‘I see,’ said Glynn, leafing through her manuscript, pausing to read paragraphs at random. He was frowning. ‘And you’ve been working on this all year, have you?’
‘Em, no,’ said Aisling. ‘I started it this week.
‘This week?’
‘Yes. Monday.’
Glynn flicked to the end of the manuscript. Two hundred and sixteen pages in length. In three days. Two days, actually — Aisling had been with us since half eleven. He raised his glasses to his artist’s eye to peer at the girl. How stark she looked in the vivid company of the others, a black and white photograph in a roomful of colour, a figure from a past century transplanted to the modern age. ‘Have you been sleeping, Aisling?’ Glynn asked with a kindness we didn’t know he had in him. Aisling smiled shyly and shrugged, as if she wasn’t really sure. Her eyes were dark and glossy.
Glynn invited her to read a little more, though I wished he hadn’t. I was rapidly losing my bearings, such as they were. How had the girl managed to write so much in two days? It wasn’t physically possible. Syncope, the novel was called. Even the title was a reproof. I had no idea what it meant. Had she made that word up too? I glanced at the faces of the others for guidance. They gave nothing away, as usual.
Aisling leafed through her manuscript and settled on a passage about halfway through. We opened our copies to the designated page as if it were a hymnbook. This extract was entirely different in character to the novel’s opening, consisting solely of dialogue. Dialogue was my terrain. It was the only thing I was good at, the only thing the girls ever praised me for. Even Antonia had assented, sort of. (‘Have you considered trying your hand at a screenplay instead?’ was how she phrased it, meaning she thought my descriptive prose was crap.) Turned out Aisling had a natural flair for voices which far outshone mine. This was a gift her poetry had kept firmly hidden under a bushel.
Her switch from poetry was both abrupt and wholesale. Her first prose endeavour did not even have the safety net of being a short story. It was a shot at a novel and therefore possessed all the latent threat of a novel, all the danger, all the potential. A trilogy at that. Aisling had dived off at the deep end. I couldn’t get a handle on the words in front of me. The piece was so good that I was unable to quantify it. All I discerned from hearing her read was that I was no good, I should give up.
She read in her customary way, to which I was unable to grow accustomed: head lolling broken-necked over the page, arms dangling lamely by her side — what in the name of Jesus was wrong with her? The curtain of hair, blue-black as a magpie’s wing, concealed her face and the source of her voice, which was ventriloquial at the best of times but now seemed to be emanating a whole yard shy of her. I got it into my head that it was no longer Aisling under there. Were I to part that heavy curtain, I did not know who — or what — would look back at me.
Aisling’s second reading was met with another silence from us and an impressed nod from Glynn. The fictional space should never be cosy, he had recently warned us. Glynn didn’t rate Dickens for the same reason he didn’t rate Mozart. Not enough doubt. Didn’t reflect the world. That’s why he responded so positively to Aisling’s piece that day: it was doubt incarnate.
‘Well so,’ he said, sitting back in his chair to indicate that the discussion was now open to the table. He waited for our reaction. So did Aisling. But what could we say? A meteor had crashed through the ceiling, and we stared at it smouldering away on the desk, wondering where the fuck it had come from. And what the fuck it was. This was not matter as it existed on Earth. There we were, the rest of us, plodding around trying to hone our similes, conjugate our adverbs, and Aisling had just invented — well, what? What had Aisling just invented? My biro rolled across the desk and fell through the gap that had appeared between our tables. I made no attempt to retrieve it.
‘Page ninety-six,’ Antonia eventually said, seeing as no one else was prepared to get the ball rolling. ‘I have a problem with your use of meta-. You’ve used it as a prefix. Meta- is not a prefix. It’s a combining form. A combining form is a linguistic element used in combination with another element to form a word, e.g., bio- equals life, — graphy equals writing, hence “biography”. Neither element is a complete word in itself.’ As openers went, even I could have done better.
‘Okay,’ said Aisling. She didn’t know what point was being made either, still less care. Antonia waited for her to pencil her comment into the margin, but Aisling didn’t seem to grasp what was required of her and looked about the table benignly, as though our faces constituted pleasant if unremarkable scenery. She may as well have been drifting down a river in a punt. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep.
‘You should have used para-,’ Antonia said. ‘Para- is a prefix, so you can append it to a complete word. Hence, in this case, it would be “paranotional”. Which isn’t a word either, obviously, but it’s grammatically more accurate than “metanotional”, as you’ve used.’ Antonia had been drinking so much black coffee lately that her teeth were marled brown.
‘Thank you, Antonia,’ Aisling said but still didn’t reach for the pencil. We stared at it, lying there like a loaded pistol, willing Aisling to pick it up and put us out of our misery.
Faye swallowed tensely, the room so quiet we heard her ligaments wrench. My eyes made the sound of the drip of a tap every time I blinked. I tried to stop blinking. No good. Guinevere kept her head down, and Glynn, his mouth shut. It was entirely his fault, whether he admitted it or not. He had single-handedly engineered this crisis. You stupid bitch, he had spat at Antonia, introducing a different element, bursting open the cabin door, then storming off and leaving her to brazen it out on her own, humiliated in front of all of us.
Though it was possible he no longer recalled the incident, Antonia would never forget it. There had been something of the jack-in-the-box about her ever since. Our every word was construed as potentially antagonistic, an insinuation of her damaged status, another twist of the handle. Did you shag Professor Glynn? Wallop. Fuckhead, she had called me. The spring-loaded mechanism was getting tauter by the second. The leering head would explode across the table. It was only a question of time.
‘Did you listen to a word I said?’ Antonia demanded.
Aisling scratched at the powdery eczema coating the back of her hands. Her knuckles were bleeding, the blood pink and watery. Words tumbled into her as into a black hole when she was in that frame of mind. They met with no resistance, just kept falling, never to connect with their target. There was no point in even saying them. I don’t know why Antonia couldn’t see that. The two of them were caught in some sort of inversely proportionate closed energy system. The tenser Antonia got, the more languid Aisling became. She was sinking into her chair, melting into a pool of faded black fabric. Antonia shook her head. ‘There’s a name for people like you, Aisling,’ she said carefully. She indicated the manuscript. ‘People who write this sort of thing, dismissing the rules, abandoning the signposts.’
‘And what might that be?’ Aisling asked. ‘What’s the name for people like me?’ So she had been listening all along.
Antonia flicked her blonde hair. ‘Icarus,’ she said. ‘You’re sailing too close to the sun. You are going to crash and burn like Icarus.’
Nothing. No reaction at all, not a flicker. The black hole had been reinstated. Antonia sat there looking at Aisling. Aisling sat there looking back. The rest of us held our breath and waited. Something bad was about to happen, as Faye would say, or Aisling, or Guinevere, or even myself. We were all primed for catastrophe by then. We could all see it coming. By leaving Antonia wounded, by cornering her, Glynn had forced her to this, to attack Aisling, who could least sustain it, who was sailing too close to the sun. What was it those poison-pen letters had warned him? There is always a price. But when had Glynn ever listened?