Giz crossed the room in silhouette and grabbed something from the shelf. It glinted orange in the dying light of the heater. He climbed onto a chair and got to work on the electricity meter, ratcheting away at it as if jacking up a car. The glow from the heating elements was fading rapidly, as was the outline of Giz. He expanded towards me in the darkness, loomed inches from my face.
The lights flickered on again. Giz shrank back to his regular dimensions, angry and compact. He cast the butter knife aside and jumped down from the chair, sighing like a man knocking off the night shift. I began to laugh, with relief I believe. I had seen strange forms in the dark.
The two-bar heater began to hum convivially once more, resuming its interrupted conversation. Giz picked up the ball of chewing gum and put his brain back in. ‘Where was I?’ he asked, standing hands on hips over the conjoined Rizla papers. He sat down and bent to his work again, childlike in his absorption. I watched him at his labours.
Somewhere along the line I stopped fretting about how to get out of there and settled into the couch as the joint passed between us. The buzz and fizzle of the two-bar heater was the very sound of cosiness. I pointed at the section of ceiling that supported my bed. ‘There’s my bed,’ I told him, as if introducing Giz to a member of my family. ‘And that’s my desk.’ I indicated the space by the far window.
Giz screwed his eyes up against the smoke. ‘I know.’ Of course he knew. He’d broken in once. Nothing to steal, but buckled the door, scribbled his name on the wall. ‘Here, d’ya wanna buy a Sony Walkman?’
‘You’re alright, thanks.’
He nodded as if he couldn’t blame me.
‘Tell us,’ he said later, ‘how’s your book?’
He made it rhyme with puke. He’d sunk so deeply into the armchair by then that his knees – cobalt blue and shiny in the silky tracksuit – were higher than his chin. A muscle in the hollow of his jaw flexed.
‘Me buke,’ I repeated, testing the pronunciation, trying it out for myself. When had I told him about me buke? He was holding the flame of a match to the tip of his cigarette but couldn’t get it to ignite.
‘Giz.’
‘Wha?’
‘Wrong end.’
He took the cigarette out of his mouth and saw that he’d been trying to light the filter. He held it up for my inspection. ‘Wrong end,’ he told me, then we laughed for, I don’t know, an hour. His shaved cuttlebone skull. It was a head-butting head.
When the doorbell rang downstairs, an hour or so again after that, Giz went to the window and raised a corner of the blanket to look out. He cursed when he saw who it was and pulled on his leather jacket. ‘I’m expectin a client,’ he told me, and I nodded to indicate that was fine by me and shoved up on the couch. It took a few moments to cop that Giz was throwing me out. ‘Aw, slick,’ I said, like he’d outfoxed me fair and square in some game of wits we’d been playing. I hauled myself to my feet. It was cold out there on the sagging corridor. For some reason, we shook hands before parting.
15
How can I protect you from this crazy world?
A full forty-eight hours elapsed before the north wind finally dropped. The flag mounted over Front Arch collapsed, flayed and crucified upon its pole. The sun shone fiercely throughout the day. I do not remember it faltering for so much as one second. The flash floods had receded, leaving tidemarks of detritus behind. We had gathered upstairs in House Eight in advance of the first workshop of the year.
Something looked different after the storm, we agreed, but not even Faye’s keen eye could identify precisely what. The terrain seemed smoother, the edges had gone off things. ‘That tree is new!’ Aisling exclaimed, pointing to the great oak behind the Campanile. It was like returning to a childhood room after an absence of years and finding it altered in scale, though you know it to be the same. The room hasn’t changed; you have. Our surroundings hadn’t changed; we had. The storm had changed us. We had weathered it together. We had come out the other side.
Glynn, too, we found altered. His funny walk was immediately apparent that first class after Christmas, even from a distance. When I say funny, I mean the opposite of funny. There was nothing remotely funny about it. Faye had been sitting by the radiator under the window when she abruptly stood up and put her hand to her mouth. The novel she had been reading slipped from her lap, landing with a slap on the floor. We crowded at the window to see what had upset her. Faye did not have to tell us. You couldn’t miss him. There he was on the far side of Front Square, reeling in our direction.
