All Names Have Been Changed

by Claire Kilroy

  When Glynn had emerged from Guinevere’s bedroom, it had physically hurt. There’d been a sundering in my core, a tooth torn from its socket, leaving an unfamiliar hole behind, a hole which, though small, became the throbbing centre of my being. I couldn’t stop exploring the aching cavity that had opened in her wake. It commanded every drop of my attention. ‘Now you know how it feels,’ she might have said to me, were she that type of girl.

  I tried to stuff a shop-bought corned-beef sandwich down my throat as if posting a letter but ended up gagging on my tears. I ducked down a side lane to hide my contorted face. Giz woz ere was sprayed on the piss-stinking, slime-glossy wall. My friend, I thought wildly, and looked around for him, grinning like a maniac at this unexpected reprieve. I was clutching at straws.

  Vast swathes of the city seemed darker than usual that night, as if there’d been a power cut, though the street lights burned. The air was draining the light out of things, I decided, just as Antonia had drained the light out of me and Glynn had drained the light out of Guinevere, the filthy rotten bastard. I was pleased with my pathetic fallacy, if nothing else. I hoped to find one of them waiting outside the flat on Mountjoy Square, wanting to talk. Either of them would have done me, even Antonia. Even Glynn, for the love of God. Anything but sit alone on my soldier’s bed looking at my knees. The emptiness of the steps leading up to the front door was another blow. Giz’s light shone through his nailed-up blanket, the moth holes twinkling like constellations.

  His complexion was as ashen as Antonia’s had been at dawn, except that Giz’s face was faintly luminous, like the static afterglow of a television screen, and faintly marine, the milky-grey of a bottom feeder. His eyelids were inflamed, two blisters. Would you even call him a man, I speculated as I took my usual seat and waited for him to spread out his wares, which he kept in a rusty Jacob’s Cream Crackers tin divided into cubbyholes. The tin was almost empty. His prices had been hiked.

  He moved about the bedsit in an agitated state, barely five foot five. A man or a boy? Boy or a man? I had no idea how old Giz was. Anywhere between sixteen and thirty. He still bore the hallmarks of the local children – pallid, chilblained, puffy-eyed – but he increasingly resembled a pensioner. That stiff pigeon walk of his was getting stiffer. His joints were seizing up. A comfort, somehow, knowing that others were worse off than you. Pain was pounding through my mangled fist to the beat of my heart. I wished he’d hurry up.

  ‘Wha?’ he demanded, catching me staring.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Wha?’ he demanded again.

  ‘Nothing,’ I asserted again.

  He flexed the tendons in his neck, then shook his head to indicate he’d let it go, this once. I watched him roll a joint and wondered when he’d last washed his hands. He had started to smell like that boy in school who nobody would sit beside, that mangy boy from the bad family who had no friends. It was the rank tang of ingrained dirt. There was a cold sore on his mouth, a big crusty scab. Giz handed me the joint and a tab. It was all that was left in the tin. I gave him all that was left in my pocket. He sat into his armchair and started tinkering about with a piece of tinfoil and a lighter, looking more boy than pensioner again, with that intent frown of concentration on his face.

  ‘Whatcha making?’ I asked, and then, ‘Oh.’ He was rolling up his sleeve.

  There was something wrong with his forearm. It was swollen like a ham, but unevenly swollen, lumpy. I swung my head around and fixed my eyes on the empty space where his stack of television sets had been. I took my medicine and smoked steadily until it seemed the sofa was sliding towards the empty space, or the empty space was sliding towards the sofa. I shivered. My bowels had turned to ice. My stomach had sprouted teeth. I wanted to get up and leave but was scared my exit might antagonise Giz. You never knew what would trigger his rage, you never knew what would send him rampaging. So I sat there, quiet as a mouse, smiling probably, or trying to, demonstrating that I was good. I must have fallen asleep for a few seconds. I had been dreaming of ants.

  ‘Bleedin perished,’ Giz whispered.

  ‘Plug in the heater,’ I whispered back.

