Claire Kilroy - All Names Have Been Changed

Aisling dropped her cigarette and took off into the shrubbery on her hands and knees, her widow’s weeds snagging on every twig and thorn, like there was a chance in hell of catching poor Sylvia, let alone saving her. ‘There’s nothing you can do for her,’ I kept telling her bent form, but I may as well have been talking to the wall.

It was a good quarter of an hour before Aisling gave up the hunt. God knows what crack in the earth Sylvia had slipped into to die. I reassured Aisling that she’d done her best, but the girl would not be comforted. ‘Did you see her?’ she kept asking me, her gaze unable to settle. It flitted about the bushes like a butterfly. ‘Declan, did you actually see her?’

‘Of course I saw her.’ I wasn’t sure I understood the point of the question. The cat had been standing right there in front of us, after all, half-savaged, panting, dying. How could you not see her?

Aisling bit at her cuticles. ‘We mustn’t tell Faye,’ she made me promise, then we smoked another cigarette each to seal the oath.

Glynn was well on by the time we joined them in the Buttery. It was barely five o’clock. He was shit-faced, rat-arsed, locked out of his tree. This is a stupid language. It was immediately evident that something wasn’t right. More wrong than usual, I should say. The others were exchanging meaningful glances over his head — there’d obviously been an incident in our absence. ‘Oh, here they are at last, Professor!’ Faye announced with forced gaiety, trying to jolly the fucker along, as if he were already enrolled in the nursing home. Glynn’s skin was the colour of an eyeball. His eyeball was the colour of skin. The glisten of dribble down his chin was new. In his paw was a pint which he clasped like a sceptre, the court of slobbering Glynn, king of porter. ‘Where the fuck have you two been until now?’ Antonia hissed under her breath.

‘Look who it is‚’ Glynn murmured blackly as we took our seats. He reached across the table and plucked a leaf from Aisling’s hair with a card-trick flourish, then turned to take me in, shaking his head. ‘At it again, you dirty little bollocks. You’re an awful man altogether, so you are.’

Aisling was wearing the manic grin she used to mask her profound self-consciousness, or to poorly mask it, rather. ‘We were smoking, Professor,’ she said, as if she had to explain herself to the likes of him.

‘Can’t a man have a drink?’ Glynn bellowed in protest, as if one of us had tried to stop him. As if any of us would have dared embark on such a course of action. The thought hadn’t entered our minds. It is possible that Glynn was dropping a hint — prompting us with one of his rhetorical devices to attempt to stop him drinking, seeing as he had long since gone beyond attempting to stop himself. Instead, Aisling went to the bar. What a disappointment we must have been to him.

Glynn watched Guinevere over the cream disc of the head of his pint, then caught me watching him over the cream disc of the head of my pint. He raised his sceptre in salute. ‘Playboy of the Western World, isn’t that right Dermot!’ He elbowed Faye in the ribs. ‘Get this one into bed and it’s a royal flush!’ His face twinkled, his gums sparkled, his eyes kindled, his brow darkened. I bridled and bristled, nettled and rankled, then drinkled and drankled some more.

Glynn coughed fleshily until it seemed his rotting lungs would come shooting out of his chest and land wetly on the table, still gasping, unable to bear it in there a minute longer. ‘Here, Professor,’ Antonia said, and dealt the old fuck a good sound clap on the back, that bit too forceful to be benevolent. He hocked up a mighty phlegm and gobbed it into the waiting lap of his hanky. It burst out with the ripe pop of a wine bottle being uncorked.

‘I’m going to vomit,’ Aisling said, but didn’t leave the table.

Glynn raised his glasses to his artist’s eye to appraise the winnings, and judging by the look of rapture on his face, he was not disappointed. He was forever picking at himself, sniffing himself, tasting himself, sampling the compressed bits of self he found compacted beneath his fingernails, in a perpetual swoon of fascination with his own detritus. ‘Glynn’s great subject was the self,’ wrote the New York Review of Books . Little did they know.

