All Names Have Been Changed (4 page)

We each had a favourite photograph of Glynn. Mine was the aforementioned
Irish
Times
shot taken in his study, or ‘The great writer at work,’ as I had mentally subtitled it. Faye nominated the one taken in the early 1970s by the
Observer
, which was subsequently reprinted in the British broadsheets every time Glynn won a prize, and he was on a roll that decade, go on you good thing. What a rush of fondness that particular portrait generated. He could be a real charmer when it suited him, P. J. Glynn. The photographer must have been a woman. We were as familiar with his face in that shot as we were with the faces of our grandparents. You would swear that the man was not a complete stranger to us all. The jaunty go-heck of him caught by the lens appealed to Faye enormously. This was how she liked to think of him – relaxed, good-humoured, congenial, on the brink of astonishing literary achievement but making no great fuss of it.

He was pictured on what the caption printed beneath described simply as ‘a Dublin street’, leaning at an angle of around sixty degrees against the wooden jamb of what we decided was the door to Bartley Dunne’s. By ‘we’, I mean, of course, ‘they’: the women. The women declared it the door to Bartley’s, and so it became the
door to Bartley’s – the fiction-making process in action. I just went along with their reasoning. How they were so positive it was the door to Bartley’s, I have no idea. No definitive means of identification were in shot. Just another of those arbitrary decisions the group arrived at which went on to enter the realm of fact. For all I know, they were right.

The composition of the image was immensely attractive. Faye kept a folded copy in an envelope as a bookmark, delicate as a pressed flower. The interior of the pub, what could be seen of it, formed a narrow column of black ink running the full length of the left-hand side of the frame. In the space between Glynn’s tilted body, the door and the pavement stood a brilliant triangle of morning light, solid and true as an object in its own right. Glynn somehow always contrived to lure the eye toward the unseen. The triangle is just one example.

He had more hair then, and less flesh, and was dressed in old jeans and a plain white shirt. The shirt was open at the collar and rolled up at the sleeves, for all the world a man who’d logged a hard day’s graft. Against the white cotton, his skin looked darker than we knew it to be, and his eyes looked black, not blue. ‘Byronic’ was the word Faye employed. His gaze was candid in the image, amenable even, lacking the customary scowl that appeared when photographers did. In fact, in that picture he almost looked pleased. I would go so far as to say happy.

What is not immediately apparent to the casual observer is that Glynn is dressed for a different season. You have to look at the photograph for a long time, and still there is no guarantee that you will notice this for yourself. I for one did not. Faye had to point it out. It
was the telltale plume of white breath escaping from his mouth that had alerted her keen eye. ‘See how cold it is?’ she asked me, tapping the ghostly vapour with her fingernail. I dismissed it as an exhalation from his cigarette. Faye seemed prepared for this response – to have anticipated it, in fact, as if already she had learned to expect no better from me. ‘What cigarette?’ she countered, searching not the photograph, but my face. ‘Show me where you see the cigarette, Declan.’ It was unlike her to be so assertive.

I examined the petal-frail newspaper cutting again. Faye was right. There was no cigarette in Glynn’s hand, though I could have sworn I’d seen one a second before. The other three had remained attentive throughout this exchange. If they’d been darting knowing looks around the table at my expense, these too had escaped my notice.

‘Look at the background figures,’ Faye continued in the manner of a tour guide discoursing upon a great painting, now broadening her frame of reference to encompass the pedestrians on the street. She had given her subject much consideration. ‘Look at the way they’re huddled up, Declan. They’re absolutely perished.’

I could not confute her. The passers-by did indeed look frozen, buttoned into winter coats and wrapped up in scarves, some of them moving at such a clip that all the camera had captured was a blur of limbs. Glynn’s nonchalant deportment betrayed no vulnerability to the cold against which the ordinary mortals around him struggled. How easeful he looked, the still centre of the image, as if it were perpetually summer in his domain. Antonia, of course, could well have had the measure of him when she pronounced him too effing
plastered to register the elements.

This immunity to his surroundings seemed proof of something. It distinguished Glynn as fundamentally, intrinsically different to the rest of us. So entirely preoccupied was that great forehead with matters cerebral there simply wasn’t room left in it to bother with minor details such as the weather. Transported is the word. This appealed to our notions of what a writer was. It was the condition to which we aspired. Glynn was everything in that photograph that an artist at the height of his powers should be, from the ink stains on his fingertips to the dishevelment of his hair. That was the Glynn we had signed up to see, and that was the Glynn we got.

The group backed up into the workshop when they heard the door on the ground floor slam. They resumed their seats with lowered eyes, their defection foiled. Glynn had put a halt to their gallop. I will not say I wasn’t pleased to see them chastened. I threw a triumphant glance back at your man in the corner, suddenly my ally, but Mike didn’t register my smirk. He couldn’t take his eyes off the workshop door. The footsteps were getting louder.

