All Names Have Been Changed (20 page)

The other three went on ahead with him to the Buttery. Aisling and I hung back by the dismal patch of shrubbery into which he’d tossed his hearing aid. We sucked down a cigarette each without speaking, fast as we were able, as if it were a race. What was wrong with me? What was wrong with her? The seagulls had started to scream.

‘I feel sick, Declan,’ she muttered.

I nodded. Indeed she looked sick. ‘We’d better go in, I suppose.’

‘Oh Jesus!’ she cried, and covered her mouth. I whipped around to see what had startled her this time. Sylvia. Their feral cat glared up at us reproachfully, a tiny, underweight slip of jet black and lollipop pink. It was unlike her to be out in broad daylight like this. It was unlike her to stand motionless.

At first I thought she was snarling at us. Her lip was curled back to reveal an expanse of livid pink, but when she turned to flee into the shrubbery – wait, it did not have the agility of flight, I cannot call it that – when she turned to saunter off, her gait uncharacteristically nonchalant, practically a swagger, I saw that the pink was not snarling lip but exposed flesh. The animal’s muzzle had been partially torn off. Her teeth were set needle-thin
into her gums. She was panting. No, she was dying.

Aisling dropped her cigarette and took off into the shrubbery on her hands and knees, her widow’s weeds snagging on every twig and thorn, like there was a chance in hell of catching poor Sylvia, let alone saving her. ‘There’s nothing you can do for her,’ I kept telling her bent form, but I may as well have been talking to the wall.

It was a good quarter of an hour before Aisling gave up the hunt. God knows what crack in the earth Sylvia had slipped into to die. I reassured Aisling that she’d done her best, but the girl would not be comforted. ‘Did you see her?’ she kept asking me, her gaze unable to settle. It flitted about the bushes like a butterfly. ‘Declan, did you actually
see
her?’

‘Of course I saw her.’ I wasn’t sure I understood the point of the question. The cat had been standing right there in front of us, after all, half-savaged, panting, dying. How could you not see her?

Aisling bit at her cuticles. ‘We mustn’t tell Faye,’ she made me promise, then we smoked another cigarette each to seal the oath.

Glynn was well on by the time we joined them in the Buttery. It was barely five o’clock. He was shit-faced, rat-arsed, locked out of his tree. This is a stupid language. It was immediately evident that something wasn’t right. More wrong than usual, I should say. The others were exchanging meaningful glances over his head – there’d obviously been an incident in our absence. ‘Oh, here they are at last, Professor!’ Faye announced with forced gaiety, trying to jolly the fucker along, as if he were already enrolled in the nursing home. Glynn’s skin was the colour of an eyeball. His eyeball was the colour of skin. The glisten of dribble down his chin was new. In
his paw was a pint which he clasped like a sceptre, the court of slobbering Glynn, king of porter. ‘Where the fuck have you two been until now?’ Antonia hissed under her breath.

‘Look who it is‚’ Glynn murmured blackly as we took our seats. He reached across the table and plucked a leaf from Aisling’s hair with a card-trick flourish, then turned to take me in, shaking his head. ‘At it again, you dirty little bollocks. You’re an awful man altogether, so you are.’

Aisling was wearing the manic grin she used to mask her profound self-consciousness, or to poorly mask it, rather. ‘We were smoking, Professor,’ she said, as if she had to explain herself to the likes of him.

‘Can’t a man have a drink?’ Glynn bellowed in protest, as if one of us had tried to stop him. As if any of us would have dared embark on such a course of action. The thought hadn’t entered our minds. It is possible that Glynn was dropping a hint – prompting us with one of his rhetorical devices to attempt to stop him drinking, seeing as he had long since gone beyond attempting to stop himself. Instead, Aisling went to the bar. What a disappointment we must have been to him.

Glynn watched Guinevere over the cream disc of the head of his pint, then caught me watching him over the cream disc of the head of my pint. He raised his sceptre in salute. ‘Playboy of the Western World, isn’t that right Dermot!’ He elbowed Faye in the ribs. ‘Get this one into bed and it’s a royal flush!’ His face twinkled, his gums sparkled, his eyes kindled, his brow darkened. I bridled and bristled, nettled and rankled, then drinkled and drankled some more.