  Where was the heater? It was missing, same as his television stack and collection of video nasties. All gone. His communion photo lay face down on the carpet beneath a chipped Toyota hubcap. Giz’s skin was so clammy, so pale by then, that his freckles looked black in comparison, as if they’d been spattered onto him by the wheel of a passing car. He slumped forward in his armchair and held the flame of his lighter to the leg of the table.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  He sniffed. ‘Bleedin perishing in here.’ The varnish was flaring black.

  ‘But Giz, that’s–’ Dangerous, I was going to say, but it seemed a bit late for that. He was shivering too hard to keep the flame applied to the table leg anyway. His body seemed not to be shaking itself but shaken by another agency, such was the force of it. The lighter flew out of his hand, and he gave a little cry of protest.

  The detritus on the table juddered as if there were a poltergeist in the room. My ashtray slid off the armrest, landing upside down on the floor. Blood was trickling down Giz’s chin. The scab on his cold sore had cracked. I sat there in confusion, taking it all in. Then – slowly, so as not to alarm him – I reached across the sofa to lay a steadying hand on his arm. My good hand closed around a rattling humerus, thin as the leg of the table he’d been trying to set alight. Giz recoiled violently from my touch.

  ‘Get off of me,’ he spat, though I hadn’t been on him. ‘Fucken puff,’ he added, a quiver of disgust contorting his bleeding mouth.

  ‘I’m not a puff.’

  ‘I seen ya lookin at me. Don’t try an deny it. I fucken seen ya.’

  Oh Jesus, his forearm was rupturing. A septic fissure was splitting his skin. Something toxic was breaking through his flesh. It was red and yellow inside. I sat rooted to my seat. Giz had no sense of how wretched he had become. He did not grasp that if I were a bleedin puff, the last man I would touch was him.

  His spasm abruptly subsided. He sank, head thrown back, limbs splayed, star-shaped on the armchair. Two crescents of white showed between his eyelids. I stared at him, my mouth as far agape as it would open. Was he dying? Was he dead? I couldn’t take my eyes off him, terrified at the same time that his eyeballs would roll into place and he’d lash out at me for gawping.

  ‘Giz?’ I asked hesitantly, still whispering, as if some third party were present in the room, some prison warden, some dungeon keeper, behind whose back I might manage – were I stealthy enough – to make covert contact with my old friend. I was throwing pebbles up at his window, trying to wake him without rousing the house. ‘You alright there, Giz?’

  It seemed important to keep using his name, in case I had become as unfamiliar to him as he had become to me. ‘Giz,’ I whispered, louder now, ‘Wake up, it’s Declan. Deco. From upstairs.’

  Repeating his name did nothing to summon him from the catatonic state. Giz woz ere, but not any more. Jesus, fucking answer, I wanted to scream before it was too late. Too late for what? I didn’t know. I didn’t know yet.

  There was a whirring noise in the far corner, followed by a familiar mechanical clunk. The bedsit was plunged into darkness. The electricity meter had run out.

  Giz did not react. I couldn’t hear him breathe. I held my breath to listen for his. Nothing. Just the sound of a poor old dog howling away the night, the groan of a bus labouring up the square.

  ‘Giz?’ I whispered yet again.

  Silent as the grave.

  I was pleading with him by then, begging him to become Giz again, and not this awful lifeless changeling. I tried to make out his star shape in the darkness. I blinked and strained my eyes at his armchair, or at the spot I reckoned contained his armchair, because I was entirely disorientated by then, had entirely lost my bearings, could barely tell up from down. The part of the room at which I stared remained the blackest. It was so black, in fact, that I got
it into my head that it wasn’t Giz at all. That thing which had split open his arm had been unleashed by the darkness and was taking form. It was right there in the room beside me. I could have reached out and touched it.

  I tried to stand up but was unable to move, whether from fright or intoxication, I cannot say. My limbs pegged me to the sofa like a tent. I heard myself whimper, the sound loud and glandular in my ears. My head was issuing dogmatic instructions. Don’t make any noise, it warned me. It’ll hear you, and then it’ll get you. It’ll get you, and then it’ll hear you. So don’t make any noise.

  ‘It’s the tab,’ I managed to say out loud, a eureka moment.

