‘Where were we?’ he asked, but nobody answered him. Nobody said a word.
22 This boy is cracking up, this boy has broke down
‘So what’s going on?’ I said to Guinevere after the workshop. It was with some difficulty that I had managed to separate her from the pack. They reluctantly agreed to go on ahead without her after she’d promised she’d be along soon. The second they rounded the corner out of sight, I steered her down the damp lane running alongside Bartley’s. She had her back against the wall. ‘What was all that about earlier?’ I demanded. ‘In the women’s toilet?’ She didn’t like my tone.
‘Nothing, Declan.’ She looked down at her arm. I saw that I was still holding it, and let go. She massaged it as if I’d hurt her. It was a quarter to five. The setting sun was shining thinly upon the tips of things, picking out the sharp edges which had sprung up around us. There was no guarantee that the fine spell would hold.
‘Why didn’t you answer me when I asked you before the workshop what was wrong?’
‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘you make it sound like I felt sick on purpose.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Okay, fine. Just, you made me look like a complete dick in front of the others, that’s all.’ Fuckhead, Antonia had called me.
She blinked. ‘Why are you being so obnoxious?’
I looked up at the sky, what was visible of it from the narrow lane, and laughed in disbelief. ‘Why am I being so obnoxious?’
She sighed as if I was wearing her out. ‘Don’t do this,’ she said quietly. She was still massaging her arm.
‘Do what?’
‘You know.’
‘No, I don’t know. Tell me. Oh wait: you never tell me anything. Sorry, I forgot.’ An oniony smell of sweat hovered on the air. I realised with a surprise that it was me.
The lane was littered with weeds and broken glass. Guinevere looked up and down the length of it in desperation, but there was nowhere for her to run, no one to appeal to for help. ‘Why are you trying to upset me?’
‘Why am I trying to upset you?’
‘Yes, why are you being like this?’
‘Why am I being like this?’ It was like some sort of foreign-language exercise in pronouns.
‘Stop it!’ She had never raised her voice to me before.
No, something inside me said, no, I will not stop. ‘Stop what?’ I asked flatly, warming to my subject. A twisted life form had pierced the forest floor, a coiled stump of fern — primitive, flowerless, beckoning. My black thoughts extended their fronds around Guinevere. Spores hung all about us on the air.
‘Listen to yourself, Declan,’ she said in wonderment, her head tilted to one side as if she were reasoning with a rational human being, one possessed of empathy and kindness.
‘No, you listen to yourself.’ An unspeakable resentfulness had overtaken me. I had never known its like.
Guinevere couldn’t seem to register what she was dealing with and persisted in treating me like a grown-up. ‘I think you should apologise to Antonia,’ she advised me.
‘I should apologise?’ This, I could hardly credit.
‘You’re the one who suggested she’d shagged Professor Glynn.’
‘So everything’s my fault now?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying. Antonia is very upset about the whole thing, and I think you should have a quiet word with her. Sort things out before the situation escalates.’
I threw back my head and laughed again. ‘Here we go.’
‘I’m glad you find this so amusing.’
‘Yeah, so am I.’
‘There’s no point in even talking to you.’
‘If you say so.’
‘You’re doing it on purpose.’
‘Doing what?’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ she cried in frustration. She said, I said, she said, I said. It went on for ever. It was dark before we knew it. People were going about their business on the street beyond. You would think it was a normal evening like any other. Guinevere bit her bottom lip. My answers were just inversions of her questions, she complained, wiping away the first of the tears. I observed her as if she were trapped in a vacuum: mouth moving, no sound, a specimen in a jar.
‘You seem to be enjoying this,’ she noted.
‘Dunno, am I?’
I was as good as lying at the bottom of a well by then, listening to the distant sounds of life going on above me. I had become a small man trapped inside a large man’s suit of armour, too short to see out the eye slits. It is difficult to explain. Yes, extremely difficult to explain. Even looking back on it, it seems terribly remote, hardly me at all in fact, as if, no more than Aisling, I had temporarily drifted away from myself, leaving the whole show behind.
‘What’s wrong, Declan?’ Guinevere implored me. ‘Has something happened? You can tell me.’
‘Dunno,’ I mumbled again.
This was less than the truth. I was not good enough for Guinevere, and she, with her remarkable powers of perception, would see through me sooner or later. From the way she was now studying me, it was evident that this process had already begun. I had never attained my heart’s desire before and had revealed myself, in the having of it, to be unworthy of it, undeserving. I had exposed myself as an essentially unsympathetic character. Cardinal sin in a novel, they tell me.
Guinevere’s protestations continued undiminished, and unheeded. At one point she pummelled my chest to get my attention, and I wondered, in my abstract, sullen way, whether it was warped of me to find those punches arousing. Didn’t matter any more, one way or the other. Talk to me, she kept insisting, as if such a thing were still possible. We had gone beyond all that. She said that I was being selfish, that I was being a selfish bastard. Who was I to disagree? The girl was shivering from head to foot. We had been standing in that dank lane for hours.
‘So that’s it then?’ she finally asked after an extended period of silence had elapsed. Though she had phrased it as a question, I deliberately interpreted it as a statement.
‘Okay,’ I shrugged, like it was fine by me. ‘If you’re sure that’s what you want.’
She sharply averted her face as if my breath reeked, which it probably did. Then she started to cry again. I kept my hands in my pockets. Her tears were not the usual picturesque variety, I noted sourly. A blast of sea smell hit my nostrils, as pungent, as evocative, as childhood. I looked about for the source but could not identify it. Where was all this fatalism coming from? We were in Glynn terrain now.
‘So here we are,’ I said, and felt for one exhilarating moment that I was over her and that there would be another Guinevere. That she was one in a sequence of extraordinary women I would love, and who would love me. I must have been in shock. I was young then and had no comprehension of the significance of proceedings, no grasp yet that such encounters were unique and unrepeatable, instead regarding all that occurred as preludes to the main event. Life was an entity due to commence at some point in the future. That’s what I used to think.
‘Here we are,’ I said again and felt that surge of liberty again. Fainter this time, I couldn’t help noticing. It was a satisfying enough moment all the same. I wasn’t confined to the muted surroundings of my own head, for once. I was living at last, sort of. Here we are, still standing, having come out the other side. I shouldn’t say we. I was speaking for myself. Didn’t ask Guinevere what was running through her mind at that juncture. Nothing good, by the looks of it.