All Names Have Been Changed (12 page)

Evil was a local occurrence. It ran into you in the bookies, shot past you in the backseats of taxis. In
Farm
Animals,
the narrator, O’Dea, reads about the Dogman in the court pages of a regional newspaper whilst sitting in the waiting room of a dental surgery in Gorey, queuing to get a rotten molar extracted. Entirely coincidental,
spotting the Dogman’s mugshot like that – O’Dea would have preferred to scan the GAA fixtures, but the scrofulous young fella with the scabby kneecaps had appropriated the sports section.

That Glynn referred to his villains as he might the weather – that is, in passing – leads the perceptive reader to draw the conclusion that Glynn had drawn the conclusion that one can never escape one’s demons but must instead learn to live with them. So he turned them into background figures: Malachy, the Dogman – Diabolus I and II, thus rounding off his moral universe, the depth and complexity of which was renowned. Personify the bastards: oldest trick in the book. Finally, I’d spotted one of his invisible wires.

‘Would you fucking keep it down?’ Antonia snapped at me.

I wasn’t aware that I’d opened my mouth. ‘Sorry,’ I said sarcastically. Inside Glynn’s room, something hit the wall and shattered. Glass. Aisling had been jabbing at a carpet tile with the tip of her biro, trying to slay it, but she looked up at the sound of this crash.

‘You’ve interrupted him,’ she said darkly.

The lock on Glynn’s door disengaged, and he pulled it open to find the five of us sitting on the corridor floor. He glared down at us, frog-faced, dog-jowled, then stepped over our limbs without comment, none too steady on his feet. From that low angle, the distension of his gut was hard to miss. His trousers were buttoned tightly under it, the straining waistband pushed down around the groin where his girth was narrowest.

Aisling jammed her foot in the door just before it clicked shut. The others didn’t notice. They had climbed to their feet to traipse after Glynn, stiff as passengers
disembarking from a long-haul flight. Aisling looked at me, wordlessly rotating the magnifying glass suspended from her neck. The second the others rounded the corner out of sight, we slipped inside. It was almost dark by then.

Glynn’s office had the stifling pall of a sickroom. He’d been holed up in there for some time, possibly overnight. The most extraordinary booze-fumes polluted the air, and a cigarette smouldered in the overflowing ashtray. Aisling dived on something.

‘It’s here,’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ!’

‘What?’

‘His red notebook.’ I must have frowned my ignorance. ‘
The
red notebook,’ she clarified. I still didn’t know what she was talking about.

She held it up briefly before placing it on his desk to rifle through the pages. I got to work on the contents of the wastepaper basket. We worked quickly in the gloom, unable to turn on the lights as the staff in the offices opposite would see what we were up to. Shards of glass crunched underfoot – the remnants of a whiskey bottle, judging by the gold foil collar, and not one of Glynn’s crystal trophies, as we’d feared. Another whiskey bottle was stashed in the wastepaper basket, buried beneath a snowdrift of crumpled paper balls. The bottle was drained. I smoothed the paper balls out one by one on the floor. On the top of each page was scrawled a single scored-out word.
Storm,
fire,
funeral
;
that sort of thing. I can’t remember the others. They added up to nothing. Anyone could have written them. I crumpled the pages up again and tossed them back in the bin.

I took down his
Collected
Works
of
Blake
to find a bottle of Baby Power’s pressed hard against the back of
the bookcase, its hands raised in surrender, caught in the act. This bottle too was empty. I removed
Paradise
Lost.
Getting harder to read the titles in the dusk. A naggin of Bushmills, not a drop in it. I started unshelving volumes at random. Whiskey bottles riddled Glynn’s bookcase like dental cavities, like shadows on his lungs.

I pulled open a drawer in his desk. Ink jars, rulers, sellotape, a stapler. I rammed it shut and grabbed the next handle down. Letters sprang out of that drawer like a jack in the box, it was packed so tightly. I gathered those that had fallen. Bond paper, pale blue, the stationery used by old ladies and priests. A few words were written in copperplate in the dead centre of each page, the lettering so tiny I had to hold it to my nose.
You
will
pay,
read one.
Mark
my
words,
read another.
There
is
always
a
price.
At the base of each note, the time and date was scratched in a different hand. Glynn’s.

‘Look,’ I said to Aisling, ‘the poison-pen letters,’ but Aisling wasn’t listening.

