All Names Have Been Changed (7 page)

It was the polar opposite of Aisling’s reading, which
foregrounded not the subject matter but the struggle of the artist herself. Guinevere receded altogether as a fictional character appeared in her skin, pressing his face into hers. There were times when it was clear that Guinevere could have done anything she wanted. Her use of the disappointed male voice generated a tragic resonance, but the real tragedy to my mind was that a young woman perceived an ostensibly successful and powerful businessman as so abjectly pitiful. Was that what got to me about Guinevere’s writing: her ability to see through the male armoury to the shivering wretch underneath? Was that what made me come to her?

Mike adjusted his ponytail and read an extract from some class of crime fiction, some scrape about a good guy, a bad guy, a blonde and a bag of loot. The women didn’t appreciate his efforts either, though Glynn bestowed upon him a hearty wink. And then it was my turn. I leafed through my manuscript in a harassed fashion for no good reason. It wasn’t like the pages had scrambled into the wrong order behind my back. I was barely a paragraph into Chapter One when Glynn interrupted me.

‘What happened your eye?’ he demanded.

What eye, I wondered. There was no eye in Chapter One. Never had been. Or did he mean
I,
the first-person narrator?

Glynn raised his glasses to his forehead, awaiting an explanation. The lenses framed two rectangles of skin, as if a second, covert set of eyes was concealed behind the pink membrane, his mind’s eye, his artist’s eye, window to his imagination.

‘Your eye,’ he repeated, nodding at my shiner. ‘What happened? Someone give you a dig?’

‘Oh that,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

‘Was it over a woman?’

‘No,’ I said apologetically.

Glynn peered at my black eye for another few seconds, then dropped his glasses back onto his nose to indicate that he’d lost interest. I shuffled my sheaf of papers as needlessly as before and returned to the business of reading out Chapter One. Anyone could see that it was about Guinevere, and that I wasn’t up to the job. I listened to the lonely sound of my own voice losing conviction with every word. Soon it had dwindled to a barely audible trickle. I think this is how a parent must feel to discover that his child is not clever, or pretty, or even happy. The less said about the whole thing the better.

The payphone in the corridor started ringing in the small hours later that same night. I was out of the bed and running down the stairs before I knew what was going on. ‘Who’s there?’ I challenged the mouthpiece, as if the person on the other end had broken into the building. ‘Giz woz ere’ was scratched onto the coin-box casing. A light on the ground floor came on.

‘Declan?’ Guinevere’s voice. I recognised it instantly. ‘It’s Glynn,’ she said. ‘He’s in trouble. Can you help us? We’re on Duke Street.’

It would take a good half-hour to reach Duke Street on foot, no matter how hard I ran. The fucker downstairs had stolen my bike. I pummelled his door with my fists on the way out. ‘Give me back my bike, you prick!’ I shouted, but didn’t stick around for a response.

It was a freezing November night, no cloud cover, a rack of winter stars. A dog howled forlornly in the distance. Three knackers in silky tracksuits stood huddled at the entrance to the park. I pressed on. Guinevere was waiting on the other side of the river. I couldn’t let her down.

The knackers lunged at me as I passed. They pursued me halfway up the street, white runners pistoning, then lost impetus and fell by the wayside. Their heart wasn’t
in it. The chase was just for show. I heard them laughing with bravado at my retreat, at the great triumph it denoted. ‘Little Trinity gee-bag,’ one of them shouted, then fired an empty can in my direction. It fell far short of its target. How did they know I went to Trinity? A life force I didn’t think aware of my existence turned out to be monitoring my movements. It was as if the street-lamps had started to speak, or the gateposts nodded at my return.

A tall lone female was standing at the mouth of the service lane to Brown Thomas when I rounded the corner onto Duke Street from Grafton Street. My heart surged at the sight of her, and I waved. The figure did not return my greeting but unfolded her arms and threw her cigarette to the ground. The street lighting glanced off the crown of her head as she did so. Blonde bobbed hair. Antonia. My hand dropped to my side.

She didn’t speak when I drew up, just checked her watch in irritation. You would think I had kept her waiting. ‘Where’s Guinevere?’ I asked.

‘Glynn, you mean. He’s down here.’