Antonia folded her arms after we had watched this spectacle for thirty seconds or so. ‘How long has that been going on?’ she demanded. She sounded cross with Glynn, as if he was deliberately putting it on to annoy her, testing her patience and pushing his luck. The world was one big trial designed to antagonise her. To this end, no stone had been left unturned.
Nobody answered Antonia’s question. Nobody had an answer. It was the first any of us had seen of him that year.
We observed his erratic progress from our bird’s-nest vantage, five wan faces behind a pane of glass, five hearts in five mouths. A sentence had formulated in my mind of its own accord, and, once it lodged there, it would not be dislodged. The phrase wasn’t one I had consciously composed but seemed rather to arise as a natural accompaniment to Glynn’s spasmodic procession, each syllable attuned to the jerky movement which had inspired it: Something is now broken that cannot be fixed, something is now broken that cannot be fixed. Uncanny, how precisely it fitted the rhythm of Glynn’s gait, as if it were the beat he was dancing to.
The storm had washed the cobbles on Front Square as clean as riverbed pebbles. Glynn’s hobble wasn’t regular enough to count as a limp, being instead palsied, random and mortifying. Something had happened to his brain, not his legs. He trundled across the cobbles, perverse as a supermarket trolley, limbs accelerating with no increase in pace. We were used to him drifting along lost in thought, musing in the medium of poetic metaphor. Something is now broken that cannot be fixed, something is now broken that cannot be fixed. His actions were timed so perfectly to those words that it seemed he could hear me, or that I was controlling him, or that we, rather, were controlling him, standing up there, agents of fate, drawing him to us, our puppet. ‘I can’t bear this,’ Guinevere said.
Glynn must have been muttering away to himself, because students were turning around to look back at him in surprise, then smirking to each other. How could we have stopped them, answer me that? How could we have shielded him from their ridicule? Not everyone saw past his faults, as we saw. We saw so far past his faults that we barely saw him at all. We were dying for him up there. That is the only way to describe it. The five of us were dying up there for Glynn, wanting him safe inside with us where he was treasured, no matter what his state. I never loved Glynn more than at that moment, if love is the acute compound of tenderness and anxiety for another that I believe it to be.
Glynn’s short journey went on for an eternity. He didn’t glance up at the window to check for us. He knew we would be watching. We were always watching. Everyone slows down to gape at car crashes. Something is now broken that cannot be fixed. There was no way out of that sentence.
Eventually Glynn entered the shadow of House Eight and cleared our field of vision. It wasn’t until he was out of sight that we started breathing again. ‘We’re all ballsed now,’ said Aisling.
We took our seats at the workshop table and waited for him. Waited and waited and waited. Faye’s head was in her hands throughout this period. What was he doing down there? And so quietly too. After an extended interlude of silence from the stairwell, the girls elected me to go down to investigate. I’m sure they heard him calling me everything under the sun before turning on his heel and storming out. You would think I had mortally insulted him. ‘Professor Glynn,’ is all I had said, but the sound of his own name proved a step too far. He had swiped the air in fury at it, batted it away like a swarm of bees, telling me
that I made him sick, that we all made him sick, that he couldn’t stand the sight of us. The whiskey fumes were enough to fell a pony.
I made my way back upstairs and admitted myself into the workshop as unobtrusively as I was able, shaking my head apologetically as if they were a waiting room of expectant relatives and my role was to break bad news. A flamingo-pink disc of a sun was shining at the tip of the Campanile, tinting the workshop windows rose. The sun couldn’t, of course, have been shining at the tip of Campanile, not at that hour of the afternoon, not at that elevation, but I distinctly remember looking up to see it suspended in the sky, glowing through the soft haze like something from Miami.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told them gravely, ‘I’m afraid he’s gone,’ and then I took Guinevere’s hand in mine without a second’s thought. I led her away from there, as if love was a simple thing and freedom was a possibility and an old man’s troubles weren’t ours. Who did I think I was?
