17
The Book of Evidence
It had started again, as if the coming together of Guinevere and I had tipped a scale, setting some vast rusty mechanism grinding back into motion, unleashing those turning forces Glynn had discoursed upon that evening in Earlsfort Terrace. He was writing once more. A heart that had been still a long time contracted and squeezed out a beat just as we’d given up on it. Glynn was a master of cliffhanger timing.
The discovery was made the following Wednesday. Guinevere had deemed it inappropriate that she and I arrive at the workshop together, so I had been dispatched ahead. We had kissed goodbye on the doorstep of the labourer’s cottage she rented in the Liberties. She shared it with a theology student who was never there but who showed up in the dead of the night to move beer cans around as proof of his existence, in case she stopped believing in him. On the windowsill of the cottage next door was a pot of leggy geraniums, the stalks brown and segmented like earthworms. A child’s small bike had been abandoned two doorsteps up, the back wheel still spinning and the front door ajar, leaking a smell of institutional cooking onto the cul-de-sac, which was called a square though it was no such thing, just two rows of terraced redbrick cottages truncated by a wall. Guinevere and I had spent the week in bed.
Her face had a newly hatched moistness without make-up. She was wearing a powder-blue dressing gown and not much else besides. I could tell, from the way she kept tightening the knot on the belt, glancing up and down the length of the cul-de-sac, that she felt exposed standing out on her own doorstep, an animal that had strayed onto open ground. ‘Cold, isn’t it?’ she asked me.
I did not take the hint. She performed a shiver. Her feet were bare on the stone doorstep. Still I would not let go of her hand, tracing my fingertips across her palm, stooping to kiss the faint blue veins lining the inside of her wrist – anything to detain her. I wanted to watch her get ready for class. That’s what I was angling for. I wanted to witness her moments, all of them. Her showering, her dressing, the pinning up of her hair. Whatever it took her to become the Guinevere she presented to us in class – that would be my subject. Not one drop of her time would be wasted were she to spend it all with me. I tried to explain this exciting new project, but Guinevere just laughed, pulling her hand from mine and retreating into the cottage, protesting that she didn’t want to be late.
*
Aisling was sitting alone at the bottom of the staircase in House Eight, swathed in her widow’s weeds. I clocked her before she clocked me. Sometimes it was hard not to stare at her. Her head hung low between her knees, looking too large, too burdensome, for the pale stem of her neck, which was exposed as if for a beheading. A leather cord was knotted at her nape. Aisling hung weird artefacts around her neck – not the skulls and horns the regular Goths purchased from the wind-racked stalls on O’Connell Bridge but antique medical instruments, phials of dark viscid liquid, little brass dial things saying Yes or No, mummified bits of Christ knows what. Where did she even find them? They were not from this century. It was an eerie world she went home to, that contained such oddities strewn throughout it, and her harvesting them like toadstools in a forest. There seemed no end to her supply of peculiarities. Amulets, I suppose you might call them. The manner with which she constantly toyed with them, turning them over and over in her left hand as if seeking their counsel, her eczematous fingers spinning like the legs of a spider, imbued them with a sentient status.
Her long hair had pooled between her Doc Martened feet on the linoleum floor, so black it looked synthetic. She often presented herself in alarming configurations, her bones a bundle of sticks she’d tossed into the air and allowed to collapse into a pile any which way. This was done unwittingly, as far as I could tell. It was simply her nature, the casual disregard with which she treated herself. She was more careless with her own person than even Glynn.
You would think we’d have acclimatised to her endless rag-doll positions, the broken-winged bird shapes, but, if anything, they grew progressively more upsetting. Normal girls didn’t sit like that, as if a joint were dislocated, a central sinew severed. The aura of calamity surrounding Aisling didn’t drop its guard for a second. I longed to return to my thoughts of Guinevere. They were a warm bed on a cold morning.