She led me down the lane in silence. The others were stationed throughout it, Aisling first, so black that she merged with the background. I didn’t realise she was there until she spoke. ‘Hi Declan,’ came her voice from the murk, the moon of her disembodied face materialising in the darkness. It was swaying slightly. Up ahead, amongst a pile of cardboard boxes and packing crates, bathed in the glow of a security lamp, lay the great man himself. Faye was on her knees ministering to him. Guinevere stood to attention at his head. It was the deathbed scene of a king.

Faye got to her feet when she saw me. ‘He’s taken a bit of a turn,’ she said apologetically, brushing down her skirt.

‘Hello Declan,’ said Guinevere. ‘Sorry to have called you in the middle of the night.’

‘That’s alright,’ I told her. ‘Any time.’

‘Mike wasn’t home, so we had to ring you instead,’ Antonia clarified, in case there was any doubt as to their first preference.

They stood back to allow me to examine the body, which was in the recovery position on the ground. I nudged Glynn in the ribs with the toe of my shoe. No response. ‘He’s asleep,’ I said. Aisling sniggered.

‘We can see that, thanks,’ said Antonia, and lit another cigarette.

‘Problem is,’ said Guinevere, ‘he won’t wake up.’

‘Why didn’t you call me earlier?’

‘We thought we could handle it ourselves,’ said Faye. Spurred sleech. I turned to look at her.

‘Have you lot been drinking since the workshop ended?’ That seemed like days ago.

Faye bit her lip. ‘Afraid so. We’ve let Professor Glynn get into a terrible state.’ Glynn’s drinking became public knowledge when he was expelled from a Northern Ireland peace conference for singing rebel songs of his own composition.

‘He’s a grown man,’ Antonia pointed out. ‘He got himself into this state.’

I surveyed his length. ‘Exactly how long has he been in this condition?’ There was something about their anxious, solicitous tone that made me adopt a clipped, professional one. I’d gotten myself stuck in Mike’s cop novel.

‘I don’t know,’ said Guinevere. ‘Two hours maybe?’

I nodded gravely, as if I were a doctor and this time span confirmed my worst suspicions. I wanted to punish them, I suppose, for leaving me behind. ‘So what do you want me to do with him?’

‘Fucking pick him up,’ said Antonia. ‘Jesus.’

‘We can’t seem to lift him ourselves,’ Guinevere explained. ‘He’s a dead weight.’

‘And we can hardly leave him out here in the cold,’ added Faye.

I wasn’t sure I understood their problem. ‘Why didn’t you just wake him?’

Guinevere shrugged. ‘We couldn’t. We’ve tried everything. Seriously.’ Aisling sniggered again.

I moved around Glynn, hunkering down like a snooker player looking for a good angle. There was no good angle. Laid out on his side with his shirt untucked, exposing an expanse of haunch, Glynn’s true bulk was revealed, and it was reckonable. There was at least a third more of him on the flat, a ship hoisted out of the water. The girls waited patiently for me to do something. Even Antonia gave me the benefit of the doubt. A stranger I was then to ageing flesh and had never been confronted with so much of it before, and of such a lifeless texture too, squeezed into goosebumped skin like sausage meat. I got down on my knees.

I tried to engage him in conversation, cupping my hands and calling down his ear as if it were the well shaft he’d fallen into. ‘Hello?’ I cried, then leaned back to check for signs of life. None. I bent over him again. ‘Can you hear me, Professor? Do you think you could stand up?’ That sort of thing. On it went. Stupid questions, the answers to which I already knew. Antonia
made a tutting noise in response to each one.

‘Look it, Antonia,’ I told her, sitting back on my heels, ‘this is hard enough without you standing behind me sneering.’

She tutted again.

‘For the love of God, woman!’ Glynn suddenly cried. ‘Stop your infernal complaining. One of you: help me up.’ I grasped his arm and hauled him to his feet. Guinevere inserted herself under his other arm for balance.

‘The lovely Guinevere,’ he murmured, drawing her to him.

‘It’s alright,’ I assured her, swinging Glynn around so that she was out of his reach. ‘I can manage.’

Glynn swivelled his head to regard me. ‘Who’s this clown?’ he demanded but then decided it didn’t matter, so intent was he on keeping up with the women. We stumbled towards Nassau Street, a three-legged race, the girls going on ahead to hail a taxi.

Guinevere opened the cab door and stood back to let him in first, but the man didn’t understand what was required of him and gazed at the waiting taxi as if it were no concern of his. I tried to lower his intractable bulk into the back seat, but he wouldn’t release my shoulder, so in the end I had to climb in first and ease him down on top of me. I inched him along the scalloped seat until there was enough room on the other side for Guinevere. She stuck her head in after us. I could barely see her over the mound of Glynn.