16
Alive alive oh
Glynn spoke at length during the lecture he delivered to – ah, how can I be expected to remember the where and the when of it? All I’m good for is parroting variations on Glynn’s words, in this instance his description of his love not just for the physical world but for the world of physics. I’d nodded my head in fierce agreement before I’d even heard what the man had to say, that is the class of fool I was then. It was no less than tribal. Glynn was a country I’d have borne arms to defend. Show me where the cudgels are kept, and I will take them up for you.
Physics delineated the natural world from a standpoint that was new to him, Glynn told us almost shyly, not being a man of science, here amongst a hall of them – he gestured at the audience at this juncture. Earlsfort Terrace, I have it now. I was halfway through my engineering degree. That’s why the girls weren’t there. Few women, if any, were present that evening, and it sort of took the wind out of Glynn’s sails, sort of knocked out his stuffing.
He’d stepped up to the lectern on the hangman’s platform and cleared his throat more than once before commencing, a man summoned to give an account of himself. I was sitting on my own in the back row of the lecture hall, looking down on him from a steep incline. Long thin planks ran the length of each row by way of a desk, into which various names and dates were inscribed, including my name, including that date: the night I first saw Glynn in the flesh.
The invisible forces acting upon the human psyche was his topic, as seen from the perspective of the creative mind. It was neither the time nor the place. Physics lent him the methodology and terminology to explain those forces which were working upon us when nothing appeared to be happening, Glynn explained. He made reference to that old school textbook staple, the balanced see-saw, for the love of God: not motionless because it was at rest, but because two equal turning forces were acting against one another. He paused and looked around the hall to allow this to sink in. The example might have impressed a class of junior-freshmen English students, but it was never going to constitute the revelation to the School of Engineering that it evidently constituted to Glynn. How thoroughly he had miscalculated the situation; so it seemed at the time. Someone in the audience sighed. Staff members were out in force. What joker had deemed it appropriate to invite a novelist to address an engineering faculty in the first place?
‘This is not wood,’ I remember him proclaiming, rapping the wooden lectern with his knuckle for dramatic effect. ‘This is energy in a static form.’ He had not the slightest clue what he was talking about, it was obvious, but still he made the effort, undeterred, striving to forge a link between his world and ours – the burden the artistic imagination is cursed with.
Load, thrust, potential energy, torque, he continued, throwing about words and ideas he found attractive but didn’t understand. All of them tearing us this way and that, he went on, exerting pressures on the body that were invisible to the naked eye, so that even though he was being hurled around the Earth’s atmosphere by centripetal force, still he was accused of sitting around on his backside all day doing nothing. Glynn all but winked, earning himself a low ripple of laughter for his efforts, a low rumble of gruff amusement. Sitting around on your backside all day doing nothing. I don’t know why he felt obliged to poke fun at the writerly endeavour, his life’s work, on that occasion. There were plenty happy to do it for him, and plenty more happy to listen. Oh Glynn, did you have to make it so easy?
Despite having imposed a liberal interpretation upon forces which did not sustain a liberal interpretation, and despite his flawed grasp of the laws governing the universe, I still kind of knew what Glynn was stabbing away at down there in his oblique, unscientific, analogical way, a diagram of a rotary wing from a previous lecture chalked on the blackboard behind him. Questions were invited from the audience, but none were forthcoming, and the applause that closed the event was by no means ardent.
It is almost certain that I was alone in that lecture hall in experiencing a moment of enlightenment. I wanted to speak up to let Glynn know that at least one of those blank faces lined up before him had grasped something of what he’d been trying to communicate to us that night, but I didn’t budge from my back-row entrenchment, and the department head led him away. Physics, Glynn mistakenly believed, had equipped him with the vocabulary to depict something else entirely, something that wasn’t physical at all, or quantifiable, or even describable, but which he still, despite these multiple impasses, managed to evoke in his novels. Here we run into representational difficulties of our own.
