All Names Have Been Changed (8 page)

Glynn sprang to life at the clink of the tray being set down on the table. He grabbed the nearest glass and raised it. ‘A toast!’ he proposed, but sank his pint before naming one, then stood up to regard us fondly.

‘I’m off to write a novel,’ he announced. ‘Back in a tick.’ He headed for the jacks.

Faye glanced around the table in excitement the second his back was turned. ‘He’s started, you know,’ she blurted when she was certain he was out of earshot. ‘He’s started a new novel. He recited the opening line to me earlier when we were up at the bar.’

‘How did it go?’ Guinevere asked.

‘Now
that
the
long
evenings
are
upon
me
once
again.’

‘Jesus,’ said Aisling. ‘Fuck.’

‘His first set in Dublin,’ I added.

‘Does he have a title yet?’ said Guinevere.

Faye nodded.
‘Desiderata.’

We marvelled at what a good title it was, wishing we’d thought of it first. And that opening line: such resonance. Five ideas sprouted in our minds.

‘Did he say anything else about it?’ Antonia asked.

‘No, he just recited the opening line and asked me what I thought of it.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I told him I thought it was beautiful. What else could I say? He just sprang it on me.’

We saw Faye’s dilemma. ‘Beautiful’ was hardly complex enough a word for Glynn, but no adequate alternative was available at such short notice, not with so little to go on. It was a rabbit-caught-in-the-headlamps response, the literary equivalent of discussing the weather. The word had lost its currency. They were worn-out tools we’d been given to work with, cracked cups and saucers, tattered hand-me-downs, ruined through overuse. ‘Beautiful.’ How hollowly it must have rung in the great writer’s ears. Same thing everyone said to him at every book signing, whether they’d read his work or not. How were we to prove to Glynn that we were any different? How was he to
know?

The barman rammed the shutters down, and Aisling jumped in fright. The strip fluorescent lights shunted on, and she let her black hair fall forward to conceal her face, though we’d already seen the smudged eyeliner, the caked foundation. Difficult to miss it. She applied so
much white stuff to her skin that it seemed she was trying to erase herself. She could have been anyone under that mask. We might not have recognised her without it.

I sat back from the table. My elbows were soaked in peaty brown stout. The pub was emptying out. The bar staff instructed us to finish up as they collected the last of the glasses. ‘Alright now
folks,
make a move there now
folks,
have youse no homes to go to
folks?
’ Roaring it over and over until it became unbearable. Where the hell was Glynn? He’d been gone an age. I felt inexplicably aggrieved that he had chosen to confide in Faye about his new novel. Judging by the sullen mood that had descended on our number, we were all mulling this same scrap of information, probing at it with our tongues like a piece of food trapped between our teeth; small, but extremely irritating.

It was me they sent after him to the men’s toilets, joking that I had my uses. No trace of the man. I came back out to find that our booth was also empty. Faye was waiting by the exit in her coat. She thrust my jacket at me before hurrying away, apologising that she had to run for the last bus. The other three had already left. The nation’s finest, it turned out, had wandered off without telling us, as, we were to discover over the coming weeks, was his wont. We hadn’t noticed him slipping away, sort of like the moment of death. The girls had drifted after him one by one. There wasn’t a thing I could have done to stop them. I pulled up my hood and walked home to my hovel, as disgruntled as the worst of Glynn’s narrators, as soured by my own plight.

I was barely in the door when a young fella in a silky tracksuit came panting up the steps behind me. He
pushed past me into the hall, a pub-sized television set in his arms. I flattened myself against the wall to allow him pass. It was the fucker from the flat downstairs, the one who’d stolen my bike.
Giz
woz
ere
. ‘Sorry,’ I said when he stood on my foot.

He cursed, unable to throw a filthy look my way since his cheek was jammed against the milky grey screen. I watched him make his way up the stairs, half-blind and stumbling. What had he painted on his runners to get them so white? Tippex? The same stuff Aisling trowelled on her face? They were incongruously immaculate, considering the state of the rest of him; the stained tracksuit bottoms, the saggy black leather jacket, elasticated at the waist. Funny smell off him too. He drew up on the stairs.

‘Here,’ he said, unable to turn around within the narrow confines of the stairwell, not with that thing in his arms. I glanced over my shoulder. The hall was empty. The front door was shut. I looked back up.

‘You mean me?’