Aisling’s head lashed back when I touched the door handle, as if it were no door handle at all but one of her drifting tentacles. I, for my part, recoiled as if stung. The two of us looked at each other in momentary alarm, but she relaxed when she saw it was only me. Who had she been expecting?
She stood up, slinging her canvas army bag over her shoulder, and blocked my entrance. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked when she motioned for me to turn around and go back out. I was forever having to ask them what was happening. They were forever having to interrupt themselves to explain. Aisling narrowed her eyes at the sky, deciphering more there than the weather. I foolishly glanced up too, as if warplanes might crest the horizon.
‘It’s Glynn,’ she said. ‘He’s holed up in his office.’
We set off for the Arts Block, the miniature magnifying glass swinging from her neck warping the matter on the other side, an evil eye. It was a bitterly cold afternoon, even for early February. Frost coated the tracts of cobbles still trapped in the shade. Aisling wasn’t dressed for the cold and was soon hunched up against it like a greyhound, all shivering spine.
She offered me an unfiltered Major, and selected one for herself with a suit-yourself shrug when I declined. I couldn’t bear to watch her inhale those builders’ smokes into her tattered lungs. The orangey-yellow nicotine stains on her fingers were a source of pride to her, for some reason. She had brandished them at us one night in the pub, holding them out to be admired like an engagement ring, as if she couldn’t quite believe her good fortune and wanted to share it with us, though they were the colour of old men’s feet. She gave one of her terrible racking coughs, hoarse as the cry of a hooded crow, and so raw that I felt the pain myself. She pressed her palm against her thorax in an attempt to subdue it. This stratagem didn’t work.
The other three were already waiting when we rounded the corner onto the corridor of the English Department, stationed in manneristic postures of stylised concern, a bible scene. Guinevere had somehow contrived to get there ahead of me. Aisling left my side, and they made way for her. The light flooding through the window behind them picked out the folds of their garments, the contours of their bodies. Had they any conception of how striking they looked when placed together in such a formal arrangement, staggered like peaks in a mountain range? They took my breath away. It was to do with their silence as much as anything else on that occasion.
All that was missing from the composition was the big man himself, towards whom the four women were inclined so that it was all about him, and no one but him, though he was not present. You had to give Glynn his due.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked again, my voice an uproar in the church-quiet corridor. They shushed me by waving their hands and putting fingers to their lips, scared I might disturb Glynn, whatever he was up to. He should’ve been in the workshop with us. They seemed to think he wouldn’t suspect they were there, listening at his door in their default state of rapture, but Glynn always knew where to find his audience.
I hesitated before approaching. There were times, as I went stumbling through their doll’s house, knocking things over in my clumsy wake, smashing their bone china and matchstick furniture, when it seemed I was too big for them. They didn’t know what to do with me. I could read it on their faces, particularly Faye’s, who was smiling that tolerant, sympathetic smile of hers that I had no liking for when it was directed at me. She could take her benevolence elsewhere. Guinevere was strange and separate once more. I knew that if I took her hand and tried to lead her away from the pack, it would not work this time.
Faye beckoned me over to listen at Glynn’s door. I pressed my ear against it. He could be heard muttering away to himself inside, low-level malcontent gr
umblings. ‘It’s been going on for hours,’ Faye whispered. She had been about to knock on his door that morning when she’d overheard him. ‘When I eventually did knock, he roared at me. “Feck off, I’m working,” he shouted. We think he’s finally writing the new novel.’ Now that the long evenings are upon me once again,
‘Jesus,’ I said, and the four of them nodded. The last we’d seen of Glynn, he could barely walk. Now this.
‘Blake!’ he suddenly exclaimed. We looked at each other in delight, as if a baby in the womb had just kicked. Even Antonia looked intrigued.
