All Names Have Been Changed

by Claire Kilroy

  This desire to sermonise was misinterpreted by the religious orders as evidence of a vocation, and a seventeen-year-old Glynn found himself packed off to Maynooth with another hundred or so boys similar to him, and probably worse than him, knowing the state of the country then, forties Ireland, mother of God, was there no end to it? The forties dragged on until the seventies. This was hardly the plan, not by a long shot, not to get banged up with them yokes, up there chewing the altar rails. Where were the women, for a start? After an interlude of spiritual reflection, Glynn, now nineteen, discovered that his calling wasn’t in fact to serve the Lord after all, but rather to find a flock. And there were easier ways of coming by an audience, what with his talent. I am, it should be said, surmising.

  Brigid did not grasp the significance of her anecdote: that Glynn had managed by the tender age of eight to captivate his first audience. His mesmerising faculty with language was evident from the outset, his strange power with words was apparent even then. The audacity of coupling biblical names with historical props to fashion a narrative so authentic that the local kids accepted it as, well, Gospel – you had to hand it to the little chancer, you had to take off your hat. The man was born to hold a pen in his hand.

  Brigid stubbornly refused to see the matter in those terms. She had formulated strong opinions of her own regarding Patsy Glynn’s coal-shed evangelising and seemed crestfallen, even a little bitter, when I didn’t endorse them, when I declined to add my voice to her round condemnation, on the contrary finding it increasingly difficult to contain my mounting excitement. It marked the end of our association.

  The timing of my chat with Brigid turned out to be auspicious. Just one of those things. A sign, if you like. A mere matter of weeks later, and a full three years after the five of us had individually, unbeknownst to each other, scattered throughout the soggy audience of approximately two hundred, attended Glynn’s Royal Irish Academy reading, I found myself entirely by chance face to face with the man himself. I had never seen him in daylight before. What a pallor he had on him.

  It was the Christmas of 1984, and I was home in Ireland for the holidays. I’d just that morning come up on the bus from Mayo to visit friends in Dublin when he joined me at the pedestrian lights on the Ha’penny Bridge, also waiting to cross. There we suddenly were, standing side by side on the banks of the Liffey one brisk breezy afternoon in late December, regarding each other none too warmly. Seagulls with wingspans as broad as eagles wheeled and screamed above the great writer’s head, part of the aura he carried everywhere, the raucous extension of his mind into the sky. Glynn protested a lifelong interest in the avian world, coastal species in particular: gulls of all types, terns, gannets, cormorants, guillemots – they feature prominently in his work.

  Though I knew the contours of his face almost as well as I knew my own, I still did a double take to make sure it was really Glynn. He looked somehow contrived; not Glynn, but a man dressed up as him. Surely the real Glynn should not have to try so hard to resemble himself, and still not fully succeed? He was shivering despite it being an unseasonably pleasant afternoon, sunny enough to force us both to squint, or, in his case, scowl. In retrospect, it seems likely he was enduring one of his health scares at the time. Mortality; another of Glynn’s great topics.

  His navy coat was fastened to the throat, the collar turned up around his ears. It looked as naked as a shirt buttoned to the neck without a tie. No one had ever accused Glynn of possessing style. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his cheeks, when he coughed wetly without covering his mouth, puffed out the mauve grey of the homeless. About his person, the various appurtenances with which we were to become so familiar: the umbrella, the high grade hat and, in case there was any doubt as to his occupation, the old chestnut-brown leather satchel from his student days. Glynn had been a Foundation Scholar at Trinity in the early 1950s, an honour he shared with Wilde and Beckett.

  A fair to middling crowd of bargain hunters had gathered at the lights, not one of whom had spotted the prodigy walking amongst us. Hibernia had been published three years previously to international acclaim. Glynn must have read the jumble of confusion and zeal on my face, because he regarded me with a harried eye, but it was also a speculative one. This was typical of the man, I would come to learn. Jaded by the attention, but nonetheless courting it. He seemed perpetually on the brink of issuing an observation of literary import, of producing poetic utterance. That’s how it felt to be standing next to him – braced for epiphanic articulation to burst into the world, your hands cupped in readiness to catch it.

