All Names Have Been Changed

by Claire Kilroy

  My shoes squelched as I climbed to the top deck. The rain was drumming hard on the roof. The bus braked, and I went stumbling forwards. There was an empty seat up near the front. I slotted myself in beside a man reading the Star. The windows had steamed up with condensation. The outside world was a mess of headlamps and tail lights looming through the dribbling greyness. ‘Thin Lizzy’ was scratched into the seat in front of me. ‘Philo RIP.’ The conductor came up and collected my fare. No one got on or off. We trooped along in a convoy of traffic as if we had all day.

  I kept my eyes on the ‘RIP’, listening to the tinny dumb dumb dumb of someone else’s headphones. Water rolled up and down the aisle of the bus, which surged forward and drew back again like an uncertain child. The idling engine hit a frequency that caused the windows to vibrate.

  The bus performed a sharp swerve. We had turned away from town. I hadn’t checked the destination before boarding. I sensed that we were passing a church – the pale grey mass filling the fogged-up window on the left formed, in my peripheral vision, a church. The intuition quickly developed into a conviction. A church, definitely, no doubt about it. I kept my head down so as not to invite further disorientation. If it were, say, a school, for instance, and not a church – I wasn’t sure how I’d respond to that. Things were tentative that morning.

  The woman in the front seat blessed herself. It was a church. The water in my shoes had warmed up. These are the things I noticed. My teeth felt sharp in my mouth. I had never been so acutely aware of them before. Had never been aware of them at all, really, but suddenly it seemed all wrong, this army of sharp objects regimented across my soft pink gums. Tail lights the size of cartwheels flared in the front window as the lorry ahead applied the brakes. The bus pulled in to allow a squad car to speed past, followed by an ambulance. Passengers craned their necks to get a look at the blur of flashing blue lights. Murmurs rippled through the top deck. We were no better than worried cattle.

  The flashing blue lights disappeared when we took another corner. The chain of approaching headlamps on the far side of the street was replaced by a low lichen-green expanse. I stared at it for some time, trying to make it out, before realising that it was the Liffey. We were travelling along the quays. I jumped off at the next stop. The water in my shoes became cold again.

  I stumbled up Westmoreland Street against the driving rain, colliding with pedestrians, apologising without looking up from my feet. I was almost hit by a car while crossing Fleet Street – I’d run straight into its path. Sorry, I mouthed at the driver, bloated and deformed behind whirring windscreen wiper blades. If I could just make it to Front Arch and get out of the thunderstorm. That’s what I kept telling myself as I blundered along. If I can just get under the Arch and take shelter for a while. The weather will be more clement on the other side.

  It was no such thing.

  The lights in House Eight were out, but the door was unlocked. Up the wooden stairs I ran and threw open the door to the workshop. It hadn’t been disturbed over Christmas. The murky shadows of raindrops trickled down the white walls like – I don’t know. Like something inimical. The creative imagination failed me that day. I couldn’t come up with a single simile to elevate those oozing shadows. They were nothing better than their grimy selves.

  Glynn would not have fallen at that hurdle. He wrote about Irish rain as if no other rain in the world was quite like it, quite as desolate, quite as disabling. How bleak that room was without him, and without the group. I touched a radiator. It was cold. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ I whispered – the touch of cold metal was the final straw. I stood there shivering and dripping, not knowing where to turn, a man who had reached the dock only to find that his ship had already set sail, after the great struggle to get there, the blind rush across the city.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  The voice, a woman’s, had come from downstairs. I went out to the landing and leaned over the banister. Faye was standing at the foot of the stairs. She put her hand on her heart when she saw me.

  ‘Declan! Oh, thank God, you scared us. Come down – we’re all in the kitchen.’

  The kitchen? There was a kitchen? I joined Faye at ground level and followed her around a corner, down another flight of stairs into the basement, whereupon she opened a door into a gaslight yellow room. And there they were, the girls the girls the girls, sitting around a table drinking tea. How did they know to be there? They just knew. They sensed the state of emergency too. We weren’t due in until Wednesday.

