All Names Have Been Changed (16 page)

A bell was tolling on Front Square. Graduates filed out of the Examination Hall dressed in black gowns and tasselled mortarboards. Commencements. ‘Look at them,' Antonia scoffed. Glynn was two hours late.

‘Why are they called commencements when it's all coming to an end?' Faye wondered.

I had no idea either what I would do once the course was over. Only a few months left, and nothing to show for my time. Then what? Back to England? Back to the factory, empty-handed? I looked away from the window.

‘What good will it do us anyway?' Aisling asked. ‘What use is their stupid scrap of paper? How will that secure us a job?' It was an unexpectedly practical line of thought for Aisling. I'd never have guessed that such considerations entered her head. ‘I don't want to end up on the dole,' she added. Her fears were met with silence. I hoped her parents were wealthy.

It was dusk before the lord of the prose finally materialised under the Arch. Don't know why we'd bothered waiting. A reluctance to go home, must have been. He made his way across the cobbles in our direction, roaring drunk yet still managing to keep a glad eye out for admirers. The graduates and their families had disbanded by then. Glynn was out of luck.

‘Oh, the rotten bastard!' Antonia cried when he veered past House Eight and diverted to the Buttery. He had seen our five faces bearing down and thought the better of it. Antonia grabbed her coat and ran down the stairs, the others in close pursuit.

They had him surrounded by the time I arrived. He'd only made it as far as the side of the Dining Hall. Antonia was upbraiding him while the others stood at her side, silently lending their support. Glynn didn't like it one bit. He didn't appreciate being corrected by a shower of women. He growled and broke free of the arena of girls, then turned his terrible eyes on them. Red and white, they were; half mad. The girls instinctively drew back.

He panted fiercely at us through his nose, a bull working up to a charge, but then he winced sharply and tore at his ear. At first we thought a wasp had stung him. He shuddered and whimpered in an agonised paroxysm, clutching the side of his head, shambling about in a small circle, tripping over his own feet. Never had he looked more like a derelict.

The writer crumpled before our eyes, emitting a shocking moan. Aisling shook her head pleadingly, as if that would make it stop. I felt a bolt of terror that I would in good conscience describe as mortal, for Glynn, it appeared to me at that moment, had entered a realm beyond common mortal experience. Whatever afflicted him was invisible to the rest of us. There was nothing there, as far as we could see.

We formed an arc around his torment, stricken observers. No one could help him, no one knew what to do. That was the worst thing about it: we could only stare. The tears were stinging my eyes. Glynn's palm
remained clamped to his ear, trying to shut out unwanted voices. The demons. They were here.

He finally straightened up and lowered his fist, holding it out like a conjuror for the big reveal, ensuring he had our full attention. His arm trembled with the strain of clenching his fingers so tightly. Glynn threw us a grisly leer – victorious, scornful – before flinging the contents of his hand away with a force that nearly knocked him off balance. A glimpse of outstretched fingers silhouetted against the electric-blue dusk, then his hand dropped to his side.

Glynn stood winded in our circle, half the man we knew him to be. He had exorcised his demon, cast out his succubus, with the terrifying complication that we had
seen
it. Something three-dimensional had shot from his fingers and fallen into the shrubbery. We had heard it land. I looked to the others. They too were transfixed. Glynn delivered a final jubilant scowl – he seemed to have taken pleasure in the whole macabre spectacle – before lurching down the ramp to the Buttery.

‘Fuck,' I said when the double doors clattered shut behind him, ‘what the hell was that?'

They didn't answer. I glanced at them again, pale blue and black-eyed in the dusk. Aisling was rotating the crystal amulet hanging from her neck, her fingers spider-spinning.

‘What the fuck just happened?' I was worn out with petitioning them, sick of the sound of my own whine. Tiny wriggling sperm, big white ovum. Fuckhead, Antonia had called me. ‘Jesus Christ, one of you. What did Professor Glynn just throw into the bushes? Aisling? Faye? Tell me.'

Guinevere inclined her head toward Aisling. This
motion was so slight and so slow that it was sinister in the twilight, a statue coming to life. What good murderesses they'd have made. They continued to ignore me, though it didn't appear deliberate, more that they'd tuned me out, which was worse. As if, like Glynn, they were now functioning on a different plane altogether, one on which I was no longer audible, so thoroughly had I been dismissed. I could have shoved the lot of them over in frustration. Down they'd have toppled in a sprawl of limbs, a heap of porcelain dolls.