  Hearing myself speak fulfilled some normalising function, and I propelled myself to my feet. From that elevation, a slit of white was visible under Giz’s door, welcoming as a landing strip. Beyond it was the sagging corridor, the old carpet, electric light. If I could just make it to the door.

  I lunged toward the light and collided with his coffee table. An almighty clatter as his wares crashed to the floor. ‘Careful now,’ warned my head, ‘You’ll wake it.’

  I listened, my head cocked to one side like a bird. Not a whisper of breath out of him. I was hardly breathing myself. I had no notion of where Giz was presently located. He could have been hanging from the ceiling, for all I knew. I took another tentative step toward that three-foot-long chink of light, worried it would startle and take flight at any sudden movements. The thing to do was creep up without it noticing. That was the thing to do.

  Something split in two underfoot with a loud brittle crack; I braced, ready for a hand to snatch my ankle. There were objects scattered about the floor that hadn’t been there when the light was on. They scuttled around the room like rats. ‘It’s okay,’ I assured myself, ‘This isn’t happening.’ The one thing that I could be certain of was that Giz was seeing worse. If I was caught in the ninth level of Hell, he was trapped in the Inferno itself.

  The floor lurched, and I lost my footing. The bar of light beneath the door started to ascend. Smoothly and evenly, it rose higher, as if we were descending in an old-fashioned elevator cage. ‘Aw Jesus no,’ I whispered. The bedsit was sinking into the basement.

  A wild thrashing broke out behind me. I hurled myself at the bar of white and miraculously connected with the door. I did not expect it to open, but open it did, flooding a benediction of light over me. I was all but crying by then.

  The arc of light from the corridor did not extend as far as Giz’s armchair, just to his runners, which were no longer glaringly white as of old. He was flipping about like a landed fish. At least he wasn’t dead. I pulled his door shut and, to my shame, held the lever of the handle in place with my good hand, just in case, God forbid, he tried to come after me.

  *

  When all fell quiet inside, as it quickly and ominously did, I crept upstairs to my room and got into the bed without undressing. A full day and a half without sleep, yet I was scared to close my eyes. I couldn’t lie facing the wall because ghouls seeped out of the corner as soon as my back was turned, and I couldn’t lie facing the corner because hands stretched out of the wall. I couldn’t go downstairs because Giz, what was left of him, was waiting, and I couldn’t stay in the bedroom because Giz, or whoever he was now, was on his way up to get me. I propped myself upright on pillows and sat facing the door.

  At some point during the night, the sound of breaking glass roused me. I opened my eyes with a gasp. My light was still on. The room was empty. People were shouting, chanting. It was coming from outside. Not outside my door, but outside the building, down below on the street. It sounded like an angry mob. An angry mob, of all things, out in the dead of night baying for blood, like something from a different century. My imagination was getting carried away with itself. It was going to town. Jesus, you’re worse than Aisling, I told myself, trying to make a joke out of the whole thing. When that didn’t work, I put my hands to my ears and blocked the angry mob out with my palms.

  *

  Next time I opened my eyes it was daytime. Around about noon, judging by the light. I checked my watch. Gone. Sitting on Antonia’s bedside table. Fuckhead. Are you happy now? My knuckles had puffed and dried to black scabs. I couldn’t straighten my fingers.

  I stood outside Giz’s door and knocked with my good hand, but not very hard, if I’m honest. He didn’t answer. It was the result I was hoping for. I headed down the stairs. My relief was short-lived. It occurred to me that Giz was dead.

  I went back up to his door and knocked harder. ‘Giz,’ I called. No response. I pressed my ear to the door. Silence. I tried the handle. Locked. I put my eye to the keyhole. His armchair was directly in my line of vision, and his armchair was empty.

  Daylight was a strained compound of nerves after the lurid night that was in it. I had shed a protective layer. Everything in me blinked and blenched, a colony of insects when their rock is lifted. So when I stumbled out squinting onto the street and registered in my peripheral vision the funeral wreath hanging from the front door of the house on Mountjoy Square, my initial reaction was to assume that it wasn’t actually there. It was another demon, the kind of thing Glynn saw in his cups, the kind of thing I saw in mine.

