period costumes with which Glynn clearly amused himself (cod pieces, skullcaps, cuckolds’ horns). They played marginal, inessential roles, neither advancing the plot nor developing the characterisation, hardly needing to be there at all, really, from a technical point of view. The Dogman was merely sketched into a crowd scene, little more than a leering flash of teeth, yet distinct as a painter’s signature.

Seen from this perspective, Glynn’s approach is comparable in its symbolisation of evil to that of the British medieval mystery plays. Belsabub, Sattan. Bonus Angelus et Malus Angelus. Diabolus I and II. Stock characters, waiting in the wings to posture and speak their lines with an ironical sneer before retiring to loiter backstage until the next novel gets underway. Not that this was a simplistic vision, far from it. It was rather an insight into the absolute intimacy Glynn felt with evil. He knew his demons on a first-name basis. Their commerce was almost neighbourly.