‘Yeah. D’ya wanna buy a telly?’

‘No.’

He continued on his way without further discussion, the flex of the television trailing after him like a tail. Those Tippexed runners. They were familiar. I’d encountered them recently somewhere. I watched them pistoning up the stairs, but it wasn’t until lying in bed later that night that I finally managed to place them. The knackers at the entrance to the park who had lunged at me last week. ‘Little Trinity gee-bag,’ the prick had shouted in my wake, laughing loudly for the benefit of his friends. He’d hurled a beer can in my direction, but it lacked the ballast to reach its target. He may as
well have thrown a leaf. ‘Little Trinity gee-bag,’ he’d repeated, then laughed again, louder still, so pleased was he with this description.

We greatly enjoyed the succinct biographical notes which accompanied reissues of Glynn's novels, never mind whether they were true. ‘He lives in Wicklow and Havana.' ‘He is a leading exponent of the rural postmodern in Anglo Irish Literature.' ‘He retired from active service in the Irish Free State's Intelligence Corps when misdiagnosed with a wasting disease.' These notes, written in the third person by the man himself, were neither outlandish enough nor specific enough to leap out at the casual reader as blatant lies. It was Faye who disabused us of their veracity, showcasing the formidable research skills that would stand to her in her future career. Although he had joined the FCA in his youth, there was no Irish Intelligence Corps as such, and even if there were, the likes of Glynn would hardly have been enlisted, not with his criminal record, minor though it was.

We came to regard his biographical notes as demonstrations in miniature of the power of fiction. No sooner had Glynn published them than they entered the realm of fact. He had altered the world with a pen stroke, the very mark of a god. Lazy journalists rushing to meet deadlines parroted variations on them, covering their tracks as best they could be bothered with thesauruses. Thus ‘Havana' became ‘the Tropics', Glynn's
alleged spell in the ‘Intelligence Corps' became ‘Republican spy', and his ‘wasting disease' somehow morphed into ‘rumoured syphilis'. Superb, as Antonia would say, then the horsy laugh.

These concocted fragments evolved into a colourful portrait that offered more of an insight into the man's playful spirit than a strict adherence to the bare nuts and bolts could have hoped to. For Glynn enjoyed parallel lives in his imagination, and it was his imaginative life above all else that those biographical notes sought to evoke, we concluded. What was a writer but his imaginative existence, after all?

It was true that he had been to Cuba just the once, and only for a week at that, but he never fully left it behind either. The place stole his heart, rendered him perpetually longing to return, escaping there on a regular basis in his daydreams, and so it could be said with some degree of conviction that part of Glynn
did
live in Havana, an important part, a substantial portion of his envisaging faculty, wandering down the narrow streets during the hot white noon while his earthbound self was tucked up in the
leaba.
We could all but see him in his crumpled linen, his jaunty fedora, seeking out the shade of the hibiscus or the respite of his favourite bar. Like a shaggy Irish wolfhound he would be, farcically ill adapted to the heat, an object of some curiosity and amusement to the locals, lying around panting in the shadows.

This notion of a doppelgänger, a southern señor Glynn, the Great Irish Writer in Exile, on tour, proved irresistible to us, particularly when it was raining. He understood exactly how to go about constructing his double, knew where best on the soft tissue of the mind to apply the electrodes to make his simulation of a man
jolt into life and become one. The wrong imagery, and it mightn't take. But aside from his biographical notes being a masterclass in creative writing, it was their freedom that most appealed to us, this proffering of alternative versions of the self, just like that, with the insertion of an adjective, the souping up of a noun. For we were not there to continue being the people we had previously been, either. That was not our objective in enrolling on the course.

Glynn, or ‘Professor Patrick Glynn, Writer Fellow', as the brushed-steel nameplate slotted into the door of his office in the Department of English read, finally appeared in the middle distance of Front Square. It was a cold bright morning in early December.

The walled college campus was divided into sections as distinct as the rooms in a home. Each section represented a different era in European architecture. Front Square, accessed via the Arch on College Green, was an eighteenth-century neoclassical tableau. The Arts Block, fronting onto Nassau Street, and towards which Glynn was presently headed, was a cement box homage to the nineteen seventies, the façade of which broke out in large weeping sores when it rained, as it often did in Dublin, lending the building a bleak, bedraggled appearance. It failed in its purpose to be a monument to the consolations offered by the arts and humanities, to act as a bulwark against the Irish winter. Small wonder we conceived of Glynn as being elsewhere. We rarely, if ever, pictured him in his office in the Department of English, despite it being his place of employment. As backdrops went, the Arts Block didn't live up to him.

