*
Faye, kind Faye, waved her hand and called my name as I was wandering through the red and black gloom of Bartley Dunne’s, pint in hand. Imagine my surprise to encounter my fellow writing students. And the Professor too, as luck would have it. I stood there, smiling broadly at the lot of them.
They seemed pleased enough to see me, at any rate. Glynn interrupted his song to throw an arm out in welcome. ‘Dermot!’ he cried, knocking over his pint. The women had made him giddy. Guinevere stemmed the spillage by dealing a dam of beer mats with the air of one with much practice in this field. ‘Sit down there now like a good man,’ Glynn instructed me. I set my pint on the table and took my rightful place amongst them, the six of us crammed into a booth.
How delicate and colourful the girls were. It was like sitting in a flowerbed. I knew I was too big for them, too awkward, too crude. Didn’t matter: I scrunched in tighter. Glynn leaned across. ‘You’ve got your knees under the table now, so you have, ya boyo!’ he winked. Aisling went to the bar to replace his pint.
‘Did you follow us here?’ Antonia demanded.
Guinevere laughed. ‘God almighty, of course he didn’t follow us here. What sort of weirdo would do a thing like that?’ Ya fucken perv. Spying on the kiddies.
‘I often drink in Bartley’s,’ I told them.
‘Do you have family in Dublin, Declan?’ Faye asked, keen to introduce a neutral subject.
‘No, I’m an only child.’
‘Oh right. So do you go home to your parents at the weekends?’
‘Ah no. The mother doesn’t know I left England.’
Antonia lowered her drink. ‘Your mother doesn’t know you left England?’
‘Yeah. She thinks I’m still in Leeds.’ They were all looking at me now.
‘But why?’ asked Faye.
‘She’d be really upset if she knew I’d given up a good job to do, well …’ I gestured at the table, ‘this. So I didn’t tell her.’ Blank faces. ‘She’d have thought Daddy would have disapproved,’ I added, sensing more was needed.
Guinevere frowned. ‘Your father doesn’t know you’re here either?’
‘No, he passed away.’ Daddy had been dead the past twenty years, yet despite his absence, no family decision was made without reference to him, without an agonised consideration of his feelings. Since he had been a quiet man, loath to complain, it had always been difficult to gauge what might have attracted his unspoken displeasure. There were no set rules. Like the Irish language, he had to be learned by ear.
‘They were quite old when they had me,’ I offered, talking to fill the gap. ‘From a different era, really. More like grandparents, in fact.’ I was as struck by this information as the girls. I hadn’t looked at it that way before. My ageing parents had treated me as politely and tactfully as a guest staying in their home. Ours had been a reticent household, for the most part.
Antonia found it uncontrollably amusing that my mother referred to her deceased husband as Daddy. Really, she could barely contain herself. She repeated my mother’s words to stoke herself up again when her amusement waned: Daddy would have preferred to see you settle. ‘Priceless,’ she said, wiping away a tear. Faye whispered to Antonia to for God’s sake leave poor Declan alone.
‘Write it down,’ said Glynn, ‘Write it down.’ He had a tendency to issue words of advice twice, in order to imbue them with the quality of axiom. A few observations regarding the state of mind of the artist might be appropriate at this juncture, in the interests of posterity. I hadn’t seen him execute the office of Great Irish Writer so movingly before. He sat amongst us in some class of reverie, head tilted back, eyes shut, basking in the glory of female company. His boyish good looks were extant in sufficient measure to make you nostalgic for the handsome young poet he once had been, because it was poetry Glynn had started with, yes, it is true, all those years ago when he was purer of mind and had less to say for himself.
They say alcohol has spelled the ruin of many a great Irish writer, but I maintain it is part of what made them great in the first place. It lifts a veil, releases a man from inhibitions, frees the creative spirit. Gazing at Glynn across the table with that half-fledged smile on his face, which expressed his contentment more completely than any fully effected version, I was finally granted what I felt was my first real insight into the internal layout of the writer’s mind. Were Glynn stone-cold sober, I would not have been afforded that licence. A July sunset on a rolling lawn is what I saw. Shadows on the grass as cool and alluring as rock pools. Glynn possessed a working knowledge of the stars which informed his writing, at times infusing it with a celestial dimension, other times foregrounding the staggering insignificance of man. ‘There is a moment when you realise,’ the stricken narrator notes towards the end of Broken Man, as he reflects on the sudden passing of his infant son, ‘that the sun is not the sun, but a dying planet, expiring before your eyes.’
