All Names Have Been Changed

by Claire Kilroy

  ‘Well so,’ he said, sitting back in his chair to indicate that the discussion was now open to the table. He waited for our reaction. So did Aisling. But what could we say? A meteor had crashed through the ceiling, and we stared at it smouldering away on the desk, wondering where the fuck it had come from. And what the fuck it was. This was not matter as it existed on Earth. There we were, the rest of us, plodding around trying to hone our similes, conjugate our adverbs, and Aisling had just invented – well, what? What had Aisling just invented? My biro rolled across the desk and fell through the gap that had appeared between our tables. I made no attempt to retrieve it.

  ‘Page ninety-six,’ Antonia eventually said, seeing as no one else was prepared to get the ball rolling. ‘I have a problem with your use of meta-. You’ve used it as a prefix. Meta- is not a prefix. It’s a combining form. A combining form is a linguistic element used in combination with another element to form a word, e.g., bio- equals life, -graphy equals writing, hence “biography”. Neither element is a complete word in itself.’ As openers went, even I could have done better.

  ‘Okay,’ said Aisling. She didn’t know what point was being made either, still less care. Antonia waited for her to pencil her comment into the margin, but Aisling didn’t seem to grasp what was required of her and looked about the table benignly, as though our faces constituted pleasant if unremarkable scenery. She may as well have been drifting down a river in a punt. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep.

  ‘You should have used para-,’ Antonia said. ‘Para- is a prefix, so you can append it to a complete word. Hence, in this case, it would be “paranotional”. Which isn’t a word either, obviously, but it’s grammatically more accurate than “metanotional”, as you’ve used.’ Antonia had been drinking so much black coffee lately that her teeth were marled brown.

  ‘Thank you, Antonia,’ Aisling said but still didn’t reach for the pencil. We stared at it, lying there like a loaded pistol, willing Aisling to pick it up and put us out of our misery.

  Faye swallowed tensely, the room so quiet we heard her ligaments wrench. My eyes made the sound of the drip of a tap every time I blinked. I tried to stop blinking. No good. Guinevere kept her head down, and Glynn, his mouth shut. It was entirely his fault, whether he admitted it or not. He had single-handedly engineered this crisis. You stupid bitch, he had spat at Antonia, introducing a different element, bursting open the cabin door, then storming off and leaving her to brazen it out on her own, humiliated in front of all of us.

  Though it was possible he no longer recalled the incident, Antonia would never forget it. There had been something of the jack-in-the-box about her ever since. Our every word was construed as potentially antagonistic, an insinuation of her damaged status, another twist of the handle. Did you shag Professor Glynn? Wallop. Fuckhead, she had called me. The spring-loaded mechanism was getting tauter by the second. The leering head would explode across the table. It was only a question of time.

  ‘Did you listen to a word I said?’ Antonia demanded.

  Aisling scratched at the powdery eczema coating the back of her hands. Her knuckles were bleeding, the blood pink and watery. Words tumbled into her as into a black hole when she was in that frame of mind. They met with no resistance, just kept falling, never to connect with their target. There was no point in even saying them. I don’t know why Antonia couldn’t see that. The two of them were caught in some sort of inversely proportionate closed energy system. The tenser Antonia got, the more languid Aisling became. She was sinking into her chair, melting into a pool of faded black fabric. Antonia shook her head. ‘There’s a name for people like you, Aisling,’ she said carefully. She indicated the manuscript. ‘People who write this sort of thing, dismissing the rules, abandoning the signposts.’

  ‘And what might that be?’ Aisling asked. ‘What’s the name for people like me?’ So she had been listening all along.

  Antonia flicked her blonde hair. ‘Icarus,’ she said. ‘You’re sailing too close to the sun. You are going to crash and burn like Icarus.’

  Nothing. No reaction at all, not a flicker. The black hole had been reinstated. Antonia sat there looking at Aisling. Aisling sat there looking back. The rest of us held our breath and waited. Something bad was about to happen, as Faye would say, or Aisling, or Guinevere, or even myself. We were all primed for catastrophe by then. We could all see it coming. By leaving Antonia wounded, by cornering her, Glynn had forced her to this, to attack Aisling, who could least sustain it, who was sailing too close to the sun. What was it those poison-pen letters had warned him? There is always a price. But when had Glynn ever listened?

