All Names Have Been Changed (17 page)

Her house had a name. I can no longer put my finger on it. Something genteel and Anglo. I would have expected no less of her. I can see the black font in my mind’s eye to this day, but not the word itself, painted in duplicate in block capitals like a trespassing sign, warning me as I passed through her twin gateposts to turn back, turn back, but did I listen? She had me going by then.

In the back of the taxi she had linked my arm as before, and held it for the duration of the journey against the heft of her breast, easing herself towards me, a warm pliant mass, a long thigh pressed to mine, until I felt a longing for her that almost pained me. We travelled in silence. Antonia kept her eyes on the road ahead, but when I glanced at her face I saw the slight smile at the corner of her lips. She was pleased with her night’s work.

She paid for the taxi, and it pulled away, leaving the two of us facing each other across a deserted street. A great, still moon was hanging in the sky, though it was not still at all but hurtling through the glittering wastes faster than I had the wit to understand. That the moon was serene was yet another delusion. Had I thought that, or read it in Glynn? ‘Long way from home, eh soldier?’ Antonia teased. The crunch of gravel on her driveway
delineated the point at which the mark had been irrevocably overstepped. I found I couldn’t turn back.

‘Beware of the Dog’ read the sign mounted above the brass letterbox on her lacquered door. Antonia laughed when she caught me looking at it. ‘There is no dog, silly,’ she said, shaking her head at my naivety in falling for that one. She swung the door open and pulled me inside.

I fucked her first on the stairs and then in her bedroom. I fucked her as many times as she wished to be fucked. Neither one of us was willing to admit defeat first, neither one prepared to lose face. She issued instructions and guided me into positions as if this tutoring role were the prerogative and duty of the older woman, as if she had something to teach me, and I had something to learn. If I was considerably rougher with her than I should have been, Antonia did not flinch, but took it on the chin, being the kind of woman who was pathologically unable to admit that you were hurting her, even if it killed her. Two could play at that game.

As the night wore on, I grew progressively more resentful. ‘Fuck,’ I remember crying up to the ceiling in sheer frustration and regret.

‘That’s it,’ she gasped, throwing back her head, displaying her long white neck, which I instinctively placed my hand on, marvelling at its fragility, at how easy it would have been to throttle her.
You
stupid
bitch
.
Are
you
happy
now?
I didn’t really understand the grace of youth until Antonia drained it out of me, tainting it with knowledge of what it was to have lost youth, or to have never possessed it in the first place. It was a party she had watched all her life from the outside. And now the party was over.

Women only fall asleep in your arms in novels.
Antonia wanted to talk about her broken marriage, as if it were a subject I could cast light on. What did she think I could possibly say to her? I just kept nodding. She had married too young, she explained. Barely eighteen. Straight out of school. I nodded. She’d subsequently felt she’d missed out on so much. She had never slept with a boy my age when she was a girl my age. Edmund had been so much older than her, you see. I nodded.

‘So that’s why you fucked me. To see what you were missing.’

‘I burgled your bank of youth,’ she smiled. I didn’t think it was funny. ‘Oh don’t be like that,’ she cajoled, marching her fingers up the centre of my chest like a little man. I couldn’t stand childish games in a grown woman and rolled onto my side to get away from her. There was a framed photograph of a blonde girl on her bedside table. I picked it up to change the subject.

‘Is this you?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s my daughter. She lives with Edmund now.’

I didn’t know what to say. It had never occurred to me that Antonia could be a mother. She had never mentioned her child before. I put the photograph back on the table.

A terrible confession followed. It must have been four in the morning by then, no sign of it yet getting bright, no assurance of an end in sight. Antonia had just returned from the bathroom, and she climbed back into bed, shivering with the cold. Her eyes were enormous in the darkness. She rested her head in the crook of my arm. ‘I’ve never slept with anyone other than my husband,’ she said in a small voice. Then she started to cry.

I stroked her hair. Stroked it mechanically, back and
forth, a windscreen wiper. It seemed like the right thing to do, but it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. Antonia was too grown up for me to stroke her hair. We would have to sit across from each other in class every Wednesday. ‘We must never tell anyone about this,’ she whispered, glancing up at me.

‘No,’ I agreed vehemently.

She was feeling emotional because she hadn’t slept well last night. At least, I think that’s what she was trying to tell me. She was feeling emotional, she said, she hadn’t slept well last night, but she didn’t use the conjunction ‘because’. I don’t know why she was feeling emotional. I didn’t know what this term ‘feeling emotional’ meant, exactly, as it applied to her. I knew what it meant to me – it meant the desire to punch a wall – but it appeared to denote something altogether different to Antonia, something spongy and discoloured and spreading that would eventually get the better of her, a bruise on an apple. She also seemed to think that I would empathise, maybe even attempt to help. Where did she get such notions? Seeing as she was older than the rest of us, I had taken it for granted that she was better equipped to take care of herself, but it turned out her seniority made her even more vulnerable. The gradient increased as your resources diminished. And me assuming life got easier with every passing year. Me, in fact, counting on it.

‘So you didn’t shag Glynn then?’

