‘–No.
‘–You’re the only one. Oh, what would I do without you? Come here and sit on my knee. That’s it, good girl. Up a bit … Ahhhhh.
‘There were huffing, slobbering noises as the priapic Professor’s aged tongue explored the canal of the young girl’s ear, then he murmured her name, possibly to remind himself of it, what with his creaky memory (not getting any younger), or else as a ploy to distract the innocent creature from the sly progress of his hand, which was creeping up her thigh, groping for the leg of her drawers.
‘Genevieve panicked at the prospect of Flynn clapping eyes on her tatty grey pants, purchased by her mother many years previously in Dunnes Stores, Better value beats them all. Instead of slapping the old man’s hand away, as any sensible girl might, she yanked off her knickers altogether and kicked them out of sight under his desk, so sweet and obliging was her nature.
‘A happy sigh from Flynn, followed by a grunt and lurch as he parted the young girl’s knees and took aim. There was some fumbling. Yes, an extended period of fumbling. The girl waited patiently, gazing over the Professor’s shoulder at the array of trophies displayed on his bookcase. She didn’t wish to rush him. He was a great man, after all.
‘–Well now, said Professor Flynn, glancing down and clearing his throat. Would you ever look at that? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone. It’s with O’Leary in the grave. He laughed hollowly as he tucked his lad back into his brown polyester trousers. The girl smiled weakly back. It was the most excruciating moment of her life. No wait, I am wrong. The most excruciating moment of the young girl’s life wasn’t to occur for another thirty seconds, when she had to crawl under Flynn’s desk to retrieve her tattered knickers, then step back into them one leg at a time while the mighty scribbler hungrily watched.
‘Professor Flynn burst into tears again. Fourth time already that night. It was a pre-emptive strike: the young girl was the one with cause for tears, but Glynn – I mean, Flynn – made sure to get the boot in first.
‘–Boo hoo hoo, he said, then swivelled an eye at Genevieve to check that it was working. Good stuff, the job was oxo. Was there no end to his crusade for pity? Flynn inhabited a world which, through his own mismanagement, had spiralled out of control. His wife had left him, his only child despised him, and it was just a matter of time before the college fathers turfed him out on his ear. Flynn was in service to nothing but his own capricious gift, which had abandoned him. And who could blame it? His voice had been described as inimitable in the past, but to Flynn it had become uninimitable. He couldn’t stop cogging himself. The descent into self-parody was complete.’
*
Of all my Chapter Ones – and there were more than a few – this was my favourite. It was the first thing I’d written that wasn’t tainted by despair, the only few pages of the past hundred or so to have afforded me any pleasure at all. I had turned an important corner in my writing life.
Glynn raised his glasses to his artist’s eye. ‘Be the hokey,’ says he, trading on that brand of Hiberno-English that had brought him so far, but only so far. Somewhere along the line, he had gotten it into his thick skull that the Irish were more charming than other nationalities, when the best that could be said of us was that we weren’t the worst. ‘Write that with your good hand, didya Dermot?’
‘Begob, I did not. I bet it out with this one, sir!’ says I, holding up my bad hand, wrapped like a parcel of meat. I’d as much a claim on that manic bog codology as he. We sat there grinning wildly at each other, the big Wicklow head on him, and the big Mayo head on me. Odd as it sounds, I was delighted that we were all back together again, birds in a nest, snug as a gun, after the best part of a month’s break. A beautiful afternoon in April, it was, so perfect it couldn’t last.
My good cheer was inappropriate, which only served to reinforce it. My latest Chapter One hadn’t gone down too well with the ladies.
‘I find your abrupt adoption of the Continental style sheet pretentious,’ was the only comment it elicited, from Antonia, who else? ‘This business of prefacing lines of dialogue with em dashes – who on earth do you think you are? Joyce?’ The rest of them just stared at me, the female gaze. Which was like the male gaze, only more observant.
‘I like it, son,’ Glynn concluded, his glasses still perched on his forehead. ‘A terrible beauty is born. You’ve been falling the wrong side of earnest for too long.’
‘I have, right enough, Professor Glynn,’ I nodded. ‘I am in firm agreement with you there. Wait till ye see Chapter Two! No more Mister Nice Guy, what?’ I made a series of faces at him, the way we did as school children before we’d acquired vocabulary to equal our malice. My enmity towards glynn I mean Glynn outstripped my ability to express it.
