*
I was barely in the door when a young fella in a silky tracksuit came panting up the steps behind me. He pushed past me into the hall, a pub-sized television set in his arms. I flattened myself against the wall to allow him pass. It was the fucker from the flat downstairs, the one who’d stolen my bike. Giz woz ere. ‘Sorry,’ I said when he stood on my foot.
He cursed, unable to throw a filthy look my way since his cheek was jammed against the milky grey screen. I watched him make his way up the stairs, half-blind and stumbling. What had he painted on his runners to get them so white? Tippex? The same stuff Aisling trowelled on her face? They were incongruously immaculate, considering the state of the rest of him; the stained tracksuit bottoms, the saggy black leather jacket, elasticated at the waist. Funny smell off him too. He drew up on the stairs.
‘Here,’ he said, unable to turn around within the narrow confines of the stairwell, not with that thing in his arms. I glanced over my shoulder. The hall was empty. The front door was shut. I looked back up.
‘You mean me?’
‘Yeah. D’ya wanna buy a telly?’
‘No.’
He continued on his way without further discussion, the flex of the television trailing after him like a tail. Those Tippexed runners. They were familiar. I’d encountered them recently somewhere. I watched them pistoning up the stairs, but it wasn’t until lying in bed later that night that I finally managed to place them. The knackers at the entrance to the park who had lunged at me last week. ‘Little Trinity gee-bag,’ the prick had shouted in my wake, laughing loudly for the benefit of his friends. He’d hurled a beer can in my direction, but it lacked the ballast to reach its target. He may as well have thrown a leaf. ‘Little Trinity gee-bag,’ he’d repeated, then laughed again, louder still, so pleased was he with this description.
12 I’m an ordinary man, nothing special, nothing grand
We greatly enjoyed the succinct biographical notes which accompanied reissues of Glynn’s novels, never mind whether they were true. ‘He lives in Wicklow and Havana.’ ‘He is a leading exponent of the rural postmodern in Anglo Irish Literature.’ ‘He retired from active service in the Irish Free State’s Intelligence Corps when misdiagnosed with a wasting disease.’ These notes, written in the third person by the man himself, were neither outlandish enough nor specific enough to leap out at the casual reader as blatant lies. It was Faye who disabused us of their veracity, showcasing the formidable research skills that would stand to her in her future career. Although he had joined the FCA in his youth, there was no Irish Intelligence Corps as such, and even if there were, the likes of Glynn would hardly have been enlisted, not with his criminal record, minor though it was.
We came to regard his biographical notes as demonstrations in miniature of the power of fiction. No sooner had Glynn published them than they entered the realm of fact. He had altered the world with a pen stroke, the very mark of a god. Lazy journalists rushing to meet deadlines parroted variations on them, covering their tracks as best they could be bothered with thesauruses. Thus ‘Havana’ became ‘the Tropics’, Glynn’s alleged spell in the ‘Intelligence Corps’ became ‘Republican spy’, and his ‘wasting disease’ somehow morphed into ‘rumoured syphilis’. Superb, as Antonia would say, then the horsy laugh.
These concocted fragments evolved into a colourful portrait that offered more of an insight into the man’s playful spirit than a strict adherence to the bare nuts and bolts could have hoped to. For Glynn enjoyed parallel lives in his imagination, and it was his imaginative life above all else that those biographical notes sought to evoke, we concluded. What was a writer but his imaginative existence, after all?
It was true that he had been to Cuba just the once, and only for a week at that, but he never fully left it behind either. The place stole his heart, rendered him perpetually longing to return, escaping there on a regular basis in his daydreams, and so it could be said with some degree of conviction that part of Glynn did live in Havana, an important part, a substantial portion of his envisaging faculty, wandering down the narrow streets during the hot white noon while his earthbound self was tucked up in the leaba. We could all but see him in his crumpled linen, his jaunty fedora, seeking out the shade of the hibiscus or the respite of his favourite bar. Like a shaggy Irish wolfhound he would be, farcically ill adapted to the heat, an object of some curiosity and amusement to the locals, lying around panting in the shadows.
This notion of a doppelgänger, a southern señor Glynn, the Great Irish Writer in Exile, on tour, proved irresistible to us, particularly when it was raining. He understood exactly how to go about constructing his double, knew where best on the soft tissue of the mind to apply the electrodes to make his simulation of a man jolt into life and become one. The wrong imagery, and it mightn’t take. But aside from his biographical notes being a masterclass in creative writing, it was their freedom that most appealed to us, this proffering of alternative versions of the self, just like that, with the insertion of an adjective, the souping up of a noun. For we were not there to continue being the people we had previously been, either. That was not our objective in enrolling on the course.
Glynn, or ‘Professor Patrick Glynn, Writer Fellow’, as the brushed-steel nameplate slotted into the door of his office in the Department of English read, finally appeared in the middle distance of Front Square. It was a cold bright morning in early December.
The walled college campus was divided into sections as distinct as the rooms in a home. Each section represented a different era in European architecture. Front Square, accessed via the Arch on College Green, was an eighteenth-century neoclassical tableau. The Arts Block, fronting onto Nassau Street, and towards which Glynn was presently headed, was a cement box homage to the nineteen seventies, the façade of which broke out in large weeping sores when it rained, as it often did in Dublin, lending the building a bleak, bedraggled appearance. It failed in its purpose to be a monument to the consolations offered by the arts and humanities, to act as a bulwark against the Irish winter. Small wonder we conceived of Glynn as being elsewhere. We rarely, if ever, pictured him in his office in the Department of English, despite it being his place of employment. As backdrops went, the Arts Block didn’t live up to him.
Upon encountering the narrow passage between the 1937 Reading Room and the Colonnades (which wasn’t all that narrow — it merely seemed so in contrast to the gracious expanse of Front Square) those approaching from the other side faltered and deferred right of way to Glynn, who proceeded without so much as checking his pace, nor registering the guard of honour of stalled students lined up on either side of the passage through which some minutes earlier I myself had slipped, unnoticed.
Glynn crossed the smooth worn cobbles flanking New Square. The gradient of the ramp leading up to the Arts Block appeared to cause him undue difficulty. He lost impetus and ground to a halt halfway up, as if the ramp were a taxing paragraph he would return to later, once he had mustered his resources. He leaned against the railing and checked his watch. Only thirteen minutes late: Grand so. He lit a cigarette.