All Names Have Been Changed

by Claire Kilroy

  Not being in the least bit technically minded, and certainly not prepared to give it a bash in front of all those people, Glynn simply removed his book and took a step back. A man appeared and tinkered behind the podium until he found the switch that turned the shagging thing on; the microphone which, when it did eventually decide to work, converted all of Glynn’s p’s into minor explosions, so that every time he pronounced a word beginning with that letter (‘profundity’ he used at least twice), the backfire caused him to recoil from the grey foam turtle head as if it had electrically shocked him. All five of us, a full four years after the fact, still harboured resentment towards this unsatisfactory piece of equipment and thought – individually, unbeknownst to each other, scattered throughout the soggy audience of approximately two hundred – Could we not, as a nation, have done better for the man? Wasn’t this precisely the class of shabby disregard that drove Joyce and Beckett away in the first place?

  And the coughers. Why were they there? And in such numbers. Those dirty sickly people teeming with greasy germs – why had they come out that evening if they were so very unwell? Glynn had to raise his voice to be heard, and repeat sentences, or halt them halfway through until a bronchitic fit subsided. ‘Stop it!’ Antonia had hissed at the old man beside her, as if the event were a recital. He did stop, confirming her suspicion that much of this coughing was recreational, stemming from habit as opposed to need. Perhaps it was the same crowd shooed like chickens out of St Anne’s Church at closing time, there simply to spend a few more hours in a heated building, hunched up in overcoats like perverts. There was so much coughing, and in such rhythmic patterns, that we discussed the possibility that it was an act of sabotage. Glynn had enemies, jealous rivals. I concentrated on his voice, my hands clenched into fists. The Meeting Room was beginning to smell of wet dog.

  The man who always showed up to readings was first to pose a question, that vain white-haired man who was more interested in listening to the sound of his own voice than in hearing Glynn’s response. That man, who didn’t know the difference between a query and a speech – all of us remembered him distinctly. A question mark, we observed, could not with any degree of conviction be placed at the end of his concluding sentence. It was merely a verbose statement of opinion. Glynn, we concurred, delivered the most felicitous response. ‘Good for you, sir,’ he replied cheerfully, and then, swiftly pointing at another raised hand, ‘Next.’

  In his answers, Glynn demonstrated no desire to entertain or amuse, no tendency towards flippancy, instead speaking about the act of writing with generosity and lucidity. ‘The writer’s role,’ I recall him saying, ‘is to snow on things, that is, to pick out the surfaces which go unnoticed when it does not snow, to illustrate the world as it really is: a chaos of peaks and troughs.’ Yes, I found myself nodding; yes, that’s it exactly! This was what I had come to hear. ‘Pliancy–’ Glynn continued, but the explosion on the p put him off his stride, and we lost whatever he was about to tell us.

  At the book signing which followed the reading (badly organised, queue as bloated and malformed as a tumour), the pushiest denizens of Dublin were, as ever, attended to first. Antonia would have been up amongst them but for her delicate state of mind. She feigned rapt fascination with the cover of Hibernia to avoid meeting the eye of past acquaintances, though this measure was unnecessary and well she knew it. Her old friends no longer acknowledged her. There’d been much unpleasant talk surrounding her separation, she told us. ‘Dublin,’ she noted, ‘is excruciatingly small.’

  The Meeting Room fell suddenly quiet when the rabble of boors left, clattering the double doors carelessly in their wake. The rest of us drifted in single file along the aisle, waiting for a brief audience with the man at the top. At a table, with a publicist standing in attendance to his right – a whole publicist, God forgive us our sins – sat Glynn, listening, nodding, inscribing. He was for the most part obscured from view by those ahead in the queue. We caught a glimpse of elbow here, a silvery flash of curl there. The smell of antiquarian books lining the walls was as musky as incense, the gold titles embossed on their spines arcane as alchemy. The brass fittings of the overhead lamps glinted down on us like thuribles. There was an atmosphere of the midnight mass, though it wasn’t past nine.

