All Names Have Been Changed (3 page)

A backdrop of swollen clouds was steadily rising behind him, an assassin creeping up to slit his throat.
Clouds all but had minds in the fictions of Glynn. They were all but sentient. ‘The highwaymen of the sky,’ he had called them in
The
Devil’s
Party
, flattened in hiding on the horizon, ready to loom up and ambush you the second you came into range, as this one had done just now, all eighty foot of it. The chests of the gliding gulls looked so chalky white against its sodden greyness, and Glynn, he looked so small.

The pedestrian lights turned green and the crowd surged forward. Glynn headed back to the doghouse. He was living in a dank bedsit in a condemned building on Bachelors Walk by then, his wife having thrown him out the week before Christmas. Yet another fact I could never have inferred at the time. ‘Wait,’ I heard myself calling after him, but Glynn was already out of earshot, taking his retinue of screeching gulls with him. ‘Rain!’ they shrieked, ‘Rain!’ Fat drops burst on the pavement as the sky blackened. They fell tentatively at first, and then in a deluge, but still Glynn did not open his large umbrella, using it instead to strike a dustbin, then another, and so on up the quays,
bang
bang,
bang
bang
, confirming an opinion I’d heard muttered in licensed premises the length and breadth of the country: that here was a fellow who did not know what was good for him, and who was unwilling to learn.

On the last bus home that night, I jotted down notes obliquely based on this thwarted encounter, my handwriting juddering across the page like a seismogram. I’d filled a copybook by the time I disembarked, and over the next four nights, before returning to the factory in Leeds, I fashioned a short prose piece. It was my first Chapter One, the first of my many Chapter Ones.

I termed it an excerpt from a novel in my application
to Glynn for a place on his course, though there never was any novel. The piece was about, well, defeat, I suppose. Perhaps that’s what Glynn responded to when he read my few pages and added my name to the list alongside the names of the four girls – neither the imagery nor the characterisation, not the plot nor the language, but the all-pervasive tincture of failure. It must have struck a chord.

Ten months later, I was back on the boat, this time going against the tide of panicked young Irish who were bailing off the island like rats off a sinking ship. Not me. I wanted to be there when that ship sank. I wanted to see it happen. It was the final week of September 1985.

The country I returned to was comprehensively and publicly on its knees. My teenage years had been dominated by news bulletins detailing which factories had closed and where, incurring how many job losses, how many new additions to the live register. Having in ’82 completed an engineering degree out of a sense of duty to my poor mother, a widow then of some seventeen years, God have mercy on my father’s soul, I left Ireland to work in a manufacturing plant in Leeds. We produced components for various domestic appliances. Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, irons, sandwich makers.

Through living an existence entirely temporary in nature, barely an existence at all by Glynn’s red-blooded, hot-headed criteria, I had saved enough money to keep myself – were I to continue living frugally – for a full academic year in Trinity. Like many witless young idealists, I was of the conviction that money was of no inherent value in itself. I was twenty-five years old. By that age, Glynn had already published a debut collection
of short stories, one novel (the aforementioned
Prussian Blue
) and what he described during the Royal Irish Academy public interview as ‘a few aul poems’, finding two syllables in the word ‘poem’, as, very soon, did we.

I spent altogether twelve days trawling the streets for a suitable bedsit, a search that proved more sobering than anticipated. Michelmas term had already commenced, so only the dregs were left by then, the dives every other student had rejected. The full extent of the neglect Dublin had suffered was revealed to me in a series of tableaux presented by bored landlords. They swung doors open onto scenes of dilapidation so grim that they didn’t even attempt to defend them. Those rooms told a story not just of a recession, but of a city – once the second of the British Empire, it is hard to credit – that had been in decline for the guts of two centuries.

