All Names Have Been Changed (9 page)

Antonia, of all people, told me in the pub after that workshop that she had felt exactly the same.
How
can
anyone
feel
exactly
the
same?
I wanted to shout at her. It was the most inane thing I'd ever heard in my life,
although I knew Antonia was only trying to be empathetic, or human, or something. She could not recall the specific trigger in Guinevere's reading, just the sudden onslaught in its aftermath of a sense of isolation so profound it had made her want to weep. Uncanny, how Guinevere had managed to summon into the room precisely the condition of alienation she'd been seeking to describe. It had pulled up a seat alongside us at the workshop table, where it had remained, slumped and odious, for the duration of the class, demonstrating the terrible irony that if you write well about something bad, you'll never have any readers. Where did that leave us? With very few options. Very few options indeed.

The shadow of the leg of Glynn's desk was rapidly fading from the floor. It could have been my own reflection I was watching disappear, the impact this dwindling had on me. A black cloud was occluding the watery sun. Glynn's office darkened with remarkable speed, as if a whale were swallowing us whole. I looked at the Professor with appeal and saw the same appeal in him.

‘Dropping out?' he prompted me. ‘Why?'

I shrugged. ‘Because I feel so …'

The only adjective that sprang to mind was ‘wobbly'. How could I produce the likes of ‘wobbly' in front of the likes of Glynn? Words were at least as clunky as Glynn's collection of trophies, his bulky lumps of metal and stone which in no way communicated the literary achievements they'd been designed to represent. I didn't finish my sentence, merely shrugged again. Really, the intensity of the moods that used to sweep over me then.

The stoical nod with which Glynn received this information, or lack of it, indicated that nothing I could say would surprise the man. He had seen it all before.
Emotions that were new and raw to me had been endured by him years ago, in another life that was over now, and all he could do was nod with a recognition that was in itself a comfort. He stood up and went to his bookcase, his repository of infinite riches, his windbreak, and selected a thick red leather tome.
The
Collected
Works
of
William
Blake,
his favourite British poet.
The Devil's Party,
Glynn's sixth novel, was loosely based on Blake's life. Parallels between the two men were not difficult to discern.

I watched as Glynn took down two more volumes of Romantic poetry and retrieved a metal hip flask from its hiding place at the back of the bookcase. He produced two teacups from his drawer and poured a generous measure of whiskey into each. He handed one cup to me and raised the other. ‘So explosive, MI5 monitors the distillery,' he joked, but neither of us laughed. We sat in silence in Glynn's trophy room while the world outside darkened around us, and the whiskey warmed the world within us. Lights in the offices across the way came on one by one. Glynn poured himself another drop.

‘You remind me of myself,' he finally commented. The compassion with which he offered this was almost paternal in quality. ‘I won't lie to you,' he added, ‘it's a difficult path we've chosen.' We. It didn't matter that everything recently written about Glynn read like a death notice. He kept writing writers' novels, that was the problem. Readers' novels were what was wanted. His career had been deemed moribund by those in the know, but still, I'd have done anything to join him.

‘You wouldn't be feeling any better now?' he wondered when my cup was empty.

‘I would,' I told him. It was the truth.

‘Good man, good man.'

He returned the two teacups to the drawer and slotted the hip flask back in behind Blake, Byron and Shelley. I stood up, and he saw me to the door. Tacked to his message board was another pale-blue note. Glynn smiled weakly as he unpinned it. I lowered my eyes in embarrassment.

He gripped my shoulder. ‘Look after yourself, Declan.' I didn't know what to say. He retreated to his den with the note. An image of a lily stem, of all things, flashed into my mind, a freshly cut lily stem with three closed buds that I had once contemplated in a glass vase. The buds would open because they didn't understand that their life supply had been severed, that they were already dead. I gazed at Glynn's stooped shoulders as his door swung shut and thought of that stem, think of it still, think of him still, think of us all still, flowering regardless.