  All manner of thoughts flowed through my mind as I progressed, head bowed, toward Glynn; Russia at the turn of the last century, extreme unction, a handful of uncut emeralds. These images fell beyond the pale of my habitual sphere of reference, and I was happy to break loose for once in my life from the usual banal restrictions that held my imagination in check. My mind glided freely as if it had been released into the locked wing of an old castle in the great forest of a country since dissolved, some long-gone kingdom that exists only in the annals of history and the realm of folk memory and is thus more alluring, more compelling, than the modern-day place could hope to be. Bohemia, say, or Dalmatia; Hibernia itself.

  Nothing that transpired that evening quite took place in the present tense, nor did it feel as if it were unfolding in the city I knew so well but, rather, in some chamber out of time. More than anything, it seemed that I was reading it, in the purest, most liberating sense of the word reading, that state in which the mind is lifted out of its confines and cut free to roam at will behind the veil of a book. My imagination felt airborne, as if it had set down a great weight it had been carrying for miles, for years, until it had all but merged with it.

  I – we – still heard the occasional blast of traffic on Dawson Street, but it sounded improbable, artificial, noises off on a stage set. That I hadn’t previously been aware of that building’s existence compounded the impression that the real world had been temporarily suspended. It was extraordinarily peaceful. I don’t recall ever having felt so calm. Things made sense. Faith systems, religious rituals, liturgy, made sense that night as we closed in on Glynn – not as they pertained to the divine, but in the true value of ceremony, the recalibration it induced.

  We each of us in our own way attempted to explain to Glynn as best we were able how much his work meant to us. We stuttered and blurted before him, blushed and shifted our weight. Antonia was too curt and said it came out patronisingly, as if she were addressing the hired help. ‘Wonderful work,’ she informed him, followed by a hearty, ‘Well done,’ hearing in her voice an echo of the belligerent insincerity of Glynn’s earlier ‘Good for you!’ Antonia was cursed with an unfortunate manner, but couldn’t seem to help herself. Aisling was too vague: (‘I get it. No, really: I get it.’) Guinevere, by the time she reached the top of the queue, was trembling from head to toe. She didn’t utter a syllable, could barely manage eye contact, and instead spilled warm smiles all over the great writer’s hands. Faye said she just closed her eyes.

  Despite our tongue-tied stage fright, we came away discerning from whatever way Glynn had responded, whatever glance he had thrown in our direction – this communication must not have been forged through words, seeing as none of us could remember him saying any – each of us came away from the signing believing that he loved us. He may not have said as much, but we felt his love as strongly as we hoped he felt ours. It wasn’t a trick, it wasn’t a delusion, it wasn’t a testament to what a professional he was. His love was perceptible in a capacity that is impossible to define, being expressed not through word or sign, but directed at the soul. Our soul. Glynn hated that word.

  We spilled out into the filthy city afterwards, the five of us, and slipped back unnoticed into the driving rain, not to meet for another four years. I was aware as I crossed onto South Anne Street of a foolish reluctance to glance back at the Academy lest it already be magicked away. I longed to be back there the moment I left, amongst the warmth, the shuffling bodies, the lowered voices, the comforting fug. Once, as a small boy, I had hidden in the cloakroom when the school bell rang and spent a happy morning amongst duffel coats and the contents of classmates’ pockets while the school day went on as normal without me. All my life I have been trying
to return there.

  *

  ‘Do you think he really loved us?’ Antonia once asked me, apropos of nothing. She wasn’t even drunk. We’d been crossing Front Square when she detained me with a gloved hand and made me turn to face her. It was unusual for Antonia and me to be alone together. This was not a permutation into which the group naturally fell.