  We sat around the kitchen table clutching mugs as intently as hands at a séance. I placed my copy of The Watchtower in the centre. There was one small window in the room, sealed shut with layers of old gloss paint. It faced onto the twelve-foot wall that separated Trinity from Pearse Street and was level with the cobbles outside. We looked out through weeds and security bars. A Superser heater wheezed away in the corner like a dozing grandparent. It was as if we’d always been there.

  Guinevere was relating how she’d woken up that morning weeping for no good reason. Uncontrollably, she added. Difficulty breathing. Funny, how the mention of suffocation brings out the symptoms in the listener. We took deep breaths and nodded in sympathy. It was stuffier than the bus in that basement. Aisling’s chain-smoking didn’t help.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m so upset,’ Guinevere shrugged. She attempted a smile, but it didn’t take, which only made things worse. We were in the same seating arrangement as for the workshops, I noticed. It was no time for banal observations.

  ‘Poor pet,’ Faye murmured, in that calm, sympathetic way of hers which was soothing to us all. I wanted her to say it again. Guinevere was paler than usual that day. As white as a page, I remember thinking. But not as white as Aisling.

  And then, when Guinevere finally got herself up and out of the house, a jumbo jet had flown overhead at too low an altitude, while a motorbike simultaneously accelerated past without a muffler, making that awful sound – ‘You know the one like a lion’s roar?’ We nodded. ‘Except it seemed that the roar had come from within the biker’s helmet, as if some mythical half-man, half-beast was inside.’

  ‘Oh fuck,’ said Aisling. ‘Chimera.’

  ‘I know it sounds stupid,’ Guinevere continued, ‘but what with the jet engine reverberating in the sky, and that violent roar warping the street, I suddenly found I couldn’t take another step, so I pretended to root around in my bag in search of something, when, in reality, I was crouching against the wall.’

  ‘Crouching against the wall!’ she repeated incredulously, and had a go at a laugh, her voice pitching upward.

  ‘Poor pet,’ Faye repeated.

  Aisling was peeling strands of her hair in two. ‘Do you think the rain’s going to stop?’

  Faye squinted out the little window. ‘Not for a while yet.’

  ‘Anyone catch a forecast?’ These were my first words to the group that year. Hadn’t even said hello.

  No one had caught a forecast.

  Faye asked for one of Aisling’s cigarettes. I didn’t know she smoked. ‘Something weird happened to me too this morning,’ she said quietly. Faye wasn’t one for talking about herself. She was more what you’d call a listener.

  ‘It’s no big deal, just, my doorbell rang, but when I opened the door, not a sinner was there. The garden was empty, and the latch on the gate was in place. No one could ring the doorbell, then run away and latch that gate in the time it took for me to answer. It’s a fecky little device, the latch. You see, you have to–’ Faye demonstrated with her fingers how to get the latch in place. These mid-air gestures made no sense without the context of the latch itself. She may as well have been playing a zither. ‘Anyway,’ she concluded, seeing the futility of her explanation, ‘it can’t be done that quickly. And the garden walls are too high to jump. I can’t explain how it happened, but when I closed the door, I sensed a presence in the hall with me.’

  ‘Is it here now?’ Aisling asked.

  Faye rotated the
ashtray, first clockwise, then anti-clockwise, her head tilted in concentration as if it were the combination wheel to a safe, Pandora’s Box. ‘She,’ Faye softly corrected Aisling. ‘She’s a she, this presence, not an it.’ Aisling shuddered extravagantly.

  ‘I do not believe in ghosts,’ Glynn had written in Hibernia, ‘but I can see how the misunderstanding arose. A longing so fierce as to be almost corporeal, an inability to come to terms with loss.’

  Antonia, who had remained withdrawn throughout, abruptly got to her feet. ‘Why is everybody whispering all of a sudden?’

  We didn’t register how low the volume in the kitchen had fallen until Antonia reprimanded us. The impact was the same as switching on the lights in the middle of the night. We winced at her and blinked.

  She pulled on her coat and picked up her handbag, muttering that she needed some fresh bloody air. You would think we’d been intentionally depriving her. We listened to her trip-trapping above our heads, huddled in our bunker watching the ceiling, on the other side of which a phantom Antonia paced, one who deviated qualitatively in nature from the woman who had just stormed out. A crack in the plaster splintered across the ceiling, dramatic as a shooting star. What a day we were having.

