Glynn stood winded in our circle, half the man we knew him to be. He had exorcised his demon, cast out his succubus, with the terrifying complication that we had seen it. Something three-dimensional had shot from his fingers and fallen into the shrubbery. We had heard it land. I looked to the others. They too were transfixed. Glynn delivered a final jubilant scowl — he seemed to have taken pleasure in the whole macabre spectacle — before lurching down the ramp to the Buttery.
‘Fuck,’ I said when the double doors clattered shut behind him, ‘what the hell was that?’
They didn’t answer. I glanced at them again, pale blue and black-eyed in the dusk. Aisling was rotating the crystal amulet hanging from her neck, her fingers spider-spinning.
‘What the fuck just happened?’ I was worn out with petitioning them, sick of the sound of my own whine. Tiny wriggling sperm, big white ovum. Fuckhead, Antonia had called me. ‘Jesus Christ, one of you. What did Professor Glynn just throw into the bushes? Aisling? Faye? Tell me.’
Guinevere inclined her head toward Aisling. This motion was so slight and so slow that it was sinister in the twilight, a statue coming to life. What good murderesses they’d have made. They continued to ignore me, though it didn’t appear deliberate, more that they’d tuned me out, which was worse. As if, like Glynn, they were now functioning on a different plane altogether, one on which I was no longer audible, so thoroughly had I been dismissed. I could have shoved the lot of them over in frustration. Down they’d have toppled in a sprawl of limbs, a heap of porcelain dolls.
The four girls descended on the shrubbery, stooping to work the bare brown bushes like a paddy field.
‘Let’s just go,’ I urged them. ‘You’ll find nothing in the dark.’ Of course they’d find something. They’d find everything. They missed nothing, those women. ‘Jesus, come on. What’s the point? It’ll have escaped by now.’
Aisling straightened up sharply. ‘It’ll have what?’
‘Go home, Declan,’ said Guinevere. ‘You’re only impeding us.’ It was the first time she’d addressed me since our break-up. Are you happy now?
The others kept their faces averted, and Aisling lowered her eyes and returned to her work. So they’d heard. They’d discussed the break-up behind my back. Don’t know why that came as a surprise.
Their strained silence was punctured by a loud hiss. Faye stumbled out backwards from the shrubbery with a cry of pain. A small black sinewy creature darted along the base of the wall, snapping undergrowth in its wake. Aisling gasped in alarm. ‘Your arm, Faye,’ said Guinevere, ‘it’s bleeding.’
The girls crowded around to inspect the damage, what could be seen of it in the flicker of Antonia’s lighter. Must have been the feral cat, they decided from the pattern of the claw marks. They’d named it Sylvia after their favourite author. You’d see it crouched in the shadows watching the outside world in fright, if you knew the right places to look. They’d taken to leaving food out and reporting on its appetite and general appearance. I’ll bet they even made it feel special for a while, the unfortunate trembling mite. Who’d watch out for it when the course was over? That’s what I wanted to know.
Because it was so slight, barely able to defend its corner, the girls had assumed that Sylvia was female, though the cat could as easily have been a young male, I once pointed out. They didn’t hear me, so I’d said it again. Still no response. They’d moved on to more pressing matters. I should have thrown myself on my back and bawled it in frustration: ‘This wretched suffering creature on which you take pity could just as easily be a young male!’ They’d never have listened.
The group resumed their search. Faye poked around with her good hand, finding it difficult to accept that Sylvia could have done such a thing to her and making excuses for the animal. That was Faye all over. Didn’t live in the real world, was unable to assimilate the idea of badness into her outlook. Got it, Antonia finally said without inflection, without her customary air of condescension. Night had fallen by then.
The girls climbed out of the shrubbery to examine their quarry, their skirts wet and clinging to their legs. On the palm of Antonia’s outstretched hand lay a small curled trilobite. ‘It’s his hearing aid!’ I stammered with relief, ‘oh thank God for that!’ but they’d tuned me out again. Faye would have to explain it all to me later, in that patient primary-school-teacher way of hers, and I would sit by her knee, listening and nodding attentively, obedient as a Labrador, as good as gold. I hoped. Go home, Guinevere had told me, you’re only impeding us, and not one of them had contradicted her.
‘I suppose we’d better bring it back to him,’ Aisling said.
Antonia slowly tipped her palm, and Aisling caught the small salmon-pink plastic moulding in her cupped hands. ‘He’s all yours,’ Antonia informed them. ‘Go in there and tie his shoelaces. I’m washing my hands of him. Goodnight.’
She headed for the Nassau Street gate, shoulders thrown back in full Valkyrie mode. I watched her glide across the cobbles, steady as a ship on her stilettos. You could see why Glynn had fallen for her, all the same. No one could deny she had class. ‘You have to admire her sometimes,’ I conceded, turning back to the group, but they had already deserted me.
24 School for Scandal
I caught up with Antonia on the ramp to the Arts Block. She appraised me with an arched eyebrow. ‘Look who it is,’ she said without slowing her pace. Her causticity suited my frame of mind. I was in the mood for her.
‘State of Professor Glynn,’ I offered, believing it was a topic she’d rise to, but Antonia would not be drawn.
‘Glynn is not a professor. That’s an affectation he picked up in the States.’
‘But it says Professor Glynn on his door in the English Department.’
‘No it doesn’t. Go back and check.’
We emerged onto Nassau Street and stood at the kerb, side by side with nothing to say to each other. A convoy of double-decker buses trundled towards us. Antonia was standing too close to the edge. There were so many buses, all of a sudden, that it became farcical. Just as it seemed a gap in the traffic might appear, another came heaving around the corner.
‘Do you want to go for a drink?’ I eventually asked. The screech of bus brakes drowned out my voice.
‘What?’ she shouted over the racket.
‘Can I buy you a drink?’ I shouted back.
The roar of bus engines died down like a drop in the wind, and all was suddenly hushed, as hushed as it had been within the college walls, as if the street itself waited on Antonia’s answer. She appraised me with her arched eyebrow once more.
‘Certainly‚’ she replied when she was good and ready. ‘Certainly, you can buy me a drink, Declan.’ She enunciated my name with pointed scepticism as if, no more than Glynn’s title, she knew it to be a sham. There was something about her cynicism that endeared her to me then. She made herself easy to describe.
She led me to a cellar wine bar just past McGonagles, knowing full well that I could not afford such a place. I could see her smiling away to herself, enjoying my discomfort. She had style, Antonia. Style is everything, Glynn had told us, reeling off the names of the great prose stylists, urging us to devote our lives to them.
‘I’ve never been here before,’ I said after she’d ordered a bottle of Bordeaux. This information was of no interest to Antonia. She did not acknowledge it. They had seated us at a table in the corner. Her lipstick left a waxy cerise print on the rim of her wine glass. This pattern was repeated on the filter of her cigarette, a set of matching tableware. ‘Sorry,’ I said when I accidentally kicked her ankle. I glanced under the table when she registered no annoyance, and saw that it was only her handbag.