Claire Kilroy - All Names Have Been Changed

‘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Antonia, who had remained withdrawn throughout, abruptly got to her feet.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.’

I stood up and clasped her shoulders. The force of her emotions. A shaft shot out of her into the heavens, another down to the molten core of the Earth. I felt the true magnitude of her, caught a glimpse of her dimensions. All I can compare it to is how certain places, certain historical sites, connect you to the events that unfolded there centuries earlier. It is a poor comparison, but it is all I can offer. It is the closest I can get. She raised her face. I placed my lips on her tear-stained cheek, and then I kissed her mouth.

Footfall on the stairs — we pulled apart. They were coming to take her back. Guinevere wiped away her tears, and I returned to my seat. We turned our expectant faces to the door. It was Aisling who burst in, noticing nothing. ‘It’s finally stopped raining,’ she announced.

The rain had stopped alright, but the north wind had picked up, and it cut right through to the bone. I stood around Mountjoy Square for the guts of two hours, waiting for someone to come home and let me in. My keys were in the ashtray on my desk, my jacket slung over the back of the chair. I shouted through the letterbox and pumped the doorbell like a Morse code button, but the building didn’t rouse from its darkness.

I took another turn around the park to keep warm. The wind roared overhead in the crowns of the trees like an ocean liner powering towards me. On the far side of the square I was grabbed from behind and shoved into the railings and wet shrubbery. A flash of metal as something sharp was thrust into my face. I blinked to get it into focus. A blade? No. It was a hypodermic needle.

‘Give us yer fucken wallet,’ I was instructed in a flat Dublin accent. The man held me up by the scruff, as if impaled on a pitchfork. He banged me against the railings. ‘Now!’

‘Okay, okay,’ I said, reaching into my back pocket. I held up my wallet. ‘Here.’ The needle was withdrawn and my collar released. Laughter. I turned around. It was the knacker from the flat downstairs. I recognised his white runners.

‘Classic,’ he said, slotting the needle like a pen into the breast pocket of his leather jacket. ‘Ya shudda seen yer face.’ He nodded at my wallet. I was still holding it up. ‘Put yer money away,’ he told me grandly, as if I’d been insisting on buying him a drink and he wouldn’t hear of it. He rubbed his palms together. ‘Aw, I was crackin me hole.’

I didn’t respond. Couldn’t. The world had stopped at the sight of that flash of metal, and it hadn’t fully started up again.

‘Wha?’ he demanded, interpreting my silence as criticism. ‘Fuck’s sake, relax, it was a joke.’

‘A joke,’ was all I said, and gently enough at that, simply repeating the word, explaining to myself that I was no longer in danger — that all it had been was a joke! — but he marched right up and bared his teeth in my face as if I’d insulted his mother.

‘Joke!’ he shouted in rage, jaw clenched, tendons pulsing. His body, I knew without laying a finger on it, would be as hard as nails under that tracksuit, and not because he was strong but because he was pinched, sucked protectively around the pit of his stomach to the point of concavity. Joke was an instruction, not an observation, meaning, in effect, laugh. Laugh, he was shouting into my face, laugh you prick, or else.

I laughed. He joined in as if I’d cracked the joke and it was a job well done. ‘Giz,’ he said, extending his hand, and then proceeded to walk me home in high good humour, as if the pair of us had been out on the lash. ‘Ya shudda seen yer face,’ he kept saying all the way around the square, shaking his head in amused recollection, though Giz patently hadn’t seen my face, on account of it being shoved in a bush.

His head swivelled from side to side when he walked, as if crossing a busy street. It seemed part of his gait. It made no difference where he was, indoors or out. He did it while climbing the stairs to his flat, checking left, then right, left, then right, perpetually on the lookout. The condition was chronic, and contagious. Soon I was checking my back too.

He unlocked his door and switched on the lights. ‘Go on ahead,’ he instructed me. ‘Be witcha in a minute.’ I couldn’t find the right words to decline and stepped inside. He shut the door behind me.

There were no books on his bookshelf. I ran a finger along the spines of his collection of video nasties, which was extensive. He was urinating noisily down the corridor. There didn’t appear to be a bed in the room. Looked like he slept on the couch. No sign of my bike, either, that I could see. My hair was still wet from the shrubbery. I found a leaf snagged in it, which I tucked into my pocket, I don’t know why. Scared of offending him, I suppose; scared he’d decree the leaf accusatory on some level, a reproof for what he’d done earlier. Hard to tell what would set him off.

I raised a corner of the grey wool blanket which was nailed over the sash window. Giz had a fine view of the square, for all the good it did him. His communion photograph was displayed on top of three television sets, stacked high in the alcove like a totem pole. I took the picture down to examine it. The standard-issue cloudy-sky backdrop, brown and gold cardboard frame — there was an identical one of me at home on the mother’s sideboard. The seven-year-old Giz was dressed as a miniature man in a three-piece off-white suit. Black shirt, white tie, red rosette, hands pressed together in simulation of prayer, a rash of blotchy freckles across his nose. The camera had caught him with his eyes squeezed shut. A new set was drawn on his eyelids in red marker, crooked like a Picasso. The toilet on the landing flushed. Giz entered the flat and plugged in the two-bar heater.