‘No, I didn’t shag Glynn, as you so elegantly phrase it.’

‘So why did he call you a stupid bitch?’

Antonia winced at the recollection. ‘Letters,’ she admitted eventually. ‘I sent him some anonymous letters.
We had a relationship briefly, but he went back to his wife. I was terribly hurt at the time. He never knew who’d written them until I confessed in the pub that night. Shouldn’t have opened my mouth.’

I stopped stroking her hair and sat up, dislodging her from the crook of my arm. ‘You were the one sending those letters?’

‘Jesus, Declan, doesn’t anyone tell you anything?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They don’t.’

Antonia looked unwell by the time the bleak dawn light came seeping through her bedroom curtains. It was obvious from the way she kept fiddling with her hair, pulling it forward over her face, that she was embarrassed to be seen in that state. I couldn’t blame her. Her hands, when she sat on the edge of the bed to light a cigarette, were shaking. The sight reminded me of the prelude to one of my mother’s rages. Wells of unhappiness so deep, so terminal, that they could never be appeased. The massive, obstructive fact of my mother’s disappointment in life was distressing to the point that I had started to hate being near her. Which was little better in practice than hating the woman herself, after all that she had done for me.

I stopped responding to Antonia’s words. I stopped nodding. Women want to talk when you least feel able. At first she kept offering sentences that trailed off, leaving gaps for me to jump in and assert the opposite. ‘This has been a huge mistake, Declan …’ she murmured, watching my face closely, inviting me to disagree, to extend some reassurance. I didn’t open my mouth. ‘No, really, it was all my fault …’, ‘I’m far too old for you …’, ‘I should have known better …’ I didn’t beg to differ.

Next thing she was telling me that her unhappiness
was my fault, that I was inconsiderate, heartless, cruel – that I had
used
her
. All she wanted was not to feel rejected for once in her shitty life. Was that so much to ask? That’s when I got up and left. I stood up and dressed quickly and walked out of her bedroom, feeling as guilty as a four-year-old boy, but there you have it. Knowing with every step that I was fucking up again, but without exactly understanding why, and without exactly caring.

‘That’s right!’ she was shouting after me, standing at the top of the stairs in her nightdress, clinging to the banisters like a madwoman. How much smaller she was without her heels. Almost ordinary. Almost plain. ‘Run away!’ she screamed. ‘You just run away!’ My mother’s words to the letter. Uncanny. Antonia had probably learned them from her mother, who had in turn learned them from her mother before her. Women were never happy. They didn’t want to be happy. They deliberately pushed all your buttons, manipulated you into acting the bollocks, then derived a perverse satisfaction out of watching you crack and seeing their blackest suspicions confirmed. Fuckhead, she had called me.

Antonia’s face up there on the landing was monstrous with disgust and triumph, as if she had finally tricked me into revealing my true colours, and those colours were even uglier than she could have hoped for.
You
stupid
bitch.
Are
you
happy
now?
I pulled on my shoes and grabbed my jacket from the floor. I could hardly bear to look at her.

She hurled a book down the stairs as I undid the latch. How symbolic. ‘Tinker,’ she hissed. ‘Dirty little tinker.’ I slammed her lacquered door behind me. Beware of the Dog. Was it then that my hatred for Antonia peaked? No, I was only getting started.

The street lights were still glowing orange. It was about half six in the morning, judging by the grubby light. I’d left my watch behind on Antonia’s bedside table. No turning back. I crunched across the gravel driveway delineating the point at which the mark had been irrevocably overstepped and shut the wrought iron gate behind me. We had left it askew the night before in our haste.

I did not glance up at her bedroom window. It’s the one thing a man’s supposed to do – look over his shoulder to steal a last lingering glimpse of his beloved, displaying how he cannot get his fill of her. Antonia would be watching for the glance, or watching for its omission, rather, to add to her slate. She’d be standing by that window in her white nightdress like a ghost, her ashen face more ashen behind the pane of glass, eyes boring into the back of my skull until I disappeared from view. It was a long, straight street.

I pulled up my collar and tucked in my chin. A few flakes of snow drifted down, grey as the cloud that had issued them. My empty stomach sucked and squelched with every step, a drain being unblocked with a plunger. The last of the street lights petered out as it grew bright, if you could call it bright. I wouldn’t. I reached for a
stick of gum but the packet was empty. I crumpled it in my fist and jammed it into a hedge.

Antonia’s road intersected with a thoroughfare. A general feeling of flintiness loured about the place, a prevailing lack of comfort. The pavement was as perishing as compacted ice. It was hard on the bones. The buses weren’t up and running yet. I did not know that part of the city. I was as lost as I had ever been.

The second I rounded the corner out of Antonia’s sight, I had the most unbelievable headache. I crouched over by a pebbledash wall and cradled the crown of my head in my hands, pleading for it to pass, practically praying, thinking at one point that something had burst, or was about to.
There
is
always
a
price
. Eventually, the headache lifted, and I floundered on as best I was able. The odd car was out on the road by then, windscreen frosted and exhaust pipe pluming. How people found the will to leave their beds at that godforsaken hour to climb into frozen metal machines, I did not know. It was beyond me.

