Claire Kilroy - All Names Have Been Changed

When Glynn had emerged from Guinevere’s bedroom, it had physically hurt. There’d been a sundering in my core, a tooth torn from its socket, leaving an unfamiliar hole behind, a hole which, though small, became the throbbing centre of my being. I couldn’t stop exploring the aching cavity that had opened in her wake. It commanded every drop of my attention. ‘Now you know how it feels,’ she might have said to me, were she that type of girl.

I tried to stuff a shop-bought corned-beef sandwich down my throat as if posting a letter but ended up gagging on my tears. I ducked down a side lane to hide my contorted face. Giz woz ere was sprayed on the piss-stinking, slime-glossy wall. My friend, I thought wildly, and looked around for him, grinning like a maniac at this unexpected reprieve. I was clutching at straws.

Vast swathes of the city seemed darker than usual that night, as if there’d been a power cut, though the street lights burned. The air was draining the light out of things, I decided, just as Antonia had drained the light out of me and Glynn had drained the light out of Guinevere, the filthy rotten bastard. I was pleased with my pathetic fallacy, if nothing else. I hoped to find one of them waiting outside the flat on Mountjoy Square, wanting to talk. Either of them would have done me, even Antonia. Even Glynn, for the love of God. Anything but sit alone on my soldier’s bed looking at my knees. The emptiness of the steps leading up to the front door was another blow. Giz’s light shone through his nailed-up blanket, the moth holes twinkling like constellations.

His complexion was as ashen as Antonia’s had been at dawn, except that Giz’s face was faintly luminous, like the static afterglow of a television screen, and faintly marine, the milky-grey of a bottom feeder. His eyelids were inflamed, two blisters. Would you even call him a man, I speculated as I took my usual seat and waited for him to spread out his wares, which he kept in a rusty Jacob’s Cream Crackers tin divided into cubbyholes. The tin was almost empty. His prices had been hiked.

He moved about the bedsit in an agitated state, barely five foot five. A man or a boy? Boy or a man? I had no idea how old Giz was. Anywhere between sixteen and thirty. He still bore the hallmarks of the local children — pallid, chilblained, puffy-eyed — but he increasingly resembled a pensioner. That stiff pigeon walk of his was getting stiffer. His joints were seizing up. A comfort, somehow, knowing that others were worse off than you. Pain was pounding through my mangled fist to the beat of my heart. I wished he’d hurry up.

‘Wha?’ he demanded, catching me staring.

‘Nothing.’

‘Wha?’ he demanded again.

‘Nothing,’ I asserted again.

He flexed the tendons in his neck, then shook his head to indicate he’d let it go, this once. I watched him roll a joint and wondered when he’d last washed his hands. He had started to smell like that boy in school who nobody would sit beside, that mangy boy from the bad family who had no friends. It was the rank tang of ingrained dirt. There was a cold sore on his mouth, a big crusty scab. Giz handed me the joint and a tab. It was all that was left in the tin. I gave him all that was left in my pocket. He sat into his armchair and started tinkering about with a piece of tinfoil and a lighter, looking more boy than pensioner again, with that intent frown of concentration on his face.

‘Whatcha making?’ I asked, and then, ‘Oh.’ He was rolling up his sleeve.

There was something wrong with his forearm. It was swollen like a ham, but unevenly swollen, lumpy. I swung my head around and fixed my eyes on the empty space where his stack of television sets had been. I took my medicine and smoked steadily until it seemed the sofa was sliding towards the empty space, or the empty space was sliding towards the sofa. I shivered. My bowels had turned to ice. My stomach had sprouted teeth. I wanted to get up and leave but was scared my exit might antagonise Giz. You never knew what would trigger his rage, you never knew what would send him rampaging. So I sat there, quiet as a mouse, smiling probably, or trying to, demonstrating that I was good. I must have fallen asleep for a few seconds. I had been dreaming of ants.

‘Bleedin perished,’ Giz whispered.

‘Plug in the heater,’ I whispered back.

Where was the heater? It was missing, same as his television stack and collection of video nasties. All gone. His communion photo lay face down on the carpet beneath a chipped Toyota hubcap. Giz’s skin was so clammy, so pale by then, that his freckles looked black in comparison, as if they’d been spattered onto him by the wheel of a passing car. He slumped forward in his armchair and held the flame of his lighter to the leg of the table.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

He sniffed. ‘Bleedin perishing in here.’ The varnish was flaring black.

‘But Giz, that’s—’ Dangerous, I was going to say, but it seemed a bit late for that. He was shivering too hard to keep the flame applied to the table leg anyway. His body seemed not to be shaking itself but shaken by another agency, such was the force of it. The lighter flew out of his hand, and he gave a little cry of protest.

The detritus on the table juddered as if there were a poltergeist in the room. My ashtray slid off the armrest, landing upside down on the floor. Blood was trickling down Giz’s chin. The scab on his cold sore had cracked. I sat there in confusion, taking it all in. Then — slowly, so as not to alarm him — I reached across the sofa to lay a steadying hand on his arm. My good hand closed around a rattling humerus, thin as the leg of the table he’d been trying to set alight. Giz recoiled violently from my touch.

‘Get off of me,’ he spat, though I hadn’t been on him. ‘Fucken puff,’ he added, a quiver of disgust contorting his bleeding mouth.

‘I’m not a puff.’

‘I seen ya lookin at me. Don’t try an deny it. I fucken seen ya.’

Oh Jesus, his forearm was rupturing. A septic fissure was splitting his skin. Something toxic was breaking through his flesh. It was red and yellow inside. I sat rooted to my seat. Giz had no sense of how wretched he had become. He did not grasp that if I were a bleedin puff, the last man I would touch was him.

His spasm abruptly subsided. He sank, head thrown back, limbs splayed, star-shaped on the armchair. Two crescents of white showed between his eyelids. I stared at him, my mouth as far agape as it would open. Was he dying? Was he dead? I couldn’t take my eyes off him, terrified at the same time that his eyeballs would roll into place and he’d lash out at me for gawping.

‘Giz?’ I asked hesitantly, still whispering, as if some third party were present in the room, some prison warden, some dungeon keeper, behind whose back I might manage — were I stealthy enough — to make covert contact with my old friend. I was throwing pebbles up at his window, trying to wake him without rousing the house. ‘You alright there, Giz?’

It seemed important to keep using his name, in case I had become as unfamiliar to him as he had become to me. ‘Giz,’ I whispered, louder now, ‘Wake up, it’s Declan. Deco. From upstairs.’

Repeating his name did nothing to summon him from the catatonic state. Giz woz ere , but not any more. Jesus, fucking answer , I wanted to scream before it was too late. Too late for what? I didn’t know. I didn’t know yet.

There was a whirring noise in the far corner, followed by a familiar mechanical clunk. The bedsit was plunged into darkness. The electricity meter had run out.

Giz did not react. I couldn’t hear him breathe. I held my breath to listen for his. Nothing. Just the sound of a poor old dog howling away the night, the groan of a bus labouring up the square.