‘Safe home now, Declan,’ she said. The others chimed their goodbyes behind her. ‘Wait,’ I protested as the door slammed shut. I tried to wrench myself around to look out the back window as the taxi pulled away but was
pinioned under the great slouched mass of Glynn, pressed hard up against me like a lover.

I tried to push him off, but he remained slumped across my shoulder. ‘This isn’t my car,’ he observed mildly, then started to hum.
Ain’t
no
sunshine
when
she’s
gone.
The first rumblings of resentment began to stir in my chest, as is so often the way with these things, but I said nothing, did nothing, just let it come down on me. The Irish are used to being rained on.

We could not fail but notice, at the workshop the following Wednesday, that Glynn’s voice had lost the antagonistic edge which had characterised previous classes. He commenced the session by speaking to us about the aloneness of writing, tacitly acknowledging for the first time that writing was a condition we shared.

Not loneliness, he clarified, but aloneness with the writing self. No amount of time spent alone with the writing self was too much, he said. You stay up with it all night as if it were your lover. You go through the details of your day with it until it becomes your closest friend. Your only friend, at times. Being a writer, Glynn believed, was like getting the keys to the city. You could go anywhere you wanted within the fictive space, do anything you wanted. To waste that freedom would be nothing short of irresponsible. Did we understand what he meant? We nodded. We understood. There were periods in Glynn’s life – contemplating the various editions of his novels, for instance (translated into thirty-two languages now) – when he could enjoy a spirit of comradeship with his books, his fellow conspirators, that they had managed to pull it off together, that they had come this far, them against the world. These periods never lasted long. The great writer’s face clouded. For a
moment, we thought he was going to start telling us about his suffering. He took a breath, glanced at our expectant faces, but something held him back.

‘I’ll leave it there,’ he said, getting to his feet.

The four girls jumped up and followed him down the stairs. I glanced at Mike to do something, stop him, but Mike just packed away his notebook. When was Glynn going to show us how to write?

The group left House Eight in a hexagon, for they had gained a fifth point. Glynn had joined their number. They had annexed Glynn. I watched them from the top floor, surrounding him like a bracelet, moving him across the cobbles with the sheer gravitational force of their presence. The five of them made their way to Front Arch. Glynn looked pleased. Bewildered, admittedly, as if he couldn’t quite grasp how they were dictating his movements, but pleased all the same with the attention they lavished on him, willing to pay the price.

I came upon them a couple of hours later. It was the night we made the landmark discovery that all five of us had attended Glynn’s Royal Irish Academy reading back in ’81. Aisling had been celebrating her twentieth birthday. Now she was celebrating her twenty-fourth. It was our anniversary.

When I say I came upon them, I mean I followed them to the door of Bartley Dunne’s, then returned a couple of hours later and wandered past their table in an abstracted manner copied from Glynn, as if my head was stuffed so full of poetic matter that there simply wasn’t room left in it to accommodate the quotidian stuff, like looking where you were going. Glynn was singing come-all-ye’s by then. The women had gone to his head.

It was Faye who spotted me, good old Faye. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing me out to the others, ‘isn’t that Declan?’ A man could always rely on her type. She had seven cats at home, all of them strays, because she couldn’t bear to see a fellow creature suffer. Her heart was too big for her own good. Her belief in the essential goodness of human nature was irrational and subject to manipulation by precisely the strain of badness she refused to accept prevailed in the world. All a man had to do was look crestfallen and she’d forgive him, no matter how heinous the transgression nor how hollow the assertion to reform. ‘You know her husband beats her, don’t you?’ Aisling once whispered urgently into my ear while the two of us were standing at the bar waiting for our pints to settle.

‘What! Whose husband? Jesus Christ Almighty!’

It hadn’t been my intention to raise my voice. Aisling had caught me by surprise. The barman raised an admonitory eyebrow as he topped up our pints. ‘Take it handy there, folks,’ he warned us. Aisling glanced at the others in panic, though they were too far away to have overheard. ‘Nothing, Declan,’ she blurted, ‘I shouldn’t have told you. Forget I said anything,
please.
’

This wasn’t the kind of information you could forget in a hurry, and Aisling knew it. Her face flushed red under all the white make-up, making her look stranger still. She had evidently just broken one of the group’s secret confidences, one of those blood oaths with which their little cabal was ridden, and she grew so frantic, so distraught, as she fumbled first with her packet of cigarettes and then with her lighter, all the while begging me to forget she’d opened her mouth, that I backed off altogether to calm her down. Neglecting one to protect
another. It was an insane situation, but there you go.