  ‘Where were we?’ he asked, but nobody answered him. Nobody said a word.

  22

  This boy is cracking up, this boy has broke down

  ‘So what’s going on?’ I said to Guinevere after the workshop. It was with some difficulty that I had managed to separate her from the pack. They reluctantly agreed to go on ahead without her after she’d promised she’d be along soon. The second they rounded the corner out of sight, I steered her down the damp lane running alongside Bartley’s. She had her back against the wall. ‘What was all that about earlier?’ I demanded. ‘In the women’s toilet?’ She didn’t like my tone.

  ‘Nothing, Declan.’ She looked down at her arm. I saw that I was still holding it, and let go. She massaged it as if I’d hurt her. It was a quarter to five. The setting sun was shining thinly upon the tips of things, picking out the sharp edges which had sprung up around us. There was no guarantee that the fine spell would hold.

  ‘Why didn’t you answer me when I asked you before the workshop what was wrong?’

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘you make it sound like I felt sick on purpose.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Okay, fine. Just, you made me look like a complete dick in front of the others, that’s all.’ Fuckhead, Antonia had called me.

  She blinked. ‘Why are you being so obnoxious?’

  I looked up at the sky, what was visible of it from the narrow lane, and laughed in disbelief. ‘Why am I being so obnoxious?’

  She sighed as if I was wearing her out. ‘Don’t do this,’ she said quietly. She was still massaging her arm.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘No, I don’t know. Tell me. Oh wait: you never tell me anything. Sorry, I forgot.’ An oniony smell of sweat hovered on the air. I realised with a surprise that it was me.

  The lane was littered with weeds and broken glass. Guinevere looked up and down the length of it in desperation, but there was nowhere for her to run, no one to appeal to for help. ‘Why are you trying to upset me?’

  ‘Why am I trying to upset you?’

  ‘Yes, why are you being like this?’

  ‘Why am I being like this?’ It was like some sort of foreign-language exercise in pronouns.

  ‘Stop it!’ She had never raised her voice to me before.

  No, something inside me said, no, I will not stop. ‘Stop what?’ I asked flatly, warming to my subject. A twisted life form had pierced the forest floor, a coiled stump of fern – primitive, flowerless, beckoning. My black thoughts extended their fronds around Guinevere. Spores hung all about us on the air.

  ‘Listen to yourself, Declan,’ she said in wonderment, her head tilted to one side as if she were reasoning with a rational human being, one possessed of empathy and kindness.

  ‘No, you listen to yourself.’ An unspeakable resentfulness had overtaken me. I had never known its like.

  Guinevere couldn’t seem to register what she was dealing with and persisted in treating me like a grown-up. ‘I think you should apologise to Antonia,’ she advised me.

  ‘I should apologise?’ This, I could hardly credit.

  ‘You’re the one who suggested she’d shagged Professor Glynn.’

  ‘So everything’s my fault now?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying. Antonia is very upset about the whole thing, and I think you should have a
quiet word with her. Sort things out before the situation escalates.’

  I threw back my head and laughed again. ‘Here we go.’

  ‘I’m glad you find this so amusing.’

  ‘Yeah, so am I.’

  ‘There’s no point in even talking to you.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘You’re doing it on purpose.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ she cried in frustration. She said, I said, she said, I said. It went on for ever. It was dark before we knew it. People were going about their business on the street beyond. You would think it was a normal evening like any other. Guinevere bit her bottom lip. My answers were just inversions of her questions, she complained, wiping away the first of the tears. I observed her as if she were trapped in a vacuum: mouth moving, no sound, a specimen in a jar.

  ‘You seem to be enjoying this,’ she noted.

  ‘Dunno, am I?’