Upon encountering the narrow passage between the 1937 Reading Room and the Colonnades (which wasn't
all that narrow – it merely seemed so in contrast to the gracious expanse of Front Square) those approaching from the other side faltered and deferred right of way to Glynn, who proceeded without so much as checking his pace, nor registering the guard of honour of stalled students lined up on either side of the passage through which some minutes earlier I myself had slipped, unnoticed.

Glynn crossed the smooth worn cobbles flanking New Square. The gradient of the ramp leading up to the Arts Block appeared to cause him undue difficulty. He lost impetus and ground to a halt halfway up, as if the ramp were a taxing paragraph he would return to later, once he had mustered his resources. He leaned against the railing and checked his watch. Only thirteen minutes late:
Grand
so.
He lit a cigarette.

That a literary colossus should struggle with a ramp was what you might call a paradox. From an elevated position, it was evident that Glynn was beginning to thin at the crown. He ran a protective hand over his hair, somehow sensing that it had become the focus of negtive attention. He scanned the faces of the students milling about him, then squinted up in my direction, where I stood at a window on the third floor of the Arts Block, trained on him like a sniper. Could he see me? Hard to say.

Glynn stamped out his cigarette and finally gained the ramp. I lost sight of him until he reappeared at the far end of the English Department corridor, a full nineteen minutes late for our appointment.

‘You wanted to see me, Professor?' It was a rhetorical question. I was reminding him, not asking him, because Glynn patently didn't want to see me at all.

‘That's right,' he conceded. He'd asked me at the end of the last workshop to schedule a private appointment with him in his office later that week. I asked Aisling whether he'd issued the same request to the others. She told me he had not. Glynn unpinned the few notes thumb-tacked to his message board and unlocked the door, ushering me in ahead of him.

His office was the first disappointment. I had anticipated stepping into my favourite photograph of him, I suppose: bay window, mahogany table, tiny glinting sceptre. I had failed to deduce that a Georgian window could not exist in a modern building like the Arts Block.

‘Have a seat,' said Glynn, indicating a tomato-red plastic chair, as he settled himself behind a metal desk.

It was uncomfortable, having him to myself like that. We had never been alone together. Wait, that's a lie. There was a preponderance of red biros on his desk, which I thought at the time was part of some intriguing system he'd devised to inspire himself, because everything was a big secret then, everything was alchemical and occult and enthralling. Glynn was frowning at one of the notes he'd untacked from his message board. It wasn't written on foolscap like the other notes, but instead on a pale blue sheet of watermarked writing paper, the kind of stationery used by old ladies and priests. He put his glasses on and sat riveted to the page. ‘Be with you in a second,' he murmured.

He leaned over to root through a drawer in an agitated fashion, leaving the note face up on the desk. A few words – no more than three or four – were printed in the dead centre of the sheet in lettering compact to the point of illegibility. Jesus Christ, I realised, it was one of the famous poison-pen letters. Aisling had described them to
me: the bond paper, the minute writing. They were arriving thick and fast by then. Glynn uncapped a fountain pen and grimaced as he flicked it. A spray of black ink shot across the desk. He checked his watch, then scratched a series of numbers along the base of the note – the date, probably, and time of receipt – before dropping both the note and the pen into the drawer and pushing it shut.

‘So,' he said, placing his forearms on the table and interlacing his fingers: ‘How are you settling in?'

I sat there like an actor who had forgotten his lines. I couldn't think of an answer. I reached out and rested my fingertips lightly on the cool surface of the metal desk, not far from the spray of black ink. Glynn had asked me that exact question before, years ago, in another life, I was certain of it. He wasn't Glynn, and I wasn't me, but we had faced each other then, as we faced each other now, caught in the same dynamic. Did he not remember?

The disorientation must have been written all over my face. Guinevere said you could read me like an open book. Glynn plucked at a button on the cuff of his shirt. ‘It is not easy, I know,' he began, ‘which is why I thought we might meet at this juncture, for a …'

He trailed off in search of the right word. That was a first – words failing Glynn. I wished the others had been there to see it. It was how he had opened his fourth novel,
Broken
Man:
‘I am lost for words, Annabel.' And then appended a hundred thousand of them. On this occasion, however, the inarticulacy seemed genuine. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and proceeded to polish the lenses of his glasses.