The rooms were situated mainly in the grand Georgian terraces and squares built in the late eighteenth century. The sad deterioration of those gracious family residences was not a reflection on Ireland’s distaste for its colonial past but, rather, on the lack of resources available to bestow on those fine old buildings the specialist care they required. Whole rows, entire streets, had been broken down into the maximum amount of rental units for the minimum possible investment. I encountered rooms with broken windows, rooms with no windows, rooms that were sited partially underground, or in poorly converted attic spaces, shards of daylight piercing the rafters. Rooms that were split into smaller rooms by panels of sheet rock, floor areas not much larger than coffins. Rooms that stank of mildew or grew mushrooms in the corner. Rooms with ivy poking through cracks in the walls, floors squelching underfoot.

Most disquieting of all were the faded traces of genteel living, lingering ghostlike in the details: the incomplete ceiling roses, the crumbling stuccowork, the chipped marble mantelpieces and shattered fanlights. Everywhere, ruined proportions; windows bricked up or knocked through, kitchenettes shoved in hall corners, toilets plumbed into reception rooms. Those unloved rooms pleaded with me to do something, do something, to speak on their behalf, or at least not to close the door again. I picked my way around, observing their condition without comment, mindful to touch nothing, as if they were plague victims or war casualties in a field hospital and my role was solely to count them, to compile an inventory of the condemned and the dead. The relief I experienced upon coming back out to fresh air fell far short of adequate.

The flat on Mountjoy Square, in the heart of Gardiner’s Dublin, became available late in the day for reasons that were never specified. It was Aisling, with her great fondness for the macabre, who planted the idea in my head that the previous tenant had dropped dead in it. Suicide, most likely, she reckoned. I followed the haunches of an Offaly man with a beer gut straining the buttons of his tea-coloured shirt as he laboured up the stairs. Up three flights to the top floor he led me, jangling his ring of keys as offhandedly as a jailer, pausing on each landing to catch his breath, all the time profaning softly. ‘Mother of God,’ he sighed. ‘Merciful hour. All the angels and saints.’

The room was clean, bright, plain. A single bed, desk and chair, two-bar electrical heater. The landlord placed his hands on his kidneys and surveyed the room as if
seeing it for the first time. ‘Snug,’ he noted with approval. ‘Central location, own sink.’

‘Take your time,’ he added before retiring to lean out the landing window for a smoke.

In gradient, it recalled that rickety bedroom in Arles that Van Gogh had painted a hundred years earlier, except that his floor sloped upward, not down. It was the shipshape bareness that most appealed to me, as if everything was nailed to the ground. The simple, practical sturdiness of its contents, the sense of things being orderly and under control, was as satisfactory to me as a tightened belt. I could picture myself bent over the stout desk scribbling past midnight, ripping pages from notebooks and firing crumpled balls into the corner. Such were my notions of the writing life. God knows where I got them. Not from Glynn. Can’t blame him for that. Out I went to the landing.

‘I’ll take it,’ I told the landlord, pulling out my roll of money. He flicked his cigarette out the window and tossed his head in a manner intended to convey approbation, but which somehow seemed more like a scoff.

I transported my belongings from the temporary student dormitory accommodation to Mountjoy Square that same afternoon. It took just two crossings. All I had were the few changes of clothes and, of course, my books. Local children overtook me on the street hauling tyres and furniture. A convoy of five carried an upended three-piece suite on their heads, ants raiding a picnic. Smaller kids, six-year-olds, lagged behind dragging the matching cushions. They were dismantling the city at a ferocious rate. Unlit bonfires loomed up from every patch of open ground, squat and totemic, some of them
already fifteen feet high though Halloween wasn’t for weeks.

I moved the desk in my new room from the corner to the window. Van Gogh’s window glowed with Provençal sunlight. Mine gave onto a concrete yard jammed with decades’ worth of household detritus: paint cans, ironing boards, a rusting cooker, half a bike. Nothing the local children could burn. A buddleia sprouted from the boundary wall, its flowers brown and curling. To the rear of the yard, a back lane ran the length of the terrace, joining up with Fitzgibbon Street and the flats. The rhythmic ticking sound which had promised during the viewing to be a grandfather clock turned out to be a dripping tap. The toilet and shower stall were located downstairs.