The four girls descended on the shrubbery, stooping to work the bare brown bushes like a paddy field.

‘Let's just go,' I urged them. ‘You'll find nothing in the dark.' Of course they'd find something. They'd find everything. They missed nothing, those women. ‘Jesus, come on. What's the point? It'll have escaped by now.'

Aisling straightened up sharply. ‘It'll have
what
?'

‘Go home, Declan,' said Guinevere. ‘You're only impeding us.' It was the first time she'd addressed me since our break-up.
Are
you
happy
now
?

The others kept their faces averted, and Aisling lowered her eyes and returned to her work. So they'd heard. They'd discussed the break-up behind my back. Don't know why that came as a surprise.

Their strained silence was punctured by a loud hiss. Faye stumbled out backwards from the shrubbery with a cry of pain. A small black sinewy creature darted along the base of the wall, snapping undergrowth in its wake. Aisling gasped in alarm. ‘Your arm, Faye,' said Guinevere, ‘it's bleeding.'

The girls crowded around to inspect the damage, what could be seen of it in the flicker of Antonia's lighter. Must have been the feral cat, they decided from
the pattern of the claw marks. They'd named it Sylvia after their favourite author. You'd see it crouched in the shadows watching the outside world in fright, if you knew the right places to look. They'd taken to leaving food out and reporting on its appetite and general appearance. I'll bet they even made it feel special for a while, the unfortunate trembling mite. Who'd watch out for it when the course was over? That's what I wanted to know.

Because it was so slight, barely able to defend its corner, the girls had assumed that Sylvia was female, though the cat could as easily have been a young male, I once pointed out. They didn't hear me, so I'd said it again. Still no response. They'd moved on to more pressing matters. I should have thrown myself on my back and bawled it in frustration: ‘This wretched suffering creature on which you take pity could just as easily be a young male!' They'd never have listened.

The group resumed their search. Faye poked around with her good hand, finding it difficult to accept that Sylvia could have done such a thing to her and making excuses for the animal. That was Faye all over. Didn't live in the real world, was unable to assimilate the idea of badness into her outlook. Got it, Antonia finally said without inflection, without her customary air of condescension. Night had fallen by then.

The girls climbed out of the shrubbery to examine their quarry, their skirts wet and clinging to their legs. On the palm of Antonia's outstretched hand lay a small curled trilobite. ‘It's his hearing aid!' I stammered with relief, ‘oh thank God for that!' but they'd tuned me out again. Faye would have to explain it all to me later, in that patient primary-school-teacher way of hers, and I
would sit by her knee, listening and nodding attentively, obedient as a Labrador, as good as gold. I hoped. Go home, Guinevere had told me, you're only impeding us, and not one of them had contradicted her.

‘I suppose we'd better bring it back to him,' Aisling said.

Antonia slowly tipped her palm, and Aisling caught the small salmon-pink plastic moulding in her cupped hands. ‘He's all yours,' Antonia informed them. ‘Go in there and tie his shoelaces. I'm washing my hands of him. Goodnight.'

She headed for the Nassau Street gate, shoulders thrown back in full Valkyrie mode. I watched her glide across the cobbles, steady as a ship on her stilettos. You could see why Glynn had fallen for her, all the same. No one could deny she had class. ‘You have to admire her sometimes,' I conceded, turning back to the group, but they had already deserted me.

I caught up with Antonia on the ramp to the Arts Block. She appraised me with an arched eyebrow. ‘Look who it is,’ she said without slowing her pace. Her causticity suited my frame of mind. I was in the mood for her.

‘State of Professor Glynn,’ I offered, believing it was a topic she’d rise to, but Antonia would not be drawn.

‘Glynn is not a professor. That’s an affectation he picked up in the States.’

‘But it says
Professor
Glynn
on his door in the English Department.’

‘No it doesn’t. Go back and check.’

We emerged onto Nassau Street and stood at the kerb, side by side with nothing to say to each other. A convoy of double-decker buses trundled towards us. Antonia was standing too close to the edge. There were so many buses, all of a sudden, that it became farcical. Just as it seemed a gap in the traffic might appear, another came heaving around the corner.

‘Do you want to go for a drink?’ I eventually asked. The screech of bus brakes drowned out my voice.

‘What?’ she shouted over the racket.

