All Names Have Been Changed (15 page)

‘Here Comes Everybody,’ Glynn said glumly when the four women finally joined us upstairs, having taken their sweet time. Aisling had embarked on a novel. That was the day’s big news. She distributed a partial manuscript to each of us when her turn to read came.

It was like one of her poems, only more so. I had not the slightest notion what it meant. There were over thirty characters in it, as far as I could make out. It shuttled back and forth in time through major civilisations: Hellenic, Celtic, Mycenaean and one wholly imaginary one – at least, I think it was wholly imaginary. It was written in a compulsively rhythmic Dublin street argot which was part observed, part invented. The Peamount Tuberculosis Hospital functioned as some class of portal. Sickness was a major trope. ‘It’s part one of a trilogy,’ she told us after she’d read out the first five pages. Her reading was met with silence.

When queried by Glynn, Aisling described the novel as the application of the apparatus of string theory to the traditional murder-mystery genre with a view to elucidating the chaos rife in our daily environment, from which there is no escape.

‘I see,’ said Glynn, leafing through her manuscript, pausing to read paragraphs at random. He was frowning.
‘And you’ve been working on this all year, have you?’

‘Em, no,’ said Aisling. ‘I started it this week.

‘This week?’

‘Yes. Monday.’

Glynn flicked to the end of the manuscript. Two hundred and sixteen pages in length. In three days. Two days, actually – Aisling had been with us since half eleven. He raised his glasses to his artist’s eye to peer at the girl. How stark she looked in the vivid company of the others, a black and white photograph in a roomful of colour, a figure from a past century transplanted to the modern age. ‘Have you been sleeping, Aisling?’ Glynn asked with a kindness we didn’t know he had in him. Aisling smiled shyly and shrugged, as if she wasn’t really sure. Her eyes were dark and glossy.

Glynn invited her to read a little more, though I wished he hadn’t. I was rapidly losing my bearings, such as they were. How had the girl managed to write so much in two days? It wasn’t physically possible.
Syncope
, the novel was called. Even the title was a reproof. I had no idea what it meant. Had she made that word up too? I glanced at the faces of the others for guidance. They gave nothing away, as usual.

Aisling leafed through her manuscript and settled on a passage about halfway through. We opened our copies to the designated page as if it were a hymnbook. This extract was entirely different in character to the novel’s opening, consisting solely of dialogue. Dialogue was my terrain. It was the only thing I was good at, the only thing the girls ever praised me for. Even Antonia had assented, sort of. (‘Have you considered trying your hand at a screenplay instead?’ was how she phrased it,
meaning she thought my descriptive prose was crap.) Turned out Aisling had a natural flair for voices which far outshone mine. This was a gift her poetry had kept firmly hidden under a bushel.

Her switch from poetry was both abrupt and wholesale. Her first prose endeavour did not even have the safety net of being a short story. It was a shot at a novel and therefore possessed all the latent threat of a novel, all the danger, all the potential. A trilogy at that. Aisling had dived off at the deep end. I couldn’t get a handle on the words in front of me. The piece was so good that I was unable to quantify it. All I discerned from hearing her read was that I was no good, I should give up.

She read in her customary way, to which I was unable to grow accustomed: head lolling broken-necked over the page, arms dangling lamely by her side – what in the name of Jesus was wrong with her? The curtain of hair, blue-black as a magpie’s wing, concealed her face and the source of her voice, which was ventriloquial at the best of times but now seemed to be emanating a whole yard shy of her. I got it into my head that it was no longer Aisling under there. Were I to part that heavy curtain, I did not know who – or what – would look back at me.

Aisling’s second reading was met with another silence from us and an impressed nod from Glynn. The fictional space should never be cosy, he had recently warned us. Glynn didn’t rate Dickens for the same reason he didn’t rate Mozart. Not enough doubt. Didn’t reflect the world. That’s why he responded so positively to Aisling’s piece that day: it was doubt incarnate.

‘Well so,’ he said, sitting back in his chair to indicate that the discussion was now open to the table. He waited
for our reaction. So did Aisling. But what could we say? A meteor had crashed through the ceiling, and we stared at it smouldering away on the desk, wondering where the fuck it had come from. And what the fuck it was. This was not matter as it existed on Earth. There we were, the rest of us, plodding around trying to hone our similes, conjugate our adverbs, and Aisling had just invented – well, what? What had Aisling just invented? My biro rolled across the desk and fell through the gap that had appeared between our tables. I made no attempt to retrieve it.