Glynn coughed fleshily until it seemed his rotting
lungs would come shooting out of his chest and land wetly on the table, still gasping, unable to bear it in there a minute longer. ‘Here, Professor,’ Antonia said, and dealt the old fuck a good sound clap on the back, that bit too forceful to be benevolent. He hocked up a mighty phlegm and gobbed it into the waiting lap of his hanky. It burst out with the ripe pop of a wine bottle being uncorked.

‘I’m going to vomit,’ Aisling said, but didn’t leave the table.

Glynn raised his glasses to his artist’s eye to appraise the winnings, and judging by the look of rapture on his face, he was not disappointed. He was forever picking at himself, sniffing himself, tasting himself, sampling the compressed bits of self he found compacted beneath his fingernails, in a perpetual swoon of fascination with his own detritus. ‘Glynn’s great subject was the self,’ wrote the
New
York
Review
of
Books
. Little did they know.

‘Where’s his pap?’ Antonia asked. ‘Give him his pap. The poor fellow: his glass is empty.’ It was my turn to go the bar.

I set a rack of pints down on the table and headed for the jacks. Jesus, the fucker had snuck in ahead of me. He gave a nod as he tucked himself in, then proceeded to the exit without washing his hands. Icky sticky gicky Glynn, his urinal fingers contaminating Guinevere’s skin. He paused in the doorway.

‘She’ll come back to you once her dreams turn to shite,’ he told me. ‘You just watch.’

I shook my head at him. For all his insight, he had no conception of who Guinevere was, or of what she was capable, and the tender years of her. He could not see her tremendous gift. Or maybe he could see it. Maybe
that was the whole problem. Maybe he knew she’d outstrip him in the end. He cured me of my earnestness, I suppose, and I’ll always owe him for that. Glynn cured us all of our earnestness.

I squeezed myself in beside Guinevere when I returned. ‘So how are you?’ I asked, perhaps a little aggressively. Been a few weeks since we’d spoken.

‘I’m worried about Patrick,’ she said. It wasn’t the answer to the question I’d asked. She leaned in so he wouldn’t overhear. ‘Do his lips look a little blue to you?’

His lips? Why was she looking at his lips? How could I make her stop? ‘So it’s Patrick now, is it?’ I sneered, ‘Rat Prick now, is it?’ I sneered. She lowered her head. I wished the others had overheard my fine piece of wordplay. It was Aisling, most of all, I wished had been listening. Aisling would have enjoyed it.

Glynn slammed down his emptied glass and expelled a flabby yawn.

‘Dear oh dear,’ Antonia chimed, ‘the Professor needs another drink,’ although another drink was patently the last thing the Professor needed. ‘Here,’ she said picking up her handbag, ‘why don’t I go to the bar this time? I’m sure it must be my round.’

Glynn blinked gratefully and eyed her handbag gluttonously, as if he might like to wolf the contents down. It was Antonia who got him started on the spirits that night, avenging herself with the perfect crime.
There
is
always
a
price
.

‘I think she’s trying to kill him,’ Guinevere said in wonderment when Antonia left the table. ‘I think the woman is actually trying to kill him.’

‘There’s something going wrong with me,’ Aisling blurted. ‘It’s like everything I’m thinking is written in
block capitals. I can’t switch off Caps Lock. My thoughts are all screaming. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Do you know what I mean?’ she asked a second time, clearly accustomed to being misunderstood, to having to go to great lengths to explain herself. She looked at our faces around the table. DO YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?

We nodded, I, we, they. Those assembled at the table nodded, all except for Glynn, whose mind had wandered. It did kind of bother me that I knew what Aisling meant. A few months ago, I’d have drawn a blank.

‘Funny taste in my mouth,’ Glynn complained, and belched graphically. Anything to be the centre of attention.

‘Probably only a brain tumour,’ said Antonia, placing a tumbler of whiskey on the beer mat in front of him. A double, we silently noted.

‘Maybe you’re having a stroke,’ I offered.

‘Oh now,’ said Faye. ‘Enough of that.’

Guinevere didn’t open her mouth. She didn’t denounce Glynn’s whining, she, who had most to denounce. Why didn’t she slap him? Why did she leave the job fall to others instead? Grizzling Glynn complained steadily for the guts of an hour, as if setting us an endurance test. He muttered and murmured and mumbled, maundered and malingered and moaned. Oh Christ, there was no end to it. On and on it went. He was teething, or required burping, or a nappy change. I looked at his old freckled hand in disgust, watched it perform gestures of self-regard. The urinal fingers, the breast-sized palm. It was not a writerly hand. It wasn’t a lover’s hand either. ‘I’m finished as a novelist,’ he concluded bitterly, and nobody contradicted him.

