Claire Kilroy: All Names Have Been Changed

‘Are we still here?’ Aisling asked. She seemed surprised. If she had briefly fallen asleep, I can’t say I’d noticed. She finished off her pint, knocking it back like water.

‘Why are you still sending those hateful letters to me?’ Glynn snarled at Antonia.

‘Because I hate you.’ She laughed. ‘Because I hate you.’ She laughed again.

‘Stupid bitch,’ he retaliated. We think that’s what he said. His speech was slurred, his eyes had glazed. He was listing over the table in a limp, boneless manner, his hands dangling by his side as if he’d lost the use of them, which for an awful moment we thought he had, until he batted Faye away when she tried to prop him up.

Glynn pushed the table back from his belly for the final act. For this, he needed an audience, though whether he could distinguish our individual forms in the blizzard of his whiskey blindness is debatable.

His demons were everywhere by then. There was more to it than a bad pint. They had stolen up without us noticing and had him rightly surrounded. No matter which way he turned, a leering head popped up, provoking one wincing grimace after another from the writer. Great was his torment. Glynn had never witnessed such ugliness in his life. Hideous was the word he used. ‘Hideous, hideous,’ he declared, yet he couldn’t tear his eyes from their disfigured faces either, couldn’t get his fill, now that they had finally revealed their foul selves to him. They’d been hiding behind books and doors for years, lurking at the bottom of pint glasses and whiskey bottles, but now his demons were sitting right there at the table with us, bold as brass, defiant as you like. I am going to keep this short.

By the looks of it, we were outnumbered. There was one beside me, one next to Aisling, and a whole rack of them lined up in the wings. They even had names. Moloch, Ezekiel, Belial, Glynn called them, pointing from one to the other. He paused for a moment to reflect. His wife hated him. His only child wouldn’t speak to him. He’d only gone and … he gestured in the direction of Guinevere and Antonia at this point. ‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ he cried in anguish.

The demons leapt up and down in delight at that, monkeys in a cage. Glynn cursed them mercilessly in his best demonish. No better man for the job. He had recourse to the language of Milton and Dante, works with which he had forged a deep connection for all the wrong reasons, regarding them not as the moral allegories they patently were but as early examples of kitchen-sink realism.

‘Infernal Serpent,’ he hissed. ‘Arch-fiend, Chemos the Obscene, horrid king.’ I put my arm around Guinevere. It quickly degenerated into vile street argot, which was evidently fresher in his mind. He must have picked it up the night the knackers spat in his face beneath the statue of Thomas Moore. Still possessed a keen ear for the demotic, Glynn.

‘He’s right,’ Aisling exclaimed, looking urgently from one face to the next, nodding vigorously to canvass our support. ‘Listen to him: he knows what he’s talking about. He’s right .’

‘I’m fucking light-starved,’ Antonia was saying, ‘I’m fucking light-starved.’ Everyone was repeating everything twice. Or maybe I was hearing everything twice. What follows is my version of events, unexpurgated, after the master.

Up Glynn reared onto his hind legs. We too jumped to our feet. Then what? Then nothing. The five of us just stood around the table staring at him in alarm, waiting for instructions. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked, and we shuffled out of his way, biddable as sheep.

‘Go after him,’ Faye said in panic, ‘Go after him. We can’t leave him alone in that state.’

Glynn ploughed through the mill of students to the exit. Difficult, keeping up with him. It was quiet as a church out on the quad after the clamour of the Buttery. A large moon was rising over Botany Bay, the colour of the head of a pint. It seemed to possess no third dimension but was instead wafer thin, a communion host.

We were barely a few steps into the darkness when Aisling collapsed. I turned around to see her in a whimpering heap on the ground, a small whorl of trembling black fabric. Two tyre tracks of mascara scored her face as if something had mown her down. She gulped convulsively, sheer terror in her eyes, and pointed at the corner. ‘Look!’ she cried. ‘It’s here!’

Faye and Guinevere tried to pick her up, but she wouldn’t let them. ‘Look at it!’ she kept shrieking, thrusting her finger at the corner, but the corner was empty. There was nothing there. ‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ Antonia was chanting in the background, over and over like an unanswered phone. Glynn turned around and saw that he had lost his audience. We, like his gift, had abandoned him.

‘You,’ he said sharply.

I turned my head. ‘What?’

He muttered something under his breath, deliberately inaudible to force me to approach. He lured me around the corner and out of sight. ‘What?’ I said again.

‘That one. Your one.’

‘Guinevere?’

‘Yes, her.’ He laughed. ‘To think I thought she’d be one of those girls who look better with their clothes on than off.’

That did it. I took a run at him. He went down easy, not a bother. Nothing to it at all. I’d have straight out punched him only for my bad fist, so I shouldered him instead, and down the great writer went, face first, rigid, a statue toppling from its plinth, first slowly, then quickly, making a meaty, gristly sound upon impact with the cobbles.

He started laughing again once he got his wind back. I swung a good kick at his ribs. My foot connected not with bone but a dreary mass of fat. It was a disgusting sensation. I kicked him again to rid myself of it. He grunted. I didn’t feel any better. And I didn’t feel any worse. I hated the fucker, hated him. I hope he is reading these words.

‘State of you,’ I pronounced in lofty judgement over the writer’s bent back and hawked a gullier just shy of his face.

He stopped laughing at that and raised his head to regard me, a smile of sorts smeared across his face. It was the hapless oafish grin of a simpleton — Glynn’s front tooth had shattered on a cobble. A quivering string of snot-clotted blood dangled from his nostril, elongating and contracting with the rhythm of his breath. ‘State of you,’ I said again, but he didn’t retaliate, just nodded in what for all the world looked to be agreement, then lowered his head onto the smooth cobbles again and closed his eyes to rest. I think that’s all he wanted. Another good reason to wallow in self-pity. Or confirmation that he was a prick. I no longer cared. It was nothing to me. By the time we passed that way again, maybe half an hour later, helping Aisling who was doing her best to walk to her parents’ car — still doing her best, in spite of everything, God be good to her — Glynn was already gone, having sought cover in some dark corner to lick his wounds, as any animal might.

You’ll never see the like of us again

This is the order in which I said goodbye to them:

Aisling was the first.

She was gone before we knew it. Gone before she knew it either. St Pat’s psychiatric hospital wasn’t half as intimidating an institution as you might expect, and the VHI covered it, her mother told me, adding that I was so kind to visit, that all of us had been so kind. Aisling had been given a room of her own once they took her off the suicide ward, where she had been kept for just two nights. In the scale of things, this was very good news, apparently. Her wing was filled with tranquillised women in slippers and dressing gowns, some still carrying their handbags about. They bore the muted, slightly sheepish demeanour of drinkers in an early house. ‘You should see the anorexics upstairs,’ Aisling confided, enunciating her words with a slow deliberateness that was neither characteristic nor necessary. ‘Mother of God.’