‘Page ninety-six,’ Antonia eventually said, seeing as no one else was prepared to get the ball rolling. ‘I have a problem with your use of
meta
-. You’ve used it as a prefix.
Meta
- is not a prefix. It’s a combining form. A combining form is a linguistic element used in combination with another element to form a word, e.g.,
bio
- equals life, -
graphy
equals writing, hence “biography”. Neither element is a complete word in itself.’ As openers went, even I could have done better.

‘Okay,’ said Aisling. She didn’t know what point was being made either, still less care. Antonia waited for her to pencil her comment into the margin, but Aisling didn’t seem to grasp what was required of her and looked about the table benignly, as though our faces constituted pleasant if unremarkable scenery. She may as well have been drifting down a river in a punt. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep.

‘You should have used
para
-,’ Antonia said. ‘
Para
- is a prefix, so you can append it to a complete word. Hence, in this case, it would be “paranotional”. Which isn’t a word either, obviously, but it’s grammatically more accurate than “metanotional”, as you’ve used.’ Antonia had
been drinking so much black coffee lately that her teeth were marled brown.

‘Thank you, Antonia,’ Aisling said but still didn’t reach for the pencil. We stared at it, lying there like a loaded pistol, willing Aisling to pick it up and put us out of our misery.

Faye swallowed tensely, the room so quiet we heard her ligaments wrench. My eyes made the sound of the drip of a tap every time I blinked. I tried to stop blinking. No good. Guinevere kept her head down, and Glynn, his mouth shut. It was entirely his fault, whether he admitted it or not. He had single-handedly engineered this crisis.
You
stupid
bitch
, he had spat at Antonia, introducing a different element, bursting open the cabin door, then storming off and leaving her to brazen it out on her own, humiliated in front of all of us.

Though it was possible he no longer recalled the incident, Antonia would never forget it. There had been something of the jack-in-the-box about her ever since. Our every word was construed as potentially antagonistic, an insinuation of her damaged status, another twist of the handle.
Did
you
shag
Professor
Glynn
? Wallop. Fuckhead, she had called me. The spring-loaded mechanism was getting tauter by the second. The leering head would explode across the table. It was only a question of time.

‘Did you listen to a word I said?’ Antonia demanded.

Aisling scratched at the powdery eczema coating the back of her hands. Her knuckles were bleeding, the blood pink and watery. Words tumbled into her as into a black hole when she was in that frame of mind. They met with no resistance, just kept falling, never to connect with their target. There was no point in even saying
them. I don’t know why Antonia couldn’t see that. The two of them were caught in some sort of inversely proportionate closed energy system. The tenser Antonia got, the more languid Aisling became. She was sinking into her chair, melting into a pool of faded black fabric. Antonia shook her head. ‘There’s a name for people like you, Aisling,’ she said carefully. She indicated the manuscript. ‘People who write this sort of thing, dismissing the rules, abandoning the signposts.’

‘And what might that be?’ Aisling asked. ‘What’s the name for people like me?’ So she had been listening all along.

Antonia flicked her blonde hair. ‘Icarus,’ she said. ‘You’re sailing too close to the sun. You are going to crash and burn like Icarus.’

Nothing. No reaction at all, not a flicker. The black hole had been reinstated. Antonia sat there looking at Aisling. Aisling sat there looking back. The rest of us held our breath and waited. Something bad was about to happen, as Faye would say, or Aisling, or Guinevere, or even myself. We were all primed for catastrophe by then. We could all see it coming. By leaving Antonia wounded, by cornering her, Glynn had forced her to this, to attack Aisling, who could least sustain it, who was sailing too close to the sun. What was it those poison-pen letters had warned him?
There
is
always
a
price
. But when had Glynn ever listened?

‘Where were we?’ he asked, but nobody answered him. Nobody said a word.

‘So what’s going on?’ I said to Guinevere after the workshop. It was with some difficulty that I had managed to separate her from the pack. They reluctantly agreed to go on ahead without her after she’d promised she’d be along soon. The second they rounded the corner out of sight, I steered her down the damp lane running alongside Bartley’s. She had her back against the wall. ‘What was all that about earlier?’ I demanded. ‘In the women’s toilet?’ She didn’t like my tone.

‘Nothing, Declan.’ She looked down at her arm. I saw that I was still holding it, and let go. She massaged it as if I’d hurt her. It was a quarter to five. The setting sun was shining thinly upon the tips of things, picking out the sharp edges which had sprung up around us. There was no guarantee that the fine spell would hold.

‘Why didn’t you answer me when I asked you before the workshop what was wrong?’

‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘you make it sound like I felt sick on purpose.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Okay, fine. Just, you made me look like a complete dick in front of the others, that’s all.’ Fuckhead, Antonia had called me.

She blinked. ‘Why are you being so obnoxious?’

I looked up at the sky, what was visible of it from the
narrow lane, and laughed in disbelief. ‘Why am
I
being so obnoxious?’

She sighed as if I was wearing her out. ‘Don’t do this,’ she said quietly. She was still massaging her arm.

‘Do what?’

‘You know.’

‘No, I don’t know. Tell me. Oh wait: you never tell me anything. Sorry, I forgot.’ An oniony smell of sweat hovered on the air. I realised with a surprise that it was me.

The lane was littered with weeds and broken glass. Guinevere looked up and down the length of it in desperation, but there was nowhere for her to run, no one to appeal to for help. ‘Why are you trying to upset me?’

‘Why am
I
trying to upset
you
?’

‘Yes, why are you being like this?’

‘Why am
I
being like this?’ It was like some sort of foreign-language exercise in pronouns.

‘Stop it!’ She had never raised her voice to me before.

No
, something inside me said,
no,
I
will
not
stop
. ‘Stop what?’ I asked flatly, warming to my subject. A twisted life form had pierced the forest floor, a coiled stump of fern – primitive, flowerless, beckoning. My black thoughts extended their fronds around Guinevere. Spores hung all about us on the air.

‘Listen to yourself, Declan,’ she said in wonderment, her head tilted to one side as if she were reasoning with a rational human being, one possessed of empathy and kindness.

‘No,
you
listen to
your
self.’ An unspeakable resentfulness had overtaken me. I had never known its like.

Guinevere couldn’t seem to register what she was dealing with and persisted in treating me like a grown-up. ‘I think you should apologise to Antonia,’ she
advised me.

‘
I
should apologise?’ This, I could hardly credit.

‘You’re the one who suggested she’d shagged Professor Glynn.’

‘So everything’s my fault now?’

‘That’s not what I’m saying. Antonia is very upset about the whole thing, and I think you should have a quiet word with her. Sort things out before the situation escalates.’

I threw back my head and laughed again. ‘Here we go.’

‘I’m glad you find this so amusing.’

‘Yeah, so am I.’

‘There’s no point in even talking to you.’

‘If you say so.’

‘You’re doing it on purpose.’

‘Doing what?’

‘For fuck’s sake!’ she cried in frustration. She said, I said, she said, I said. It went on for ever. It was dark before we knew it. People were going about their business on the street beyond. You would think it was a normal evening like any other. Guinevere bit her bottom lip. My answers were just inversions of her questions, she complained, wiping away the first of the tears. I observed her as if she were trapped in a vacuum: mouth moving, no sound, a specimen in a jar.

‘You seem to be enjoying this,’ she noted.

‘Dunno, am I?’

I was as good as lying at the bottom of a well by then, listening to the distant sounds of life going on above me. I had become a small man trapped inside a large man’s suit of armour, too short to see out the eye slits. It is difficult to explain. Yes, extremely difficult to explain. Even
looking back on it, it seems terribly remote, hardly me at all in fact, as if, no more than Aisling, I had temporarily drifted away from myself, leaving the whole show behind.

‘What’s wrong, Declan?’ Guinevere implored me. ‘Has something happened? You can tell me.’

‘Dunno,’ I mumbled again.

This was less than the truth. I was not good enough for Guinevere, and she, with her remarkable powers of perception, would see through me sooner or later. From the way she was now studying me, it was evident that this process had already begun. I had never attained my heart’s desire before and had revealed myself, in the having of it, to be unworthy of it, undeserving. I had exposed myself as an essentially unsympathetic character. Cardinal sin in a novel, they tell me.

Guinevere’s protestations continued undiminished, and unheeded. At one point she pummelled my chest to get my attention, and I wondered, in my abstract, sullen way, whether it was warped of me to find those punches arousing. Didn’t matter any more, one way or the other. Talk to me, she kept insisting, as if such a thing were still possible. We had gone beyond all that. She said that I was being selfish, that I was being a selfish bastard. Who was I to disagree? The girl was shivering from head to foot. We had been standing in that dank lane for hours.

‘So that’s it then?’ she finally asked after an extended period of silence had elapsed. Though she had phrased it as a question, I deliberately interpreted it as a statement.

‘Okay,’ I shrugged, like it was fine by me. ‘If you’re sure that’s what you want.’