  Night was almost upon us. The air was growing glutinous, mottled as the cobbles underfoot. The darkness exaggerated Antonia’s already dramatic features. She was all mouth and eyes staring urgently up at me, as if my answer mattered to her; Antonia, who generally barely registered my presence. I’d either stopped hating her by then, or had not yet started. She’d voiced the question quietly, careful that no one should overhear, choosing me and not one of the others presumably on the reasoning that I was the sole member of the group who would not lie to her out of common decency, possessing, in her opinion, no shred of it. Whatever way she’d inflected the question made me unexpectedly want to hold her, hold the ball of nervy sinews and resentful bones that was her.

  ‘I do,’ I affirmed as vigorously as I could, conscious of how difficult it must have been for a woman like Antonia to have used as intimate a term as ‘love’, in light of its spectacular failure in her life. I wanted her to know that she was in safe company now, that the restrictions she had experienced in her relationships hitherto no longer applied with us. ‘I do, Antonia, I firmly believe he loved us. There is not a shadow of doubt in my mind.’

  She accepted this information with a nod of agreement – Glynn’s love had felt real to her too – and then she threw me an imploring, almost panicked, glance, which exposed the fragility I hadn’t discerned in her until then.

  ‘Well, goodbye then, Declan,’ she said, knotting the belt on her long black coat, having learned the invaluable lesson that every mother should teach her daughter, apparently: that a decent winter coat is a good all-round defence against whatever life might throw at you. That, and a good haircut. We hovered by Front Arch a second longer, wondering how to part. This delay decided matters. Antonia abruptly set off alone on her patent stilettos, as if we hadn’t previously been travelling in the same direction. The incident was never mentioned again, but I was glad of the exchange. I don’t think I ever really hated Antonia, when it comes down to it. It was just a way of channelling insurmountable emotions.

  3

  Tarry Glynn

  I met a woman once who claimed she’d known Glynn as a child, and I can find no reason to doubt her account of him. I had been sitting on my own in the lounge area of a public house in Leeds one Sunday afternoon in the December of 1984 reading Glynn’s first novel, Prussian Blue, a second time (just twenty-four years of age when he published it – what hope was there for the rest of us?) when the woman seated next to me on the wall-to-wall banquette leaned across to my table. She wore a gold T-bar rope chain over her royal-blue polo-neck jumper, and a black mohair cardigan over that again, stray fibres of which she picked off her lip from time to time like strands of loose tobacco. She had been observing me for some minutes.

  ‘I was in national school with your man,’ she finally remarked, nodding at my paperback. Her accent was rural Irish, right enough. ‘A holy terror,’ she added with satisfaction, pursing her lips in a manner that said, Go on, ask me more. She folded her arms and gave herself a brisk squeeze of pleasure at the prospect of throwing in her tuppence worth. We are a nation that likes nothing better than a good story, preferably featuring one of our own, ideally the parish black sheep, and few could hold a candle to Glynn in that field. I frowned at his author photograph on the back of Prussian Blue to confirm we were discussing the same individual. ‘That’s the boyo,’ said the woman, ‘the very man,’ and indeed she looked the correct vintage to have been in Glynn’s class: mid-fifties, thereabouts.

  ‘In Wicklow, was this?’ I asked her.

  ‘Arklow,’ she asserted.

  ‘I see.’ So she knew what she was talking about. I was all ears after that.

  Glynn’s childhood remains what you might call a grey area. It is difficult to even conceive of him as a boy, if the truth be told. Just one short story in his body of work is told from the point of view of a child. The powerful evocations of childhood which characterise the novels are refracted through the narrative agency of a grown man casting his mind back (for yes, they are all male, Glynn’s protagonists – all male, all to blame, all contrite to the point of belligerence). Little is recorded of Glynn’s early years save for a few bald facts such as which schools he attended, and when. Dr M. J. Hanratty’s otherwise exhaustively researched biography, Glynn: An Irish Paradox (Oxford University Press, 1982), glosses over the topic in a matter of paragraphs. Glynn himself joked in an interview with the London Times that he sprang forth fully grown on the 18th of April 1952, at the age of twenty-one. This was the date his first piece of writing was published, a short story in the Irish Press. ‘Homo poeticus was born,’ he was quoted as saying, borrowing the phrase from Nabokov without accrediting him. ‘Life before writing was hardly a life for me at all,’ he elaborated when queried by the interviewer why he so casually discounted his childhood.