He for his part grimaced back for all he was worth. ‘Oh ho, no more Mister Nice Guy, indeed!’ he winked, rolling up his sleeves. ‘Every story needs a good villain, isn’t that right, Dermot?’
I clenched my jaw and winked back. ‘That’s right, you fucking gee-bag.’
*
My notes on the workshop end at this juncture. What follows is drawn from memory and must accordingly be treated as partisan, one-sided, hopelessly lovelorn, hammered thin by anguish and pain. Ignore it, ignore every word of it – it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. I am only out for revenge, in so much as I can get it. A near-black trickle of blood shot out of Guinevere’s left nostril, fast as a darting minnow. Glynn jumped to his feet. Faye delved for a tissue. Guinevere touched her top lip in surprise, and slumped when she saw her scarlet fingertips. My chair screeched as I lunged for her. I caught her in my arms and felt like a man.
‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing,’ Guinevere insisted when she opened her eyes again. ‘Really, it’s fine,’ she kept telling us. Faye guided her to tilt back her head and pinch the bridge of her nose. Aisling wrapped her in her black coat. I sat rubbing her poor white hand. Antonia ran downstairs to brew strong tea. But Glynn, the bowsie, hadn’t jumped out of his chair to rush to her aid, but to get as far away as he was able from the blood.
‘Is she alright?’ he asked from a safe distance. Nobody answered him. We, who had hung on his every word for so long, now ignored him. That was the moment he became extraneous. There is always a price. ‘Is she alright?’ he asked again. Third-person singular. Go home, you’re only impeding us.
‘Dunno,’ I said to him. ‘Depends on what you’ve done to her.’ I was gleaming with animosity. My hurt polished me like a diamond; it changed the shape of my face. I was all sharp angles, hard edges, cutting remarks.
‘Leave it, Declan,’ Guinevere told me, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to leave it.
Antonia returned from the kitchen empty-handed. ‘The milk was off,’ she said.
‘The milk was off!’ Glynn repeated with relish, as if it were a choice metaphor indeed. He felt an epiphany coming on. Maybe he’d beat a paragraph into his red notebook that very night, or lash out a limerick at least. Seemed more likely he’d traipse home after Guinevere, and mewl and pule at her door until she took pity and let him in again. The colour had returned to her face.
Glynn resumed his seat at the head of the table and threw my chapter back at me. He had underlined every use of the word ‘seemed’ and its synonyms. ‘As if’, ‘like’, ‘appeared to’, ‘as though’. I shook my head at him in disbelief. People in glasshouses. Pots calling kettles black. I didn’t lick it off the stones. If ever there was a writer who knew how to flog a simile to death, here he sat enthroned before us. The smell of death was on his breath that day, but perhaps this is memory speaking. The smell of death was on his breath every day, but until that day, it had smelt like books. It was Aisling’s turn to read. Glynn dropped his glasses back into position like a welding visor, and waved her on.
She was five hundred pages into that Promethean novel of hers. Never did manage to understand a word of it. Couldn’t make head nor tail out of a thing she wrote. All I ever deduced from Aisling’s work was
its innate superiority over anything I could have produced and her innate right to be in that workshop over me. Not an ‘as if’ or a ‘like’ in sight. Different class.
The extract Aisling read that afternoon further upset the balance in House Eight for reasons which are too elusive to quantify without the evidence once more in front of us. Unfortunately the evidence is gone. Why didn’t I retain a copy? Why didn’t I take more care? There was an alarming aura about the piece, not just in the content but also the form, its visual presence on the page, as if it were a composite of letters cut from magazines and pasted down, though it was typed, same as everyone else’s. Perhaps the first letters of every line combined to spell out a message, a cry for help. That would not surprise me in the least. We cannot say we were not warned. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Faye chose that class to depart from her short, sweet elegiac meditations on human frailty to instead read a chapter from a novel about a battered wife. We sat there in horror listening to graphic descriptions of a drunken farmer kicking the living daylights out of his missus as she lay cowering on the bathroom floor. You know her husband beats her, don’t you?