She sharply averted her face as if my breath reeked,
which it probably did. Then she started to cry again. I kept my hands in my pockets. Her tears were not the usual picturesque variety, I noted sourly. A blast of sea smell hit my nostrils, as pungent, as evocative, as childhood. I looked about for the source but could not identify it. Where was all this fatalism coming from? We were in Glynn terrain now.

‘So here we are,’ I said, and felt for one exhilarating moment that I was over her and that there would be another Guinevere. That she was one in a sequence of extraordinary women I would love, and who would love me. I must have been in shock. I was young then and had no comprehension of the significance of proceedings, no grasp yet that such encounters were unique and unrepeatable, instead regarding all that occurred as preludes to the main event. Life was an entity due to commence at some point in the future. That’s what I used to think.

‘Here we are,’ I said again and felt that surge of liberty again. Fainter this time, I couldn’t help noticing. It was a satisfying enough moment all the same. I wasn’t confined to the muted surroundings of my own head, for once. I was living at last, sort of. Here we are, still standing, having come out the other side. I shouldn’t say we. I was speaking for myself. Didn’t ask Guinevere what was running through her mind at that juncture. Nothing good, by the looks of it.

She dried her tears and stared at the ground for some time. Those lashes of hers. So long. I wondered if they edged the objects she looked at, set things off like a picture frame. No wonder she wrote from such an elegant perspective.

‘Are you happy now?’ she asked me quietly.

When I did not reply, Guinevere turned and walked
down the lane to rejoin the civilised world. She held her head high and not once did she glance over her shoulder. I watched until she had left my sight. She had the most beautiful back.

On I blundered across the city without her, as if it meant nothing, as if there would be no consequences, as if I wasn’t leaving tracks of blood in the snow.
There is
always
a
price
. A good hour passed before it dawned on me that the scene in the lane with Guinevere conformed almost identically in spirit to one Glynn had written over a quarter of a century earlier in
Prussian
Blue
. I laughed, but not for long. The specifics were different, but the dialogue was broadly the same: dismal, repetitive. The narrator had broken a girl’s heart because he was a stupid bastard. Then he’d gone out on the batter.

There was a time I would have attributed these uncanny parallels to Glynn’s unrivalled ability to distil the real world into prose, but that time was over. It was my behaviour that demanded a critical appraisal. I had internalised Glynn’s imaginative landscape so thoroughly that I could no longer tell where he stopped and I began. ‘You’re worse than him,’ Guinevere had said. I wasn’t even aping the big man himself – it was worse than that: I was aping characters from his novels. And Glynn’s novels never had happy endings. Everyone knew that.

I sat on my little soldier’s bed and looked at my knees, viscerally regretting the absence of a trace of Guinevere in that room now that it was too late. A pillowslip she had slept on to press to my face, a towel still carrying the faintest hint of her scent. Should have thought of that. Should have thought of a lot of things. She had
requested once to see where I lived, but her request had been denied. I hadn’t wanted her to witness the room’s meanness, as if she was the sort of girl who would think less of me for it, and so I had hidden it away from her like an embarrassing parent; an embarrassing, forsaken parent. A long slash of seagull shit streaked the window, calcium white and acidic.

Jaunty and shipshape, I had decided when I first laid eyes on that room. It was one of many lies I had to tell myself. Just like Van Gogh’s sunny bedroom in Aries, I had affirmed as I’d looked around, forgetting that Van Gogh’s painting was a work of optimism, not realism. No sign in it of the chaos he daily endured. His belongings all hanging neatly on pegs, as if that would suppress it. Same amount of pegs as objects to be hung. Not so much as a patch of shadow under the bed. Not even a speck of dust. No evidence of his demons at all. Where were they hiding? Under which loose floorboard, behind what crack in the plaster? Because they were there, alright, lying in wait for him. Who was he trying to fool? Himself, I suppose, most of all. Within one year of painting that cheerful yellow room, with its sturdy little bed and pillows for two, the artist had gone and topped himself.

‘Alright Deco?’ said Giz when he answered my knock on his door. He didn’t seem in the least bit surprised to see me standing there. It was as if he’d been expecting me. ‘How’s it goin?’ he asked, ‘What’s the story?’ As if I would know. Me, who never wrote any story, me who never got past page five. Giz made sure before unhooking the security chain that I had money in my pockets this time, then he named his price.

I sat into his couch and smoked until I was juddering
from side to side when I closed my eyes, though my body was still as stone. Giz sucked lighter fluid through a balled-up sock. His bedsit was as grey as a rotten lung. I found myself gasping for breath all of a sudden and clawed at the armrest in panic, but it was no good. Giz was too far gone to notice or help. ‘Are you happy now?’ she had asked before turning her back on me. Are you happy now?