All Names Have Been Changed (6 page)

The sirens were almost upon us by then. The children rushed off the building site, and I joined their number. We flowed like rats through the gap in the hoarding. A stolen car screeched sideways around the corner, a garda van with lowered riot shield in close pursuit. Locals were out banging dustbin lids against the pavement. The children dispersed into the back lanes and flats, but three men were chasing after me. There was a loud
phht
not far from my ear, like a huge cat spitting, then a shower of sparks as the rocket collided with steel security shuttering ahead. A fire engine came hurtling along Gardiner Street, followed by an ambulance, and when next I looked over my shoulder, the three men were gone. I was running down a dark empty road on my own.

The four, my four, the Square of Pegasus, the Northern Cross, were there ahead of me when I arrived at the workshop the following Wednesday. The furniture had been rearranged, on whose instructions, I never asked. The small individual tables had been pushed together into the centre of the room to form one large desk, around which nine chairs were placed. At the head of this expanse of reticulated tabletop, the bulky desk with the drawers was set. Glynn did not register surprise or even awareness of these modifications when he finally darkened our doorway, twenty-five minutes late. Two of the chairs were still empty. They were to remain empty for the duration of the class, and for the duration of the academic year. Already we were down to six in number: the four girls, myself and your man with the ponytail – Mike.

Antonia was first to read from her work. She’d written a disconcertingly ambivalent short story about a middle-aged man in the numbing wake of his mother’s death. The man returned after a prolonged absence to his childhood home, which, since he was an only child and his father had passed away some years previously, had now fallen to him. He barely recognised the place, it was all so long ago. The son, unnamed (‘The son
scratched his head …’, ‘The son belched softly …’, ‘The son suddenly realised he was an orphan’), hadn’t been close to his mother during her lifetime, had barely known the woman in fact, but after her death he kept finding dressmakers’ pins around the house. This came as a surprise to him. He hadn’t known that his mother sewed.

He encountered the first pin sticking out of the armrest of her favourite chair, and as he rolled the narrow metal cylinder contemplatively between thumb and forefinger, it occurred to the son that this unanticipated memento should move him to tears. He hadn’t cried at the news of his mother’s death, or at her funeral. Tears, however, did not come, and the son carried on watching
The
Late
Late.

Antonia’s prose entertained a certain amount of ambiguity as to whether the pins were intended as a symbol of the mother’s creativity in the female domain, as in the burgeoning North American patchwork-quilt genre, or of her cunningly remonstrative spirit railing against an ungrateful and emotionally inert male; see Carter, Angela. My guess is that it was a gender thing. Glynn definitely looked uncomfortable. The pins appeared with increasing frequency, and in places the son was adamant they hadn’t been the day before: a scattering of them on the mantelpiece, a sprinkling in the box of tissues, a lone embroidery needle lying in ambush between the sheets of his unmade bed. Mostly, the son located the pins by sitting on them. No matter how carefully he checked the cushions before lowering his apprehensive backside, a pin would surely prick the seat of his pants until one day his arse was pierced so deeply and so deliberately that tears of confused pain sprang to his eyes.
The son dropped his head into his hands and wailed. ‘Oh Mammy,’ is what he said. Dialogue was never Antonia’s forte.

Once the tears started, there was no stopping them. The son wept until day became night became day again. His head changed colour several times (I’m paraphrasing). The pins stayed put in their pincushion after that. You had to hand it to Antonia. It was a very dramatic climax.

Aisling read aloud a poem, the content of which I recall in no detail – it seemed to erase its own shifting nature as soon as it was spoken, a palimpsest, I suppose you would call it – but each of us, Glynn included, registered the roiling aftershock of its dark inaccessibility, its staunch brevity, its confident deployment of the word
apotropaic
(adj. supposedly having the power to avert an evil influence or bad luck), introducing to Aisling’s dynamic a radical element. She scared me, that girl. I think she scared herself.

She read the poem with such gravity that we knew in our bones it was the real thing. Not that Aisling’s poem was the real thing – not one of us, if we were honest, understood a word of it – but that one day she would write poetry equalling her conviction. Her voice became progressively deeper, more incantatory, as she read, not fully emanating from her narrow chest but someplace altogether lower, smothered beneath those swathes of black clothes, as if an act of paranormal channelling were underway. She did not hold her manuscript in her hand, but instead left it on the table, her arms dangling limply by her side, her head hanging no more than a few inches from the page. You couldn’t see her face behind that blue-black curtain of hair. She could have been anyone
under there. This was no way to give a reading. We’d all attended Glynn’s events. He had shown us how it was done.