Any self-respecting man would have retreated to an early house, but it was pity I was after, not oblivion. My thoughts alighted on Guinevere. She was their natural destination. I had loved her before I met her. She was in every book, every song, every poem. It was not too late for us, I felt certain in my desperation, and was buoyed up by the conviction. I would place my aching head on her lap and beg forgiveness. The prospect made me walk faster. A car screeched past with a broken fan belt. I would present myself at her door and make a full confession, then beseech her to absolve me. It was too much responsibility to place on a young girl’s shoulders, but I didn’t let that stop me.

The threat of snow had passed by the time I made it to her door. I had been walking for maybe two hours, half-starved and smelling of another woman. What a relief it was to turn the corner onto her familiar cul-de-sac, those sleepy redbrick cottages with their net curtains and pink geraniums. No crunch of irrevocable gravel, no twin block-capital trespassing signs. ‘I love you,’ I was chanting as I stumbled along the cracked uneven paving leading to her door. ‘I love you, I love you, oh I love you, my love.’ Guinevere’s curtains were drawn.

The black cat from the house next door displayed itself archly behind the glass, as if it were the finest merchandise in the city’s finest shop window. I rapped on Guinevere’s door with the brass knocker. I gave it a good clatter. It took a few goes to rouse her. Her bedroom was at the back. I was finding it difficult to contain my excitement. When she finally answered the door, she looked dismayed to find me standing on her doorstep. It was not the reaction I’d been hoping for.

‘Declan,’ she said. Why was she whispering?

I rushed forward, but the door was not opened to me. Guinevere held it fast. ‘What are you doing here?’ she wanted to know, ‘at this hour? God almighty, go home.’ She was wearing her powder-blue dressing gown, and not much else besides.

I tried to get a hold of her waist to pull her to me but she back-stepped out of my grasp. ‘Go home, Declan,’ she warned me again, and tried to close the door. I jammed in the foot before she got it shut. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered in exasperation. Her eyes had a raw look. She had been crying. For a sickening moment I wondered whether Antonia had phoned her.
You
stupid
bitch
.
There
is
always
a
price
. But Guinevere didn’t have a
phone. I reached for her hand, but she wouldn’t let go of the door.

‘Oh my beautiful girl, I’m so sorry,’ I blurted. ‘I’m so sorry for everything. I’ve been a selfish bastard, and a stupid one, but I love you so much. I’ll never hurt you again. Let’s give it another go. Please don’t shake your head at me like that.’

I attempted to kiss her through the chink in the door, but she averted her face. I groaned with the tender agony of it. There was a movement in the gloom behind her: I froze. She wasn’t alone in there. I craned my neck to get a look over her shoulder. Emerging from her bedroom, and craning his neck to get a look at me, was Glynn.

‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ I said.

Guinevere glanced over her shoulder and saw Glynn standing there, the two of us squaring up to each other like dogs. She gasped and turned back to me. ‘Declan, please,’ she pleaded, but what was there to say? I looked at her, then at Glynn in the shadows, then back at her, as if doing some exercise for my focal length, though it was my brain that lacked flexibility, not my eyesight. They did not belong on the same visual plane. Ariel and Caliban. ‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ I said again.

Guinevere started talking rapidly, tears rolling down her cheeks in panic. Glynn skulked at the back of the cottage in his vest and kacks, letting the girl defend him, the craven bollocks. I didn’t take my eyes off the prick for so much as one second. The prick didn’t take his eyes off me. Everything had become abstract and disconnected in my rage. Guinevere was saying his words, but in her voice. He was the ventriloquist, and she was his doll, propped up on his knee, doing his bidding. ‘He needed me,’ she was imploring me,
I
wanted
her,
so
I
took
her
.
‘He was in crisis,’
I
manipulated
her
into
bed
. ‘You didn’t see the state he was in last night,’
I
pulled
every
trick
in
the
book,
bud
. ‘It’s delicate, Declan.’
Now
shag
off
home,
son,
can’t
you
see
we’re
busy
? Guinevere seemed to be trying to convince herself as much as anyone.

‘Stop talking!’ I shouted when I could bear it no longer. Guinevere saw what was going to happen next and slammed the door in my face before I could go in there and break the fucker’s neck for him. It was the wall I drove my fist into. I smashed it into one of her red bricks and screamed as the Shockwaves ripped through my frame. I sank down on my hunkers with the pain, clutching my wrist with my good hand, holding it to my chest like a wounded bird. I could hear them arguing inside. I like to think that Guinevere wanted to rush out to help me, but that Glynn wouldn’t hear of it. That’s what I like to think. I am entitled to my opinions. A rivulet of blood trickled down my forearm. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I started laughing. Mad, hysterical, unhinged laughing, echoing up and down the narrow cul-de-sac. It was a trick I had learned from Aisling.

Are
you
happy
now?
Guinevere had wanted to know. I pushed her letterbox open. ‘Yes,’ I screamed into the rectangular vault, ‘yes I am Yes!’