Claire Kilroy - All Names Have Been Changed

The storm had washed the cobbles on Front Square as clean as riverbed pebbles. Glynn’s hobble wasn’t regular enough to count as a limp, being instead palsied, random and mortifying. Something had happened to his brain, not his legs. He trundled across the cobbles, perverse as a supermarket trolley, limbs accelerating with no increase in pace. We were used to him drifting along lost in thought, musing in the medium of poetic metaphor. Something is now broken that cannot be fixed, something is now broken that cannot be fixed. His actions were timed so perfectly to those words that it seemed he could hear me, or that I was controlling him, or that we, rather, were controlling him, standing up there, agents of fate, drawing him to us, our puppet. ‘I can’t bear this,’ Guinevere said.

Glynn must have been muttering away to himself, because students were turning around to look back at him in surprise, then smirking to each other. How could we have stopped them, answer me that? How could we have shielded him from their ridicule? Not everyone saw past his faults, as we saw. We saw so far past his faults that we barely saw him at all. We were dying for him up there. That is the only way to describe it. The five of us were dying up there for Glynn, wanting him safe inside with us where he was treasured, no matter what his state. I never loved Glynn more than at that moment, if love is the acute compound of tenderness and anxiety for another that I believe it to be.

Glynn’s short journey went on for an eternity. He didn’t glance up at the window to check for us. He knew we would be watching. We were always watching. Everyone slows down to gape at car crashes. Something is now broken that cannot be fixed. There was no way out of that sentence.

Eventually Glynn entered the shadow of House Eight and cleared our field of vision. It wasn’t until he was out of sight that we started breathing again. ‘We’re all ballsed now,’ said Aisling.

We took our seats at the workshop table and waited for him. Waited and waited and waited. Faye’s head was in her hands throughout this period. What was he doing down there? And so quietly too. After an extended interlude of silence from the stairwell, the girls elected me to go down to investigate. I’m sure they heard him calling me everything under the sun before turning on his heel and storming out. You would think I had mortally insulted him. ‘Professor Glynn,’ is all I had said, but the sound of his own name proved a step too far. He had swiped the air in fury at it, batted it away like a swarm of bees, telling me that I made him sick, that we all made him sick, that he couldn’t stand the sight of us. The whiskey fumes were enough to fell a pony.

I made my way back upstairs and admitted myself into the workshop as unobtrusively as I was able, shaking my head apologetically as if they were a waiting room of expectant relatives and my role was to break bad news. A flamingo-pink disc of a sun was shining at the tip of the Campanile, tinting the workshop windows rose. The sun couldn’t, of course, have been shining at the tip of Campanile, not at that hour of the afternoon, not at that elevation, but I distinctly remember looking up to see it suspended in the sky, glowing through the soft haze like something from Miami.

‘I’m sorry,’ I told them gravely, ‘I’m afraid he’s gone,’ and then I took Guinevere’s hand in mine without a second’s thought. I led her away from there, as if love was a simple thing and freedom was a possibility and an old man’s troubles weren’t ours. Who did I think I was?

Glynn spoke at length during the lecture he delivered to — ah, how can I be expected to remember the where and the when of it? All I’m good for is parroting variations on Glynn’s words, in this instance his description of his love not just for the physical world but for the world of physics. I’d nodded my head in fierce agreement before I’d even heard what the man had to say, that is the class of fool I was then. It was no less than tribal. Glynn was a country I’d have borne arms to defend. Show me where the cudgels are kept, and I will take them up for you.

Physics delineated the natural world from a standpoint that was new to him, Glynn told us almost shyly, not being a man of science, here amongst a hall of them — he gestured at the audience at this juncture. Earlsfort Terrace, I have it now. I was halfway through my engineering degree. That’s why the girls weren’t there. Few women, if any, were present that evening, and it sort of took the wind out of Glynn’s sails, sort of knocked out his stuffing.

He’d stepped up to the lectern on the hangman’s platform and cleared his throat more than once before commencing, a man summoned to give an account of himself. I was sitting on my own in the back row of the lecture hall, looking down on him from a steep incline. Long thin planks ran the length of each row by way of a desk, into which various names and dates were inscribed, including my name, including that date: the night I first saw Glynn in the flesh.

The invisible forces acting upon the human psyche was his topic, as seen from the perspective of the creative mind. It was neither the time nor the place. Physics lent him the methodology and terminology to explain those forces which were working upon us when nothing appeared to be happening, Glynn explained. He made reference to that old school textbook staple, the balanced see-saw, for the love of God: not motionless because it was at rest, but because two equal turning forces were acting against one another. He paused and looked around the hall to allow this to sink in. The example might have impressed a class of junior-freshmen English students, but it was never going to constitute the revelation to the School of Engineering that it evidently constituted to Glynn. How thoroughly he had miscalculated the situation; so it seemed at the time. Someone in the audience sighed. Staff members were out in force. What joker had deemed it appropriate to invite a novelist to address an engineering faculty in the first place?

‘This is not wood,’ I remember him proclaiming, rapping the wooden lectern with his knuckle for dramatic effect. ‘This is energy in a static form.’ He had not the slightest clue what he was talking about, it was obvious, but still he made the effort, undeterred, striving to forge a link between his world and ours — the burden the artistic imagination is cursed with.

Load, thrust, potential energy, torque, he continued, throwing about words and ideas he found attractive but didn’t understand. All of them tearing us this way and that, he went on, exerting pressures on the body that were invisible to the naked eye, so that even though he was being hurled around the Earth’s atmosphere by centripetal force, still he was accused of sitting around on his backside all day doing nothing. Glynn all but winked, earning himself a low ripple of laughter for his efforts, a low rumble of gruff amusement. Sitting around on your backside all day doing nothing. I don’t know why he felt obliged to poke fun at the writerly endeavour, his life’s work, on that occasion. There were plenty happy to do it for him, and plenty more happy to listen. Oh Glynn, did you have to make it so easy?

Despite having imposed a liberal interpretation upon forces which did not sustain a liberal interpretation, and despite his flawed grasp of the laws governing the universe, I still kind of knew what Glynn was stabbing away at down there in his oblique, unscientific, analogical way, a diagram of a rotary wing from a previous lecture chalked on the blackboard behind him. Questions were invited from the audience, but none were forthcoming, and the applause that closed the event was by no means ardent.