Aisling did not look up for a reaction when the poem was finished, just turned the page a 180-degree angle, face down, as if it were attached to the table by a hinge. It seemed that she was closing a door, shutting out what had seconds earlier rampaged squalling amongst us. Despite its impact, that page occupied practically no mass, barely impinging on the room at all. It was so innocent, in fact, so blameless and white, and attractively tactile in that way paper is, that I experienced a moment of disorientation, having glimpsed the chaos encrypted on the other side. The round silence which followed her reading was broken by a small grunt of approval from Glynn, a small surprised grunt of approval.

Faye had brought in a short story about two little old ladies attending a piano recital in the National Concert Hall on Earlsfort Terrace. The first section detailed the pains the pair took getting dressed up beforehand, their appraisals of their reflections in the age-mottled mirrors which had once held images of their girlhood selves, the admiring glances they hoped their elegant (if dated) clothes and jewellery might attract. They separately, in their respective homes, envisaged the entrance they would make, imagined themselves in various social contexts, rehearsed the lines they might deliver upon encountering old acquaintances not seen in years. The two old ladies realised that they were nervous. Recent unspecified losses had shaken their confidence, and this trip to the concert hall was to be their first night out in some time.

The pair arrived early and purchased interval drinks – one glass of white wine, a gin and tonic – before taking their seats up on the yellow balcony. The seats were excellent, commanding an impressive view, having been booked well in advance under the guidance of the nice man in the ticket office, who advised them to sit slightly to the left if they wanted to see the pianist’s hands (they had nodded their heads:
yes
please!
). The old ladies looked around to see who else was in, and were pleased to recognise more than a few faces, who recognised them in turn. Yes, it was splendid. The world had not changed as much as they’d feared. However – and there was always a ‘However’ in Faye’s work – as the two-minute curtain call sounded, another couple, a middle-aged man and his wife, arrived and hovered unhappily over the little old ladies, who smiled sweetly up at them, wondering if they were acquainted. Their faces didn’t ring a bell.

The couple looked at their tickets, then down at the little old ladies, then back at their tickets again. There were no empty seats left in the row. The man cleared his throat and mentioned that the two ladies were occupying his seats. The little old ladies blinked. How papery their powdered skin looked under the auditorium lights. Faye deployed a deft simile to capture their fright, though the phrasing escapes me now. Much bluster was to follow. The couple showed the old ladies their tickets, and, sure enough, this second set also read Row J, Seats 15 and 16. The old ladies declined to move. The middle-aged couple continued to unhappily hover. A hush fell over the rows behind. Two tickets for the same seat had been printed by accident, and the concert was a sell-out. What would happen next?

The middle-aged couple summoned the usher, a smart young woman, who, after a brisk examination of both sets of tickets, pointed out as tactfully as she was able that the old ladies’ concert wasn’t until the following evening. The little old ladies had to hurriedly collect their belongings and vacate the seats, as the recital was already late in commencing.

Faye’s evocation of their humiliation as they were escorted to the back of the hall was as masterful as it was poignant. Applause met their exit as the soloist appeared on stage (a violinist! – how had they missed the absence of a grand piano on stage?). It wasn’t until the two were travelling home in silence on the lower deck of the bus that they realised they’d forgotten their interval drinks. Each lady arrived at this discovery independently, but both made the decision not to mention it to the other. It was as complete an exposition of disappointment as I had ever read.

‘Would it not be better,’ Glynn suggested after some moments consideration, ‘if the usher pointed out that the two tickets were for
yesterday
instead? In your version, the two little old ladies get a second chance, because they get to do it all over again the following evening.’

There was a sort of collective
aha
in the room, causing our chairs to creak beneath us. Aha, of course, perfect. That was the difference between Glynn and an ordinary writer, that ability to locate tragedy in the inappreciable details. Faye pencilled in his recommendation.

Guinevere then read an extract from
Hartman,
the novel she’d been working on for some months, the eponymous protagonist of which was an ageing American insurance broker with a cardiac complaint,
failed husband twice over and parent to three outstandingly disaffected grown-up children, none of them his own.

