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.
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.
I pulled open a drawer in his desk. Ink jars, rulers, sellotape, a stapler. I rammed it shut and grabbed the next handle down. Letters sprang out of that drawer like a jack in the box, it was packed so tightly. I gathered those that had fallen. Bond paper, pale blue, the stationery used by old ladies and priests. A few words were written in copperplate in the dead centre of each page, the lettering so tiny I had to hold it to my nose. You will pay, read one. Mark my words, read another. There is always a price. At the base of each note, the time and date was scratched in a different hand. Glynn’s.
‘Look,’ I said to Aisling, ‘the poison-pen letters,’ but Aisling wasn’t listening.
‘It’s the demons,’ she said, still bent over the pages of Glynn’s red notebook. Her black hair had fallen forward, concealing her features. She was invisible in the darkness in her funereal clothes. It was like looking into a vault. Not until she raised her white face to me, which was contorted with distress, did I see where the voice was coming from. ‘It’s weird fucking drawings of the demons, Declan,’ she practically whimpered. ‘The ones you were talking about.’
‘Me?’
‘Out there on the corridor. Belsabub and Sattan, you said. Diabolus I and II. He’s drawn pictures of them. Look.’ She held up the pages of the red notebook to me, but what could I see in the dark?
‘Come on,’ I told her, ‘we’d better go before we lose him.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was the best that I could come up with. We shoved everything back where we’d found it and got the hell out of there. Glynn’s door locked shut behind us. Aisling clapped a hand to her mouth.
‘The cigarette,’ she said. We’d left it smouldering. The two of us stared at each other in mute concern, then Aisling started to laugh — this mad, hysterical, unhinged laugh, to which there was no reasonable response.
18 An puc ar buile. The goat is mad
Coronas of mist encircled the Victorian lanterns as we raced across the black sweep of Front Square, the cobbles slippery and glistening in the drizzle, Aisling a shadow flitting by my side. We caught up with the others just before they disappeared under the Arch. They hadn’t noticed our absence, so preoccupied were they with Glynn and his raucous tumult, squalling above his head like a flock of gulls. His funny walk was back.
Glynn blundered out onto College Green and headed up Westmoreland Street. We trudged along after him, docile as a herd of livestock. We’re lumbered with him now, for better or for worse, I remember thinking. It was too late to abandon him. He led us to the nearest pub. If he was surprised, upon turning around, to find the five of us lined up behind him, he betrayed no sign of it. But then, he was hardly capable of discharging a look of surprise, the whiskey-sodden state of him.
Glynn’s work, in keeping with the great tradition of Irish fiction, is littered throughout with scenes fuelled by alcohol, of which his male protagonists partake liberally, enabling Glynn to introduce new characters through old ones: his men turn into different people with a few jars on them, sometimes aggressive, sometimes maudlin, effectively doubling his cast. What a frugal individual he was. Nothing went to waste.
Alcohol was a narrative device he leaned on heavily, employing it to fulfil the function more traditionally executed by the conceit of the dream. Inebriation freed Glynn’s novels to roam in whichever direction he wished, unconstrained by logic or the limiting principles of plot development. It liberated Glynn’s work so much in fact that at times it seemed he was working within the fantasy genre. He wrote about chaos as if it were a real place, like Nighttown in Joyce’s Ulysses. Which is why, I suppose, when Glynn took a drink, it was a literary event. He located an empty table and sat at the head of it. We filed in on either side of him.
I tried to catch Guinevere’s eye. She hadn’t acknowledged me since I’d left her cottage that morning. Glynn must have noticed this one-way exchange, so plastered that he had acquired a bird’s-eye perspective on matters that didn’t concern him. I think he wanted to be young again. That’s what I suspect. He raised his glasses to his shiny forehead, observing the two of us with his artist’s eye, before leaning over to speak into my ear in the same low rumbling growl that had gone on all afternoon in his office.
‘You ever seen footage of human gestation, Declan?’ he wanted to know. I shook my head. ‘The little wriggling sperm trying to penetrate the big white ovum?’ He sat back to try to get my face into focus. Couldn’t. Didn’t matter. He leaned in again. ‘Because that’s what you’re like, Declan. You’re like that little sperm, banging your head over and over against their battlements, whining for admittance.’ He scratched his head, then examined his fingernails to see what he’d dislodged.
‘That’s lovely,’ I said. ‘That’s just lovely. That’s a really lovely image you have of me there, Professor Glynn.’
‘No, no, no, no,’ said Glynn, nudging my arm with the rim of his pint, leaving a strip of foam on it. He was more the Dogman than himself at that moment, the way he smirked lopsidedly into his stout before sinking his teeth in it. He was enjoying himself, enjoying his troublemaking. ‘Not you personally, you fecking eejit, Declan. This is a paradigm that applies to all male-female relationships. You — meaning: us, banging our heads off the walls; and them — meaning: the women, imperturbable, impassive, oblivious.’ He gestured at the group. ‘Look at them,’ he remarked caustically, as if the four girls proved his point for him.