We froze when Glynn at last appeared – you would think he had pulled a gun on us. He paused in the doorway to consider the room and its occupants. Glynn was never a big enough name for him. Hieronymus Bosch, he should have been called. Lucas Cranach the Elder. I was transfixed, as bad as the rest of them. His sheer tangibility was more than I’d bargained for.

He walked to the top of the room and pulled out the chair from the large desk, frowning at it as if it fell far short of his expectations. Still he hadn’t spoken a word.
Finally he threw down his bulk and faced us. The silence at that point was absolute. It was not a formal silence, but a stricken one. We agreed later how alarming it had been the way he’d just sat there glaring at us like that, with such forthright disdain, such open contempt, and for such a protracted period of time too. The lot of us were in a rush to discuss him, to blurt our first impressions the second his back was turned, but while the man himself sat entrenched before us, we couldn’t have opened our mouths if we’d tried to.

Glynn leaned back in the chair the better to get a good look at us. He folded his arms over his chest, which rose and fell soundlessly – he appeared to be panting, though he wasn’t out of breath, not that we could tell. Faye said she thought he was having a heart attack, then thought she was having one herself at this prospect. From the outset, he commanded this level of rapt, almost fearful, concern. He was a spectacle we watched, a visual installation. We never knew what to expect.

Glynn’s scornful gaze roved from one face to the next, sizing up who first to attack. Strange, how he singled the five of us out for special scrutiny, though there were seven students seated before him that first class. We like to think that he chose us. That’s what we like to think. He did not speak for the longest time, just stared at each of us in turn. Impossible to know what he was thinking during this interlude. Glynn’s mind was an object of fascination and some perplexity, a jellyfish washed up on a beach.

A jolt when his eyes met mine. To my shame, I couldn’t keep from blinking. That unnervingly silent bullfrog inflation and contraction of his chest – was he doing it on purpose? Was it a deliberate act of intimidation?
There is every likelihood. My skin burned under the full force of his attention, but despite this uncomfortable proximity – intimacy, I almost called it – still I felt no closer to the artistic sensibility driving him, becoming instead only more aware of his remoteness, of the breadth of the gulf dividing us. I looked down at my notebook, my empty, unmarked notebook, unable to sustain his gaze.

When I raised my eyes again, Glynn had moved on. He was staring now at Guinevere, and Guinevere, more power to the girl, was staring right back. Aisling tilted her palms toward the great writer as if warming them at a fire. So she felt the heat radiating off him too.

The way he kept soundlessly panting like that, physically spent: I too wanted to be emptied out like him. Scraped clean of the seething mess within, granted the compensation of seeing it distilled into words, a life lived, an imagination quarried. Exorcisms, he had once called his books – demons that had been cast out to take form, hoisted up on bookshelves for all the world to see, a rack of carcasses in a butcher’s window.

‘What do you want from me?’ Glynn finally demanded, the words propelled at us as if he’d dealt them a belt of a hurl. The question highlighted a troubling discrepancy, one we had failed to anticipate. Glynn’s pre-eminence in our lives, the central role he had played, was such that, on some instinctive level, we expected him to recognise if not us, then our type. We had presumed he would understand innately what had driven us to his door, see that only he could help us with it and know it wasn’t something that could be communicated in a sentence, not by us at least.

When Glynn got no response, he tried another tack.

‘Why do you need me?’

‘We don’t need you,’ Antonia snapped, averting her face and presenting Glynn with a wing of ash-blonde hair. It was the first instance I recall of the pronoun ‘we’ being used to refer to the group.
We
don’t
need
you
. The Anglo-Irish accent. Glynn won’t like that, I thought. Turned out I was wrong. He did like it, had liked it very much.

Glynn grunted. I thought for a second that he was going to stand up and leave, seeing as we didn’t need him after all. I think he thought so too. He spent a long while pulling at his earlobe. Antonia kept her face averted during this period; Aisling absorbed the bad vibes through her palms; Faye contemplated various avenues for making everything better, and Guinevere set her calm face in solemn preparation for whatever was to come. If Glynn left, he would not return, that much was plain.

‘Why do you want to write?’ he eventually asked, sighing to illustrate the excessive tolerance demanded of him by the situation. He nodded at the girl by the radiator, indicating that she should start. Sound choice, Professor Glynn. Selecting her had less to do with working from left to right than picking off the weakest first. Of the girl’s startled response (we never got her name) all I remember is ‘Well, um, because.’ It seemed Glynn was correct in his initial assessment that here sat a shower of messers.