Glynn was onto something ideational, something the audience before him lacked the curiosity to understand, it being a phenomenon of no interest to the practical mind. There are extrasensory faculties at work that cannot be adequately explained. It is not my intention to sound so portentous. Stare at someone hard enough and they will feel your gaze. Keep staring, and they will turn around to identify the source of it. Glynn perceived those forces that whirred about us, and whirred us about, when we appeared to be at rest. He saw those pulsations spooling from our fingertips like dragonflies through the air. It is difficult to explain. I have a memory of a walk I took along a country lane. It was late May, or early June, one of those still, momentous evenings brimming with promise, when life finally seems on the brink of commencing and all is yet to play for. Meadows unrolled on either side as I descended into the valley, the seed heads of the wild grasses tipped gold in the setting sun. I had nowhere to be that night.
The lane below curved around an outcrop of rock and disappeared out of sight behind the grove of flowering whitethorn which had so strongly scented the evening air. I sensed the presence of a small party of people on the other side, making their way up the hill. I had caught a strain of laughter on the air, gaiety, a thrumming. As I rounded the corner into the shadows of the grove, I prepared to encounter faces on the other side. The other side, however, was bare.
I paused in the middle of the lane in confusion. The shafts of sunlight piercing the dun shade quivered like plucked strings. That thrumming was everywhere; the valley, the meadows, the hedgerows, on the breeze. The whitethorns were loud with the drone of bees, but it was more than that. Something had been interrupted.
This wavering, I propose, approximates on some level to the condition of being Glynn – living with that swarm of nascent activity alongside you, that charge of potential energy, that flux. I am applying scientific terms to artistic ends, using the technique propounded by the master. Except that upon rounding the corner, instead of almost encountering them, as I almost encountered them, Glynn saw the faces of the people in his path, their colourful clothes, their longing for each other revealed in their gait, desires divulged by subtle tilts and inclinations. Sometimes they even took him with them, off on their summer adventures. Where did they all disappear to? Into which Kavanagh poem?
The world, when I picked up Guinevere’s hand and led her out of the sun-pink workshop, was not the same place it had been that morning. There was a before and an after. We saw
not just pavement, city and sky, but future tenses swirling around us. The wet surface of Dame Street glinted silver as we emerged from the Arch, blinding Guinevere with the glare. I shielded her eyes with my hand before leaning in to kiss her.
I picked her up outside City Hall and twirled her in the air. Guinevere Wren was no weight at all. She laughed, her coiled hair streaming out behind her, and I realised I could not be happier. It was not possible to be any happier. She was the difference between the sun shining and not. ‘Put me down!’ she shrieked, but I couldn’t bear to. Though I’d walked that street a thousand times without her, our first walk together would eclipse all previous walks. I knew that even as the journey was unfolding. Dame Street would never be detached from my memory of walking it, practically running it, hand in hand with Guinevere. She was taking me to her room.
The sky seemed terribly high up later that day as we lay on our backs looking out at it from her tangled bed. The rush of air had gone to our heads. It was deep blue and dotted about with small white scudding clouds. They were perfect clouds, spot on, I couldn’t have asked for better. Round, plump, flocculent, the kind you’d like to fall asleep on. A tear had formed in the corner of Guinevere’s eye. It was the most beautiful tear I had ever seen, an absolute credit to her. I didn’t know whether to mention it or not. A butterfly had once closed its wings to me, barely a butterfly any more then, really, no better than an old brown leaf. I’d nudged the thing with my foot, expecting it to flutter away and reveal its pretty colours once more, but the tiny scrap clung tightly to the path and my boot destroyed it.
The tear swelled and spilled down Guinevere’s cheek. I turned back to consider the panorama of sky. It took all my restraint not to try to prise her open. I wished I knew more about types of clouds, about the atmospheric conditions necessary to sustain those small white pillowy ones. And I wish I’d known more about the conditions necessary to sustain Guinevere. I never thought to ask.
All Names Have Been Changed Page 11