‘I would like to believe,’ Faye offered, ‘that the names of great twentieth-century female novelists do not spring as readily to our lips as those of their male counterparts simply because we haven’t heard of them.’
‘So would I,’ Guinevere replied flatly, her tone conveying that although she too would have liked to enjoy Faye’s benign belief, the stark facts of the matter denied her that luxury.
‘Am I doomed from the start?’ Antonia demanded. ‘Is that what you’re saying? Is that what you’re telling me? That I’m doomed in my literary endeavours from the outset because I’m female? That I may as well not bother?’ The blood had drained so thoroughly from her face that Antonia’s lips were the colour of skin, and her skin was the colour of bone. How unfamiliar she had suddenly become, and yet how genuine, as if the mask had finally dropped.
We were evidently in the grip of a serious crisis, and although I had no comprehension of the immense personal significance Antonia had clearly invested in the argument, the urge to defend Guinevere, who was sitting listlessly by my side, was at that moment overpowering. ‘Listen Antonia–’ I began, the adrenalin surging through my body, but then Aisling slammed her pint down with such force that it splashed all over the table.
‘Shut up,’ she warned us, and we did.
There was something about Aisling’s delivery on that occasion that made us pay absolute heed to her. The five of us drank in sullen silence until our glasses were drained. It didn’t take long. Where was Glynn for all of this? God knows. And yet he seemed the very epicentre of the incident, present and amongst us in some auditing capacity, watching our five miniatures through a crystal ball, goading us into the expression of contentious opinions we didn’t know we held so strongly, or even held at all. God forbid that we should disappoint him. We spoke our lines for him alone. They would filter back for his critical appraisal through one channel or another. Everything filtered back to Glynn, eventually. Everything bore his mark. I do not remember how that particular evening ended. Unsatisfactorily, I suppose.
And so Guinevere read to us her inspired solution to the quandary she said had plagued her (and plagued Antonia too, whether she admitted it or not): her novel narrated by a man. After a few sentences, we acclimatised to her light voice recreating that of an American male, until soon we were hearing not Guinevere’s Irish accent, but Maxwell Hartman’s East Coast burr. It crept up on you gradually, the cumulative impact of all that unassuming detail, the combined weight of those deceptively throwaway observations. It stole up, gathered round, had you surrounded, snug, until without warning it had come to life: Maxwell Hartman was in the room.
It was the polar opposite of Aisling’s reading, which foregrounded not the subject matter but the struggle of the artist herself. Guinevere receded altogether as a fictional character appeared in her skin, pressing his face into hers. There were times when it was clear that Guinevere could have done anything she wanted. Her use of the disappointed male voice generated a tragic resonance, but the real tragedy to my mind was that a young woman perceived an ostensibly successful and powerful businessman as so abjectly pitiful. Was that what got to me about Guinevere’s writing: her ability to see through the male armoury to the shivering wretch underneath? Was that what made me come to her?
Mike adjusted his ponytail and read an extract from some class of crime fiction, some scrape about a good guy, a bad guy, a blonde and a bag of loot. The women didn’t appreciate his efforts either, though Glynn bestowed upon him a hearty wink. And then it was my turn. I leafed through my manuscript in a harassed fashion for no good reason. It wasn’t like the pages had scrambled into the wrong order behind my back. I was barely a paragraph into Chapter One when Glynn interrupted me.
‘What happened your eye?’ he demanded.
What eye, I wondered. There was no eye in Chapter One. Never had been. Or did he mean I, the first-person narrator?
Glynn raised his glasses to his forehead, awaiting an explanation. The lenses framed two rectangles of skin, as if a second, covert set of eyes was concealed behind the pink membrane, his mind’s eye, his artist’s eye, window to his imagination.
‘Your eye,’ he repeated, nodding at my shiner. ‘What happened? Someone give you a dig?’
‘Oh that,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
‘Was it over a woman?’
‘No,’ I said apologetically.