It had long been Glynn’s habit to talk to himself. That was nothing new. He told a reporter once that he was indeed aware of it but made not the slightest effort to censor himself, since he regarded it as a component of the writing process externalised. Glynn was full of fighting talk in interview situations, tending to interpret questions about the creative act as attacks upon it. Sometimes he was right. These occasional unintentional articulations on his part, he informed the journalist, were not the first sign of madness, but rather evidence of what he called his ‘imaginative fertility’, but which another well-known Irish author of similar vintage rechristened his ‘imaginary fertility’. In fairness, he’d been asking for that one.
Fragments of Glynn’s internal monologue regularly escaped his lips when he thought himself alone, or had forgotten we were still there, or knew we were still there but didn’t care, or was trying to impress us with his scope of reference – by us, I mean the girls. So many ideas clamoured for attention in his brain that he can be forgiven if the excess spurted out, like lava. This, however, wasn’t thinking aloud so much as arguing. ‘Blake!’ he insisted once more, in a tone of high exasperation, as if his own company were being wilfully obstinate, which it probably was. We could just see him behind that door, amongst his books and accolades, pacing the length of the room which could never contain him, gesticulating impatiently at imagined opponents. Something was heard to fall over.
The Blake invocation was of central significance. That Glynn based his sixth novel, The Devil’s Party, loosely around the life of William Blake has already been mentioned. Despite its eighteenth-century setting, Glynn acknowledged in a radio interview that The Devil’s Party was his most autobiographical work. ‘To date,’ he added tantalisingly.
The radio signal did not broadcast the wink we agreed he almost certainly appended. A great man for the winks, no more than his protagonists, leaving you neither here nor there. Was it all a big joke, or what? Is that what he was trying to tell us? He enjoyed toying with people, pulling their legs, seeing how far he could push them. You could practically hear him gearing up sometimes, cracking his knuckles, flexing his digits, rolling up his sleeves. I do not wish to reduce him to a series of ludicrous traits, merely acknowledge that he had more than a few. Which of us is without flaws? Vanity was Glynn’s great weakness. No portrait of the man would be complete without a reference to his ego, which he dragged around like a ball and chain. It stunted his progress, begat the funny walk. That’s why he got on so famously with us: we worshipped him, plain and simple.
Of his eight novels, The Devil’s Party was our favourite, and not just because the main character was a writer. Antonia cited an early minor work, Gorsefire, as her favourite, just to be obtuse, but The Devil’s Party was the one she could quote at length, as I lost no time in reminding her. On the inscription page was an extract from Blake’s great prose work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’
A key element of the Glynnian endeavour fell into place while I was sitting out there on the corridor, concerning the iconography of evil. Glynn did not publicly admire Blake because it was safe to – Blake was well dead and therefore no longer posed a threat to his ball-and-chain ego, which, though cast in heavy metal, was as fragile as glass. It is a sorry indictment, Antonia had more than once pointed out to us, that most male writers would rather choke than praise the competition. No, Glynn admired the poetics of Blake for the same reason that Blake admired the poetics of Milton, namely, for its depiction of badness. Milton infamously evoked evil not as a deviation, but as human. The mind of Lucifer was more accessible than the mind of God. It was divinity he found remote.
A distinctive characteristic of Glynn’s work was his use and reuse of the same four rogues throughout the eight novels. Not half enough has been made of this in the academic domain. Glynn’s protagonists encounter the same villains over and over, from novel to novel, as if trapped on the same carousel. There was Malachy, P.J., the Dogman, Flood. All four featured in The Devil’s Party, lifted from fifties parish-pump-politics Ireland and transplanted wholesale to Georgian England, unchanged but for their outlandish and anachronistic period costumes with which Glynn clearly amused himself (cod pieces, skullcaps, cuckolds’ horns). They played marginal, inessential roles, neither advancing the plot nor developing the characterisation, hardly needing to be there at all, really, from a technical point of view. The Dogman was merely sketched into a crowd scene, little more than a leering flash of teeth, yet distinct as a painter’s signature.
