Claire Kilroy: All Names Have Been Changed

I pulled up my collar and tucked in my chin. A few flakes of snow drifted down, grey as the cloud that had issued them. My empty stomach sucked and squelched with every step, a drain being unblocked with a plunger. The last of the street lights petered out as it grew bright, if you could call it bright. I wouldn’t. I reached for a stick of gum but the packet was empty. I crumpled it in my fist and jammed it into a hedge.

Antonia’s road intersected with a thoroughfare. A general feeling of flintiness loured about the place, a prevailing lack of comfort. The pavement was as perishing as compacted ice. It was hard on the bones. The buses weren’t up and running yet. I did not know that part of the city. I was as lost as I had ever been.

The second I rounded the corner out of Antonia’s sight, I had the most unbelievable headache. I crouched over by a pebbledash wall and cradled the crown of my head in my hands, pleading for it to pass, practically praying, thinking at one point that something had burst, or was about to. There is always a price . Eventually, the headache lifted, and I floundered on as best I was able. The odd car was out on the road by then, windscreen frosted and exhaust pipe pluming. How people found the will to leave their beds at that godforsaken hour to climb into frozen metal machines, I did not know. It was beyond me.

Any self-respecting man would have retreated to an early house, but it was pity I was after, not oblivion. My thoughts alighted on Guinevere. She was their natural destination. I had loved her before I met her. She was in every book, every song, every poem. It was not too late for us, I felt certain in my desperation, and was buoyed up by the conviction. I would place my aching head on her lap and beg forgiveness. The prospect made me walk faster. A car screeched past with a broken fan belt. I would present myself at her door and make a full confession, then beseech her to absolve me. It was too much responsibility to place on a young girl’s shoulders, but I didn’t let that stop me.

The threat of snow had passed by the time I made it to her door. I had been walking for maybe two hours, half-starved and smelling of another woman. What a relief it was to turn the corner onto her familiar cul-de-sac, those sleepy redbrick cottages with their net curtains and pink geraniums. No crunch of irrevocable gravel, no twin block-capital trespassing signs. ‘I love you,’ I was chanting as I stumbled along the cracked uneven paving leading to her door. ‘I love you, I love you, oh I love you, my love.’ Guinevere’s curtains were drawn.

The black cat from the house next door displayed itself archly behind the glass, as if it were the finest merchandise in the city’s finest shop window. I rapped on Guinevere’s door with the brass knocker. I gave it a good clatter. It took a few goes to rouse her. Her bedroom was at the back. I was finding it difficult to contain my excitement. When she finally answered the door, she looked dismayed to find me standing on her doorstep. It was not the reaction I’d been hoping for.

‘Declan,’ she said. Why was she whispering?

I rushed forward, but the door was not opened to me. Guinevere held it fast. ‘What are you doing here?’ she wanted to know, ‘at this hour? God almighty, go home.’ She was wearing her powder-blue dressing gown, and not much else besides.

I tried to get a hold of her waist to pull her to me but she back-stepped out of my grasp. ‘Go home, Declan,’ she warned me again, and tried to close the door. I jammed in the foot before she got it shut. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered in exasperation. Her eyes had a raw look. She had been crying. For a sickening moment I wondered whether Antonia had phoned her. You stupid bitch. There is always a price . But Guinevere didn’t have a phone. I reached for her hand, but she wouldn’t let go of the door.

‘Oh my beautiful girl, I’m so sorry,’ I blurted. ‘I’m so sorry for everything. I’ve been a selfish bastard, and a stupid one, but I love you so much. I’ll never hurt you again. Let’s give it another go. Please don’t shake your head at me like that.’

I attempted to kiss her through the chink in the door, but she averted her face. I groaned with the tender agony of it. There was a movement in the gloom behind her: I froze. She wasn’t alone in there. I craned my neck to get a look over her shoulder. Emerging from her bedroom, and craning his neck to get a look at me, was Glynn.

‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ I said.

Guinevere glanced over her shoulder and saw Glynn standing there, the two of us squaring up to each other like dogs. She gasped and turned back to me. ‘Declan, please,’ she pleaded, but what was there to say? I looked at her, then at Glynn in the shadows, then back at her, as if doing some exercise for my focal length, though it was my brain that lacked flexibility, not my eyesight. They did not belong on the same visual plane. Ariel and Caliban. ‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ I said again.

Guinevere started talking rapidly, tears rolling down her cheeks in panic. Glynn skulked at the back of the cottage in his vest and kacks, letting the girl defend him, the craven bollocks. I didn’t take my eyes off the prick for so much as one second. The prick didn’t take his eyes off me. Everything had become abstract and disconnected in my rage. Guinevere was saying his words, but in her voice. He was the ventriloquist, and she was his doll, propped up on his knee, doing his bidding. ‘He needed me,’ she was imploring me, I wanted her, so I took her . ‘He was in crisis,’ I manipulated her into bed . ‘You didn’t see the state he was in last night,’ I pulled every trick in the book, bud . ‘It’s delicate, Declan.’ Now shag off home, son, can’t you see we’re busy ? Guinevere seemed to be trying to convince herself as much as anyone.

‘Stop talking!’ I shouted when I could bear it no longer. Guinevere saw what was going to happen next and slammed the door in my face before I could go in there and break the fucker’s neck for him. It was the wall I drove my fist into. I smashed it into one of her red bricks and screamed as the Shockwaves ripped through my frame. I sank down on my hunkers with the pain, clutching my wrist with my good hand, holding it to my chest like a wounded bird. I could hear them arguing inside. I like to think that Guinevere wanted to rush out to help me, but that Glynn wouldn’t hear of it. That’s what I like to think. I am entitled to my opinions. A rivulet of blood trickled down my forearm. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I started laughing. Mad, hysterical, unhinged laughing, echoing up and down the narrow cul-de-sac. It was a trick I had learned from Aisling.

Are you happy now? Guinevere had wanted to know. I pushed her letterbox open. ‘Yes,’ I screamed into the rectangular vault, ‘yes I am Yes!’

Giz cleared his sinuses when he saw my smashed-up fist. No ‘Hate tha,’ no ‘State a ya,’ no ‘Fucken spa,’ just that plunging sound from the depths of his nasal cavities, a mixture of approval and recognition. ‘Let me in,’ I said nervously, half-expecting to be turned away even there.

He did not immediately respond but stood there regarding his own knuckles, what was left of them, gnarled and stunted as a pit bull’s muzzle and pocked with tattooed melanomas. I had a long way to go. There was a long way down. Giz cleared his sinuses once more before stepping back to admit me. His stack of television sets was gone.

All day I had wandered around town on my own, all day, all day, it went on for months, not knowing what else to do with myself, not knowing where else to go, so I went nowhere. Down the windy north quays, around the courts, through the hilly cluster of streets riddling Stoneybatter; nowhere. It seemed at one point that the sun might break through — there was a concentration of lemony light in the southern sky, then a sun shaft beamed down, an escape hatch to a better world — I stopped to watch, pinning my hopes on it, placing bets with the Devil. But the clouds steamrolled in and suppressed it, a crushed rebellion. The sunrays were hauled off and shot. The street became flat and oppressive once more as the sky darkened to silver, steel, and finally iron. I started on my rounds again.