Glynn peered at my black eye for another few seconds, then dropped his glasses back onto his nose to indicate that he’d lost interest. I shuffled my sheaf of papers as needlessly as before and returned to the business of reading out Chapter One. Anyone could see that it was about Guinevere, and that I wasn’t up to the job. I listened to the lonely sound of my own voice losing conviction with every word. Soon it had dwindled to a barely audible trickle. I think this is how a parent must feel to discover that his child is not clever, or pretty, or even happy. The less said about the whole thing the better.
10
You scumbag, you faggot
The payphone in the corridor started ringing in the small hours later that same night. I was out of the bed and running down the stairs before I knew what was going on. ‘Who’s there?’ I challenged the mouthpiece, as if the person on the other end had broken into the building. ‘Giz woz ere’ was scratched onto the coin-box casing. A light on the ground floor came on.
‘Declan?’ Guinevere’s voice. I recognised it instantly. ‘It’s Glynn,’ she said. ‘He’s in trouble. Can you help us? We’re on Duke Street.’
It would take a good half-hour to reach Duke Street on foot, no matter how hard I ran. The fucker downstairs had stolen my bike. I pummelled his door with my fists on the way out. ‘Give me back my bike, you prick!’ I shouted, but didn’t stick around for a response.
It was a freezing November night, no cloud cover, a rack of winter stars. A dog howled forlornly in the distance. Three knackers in silky tracksuits stood huddled at the entrance to the park. I pressed on. Guinevere was waiting on the other side of the river. I couldn’t let her down.
The knackers lunged at me as I passed. They pursued me halfway up the street, white runners pistoning, then lost impetus and fell by the wayside. Their heart wasn’t in it. The chase was just for show. I heard them laughing with bravado at my retreat, at the great triumph it denoted. ‘Little Trinity gee-bag,’ one of them shouted, then fired an empty can in my direction. It fell far short of its target. How did they know I went to Trinity? A life force I didn’t think aware of my existence turned out to be monitoring my movements. It was as if the street-lamps had started to speak, or the gateposts nodded at my return.
*
A tall lone female was standing at the mouth of the service lane to Brown Thomas when I rounded the corner onto Duke Street from Grafton Street. My heart surged at the sight of her, and I waved. The figure did not return my greeting but unfolded her arms and threw her cigarette to the ground. The street lighting glanced off the crown of her head as she did so. Blonde bobbed hair. Antonia. My hand dropped to my side.
She didn’t speak when I drew up, just checked her watch in irritation. You would think I had kept her waiting. ‘Where’s Guinevere?’ I asked.
‘Glynn, you mean. He’s down here.’
She led me down the lane in silence. The others were stationed throughout it, Aisling first, so black that she merged with the background. I didn’t realise she was there until she spoke. ‘Hi Declan,’ came her voice from the murk, the moon of her disembodied face materialising in the darkness. It was swaying slightly. Up ahead, amongst a pile of cardboard boxes and packing crates, bathed in the glow of a security lamp, lay the great man himself. Faye was on her knees ministering to him. Guinevere stood to attention at his head. It was the deathbed scene of a king.
Faye got to her feet when she saw me. ‘He’s taken a bit of a turn,’ she said apologetically, brushing down her skirt.
‘Hello Declan,’ said Guinevere. ‘Sorry to have called you in the middle of the night.’
‘Mike wasn’t home, so we had to ring you instead,’ Antonia clarified, in case there was any doubt as to their first preference.
They stood back to allow me to examine the body, which was in the recovery position on the ground. I nudged Glynn in the ribs with the toe of my shoe. No response. ‘He’s asleep,’ I said. Aisling sniggered.
‘We can see that, thanks,’ said Antonia, and lit another cigarette.
‘Problem is,’ said Guinevere, ‘he won’t wake up.’
‘Why didn’t you call me earlier?’
‘We thought we could handle it ourselves,’ said Faye. Spurred sleech. I turned to look at her.
‘Have you lot been drinking since the workshop ended?’ That seemed like days ago.
Faye bit her lip. ‘Afraid so. We’ve let Professor Glynn get into a terrible state.’ Glynn’s drinking became public knowledge when he was expelled from a Northern Ireland peace conference for singing rebel songs of his own composition.