The morning of the sixth of January found me sitting bolt upright at my desk in the flat on Mountjoy Square. I hadn't spoken in five days. A month had passed since the last workshop. My pens and paper were laid out in front of me, but I wasn't writing: I was
listening.
Several odd things had occurred in rapid succession. First, the animal cries. A dog started yelping at its upper register, its agony piercing the thin blue sky. It was coming from the back lane. Somewhere below, not far from where I sat, a bloody scene was unfolding. That I could not see it only made it worse. I would have given anything to make it stop.

And then, abruptly, the yelping did stop. The silence which ensued was more ominous still. I sat rooted to the seat.

Next came the rhythmic thumping in the sky, as if the wings of a huge bird were beating the air. It came from all directions at once, growing louder and closer. It took a long time for the helicopter to appear. That's when I clapped eyes on the gull. I hadn't seen it alight. A massive creature, big as a fox, but brazen, territorial, almost pugilistic in its assertion of its dominion, mounted on the spine of a roof. It had its eye on me, its glassy, lemony eye. It did not have to turn its head to regard me.

A shaft of low light illuminated the gull as purple storm clouds bore down on the winter sun. You could wait all year for such light and still not find it. I tried to take it in as best I was able. The gull was smooth, sculptural, declaratory, and showed no fear at all, just a – what could you call it? – a knowingness, as if it wasn't a bird in that round earless skull, exactly. No, not the consciousness of a bird in there, exactly.

The first plump raindrops slashed across the windowpane. A flash of sheet lightning, followed by a rumble of thunder. Something was expanding within me. I put down my pen. The gull was ululating by then, a wild, maniacal sound. A torrential downpour drowned him out. Then the doorbell rang. The doorbell, in that weather. I could hardly believe it.

Two men in navy suits and beige trench coats were standing on the doorstep under a green golf umbrella. The sky lit up theatrically behind them. ‘Is Jesus in your life?' one of them asked me in a dapper London accent. Their trousers gleamed wetly like bin liners. ‘You're having me on,' was the best I could manage.

I pushed past them down the steps, and the front door clattered shut behind me. ‘Ah Jesus,' I cried – my keys were upstairs on my desk. The second man said something that I didn't catch and pressed a magazine into my hands.

The rain was lashing so hard by then that it bounced back up from the pavement. Cars ploughed hesitantly through the rising floodwater, waves rippling in their wake. The orange hulk of a double-decker bus was making slow progress along the North Circular Road. I ventured in the slipstream towards it. It was as dark as dusk, though the church bells hadn't yet rung the noon Angelus.

I could find no bus stop on that stretch of the North Circular, so I waved my Jesus magazine. The bus pulled in, and the doors retracted. ‘Get in, get in!' the driver roared, like a man hauling bodies out of the sea. ‘Where's your coat? Merciful hour.'

My shoes squelched as I climbed to the top deck. The rain was drumming hard on the roof. The bus braked, and I went stumbling forwards. There was an empty seat up near the front. I slotted myself in beside a man reading the
Star.
The windows had steamed up with condensation. The outside world was a mess of headlamps and tail lights looming through the dribbling greyness. ‘Thin Lizzy' was scratched into the seat in front of me. ‘Philo RIP.' The conductor came up and collected my fare. No one got on or off. We trooped along in a convoy of traffic as if we had all day.

I kept my eyes on the ‘RIP', listening to the tinny
dumb
dumb
dumb
of someone else's headphones. Water rolled up and down the aisle of the bus, which surged forward and drew back again like an uncertain child. The idling engine hit a frequency that caused the windows to vibrate.

The bus performed a sharp swerve. We had turned away from town. I hadn't checked the destination before boarding. I sensed that we were passing a church – the pale grey mass filling the fogged-up window on the left formed, in my peripheral vision, a church. The intuition quickly developed into a conviction. A church, definitely, no doubt about it. I kept my head down so as not to invite further disorientation. If it were, say, a school, for instance, and not a church – I wasn't sure how I'd respond to that. Things were tentative that morning.