  Glynn sighed impatiently and tapped his umbrella against his leg, urging it to giddy up and get him the hell out of there. He had a point: the lights were taking for ever to change. The country should have shown him more respect. The circumstances, it occurred to me then, were unrepeatable. I could not, even on paper, have devised a scenario more accommodating to our first conversation. It was the casual nature of the encounter that was most striking. Two men of the world briefly detained by a set of pedestrian lights. One man, the younger, leans in to extol the work of the elder, and the elder is pleased to hear that his work remains relevant to the next generation. These are his people, after all. This is his country, is it not? Glynn put himself on the line with The Ashtray Chronicle, exposed the darkest thoughts, the most pitiful weaknesses, the apparently boundlessly abject nature of man. It wasn’t much to ask of me to issue a sentence or two of gratitude in return for such uncompromising honesty. There was another fierce outbreak of shrieking amongst the gulls, their hysteria louder than the thundering traffic. Glynn swivelled his bloodshot eyes upward, swaying on his feet, and I winced at the stale reek of last night’s stout.

  A lorry hurtled up the quays at a reckless speed, and the crowd back-stepped in alarm, jostling the two of us together. I turned to Glynn and cleared my throat to speak. His speculative appraisal of me hardened into an admonitory glare. How was I supposed to know that the anonymous poison-pen letters had recently put in their first appearance? Sometimes they were delivered through the postal system, but more often than not by hand, dropping through his letterbox at all hours of the day and night. One had even materialised in his coat pocket after a particularly punishing night out on the tiles.

  Despite putting his back into it, deploying the formidable powers of observation at his disposal, Glynn never managed to catch the perpetrator in the act. Whoever penned the things was unnervingly conversant with his movements, appearing to know before even Glynn knew where he would be found. It was with great assiduity that they had studied their subject, displaying an eye for detail and a flair for dramatic timing rivalling that of the master himself. How intimate the two must have become, in a perverse way, brooding over each other like lovers all those long hours. Glynn had come to regard every dog and divil as their potential author, a man under siege from an assailant he couldn’t see. His tormentor could have been standing right next to him in the crowd at that very moment, for all he knew. Perhaps that explains why he shuddered.

  A backdrop of swollen clouds was steadily rising behind him, an assassin creeping up to slit his throat. Clouds all but had minds in the fictions of Glynn. They were all but sentient. ‘The highwaymen of the sky,’ he had called them in The Devil’s Party, flattened in hiding on the horizon, ready to loom up and ambush you the second you came into range, as this one had done just now, all eighty foot of it. The chests of the gliding gulls looked so chalky white against its sodden greyness, and Glynn, he looked so small.

  The pedestrian lights turned green and the crowd surged forward. Glynn headed back to the doghouse. He was living in a dank bedsit in a condemned building on Bachelors Walk by then, his wife having thrown him out the week before Christmas. Yet another fact I could never have inferred at the time. ‘Wait,’ I heard myself calling after him, but Glynn was already out of earshot, taking his retinue of screeching gulls with him. ‘Rain!’ they shrieked, ‘Rain!’ Fat drops burst on the pavement as the sky blackened. They
fell tentatively at first, and then in a deluge, but still Glynn did not open his large umbrella, using it instead to strike a dustbin, then another, and so on up the quays, bang bang, bang bang, confirming an opinion I’d heard muttered in licensed premises the length and breadth of the country: that here was a fellow who did not know what was good for him, and who was unwilling to learn.

  On the last bus home that night, I jotted down notes obliquely based on this thwarted encounter, my handwriting juddering across the page like a seismogram. I’d filled a copybook by the time I disembarked, and over the next four nights, before returning to the factory in Leeds, I fashioned a short prose piece. It was my first Chapter One, the first of my many Chapter Ones.