I didn’t fare much better when my turn came. The question was designed to catch me out, to sift my dilettantism from his authenticity. Glynn had railed publicly against the notion that everyone had a novel in them, appearing to instead believe that he held the Irish monopoly on the form. This had earned him no friends
amongst that contingent who slept with draft manuscripts inspired by the War of Independence under their mattresses, that standing army of ten thousand or so, and counting.

Well we knew that Glynn could make words do whatever he wished them to, could turn our words against us with a flick of the wrist, and perhaps this accounts for the reticence and caution with which we navigated his question that afternoon. Except for Antonia. Her answer alone stood out that day, both for the content and stark gravity of her delivery. Sadness progressively descended upon the room with her every word, falling, falling, weighing down our bodies like a blanket of snow. When she was finished, it was difficult to move.

She spoke in brief cogent sentences and never once had to cast about for the correct term, knowing already which words to apply, as if they were laid out on the desk before her. She picked them up and put them down again as though talking us through a selection of historical artefacts. If Glynn’s intention had been to send us skulking away in humiliation, well then, he had met his match. Antonia, face averted, nothing left to lose. I transcribe her answer, what I remember of it, in full, more or less, give or take:

‘I am thirty-nine years old now,’ Antonia began, and lowered her head as if this were a shameful admission. ‘My mind is full of fragments of roads travelled. I cannot remember the journeys themselves. I do not recall the destinations. On these journeys, it is always dusk, and I am always strapped into the passenger seat of a car, staring out the window. Someone to my right, a man, is driving. I assume it is my ex-husband, but I have no real sense of his presence. It could be my dead father. It could be a stranger. We travel along the road in silence. The only sound is the drone of the engine. It is warm inside the car, but outside it looks inhospitable, too inhospitable to survive the night.

‘I have no idea where these roads are. There is nothing familiar about them. They are not within the environs of my home. Sometimes it is a rural landscape, other times suburban. Occasionally the region doesn’t look Irish at all, but vaguely Soviet in character, some deserted province I must have seen in a documentary. These fragments don’t present themselves in a chronological sequence, and are not linked to any particular person or event. If I could manage to glance down to see what I am wearing, there’s some chance I might be able to connect the journey to a specific occasion. A hospital
visit, a funeral, something grim like that. But I can’t glance down. It is impossible to move my head. I’ve been staring out the passenger window for so long that my neck has set.

‘All that remains of my twenties and thirties are these puzzling oddments, these disconnected recollections of staggered junctions, derelict outhouses, oppressive tunnels, road kill of indeterminate species. These fragments loom up at me without warning at any time of the day or night – at least three of them this morning alone. I am never safe from them. I could be making the bed or reading a book when, out of nowhere, I am confronted with a desolate road at twilight. These images leave me with a sense of profound emptiness, close to nausea in quality. There seems no end to the store stockpiled in my head. This is the mind I have been left with.

‘Do you see?’ she asked, suddenly addressing us, but thankfully not waiting for an answer. ‘I have come to regard these snatches of roads as flashbacks from a kidnapping. The man in the driver’s seat is my abductor. I was not, of course, abducted. It is merely how I’ve learned to interpret these images. The girl I used to be was bundled into a car and whipped away from her life. I am the changeling who took her place. She transmits these messages to remind me she’s still out there.

‘And now I find I am disappointed. I am a disappointed woman. What will sustain me through the long years ahead? The only good to be derived is that twenty years of this is enough to demonstrate the necessity to stop. It is time to plug the dam of wasted days. So, here I am.’ She shrugged.

It appeared to be darker in the workshop when Antonia had finished speaking. Residues of her dusk
roads had invaded the room, draining the colour from things, extinguishing the warmth. We saw them in our minds’ eyes – her wretched thorny hedgerows snagged with shreds of plastic bags, her stagnant brown ditchwater, her rapidly dimming skies.

Antonia looked around calmly for a response, but got none. There was nothing to be said. What, I wonder, had she expected from us? We were so much younger than her. What did we know? She had moved beyond our frame of reference. However, she instilled an awareness that what had happened to her could as easily happen to one of us if we did not lead our lives with due vigilance, though to play that cautionary role was not what she had come for.

‘I hate the word “journey”,’ Antonia concluded, and Glynn nodded. He nodded for a long time, apparently knowing what all this meant.

The second he was gone, Antonia began to tremble. Her lips turned purple as she shook with rage. ‘Effing bastard,’ she hissed, ‘trying to demean us like that. Who the hell does he think he is?’ A bubble of anxiety formed in the pit of my stomach. There was something about a grown woman’s rage that I could not begin to cope with. Glynn would have been horrified too. He might have acted with a little circumspection had he witnessed her in that state, had he apprehended her terrifying volatility.

The three girls, naturally, knew exactly what to do. They sprang into action and were making soothing noises, stroking her arms, smoothing her hair, as I found myself being propelled out of that room with a velocity that I can only excuse as involuntary.