Claire Kilroy - All Names Have Been Changed

‘Listen to yourself, Declan,’ she said in wonderment, her head tilted to one side as if she were reasoning with a rational human being, one possessed of empathy and kindness.

‘No, you listen to your self.’ An unspeakable resentfulness had overtaken me. I had never known its like.

Guinevere couldn’t seem to register what she was dealing with and persisted in treating me like a grown-up. ‘I think you should apologise to Antonia,’ she advised me.

‘ I should apologise?’ This, I could hardly credit.

‘You’re the one who suggested she’d shagged Professor Glynn.’

‘So everything’s my fault now?’

‘That’s not what I’m saying. Antonia is very upset about the whole thing, and I think you should have a quiet word with her. Sort things out before the situation escalates.’

I threw back my head and laughed again. ‘Here we go.’

‘I’m glad you find this so amusing.’

‘Yeah, so am I.’

‘There’s no point in even talking to you.’

‘If you say so.’

‘You’re doing it on purpose.’

‘Doing what?’

‘For fuck’s sake!’ she cried in frustration. She said, I said, she said, I said. It went on for ever. It was dark before we knew it. People were going about their business on the street beyond. You would think it was a normal evening like any other. Guinevere bit her bottom lip. My answers were just inversions of her questions, she complained, wiping away the first of the tears. I observed her as if she were trapped in a vacuum: mouth moving, no sound, a specimen in a jar.

‘You seem to be enjoying this,’ she noted.

‘Dunno, am I?’

I was as good as lying at the bottom of a well by then, listening to the distant sounds of life going on above me. I had become a small man trapped inside a large man’s suit of armour, too short to see out the eye slits. It is difficult to explain. Yes, extremely difficult to explain. Even looking back on it, it seems terribly remote, hardly me at all in fact, as if, no more than Aisling, I had temporarily drifted away from myself, leaving the whole show behind.

‘What’s wrong, Declan?’ Guinevere implored me. ‘Has something happened? You can tell me.’

‘Dunno,’ I mumbled again.

This was less than the truth. I was not good enough for Guinevere, and she, with her remarkable powers of perception, would see through me sooner or later. From the way she was now studying me, it was evident that this process had already begun. I had never attained my heart’s desire before and had revealed myself, in the having of it, to be unworthy of it, undeserving. I had exposed myself as an essentially unsympathetic character. Cardinal sin in a novel, they tell me.

Guinevere’s protestations continued undiminished, and unheeded. At one point she pummelled my chest to get my attention, and I wondered, in my abstract, sullen way, whether it was warped of me to find those punches arousing. Didn’t matter any more, one way or the other. Talk to me, she kept insisting, as if such a thing were still possible. We had gone beyond all that. She said that I was being selfish, that I was being a selfish bastard. Who was I to disagree? The girl was shivering from head to foot. We had been standing in that dank lane for hours.

‘So that’s it then?’ she finally asked after an extended period of silence had elapsed. Though she had phrased it as a question, I deliberately interpreted it as a statement.

‘Okay,’ I shrugged, like it was fine by me. ‘If you’re sure that’s what you want.’

She sharply averted her face as if my breath reeked, which it probably did. Then she started to cry again. I kept my hands in my pockets. Her tears were not the usual picturesque variety, I noted sourly. A blast of sea smell hit my nostrils, as pungent, as evocative, as childhood. I looked about for the source but could not identify it. Where was all this fatalism coming from? We were in Glynn terrain now.

‘So here we are,’ I said, and felt for one exhilarating moment that I was over her and that there would be another Guinevere. That she was one in a sequence of extraordinary women I would love, and who would love me. I must have been in shock. I was young then and had no comprehension of the significance of proceedings, no grasp yet that such encounters were unique and unrepeatable, instead regarding all that occurred as preludes to the main event. Life was an entity due to commence at some point in the future. That’s what I used to think.

‘Here we are,’ I said again and felt that surge of liberty again. Fainter this time, I couldn’t help noticing. It was a satisfying enough moment all the same. I wasn’t confined to the muted surroundings of my own head, for once. I was living at last, sort of. Here we are, still standing, having come out the other side. I shouldn’t say we. I was speaking for myself. Didn’t ask Guinevere what was running through her mind at that juncture. Nothing good, by the looks of it.

She dried her tears and stared at the ground for some time. Those lashes of hers. So long. I wondered if they edged the objects she looked at, set things off like a picture frame. No wonder she wrote from such an elegant perspective.

‘Are you happy now?’ she asked me quietly.

When I did not reply, Guinevere turned and walked down the lane to rejoin the civilised world. She held her head high and not once did she glance over her shoulder. I watched until she had left my sight. She had the most beautiful back.

*

On I blundered across the city without her, as if it meant nothing, as if there would be no consequences, as if I wasn’t leaving tracks of blood in the snow. There is always a price . A good hour passed before it dawned on me that the scene in the lane with Guinevere conformed almost identically in spirit to one Glynn had written over a quarter of a century earlier in Prussian Blue . I laughed, but not for long. The specifics were different, but the dialogue was broadly the same: dismal, repetitive. The narrator had broken a girl’s heart because he was a stupid bastard. Then he’d gone out on the batter.

There was a time I would have attributed these uncanny parallels to Glynn’s unrivalled ability to distil the real world into prose, but that time was over. It was my behaviour that demanded a critical appraisal. I had internalised Glynn’s imaginative landscape so thoroughly that I could no longer tell where he stopped and I began. ‘You’re worse than him,’ Guinevere had said. I wasn’t even aping the big man himself — it was worse than that: I was aping characters from his novels. And Glynn’s novels never had happy endings. Everyone knew that.

I sat on my little soldier’s bed and looked at my knees, viscerally regretting the absence of a trace of Guinevere in that room now that it was too late. A pillowslip she had slept on to press to my face, a towel still carrying the faintest hint of her scent. Should have thought of that. Should have thought of a lot of things. She had requested once to see where I lived, but her request had been denied. I hadn’t wanted her to witness the room’s meanness, as if she was the sort of girl who would think less of me for it, and so I had hidden it away from her like an embarrassing parent; an embarrassing, forsaken parent. A long slash of seagull shit streaked the window, calcium white and acidic.

Jaunty and shipshape, I had decided when I first laid eyes on that room. It was one of many lies I had to tell myself. Just like Van Gogh’s sunny bedroom in Aries, I had affirmed as I’d looked around, forgetting that Van Gogh’s painting was a work of optimism, not realism. No sign in it of the chaos he daily endured. His belongings all hanging neatly on pegs, as if that would suppress it. Same amount of pegs as objects to be hung. Not so much as a patch of shadow under the bed. Not even a speck of dust. No evidence of his demons at all. Where were they hiding? Under which loose floorboard, behind what crack in the plaster? Because they were there, alright, lying in wait for him. Who was he trying to fool? Himself, I suppose, most of all. Within one year of painting that cheerful yellow room, with its sturdy little bed and pillows for two, the artist had gone and topped himself.