  I was as good as lying at the bottom of a well by then, listening to the distant sounds of life going on above me. I had become a small man trapped inside a large man’s suit of armour, too short to see out the eye slits. It is difficult to explain. Yes, extremely difficult to explain. Even looking back on it, it seems terribly remote, hardly me at all in fact, as if, no more than Aisling, I had temporarily drifted away from myself, leaving the whole show behind.

  ‘What’s wrong, Declan?’ Guinevere implored me. ‘Has something happened? You can tell me.’

  ‘Dunno,’ I mumbled again.

  This was less than the truth. I was not good enough for Guinevere, and she, with her remarkable powers of perception, would see through me sooner or later. From the way she was now studying me, it was evident that this process had already begun. I had never attained my heart’s desire before and had revealed myself, in the having of it, to be unworthy of it, undeserving. I had exposed myself as an essentially unsympathetic character. Cardinal sin in a novel, they tell me.

  Guinevere’s protestations continued undiminished, and unheeded. At one point she pummelled my chest to get my attention, and I wondered, in my abstract, sullen way, whether it was warped of me to find those punches arousing. Didn’t matter any more, one way or the other. Talk to me, she kept insisting, as if such a thing were still possible. We had gone beyond all that. She said that I was being selfish, that I was being a selfish bastard. Who was I to disagree? The girl was shivering from head to foot. We had been standing in that dank lane for hours.

  ‘So that’s it then?’ she finally asked after an extended period of silence had elapsed. Though she had phrased it as a question, I deliberately interpreted it as a statement.

  ‘Okay,’ I shrugged, like it was fine by me. ‘If you’re sure that’s what you want.’

  She sharply averted her face as if my breath reeked, which it probably did. Then she started to cry again. I kept my hands in my pockets. Her tears were not the usual picturesque variety, I noted sourly. A blast of sea smell hit my nostrils, as pungent, as evocative, as childhood. I looked about for the source but could not identify it. Where was all this fatalism coming from? We were in Glynn terrain now.

  ‘So here we are,’ I said, and felt for one exhilarating moment that I was over her and that there would be another Guinevere. That she was one in a sequence of extraordinary women I would love, and who would love me. I must have been in shock. I was young then and had no comprehension of the significance of proceedings, no grasp yet that such encounters were unique and unrepeatable, instead regarding all that occurred as preludes to the main event. Life was an entity due to commence at some point in the future. That’s what I used to think.

  ‘Here we are,’ I said again and felt that surge of liberty again. Fainter this time, I couldn’t help noticing. It was a satisfying enough moment all the same. I wasn’t confined to the muted surroundings of my own head, for once. I was living at last, sort of. Here we are, still standing, having come out the other side. I shouldn’t say we. I was speaking for myself. Didn’t ask Guinevere what was running through her mind at that juncture. Nothing good, by the looks of it.

  She dried her tears and stared at the ground for some time. Those lashes of hers. So long. I wondered if they edged the objects she looked at, set things off like a picture frame. No wonder she wrote from such an elegant perspective.

  ‘Are you happy now?’ she asked me quietly.

  When I did not reply, Guinevere turned and walked down the lane to rejoin the civilised world. She held her head high and not once did she glance over her shoulder. I watched until she had left my sight. She had the most beautiful back.

  *

  On I blundered across the city without her, as if it meant nothing, as if there would be no consequences, as if I wasn’t leaving tracks of blood in the snow. There is always a price. A good hour passed before it dawned on me that the scene in the lane with Guinevere conformed almost identically in spirit to one Glynn had written over a quarter of a century earlier in Prussian Blue. I laughed, but not for long. The specifics were different, but the dialogue was broadly the same: dismal, repetitive. The narrator had broken a girl’s heart because he was a stupid bastard. Then he’d gone out on the batter.

  There was a time I would have attributed these uncanny parallels to Glynn’s unrivalled ability to distil the real world into prose, but that time was over. It was my behaviour that demanded a critical appraisal. I had internalised Glynn’s imaginative landscape so thoroughly that I could no longer tell where he stopped and I began. ‘You’re worse than him,’ Guinevere had said. I wasn’t even aping the big man himself – it was worse than that: I was aping characters from his novels. And Glynn’s novels never had happy endings. Everyone knew that.

