‘A happy sigh from Flynn, followed by a grunt and lurch as he parted the young girl’s knees and took aim. There was some fumbling. Yes, an extended period of fumbling. The girl waited patiently, gazing over the Professor’s shoulder at the array of trophies displayed on his bookcase. She didn’t wish to rush him. He was a great man, after all.
‘—Well now, said Professor Flynn, glancing down and clearing his throat. Would you ever look at that? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone. It’s with O’Leary in the grave. He laughed hollowly as he tucked his lad back into his brown polyester trousers. The girl smiled weakly back. It was the most excruciating moment of her life. No wait, I am wrong. The most excruciating moment of the young girl’s life wasn’t to occur for another thirty seconds, when she had to crawl under Flynn’s desk to retrieve her tattered knickers, then step back into them one leg at a time while the mighty scribbler hungrily watched.
‘Professor Flynn burst into tears again. Fourth time already that night. It was a pre-emptive strike: the young girl was the one with cause for tears, but Glynn — I mean, Flynn — made sure to get the boot in first.
‘—Boo hoo hoo, he said, then swivelled an eye at Genevieve to check that it was working. Good stuff, the job was oxo. Was there no end to his crusade for pity? Flynn inhabited a world which, through his own mismanagement, had spiralled out of control. His wife had left him, his only child despised him, and it was just a matter of time before the college fathers turfed him out on his ear. Flynn was in service to nothing but his own capricious gift, which had abandoned him. And who could blame it? His voice had been described as inimitable in the past, but to Flynn it had become uninimitable. He couldn’t stop cogging himself. The descent into self-parody was complete.’
*
Of all my Chapter Ones — and there were more than a few — this was my favourite. It was the first thing I’d written that wasn’t tainted by despair, the only few pages of the past hundred or so to have afforded me any pleasure at all. I had turned an important corner in my writing life.
Glynn raised his glasses to his artist’s eye. ‘Be the hokey,’ says he, trading on that brand of Hiberno-English that had brought him so far, but only so far. Somewhere along the line, he had gotten it into his thick skull that the Irish were more charming than other nationalities, when the best that could be said of us was that we weren’t the worst. ‘Write that with your good hand, didya Dermot?’
‘Begob, I did not. I bet it out with this one, sir!’ says I, holding up my bad hand, wrapped like a parcel of meat. I’d as much a claim on that manic bog codology as he. We sat there grinning wildly at each other, the big Wicklow head on him, and the big Mayo head on me. Odd as it sounds, I was delighted that we were all back together again, birds in a nest, snug as a gun, after the best part of a month’s break. A beautiful afternoon in April, it was, so perfect it couldn’t last.
My good cheer was inappropriate, which only served to reinforce it. My latest Chapter One hadn’t gone down too well with the ladies.
‘I find your abrupt adoption of the Continental style sheet pretentious,’ was the only comment it elicited, from Antonia, who else? ‘This business of prefacing lines of dialogue with em dashes — who on earth do you think you are? Joyce?’ The rest of them just stared at me, the female gaze. Which was like the male gaze, only more observant.
‘I like it, son,’ Glynn concluded, his glasses still perched on his forehead. ‘A terrible beauty is born. You’ve been falling the wrong side of earnest for too long.’
‘I have, right enough, Professor Glynn,’ I nodded. ‘I am in firm agreement with you there. Wait till ye see Chapter Two! No more Mister Nice Guy, what?’ I made a series of faces at him, the way we did as school children before we’d acquired vocabulary to equal our malice. My enmity towards glynn I mean Glynn outstripped my ability to express it.
He for his part grimaced back for all he was worth. ‘Oh ho, no more Mister Nice Guy, indeed!’ he winked, rolling up his sleeves. ‘Every story needs a good villain, isn’t that right, Dermot?’
I clenched my jaw and winked back. ‘That’s right, you fucking gee-bag.’
*
My notes on the workshop end at this juncture. What follows is drawn from memory and must accordingly be treated as partisan, one-sided, hopelessly lovelorn, hammered thin by anguish and pain. Ignore it, ignore every word of it — it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. I am only out for revenge, in so much as I can get it. A near-black trickle of blood shot out of Guinevere’s left nostril, fast as a darting minnow. Glynn jumped to his feet. Faye delved for a tissue. Guinevere touched her top lip in surprise, and slumped when she saw her scarlet fingertips. My chair screeched as I lunged for her. I caught her in my arms and felt like a man.
‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing,’ Guinevere insisted when she opened her eyes again. ‘Really, it’s fine,’ she kept telling us. Faye guided her to tilt back her head and pinch the bridge of her nose. Aisling wrapped her in her black coat. I sat rubbing her poor white hand. Antonia ran downstairs to brew strong tea. But Glynn, the bowsie, hadn’t jumped out of his chair to rush to her aid, but to get as far away as he was able from the blood.
‘Is she alright?’ he asked from a safe distance. Nobody answered him. We, who had hung on his every word for so long, now ignored him. That was the moment he became extraneous. There is always a price. ‘Is she alright?’ he asked again. Third-person singular. Go home, you’re only impeding us.
‘Dunno,’ I said to him. ‘Depends on what you’ve done to her.’ I was gleaming with animosity. My hurt polished me like a diamond; it changed the shape of my face. I was all sharp angles, hard edges, cutting remarks.
‘Leave it, Declan,’ Guinevere told me, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to leave it.
Antonia returned from the kitchen empty-handed. ‘The milk was off,’ she said.
‘The milk was off!’ Glynn repeated with relish, as if it were a choice metaphor indeed. He felt an epiphany coming on. Maybe he’d beat a paragraph into his red notebook that very night, or lash out a limerick at least. Seemed more likely he’d traipse home after Guinevere, and mewl and pule at her door until she took pity and let him in again. The colour had returned to her face.
Glynn resumed his seat at the head of the table and threw my chapter back at me. He had underlined every use of the word ‘seemed’ and its synonyms. ‘As if’, ‘like’, ‘appeared to’, ‘as though’. I shook my head at him in disbelief. People in glasshouses. Pots calling kettles black. I didn’t lick it off the stones. If ever there was a writer who knew how to flog a simile to death, here he sat enthroned before us. The smell of death was on his breath that day, but perhaps this is memory speaking. The smell of death was on his breath every day, but until that day, it had smelt like books. It was Aisling’s turn to read. Glynn dropped his glasses back into position like a welding visor, and waved her on.
She was five hundred pages into that Promethean novel of hers. Never did manage to understand a word of it. Couldn’t make head nor tail out of a thing she wrote. All I ever deduced from Aisling’s work was its innate superiority over anything I could have produced and her innate right to be in that workshop over me. Not an ‘as if’ or a ‘like’ in sight. Different class.
The extract Aisling read that afternoon further upset the balance in House Eight for reasons which are too elusive to quantify without the evidence once more in front of us. Unfortunately the evidence is gone. Why didn’t I retain a copy? Why didn’t I take more care? There was an alarming aura about the piece, not just in the content but also the form, its visual presence on the page, as if it were a composite of letters cut from magazines and pasted down, though it was typed, same as everyone else’s. Perhaps the first letters of every line combined to spell out a message, a cry for help. That would not surprise me in the least. We cannot say we were not warned. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.