All Names Have Been Changed (21 page)

‘You,’ he said sharply.

I turned my head. ‘What?’

He muttered something under his breath, deliberately inaudible to force me to approach. He lured me around the corner and out of sight. ‘What?’ I said again.

‘That one. Your one.’

‘Guinevere?’

‘Yes, her.’ He laughed. ‘To think I thought she’d be one of those girls who look better with their clothes on than off.’

That did it. I took a run at him. He went down easy, not a bother. Nothing to it at all. I’d have straight out punched him only for my bad fist, so I shouldered him instead, and down the great writer went, face first, rigid, a statue toppling from its plinth, first slowly, then quickly, making a meaty, gristly sound upon impact with the cobbles.

He started laughing again once he got his wind back. I swung a good kick at his ribs. My foot connected not with bone but a dreary mass of fat. It was a disgusting sensation. I kicked him again to rid myself of it. He grunted. I didn’t feel any better. And I didn’t feel any worse. I hated the fucker,
hated
him. I hope he is reading these words.

‘State of you,’ I pronounced in lofty judgement over the writer’s bent back and hawked a gullier just shy of his face.

He stopped laughing at that and raised his head to regard me, a smile of sorts smeared across his face. It was the hapless oafish grin of a simpleton – Glynn’s front tooth had shattered on a cobble. A quivering string of snot-clotted blood dangled from his nostril, elongating and contracting with the rhythm of his breath. ‘State of you,’ I said again, but he didn’t retaliate, just nodded in what for all the world looked to be agreement, then lowered his head onto the smooth cobbles again and closed his eyes to rest. I think that’s all he wanted. Another good reason to wallow in self-pity. Or confirmation
that he was a prick. I no longer cared. It was nothing to me. By the time we passed that way again, maybe half an hour later, helping Aisling who was doing her best to walk to her parents’ car – still doing her best, in spite of everything, God be good to her – Glynn was already gone, having sought cover in some dark corner to lick his wounds, as any animal might.

This is the order in which I said goodbye to them:

Aisling was the first.

She was gone before we knew it. Gone before she knew it either. St Pat's psychiatric hospital wasn't half as intimidating an institution as you might expect, and the VHI covered it, her mother told me, adding that I was so kind to visit, that all of us had been so kind. Aisling had been given a room of her own once they took her off the suicide ward, where she had been kept for just two nights. In the scale of things, this was very good news, apparently. Her wing was filled with tranquillised women in slippers and dressing gowns, some still carrying their handbags about. They bore the muted, slightly sheepish demeanour of drinkers in an early house. ‘You should see the anorexics upstairs,' Aisling confided, enunciating her words with a slow deliberateness that was neither characteristic nor necessary. ‘Mother of God.'

Antonia had spent a whole summer on that same ward two years previously, also being treated for clinical depression, which is where they got her started on exploring her creativity, painting at first, or ‘daubing' as she called it, since she showed no aptitude. The writing suited her better. Though this information was offered
with the best of intentions, I don't see how Aisling could possibly have taken heart from it. Antonia was far from cured. Nor could I fathom how two individuals enduring such diverse symptoms could both be diagnosed with the same condition. But then, I wasn't a doctor. Maybe Aisling wasn't telling us the full story regarding what had gone wrong with her. Maybe she hadn't been told the full story either.

It goes without saying that we barely knew her without the stark make-up, hardly recognised her in colour. We saw the few spots she'd been trying to conceal all year. They weren't so bad, after all that, nowhere near as bad as I'd imagined. You'd scarcely notice them at all, really, but there was no right way of telling her, so I didn't.

She was dressed in a pair of pink flannel pyjamas printed with teddy bears, a small cross-legged bundle on the bed, overcome with shyness. I felt like I'd come to babysit. Already she was changing, fading. She would not be herself much longer. The hospital would cure her of being Aisling. I missed her then, a crippling pang, though she was still right there beside me, sort of.

I gave her the Walkman bought from Giz in the end, and a Bowie compilation. The Ziggy years, not the Eno stuff, to be on the safe side. The girl had enough on her plate. She had told us once, in the early days before any of us really knew one another, that she didn't believe anything bad could happen to you while you were listening to David Bowie. I dismissed the statement as foolish at the time, but the bad things she'd been referring to took place in her head, so her theory made sense, when you thought about it.

Her face lit up. ‘Guess what?'

‘What?'

‘Professor Glynn came in to see me today.' A diffident trace of pride in her voice.

‘Really? That was decent of him.'

‘Yeah,' she agreed. ‘He showed up with a bunch of flowers and a black eye.' She nodded at her bedside locker. Amongst the
Get
Well
Soon
cards was a vase of white roses.