‘It’s the demons,’ she said, still bent over the pages of Glynn’s red notebook. Her black hair had fallen forward, concealing her features. She was invisible in the darkness in her funereal clothes. It was like looking into a vault. Not until she raised her white face to me, which was contorted with distress, did I see where the voice was coming from. ‘It’s weird fucking drawings of the demons, Declan,’ she practically whimpered. ‘The ones you were talking about.’

‘
Me
?’

‘Out there on the corridor. Belsabub and Sattan, you said. Diabolus I and II. He’s drawn pictures of them. Look.’ She held up the pages of the red notebook to me, but what could I see in the dark?

‘Come on,’ I told her, ‘we’d better go before we lose him.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was the best that I could come up with. We shoved everything back where we’d found it and got the hell out of there. Glynn’s door locked shut behind us. Aisling clapped a hand to her mouth.

‘The cigarette,’ she said. We’d left it smouldering. The two of us stared at each other in mute concern, then Aisling started to laugh – this mad, hysterical, unhinged laugh, to which there was no reasonable response.

Coronas of mist encircled the Victorian lanterns as we raced across the black sweep of Front Square, the cobbles slippery and glistening in the drizzle, Aisling a shadow flitting by my side. We caught up with the others just before they disappeared under the Arch. They hadn’t noticed our absence, so preoccupied were they with Glynn and his raucous tumult, squalling above his head like a flock of gulls. His funny walk was back.

Glynn blundered out onto College Green and headed up Westmoreland Street. We trudged along after him, docile as a herd of livestock. We’re lumbered with him now, for better or for worse, I remember thinking. It was too late to abandon him. He led us to the nearest pub. If he was surprised, upon turning around, to find the five of us lined up behind him, he betrayed no sign of it. But then, he was hardly capable of discharging a look of surprise, the whiskey-sodden state of him.

Glynn’s work, in keeping with the great tradition of Irish fiction, is littered throughout with scenes fuelled by alcohol, of which his male protagonists partake liberally, enabling Glynn to introduce new characters through old ones: his men turn into different people with a few jars on them, sometimes aggressive, sometimes maudlin, effectively doubling his cast. What a frugal individual he
was. Nothing went to waste.

Alcohol was a narrative device he leaned on heavily, employing it to fulfil the function more traditionally executed by the conceit of the dream. Inebriation freed Glynn’s novels to roam in whichever direction he wished, unconstrained by logic or the limiting principles of plot development. It liberated Glynn’s work so much in fact that at times it seemed he was working within the fantasy genre. He wrote about chaos as if it were a real place, like Nighttown in Joyce’s
Ulysses.
Which is why, I suppose, when Glynn took a drink, it was a literary event. He located an empty table and sat at the head of it. We filed in on either side of him.

I tried to catch Guinevere’s eye. She hadn’t acknowledged me since I’d left her cottage that morning. Glynn must have noticed this one-way exchange, so plastered that he had acquired a bird’s-eye perspective on matters that didn’t concern him. I think he wanted to be young again. That’s what I suspect. He raised his glasses to his shiny forehead, observing the two of us with his artist’s eye, before leaning over to speak into my ear in the same low rumbling growl that had gone on all afternoon in his office.

‘You ever seen footage of human gestation, Declan?’ he wanted to know. I shook my head. ‘The little wriggling sperm trying to penetrate the big white ovum?’ He sat back to try to get my face into focus. Couldn’t. Didn’t matter. He leaned in again. ‘Because that’s what you’re like, Declan. You’re like that little sperm, banging your head over and over against their battlements, whining for admittance.’ He scratched his head, then examined his fingernails to see what he’d dislodged.

‘That’s lovely,’ I said. ‘That’s just lovely. That’s a really
lovely image you have of me there, Professor Glynn.’

‘No, no, no, no,’ said Glynn, nudging my arm with the rim of his pint, leaving a strip of foam on it. He was more the Dogman than himself at that moment, the way he smirked lopsidedly into his stout before sinking his teeth in it. He was enjoying himself, enjoying his troublemaking. ‘Not you
personally,
you fecking eejit, Declan. This is a paradigm that applies to all male-female relationships. You – meaning: us, banging our heads off the walls; and them – meaning: the women, imperturbable, impassive, oblivious.’ He gestured at the group. ‘Look at them,’ he remarked caustically, as if the four girls proved his point for him.