She finally got the cigarette up and running, and the two of us stood watching the other three conversing with Glynn as if nothing was amiss.
You
know
her
hus
band
beats
her,
don’t
you?
Aisling hadn’t specified which of them was beaten, but it was hardly the time to ask. Faye was the only one who was married. Though Antonia technically had a husband still, in the eyes of the Irish State.

Faye, kind Faye, waved her hand and called my name as I was wandering through the red and black gloom of Bartley Dunne’s, pint in hand. Imagine my surprise to encounter my fellow writing students. And the Professor too, as luck would have it. I stood there, smiling broadly at the lot of them.

They seemed pleased enough to see me, at any rate. Glynn interrupted his song to throw an arm out in welcome. ‘Dermot!’ he cried, knocking over his pint. The women had made him giddy. Guinevere stemmed the spillage by dealing a dam of beer mats with the air of one with much practice in this field. ‘Sit down there now like a good man,’ Glynn instructed me. I set my pint on the table and took my rightful place amongst them, the six of us crammed into a booth.

How delicate and colourful the girls were. It was like sitting in a flowerbed. I knew I was too big for them, too awkward, too crude. Didn’t matter: I scrunched in tighter. Glynn leaned across. ‘You’ve got your knees under the table now, so you have, ya boyo!’ he winked. Aisling went to the bar to replace his pint.

‘Did you follow us here?’ Antonia demanded.

Guinevere laughed. ‘God almighty, of course he didn’t
follow us here. What sort of weirdo would do a thing like that?’
Ya
fucken
perv.
Spying
on
the
kiddies.

‘I often drink in Bartley’s,’ I told them.

‘Do you have family in Dublin, Declan?’ Faye asked, keen to introduce a neutral subject.

‘No, I’m an only child.’

‘Oh right. So do you go home to your parents at the weekends?’

‘Ah no. The mother doesn’t know I left England.’

Antonia lowered her drink. ‘Your mother doesn’t know you left England?’

‘Yeah. She thinks I’m still in Leeds.’ They were all looking at me now.

‘But why?’ asked Faye.

‘She’d be really upset if she knew I’d given up a good job to do, well …’ I gestured at the table, ‘
this.
So I didn’t tell her.’ Blank faces. ‘She’d have thought Daddy would have disapproved,’ I added, sensing more was needed.

Guinevere frowned. ‘Your father doesn’t know you’re here either?’

‘No, he passed away.’ Daddy had been dead the past twenty years, yet despite his absence, no family decision was made without reference to him, without an agonised consideration of his feelings. Since he had been a quiet man, loath to complain, it had always been difficult to gauge what might have attracted his unspoken displeasure. There were no set rules. Like the Irish language, he had to be learned by ear.

‘They were quite old when they had me,’ I offered, talking to fill the gap. ‘From a different era, really. More like grandparents, in fact.’ I was as struck by this information as the girls. I hadn’t looked at it that way before.
My ageing parents had treated me as politely and tactfully as a guest staying in their home. Ours had been a reticent household, for the most part.

Antonia found it uncontrollably amusing that my mother referred to her deceased husband as
Daddy.
Really, she could barely contain herself. She repeated my mother’s words to stoke herself up again when her amusement waned:
Daddy
would
have
preferred
to
see
you
settle.
‘Priceless,’ she said, wiping away a tear. Faye whispered to Antonia to for God’s sake leave poor Declan alone.

‘Write it down,’ said Glynn, ‘Write it down.’ He had a tendency to issue words of advice twice, in order to imbue them with the quality of axiom. A few observations regarding the state of mind of the artist might be appropriate at this juncture, in the interests of posterity. I hadn’t seen him execute the office of Great Irish Writer so movingly before. He sat amongst us in some class of reverie, head tilted back, eyes shut, basking in the glory of female company. His boyish good looks were extant in sufficient measure to make you nostalgic for the handsome young poet he once had been, because it was poetry Glynn had started with, yes, it is true, all those years ago when he was purer of mind and had less to say for himself.