  ‘Are we hiding?’ Aisling asked. Same thought on my mind too. I was beginning to think like them.

  The front door to House Eight slammed so hard that the four of us recoiled. Aisling spilled her tea. There was nothing to mop it up with. ‘I suppose we had better go after her,’ Faye sighed, getting to her feet, and Aisling joined her, pocketing her cigarettes in case the situation called for them. Guinevere didn’t move.

  Those wide grey eyes stared at me like a wild animal when the others were gone. That is what she reminded me of at that moment: a pair of eyes I had once caught sight of, looking out from the cover of ferns. I had stopped in my tracks. The eyes had locked with mine for a beat, long enough for it to strike me that we were essentially the same. The same, when it came down to it, but in a different vessel, I told myself – or not quite told myself – it was not as direct as all that. Just a piece of stupid nonsense that entered my head. Why this compulsion to forge a connection with something that wants nothing to do with you? The thing had turned and fled, after all. ‘I don’t like it down here,’ Guinevere confessed. Tears started streaming down her face.

  ‘Hey, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She shook her head. ‘Just … nothing.’

  I stood up and clasped her shoulders. The force of her emotions. A shaft shot out of her into the heavens, another down to the molten core of the Earth. I felt the true magnitude of her, caught a glimpse of her dimensions. All I can compare it to is how certain places, certain historical sites, connect you to the events that unfolded there centuries earlier. It is a poor comparison, but it is all I can offer. It is the closest I can get. She raised her face. I placed my lips on her tear-stained cheek, and then I kissed her mouth.

  Footfall on the stairs – we pulled apart. They were coming to take her back. Guinevere wiped away her tears, and I returned to my seat. We turned our expectant faces to the door. It was Aisling who burst in, noticing nothing. ‘It’s finally stopped raining,’ she announced.

  14

  The Butchered Boy

  The rain had stopped alright, but the north wind had picked up, and it cut right through to the bone. I stood around Mountjoy Square for the guts of two hours, waiting for someone to come home and let me in. My keys were in the ashtray on my desk, my jacket slung over the back of the chair. I shouted through the letterbox and pumped the doorbell like a Morse code button, but the building didn’t rouse from its darkness.

  I took another turn around the park to keep warm. The wind roared overhead in the crowns of the trees like an ocean liner powering towards me. On the far side of the square I was grabbed from behind and shoved into the railings and wet shrubbery. A flash of metal as something sharp was thrust into my face. I blinked to get it into focus. A blade? No. It was a hypodermic needle.

  ‘Give us yer fucken wallet,’ I was instructed in a flat Dublin accent. The man held me up by the scruff, as if impaled on a pitchfork. He banged me against the railings. ‘Now!’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ I said, reaching into my back pocket. I held up my wallet. ‘Here.’ The needle was withdrawn and my collar released. Laughter. I turned around. It was the knacker from the flat downstairs. I recognised his white runners.

  ‘Classic,’ he said, slotting the needle like a pen into the breast pocket of his leather jacket. ‘Ya shudda seen yer face.’ He nodded at my wallet. I was still holding it up. ‘Put yer money away,’ he told me grandly, as if I’d been insisting on buying him a drink and he wouldn’t hear of it. He rubbed his palms together. ‘Aw, I was crackin me hole.’

  I didn’t respond. Couldn’t. The world had stopped at the sight of that flash of metal, and it hadn’t fully started up again.

  ‘Wha?’ he demanded, interpreting my silence as criticism. ‘Fuck’s sake, relax, it was a joke.’

  ‘A joke,’ was all I said, and gently enough at that, simply repeating the word, explaining to myself that I was no longer in danger – that all it had been was a joke! – but he marched right up and bared his teeth in my face as if I’d insulted his mother.

  ‘Joke!’ he shouted in rage, jaw clenched, tendons pulsing. His body, I knew without laying a finger on it, would be as hard as nails under that tracksuit, and not because he was strong but because he was pinched, sucked protectively around the pit of his stomach to the point of concavity. Joke was an instruction, not an observation, meaning, in effect, laugh. Laugh, he was shouting into my face, laugh you prick, or else.