I unpacked my reference texts, my foolscap pads, my pens, and laid them out on the windowsill like a set of surgical instruments. The
Irish
Times
had printed a large black and white photograph of Glynn in his study when he won the Prix Médicis étranger, the first Irishman to have done so and, to date, the last. I was no more than nine or ten when I saw that image, but it stayed with me all those years. Glynn was seated at a leather-topped desk by a bay window, illuminated by a soft shaft of sunlight. Behind him, a great black wall of books breathed down the back of his neck. On the desk was a sheaf of papers to which he applied a silver pen which just so happened to catch the light as the camera shutter clicked, his tiny glinting sceptre.

How ferociously Glynn scowled in that photograph, as if he were engaged in the bloodiest act of creative engendering conceivable, though it is unlikely that he could have been writing anything much, really, not with
that photographer buzzing about the room like a fly. The murderous frown must have been at the intrusion. ‘Leave me alone,’ he was scrawling across his papers, by the looks of it. ‘Go away, feck off, get out.’ Oh, to be there, not in Glynn’s study, but any study, to be any writer in any study, to break through to that fictive space, the factory floor of the imagination. If there was a secret door leading to it, a revolving bookcase, a sliding panel, it had so far proved beyond my ability to locate it. I had tried, God knows I had tried, to find it by myself. Glynn would show us how to get there. Glynn, of all people, would know.

I never once saw the interior of Trinity in high summer, it has only now occurred to me. Never set foot within those collegiate walls outside of the academic calendar, despite having lived in Dublin for years, and despite the campus obstructing everything. Perhaps it was for this reason that Trinity never fully seemed part of the city to me but was instead an intermittent phenomenon, seasonal as a winter lake.

The clatter and blare of Dame Street died away as I emerged from the darkness of Front Arch onto the broad cobbled expanse of the quad. It was an impressive vista. Front Square and its environs possessed the tranquil air of a monastic cloister – an unsettling trait, depending on how you felt about ghosts. Trinity was built on lands confiscated from the suppressed Augustinian Monastery of All Hallows which had occupied the grounds since the twelfth century. The newest construction, the Graduates Memorial Building, was almost a hundred years old, and the oldest (not one of the original Elizabethan structures had survived) was The Rubrics, dating from 1700. The sole evidence of the twentieth century was the student body itself, and even they seemed relics of a time past, so aloof, so reserved was their demeanour. I was half an hour early.

I knocked on the front door of House Eight and pushed it open when I got no response. A notice was taped to the wall. ‘Writing workshop top floor,' it read. Not Glynn's handwriting. Each door I passed on the way up the wooden stairs was shut, no trace of activity audible on the other side.

The workshop was not at all as anticipated. I'd expected floor-to-ceiling bookcases, as if books would propagate more books, words might self-seed. I'd hoped to step into that photograph of Glynn in his study, I suppose, but there were no bookcases, not even a shelf. The walls were bare as an egg. Plastic chairs and melamine tables were set out on the floor, no better than a staff canteen. A heavier table with side drawers was situated at the top. I placed my foolscap pad on a desk in the middle and glanced up at the clock on the wall. Thirty-three minutes to twelve. The clock was running late.

At six minutes to noon by the faulty clock, the group entered the building. Aisling, Faye, Guinevere, and Antonia. They were cutting it fine. The other three students had already turned up by then; one girl sat by the radiator under the window, the other next to the door. The guy with the ponytail and army fatigues had established a little dugout in the corner. We'd been sitting in silence for maybe five minutes when the door on ground level was thrown open. The sound of female laughter came drifting up the stairs, ascending the building as steadily as fire. Not Glynn then. My disappointment didn't last long. The group crowded through the door in boisterous pairs, talking, the whole time talking, all at once so as to confuse me. Four women. Two of them girls.

