Glynn cupped his daughter’s shoulders. She submitted to being held in this manner, if not quite embraced — he tried to draw her to him but she cowered and he immediately desisted, knowing better for once in his life than to push his luck. She was almost as broad as him, the poor graceless girl. Those ridiculous, matronly, ill-fitting clothes. Where had she gotten them? Not from her mother, that was for sure. Gladys was a striking, statuesque New Yorker who wore her silver hair in an angular bob, hardly the drudge we made her out to be. We demonised her to suit our purpose, which was to lionise Glynn. We required a figure of grand proportions in whom to invest our faith and therefore glorified Glynn as a tragic hero, or tragic anti-hero at least.
The breeze plastered Sofia’s hair across her face. It stuck to her tears and snot. She permitted her father to disentangle it, and he carefully tucked it behind her ears. The wind whipped it straight back into her eyes again, and she lowered her head in defeat. How had Glynn engendered this shambling, big-boned creature? Nothing by his hand was this crude, this unworked. She was his only child.
The four women were hungry to construct a narrative, a family saga, out of every tiny gesture Glynn and his slovenly daughter exchanged. Their attention was almost predatory. It was a wonder the intensity of their combined gaze didn’t set the Glynns on fire. I, on the other hand, no longer wanted to know. It was a shattering disappointment that Glynn’s offspring wasn’t the match of him. Such a disappointment, in fact, that I felt cheated. My overriding need to believe in some transcendent essence had been dealt another blow. There was no unquenchable spark of brilliance. It had petered out by the time it reached Sofia. She resembled her father only in stubbornness.
A strange thing started happening then: my disillusionment with Sofia began to infect my high opinion of Glynn, dismantling him before my eyes like a degenerative virus. Had his unquenchable spark of brilliance petered out by the time it reached Sofia, or had it petered out also in the man himself? Was it possible that Glynn was now every bit as ordinary as his daughter? Had we been hasty in our appraisal? He hadn’t written in so long. He hadn’t written in years.
Sofia’s shoulders sagged in capitulation as she conceded Glynn a little suppose-so nod. The fight had gone out of her by then. Conflict was not her natural disposition. She didn’t take after her father in that regard either. Glynn still held her upper arms and was speaking entreatingly to her slumped form. He wished she’d stand up straight for once in her life and kept rolling her shoulders back to try to straighten her frame, but she just slouched forward again. Twice he gently shook her, trying to rouse her, to no avail. Sofia kept her eyes on the cobbles.
His dishevelled girl swayed on her feet as if her father’s words had lulled her into a trance. She reminded me of Aisling at that moment, the way she lost herself. Glynn tipped a finger under her chin, attempting to raise her face. This level of intimacy proved a step too far. Sofia snapped out of the trance and shoved Glynn with both hands so violently in the chest that he staggered backwards. Her face was marbled red and white.
‘I hate you, you cow!’ she screamed. You cow; there was no mistaking it. The only words we’d caught from the entire exchange.
‘Deary me,’ said Antonia, folding her arms with satisfaction. Sofia’s outburst had hit the spot. Antonia loved that sort of thing — not other people’s distress, but their botched mismanagement of it. Made her feel better about her own life, I suppose. At least Antonia knew how to conduct herself during a dramatic crisis. So she liked to think.
Sofia turned and ran away like a walloping great child, flat-footed in her white nurse shoes, bumping into students along the way before disappearing under Front Arch. Glynn just stood there watching her recede, the rancid hanky still in his hand. Faye said it was enough to break your heart. Mmm, I murmured along with the others, but I was glad to see the back of her.
Suddenly the women crowded around Guinevere, who was standing with both palms pressed against the wall, leaning her weight against it. With her eyes shut like that, and her lips drained of blood, her face was as colourless as a death mask, as Aisling’s.
The other three elbowed me out of the way and lead her to the door. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked, but none of them answered. ‘It’s okay, chicken, we’ve got you,’ Faye was coaxing her. I followed them out to the landing. They were helping her down the stairs.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ I asked their descending backs, as if Guinevere couldn’t speak for herself. ‘Is she going to be okay?’ I trailed down the stairs in their wake, yapping at their heels. They entered the women’s toilet. I grabbed Antonia’s wrist just before the door closed behind her. ‘What the hell’s going on? Tell me.’
‘It’s her period, fuckhead.’
The door slammed shut in my face, leaving me standing alone in the empty corridor. Quiet out there, after the commotion. It was as if they’d passed into the wall. That door was as good as a wall to me. I could not pass beyond it. A plate sticker of a matchstick woman warded me off like a skull and crossbones. The triangular skirt and spherical head seemed less a representation of womanhood than a delineation of man’s limited understanding of it.
I could hear them inside, murmuring, crooning, their voices pitched low to deliberately drive me mad. What rites and rituals were under way in there? It should have been a question mark depicted on that plate sticker, or a set of quotation marks containing nothing. A pair of mirrors adjusted to reflect infinity. A pentangle, a sprig of hemlock, twigs bound into a bundle. The circle and triangle didn’t begin to cover it. Fuckhead, Antonia had called me.
Glynn rounded the corner, catching me with my ear pressed to the door. I jumped back to find him at the far end of the corridor, battle-scarred from his skirmish with his obtuse, abstruse daughter who had just called him, of all things, and in front of everyone, a cow. You couldn’t make it up. On his face was the same expression I felt written all over my own, a combination of resentment and disbelief.
He angled a weary eye at the isosceles triangle on the plate sticker, then down at me hovering below it. Big white ovum, tiny wriggling sperm, whining for admittance to the female toilets. A no-win situation, if ever he saw one. He placed a heavy hand on the banister and a leaden foot on the stair. ‘Are you right?’ he asked me gruffly, but fondly enough all the same. I nodded and followed him up.
21 Woe was general all over Ireland
‘Here Comes Everybody,’ Glynn said glumly when the four women finally joined us upstairs, having taken their sweet time. Aisling had embarked on a novel. That was the day’s big news. She distributed a partial manuscript to each of us when her turn to read came.
It was like one of her poems, only more so. I had not the slightest notion what it meant. There were over thirty characters in it, as far as I could make out. It shuttled back and forth in time through major civilisations: Hellenic, Celtic, Mycenaean and one wholly imaginary one — at least, I think it was wholly imaginary. It was written in a compulsively rhythmic Dublin street argot which was part observed, part invented. The Peamount Tuberculosis Hospital functioned as some class of portal. Sickness was a major trope. ‘It’s part one of a trilogy,’ she told us after she’d read out the first five pages. Her reading was met with silence.
When queried by Glynn, Aisling described the novel as the application of the apparatus of string theory to the traditional murder-mystery genre with a view to elucidating the chaos rife in our daily environment, from which there is no escape.