  I laughed. He joined in as if I’d cracked the joke and it was a job well done. ‘Giz,’ he said, extending his hand, and then proceeded to walk me home in high good humour, as if the pair of us had been out on the lash. ‘Ya shudda seen yer face,’ he kept saying all the way around the square, shaking his head in amused recollection, though Giz patently hadn’t seen my face, on account of it being shoved in a bush.

  His head swivelled from side to side when he walked, as if crossing a busy street. It seemed part of his gait. It made no difference where he was, indoors or out. He did it while climbing the stairs to his flat, checking left, then right, left, then right, perpetually on the lookout. The condition was chronic, and contagious. Soon I was checking my back too.

  He unlocked his door and switched on the lights. ‘Go on ahead,’ he instructed me. ‘Be witcha in a minute.’ I couldn’t find the right words to decline and stepped inside. He shut the door behind me.

  There were no books on his bookshelf. I ran a finger along the spines of his collection of video nasties, which was extensive. He was urinating noisily down the corridor. There didn’t appear to be a bed in the room. Looked like he slept on the couch. No sign of my bike, either, that I could see. My hair was still wet from the shrubbery. I found a leaf snagged in it, which I tucked into my pocket, I don’t know why. Scared of offending him, I suppose; scared he’d decree the leaf accusatory on some level, a reproof for what he’d done earlier. Hard to tell what would set him off.

  I raised a corner of the grey wool blanket which was nailed over the sash window. Giz had a fine view of the square, for all the good it did him. His communion photograph was displayed on top of three television sets, stacked high in the alcove like a totem pole. I took the picture down to examine it. The standard-issue cloudy-sky backdrop, brown and gold cardboard frame – there was an identical one of me at home on the mother’s sideboard. The seven-year-old Giz was dressed as a miniature man in a three-piece off-white suit. Black shirt, white tie, red rosette, hands pressed together in simulation of prayer, a rash of blotchy freckles across his nose. The camera had caught him with his eyes squeezed shut. A new set was drawn on his eyelids in red marker, crooked like a Picasso. The toilet on the landing flushed. Giz entered the flat and plugged in the two-bar heater.

  ‘That’s funny,’ I said to him, ‘my
eyes were shut in my communion photo too.’ I don’t know why I said this. It wasn’t true.

  ‘I made a hundred and eighty quid that day,’ he said. ‘How’d ya get on yerself?’

  ‘I don’t know. Twenty, I think.’ More like half.

  This pleased him. ‘Retard.’

  A plastic bottle in the shape of the Blessed Virgin stood on the windowsill. Her crown screwed off like a toothpaste cap. She was half full of holy water that had gone fibrous with age. On the floor was a tin of beans, one of sweet corn, and a box of Coco Pops – food that came in pellets and didn’t need to be cooked – all lying empty on their sides. Under the table was a Scalextric set. One link missing.

  Giz swiped a section of the sofa clear of crisp packets and bedclothes and indicated that I should sit. I didn’t disobey. He pulled up an armchair and set about rolling a joint. This procedure demanded his full concentration and most of mine. We did not speak for the duration. A religious ritual might have been under way. His nails were bitten so close to the quick that his fingertips ballooned over them, tiny bald scalps. Homemade black dots tattooed his knuckles, the workmanship poor. He took a lump of gum out of his mouth and placed it on the table where it sat like his brain; small, grey and chewed.

  There was a whirring sound in the corner followed by a mechanical clunk. We were plunged into darkness. The electricity meter had run out. ‘Fuck!’ Giz shouted, ‘fuck!’ He kicked the coffee table and something hit the floor. The bars of the plug-in heater glowed like a Sacred Heart. I scooped a palmful of coins out of my pocket and picked out the five-pence pieces as best I could see them in the residual light.

  ‘Here,’ I said, holding them up, stacked like gambling chips, but he was already out of the armchair, knocking things over in his wake. ‘I’ve more upstairs,’ I added for no good reason. There was no disguising the fear in my voice.