Claire Kilroy - All Names Have Been Changed

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. ’

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.