‘A black eye?'

She nodded. ‘And a broken tooth.'

I was surprised when she started to snigger. Surprised and relieved. A flash of her old self. Not gone yet, so. Not yet. Crippling, as I say.

He never saw his attackers. That's the story he put about. At least four of them had set upon him from behind and kicked the tooth right out of his head. He'd gotten the better of them in the end, overpowering them with a left hook followed up by a sharp right, but that's why he hadn't been there to help when she'd collapsed, he wanted Aisling to know. He'd since made a speedy recovery and was right as rain, he had assured her bravely.

I shook my head. ‘Who could do such a thing to him?'

‘I know. Desperate.'

‘He told me that I was not to worry about all this,' she added, gesturing at her surroundings. ‘He said it was just because I was young.' We let that hang in the air, both of us hoping Glynn was right. Aisling lowered her head. She didn't quite know what to do with her hands, now that she'd been stripped of her amulets. The pyjama sleeves were too long for her.

‘It was too much for me,' she quietly admitted.

‘I know,' I said, as gently as I could manage.

‘It got too much for me, Declan,' she confessed again some minutes later, looking me anxiously in the eye as if I would think less of her for this admission.

‘I understand,' I said, as softly as I was able.

Giz was next.

I'd seen him just the once since the Pushers Out vigilantes broke his window and nailed that funeral wreath to our door. He'd been evicted shortly afterwards. I was walking back into town after a visit to Aisling when there he was on the north quays ahead of me. The pneumatic white runners were gone, replaced by an old pair of builder's boots. They must have been weighted down with steel caps, the way he hauled them along the pavement, as if they were magnetised to it. No shoelaces, never mind socks. His left arm dangled limply by his side, and his left leg dragged, slightly twisted.

I trailed along behind him at a discreet distance. We made slow progress past the courts. He collided over and over with the railings. It was a beautiful, such a beautiful morning in late April, one of those gifts the world unexpectedly bestows on you, warmth and light flooding into your bones after the siege of an Irish winter, so long, so hard, so damp, that you'd forgotten how good the sun felt, the giddying glory of it on your bare skin. The railings turned a right angle, and Giz veered around the corner with them, involuntarily by the signs of it. His good arm reached for the other side of the street, flailing towards it like a swimmer caught in an undertow. I crossed briskly at the lights, pretending that I hadn't seen him, nor heard the moan of appeal that indicated that he had seen me.

I glanced back from the safety of the other side. The
broad splendour of the Liffey, glinting and sparkling in the late spring sun, the smoky blue of the distant mountains. Giz was still floundering by the railings, a stalled clockwork toy, needing to be turned around and set on his way again. He was making the noise, the junkie noise, a wheedling mixture of pleading and complaint, the terrible
wa-aa-aa
that was general all over Dublin during the heroin years, ringing out of every side street and back lane.
Wa-aa-aa
; how it carried.

During the numb, tentative weeks following Aisling's hospitalisation, small acts of localised kindness gained a new significance in the order of things. I finally left my bed in the dead of the night and went out to see if I could comfort the dog that had been howling away the year, lonely as a wolf. I wanted to feel like a better person.

I followed the howl down a lane separating two rows of back-to-back terraces. I hadn't considered what I would do if I found the dog. Talk to him, I suppose. Tell him he wasn't alone. The lane rounded a corner and opened onto a clearing where I encountered not a dog but a group of men, too far away to have noticed my intrusion. No, not too far away, but too intent on whatever was squirming at their feet. They were lit from above by a security lamp rigged up to a garage.

One of the men spoke, and the dog stepped up his howling. A dogfight, was my first reaction. Another of the men nudged the creature on the ground with the toe of his boot, and the creature raised its hands in defence. Not a pit-bull terrier, but a boy, no wait, a man, a thin scrawny man, head shaved. He was on his knees, wheedling ingratiatingly though they hadn't started on him yet. Merciful Jesus, it was Giz.

‘Wa-aa-aa,' he was saying, palms upturned in supplication.
The men started to laugh. They laughed for a good while at his distress, then Giz, the poor bastard, tried to join in. This brought abrupt silence. Even the dog stopped howling to listen.

One of the men said something, to which Giz shook his head in vigorous denial. The man kicked him. His foot caught Giz under the chin, snapping back his neck. That was the signal. The circle of men crumpled as if the ground had sucked them down on top of Giz. His screams were indescribable. I started to run, not to his rescue, but away from him, out of there, back to where I'd come from.