The presence of four silent strangers in the workshop ahead of them did not disrupt the flow of their conversation. The impact of Beckett's Protestantism and Joyce's Catholicism upon their respective writing styles was the discussion heading. Their cohesion, their bantering familiarity, was such that I assumed they'd known each other from before. What a surprise it was to learn some weeks later that they'd met on the way in the door. They gave such an impression of an organic whole that perhaps I never saw one without the spectrum of the other three. Even Guinevere. It proved a tricky process extracting her from their chrysalis, to the extent that in our private moments I sometimes sensed them listening in, waiting for me to put a foot wrong, poised to dive in and snatch her back.

A hush fell as the hands of the schoolhouse clock approached noon. All of us by then were seated. You would think Glynn was scheduled to appear with a puff of smoke when the big and little hands connected, never mind that the clock was slow.

‘Jesus, I hate this kind of weather,' one of them murmured, the eldest. West Brit accent. Hard to miss it. ‘For heaven's sake, just look at it.'

We turned our heads to the window, synchronised swimmers. A soft rain was falling on the shining slate rooftops. It was almost, but not quite, mist. An avenging angel in the distance brandished a sword before a verdigris dome. There was something immensely restful about this scene. The lack of living souls in it, probably.

‘I knew it,' said the same woman when noon by the slow clock had come and gone. Antonia. Her standards were unattainably high. ‘Glynn's not coming. I knew he wouldn't come. I just bloody knew it.'

The air seemed to go out of the room at this declaration. We had managed to fool ourselves until then, but Antonia was right. The chances of Glynn fulfilling a contractual obligation with an academic institution were laughable at best. His errant behaviour had been fussily documented over the years. He had made a name for himself by defaulting on contracts, ignoring writs, laughing off threats and generally bowling along with apparent impunity, capitalising on the extenuating circumstances allegedly occasioned by the artistic personality. There was nothing to be gained from suing a man with a print run of just a few thousand. Antonia dropped her head into her hands.

‘I cannot believe I've been so effing stupid,' she said, ‘coughing up good money for this.' Her words were met with rueful assent.

There was a discussion then, at least there must've been, though my recollection is that the four, my four, simply stood up and left. They filed out in pairs as before, and the workshop resumed its silence. I stood up and crossed over to the window to observe their exit. They reappeared below on Front Square and headed off in the direction of the Buttery, forming geometrical shapes as they moved along the cobbles – a parallelogram, a trapezoid, a diamond.

A lone seagull wheeled in a circle above the Examination Hall, its cries as distant as a star. I watched until the group had disappeared from sight, and then I watched the empty space that had opened in their wake, obscurely disappointed that they hadn't taken me with them. But why would they? They did not know me from Adam. Behind me, after a respectable period of time had elapsed, the other three students stole back down the
stairs as discreetly as they were able, as if slipping away early from a funeral.

Glynn stood us up again the second week. Antonia maintained her position that she knew it, just bloody knew it, always had known it, that Glynn wasn't going to show up at all, ever, that we'd flushed our money down the jacks and landed ourselves with a pig in a poke. I didn't question how she could be so adamant, how it was possible to know in advance what Glynn – a capricious man at the best of times – would and would not do. It seemed natural that those around me should know more about Glynn than I knew. Everybody in Trinity was an authority on him.

‘We should report him,' Antonia said. ‘We should go this minute to the Dean of Studies, all of us.' She picked up her handbag.

‘But we can't do that!' the one with the auburn hair protested. Faye. ‘We'll get Professor Glynn into trouble.'

‘Yeah,' the one with the black hair and white face agreed. ‘Then we'll never see him.' Antonia hadn't thought of that. He'd outwitted her already. She reluctantly returned her handbag to the floor.

In the terrible absence of Glynn, I took to the library. Days on end I spent in the English section that October, arriving at opening time, staying put until the lights flashed last orders. On Saturday mornings, while normal students slept, I was in there on the off chance that the muse might creep up when no one was looking, as if inspiration were not a mental process but a ghost. If I could've slipped into that library in the dead of night, I would have, those early weeks, searching for a portal through which to access the metaphysical world of letters.
I felt it as a constant alongside me, that world; fecund, poetical, but out of reach.

Week three. Glynn stood us up a third time. The group turned and left the workshop almost as soon as they'd arrived; a flock of swallows switching direction mid-flight.

