Claire Kilroy: All Names Have Been Changed

I clenched my jaw and winked back. ‘That’s right, you fucking gee-bag.’

*

My notes on the workshop end at this juncture. What follows is drawn from memory and must accordingly be treated as partisan, one-sided, hopelessly lovelorn, hammered thin by anguish and pain. Ignore it, ignore every word of it — it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. I am only out for revenge, in so much as I can get it. A near-black trickle of blood shot out of Guinevere’s left nostril, fast as a darting minnow. Glynn jumped to his feet. Faye delved for a tissue. Guinevere touched her top lip in surprise, and slumped when she saw her scarlet fingertips. My chair screeched as I lunged for her. I caught her in my arms and felt like a man.

‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing,’ Guinevere insisted when she opened her eyes again. ‘Really, it’s fine,’ she kept telling us. Faye guided her to tilt back her head and pinch the bridge of her nose. Aisling wrapped her in her black coat. I sat rubbing her poor white hand. Antonia ran downstairs to brew strong tea. But Glynn, the bowsie, hadn’t jumped out of his chair to rush to her aid, but to get as far away as he was able from the blood.

‘Is she alright?’ he asked from a safe distance. Nobody answered him. We, who had hung on his every word for so long, now ignored him. That was the moment he became extraneous. There is always a price . ‘Is she alright?’ he asked again. Third-person singular. Go home, you’re only impeding us .

‘Dunno,’ I said to him. ‘Depends on what you’ve done to her.’ I was gleaming with animosity. My hurt polished me like a diamond; it changed the shape of my face. I was all sharp angles, hard edges, cutting remarks.

‘Leave it, Declan,’ Guinevere told me, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to leave it.

Antonia returned from the kitchen empty-handed. ‘The milk was off,’ she said.

‘The milk was off!’ Glynn repeated with relish, as if it were a choice metaphor indeed. He felt an epiphany coming on. Maybe he’d beat a paragraph into his red notebook that very night, or lash out a limerick at least. Seemed more likely he’d traipse home after Guinevere, and mewl and pule at her door until she took pity and let him in again. The colour had returned to her face.

Glynn resumed his seat at the head of the table and threw my chapter back at me. He had underlined every use of the word ‘seemed’ and its synonyms. ‘As if’, ‘like’, ‘appeared to’, ‘as though’. I shook my head at him in disbelief. People in glasshouses. Pots calling kettles black. I didn’t lick it off the stones. If ever there was a writer who knew how to flog a simile to death, here he sat enthroned before us. The smell of death was on his breath that day, but perhaps this is memory speaking. The smell of death was on his breath every day, but until that day, it had smelt like books. It was Aisling’s turn to read. Glynn dropped his glasses back into position like a welding visor, and waved her on.

She was five hundred pages into that Promethean novel of hers. Never did manage to understand a word of it. Couldn’t make head nor tail out of a thing she wrote. All I ever deduced from Aisling’s work was its innate superiority over anything I could have produced and her innate right to be in that workshop over me. Not an ‘as if’ or a ‘like’ in sight. Different class.

The extract Aisling read that afternoon further upset the balance in House Eight for reasons which are too elusive to quantify without the evidence once more in front of us. Unfortunately the evidence is gone. Why didn’t I retain a copy? Why didn’t I take more care? There was an alarming aura about the piece, not just in the content but also the form, its visual presence on the page, as if it were a composite of letters cut from magazines and pasted down, though it was typed, same as everyone else’s. Perhaps the first letters of every line combined to spell out a message, a cry for help. That would not surprise me in the least. We cannot say we were not warned. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Faye chose that class to depart from her short, sweet elegiac meditations on human frailty to instead read a chapter from a novel about a battered wife. We sat there in horror listening to graphic descriptions of a drunken farmer kicking the living daylights out of his missus as she lay cowering on the bathroom floor. You know her husband beats her, don’t you ?

‘She felt internal tissue tear,’ Faye read, ‘and muscle wall rupture as Kiernan’s boot pounded repeatedly into her soft belly. She closed her eyes and prayed to Our Lady. He never had much stamina. It would be over soon.’

Antonia was staring across the table at me with a tight-lipped smile that was no smile at all. Looking around the room while somebody read was transgressive, like opening your eyes during the Sacrament in Mass. ‘When he was finished, Kiernan turned away and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand,’ Faye continued, ‘thirsty from his labours. He would beg forgiveness in the morning, his wife knew, but morning was a long way off yet.’

Antonia’s expression was turning violent. The whites of her eyes had begun to bulge. She was the wild woman screaming abuse from the top of the stairs again. I looked down at Faye’s manuscript. One of us was trembling. ‘His wife’s blood had spoiled the new bathroom mat. In her confusion, she couldn’t think where to hide it. Kiernan would go into another fury when he saw it.’ The words were swimming. The words had come to life.

‘Fucking hell,’ whispered Aisling when Faye’s reading was complete.

Antonia tossed her blonde hair. ‘Here, Declan,’ she said, reaching across. ‘You left this behind on my bedside table when you stayed the night.’ She deposited my watch on the desk in front of me, where it glinted in the sunlight. That was when my hatred for Antonia peaked. You stupid bitch. Are you happy now?

‘Oh ho!’ said Glynn, rubbing his palms together in glee. ‘Oh now! Bedside table, is it! Janey Mack. Look at little Pope Innocent here. Now that calls for a pint.’

He stood up and indicated with a swimming stroke, the over-arm crawl, that the lot of us were to follow. He threw the workshop door open, and Aisling gasped, but I had seen it too this time, the demon that had been hanging like a bat behind the door all along. A blink of an eye, and it was gone.

The other three went on ahead with him to the Buttery. Aisling and I hung back by the dismal patch of shrubbery into which he’d tossed his hearing aid. We sucked down a cigarette each without speaking, fast as we were able, as if it were a race. What was wrong with me? What was wrong with her? The seagulls had started to scream.

‘I feel sick, Declan,’ she muttered.

I nodded. Indeed she looked sick. ‘We’d better go in, I suppose.’

‘Oh Jesus!’ she cried, and covered her mouth. I whipped around to see what had startled her this time. Sylvia. Their feral cat glared up at us reproachfully, a tiny, underweight slip of jet black and lollipop pink. It was unlike her to be out in broad daylight like this. It was unlike her to stand motionless.

At first I thought she was snarling at us. Her lip was curled back to reveal an expanse of livid pink, but when she turned to flee into the shrubbery — wait, it did not have the agility of flight, I cannot call it that — when she turned to saunter off, her gait uncharacteristically nonchalant, practically a swagger, I saw that the pink was not snarling lip but exposed flesh. The animal’s muzzle had been partially torn off. Her teeth were set needle-thin into her gums. She was panting. No, she was dying.