At some point during the night, the sound of breaking glass roused me. I opened my eyes with a gasp. My light was still on. The room was empty. People were shouting, chanting. It was coming from outside. Not outside my door, but outside the building, down below on the street. It sounded like an angry mob. An angry mob, of all things, out in the dead of night baying for blood, like something from a different century. My imagination was getting carried away with itself. It was going to town. Jesus, you’re worse than Aisling, I told myself, trying to make a joke out of the whole thing. When that didn’t work, I put my hands to my ears and blocked the angry mob out with my palms.
*
Next time I opened my eyes it was daytime. Around about noon, judging by the light. I checked my watch. Gone. Sitting on Antonia’s bedside table. Fuckhead. Are you happy now? My knuckles had puffed and dried to black scabs. I couldn’t straighten my fingers.
I stood outside Giz’s door and knocked with my good hand, but not very hard, if I’m honest. He didn’t answer. It was the result I was hoping for. I headed down the stairs. My relief was short-lived. It occurred to me that Giz was dead.
I went back up to his door and knocked harder. ‘Giz,’ I called. No response. I pressed my ear to the door. Silence. I tried the handle. Locked. I put my eye to the keyhole. His armchair was directly in my line of vision, and his armchair was empty.
Daylight was a strained compound of nerves after the lurid night that was in it. I had shed a protective layer. Everything in me blinked and blenched, a colony of insects when their rock is lifted. So when I stumbled out squinting onto the street and registered in my peripheral vision the funeral wreath hanging from the front door of the house on Mountjoy Square, my initial reaction was to assume that it wasn’t actually there. It was another demon, the kind of thing Glynn saw in his cups, the kind of thing I saw in mine.
It was only when I slammed the door and heard something tinkle down the steps in my wake that I turned around to gape at the wreath. And then gaped at what had fallen out of the wreath. There by my feet, a hypodermic needle. I looked up. A star-shaped hole in Giz’s window. Evil had come to our door as we’d slept. Evil had left a calling card. I ran up the steps and plucked the card from its holder. PUSHERS OUT, it read.
*
There was no dole queue trailing out the door of the labour exchange on Gardiner Street. That was the first bad sign. The roads were deserted, just the odd car here and there, as on Christmas Day. The local shops were shuttered. A grown man with a tricolour knotted around his neck planted himself in my path and vomited down his front. I stepped around him.
A cloud as faded and discoloured as an old military uniform was about to occlude the sun. I watched it loom over the Custom House with the stealth of a cut-throat. The delirium of that last blast of sunlight before rain, the sun-shot world on the brink of condensing — Gardiner Street was fleetingly gilded with such beauty that I was overcome with sadness that it could not always be this way. The cloud dispatched its bright-yellow quarry briskly; there was no struggle. A tidal wave of shadow came racing along the pavement. My heart started to pound.
I gritted my teeth and kept going, kept going, kept staggering on regardless, with hardly a thought as to where I was off to, and in such a hurry too. The gulls were out in force, screaming their prophesies of doom as the first heavy raindrops spattered the pavement. The streets grew darker with every step I took, the city a coffin being lowered into a grave.
Very few cars on the quays either. I crossed Butt Bridge down the broken white line of the central traffic lane. The Liffey was an opaque limestone grey in the grainy light. Water that was not translucent was no longer just water, surely. That’s what ran through my mind as I hurried along. There was more to that river than it was letting on. A thunderous rain was unleashed on us then.
On the side lane connecting the quays to Poolbeg Street, I encountered a woman sitting amongst dustbins. Her dress had ridden up to her hips, and she wore no underwear. The sight of her pubic hair was a shocking obscenity. Her thighs were dappled mauve, like Glynn’s daughter. He’d have gotten a whole chapter out of the scene, but I averted my eyes. The woman tugged at the hem of her dress with fingers gone rubbery from booze or worse and shouted something after me that I didn’t catch, something lascivious, judging by the tone. She was well pleased with the remark, such as it was, and threw back her head to laugh as best she could manage.
Crowd-control barriers had been erected along College Green. Teenaged boys had shinned up the lampposts. A lost child with a plastic flag was crying. A convoy of sodden floats and pipe bands trudged past in the rain, watched by people in anoraks. Jesus Christ, St Patrick’s Day. Empty bottles and cans littered the streets. I kicked through them like autumn leaves. The gates to Trinity were shut. The walled city had raised the drawbridge. Ambulances and squad cars nudged the crowd along like cattle. There was news of a stabbing on Stephen’s Green.
I crossed back over the Liffey to present my pounding hand to the Accident and Emergency in the Mater, thinking to get a head start on the crowd. I was too late. The crowd had a head start on me. The crowd had been there since time began. The casualties already outnumbered the staff a hundred to one. A fine big country nurse directed me to take a seat alongside the rest of the city’s drunken, drenched carnage and wait for my name to be called. We had a painful night ahead, the lot of us, during which time we were more than welcome to take a look at ourselves, take a good long hard look at ourselves in the cold light of day, tufts of wilted shamrock pinned to our scruffs, worse than any dunce hat.
PART III Trinity Term, April
28 Failing better
It was my turn to read. I shuffled my sheaf of papers and cleared my throat:
‘The Professor’s forehead positively bulged with metaphors and imagery. Full to the rafters, so it was, worse than a pub on Holy Thursday. He hadn’t, of course, written a word in five years; not a publishable word, at least. Why let a minor detail like that impede you? Professor Flynn wasn’t remotely ashamed of the ludicrous figure he cut, having long ago lost sight of the fact that he was a preposterous personage. At times, it was possible to pity him. Mainly, though, it was not.
‘—Everybody hates me, he told the young girl.
‘—I don’t hate you, Professor Flynn, the young girl replied. She was beautiful beyond compare.
‘—Don’t you?
‘—No.
‘—You’re the only one. Oh, what would I do without you? Come here and sit on my knee. That’s it, good girl. Up a bit … Ahhhhh.
‘There were huffing, slobbering noises as the priapic Professor’s aged tongue explored the canal of the young girl’s ear, then he murmured her name, possibly to remind himself of it, what with his creaky memory (not getting any younger), or else as a ploy to distract the innocent creature from the sly progress of his hand, which was creeping up her thigh, groping for the leg of her drawers.
‘Genevieve panicked at the prospect of Flynn clapping eyes on her tatty grey pants, purchased by her mother many years previously in Dunnes Stores, Better value beats them all. Instead of slapping the old man’s hand away, as any sensible girl might, she yanked off her knickers altogether and kicked them out of sight under his desk, so sweet and obliging was her nature.