Claire Kilroy - All Names Have Been Changed

Women only fall asleep in your arms in novels. Antonia wanted to talk about her broken marriage, as if it were a subject I could cast light on. What did she think I could possibly say to her? I just kept nodding. She had married too young, she explained. Barely eighteen. Straight out of school. I nodded. She’d subsequently felt she’d missed out on so much. She had never slept with a boy my age when she was a girl my age. Edmund had been so much older than her, you see. I nodded.

‘So that’s why you fucked me. To see what you were missing.’

‘I burgled your bank of youth,’ she smiled. I didn’t think it was funny. ‘Oh don’t be like that,’ she cajoled, marching her fingers up the centre of my chest like a little man. I couldn’t stand childish games in a grown woman and rolled onto my side to get away from her. There was a framed photograph of a blonde girl on her bedside table. I picked it up to change the subject.

‘Is this you?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s my daughter. She lives with Edmund now.’

I didn’t know what to say. It had never occurred to me that Antonia could be a mother. She had never mentioned her child before. I put the photograph back on the table.

A terrible confession followed. It must have been four in the morning by then, no sign of it yet getting bright, no assurance of an end in sight. Antonia had just returned from the bathroom, and she climbed back into bed, shivering with the cold. Her eyes were enormous in the darkness. She rested her head in the crook of my arm. ‘I’ve never slept with anyone other than my husband,’ she said in a small voice. Then she started to cry.

I stroked her hair. Stroked it mechanically, back and forth, a windscreen wiper. It seemed like the right thing to do, but it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. Antonia was too grown up for me to stroke her hair. We would have to sit across from each other in class every Wednesday. ‘We must never tell anyone about this,’ she whispered, glancing up at me.

‘No,’ I agreed vehemently.

She was feeling emotional because she hadn’t slept well last night. At least, I think that’s what she was trying to tell me. She was feeling emotional, she said, she hadn’t slept well last night, but she didn’t use the conjunction ‘because’. I don’t know why she was feeling emotional. I didn’t know what this term ‘feeling emotional’ meant, exactly, as it applied to her. I knew what it meant to me — it meant the desire to punch a wall — but it appeared to denote something altogether different to Antonia, something spongy and discoloured and spreading that would eventually get the better of her, a bruise on an apple. She also seemed to think that I would empathise, maybe even attempt to help. Where did she get such notions? Seeing as she was older than the rest of us, I had taken it for granted that she was better equipped to take care of herself, but it turned out her seniority made her even more vulnerable. The gradient increased as your resources diminished. And me assuming life got easier with every passing year. Me, in fact, counting on it.

‘So you didn’t shag Glynn then?’

‘No, I didn’t shag Glynn, as you so elegantly phrase it.’

‘So why did he call you a stupid bitch?’

Antonia winced at the recollection. ‘Letters,’ she admitted eventually. ‘I sent him some anonymous letters. We had a relationship briefly, but he went back to his wife. I was terribly hurt at the time. He never knew who’d written them until I confessed in the pub that night. Shouldn’t have opened my mouth.’

I stopped stroking her hair and sat up, dislodging her from the crook of my arm. ‘You were the one sending those letters?’

‘Jesus, Declan, doesn’t anyone tell you anything?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They don’t.’

Antonia looked unwell by the time the bleak dawn light came seeping through her bedroom curtains. It was obvious from the way she kept fiddling with her hair, pulling it forward over her face, that she was embarrassed to be seen in that state. I couldn’t blame her. Her hands, when she sat on the edge of the bed to light a cigarette, were shaking. The sight reminded me of the prelude to one of my mother’s rages. Wells of unhappiness so deep, so terminal, that they could never be appeased. The massive, obstructive fact of my mother’s disappointment in life was distressing to the point that I had started to hate being near her. Which was little better in practice than hating the woman herself, after all that she had done for me.

I stopped responding to Antonia’s words. I stopped nodding. Women want to talk when you least feel able. At first she kept offering sentences that trailed off, leaving gaps for me to jump in and assert the opposite. ‘This has been a huge mistake, Declan …’ she murmured, watching my face closely, inviting me to disagree, to extend some reassurance. I didn’t open my mouth. ‘No, really, it was all my fault …’, ‘I’m far too old for you …’, ‘I should have known better …’ I didn’t beg to differ.

Next thing she was telling me that her unhappiness was my fault, that I was inconsiderate, heartless, cruel — that I had used her . All she wanted was not to feel rejected for once in her shitty life. Was that so much to ask? That’s when I got up and left. I stood up and dressed quickly and walked out of her bedroom, feeling as guilty as a four-year-old boy, but there you have it. Knowing with every step that I was fucking up again, but without exactly understanding why, and without exactly caring.

‘That’s right!’ she was shouting after me, standing at the top of the stairs in her nightdress, clinging to the banisters like a madwoman. How much smaller she was without her heels. Almost ordinary. Almost plain. ‘Run away!’ she screamed. ‘You just run away!’ My mother’s words to the letter. Uncanny. Antonia had probably learned them from her mother, who had in turn learned them from her mother before her. Women were never happy. They didn’t want to be happy. They deliberately pushed all your buttons, manipulated you into acting the bollocks, then derived a perverse satisfaction out of watching you crack and seeing their blackest suspicions confirmed. Fuckhead, she had called me.

Antonia’s face up there on the landing was monstrous with disgust and triumph, as if she had finally tricked me into revealing my true colours, and those colours were even uglier than she could have hoped for. You stupid bitch. Are you happy now? I pulled on my shoes and grabbed my jacket from the floor. I could hardly bear to look at her.

She hurled a book down the stairs as I undid the latch. How symbolic. ‘Tinker,’ she hissed. ‘Dirty little tinker.’ I slammed her lacquered door behind me. Beware of the Dog. Was it then that my hatred for Antonia peaked? No, I was only getting started.

The street lights were still glowing orange. It was about half six in the morning, judging by the grubby light. I’d left my watch behind on Antonia’s bedside table. No turning back. I crunched across the gravel driveway delineating the point at which the mark had been irrevocably overstepped and shut the wrought iron gate behind me. We had left it askew the night before in our haste.

I did not glance up at her bedroom window. It’s the one thing a man’s supposed to do — look over his shoulder to steal a last lingering glimpse of his beloved, displaying how he cannot get his fill of her. Antonia would be watching for the glance, or watching for its omission, rather, to add to her slate. She’d be standing by that window in her white nightdress like a ghost, her ashen face more ashen behind the pane of glass, eyes boring into the back of my skull until I disappeared from view. It was a long, straight street.