  Here follows a little cited fact: for a period of eighteen months commencing in 1948, Glynn was a seminarian. After completing his secondary-school education he entered St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, to study to be a priest. Has enough been made of this biographical detail, I wonder? Glynn doesn’t exactly conceal this information so much as not exactly publicise it either. Should photographs of him in his cassock exist I have so far failed to come across them, notwithstanding my great curiosity and renowned attention to detail.

  Mention is always made in the Note on the Author printed on Glynn’s dust jackets of the four years he spent reading Classics in Trinity – something of a novelty for Catholics at the time – but never a whisper of his spell in Maynooth. He was asked about it on the night of his public reading in the Royal Irish Academy, which was the first I’d heard of him harbouring religious inclinations. It made sense, though, when you thought about it. He had an uncommon capacity for awe. ‘It’s no secret,’ Glynn responded, as if the questioner had suggested it was. He did not elucidate on the subject beyond this statement.

  Brigid – for that was her name, the Arklow woman in the shedding mohair cardigan that Sunday afternoon in the pub in Leeds – Brigid wasn’t in the least bit surprised when her mother told her that young Glynn was studying to enter the priesthood. And she wasn’t in the least bit surprised either, she was quick to add, when her mother told her the following year that young Glynn was only after spoiling his vocation. ‘I’d put nothing past Patsy!’ said Brigid with glee, ‘and look it, wasn’t I right?’ I laughed. Glynn with a Christian name? Ludicrous. Brigid laughed too, for different reasons, I assume. She flicked through the pages of my paperback edition of Prussian Blue and snorted in begrudging admiration before passing the book back. ‘A gas man for the sermons still, I see.’

  As a young fella of no more than seven or eight years, Patsy refused, Brigid informed me, to play Mammies and Daddies or Doctors and Nurses with all the other little boys and girls on his road, instead devising his own game, which he called Mass. Mass was conducted in Patsy’s back garden. He was always the priest, and the other children were always his flock. ‘Father,’ they had to call him. ‘Yes my child,’ he would reply. None of them ever questioned this arrangement, no one dared to bags the top job from him. Glynn organised his congregation into rows and made them sit, and sometimes kneel, to listen to his sermons in dutiful silence. Brigid corrected herself: there was nothing dutiful about their silence; the children were spellbound. Gobsmacked was the word she used. ‘The things he came out with!’ she cried. ‘And the little size of him!’ Everything she uttered had an exclamation mark attached, now that she’d hit her stride. I bought her another sherry.

  Glynn scared the living bejaysus out of his playmates, issuing arcane threats of damnation that he surely could not spell; Brig
id shuddered in lurid recollection, visibly enjoying her day out. Other times, the children were seduced by his lyrical descriptions of Paradise, or regaled with knuckle-whitening stories about bible characters which were entirely fabricated. The stories were fabricated, that is, not the characters. Glynn appropriated names from the Bible – Moses, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Saul – and threw in some period detail to lend the thing an air of authenticity; sandals, locusts, olive trees and whatnot.

  The children grew confused as to what was actually in the Bible and what most certainly wasn’t, Glynn’s stories being so much more memorable than the real thing, and that, I have come to believe, is the measure of a good novel. ‘They stayed with you,’ Brigid observed, ‘do you know what I mean? The trouble he got us into with Sister Mercedes!’ Sister Mercedes had to set the kids straight with a cane.

  Once a week, young Glynn heard confession. This was a grave, terror-inducing business conducted in the pitch darkness of the coal shed. The children kneeled beside the nettle patch, Brigid related, and prayed to the garden wall until the shed door creaked open an inch or two and Glynn’s finger beckoned through the chink. The little ones used to cry. Why they actually waited there like frightened lambs and didn’t run off to play normal games with normal children, Brigid would never know. All this, Glynn would argue, is merely hearsay.