  It was only when I slammed the door and heard something tinkle down the steps in my wake that I turned around to gape at the wreath. And then gaped at what had fallen out of the wreath. There by my feet, a hypodermic needle. I looked up. A star-shaped hole in Giz’s window. Evil had come to our door as we’d slept. Evil had left a calling card. I ran up the steps and plucked the card from its holder. PUSHERS OUT, it read.

  *

  There was no dole queue trailing out the door of the labour exchange on Gardiner Street. That was the first bad sign. The roads were deserted, just the odd car here and there, as on Christmas Day. The local shops were shuttered. A grown man with a tricolour knotted around his neck planted himself in my path and vomited down his front. I stepped around him.

  A cloud as faded and discoloured as an old military uniform was about to occlude the sun. I watched it loom over the Custom House with the stealth of a cut-throat. The delirium of that last blast of sunlight before rain, the sun-shot world on the brink of condensing – Gardiner Street was fleetingly gilded with such beauty that I was overcome with sadness that it could not always be this way. The cloud dispatched its bright-yellow quarry briskly; there was no struggle. A tidal wave of shadow came racing along the pavement. My heart started to pound.

  I gritted my teeth and kept going, kept going, kept staggering on regardless, with hardly a thought as to where I was off to, and in such a hurry too. The gulls were out in force, screaming their prophesies of doom as the first heavy raindrops spattered the pavement. The streets grew darker with every step I took, the city a coffin being lowered into a grave.

  Very few cars on the quays either. I crossed Butt Bridge down the broken white line of the central traffic lane. The Liffey was an opaque limestone grey in the grainy light. Water that was not translucent was no longer just water, surely. That’s what ran through my mind as I hurried along. There was more to that river than it was letting on. A thunderous rain was unleashed on us then.

  On the side lane connecting the quays to Poolbeg Street, I encountered a woman sitting amongst dustbins. Her dress had ridden up to her hips, and she wore no underwear. The sight of her pubic hair was a shocking obscenity. Her thighs were dappled mauve, like Glynn’s daughter. He’d have gotten a whole chapter out of the scene, but I averted my eyes. The woman tugged at the hem of her dress with fingers gone rubbery from booze or worse and shouted something after me that I didn’t catch, something lascivious, judging by the tone. She was well pleased with the remark, such as it was, and threw back her head to laugh as best she could manage.

  Crowd-control barriers had been erected along College Green. Teenaged boys had shinned up the lampposts. A lost child with a plastic flag was crying. A convoy of sodden floats and pipe bands trudged past in the rain, watched by peopl
e in anoraks. Jesus Christ, St Patrick’s Day. Empty bottles and cans littered the streets. I kicked through them like autumn leaves. The gates to Trinity were shut. The walled city had raised the drawbridge. Ambulances and squad cars nudged the crowd along like cattle. There was news of a stabbing on Stephen’s Green.

  I crossed back over the Liffey to present my pounding hand to the Accident and Emergency in the Mater, thinking to get a head start on the crowd. I was too late. The crowd had a head start on me. The crowd had been there since time began. The casualties already outnumbered the staff a hundred to one. A fine big country nurse directed me to take a seat alongside the rest of the city’s drunken, drenched carnage and wait for my name to be called. We had a painful night ahead, the lot of us, during which time we were more than welcome to take a look at ourselves, take a good long hard look at ourselves in the cold light of day, tufts of wilted shamrock pinned to our scruffs, worse than any dunce hat.

  PART III

  Trinity Term

  April

  28

  Failing better

  It was my turn to read. I shuffled my sheaf of papers and cleared my throat:

  ‘The Professor’s forehead positively bulged with metaphors and imagery. Full to the rafters, so it was, worse than a pub on Holy Thursday. He hadn’t, of course, written a word in five years; not a publishable word, at least. Why let a minor detail like that impede you? Professor Flynn wasn’t remotely ashamed of the ludicrous figure he cut, having long ago lost sight of the fact that he was a preposterous personage. At times, it was possible to pity him. Mainly, though, it was not.

  ‘–Everybody hates me, he told the young girl.

  ‘–I don’t hate you, Professor Flynn, the young girl replied. She was beautiful beyond compare.

  ‘–Don’t you?