  I termed it an excerpt from a novel in my application to Glynn for a place on his course, though there never was any novel. The piece was about, well, defeat, I suppose. Perhaps that’s what Glynn responded to when he read my few pages and added my name to the list alongside the names of the four girls – neither the imagery nor the characterisation, not the plot nor the language, but the all-pervasive tincture of failure. It must have struck a chord.

  4

  The Rocky Road to Dublin

  Ten months later, I was back on the boat, this time going against the tide of panicked young Irish who were bailing off the island like rats off a sinking ship. Not me. I wanted to be there when that ship sank. I wanted to see it happen. It was the final week of September 1985.

  The country I returned to was comprehensively and publicly on its knees. My teenage years had been dominated by news bulletins detailing which factories had closed and where, incurring how many job losses, how many new additions to the live register. Having in ’82 completed an engineering degree out of a sense of duty to my poor mother, a widow then of some seventeen years, God have mercy on my father’s soul, I left Ireland to work in a manufacturing plant in Leeds. We produced components for various domestic appliances. Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, irons, sandwich makers.

  Through living an existence entirely temporary in nature, barely an existence at all by Glynn’s red-blooded, hot-headed criteria, I had saved enough money to keep myself – were I to continue living frugally – for a full academic year in Trinity. Like many witless young idealists, I was of the conviction that money was of no inherent value in itself. I was twenty-five years old. By that age, Glynn had already published a debut collection of short stories, one novel (the aforementioned Prussian Blue) and what he described during the Royal Irish Academy public interview as ‘a few aul poems’, finding two syllables in the word ‘poem’, as, very soon, did we.

  I spent altogether twelve days trawling the streets for a suitable bedsit, a search that proved more sobering than anticipated. Michelmas term had already commenced, so only the dregs were left by then, the dives every other student had rejected. The full extent of the neglect Dublin had suffered was revealed to me in a series of tableaux presented by bored landlords. They swung doors open onto scenes of dilapidation so grim that they didn’t even attempt to defend them. Those rooms told a story not just of a recession, but of a city – once the second of the British Empire, it is hard to credit – that had been in decline for the guts of two centuries.

  The rooms were situated mainly in the grand Georgian terraces and squares built in the late eighteenth century. The sad deterioration of those gracious family residences was not a reflection on Ireland’s distaste for its colonial past but, rather, on the lack of resources available to bestow on those fine old buildings the specialist care they required. Whole rows, entire streets, had been broken down into the maximum amount of rental units for the minimum possible investment. I encountered rooms with broken windows, rooms with no windows, rooms that were sited partially underground, or in poorly converted attic spaces, shards of daylight piercing the rafters. Rooms that were split into smaller rooms by panels of sheet rock, floor areas not much larger than coffins. Rooms that stank of mildew or grew mushrooms in the corner. Rooms with ivy poking through cracks in the walls, floors squelching underfoot.

  Most disquieting of all were the faded traces of genteel living, lingering ghostlike in the details: the incomplete ceiling roses, the crumbling stuccowork, the chipped marble mantelpieces and shattered fanlights. Everywhere, ruined proportions; windows bricked up or knocked through, kitchenettes shoved in hall corners, toilets plumbed into reception rooms. Those unloved rooms pleaded with me to do something, do something, to speak on their behalf, or at least not to close the door again. I picked my way around, observing their condition without comment, mindful to touch nothing, as if they were plague victims or war casualties in a field hospital and my role was solely to count them, to compile an inventory of the condemned and the dead. The relief I experienced upon coming back out to fresh air fell far short of adequate.

  *

  The flat on Mountjoy Square, in the heart of Gardiner’s Dublin, became available late in the day for reasons that were never specified. It was Aisling, with her great fondness for the macabre, who planted the idea in my head that the previous tenant had dropped dead in it. Suicide, most likely, she reckoned. I followed the haunches of an Offaly man with a beer gut straining the buttons of his tea-coloured shirt as he laboured up the stairs. Up three flights to the top floor he led me, jangling his ring of keys as offhandedly as a jailer, pausing on each landing to catch his breath, all the time profaning softly. ‘Mother of God,’ he sighed. ‘Merciful hour. All the angels and saints.’