Dr M. J. Hanratty’s biography mentions that Glynn never fully recovered from the shock of the death of his youngest child, Saoirse, who was killed by meningitis at the age of two. It was around then that reports about him beginning with the word ‘troubled’ proliferated in the papers. ‘Troubled author Patrick Glynn was in court today to answer charges of drunk driving.’ ‘Troubled writer P. J. Glynn was expelled from an award ceremony in London’s Guild Hall last night for punching a fellow contestant.’ ‘Troubled novelist Patrick Glynn is recovering from hypothermia in hospital tonight after being found in the water on Brittas Bay.’
But that was a long time ago, a different lifetime, a different Glynn. He had written three astonishing novels since Saoirse’s death, one universally hailed upon publication as a masterpiece. His other daughter, Sofia, was grown and had flown the nest. His house was quiet once more, all strife and clamour behind him. That old grief had surely lost the power to pain him still, not when he had the inestimable consolation of art.
Glynn must have felt my gaze upon him. He opened his eyes and squinted at me through narrowed slits, as if the sun were shining in his face, then winked and shut his eyes once more. The contented half-smile did not falter. It occurred to me that the man knew what I was thinking. I wondered whether he could glimpse the internal layout of other people’s heads too. His work supports the possibility.
I had initially been sceptical the week before when our taxi drew up to that rundown shambles on Bachelors Walk with the redevelopment notices in the window. ‘This can’t be right,’ I told the taxi driver, who maintained it was the address the women had given him. ‘Are you certain this is it?’ I asked Glynn slowly, in the measured tones of an adult speaking to a lost child. There had to be a mistake.
Glynn wanted to know exactly what class of ape I thought I was dealing with, that he knew his own fecking address, in the name of God, then he jammed an elbow into my stomach to launch himself as if pushing off a boat from a pier. Out of the back seat he waded, slow as a whale, one eye fixed on the pavement. He turned to toss a balled-up pound note into my lap with an unwarranted show of contempt. I waited until he had the front door open before instructing the taxi driver to pull away. Well so, he had a key.
Key or no key, it was difficult to accept that Glynn intended spending the night in that hovel. I’d had in mind for him a genteel old pile on the hilly outer reaches of Dublin Bay, either Aisling’s or Guinevere’s side. July sunset on a rolling lawn, shadows cool as rock pools. I saw that cliff house whenever I read his prose. The details were vague, but the atmosphere was unforgettable, as if I’d been brought there to visit as a child. This is where the great writer lives. Shhh, don’t make any noise.
There had to be a better reward for a distinguished life’s work in letters. The building on Bachelors Walk was a bigger dive than my own. Small wonder he’d been reluctant to relinquish the Brown Thomas service lane. At least four women had been tending to him there. The house fronted onto a river, though, I had reasoned as the taxi progressed along the quays. A tidal river, at that, almost
the sea. Gulls combed that end of the Liffey like any other stretch of coastline. Always happiest near water, Glynn. Perhaps he’d installed himself in the dilapidated digs in the name of research, it occurred to me then. I lowered my pint and looked at him. Perhaps he’d started a new novel. His first set in Dublin, right there on the quays. Jesus. Aisling nudged me from my speculations to murmur something into my ear that I didn’t catch. She was too drunk to gauge the projection of her voice and just kept mumbling shyly, nodding dolefully into my eyes. They were all looking at me again, the girls. Antonia eventually couldn’t bear it any longer and interjected. ‘She’s telling you it’s your round, Dermot.’
Glynn sprang to life at the clink of the tray being set down on the table. He grabbed the nearest glass and raised it. ‘A toast!’ he proposed, but sank his pint before naming one, then stood up to regard us fondly.