The first phone box had no dial tone. The cash lock had been jemmied open, ‘Giz woz ere' scratched into the metal casing. The second phone box had no receiver at all. By the time I reached the third one, I knew there was no point in running any more. Whatever had been done to Giz was over with. I reported what I'd seen to the Guards.

I thought I'd never lay eyes on him again, and I wish I hadn't. I opened the front door the next day to find him huddled on the doorstep, his arm crooked protectively under his chin like a broken wing. There was a pouch of purple blood beneath his eye. His lip was torn, teeth were missing, matted black clots studded his scalp. I didn't look too closely. People on the street hurried past him. They'd been hurrying past him all morning.

I ran upstairs to phone an ambulance, then came back outside to sit with him on the doorstep until it arrived, afraid to touch so much as his finger in case it hurt him more. He had a horror of being touched anyway, a phobia, sparked by God knows what in his childhood. Giz did not regain consciousness during this period. It struck
me as inappropriate that I was the one stifling tears, not him. What had I to cry about, after all?

The tune of an ice-cream van lilted past, and, some time later, the ambulance appeared.

‘Name?' a medic with a clipboard asked me before they took him away, as if he were a parcel to be signed for.

‘Giz,' I said.

The medic sighed and redistributed his weight. It was all a great trial to him. He inserted his biro into his ear and scratched. ‘Name?' he said again.

‘Dunno.'

‘Address?'

‘None.'

They rooted through Giz's pockets for identification. A set of nickel holy medals attached by a nappy pin to the washing instructions of his ratty tracksuit top was all they found.

I said goodbye to Faye and Antonia on the same day, or, rather, they said goodbye to me.

Guinevere phoned one morning. Such a long time since we'd spoken. When I heard her voice on the other end of the line, it was Glynn who immediately sprang to mind.
Declan,
he's
gone
, I thought she was going to tell me. I closed my eyes and swallowed, surprised at the force of my reaction. I wasn't sure how much more I could take of all this. But all Guinevere wanted to know was whether I'd like to join the others in the workshop that afternoon. ‘Just the four of us,' she said.

I hadn't been back to House Eight since the night that Aisling fell, presuming it would already be locked up for the year. No one was using it, not any more, not after all
that had happened. But the door was open, and up the stairs I went, listening to the sound of female voices floating down. I had to stop halfway up, gripping the banister to compose myself: for a moment, it had been like the old days.

The three of them were sitting by the windows, sunshine streaming through their hair. I had never seen them in summer clothes before. Faye stood up when she saw me. ‘Declan,' she said. ‘I'm so glad to get a chance to say goodbye to you before I leave.'

‘You're leaving?'

‘Yes, I'm going home to Clonmel early. My train is at four.' I had noticed the large suitcase by the door downstairs. Faye put her hand on her abdomen. ‘Declan, I'm going to have a baby!'

‘A
baby
?' I repeated stupidly. I could barely fathom it. It seemed such a bizarre undertaking. This was no time to be thinking of other human beings.

Tears sprang to Faye's eyes, and she shook her head in wonderment as if she could barely fathom it either. ‘A baby, yes!' She opened her arms and held me in her embrace, the joy radiating out of her.

‘God, I'm so happy for you, Faye.'

She paused in the doorway of the workshop to take one last look at us. ‘Write,' she said before she left. And then she was gone. Just like that. It was over so quickly. Her husband was waiting below on Front Square. We sat in silence listening to her descending footsteps, then the front door clicked shut behind her.

The three of us watched as her husband carried her suitcase in one hand and placed the other on her shoulder.
You
know
her
husband
beats
her
,
don't
you
? He was a big mucker type in a maroon jumper, a Tadhg or a
Mossy or a Micky Joe, and seemed a few years older than his gentle, pretty wife, though it might have been just that he was a proper grown-up. Someone had to keep the country running. I hardly knew her, I realised as Faye disappeared under the Arch. And now I never would.

‘Well, that's that then,' said Antonia. ‘Back to the real world, I suppose.'

Guinevere walked slowly around the workshop. ‘Look at this place,' she said. ‘It's like an empty theatre set.' She rested her hands on the back of Glynn's chair, then stooped to open his side drawer, her train of thought momentarily arrested – all our trains of thought momentarily arrested – by simple curiosity. What was in the drawer? How had it never occurred to us to look? All the months we'd sat there.

Inside was a map of Dublin. Guinevere flicked through it before replacing it and pushing the drawer shut again. She moved on, trailing her fingertip along our old desks. ‘It's so sad to think we'll never sit in this room together again. I can barely believe it.'

‘I'm leaving Dublin too,' I announced. Suddenly, everything seemed so final. It had been final for a long time, but it only hit me then.