‘Can I buy you a drink?’ I shouted back.

The roar of bus engines died down like a drop in the wind, and all was suddenly hushed, as hushed as it had
been within the college walls, as if the street itself waited on Antonia’s answer. She appraised me with her arched eyebrow once more.

‘Certainly‚’ she replied when she was good and ready. ‘Certainly, you can buy me a drink,
Declan
.’ She enunciated my name with pointed scepticism as if, no more than Glynn’s title, she knew it to be a sham. There was something about her cynicism that endeared her to me then. She made herself easy to describe.

She led me to a cellar wine bar just past McGonagles, knowing full well that I could not afford such a place. I could see her smiling away to herself, enjoying my discomfort. She had style, Antonia. Style is everything, Glynn had told us, reeling off the names of the great prose stylists, urging us to devote our lives to them.

‘I’ve never been here before,’ I said after she’d ordered a bottle of Bordeaux. This information was of no interest to Antonia. She did not acknowledge it. They had seated us at a table in the corner. Her lipstick left a waxy cerise print on the rim of her wine glass. This pattern was repeated on the filter of her cigarette, a set of matching tableware. ‘Sorry,’ I said when I accidentally kicked her ankle. I glanced under the table when she registered no annoyance, and saw that it was only her handbag.

‘I didn’t realise Professor Glynn wore a hearing aid,’ I mentioned. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was that, or sit in silence.

‘Not any more he doesn’t, apparently. The man isn’t prepared to listen to us any longer. He made that perfectly clear when he chucked the dirty little contraption into the bushes. A metaphorical act, I suppose you would call it.’ Antonia gazed over my shoulder to see who else was in the room. No one took her fancy, and
she returned her attention to me. ‘What’s all this fuss between you and Lady Guinevere? Break her heart, did we?’

‘Oh,’ I said. That.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘
That.
’

‘What about you and Professor Glynn?’

Antonia shrugged and knocked back her glass of wine. He had called her Grendel behind her back a few weeks ago. ‘Where’s Grendel gotten too?’ he’d asked in the pub, and we’d burst into laughter. Well, only I had burst into laughter – the girls had looked at the floor – but the point was, we all knew who he meant. Just one of our number fit that description. I’d felt sorry for Antonia then, and stopped laughing. I’m sure she’d have appreciated my pity.

‘I suppose we have to make allowances for Professor Glynn,’ I said. ‘In his condition,’ I added.

Antonia topped up my glass and refilled hers, emptied it, refilled it again. ‘Jesus Christ, you make him sound like he’s ancient.’

‘Professor Glynn is ancient.’

‘He’s fifty-six.’

‘Exactly.’

Too late I realised my colossal blunder. Age was a delicate matter amongst women who were past it. Antonia’s mouth momentarily lost its footing, but it quickly regained its balance and she threw some more wine into it. ‘So fifty-six is ancient now, is it, Declan?’ She beamed that tight smile of hers across the table at me.
Ping
.

‘I suppose it’s not that old.’ My father was dead at fifty-two. ‘It’s not that old at all, really, when you think about it.’

‘How old do you think I am?’

‘You told us how old you are.’

‘Yes, but how
old
do you think I am? Do you think I am
old
?’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘Liar.’

She bent over to pick up her handbag, clipping the wine bottle with an elbow. It toppled over, and a broad ruby stain surged across the white linen towards me. I lurched to escape its path. This was an overreaction on my part. The tablecloth absorbed the spillage. I set the bottle upright. ‘Sorry,’ I said, though I wasn’t the one who had knocked it. I threw a napkin down to conceal the stain, as if it were somehow shameful, which it somehow was. ‘Shit, I’m really sorry.’

Antonia signalled to the waiter for a replacement bottle. ‘Doesn’t matter. It was nearly empty.’

The second bottle arrived. The waiter uncorked it and poured. ‘I don’t have the money to pay for this,’ I said quietly when he was gone.

‘I know. I will pay for it.’ She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I will pay for it,’ she repeated grimly.
There
is
always
a
price
.

The use of portent and double meaning featured prominently in Antonia’s prose, as did the persistently bitter tone, imprinting itself on every word that flowed from her pen, as ingrained as her accent. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair and kicked her handbag a third time. ‘Sorry,’ I said again.

‘For God’s sake, stop apologising.’ She excused herself to the bathroom, taking her handbag with her.