‘I’m off to write a novel,’ he announced. ‘Back in a tick.’ He headed for the jacks.
Faye glanced around the table in excitement the second his back was turned. ‘He’s started, you know,’ she blurted when she was certain he was out of earshot. ‘He’s started a new novel. He recited the opening line to me earlier when we were up at the bar.’
‘How did it go?’ Guinevere asked.
‘Now that the long evenings are upon me once again.’
‘Jesus,’ said Aisling. ‘Fuck.’
‘His first set in Dublin,’ I added.
‘Does he have a title yet?’ said Guinevere.
Faye nodded. ‘Desiderata.’
We marvelled at what a good title it was, wishing we’d thought of it first. And that opening line: such resonance. Five ideas sprouted in our minds.
‘Did he say anything else about it?’ Antonia asked.
‘No, he just recited the opening line and asked me what I thought of it.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I told him I thought it was beautiful. What else could I say? He just sprang it on me.’
We saw Faye’s dilemma. ‘Beautiful’ was hardly complex enough a word for Glynn, but no adequate alternative was available at such short notice, not with so little to go on. It was a rabbit-caught-in-the-headlamps response, the literary equivalent of discussing the weather. The word had lost its currency. They were worn-out tools we’d been given to work with, cracked cups and saucers, tattered hand-me-downs, ruined through overuse. ‘Beautiful.’ How hollowly it must have rung in the great writer’s ears. Same thing everyone said to him at every book signing, whether they’d read his work or not. How were we to prove to Glynn that we were any different? How was he to know?
The barman rammed the shutters down, and Aisling jumped in fright. The strip fluorescent lights shunted on, and she let her black hair fall forward to conceal her face, though we’d already seen the smudged eyeliner, the caked foundation. Difficult to miss it. She applied so much white stuff to her skin that it seemed she was trying to erase herself. She could have been anyone under that mask. We might not have recognised her without it.
I sat back from the table. My elbows were soaked in peaty brown stout. The pub was emptying out. The bar staff instructed us to finish up as they collected the last of the glasses. ‘Alright now folks, make a move there now folks, have youse no homes to go to folks?’ Roaring it over and over until it became unbearable. Where the hell was Glynn? He’d been gone an age. I felt inexplicably aggrieved that he had chosen to confide in Faye about his new novel. Judging by the sullen mood that had descended on our number, we were all mulling this same scrap of information, probing at it with our tongues like a piece of food trapped between our teeth; small, but extremely irritating.
It was me they sent after him to the men’s toilets, joking that I had my uses. No trace of the man. I came back out to find that our booth was also empty. Faye was waiting by the exit in her coat. She thrust my jacket at me before hurrying away, apologising that she had to run for the last bus. The other three had already left. The nation’s finest, it turned out, had wandered off without telling us, as, we were to discover over the coming weeks, was his wont. We hadn’t noticed him slipping away, sort of like the moment of death. The girls had drifted after him one by one. There wasn’t a thing I could have done to stop them. I pulled up my hood and walked home to my hovel, as disgruntled as the worst of Glynn’s narrators, as soured by my own plight.
*
I was barely in the door when a young fella in a silky tracksuit came panting up the steps behind me. He pushed past me into the hall, a pub-sized television set in his arms. I flattened myself against the wall to allow him pass. It was the fucker from the flat downstairs, the one who’d stolen my bike. Giz woz ere. ‘Sorry,’ I said when he stood on my foot.
He cursed, unable to throw a filthy look my way since his cheek was jammed against the milky grey screen. I watched him make his way up the stairs, half-blind and stumbling. What had he painted on his runners to get them so white? Tippex? The same stuff Aisling trowelled on her face? They were incongruously immaculate, considering the state of the rest of him; the stained tracksuit bottoms, the saggy black leather jacket, elasticated at the waist. Funny smell off him too. He drew up on the stairs.
‘Here,’ he said, unable to turn around within the narrow confines of the stairwell, not with that thing in his arms. I glanced over my shoulder. The hall was empty. The front door was shut. I looked back up.