‘For a …' he began again, and trailed off again, then put his glasses back on and cleared his throat. ‘A chat, I
suppose you might call it. It's just you haven't really been producing much new work, have you Declan? I'm afraid you appear to be struggling.'

I scanned the assortment of relics scattered throughout his office and shrugged. A crystal trophy, a granite one, wood, silver, gold; all displayed on his bookcase, from which also hung a medal on a ribbon. Honorary doctorates and black and white photographs of Glynn shaking hands with various dignitaries were mounted along one wall. Over his shoulder, through the window, was another wing of the Arts Block, offices the mirror image of the room in which we sat, festive fairy lights glowing in one. Christmas was less than three weeks off. House Eight was not in view.

A heap of brown leaves, I had noticed that morning as I'd walked along the railings of Mountjoy Square on my way in to see Glynn, had fallen into the shape of a skull. They can't have, I told myself, and went back for a second look. But there it was on the pavement: a skull. No two ways about it. A light-bulb shape, maybe three foot long, with cavernous eyes and leering twigs for teeth. What else could I do only gape at it, then go about my business as if nothing had happened? I didn't want to be late for my appointment with Glynn.

He had sent us away from the last workshop with a task. ‘Right,' he'd said as we were packing up to leave, ‘Next week, bring me in a sentence beginning with the words “All my life”.' It was unlike him to issue cogent instructions.

Antonia immediately demanded that she be allowed start her sentence with ‘All his' or ‘All her life', but Glynn was determined to lead us up the garden path of the first-person narrator, and granted her no leeway. All
she had to do was stick it into inverted commas and revert back to her beloved third person once the dialogue was complete, but I left her to figure that out for herself.

I had wanted desperately to get Glynn's task right. I'd sat down at my rickety desk in my rickety room and had written the three words at the top of a clean page. ‘All my life.' You could tell a mile off that Glynn had composed them. It didn't even look like my handwriting any more. Something clenched in my chest, as if I was waiting for the crack of a starting pistol, and next thing I was paring the already pared pencil with a vigour that snapped the frail stem of wood in two.

I'd raised the broken halves to my nose and sniffed them. They had smelled of primary school. I'd stood up and sat down again in one fluid movement, then spread my hands out flat on the desk, surrendering custody of them. Glynn's partial sentence sat framed by my thumbs and index fingers. ‘All my life.' I could think of nothing. Then the skull.

‘I don't seem to be able to write, Professor Glynn.'

He nodded sympathetically. Hadn't written a whole lot himself, lately.

‘So I was thinking about dropping out of the class.'

Glynn tilted his head in a manner that indicated I should continue, but I had said my lot. All I had produced in the seven weeks of attending his workshops were seven bits of Chapter Ones. It appeared I didn't have it in me. Guinevere Wren's smile, of all things, had tipped the balance – the realisation, rather, that this smile was not reserved for me alone. It was simply the way she looked at people. At the last workshop, she had read aloud a scene depicting the deep-seated alienation
that poisoned the relationship between Maxwell Hartman and his eldest son. The group's reaction had been unanimous. We had praised the extract to the hilt. Her striking imagery, her lyrical language, the sincerity and complexity of the sentiment evoked – she had absolutely nailed it.

She'd received our encomia with a little frown – our approval appeared to perplex her. Her uncertainty only made us praise her more. We embarked on a sustained group effort to rid Guinevere of self-doubt, overturning every rock and stone in a bid to hit on something that might bolster her confidence. Even Glynn joined in. ‘The electricity of poetic detail,' he murmured, without specifying which detail he had in mind. Any of them, all of them. Each one packed a voltage.

But nothing we said communicated our enthusiasm, and it began sounding as hollow to us as it patently did to Guinevere. We stepped up our efforts, but that ship was going down. Water was gushing in faster than we could bail it out. In the midst of our fervour – the five of us baying encouragement from the stands as if she were the horse we'd bet our life savings on – I experienced a moment of detachment. I looked at that lovely girl, her calm face silhouetted against the steely November sky, the praise showering down, staring at the stack of A4 pages in front of her as if it were the murder confession we were forcing her to sign, and I had never imagined that another human being could seem so remote. Remote from me, remote from herself.