She was gone a long time. She was gone for so long, in fact, that I wondered whether she’d done a runner,
leaving me with a bill she knew I couldn’t pay. A master of plot twists and revenge tragedies. It was her sheer deviousness that gave her short stories their bite. I could all but hear her laughing down Grafton Street as she click-clacked away from the scene of the crime.

I was almost surprised when she returned to the table, her face freshly powdered, her mouth painted in, the lipstick so bright it drained the colour from her skin. ‘What?’ she said when she caught me taking it in.

‘Nothing.’

‘What?’ she said again. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Nothing. You look tired, that’s all.’

Antonia shook her head in disbelief and finished off another glass of wine. ‘Christ, you really know how to make a woman feel good about herself, don’t you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said before I could help myself.

She slammed the empty glass down on the table. ‘Stop fucking apologising. I am not a charity case.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘Why do you hate me?’ she suddenly demanded. This, out of nowhere.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Even the way you look at me. You make this face. You’re making it now.’

‘I don’t hate you, Antonia.’ I was stunned that she cared what I thought of her. Stunned she was aware I even had an opinion.

‘I’m not the only one to have noticed. The others agree with me.’

‘You’ve been discussing this with the others?’ Guinevere had lost her temper over it once. ‘Stop talking about her,’ she had snapped. ‘You’re always talking about her, Declan. Haven’t you noticed that? You never
stop bitching about Antonia. Why can’t you just leave her alone? You don’t like her, she doesn’t like you, so just forget about it.’

‘She doesn’t like me?’ I had probed. ‘Did she actually say that? Were those her exact words?’ etc. Fuckhead, she had called me. Guinevere cursed and warned me to drop the subject.

Antonia allowed her head to loll forward into her hands. It was a display worthy of Aisling. I had never seen her this drunk before. She seemed to be laughing, but I couldn’t say for certain. I was confronted with the neat white strip of scalp along her parting and was surprised to note that she appeared to be a natural blonde. I had expected grey. ‘I used to be a looker in my day,’ she said apropos of nothing, her voice muffled under her hair.

‘I don’t doubt it.’

I couldn’t imagine Antonia young. I categorically couldn’t see it. There was no ghost of lapsed girlhood in her, no inner child, the opposite of Glynn, who lacked an inner adult. She’d have been one of those prim little children he’d written about, no child at all but a miniature adult, silently making note of all that took place in the grown-up world, Mummy’s little double agent.

‘No really, Declan, I used to be considered something of a beauty. The boys were all after me. Shame I didn’t have the good sense to see it at the time. And now look at me.’

Aw Jesus. She caved in on herself before my horrified eyes like a rotten roof, like a collapsed grave, like a – oh God, she reached across the table for my hand. The desperation with which she seized my wrist was dreadful. She was going to cry. She was crying. She deteriorated
into a sack of shuddering bones. I don’t know why women, with all their intuition, persist in believing that displays of vulnerability will stimulate the protective instinct in a man. All they provoke is the desire to run. Glynn has written illuminatingly on the subject more than once.
You
stupid
bitch
, he had called her. Antonia’s weeping, intended to draw me instead repelled me, but she couldn’t see my reaction through her tears.

‘You’re still a beauty,’ I said, and clamped a hand to her shoulder, a dog giving the paw. ‘You’re still a … a looker.’ That word. So dated. It only made things worse. I stared at my hand, fastened to her shoulder like a lump of meat, and wondered how to retract it without exacerbating the situation. Poor Grendel. She angrily shrugged my hand off, God bless her, and knocked back the red wine, what was left of it. A thin black line had formed on her lips, a ridge of high-tide seaweed.

She opened her purse and tossed a crumpled twenty onto the table with her usual level of disdain. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said, and I was only too happy to oblige. I helped her into her coat and bundled her up the stairs before she got a chance to change her mind.

The cold fresh air of South Anne Street was a salve. A public phone in a row of phone boxes was ringing out. Antonia took my arm, and I escorted her, click-clack, to Dawson Street to put her in a taxi. When one pulled up, I opened the door and stood back gallantly, every inch the gentleman. ‘Get in, get in, for God’s sake,’ she said, gesturing impatiently at the back seat, as if I was holding the whole street up. I hesitated for a second before doing what I was told. I could hardly refuse her. I could hardly refuse her in that state. That is what I tell myself.