I attempted to kiss her through the chink in the door, but she averted her face. I groaned with the tender agony of it. There was a movement in the gloom behind her: I froze. She wasn’t alone in there. I craned my neck to get a look over her shoulder. Emerging from her bedroom, and craning his neck to get a look at me, was Glynn.
‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ I said.
Guinevere glanced over her shoulder and saw Glynn standing there, the two of us squaring up to each other like dogs. She gasped and turned back to me. ‘Declan, please,’ she pleaded, but what was there to say? I looked at her, then at Glynn in the shadows, then back at her, as if doing some exercise for my focal length, though it was my brain that lacked flexibility, not my eyesight. They did not belong on the same visual plane. Ariel and Caliban. ‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ I said again.
Guinevere started talking rapidly, tears rolling down her cheeks in panic. Glynn skulked at the back of the cottage in his vest and kacks, letting the girl defend him, the craven bollocks. I didn’t take my eyes off the prick for so much as one second. The prick didn’t take his eyes off me. Everything had become abstract and disconnected in my rage. Guinevere was saying his words, but in her voice. He was the ventriloquist, and she was his doll, propped up on his knee, doing his bidding. ‘He needed me,’ she was imploring me, I wanted her, so I took her. ‘He was in crisis,’ I manipulated her into bed. ‘You didn’t see the state he was in last night,’ I pulled every trick in the book, bud. ‘It’s delicate, Declan.’ Now shag off home, son, can’t you see we’re busy? Guinevere seemed to be trying to convince herself as much as anyone.
‘Stop talking!’ I shouted when I could bear it no longer. Guinevere saw what was going to happen next and slammed the door in my face before I could go in there and break the fucker’s neck for him. It was the wall I drove my fist into. I smashed it into one of her red bricks and screamed as the Shockwaves ripped through my frame. I sank down on my hunkers with the pain, clutching my wrist with my good hand, holding it to my chest like a wounded bird. I could hear them arguing inside. I like to think that Guinevere wanted to rush out to help me, but that Glynn wouldn’t hear of it. That’s what I like to think. I am entitled to my opinions. A rivulet of blood trickled down my forearm. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I started laughing. Mad, hysterical, unhinged laughing, echoing up and down the narrow cul-de-sac. It was a trick I had learned from Aisling.
Are you happy now? Guinevere had wanted to know. I pushed her letterbox open. ‘Yes,’ I screamed into the rectangular vault, ‘yes I am Yes!’
27 De Profundis
Giz cleared his sinuses when he saw my smashed-up fist. No ‘Hate tha,’ no ‘State a ya,’ no ‘Fucken spa,’ just that plunging sound from the depths of his nasal cavities, a mixture of approval and recognition. ‘Let me in,’ I said nervously, half-expecting to be turned away even there.
He did not immediately respond but stood there regarding his own knuckles, what was left of them, gnarled and stunted as a pit bull’s muzzle and pocked with tattooed melanomas. I had a long way to go. There was a long way down. Giz cleared his sinuses once more before stepping back to admit me. His stack of television sets was gone.
All day I had wandered around town on my own, all day, all day, it went on for months, not knowing what else to do with myself, not knowing where else to go, so I went nowhere. Down the windy north quays, around the courts, through the hilly cluster of streets riddling Stoneybatter; nowhere. It seemed at one point that the sun might break through — there was a concentration of lemony light in the southern sky, then a sun shaft beamed down, an escape hatch to a better world — I stopped to watch, pinning my hopes on it, placing bets with the Devil. But the clouds steamrolled in and suppressed it, a crushed rebellion. The sunrays were hauled off and shot. The street became flat and oppressive once more as the sky darkened to silver, steel, and finally iron. I started on my rounds again.
When Glynn had emerged from Guinevere’s bedroom, it had physically hurt. There’d been a sundering in my core, a tooth torn from its socket, leaving an unfamiliar hole behind, a hole which, though small, became the throbbing centre of my being. I couldn’t stop exploring the aching cavity that had opened in her wake. It commanded every drop of my attention. ‘Now you know how it feels,’ she might have said to me, were she that type of girl.
I tried to stuff a shop-bought corned-beef sandwich down my throat as if posting a letter but ended up gagging on my tears. I ducked down a side lane to hide my contorted face. Giz woz ere was sprayed on the piss-stinking, slime-glossy wall. My friend, I thought wildly, and looked around for him, grinning like a maniac at this unexpected reprieve. I was clutching at straws.
Vast swathes of the city seemed darker than usual that night, as if there’d been a power cut, though the street lights burned. The air was draining the light out of things, I decided, just as Antonia had drained the light out of me and Glynn had drained the light out of Guinevere, the filthy rotten bastard. I was pleased with my pathetic fallacy, if nothing else. I hoped to find one of them waiting outside the flat on Mountjoy Square, wanting to talk. Either of them would have done me, even Antonia. Even Glynn, for the love of God. Anything but sit alone on my soldier’s bed looking at my knees. The emptiness of the steps leading up to the front door was another blow. Giz’s light shone through his nailed-up blanket, the moth holes twinkling like constellations.
His complexion was as ashen as Antonia’s had been at dawn, except that Giz’s face was faintly luminous, like the static afterglow of a television screen, and faintly marine, the milky-grey of a bottom feeder. His eyelids were inflamed, two blisters. Would you even call him a man, I speculated as I took my usual seat and waited for him to spread out his wares, which he kept in a rusty Jacob’s Cream Crackers tin divided into cubbyholes. The tin was almost empty. His prices had been hiked.
He moved about the bedsit in an agitated state, barely five foot five. A man or a boy? Boy or a man? I had no idea how old Giz was. Anywhere between sixteen and thirty. He still bore the hallmarks of the local children — pallid, chilblained, puffy-eyed — but he increasingly resembled a pensioner. That stiff pigeon walk of his was getting stiffer. His joints were seizing up. A comfort, somehow, knowing that others were worse off than you. Pain was pounding through my mangled fist to the beat of my heart. I wished he’d hurry up.
‘Wha?’ he demanded, catching me staring.
‘Nothing.’
‘Wha?’ he demanded again.
‘Nothing,’ I asserted again.
He flexed the tendons in his neck, then shook his head to indicate he’d let it go, this once. I watched him roll a joint and wondered when he’d last washed his hands. He had started to smell like that boy in school who nobody would sit beside, that mangy boy from the bad family who had no friends. It was the rank tang of ingrained dirt. There was a cold sore on his mouth, a big crusty scab. Giz handed me the joint and a tab. It was all that was left in the tin. I gave him all that was left in my pocket. He sat into his armchair and started tinkering about with a piece of tinfoil and a lighter, looking more boy than pensioner again, with that intent frown of concentration on his face.
‘Whatcha making?’ I asked, and then, ‘Oh.’ He was rolling up his sleeve.