‘He’s a grown man,’ Antonia pointed out. ‘He got himself into this state.’
I surveyed his length. ‘Exactly how long has he been in this condition?’ There was something about their anxious, solicitous tone that made me adopt a clipped, professional one. I’d gotten myself stuck in Mike’s cop novel.
‘I don’t know,’ said Guinevere. ‘Two hours maybe?’
I nodded gravely, as if I were a doctor and this time span confirmed my worst suspicions. I wanted to punish them, I suppose, for leaving me behind. ‘So what do you want me to do with him?’
‘Fucking pick him up,’ said Antonia. ‘Jesus.’
‘We can’t seem to lift him ourselves,’ Guinevere explained. ‘He’s a dead weight.’
‘And we can hardly leave him out here in the cold,’ added Faye.
I wasn’t sure I understood their problem. ‘Why didn’t you just wake him?’
Guinevere shrugged. ‘We couldn’t. We’ve tried everything. Seriously.’ Aisling sniggered again.
I moved around Glynn, hunkering down like a snooker player looking for a good angle. There was no good angle. Laid out on his side with his shirt untucked, exposing an expanse of haunch, Glynn’s true bulk was revealed, and it was reckonable. There was at least a third more of him on the flat, a ship hoisted out of the water. The girls waited patiently for me to do something. Even Antonia gave me the benefit of the doubt. A stranger I was then to ageing flesh and had never been confronted with so much of it before, and of such a lifeless texture too, squeezed into goosebumped skin like sausage meat. I got down on my knees.
I tried to engage him in conversation, cupping my hands and calling down his ear as if it were the well shaft he’d fallen into. ‘Hello?’ I cried, then leaned back to check for signs of life. None. I bent over him again. ‘Can you hear me, Professor? Do you think you could stand up?’ That sort of thing. On it went. Stupid questions, the answers to which I already knew. Antonia made a tutting noise in response to each one.
‘Look it, Antonia,’ I told her, sitting back on my heels, ‘this is hard enough without you standing behind me sneering.’
She tutted again.
‘For the love of God, woman!’ Glynn suddenly cried. ‘Stop your infernal complaining. One of you: help me up.’ I grasped his arm and hauled him to his feet. Guinevere inserted herself under his other arm for balance.
‘The lovely Guinevere,’ he murmured, drawing her to him.
‘It’s alright,’ I assured her, swinging Glynn around so that she was out of his reach. ‘I can manage.’
Glynn swivelled his head to regard me. ‘Who’s this clown?’ he demanded but then decided it didn’t matter, so intent was he on keeping up with the women. We stumbled towards Nassau Street, a three-legged race, the girls going on ahead to hail a taxi.
Guinevere opened the cab door and stood back to let him in first, but the man didn’t understand what was required of him and gazed at the waiting taxi as if it were no concern of his. I tried to lower his intractable bulk into the back seat, but he wouldn’t release my shoulder, so in the end I had to climb in first and ease him down on top of me. I inched him along the scalloped seat until there was enough room on the other side for Guinevere. She stuck her head in after us. I could barely see her over the mound of Glynn.
‘Safe home now, Declan,’ she said. The others chimed their goodbyes behind her. ‘Wait,’ I protested as the door slammed shut. I tried to wrench myself around to look out the back window as the taxi pulled away but was pinioned under the great slouched mass of Glynn, pressed hard up against me like a lover.
I tried to push him off, but he remained slumped across my shoulder. ‘This isn’t my car,’ he observed mildly, then started to hum. Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone. The first rumblings of resentment began to stir in my chest, as is so often the way with these things, but I said nothing, did nothing, just let it come down on me. The Irish are used to being rained on.
11
The Quare Fellow
We could not fail but notice, at the workshop the following Wednesday, that Glynn’s voice had lost the antagonistic edge which had characterised previous classes. He commenced the session by speaking to us about the aloneness of writing, tacitly acknowledging for the first time that writing was a condition we shared.