  I sat on my little soldier’s bed and looked at my knees, viscerally regretting the absence of a trace of Guinevere in that room now that it was too late. A pillowslip she had slept on to press to my face, a towel still carrying the faintest hint of her scent. Should have thought of that. Should have thought of a lot of things. She had requested once to see where I lived, but her request had been denied. I hadn’t wanted her to witness the room’s meanness, as if she was the sort of girl who would think less of me for it, and so I had hidden it away from her like an embarrassing parent; an embarrassing, forsaken parent. A long slash of seagull shit streaked the window, calcium white and acidic.

  Jaunty and shipshape, I had decided when I first laid eyes on that room. It was one of many lies I had to tell myself. Just like Van Gogh’s sunny bedroom in Aries, I had affirmed as I’d looked around, forgetting that Van Gogh’s painting was a work of optimism, not realism. No sign in it of the chaos he daily endured. His belongings all hanging neatly on pegs, as if that would suppress it. Same amount of pegs as objects to be hung. Not so much as a patch of shadow under the bed. Not even a speck of dust. No evidence of his demons at all. Where were they hiding? Under which loose floorboard, behind what crack in the plaster? Because they were there, alright, lying in wait for him. Who was he trying to fool? Himself, I suppose, most of all. Within one year of painting that cheerful yellow room, with its sturdy little bed and pillows for two, the artist had gone and topped himself.

  ‘Alright Deco?’ said Giz when he answered my knock on his door. He didn’t seem in the least bit surprised to see me standing there. It was as if he’d been expecting me. ‘How’s it goin?’ he asked, ‘What’s the story?’ As if I would know. Me, who never wrote any story, me who never got past page five. Giz made sure before unhooking the security chain that I had money in my pockets this time, then he named his price.

  I sat into his couch and smoked until I was juddering from side to side when I closed my eyes, though my body was still as stone. Giz sucked lighter fluid through a balled-up sock. His bedsit was as grey as a rotten lung. I found myself gasping for breath all of a sudden and clawed at the armrest in panic, but it was no good. Giz was too far gone to notice or help. ‘Are you happy now?’ she had asked before turning her back on me. Are you happy now?r />
  23

  Lowry Lynch has horse’s ears,

  Lowry Lynch has horse’s ears

  A bell was tolling on Front Square. Graduates filed out of the Examination Hall dressed in black gowns and tasselled mortarboards. Commencements. ‘Look at them,’ Antonia scoffed. Glynn was two hours late.

  ‘Why are they called commencements when it’s all coming to an end?’ Faye wondered.

  I had no idea either what I would do once the course was over. Only a few months left, and nothing to show for my time. Then what? Back to England? Back to the factory, empty-handed? I looked away from the window.

  ‘What good will it do us anyway?’ Aisling asked. ‘What use is their stupid scrap of paper? How will that secure us a job?’ It was an unexpectedly practical line of thought for Aisling. I’d never have guessed that such considerations entered her head. ‘I don’t want to end up on the dole,’ she added. Her fears were met with silence. I hoped her parents were wealthy.

  It was dusk before the lord of the prose finally materialised under the Arch. Don’t know why we’d bothered waiting. A reluctance to go home, must have been. He made his way across the cobbles in our direction, roaring drunk yet still managing to keep a glad eye out for admirers. The graduates and their families had disbanded by then. Glynn was out of luck.

  ‘Oh, the rotten bastard!’ Antonia cried when he veered past House Eight and diverted to the Buttery. He had seen our five faces bearing down and thought the better of it. Antonia grabbed her coat and ran down the stairs, the others in close pursuit.

  They had him surrounded by the time I arrived. He’d only made it as far as the side of the Dining Hall. Antonia was upbraiding him while the others stood at her side, silently lending their support. Glynn didn’t like it one bit. He didn’t appreciate being corrected by a shower of women. He growled and broke free of the arena of girls, then turned his terrible eyes on them. Red and white, they were; half mad. The girls instinctively drew back.