‘Where’s his pap?’ Antonia asked. ‘Give him his pap. The poor fellow: his glass is empty.’ It was my turn to go the bar.

I set a rack of pints down on the table and headed for the jacks. Jesus, the fucker had snuck in ahead of me. He gave a nod as he tucked himself in, then proceeded to the exit without washing his hands. Icky sticky gicky Glynn, his urinal fingers contaminating Guinevere’s skin. He paused in the doorway.

‘She’ll come back to you once her dreams turn to shite,’ he told me. ‘You just watch.’

I shook my head at him. For all his insight, he had no conception of who Guinevere was, or of what she was capable, and the tender years of her. He could not see her tremendous gift. Or maybe he could see it. Maybe that was the whole problem. Maybe he knew she’d outstrip him in the end. He cured me of my earnestness, I suppose, and I’ll always owe him for that. Glynn cured us all of our earnestness.

I squeezed myself in beside Guinevere when I returned. ‘So how are you?’ I asked, perhaps a little aggressively. Been a few weeks since we’d spoken.

‘I’m worried about Patrick,’ she said. It wasn’t the answer to the question I’d asked. She leaned in so he wouldn’t overhear. ‘Do his lips look a little blue to you?’

His lips? Why was she looking at his lips? How could I make her stop? ‘So it’s Patrick now, is it?’ I sneered, ‘Rat Prick now, is it?’ I sneered. She lowered her head. I wished the others had overheard my fine piece of wordplay. It was Aisling, most of all, I wished had been listening. Aisling would have enjoyed it.

Glynn slammed down his emptied glass and expelled a flabby yawn.

‘Dear oh dear,’ Antonia chimed, ‘the Professor needs another drink,’ although another drink was patently the last thing the Professor needed. ‘Here,’ she said picking up her handbag, ‘why don’t I go to the bar this time? I’m sure it must be my round.’

Glynn blinked gratefully and eyed her handbag gluttonously, as if he might like to wolf the contents down. It was Antonia who got him started on the spirits that night, avenging herself with the perfect crime. There is always a price .

‘I think she’s trying to kill him,’ Guinevere said in wonderment when Antonia left the table. ‘I think the woman is actually trying to kill him.’

‘There’s something going wrong with me,’ Aisling blurted. ‘It’s like everything I’m thinking is written in block capitals. I can’t switch off Caps Lock. My thoughts are all screaming. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Do you know what I mean?’ she asked a second time, clearly accustomed to being misunderstood, to having to go to great lengths to explain herself. She looked at our faces around the table. DO YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?

We nodded, I, we, they. Those assembled at the table nodded, all except for Glynn, whose mind had wandered. It did kind of bother me that I knew what Aisling meant. A few months ago, I’d have drawn a blank.

‘Funny taste in my mouth,’ Glynn complained, and belched graphically. Anything to be the centre of attention.

‘Probably only a brain tumour,’ said Antonia, placing a tumbler of whiskey on the beer mat in front of him. A double, we silently noted.

‘Maybe you’re having a stroke,’ I offered.

‘Oh now,’ said Faye. ‘Enough of that.’

Guinevere didn’t open her mouth. She didn’t denounce Glynn’s whining, she, who had most to denounce. Why didn’t she slap him? Why did she leave the job fall to others instead? Grizzling Glynn complained steadily for the guts of an hour, as if setting us an endurance test. He muttered and murmured and mumbled, maundered and malingered and moaned. Oh Christ, there was no end to it. On and on it went. He was teething, or required burping, or a nappy change. I looked at his old freckled hand in disgust, watched it perform gestures of self-regard. The urinal fingers, the breast-sized palm. It was not a writerly hand. It wasn’t a lover’s hand either. ‘I’m finished as a novelist,’ he concluded bitterly, and nobody contradicted him.