She dried her tears and stared at the ground for some time. Those lashes of hers. So long. I wondered if they edged the objects she looked at, set things off like a picture frame. No wonder she wrote from such an elegant perspective.
‘Are you happy now?’ she asked me quietly.
When I did not reply, Guinevere turned and walked down the lane to rejoin the civilised world. She held her head high and not once did she glance over her shoulder. I watched until she had left my sight. She had the most beautiful back.
*
On I blundered across the city without her, as if it meant nothing, as if there would be no consequences, as if I wasn’t leaving tracks of blood in the snow. There is always a price. A good hour passed before it dawned on me that the scene in the lane with Guinevere conformed almost identically in spirit to one Glynn had written over a quarter of a century earlier in Prussian Blue. I laughed, but not for long. The specifics were different, but the dialogue was broadly the same: dismal, repetitive. The narrator had broken a girl’s heart because he was a stupid bastard. Then he’d gone out on the batter.
There was a time I would have attributed these uncanny parallels to Glynn’s unrivalled ability to distil the real world into prose, but that time was over. It was my behaviour that demanded a critical appraisal. I had internalised Glynn’s imaginative landscape so thoroughly that I could no longer tell where he stopped and I began. ‘You’re worse than him,’ Guinevere had said. I wasn’t even aping the big man himself — it was worse than that: I was aping characters from his novels. And Glynn’s novels never had happy endings. Everyone knew that.
I sat on my little soldier’s bed and looked at my knees, viscerally regretting the absence of a trace of Guinevere in that room now that it was too late. A pillowslip she had slept on to press to my face, a towel still carrying the faintest hint of her scent. Should have thought of that. Should have thought of a lot of things. She had requested once to see where I lived, but her request had been denied. I hadn’t wanted her to witness the room’s meanness, as if she was the sort of girl who would think less of me for it, and so I had hidden it away from her like an embarrassing parent; an embarrassing, forsaken parent. A long slash of seagull shit streaked the window, calcium white and acidic.
Jaunty and shipshape, I had decided when I first laid eyes on that room. It was one of many lies I had to tell myself. Just like Van Gogh’s sunny bedroom in Aries, I had affirmed as I’d looked around, forgetting that Van Gogh’s painting was a work of optimism, not realism. No sign in it of the chaos he daily endured. His belongings all hanging neatly on pegs, as if that would suppress it. Same amount of pegs as objects to be hung. Not so much as a patch of shadow under the bed. Not even a speck of dust. No evidence of his demons at all. Where were they hiding? Under which loose floorboard, behind what crack in the plaster? Because they were there, alright, lying in wait for him. Who was he trying to fool? Himself, I suppose, most of all. Within one year of painting that cheerful yellow room, with its sturdy little bed and pillows for two, the artist had gone and topped himself.
‘Alright Deco?’ said Giz when he answered my knock on his door. He didn’t seem in the least bit surprised to see me standing there. It was as if he’d been expecting me. ‘How’s it goin?’ he asked, ‘What’s the story?’ As if I would know. Me, who never wrote any story, me who never got past page five. Giz made sure before unhooking the security chain that I had money in my pockets this time, then he named his price.
I sat into his couch and smoked until I was juddering from side to side when I closed my eyes, though my body was still as stone. Giz sucked lighter fluid through a balled-up sock. His bedsit was as grey as a rotten lung. I found myself gasping for breath all of a sudden and clawed at the armrest in panic, but it was no good. Giz was too far gone to notice or help. ‘Are you happy now?’ she had asked before turning her back on me. Are you happy now?
23 Lowry Lynch has horse’s ears, Lowry Lynch has horse’s ears
A bell was tolling on Front Square. Graduates filed out of the Examination Hall dressed in black gowns and tasselled mortarboards. Commencements. ‘Look at them,’ Antonia scoffed. Glynn was two hours late.
‘Why are they called commencements when it’s all coming to an end?’ Faye wondered.
I had no idea either what I would do once the course was over. Only a few months left, and nothing to show for my time. Then what? Back to England? Back to the factory, empty-handed? I looked away from the window.
‘What good will it do us anyway?’ Aisling asked. ‘What use is their stupid scrap of paper? How will that secure us a job?’ It was an unexpectedly practical line of thought for Aisling. I’d never have guessed that such considerations entered her head. ‘I don’t want to end up on the dole,’ she added. Her fears were met with silence. I hoped her parents were wealthy.
It was dusk before the lord of the prose finally materialised under the Arch. Don’t know why we’d bothered waiting. A reluctance to go home, must have been. He made his way across the cobbles in our direction, roaring drunk yet still managing to keep a glad eye out for admirers. The graduates and their families had disbanded by then. Glynn was out of luck.
‘Oh, the rotten bastard!’ Antonia cried when he veered past House Eight and diverted to the Buttery. He had seen our five faces bearing down and thought the better of it. Antonia grabbed her coat and ran down the stairs, the others in close pursuit.
They had him surrounded by the time I arrived. He’d only made it as far as the side of the Dining Hall. Antonia was upbraiding him while the others stood at her side, silently lending their support. Glynn didn’t like it one bit. He didn’t appreciate being corrected by a shower of women. He growled and broke free of the arena of girls, then turned his terrible eyes on them. Red and white, they were; half mad. The girls instinctively drew back.
He panted fiercely at us through his nose, a bull working up to a charge, but then he winced sharply and tore at his ear. At first we thought a wasp had stung him. He shuddered and whimpered in an agonised paroxysm, clutching the side of his head, shambling about in a small circle, tripping over his own feet. Never had he looked more like a derelict.
The writer crumpled before our eyes, emitting a shocking moan. Aisling shook her head pleadingly, as if that would make it stop. I felt a bolt of terror that I would in good conscience describe as mortal, for Glynn, it appeared to me at that moment, had entered a realm beyond common mortal experience. Whatever afflicted him was invisible to the rest of us. There was nothing there, as far as we could see.
We formed an arc around his torment, stricken observers. No one could help him, no one knew what to do. That was the worst thing about it: we could only stare. The tears were stinging my eyes. Glynn’s palm remained clamped to his ear, trying to shut out unwanted voices. The demons. They were here.
He finally straightened up and lowered his fist, holding it out like a conjuror for the big reveal, ensuring he had our full attention. His arm trembled with the strain of clenching his fingers so tightly. Glynn threw us a grisly leer — victorious, scornful — before flinging the contents of his hand away with a force that nearly knocked him off balance. A glimpse of outstretched fingers silhouetted against the electric-blue dusk, then his hand dropped to his side.