‘Are we still here?’ Aisling asked. She seemed surprised. If she had briefly fallen asleep, I can’t say I’d noticed. She finished off her pint, knocking it back like water.

‘Why are you still sending those hateful letters to me?’ Glynn snarled at Antonia.

‘Because I hate you.’ She laughed. ‘Because I hate you.’ She laughed again.

‘Stupid bitch,’ he retaliated. We think that’s what he said. His speech was slurred, his eyes had glazed. He was listing over the table in a limp, boneless manner, his hands dangling by his side as if he’d lost the use of them, which for an awful moment we thought he had, until he batted Faye away when she tried to prop him up.

Glynn pushed the table back from his belly for the final act. For this, he needed an audience, though whether he could distinguish our individual forms in the blizzard of his whiskey blindness is debatable.

His demons were everywhere by then. There was more to it than a bad pint. They had stolen up without us noticing and had him rightly surrounded. No matter which way he turned, a leering head popped up, provoking one wincing grimace after another from the writer. Great was his torment. Glynn had never witnessed such ugliness in his life. Hideous was the word he used. ‘Hideous, hideous,’ he declared, yet he couldn’t tear his eyes from their disfigured faces either, couldn’t get his fill, now that they had finally revealed their foul selves to him. They’d been hiding behind books and doors for years, lurking at the bottom of pint glasses and whiskey bottles, but now his demons were sitting right there at the table with us, bold as brass, defiant as you like. I am going to keep this short.

By the looks of it, we were outnumbered. There was one beside me, one next to Aisling, and a whole rack of them lined up in the wings. They even had names. Moloch, Ezekiel, Belial, Glynn called them, pointing from one to the other. He paused for a moment to reflect. His wife hated him. His only child wouldn’t speak to him. He’d only gone and … he gestured in the direction of Guinevere and Antonia at this point. ‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ he cried in anguish.

The demons leapt up and down in delight at that, monkeys in a cage. Glynn cursed them mercilessly in his best demonish. No better man for the job. He had recourse to the language of Milton and Dante, works with which he had forged a deep connection for all the wrong reasons, regarding them not as the moral allegories they patently were but as early examples of kitchen-sink realism.

‘Infernal Serpent,’ he hissed. ‘Arch-fiend, Chemos the Obscene, horrid king.’ I put my arm around Guinevere. It quickly degenerated into vile street argot, which was evidently fresher in his mind. He must have picked it up the night the knackers spat in his face beneath the statue of Thomas Moore. Still possessed a keen ear for the demotic, Glynn.

‘He’s right,’ Aisling exclaimed, looking urgently from one face to the next, nodding vigorously to canvass our support. ‘Listen to him: he knows what he’s talking about. He’s
right
.’

‘I’m fucking light-starved,’ Antonia was saying, ‘I’m fucking light-starved.’ Everyone was repeating everything twice. Or maybe I was hearing everything twice. What follows is my version of events, unexpurgated, after the master.

Up Glynn reared onto his hind legs. We too jumped to our feet. Then what? Then nothing. The five of us just stood around the table staring at him in alarm, waiting for instructions. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked, and we shuffled out of his way, biddable as sheep.

‘Go after him,’ Faye said in panic, ‘Go after him. We can’t leave him alone in that state.’

Glynn ploughed through the mill of students to the exit. Difficult, keeping up with him. It was quiet as a church out on the quad after the clamour of the Buttery. A large moon was rising over Botany Bay, the colour of the head of a pint. It seemed to possess no third dimension but was instead wafer thin, a communion host.

We were barely a few steps into the darkness when Aisling collapsed. I turned around to see her in a whimpering heap on the ground, a small whorl of trembling black fabric. Two tyre tracks of mascara scored her face as if something had mown her down. She gulped convulsively, sheer terror in her eyes, and pointed at the corner. ‘Look!’ she cried. ‘It’s here!’

Faye and Guinevere tried to pick her up, but she wouldn’t let them. ‘Look at it!’ she kept shrieking, thrusting her finger at the corner, but the corner was empty. There was nothing there. ‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ Antonia was chanting in the background, over and over like an unanswered phone. Glynn turned around and saw that he had lost his audience. We, like his gift, had abandoned him.