The humanities library was located in the basement of the Arts Block. It had bare cement walls and orange carpet tiles. Figures wandered through the forest of bookcases; visible, occluded, visible, occluded. I saw Guinevere there from time to time, twirling a corkscrew curl around her finger as she read. Sometimes her lips pouted to form a particularly intriguing word, I couldn't help but notice. She had doubtlessly entered that serene state which so deftly eluded me. I didn't dare approach her. I didn't dare interrupt. At night, after they'd herded us out of the library to lock up, I crossed back over to the other side of the city, having failed once again to break through to that yearned-for condition, the contemplation of which had sustained me through those long quiet years in England.

One night I happened upon Aisling, sitting alone facing the wall in the Anglo-Saxon corner. It was her chemical hair that caught my attention as I passed, blacker than anything that occurred in the natural world and as magnetic to the eye as a car crash. On the edge of her desk stood a tower of books, stacked carelessly to the verge of collapse.

I padded back to my desk and sat there for a few indecisive minutes. The air conditioning exhaled down the back of my neck, too actual, too pulmonary. I couldn't shake the image of Aisling's precarious tower of books.
A minor adjustment was all it would take to put right. I could fix it. I could sort it out. It was a simple problem.

I stood up and headed in Aisling's direction, no notion of what I would say to her, but full of resolution. Would she recognise my face from the workshop? When I rounded the corner, the Anglo-Saxon section was empty. Spanning the length of Aisling's desk: a scattered fan of books. I don't know what precisely this scene reflected back to me, but panic ballooned in my throat at the sight of it. The deadened atmosphere of the basement was suddenly intolerable. I packed up my belongings and left.

New Square was deserted, not a soul in sight. The cobbles glistened in the lamplight and drizzle. I was nothing but a black shadow crossing the stones. I veered off the path and pressed my forehead against the façade of the Colonnades. It was as clammy as the wall of a cave. I would describe my state at that moment as borderline murderous. I had left it too late, you see; I saw. The years spent cherishing the aspiration to be a writer had wrapped it up and sealed it off, rendering it as discrete and inaccessible to the substance of my being as a pearl was to an oyster.

It was Glynn I blamed. He had lured me there, after all. He had enticed me to that bleak place only to abandon me to it. Had he materialised at that point, had he just happened to stray past, God forgive me, I'd have taken a run at him. The man wouldn't even have known who I was.

We met in House Eight for the fourth week. Guinevere drummed her fingers, Aisling inscribed the desk with the ornamental dagger hanging from her neck.

‘How long can this go on?' Antonia wondered out loud.

Faye did her best to put a brave face on things so that the rest of us wouldn't lose heart. ‘I'm sure Professor Glynn has a very good reason,' she offered. Antonia wanted to hear it.

The chairs we had assumed that first day had become set fixtures. The group sat up front in a row of four like the school debating team. I was stationed a few rows behind, by no means a jolly presence. One of the other girls was wedged against the radiator, but the second girl, the one who used to sit by the door, hadn't shown up that week. We never saw her again. The guy with the ponytail was still dug into his corner, the army-surplus jacket on his desk demarking his territory.

Antonia was complaining about Glynn; the usual drill. I wasn't paying attention to the specifics. I was thinking that I hadn't known loneliness like it before, despite my years in England. It was the loneliness of being in the company of the group, but not part of it. I gazed at them, at their baffling closed circuit of four. Aisling's hair was as black and blank as a hole in the universe, a rip in the fabric of reality.

Guinevere must have sensed me staring. I hadn't made a sound, but she turned around and met my eye and smiled. This was a smile of considerable sweetness. I smiled back and was still smiling long after she'd looked away. The group then packed up and left the workshop in that abrupt, symbiotic manner of theirs. The atmosphere in the workshop sagged. I was almost used to it.

And then, out of nowhere, seconds after their departure, the guy with the ponytail got to his feet. His name was Mike and he spoke without removing his eyes from the window. ‘Lads,' said Mike, ‘he's coming.'