They say alcohol has spelled the ruin of many a great Irish writer, but I maintain it is part of what made them great in the first place. It lifts a veil, releases a man from inhibitions, frees the creative spirit. Gazing at Glynn across the table with that half-fledged smile on his face, which expressed his contentment more completely than any fully effected version, I was finally granted what I felt was my first real insight into the internal layout of
the writer’s mind. Were Glynn stone-cold sober, I would not have been afforded that licence. A July sunset on a rolling lawn is what I saw. Shadows on the grass as cool and alluring as rock pools. Glynn possessed a working knowledge of the stars which informed his writing, at times infusing it with a celestial dimension, other times foregrounding the staggering insignificance of man. ‘There is a moment when you realise,’ the stricken narrator notes towards the end of
Broken
Man,
as he reflects on the sudden passing of his infant son, ‘that the sun is not the sun, but a dying planet, expiring before your eyes.’

Dr M. J. Hanratty’s biography mentions that Glynn never fully recovered from the shock of the death of his youngest child, Saoirse, who was killed by meningitis at the age of two. It was around then that reports about him beginning with the word ‘troubled’ proliferated in the papers. ‘Troubled author Patrick Glynn was in court today to answer charges of drunk driving.’ ‘Troubled writer P. J. Glynn was expelled from an award ceremony in London’s Guild Hall last night for punching a fellow contestant.’ ‘Troubled novelist Patrick Glynn is recovering from hypothermia in hospital tonight after being found in the water on Brittas Bay.’

But that was a long time ago, a different lifetime, a different Glynn. He had written three astonishing novels since Saoirse’s death, one universally hailed upon publication as a masterpiece. His other daughter, Sofia, was grown and had flown the nest. His house was quiet once more, all strife and clamour behind him. That old grief had surely lost the power to pain him still, not when he had the inestimable consolation of art.

Glynn must have felt my gaze upon him. He opened
his eyes and squinted at me through narrowed slits, as if the sun were shining in his face, then winked and shut his eyes once more. The contented half-smile did not falter. It occurred to me that the man knew what I was thinking. I wondered whether he could glimpse the internal layout of other people’s heads too. His work supports the possibility.

I had initially been sceptical the week before when our taxi drew up to that rundown shambles on Bachelors Walk with the redevelopment notices in the window. ‘This can’t be right,’ I told the taxi driver, who maintained it was the address the women had given him. ‘Are you certain this is it?’ I asked Glynn slowly, in the measured tones of an adult speaking to a lost child. There had to be a mistake.

Glynn wanted to know exactly what class of ape I thought I was dealing with, that he knew his own fecking address, in the name of God, then he jammed an elbow into my stomach to launch himself as if pushing off a boat from a pier. Out of the back seat he waded, slow as a whale, one eye fixed on the pavement. He turned to toss a balled-up pound note into my lap with an unwarranted show of contempt. I waited until he had the front door open before instructing the taxi driver to pull away. Well so, he had a key.

Key or no key, it was difficult to accept that Glynn intended spending the night in that hovel. I’d had in mind for him a genteel old pile on the hilly outer reaches of Dublin Bay, either Aisling’s or Guinevere’s side. July sunset on a rolling lawn, shadows cool as rock pools. I saw that cliff house whenever I read his prose. The details were vague, but the atmosphere was unforgettable, as if I’d been brought there to visit as a child.
This
is
where
the
great
writer
lives.
Shhh,
don’t
make
any
noise.

There had to be a better reward for a distinguished life’s work in letters. The building on Bachelors Walk was a bigger dive than my own. Small wonder he’d been reluctant to relinquish the Brown Thomas service lane. At least four women had been tending to him there. The house fronted onto a river, though, I had reasoned as the taxi progressed along the quays. A tidal river, at that, almost the sea. Gulls combed that end of the Liffey like any other stretch of coastline. Always happiest near water, Glynn. Perhaps he’d installed himself in the dilapidated digs in the name of research, it occurred to me then. I lowered my pint and looked at him. Perhaps he’d started a new novel. His first set in Dublin, right there on the quays. Jesus. Aisling nudged me from my speculations to murmur something into my ear that I didn’t catch. She was too drunk to gauge the projection of her voice and just kept mumbling shyly, nodding dolefully into my eyes. They were all looking at me again, the girls. Antonia eventually couldn’t bear it any longer and interjected. ‘She’s telling you it’s your round,
Dermot.
’