The woman in the front seat blessed herself. It was a
church. The water in my shoes had warmed up. These are the things I noticed. My teeth felt sharp in my mouth. I had never been so acutely aware of them before. Had never been aware of them at all, really, but suddenly it seemed all wrong, this army of sharp objects regimented across my soft pink gums. Tail lights the size of cartwheels flared in the front window as the lorry ahead applied the brakes. The bus pulled in to allow a squad car to speed past, followed by an ambulance. Passengers craned their necks to get a look at the blur of flashing blue lights. Murmurs rippled through the top deck. We were no better than worried cattle.

The flashing blue lights disappeared when we took another corner. The chain of approaching headlamps on the far side of the street was replaced by a low lichen-green expanse. I stared at it for some time, trying to make it out, before realising that it was the Liffey. We were travelling along the quays. I jumped off at the next stop. The water in my shoes became cold again.

I stumbled up Westmoreland Street against the driving rain, colliding with pedestrians, apologising without looking up from my feet. I was almost hit by a car while crossing Fleet Street – I'd run straight into its path.
Sorry,
I mouthed at the driver, bloated and deformed behind whirring windscreen wiper blades. If I could just make it to Front Arch and get out of the thunderstorm. That's what I kept telling myself as I blundered along. If I can just get under the Arch and take shelter for a while. The weather will be more clement on the other side.

It was no such thing.

The lights in House Eight were out, but the door was unlocked. Up the wooden stairs I ran and threw open the door to the workshop. It hadn't been disturbed over
Christmas. The murky shadows of raindrops trickled down the white walls like – I don't know. Like something inimical. The creative imagination failed me that day. I couldn't come up with a single simile to elevate those oozing shadows. They were nothing better than their grimy selves.

Glynn would not have fallen at that hurdle. He wrote about Irish rain as if no other rain in the world was quite like it, quite as desolate, quite as disabling. How bleak that room was without him, and without the group. I touched a radiator. It was cold. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' I whispered – the touch of cold metal was the final straw. I stood there shivering and dripping, not knowing where to turn, a man who had reached the dock only to find that his ship had already set sail, after the great struggle to get there, the blind rush across the city.

‘Who's there?'

The voice, a woman's, had come from downstairs. I went out to the landing and leaned over the banister. Faye was standing at the foot of the stairs. She put her hand on her heart when she saw me.

‘Declan! Oh, thank God, you scared us. Come down – we're all in the kitchen.'

The kitchen? There was a kitchen? I joined Faye at ground level and followed her around a corner, down another flight of stairs into the basement, whereupon she opened a door into a gaslight yellow room. And there they were, the girls the girls the girls, sitting around a table drinking tea. How did they know to be there? They just knew. They sensed the state of emergency too. We weren't due in until Wednesday.

We sat around the kitchen table clutching mugs as
intently as hands at a séance. I placed my copy of
The
Watchtower
in the centre. There was one small window in the room, sealed shut with layers of old gloss paint. It faced onto the twelve-foot wall that separated Trinity from Pearse Street and was level with the cobbles outside. We looked out through weeds and security bars. A Superser heater wheezed away in the corner like a dozing grandparent. It was as if we'd always been there.

Guinevere was relating how she'd woken up that morning weeping for no good reason. Uncontrollably, she added. Difficulty breathing. Funny, how the mention of suffocation brings out the symptoms in the listener. We took deep breaths and nodded in sympathy. It was stuffier than the bus in that basement. Aisling's chain-smoking didn't help.

‘I don't know why I'm so upset,' Guinevere shrugged. She attempted a smile, but it didn't take, which only made things worse. We were in the same seating arrangement as for the workshops, I noticed. It was no time for banal observations.

‘Poor pet,' Faye murmured, in that calm, sympathetic way of hers which was soothing to us all. I wanted her to say it again. Guinevere was paler than usual that day. As white as a page, I remember thinking. But not as white as Aisling.

And then, when Guinevere finally got herself up and out of the house, a jumbo jet had flown overhead at too low an altitude, while a motorbike simultaneously accelerated past without a muffler, making that awful sound – ‘You know the one like a lion's roar?' We nodded. ‘Except it seemed that the roar had come from
within
the biker's helmet, as if some mythical half-man, half-beast was inside.'

