Claire Kilroy - All Names Have Been Changed

‘Alright Deco?’ said Giz when he answered my knock on his door. He didn’t seem in the least bit surprised to see me standing there. It was as if he’d been expecting me. ‘How’s it goin?’ he asked, ‘What’s the story?’ As if I would know. Me, who never wrote any story, me who never got past page five. Giz made sure before unhooking the security chain that I had money in my pockets this time, then he named his price.

I sat into his couch and smoked until I was juddering from side to side when I closed my eyes, though my body was still as stone. Giz sucked lighter fluid through a balled-up sock. His bedsit was as grey as a rotten lung. I found myself gasping for breath all of a sudden and clawed at the armrest in panic, but it was no good. Giz was too far gone to notice or help. ‘Are you happy now?’ she had asked before turning her back on me. Are you happy now?

A bell was tolling on Front Square. Graduates filed out of the Examination Hall dressed in black gowns and tasselled mortarboards. Commencements. ‘Look at them,’ Antonia scoffed. Glynn was two hours late.

‘Why are they called commencements when it’s all coming to an end?’ Faye wondered.

I had no idea either what I would do once the course was over. Only a few months left, and nothing to show for my time. Then what? Back to England? Back to the factory, empty-handed? I looked away from the window.

‘What good will it do us anyway?’ Aisling asked. ‘What use is their stupid scrap of paper? How will that secure us a job?’ It was an unexpectedly practical line of thought for Aisling. I’d never have guessed that such considerations entered her head. ‘I don’t want to end up on the dole,’ she added. Her fears were met with silence. I hoped her parents were wealthy.

It was dusk before the lord of the prose finally materialised under the Arch. Don’t know why we’d bothered waiting. A reluctance to go home, must have been. He made his way across the cobbles in our direction, roaring drunk yet still managing to keep a glad eye out for admirers. The graduates and their families had disbanded by then. Glynn was out of luck.

‘Oh, the rotten bastard!’ Antonia cried when he veered past House Eight and diverted to the Buttery. He had seen our five faces bearing down and thought the better of it. Antonia grabbed her coat and ran down the stairs, the others in close pursuit.

They had him surrounded by the time I arrived. He’d only made it as far as the side of the Dining Hall. Antonia was upbraiding him while the others stood at her side, silently lending their support. Glynn didn’t like it one bit. He didn’t appreciate being corrected by a shower of women. He growled and broke free of the arena of girls, then turned his terrible eyes on them. Red and white, they were; half mad. The girls instinctively drew back.

He panted fiercely at us through his nose, a bull working up to a charge, but then he winced sharply and tore at his ear. At first we thought a wasp had stung him. He shuddered and whimpered in an agonised paroxysm, clutching the side of his head, shambling about in a small circle, tripping over his own feet. Never had he looked more like a derelict.

The writer crumpled before our eyes, emitting a shocking moan. Aisling shook her head pleadingly, as if that would make it stop. I felt a bolt of terror that I would in good conscience describe as mortal, for Glynn, it appeared to me at that moment, had entered a realm beyond common mortal experience. Whatever afflicted him was invisible to the rest of us. There was nothing there, as far as we could see.

We formed an arc around his torment, stricken observers. No one could help him, no one knew what to do. That was the worst thing about it: we could only stare. The tears were stinging my eyes. Glynn’s palm remained clamped to his ear, trying to shut out unwanted voices. The demons. They were here.

He finally straightened up and lowered his fist, holding it out like a conjuror for the big reveal, ensuring he had our full attention. His arm trembled with the strain of clenching his fingers so tightly. Glynn threw us a grisly leer — victorious, scornful — before flinging the contents of his hand away with a force that nearly knocked him off balance. A glimpse of outstretched fingers silhouetted against the electric-blue dusk, then his hand dropped to his side.

Glynn stood winded in our circle, half the man we knew him to be. He had exorcised his demon, cast out his succubus, with the terrifying complication that we had seen it. Something three-dimensional had shot from his fingers and fallen into the shrubbery. We had heard it land. I looked to the others. They too were transfixed. Glynn delivered a final jubilant scowl — he seemed to have taken pleasure in the whole macabre spectacle — before lurching down the ramp to the Buttery.

‘Fuck,’ I said when the double doors clattered shut behind him, ‘what the hell was that?’

They didn’t answer. I glanced at them again, pale blue and black-eyed in the dusk. Aisling was rotating the crystal amulet hanging from her neck, her fingers spider-spinning.

‘What the fuck just happened?’ I was worn out with petitioning them, sick of the sound of my own whine. Tiny wriggling sperm, big white ovum. Fuckhead, Antonia had called me. ‘Jesus Christ, one of you. What did Professor Glynn just throw into the bushes? Aisling? Faye? Tell me.’

Guinevere inclined her head toward Aisling. This motion was so slight and so slow that it was sinister in the twilight, a statue coming to life. What good murderesses they’d have made. They continued to ignore me, though it didn’t appear deliberate, more that they’d tuned me out, which was worse. As if, like Glynn, they were now functioning on a different plane altogether, one on which I was no longer audible, so thoroughly had I been dismissed. I could have shoved the lot of them over in frustration. Down they’d have toppled in a sprawl of limbs, a heap of porcelain dolls.

The four girls descended on the shrubbery, stooping to work the bare brown bushes like a paddy field.

‘Let’s just go,’ I urged them. ‘You’ll find nothing in the dark.’ Of course they’d find something. They’d find everything. They missed nothing, those women. ‘Jesus, come on. What’s the point? It’ll have escaped by now.’

Aisling straightened up sharply. ‘It’ll have what ?’

‘Go home, Declan,’ said Guinevere. ‘You’re only impeding us.’ It was the first time she’d addressed me since our break-up. Are you happy now ?

The others kept their faces averted, and Aisling lowered her eyes and returned to her work. So they’d heard. They’d discussed the break-up behind my back. Don’t know why that came as a surprise.

Their strained silence was punctured by a loud hiss. Faye stumbled out backwards from the shrubbery with a cry of pain. A small black sinewy creature darted along the base of the wall, snapping undergrowth in its wake. Aisling gasped in alarm. ‘Your arm, Faye,’ said Guinevere, ‘it’s bleeding.’

The girls crowded around to inspect the damage, what could be seen of it in the flicker of Antonia’s lighter. Must have been the feral cat, they decided from the pattern of the claw marks. They’d named it Sylvia after their favourite author. You’d see it crouched in the shadows watching the outside world in fright, if you knew the right places to look. They’d taken to leaving food out and reporting on its appetite and general appearance. I’ll bet they even made it feel special for a while, the unfortunate trembling mite. Who’d watch out for it when the course was over? That’s what I wanted to know.

Because it was so slight, barely able to defend its corner, the girls had assumed that Sylvia was female, though the cat could as easily have been a young male, I once pointed out. They didn’t hear me, so I’d said it again. Still no response. They’d moved on to more pressing matters. I should have thrown myself on my back and bawled it in frustration: ‘This wretched suffering creature on which you take pity could just as easily be a young male!’ They’d never have listened.