He was yellower than usual. Were we aware at the time of just how yellow he was? To a degree, perhaps, in the back of our minds. He had never exactly radiated rude health. It was only when I came upon an old photograph taken around that period that I grasped the full extent of his discolouration. There we were, the six of us, sitting around a pub table. Not that pub, not that night. Don’t know who held the camera. Some passing drunk – picture’s crooked. How young we looked, with the exception of Glynn. Astonishing, that we missed the ogre in the corner, the
memento
mori,
the ghoul, his arms thrown genially around us, smiling for the dickybird, on the brink of expiration. It brings a lump to my throat. Four of us are flushed as pink from booze as Glynn is drained yellow. Aisling’s skin is so powdery white that the snow-glare practically blots her features out. She is two heavily kohled eyes staring out from an all but mouthless face. It was as if the camera had recorded not our likenesses, but our auras.

Glynn swirled his pint and knocked back the dregs.
‘Latin me that, me Trinity scholar,’ he concluded. A smattering of buff matter clung to his lapel. Something glinted at the base of his leg – a thin metal strip. I pretended to tie my shoelace to get a closer look. There was a smell of polyester trouser down there.

It was a staple. I sat up again. Professor Glynn had stapled his hem. Marjorie had turfed him out. It only dawned on me then. The group had probably known all along. That’s why he was living in the dive on Bachelors Walk. Not for research purposes. Marjorie had sent him packing. That wasn’t her name, by the way. Her name was a fine one: sophisticated, elegant, proclaimed in italics on the dedication page of his eight novels – no
to,
no
for,
just the six letters of her name, a cry directly from the heart. Marjorie was the name we assigned to her. It was the name she deserved, we decided – or they decided, rather – the girls. Marjorie or Mavis or Gladys. Gladys Glynn. They didn’t like sharing him with other women.

Glynn stood up to absent himself. ‘I’m off to write a novel,’ he announced. ‘Back in a tick.’ He only had the one joke. We watched him lumber towards the men’s toilets, ungainly as a bear.

‘At least he’s writing again,’ Faye offered, forever seeking the silver lining. Was that the night Aisling told me her husband beat her?
You
know
her
husband
beats
her,
don’t
you?
It must have been that night. I can’t tell them apart any more, especially those long diabolical ones.

‘Yeah,’ said Guinevere, ‘you heard what he said about Blake.’

Aisling mumbled something in response. She used to do that a lot – just mumble, forgetting that the outside
world was a full remove away and that she was therefore required to project. There were times, I think, when all she could hear were the sloshing sounds inside her own head.

‘Would you care to repeat that?’ Antonia demanded. This was her first line of defence: undermining her opponents using their own words, leaving them wondering what they’d let slip to inadvertently indict themselves. Her ex-husband was a senior counsel.

Aisling repeated herself so clearly and carefully this time that there was no mistaking it. ‘I said, “He didn’t say Blake”.’

Antonia folded her arms. ‘So what did he say?’ Ever the sneering tone which, for all her brains, she never managed to connect to the world’s overwhelmingly negative reaction to her.

Aisling mumbled again, her facial muscles as limp as an arm that had been slept on.

‘Sorry?’

Aisling got to her feet and stood over Antonia. ‘Glynn said “Fake”!’ she yelled. A hush descended on the pub. We were going to get thrown out.

Aisling collapsed back into her seat in a lolling slump, an unattended puppet. Her chin rested on her chest as if her neck were broken, revealing a stripe of light hair along her parting. Underneath the mad make-up, the mourning weeds, the black dye, she could have been a Guinevere.

Glynn returned to the table and set down a clutch of whiskey tumblers on a tray. He doled them out with the matter-of-fact efficiency of an Irish mammy, mindful to demonstrate that favouritism was not in practice and that complaints would not be entertained. You could tell
he’d grown up in a large family. ‘There’s no names on them,’ he asserted, his Arklow accent that bit thicker than usual. None of us had eaten, but we didn’t let that stop us.

‘The problem with the contemporary novel,’ he told us as he resumed his seat at the head of the table, having apparently given it some thought at the urinal, ‘is that beginnings are more important than endings. This is because advances are calculated on the basis of the first thirty pages, and readers rarely get beyond the first thirty pages anyway.’ He glared at each of us in turn in case this was an avenue we were contemplating ourselves and seemed disappointed when no one challenged him.

He went on to expound his theory regarding the inverse proportion between literary output and humility. Some writers published more because they had less humility, he argued. Those clowns who were prolific had no shame at all. He cited his main contemporary as proof of this phenomenon – twenty-one novels and counting. Those who barely published at all any more had let their natural God-given modesty get the better of them. Glynn rolled his eyes mournfully at his tumbler at this point. It was an insidious attempt to solicit sympathy from the women, and it worked. ‘But Professor Glynn!’ Faye interjected, as he was hoping she might, ‘Don’t be so humble – your work is wonderful.’

