Claire Kilroy - All Names Have Been Changed

She was gone a long time. She was gone for so long, in fact, that I wondered whether she’d done a runner, leaving me with a bill she knew I couldn’t pay. A master of plot twists and revenge tragedies. It was her sheer deviousness that gave her short stories their bite. I could all but hear her laughing down Grafton Street as she click-clacked away from the scene of the crime.

I was almost surprised when she returned to the table, her face freshly powdered, her mouth painted in, the lipstick so bright it drained the colour from her skin. ‘What?’ she said when she caught me taking it in.

‘Nothing.’

‘What?’ she said again. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Nothing. You look tired, that’s all.’

Antonia shook her head in disbelief and finished off another glass of wine. ‘Christ, you really know how to make a woman feel good about herself, don’t you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said before I could help myself.

She slammed the empty glass down on the table. ‘Stop fucking apologising. I am not a charity case.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘Why do you hate me?’ she suddenly demanded. This, out of nowhere.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Even the way you look at me. You make this face. You’re making it now.’

‘I don’t hate you, Antonia.’ I was stunned that she cared what I thought of her. Stunned she was aware I even had an opinion.

‘I’m not the only one to have noticed. The others agree with me.’

‘You’ve been discussing this with the others?’ Guinevere had lost her temper over it once. ‘Stop talking about her,’ she had snapped. ‘You’re always talking about her, Declan. Haven’t you noticed that? You never stop bitching about Antonia. Why can’t you just leave her alone? You don’t like her, she doesn’t like you, so just forget about it.’

‘She doesn’t like me?’ I had probed. ‘Did she actually say that? Were those her exact words?’ etc. Fuckhead, she had called me. Guinevere cursed and warned me to drop the subject.

Antonia allowed her head to loll forward into her hands. It was a display worthy of Aisling. I had never seen her this drunk before. She seemed to be laughing, but I couldn’t say for certain. I was confronted with the neat white strip of scalp along her parting and was surprised to note that she appeared to be a natural blonde. I had expected grey. ‘I used to be a looker in my day,’ she said apropos of nothing, her voice muffled under her hair.

‘I don’t doubt it.’

I couldn’t imagine Antonia young. I categorically couldn’t see it. There was no ghost of lapsed girlhood in her, no inner child, the opposite of Glynn, who lacked an inner adult. She’d have been one of those prim little children he’d written about, no child at all but a miniature adult, silently making note of all that took place in the grown-up world, Mummy’s little double agent.

‘No really, Declan, I used to be considered something of a beauty. The boys were all after me. Shame I didn’t have the good sense to see it at the time. And now look at me.’

Aw Jesus. She caved in on herself before my horrified eyes like a rotten roof, like a collapsed grave, like a — oh God, she reached across the table for my hand. The desperation with which she seized my wrist was dreadful. She was going to cry. She was crying. She deteriorated into a sack of shuddering bones. I don’t know why women, with all their intuition, persist in believing that displays of vulnerability will stimulate the protective instinct in a man. All they provoke is the desire to run. Glynn has written illuminatingly on the subject more than once. You stupid bitch , he had called her. Antonia’s weeping, intended to draw me instead repelled me, but she couldn’t see my reaction through her tears.

‘You’re still a beauty,’ I said, and clamped a hand to her shoulder, a dog giving the paw. ‘You’re still a … a looker.’ That word. So dated. It only made things worse. I stared at my hand, fastened to her shoulder like a lump of meat, and wondered how to retract it without exacerbating the situation. Poor Grendel. She angrily shrugged my hand off, God bless her, and knocked back the red wine, what was left of it. A thin black line had formed on her lips, a ridge of high-tide seaweed.

She opened her purse and tossed a crumpled twenty onto the table with her usual level of disdain. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said, and I was only too happy to oblige. I helped her into her coat and bundled her up the stairs before she got a chance to change her mind.

The cold fresh air of South Anne Street was a salve. A public phone in a row of phone boxes was ringing out. Antonia took my arm, and I escorted her, click-clack, to Dawson Street to put her in a taxi. When one pulled up, I opened the door and stood back gallantly, every inch the gentleman. ‘Get in, get in, for God’s sake,’ she said, gesturing impatiently at the back seat, as if I was holding the whole street up. I hesitated for a second before doing what I was told. I could hardly refuse her. I could hardly refuse her in that state. That is what I tell myself.

Her house had a name. I can no longer put my finger on it. Something genteel and Anglo. I would have expected no less of her. I can see the black font in my mind’s eye to this day, but not the word itself, painted in duplicate in block capitals like a trespassing sign, warning me as I passed through her twin gateposts to turn back, turn back, but did I listen? She had me going by then.

In the back of the taxi she had linked my arm as before, and held it for the duration of the journey against the heft of her breast, easing herself towards me, a warm pliant mass, a long thigh pressed to mine, until I felt a longing for her that almost pained me. We travelled in silence. Antonia kept her eyes on the road ahead, but when I glanced at her face I saw the slight smile at the corner of her lips. She was pleased with her night’s work.

She paid for the taxi, and it pulled away, leaving the two of us facing each other across a deserted street. A great, still moon was hanging in the sky, though it was not still at all but hurtling through the glittering wastes faster than I had the wit to understand. That the moon was serene was yet another delusion. Had I thought that, or read it in Glynn? ‘Long way from home, eh soldier?’ Antonia teased. The crunch of gravel on her driveway delineated the point at which the mark had been irrevocably overstepped. I found I couldn’t turn back.

‘Beware of the Dog’ read the sign mounted above the brass letterbox on her lacquered door. Antonia laughed when she caught me looking at it. ‘There is no dog, silly,’ she said, shaking her head at my naivety in falling for that one. She swung the door open and pulled me inside.

I fucked her first on the stairs and then in her bedroom. I fucked her as many times as she wished to be fucked. Neither one of us was willing to admit defeat first, neither one prepared to lose face. She issued instructions and guided me into positions as if this tutoring role were the prerogative and duty of the older woman, as if she had something to teach me, and I had something to learn. If I was considerably rougher with her than I should have been, Antonia did not flinch, but took it on the chin, being the kind of woman who was pathologically unable to admit that you were hurting her, even if it killed her. Two could play at that game.

As the night wore on, I grew progressively more resentful. ‘Fuck,’ I remember crying up to the ceiling in sheer frustration and regret.

‘That’s it,’ she gasped, throwing back her head, displaying her long white neck, which I instinctively placed my hand on, marvelling at its fragility, at how easy it would have been to throttle her. You stupid bitch. Are you happy now? I didn’t really understand the grace of youth until Antonia drained it out of me, tainting it with knowledge of what it was to have lost youth, or to have never possessed it in the first place. It was a party she had watched all her life from the outside. And now the party was over.