‘You mean me?’
‘Yeah. D’ya wanna buy a telly?’
‘No.’
He continued on his way without further discussion, the flex of the television trailing after him like a tail. Those Tippexed runners. They were familiar. I’d encountered them recently somewhere. I watched them pistoning up the stairs, but it wasn’t until lying in bed later that night that I finally managed to place them. The knackers at the entrance to the park who had lunged at me last week. ‘Little Trinity gee-bag,’ the prick had shouted in my wake, laughing loudly for the benefit of his friends. He’d hurled a beer can in my direction, but it lacked the ballast to reach its target. He may as well have thrown a leaf. ‘Little Trinity gee-bag,’ he’d repeated, then laughed again, louder still, so pleased was he with this description.
12
I’m an ordinary man, nothing special, nothing grand
We greatly enjoyed the succinct biographical notes which accompanied reissues of Glynn’s novels, never mind whether they were true. ‘He lives in Wicklow and Havana.’ ‘He is a leading exponent of the rural postmodern in Anglo Irish Literature.’ ‘He retired from active service in the Irish Free State’s Intelligence Corps when misdiagnosed with a wasting disease.’ These notes, written in the third person by the man himself, were neither outlandish enough nor specific enough to leap out at the casual reader as blatant lies. It was Faye who disabused us of their veracity, showcasing the formidable research skills that would stand to her in her future career. Although he had joined the FCA in his youth, there was no Irish Intelligence Corps as such, and even if there were, the likes of Glynn would hardly have been enlisted, not with his criminal record, minor though it was.
We came to regard his biographical notes as demonstrations in miniature of the power of fiction. No sooner had Glynn published them than they entered the realm of fact. He had altered the world with a pen stroke, the very mark of a god. Lazy journalists rushing to meet deadlines parroted variations on them, covering their tracks as best they could be bothered with thesauruses. Thus ‘Havana’ became ‘the Tropics’, Glynn’s alleged spell in the ‘Intelligence Corps’ became ‘Republican spy’, and his ‘wasting disease’ somehow morphed into ‘rumoured syphilis’. Superb, as Antonia would say, then the horsy laugh.
These concocted fragments evolved into a colourful portrait that offered more of an insight into the man’s playful spirit than a strict adherence to the bare nuts and bolts could have hoped to. For Glynn enjoyed parallel lives in his imagination, and it was his imaginative life above all else that those biographical notes sought to evoke, we co
ncluded. What was a writer but his imaginative existence, after all?
It was true that he had been to Cuba just the once, and only for a week at that, but he never fully left it behind either. The place stole his heart, rendered him perpetually longing to return, escaping there on a regular basis in his daydreams, and so it could be said with some degree of conviction that part of Glynn did live in Havana, an important part, a substantial portion of his envisaging faculty, wandering down the narrow streets during the hot white noon while his earthbound self was tucked up in the leaba. We could all but see him in his crumpled linen, his jaunty fedora, seeking out the shade of the hibiscus or the respite of his favourite bar. Like a shaggy Irish wolfhound he would be, farcically ill adapted to the heat, an object of some curiosity and amusement to the locals, lying around panting in the shadows.
This notion of a doppelgänger, a southern señor Glynn, the Great Irish Writer in Exile, on tour, proved irresistible to us, particularly when it was raining. He understood exactly how to go about constructing his double, knew where best on the soft tissue of the mind to apply the electrodes to make his simulation of a man jolt into life and become one. The wrong imagery, and it mightn’t take. But aside from his biographical notes being a masterclass in creative writing, it was their freedom that most appealed to us, this proffering of alternative versions of the self, just like that, with the insertion of an adjective, the souping up of a noun. For we were not there to continue being the people we had previously been, either. That was not our objective in enrolling on the course.
Glynn, or ‘Professor Patrick Glynn, Writer Fellow’, as the brushed-steel nameplate slotted into the door of his office in the Department of English read, finally appeared in the middle distance of Front Square. It was a cold bright morning in early December.
All Names Have Been Changed Page 8