‘She felt internal tissue tear,’ Faye read, ‘and muscle wall rupture as Kiernan’s boot pounded repeatedly into her soft belly. She closed her eyes and prayed to Our Lady. He never had much stamina. It would be over soon.’
Antonia was staring across the table at me with a tight-lipped smile that was no smile at all. Looking around the room while somebody read was transgressive, like opening your eyes during the Sacrament in Mass. ‘When he was finished, Kiernan turned away and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand,’ Faye continued, ‘thirsty from his labours. He would beg forgiveness in the morning, his wife knew, but morning was a long way off yet.’
Antonia’s expression was turning violent. The whites of her eyes had begun to bulge. She was the wild woman screaming abuse from the top of the stairs again. I looked down at Faye’s manuscript. One of us was trembling. ‘His wife’s blood had spoiled the new bathroom mat. In her confusion, she couldn’t think where to hide it. Kiernan would go into another fury when he saw it.’ The words were swimming. The words had come to life.
‘Fucking hell,’ whispered Aisling when Faye’s reading was complete.
Antonia tossed her blonde hair. ‘Here, Declan,’ she said, reaching across. ‘You left this behind on my bedside table when you stayed the night.’ She deposited my watch on the desk in front of me, where it glinted in the sunlight. That was when my hatred for Antonia peaked. You stupid bitch. Are you happy now?
‘Oh ho!’ said Glynn, rubbing his palms together in glee. ‘Oh now! Bedside table, is it! Janey Mack. Look at little Pope Innocent here. Now that calls for a pint.’
He stood up and indicated with a swimming stroke, the over-arm crawl, that the lot of us were to follow. He threw the workshop door open, and Aisling gasped, but I had seen it too this time, the demon that had been hanging like a bat behind the door all along. A blink of an eye, and it was gone.
29
The Importance of Being Earnest
The other three went on ahead with him to the Buttery. Aisling and I hung back by the dismal patch of shrubbery into which he’d tossed his hearing aid. We sucked down a cigarette each without speaking, fast as we were able, as if it were a race. What was wrong with me? What was wrong with her? The seagulls had started to scream.
‘I feel sick, Declan,’ she muttered.
I nodded. Indeed she looked sick. ‘We’d better go in, I suppose.’
‘Oh Jesus!’ she cried, and covered her mouth. I whipped around to see what had startled her this time. Sylvia. Their feral cat glared up at us reproachfully, a tiny, underweight slip of jet black and lollipop pink. It was unlike her to be out in broad daylight like this. It was unlike her to stand motionless.
At first I thought she was snarling at us. Her lip was curled back to reveal an expanse of livid pink, but when she turned to flee into the shrubbery – wait, it did not have the agility of flight, I cannot call it that – when she turned to saunter off, her gait uncharacteristically nonchalant, practically a swagger, I saw that the pink was not snarling lip but exposed flesh. The animal’s muzzle had been partially torn off. Her teeth were set needle-thin into her gums. She was panting. No, she was dying.
Aisling dropped her cigarette and took off into the shrubbery on her hands and knees, her widow’s weeds snagging on every twig and thorn, like there was a chance in hell of catching poor Sylvia, let alone saving her. ‘There’s nothing you can do for her,’ I kept telling her bent form, but I may as well have been talking to the wall.
It was a good quarter of an hour before Aisling gave up the hunt. God knows what crack in the earth Sylvia had slipped into to die. I reassured Aisling that she’d done her best, but the girl would not be comforted. ‘Did you see her?’ she kept asking me, her gaze unable to settle. It flitted about the bushes like a butterfly. ‘Declan, did you actually see her?’
‘Of course I saw her.’ I wasn’t sure I understood the point of the question. The cat had been standing right there in front of us, after all, half-savaged, panting, dying. How could you not see her?
Aisling bit at her cuticles. ‘We mustn’t tell Faye,’ she made me promise, then we smoked another cigarette each to seal the oath.