Seen from this perspective, Glynn’s approach is comparable in its symbolisation of evil to that of the British medieval mystery plays. Belsabub, Sattan. Bonus Angelus et Malus Angelus. Diabolus I and II. Stock characters, waiting in the wings to posture and speak their lines with an ironical sneer before retiring to loiter backstage until the next novel gets underway. Not that this was a simplistic vision, far from it. It was rather an insight into the absolute intimacy Glynn felt with evil. He knew his demons on a first-name basis. Their commerce was almost neighbourly.
Evil was a local occurrence. It ran into you in the bookies, shot past you in the backseats of taxis. In Farm Animals, the narrator, O’Dea, reads about the Dogman in the court pages of a regional newspaper whilst sitting in the waiting room of a dental surgery in Gorey, queuing to get a rotten molar extracted. Entirely coincidental, spotting the Dogman’s mugshot like that – O’Dea would have preferred to scan the GAA fixtures, but the scrofulous young fella with the scabby kneecaps had appropriated the sports section.
That Glynn referred to his villains as he might the weather – that is, in passing – leads the perceptive reader to draw the conclusion that Glynn had drawn the conclusion that one can never escape one’s demons but must instead learn to live with them. So he turned them into background figures: Malachy, the Dogman – Diabolus I and II, thus rounding off his moral universe, the depth and complexity of which was renowned. Personify the bastards: oldest trick in the book. Finally, I’d spotted one of his invisible wires.
‘Would you fucking keep it down?’ Antonia snapped at me.
I wasn’t aware that I’d opened my mouth. ‘Sorry,’ I said sarcastically. Inside Glynn’s room, something hit the wall and shattered. Glass. Aisling had been jabbing at a carpet tile with the tip of her biro, trying to slay it, but she looked up at the sound of this crash.
‘You’ve interrupted him,’ she said darkly.
The lock on Glynn’s door disengaged, and he pulled it open to find the five of us sitting on the corridor floor. He glared down at us, frog-faced, dog-jowled, then stepped over our limbs without comment, none too steady on his feet. From that low angle, the distension of his gut was hard to miss. His trousers were buttoned tightly under it, the straining waistband pushed down around the groin where his girth was narrowest.
Aisling jammed her foot in the door just before it clicked shut. The others didn’t notice. They had climbed to their feet to traipse after Glynn, stiff as passengers disembarking from a long-haul flight. Aisling looked at me, wordlessly rotating the magnifying glass suspended from her neck. The second the others rounded the corner out of sight, we slipped inside. It was almost dark by then.
Glynn’s office had the stifling pall of a sickroom. He’d been holed up
in there for some time, possibly overnight. The most extraordinary booze-fumes polluted the air, and a cigarette smouldered in the overflowing ashtray. Aisling dived on something.
‘It’s here,’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ!’
‘What?’
‘His red notebook.’ I must have frowned my ignorance. ‘The red notebook,’ she clarified. I still didn’t know what she was talking about.
She held it up briefly before placing it on his desk to rifle through the pages. I got to work on the contents of the wastepaper basket. We worked quickly in the gloom, unable to turn on the lights as the staff in the offices opposite would see what we were up to. Shards of glass crunched underfoot – the remnants of a whiskey bottle, judging by the gold foil collar, and not one of Glynn’s crystal trophies, as we’d feared. Another whiskey bottle was stashed in the wastepaper basket, buried beneath a snowdrift of crumpled paper balls. The bottle was drained. I smoothed the paper balls out one by one on the floor. On the top of each page was scrawled a single scored-out word. Storm, fire, funeral; that sort of thing. I can’t remember the others. They added up to nothing. Anyone could have written them. I crumpled the pages up again and tossed them back in the bin.
I took down his Collected Works of Blake to find a bottle of Baby Power’s pressed hard against the back of the bookcase, its hands raised in surrender, caught in the act. This bottle too was empty. I removed Paradise Lost. Getting harder to read the titles in the dusk. A naggin of Bushmills, not a drop in it. I started unshelving volumes at random. Whiskey bottles riddled Glynn’s bookcase like dental cavities, like shadows on his lungs.
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