This willingness to explore a complete stranger’s messy and largely self-inflicted personal setbacks seemed less to me at the time an audacious act of imagining on Guinevere’s part – a young Irishwoman narrating the inner life of a decrepit Bostonian about whom she could have known next to nothing: Guinevere hadn’t even been to the States – than a touching act of compassion. Guinevere should have been more discerning with her pity and not squandered it on those undeserving few who could never get their fill of it, no matter how much she bestowed on them. I include myself in their number.

The extract she read was narrated in that effortless first-person narrative voice that flows so freely from the pens of the American prose masters, as if they didn’t have to do any actual work to get their novels onto the page, merely show up and turn on the tap, or rather
faucet,
and of whom all, Guinevere pointed out to me one night in the pub, were men. Good stuff, I thought. Proper order.

I made no attempt to engage with the argument because I did not want to discuss other men with Guinevere. I did not want her to discuss other men with me. The sole exception was Glynn. Perhaps, she confided in a confessional tone, this awareness of male primacy in the field explained the subconscious decision she must’ve made somewhere along the line to write in a man’s voice. It was as much of a surprise to her as to anyone, she maintained, when this lemon-aertexed American golfer with his Pepto-Bismol started speaking the minute she sat at the page. ‘The twentieth century
novels of truly great stature,’ she noted with little pleasure, ‘come from the pens of male hands just as surely as sad songs are composed in a minor key.’

At this, Antonia practically sprang out of her seat. We hadn’t realised she’d been listening. We hadn’t realised they’d all been listening. Three appalled faces stared at Guinevere. ‘Virginia Woolf!’ Antonia proclaimed as an example of a female novelist of truly great stature, but the strained silence which ensued as she and the group struggled to produce another name indicated that Virginia, poor tormented, drowned Virginia, was the cautionary exception to the rule.

‘I would like to believe,’ Faye offered, ‘that the names of great twentieth-century female novelists do not spring as readily to our lips as those of their male counterparts simply because we haven’t heard of them.’

‘So would I,’ Guinevere replied flatly, her tone conveying that although she too would have liked to enjoy Faye’s benign belief, the stark facts of the matter denied her that luxury.

‘Am I doomed from the start?’ Antonia demanded. ‘Is that what you’re saying? Is that what you’re telling me? That I’m doomed in my literary endeavours from the outset because I’m female? That I may as well not bother?’ The blood had drained so thoroughly from her face that Antonia’s lips were the colour of skin, and her skin was the colour of bone. How unfamiliar she had suddenly become, and yet how genuine, as if the mask had finally dropped.

We were evidently in the grip of a serious crisis, and although I had no comprehension of the immense personal significance Antonia had clearly invested in the argument, the urge to defend Guinevere, who was sitting
listlessly by my side, was at that moment overpowering. ‘Listen Antonia–’ I began, the adrenalin surging through my body, but then Aisling slammed her pint down with such force that it splashed all over the table.

‘Shut up,’ she warned us, and we did.

There was something about Aisling’s delivery on that occasion that made us pay absolute heed to her. The five of us drank in sullen silence until our glasses were drained. It didn’t take long. Where was Glynn for all of this? God knows. And yet he seemed the very epicentre of the incident, present and amongst us in some auditing capacity, watching our five miniatures through a crystal ball, goading us into the expression of contentious opinions we didn’t know we held so strongly, or even held at all. God forbid that we should disappoint him. We spoke our lines for him alone. They would filter back for his critical appraisal through one channel or another. Everything filtered back to Glynn, eventually. Everything bore his mark. I do not remember how that particular evening ended. Unsatisfactorily, I suppose.

And so Guinevere read to us her inspired solution to the quandary she said had plagued her (and plagued Antonia too, whether she admitted it or not): her novel narrated by a man. After a few sentences, we acclimatised to her light voice recreating that of an American male, until soon we were hearing not Guinevere’s Irish accent, but Maxwell Hartman’s East Coast burr. It crept up on you gradually, the cumulative impact of all that unassuming detail, the combined weight of those deceptively throwaway observations. It stole up, gathered round, had you surrounded, snug, until without warning it had come to life: Maxwell Hartman was in the room.