Glynn was well on by the time we joined them in the Buttery. It was barely five o’clock. He was shit-faced, rat-arsed, locked out of his tree. This is a stupid language. It was immediately evident that something wasn’t right. More wrong than usual, I should say. The others were exchanging meaningful glances over his head – there’d obviously been an incident in our absence. ‘Oh, here they are at last, Professor!’ Faye announced with forced gaiety, trying to jolly the fucker along, as if he were already enrolled in the nursing home. Glynn’s skin was the colour of an eyeball. His eyeball was the colour of skin. The glisten of dribble down his chin was new. In his paw was a pint which he clasped like a sceptre, the court of slobbering Glynn, king of porter. ‘Where the fuck have you two been until now?’ Antonia hissed under her breath.
‘Look who it is‚’ Glynn murmured blackly as we took our seats. He reached across the table and plucked a leaf from Aisling’s hair with a card-trick flourish, then turned to take me in, shaking his head. ‘At it again, you dirty little bollocks. You’re an awful man altogether, so you are.’
Aisling was wearing the manic grin she used to mask her profound self-consciousness, or to poorly mask it, rather. ‘We were smoking, Professor,’ she said, as if she had to explain herself to the likes of him.
‘Can’t a man have a drink?’ Glynn bellowed in protest, as if one of us had tried to stop him. As if any of us would have dared embark on such a course of action. The thought hadn’t entered our minds. It is possible that Glynn was dropping a hint – prompting us with one of his rhetorical devices to attempt to stop him drinking, seeing as he had long since gone beyond attempting to stop himself. Instead, Aisling went to the bar. What a disappointment we must have been to him.
Glynn watched Guinevere over the cream disc of the head of his pint, then caught me watching him over the cream disc of the head of my pint. He raised his sceptre in salute. ‘Playboy of the Western World, isn’t that right Dermot!’ He elbowed Faye in the ribs. ‘Get this one into bed and it’s a royal flush!’ His face twinkled, his gums sparkled, his eyes kindled, his brow darkened. I bridled and bristled, nettled and rankled, then drinkled and drankled some more.
Glynn coughed fleshily until it seemed his rotting lungs would come shooting out of his chest and land wetly on the table, still gasping, unable to bear it in there a minute longer. ‘Here, Professor,’ Antonia said, and dealt the old fuck a good sound clap on the back, that bit too forceful to be benevolent. He hocked up a mighty phlegm and gobbed it into the waiting lap of his hanky. It burst out with the ripe pop of a wine bottle being uncorked.
‘I’m going to vomit,’ Aisling said, but didn’t leave the table.
> Glynn raised his glasses to his artist’s eye to appraise the winnings, and judging by the look of rapture on his face, he was not disappointed. He was forever picking at himself, sniffing himself, tasting himself, sampling the compressed bits of self he found compacted beneath his fingernails, in a perpetual swoon of fascination with his own detritus. ‘Glynn’s great subject was the self,’ wrote the New York Review of Books. Little did they know.
‘Where’s his pap?’ Antonia asked. ‘Give him his pap. The poor fellow: his glass is empty.’ It was my turn to go the bar.
I set a rack of pints down on the table and headed for the jacks. Jesus, the fucker had snuck in ahead of me. He gave a nod as he tucked himself in, then proceeded to the exit without washing his hands. Icky sticky gicky Glynn, his urinal fingers contaminating Guinevere’s skin. He paused in the doorway.
‘She’ll come back to you once her dreams turn to shite,’ he told me. ‘You just watch.’
I shook my head at him. For all his insight, he had no conception of who Guinevere was, or of what she was capable, and the tender years of her. He could not see her tremendous gift. Or maybe he could see it. Maybe that was the whole problem. Maybe he knew she’d outstrip him in the end. He cured me of my earnestness, I suppose, and I’ll always owe him for that. Glynn cured us all of our earnestness.
I squeezed myself in beside Guinevere when I returned. ‘So how are you?’ I asked, perhaps a little aggressively. Been a few weeks since we’d spoken.
‘I’m worried about Patrick,’ she said. It wasn’t the answer to the question I’d asked. She leaned in so he wouldn’t overhear. ‘Do his lips look a little blue to you?’
His lips? Why was she looking at his lips? How could I make her stop? ‘So it’s Patrick now, is it?’ I sneered, ‘Rat Prick now, is it?’ I sneered. She lowered her head. I wished the others had overheard my fine piece of wordplay. It was Aisling, most of all, I wished had been listening. Aisling would have enjoyed it.
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