‘Oh fuck,' said Aisling. ‘Chimera.'

‘I know it sounds stupid,' Guinevere continued, ‘but what with the jet engine reverberating in the sky, and that violent roar warping the street, I suddenly found I couldn't take another step, so I pretended to root around in my bag in search of something, when, in reality, I was crouching against the wall.'

‘Crouching against the wall!' she repeated incredulously, and had a go at a laugh, her voice pitching upward.

‘Poor pet,' Faye repeated.

Aisling was peeling strands of her hair in two. ‘Do you think the rain's going to stop?'

Faye squinted out the little window. ‘Not for a while yet.'

‘Anyone catch a forecast?' These were my first words to the group that year. Hadn't even said hello.

No one had caught a forecast.

Faye asked for one of Aisling's cigarettes. I didn't know she smoked. ‘Something weird happened to me too this morning,' she said quietly. Faye wasn't one for talking about herself. She was more what you'd call a listener.

‘It's no big deal, just, my doorbell rang, but when I opened the door, not a sinner was there. The garden was empty, and the latch on the gate was in place. No one could ring the doorbell, then run away and latch that gate in the time it took for me to answer. It's a fecky little device, the latch. You see, you have to–' Faye demonstrated with her fingers how to get the latch in place. These mid-air gestures made no sense without the context of the latch itself. She may as well have been playing a zither. ‘Anyway,' she concluded, seeing the futility
of her explanation, ‘it can't be done that quickly. And the garden walls are too high to jump. I can't explain how it happened, but when I closed the door, I sensed a presence in the hall with me.'

‘Is it here now?' Aisling asked.

Faye rotated the ashtray, first clockwise, then anti-clockwise, her head tilted in concentration as if it were the combination wheel to a safe, Pandora's Box. ‘She,' Faye softly corrected Aisling. ‘She's a she, this presence, not an it.' Aisling shuddered extravagantly.

‘I do not believe in ghosts,' Glynn had written in
Hibernia,
‘but I can see how the misunderstanding arose. A longing so fierce as to be almost corporeal, an inability to come to terms with loss.'

Antonia, who had remained withdrawn throughout, abruptly got to her feet. ‘Why is everybody whispering all of a sudden?'

We didn't register how low the volume in the kitchen had fallen until Antonia reprimanded us. The impact was the same as switching on the lights in the middle of the night. We winced at her and blinked.

She pulled on her coat and picked up her handbag, muttering that she needed some fresh bloody air. You would think we'd been intentionally depriving her. We listened to her trip-trapping above our heads, huddled in our bunker watching the ceiling, on the other side of which a phantom Antonia paced, one who deviated qualitatively in nature from the woman who had just stormed out. A crack in the plaster splintered across the ceiling, dramatic as a shooting star. What a day we were having.

‘Are we hiding?' Aisling asked. Same thought on my mind too. I was beginning to think like them.

The front door to House Eight slammed so hard that the four of us recoiled. Aisling spilled her tea. There was nothing to mop it up with. ‘I suppose we had better go after her,' Faye sighed, getting to her feet, and Aisling joined her, pocketing her cigarettes in case the situation called for them. Guinevere didn't move.

Those wide grey eyes stared at me like a wild animal when the others were gone. That is what she reminded me of at that moment: a pair of eyes I had once caught sight of, looking out from the cover of ferns. I had stopped in my tracks. The eyes had locked with mine for a beat, long enough for it to strike me that we were essentially the same. The same, when it came down to it, but in a different vessel, I told myself – or not quite told myself – it was not as direct as all that. Just a piece of stupid nonsense that entered my head. Why this compulsion to forge a connection with something that wants nothing to do with you? The thing had turned and fled, after all. ‘I don't like it down here,' Guinevere confessed. Tears started streaming down her face.

‘Hey, what's wrong?'

‘Nothing.' She shook her head. ‘Just … nothing.'