Claire Kilroy - All Names Have Been Changed

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.