His sleeping-tablet habit was escalating. He was up to three a night by then but was never quite asleep at night, and never quite awake in the morning. This, I got from Aisling, who had sprung back to life and was muttering animatedly into my ear, the magnifying glass around her neck revolving in her hands like a small planet on a wooden axis. ‘Could the sleeping tablets possibly
explain his demonic visions?’ she asked me. They were more vivid than ever now. Aisling seemed to think, after ransacking Glynn’s office together, that I would understand what she was talking about. I most certainly did not.

‘He’s seeing demons?’ I repeated incredulously, interrupting her flow.

Aisling looked panicked. ‘Shh, he’ll hear you.’

I glanced at Glynn. He was deep in sparring conversation with Antonia. (‘What bright spark allowed women into Trinity anyway?’ he grunted. ‘Who on earth admitted the Catholics?’ she countered.)

‘Is that what he told you, though? That he’s seeing demons?’

Aisling nodded.

I shrugged and drained my glass. ‘Well, he must have been speaking metaphorically, that’s all I can say.’

‘You were talking about them too. Belsabub and Sattan.’

‘I was talking about medieval English mystery plays.’

‘But you saw the drawings in his red notebook.’

‘They were just doodles.’

‘You don’t understand, Declan,’ Aisling insisted. ‘I
recognised
them. I
recognised
the demons in the red notebook. I’ve seen them too, the very same faces. They aren’t doodles: they’re portraits.’

Demons. Even the word. Glynn shouldn’t have burdened Aisling with that guff. Of all of us, she was the one who least needed reminding that a powerful imagination was as much a curse as a gift, that the world could tip into chaos without warning, and that it didn’t get any easier with age. Her world view was fragile, and Glynn abused his position in his endless, ruthless search
for an audience, knowing – what with her being the most impressionable – that Aisling would also prove the most receptive. And the least critical. Aisling or Faye. They wouldn’t be up to the like of him.

Faye set down another round of pints. Glynn reached for one without thanking her. ‘Why do you do this to me?’ he entreated Antonia in an uncharacteristically plaintive tone of voice. The pair of them had been huddled over each other the past ten minutes, his arm thrown along the back of the banquette, and she sitting in the crook of it. Antonia threw back her head and laughed, cruelly and with relish, as only she could. Glynn raised the pint to his lips and drank deeply without removing his eyes from her throat. There was something unseemly about the look of gratification on his face. Antonia revelled in the attention.

He started talking in the low rumbling growl again. Antonia had to lean in to hear him. His belly was almost lewd in its tumescence, a great egg cradled on his thighs. How was he getting fatter, when we never saw him eat? You couldn’t help but stare at him, whether you wanted to or not, like a skip full of discarded furniture. Articles you’d no more take into your home yet still you found yourself pausing on the kerb to peer in, urging yourself to move on but unable to.

Glynn was hell bent on finishing whatever it was he had to say to Antonia. Nothing would be permitted to interrupt his soliloquy. That is the problem with first-person narrators, the overbearing, unadulterated self-absorption. No wonder Gladys had dumped him.

‘Stop it, for God’s sake!’ Antonia cried, unable to take any more. Glynn retracted his arm and sat back, a smirk of satisfaction on his face. Oh Christ, I realised, he was
fucking her. I can’t say precisely why I felt so sure of it. Nothing that would stand up in court. Aisling dropped her pint on the floor. She simply let go of it, and the glass smashed on the tiles, splashing all over our shoes. Guinevere stooped to pick up the broken pieces.

‘Don’t,’ Aisling warned her.

Glynn glanced at Aisling. The depth of her voice had unnerved him too. Difficult to gauge how far you could push it with her. She was an Emily Dickinson fan. Glynn called for a fresh pint, then they settled again, himself and Antonia, circling each other like caged lions, and us, carrion birds, circling them.

Aisling steadily drank the fresh pint Glynn had ordered, as if it were a grim task he had set her. You had to admire her determination. He and Antonia were locked into some class of battle which was simultaneously hushed and frantic. Their facial expressions were those of people screaming, but we couldn’t hear a thing. They screamed underwater. We in the cheap seats found it immensely disorientating. ‘Something bad is going to happen,’ Faye said quietly.

At that, Aisling banged down her emptied pint glass and left. Islands of creamy froth slid towards the bottom of the glass like snowflakes down a windowpane. How had she drained it so quickly, the size of her? Her exit was marked by the crunch of broken glass. She was absent from the table for some time.