  The room was clean, bright, plain. A single bed, desk and chair, two-bar electrical heater. The landlord placed his hands on his kidneys and surveyed the room as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Snug,’ he noted with approval. ‘Central location, own sink.’

  ‘Take your time,’ he added before retiring to lean out the landing window for a smoke.

  In gradient, it recalled that rickety bedroom in Arles that Van Gogh had painted a hundred years earlier, except that his floor sloped upward, not down. It was the shipshape bareness that most appealed to me, as if everything was nailed to the ground. The simple, practical sturdiness of its contents, the sense of things being orderly and under control, was as satisfactory to me as a tightened belt. I could picture myself bent over the stout desk scribbling past midnight, ripping pages from notebooks and firing crumpled balls into the corner. Such were my notions of the writing life. God knows where I got them. Not from Glynn. Can’t blame him for that. Out I went to the landing.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ I told the landlord, pulling out my roll of money. He flicked his cigarette out the window and tossed his head in a manner intended to convey approbation, but which somehow seemed more like a scoff.

  *

  I transported my belongings from the temporary student dormitory accommodation to Mountjoy Square that same afternoon. It took just two crossings. All I had were the few changes of clothes and, of course, my books. Local children overtook me on the street hauling tyres and furniture. A convoy of five carried an upended three-piece suite on their heads, ants raiding a picnic. Smaller kids, six-year-olds, lagged behind dragging the matching cushions. They were dismantling the city at a ferocious rate. Unlit bonfires loomed up from every patch of open ground, squat and totemic, some of them already fifteen feet high though Halloween wasn’t for weeks.

  I moved the desk in my new room from the corner to the window. Van Gogh’s window glowed with Provençal sunlight. Mine gave onto a concrete yard jammed with decades’ worth of household detritus: paint cans, ironing boards, a rusting cooker, half a bike. Nothing the local children could burn. A buddleia sprouted from the boundary wall, its flowers brown and curling. To the rear of the yard, a back lane ran the length of the terrace, joining up with Fitzgibbon Street and the flats. The rhythmic ticking sound which had promised during the viewing to be a grandfather clock turned out to be a dripping tap. The toilet and shower stall were located downstairs.

  I unpacked my reference texts, my foolscap pads, my pens, and laid them out on the windowsill like a se
t of surgical instruments. The Irish Times had printed a large black and white photograph of Glynn in his study when he won the Prix Médicis étranger, the first Irishman to have done so and, to date, the last. I was no more than nine or ten when I saw that image, but it stayed with me all those years. Glynn was seated at a leather-topped desk by a bay window, illuminated by a soft shaft of sunlight. Behind him, a great black wall of books breathed down the back of his neck. On the desk was a sheaf of papers to which he applied a silver pen which just so happened to catch the light as the camera shutter clicked, his tiny glinting sceptre.

  How ferociously Glynn scowled in that photograph, as if he were engaged in the bloodiest act of creative engendering conceivable, though it is unlikely that he could have been writing anything much, really, not with that photographer buzzing about the room like a fly. The murderous frown must have been at the intrusion. ‘Leave me alone,’ he was scrawling across his papers, by the looks of it. ‘Go away, feck off, get out.’ Oh, to be there, not in Glynn’s study, but any study, to be any writer in any study, to break through to that fictive space, the factory floor of the imagination. If there was a secret door leading to it, a revolving bookcase, a sliding panel, it had so far proved beyond my ability to locate it. I had tried, God knows I had tried, to find it by myself. Glynn would show us how to get there. Glynn, of all people, would know.

  5

  What’s another year?

  I never once saw the interior of Trinity in high summer, it has only now occurred to me. Never set foot within those collegiate walls outside of the academic calendar, despite having lived in Dublin for years, and despite the campus obstructing everything. Perhaps it was for this reason that Trinity never fully seemed part of the city to me but was instead an intermittent phenomenon, seasonal as a winter lake.