Claire Kilroy - All Names Have Been Changed

Aisling’s second reading was met with another silence from us and an impressed nod from Glynn. The fictional space should never be cosy, he had recently warned us. Glynn didn’t rate Dickens for the same reason he didn’t rate Mozart. Not enough doubt. Didn’t reflect the world. That’s why he responded so positively to Aisling’s piece that day: it was doubt incarnate.

‘Well so,’ he said, sitting back in his chair to indicate that the discussion was now open to the table. He waited for our reaction. So did Aisling. But what could we say? A meteor had crashed through the ceiling, and we stared at it smouldering away on the desk, wondering where the fuck it had come from. And what the fuck it was. This was not matter as it existed on Earth. There we were, the rest of us, plodding around trying to hone our similes, conjugate our adverbs, and Aisling had just invented — well, what? What had Aisling just invented? My biro rolled across the desk and fell through the gap that had appeared between our tables. I made no attempt to retrieve it.

‘Page ninety-six,’ Antonia eventually said, seeing as no one else was prepared to get the ball rolling. ‘I have a problem with your use of meta -. You’ve used it as a prefix. Meta - is not a prefix. It’s a combining form. A combining form is a linguistic element used in combination with another element to form a word, e.g., bio - equals life, — graphy equals writing, hence “biography”. Neither element is a complete word in itself.’ As openers went, even I could have done better.

‘Okay,’ said Aisling. She didn’t know what point was being made either, still less care. Antonia waited for her to pencil her comment into the margin, but Aisling didn’t seem to grasp what was required of her and looked about the table benignly, as though our faces constituted pleasant if unremarkable scenery. She may as well have been drifting down a river in a punt. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep.

‘You should have used para -,’ Antonia said. ‘ Para - is a prefix, so you can append it to a complete word. Hence, in this case, it would be “paranotional”. Which isn’t a word either, obviously, but it’s grammatically more accurate than “metanotional”, as you’ve used.’ Antonia had been drinking so much black coffee lately that her teeth were marled brown.

‘Thank you, Antonia,’ Aisling said but still didn’t reach for the pencil. We stared at it, lying there like a loaded pistol, willing Aisling to pick it up and put us out of our misery.

Faye swallowed tensely, the room so quiet we heard her ligaments wrench. My eyes made the sound of the drip of a tap every time I blinked. I tried to stop blinking. No good. Guinevere kept her head down, and Glynn, his mouth shut. It was entirely his fault, whether he admitted it or not. He had single-handedly engineered this crisis. You stupid bitch , he had spat at Antonia, introducing a different element, bursting open the cabin door, then storming off and leaving her to brazen it out on her own, humiliated in front of all of us.

Though it was possible he no longer recalled the incident, Antonia would never forget it. There had been something of the jack-in-the-box about her ever since. Our every word was construed as potentially antagonistic, an insinuation of her damaged status, another twist of the handle. Did you shag Professor Glynn ? Wallop. Fuckhead, she had called me. The spring-loaded mechanism was getting tauter by the second. The leering head would explode across the table. It was only a question of time.

‘Did you listen to a word I said?’ Antonia demanded.

Aisling scratched at the powdery eczema coating the back of her hands. Her knuckles were bleeding, the blood pink and watery. Words tumbled into her as into a black hole when she was in that frame of mind. They met with no resistance, just kept falling, never to connect with their target. There was no point in even saying them. I don’t know why Antonia couldn’t see that. The two of them were caught in some sort of inversely proportionate closed energy system. The tenser Antonia got, the more languid Aisling became. She was sinking into her chair, melting into a pool of faded black fabric. Antonia shook her head. ‘There’s a name for people like you, Aisling,’ she said carefully. She indicated the manuscript. ‘People who write this sort of thing, dismissing the rules, abandoning the signposts.’

‘And what might that be?’ Aisling asked. ‘What’s the name for people like me?’ So she had been listening all along.

Antonia flicked her blonde hair. ‘Icarus,’ she said. ‘You’re sailing too close to the sun. You are going to crash and burn like Icarus.’

Nothing. No reaction at all, not a flicker. The black hole had been reinstated. Antonia sat there looking at Aisling. Aisling sat there looking back. The rest of us held our breath and waited. Something bad was about to happen, as Faye would say, or Aisling, or Guinevere, or even myself. We were all primed for catastrophe by then. We could all see it coming. By leaving Antonia wounded, by cornering her, Glynn had forced her to this, to attack Aisling, who could least sustain it, who was sailing too close to the sun. What was it those poison-pen letters had warned him? There is always a price . But when had Glynn ever listened?

‘Where were we?’ he asked, but nobody answered him. Nobody said a word.

‘So what’s going on?’ I said to Guinevere after the workshop. It was with some difficulty that I had managed to separate her from the pack. They reluctantly agreed to go on ahead without her after she’d promised she’d be along soon. The second they rounded the corner out of sight, I steered her down the damp lane running alongside Bartley’s. She had her back against the wall. ‘What was all that about earlier?’ I demanded. ‘In the women’s toilet?’ She didn’t like my tone.

‘Nothing, Declan.’ She looked down at her arm. I saw that I was still holding it, and let go. She massaged it as if I’d hurt her. It was a quarter to five. The setting sun was shining thinly upon the tips of things, picking out the sharp edges which had sprung up around us. There was no guarantee that the fine spell would hold.

‘Why didn’t you answer me when I asked you before the workshop what was wrong?’

‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘you make it sound like I felt sick on purpose.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Okay, fine. Just, you made me look like a complete dick in front of the others, that’s all.’ Fuckhead, Antonia had called me.

She blinked. ‘Why are you being so obnoxious?’

I looked up at the sky, what was visible of it from the narrow lane, and laughed in disbelief. ‘Why am I being so obnoxious?’

She sighed as if I was wearing her out. ‘Don’t do this,’ she said quietly. She was still massaging her arm.

‘Do what?’

‘You know.’

‘No, I don’t know. Tell me. Oh wait: you never tell me anything. Sorry, I forgot.’ An oniony smell of sweat hovered on the air. I realised with a surprise that it was me.

The lane was littered with weeds and broken glass. Guinevere looked up and down the length of it in desperation, but there was nowhere for her to run, no one to appeal to for help. ‘Why are you trying to upset me?’

‘Why am I trying to upset you ?’

‘Yes, why are you being like this?’

‘Why am I being like this?’ It was like some sort of foreign-language exercise in pronouns.

‘Stop it!’ She had never raised her voice to me before.

No , something inside me said, no, I will not stop . ‘Stop what?’ I asked flatly, warming to my subject. A twisted life form had pierced the forest floor, a coiled stump of fern — primitive, flowerless, beckoning. My black thoughts extended their fronds around Guinevere. Spores hung all about us on the air.