Not loneliness, he clarified, but aloneness with the writing self. No amount of time spent alone with the writing self was too much, he said. You stay up with it all night as if it were your lover. You go through the details of your day with it until it becomes your closest friend. Your only friend, at times. Being a writer, Glynn believed, was like getting the keys to the city. You could go anywhere you wanted within the fictive space, do anything you wanted. To waste that freedom would be nothing short of irresponsible. Did we understand what he meant? We nodded. We understood. There were periods in Glynn’s life – contemplating the various editions of his novels, for instance (translated into thirty-two languages now) – when he could enjoy a spirit of comradeship with his books, his fellow conspirators, that they had managed to pull it off together, that they had come this far, them against the world. These periods never lasted long. The great writer’s face clouded. For a moment, we thought he was going to start telling us about his suffering. He took a breath, glanced at our expectant faces, but something held him back.
‘I’ll leave it there,’ he said, getting to his feet.
The four girls jumped up and followed him down the stairs. I glanced at Mike to do something, stop him, but Mike just packed away his notebook. When was Glynn going to show us how to write?
The group left House Eight in a hexagon, for they had gained a fifth point. Glynn had joined their number. They had annexed Glynn. I watched them from the top floor, surrounding him like a bracelet, moving him across the cobbles with the sheer gravitational force of their presence. The five of them made their way to Front Arch. Glynn looked pleased. Bewildered, admittedly, as if he couldn’t quite grasp how they were dictating his movements, but pleased all the same with the attention they lavished on him, willing to pay the price.
*
I came upon them a couple of hours later. It was the night we made the landmark discovery that all five of us had attended Glynn’s Royal Irish Academy reading back in ’81. Aisling had been celebrating her twentieth birthday. Now she was celebrating her twenty-fourth. It was our anniversary.
When I say I came upon them, I mean I followed them to the door of Bartley Dunne’s, then returned a couple of hours later and wandered past their table in an abstracted manner copied from Glynn, as if my head was stuffed so full of poetic matter that there simply wasn’t room left in it to accommodate the quotidian stuff, like looking where you were going. Glynn was singing come-all-ye’s by then. The women had gone to his head.
It was Faye who spotted me, good old Faye. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing me out to the others, ‘isn’t that Declan?’ A man could always rely on her type. She had
seven cats at home, all of them strays, because she couldn’t bear to see a fellow creature suffer. Her heart was too big for her own good. Her belief in the essential goodness of human nature was irrational and subject to manipulation by precisely the strain of badness she refused to accept prevailed in the world. All a man had to do was look crestfallen and she’d forgive him, no matter how heinous the transgression nor how hollow the assertion to reform. ‘You know her husband beats her, don’t you?’ Aisling once whispered urgently into my ear while the two of us were standing at the bar waiting for our pints to settle.
‘What! Whose husband? Jesus Christ Almighty!’
It hadn’t been my intention to raise my voice. Aisling had caught me by surprise. The barman raised an admonitory eyebrow as he topped up our pints. ‘Take it handy there, folks,’ he warned us. Aisling glanced at the others in panic, though they were too far away to have overheard. ‘Nothing, Declan,’ she blurted, ‘I shouldn’t have told you. Forget I said anything, please.’
This wasn’t the kind of information you could forget in a hurry, and Aisling knew it. Her face flushed red under all the white make-up, making her look stranger still. She had evidently just broken one of the group’s secret confidences, one of those blood oaths with which their little cabal was ridden, and she grew so frantic, so distraught, as she fumbled first with her packet of cigarettes and then with her lighter, all the while begging me to forget she’d opened her mouth, that I backed off altogether to calm her down. Neglecting one to protect another. It was an insane situation, but there you go.
She finally got the cigarette up and running, and the two of us stood watching the other three conversing with Glynn as if nothing was amiss. You know her husband beats her, don’t you? Aisling hadn’t specified which of them was beaten, but it was hardly the time to ask. Faye was the only one who was married. Though Antonia technically had a husband still, in the eyes of the Irish State.
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