Faye chose that class to depart from her short, sweet elegiac meditations on human frailty to instead read a chapter from a novel about a battered wife. We sat there in horror listening to graphic descriptions of a drunken farmer kicking the living daylights out of his missus as she lay cowering on the bathroom floor. You know her husband beats her, don’t you?
‘She felt internal tissue tear,’ Faye read, ‘and muscle wall rupture as Kiernan’s boot pounded repeatedly into her soft belly. She closed her eyes and prayed to Our Lady. He never had much stamina. It would be over soon.’
Antonia was staring across the table at me with a tight-lipped smile that was no smile at all. Looking around the room while somebody read was transgressive, like opening your eyes during the Sacrament in Mass. ‘When he was finished, Kiernan turned away and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand,’ Faye continued, ‘thirsty from his labours. He would beg forgiveness in the morning, his wife knew, but morning was a long way off yet.’
Antonia’s expression was turning violent. The whites of her eyes had begun to bulge. She was the wild woman screaming abuse from the top of the stairs again. I looked down at Faye’s manuscript. One of us was trembling. ‘His wife’s blood had spoiled the new bathroom mat. In her confusion, she couldn’t think where to hide it. Kiernan would go into another fury when he saw it.’ The words were swimming. The words had come to life.
‘Fucking hell,’ whispered Aisling when Faye’s reading was complete.
Antonia tossed her blonde hair. ‘Here, Declan,’ she said, reaching across. ‘You left this behind on my bedside table when you stayed the night.’ She deposited my watch on the desk in front of me, where it glinted in the sunlight. That was when my hatred for Antonia peaked. You stupid bitch. Are you happy now?
‘Oh ho!’ said Glynn, rubbing his palms together in glee. ‘Oh now! Bedside table, is it! Janey Mack. Look at little Pope Innocent here. Now that calls for a pint.’
He stood up and indicated with a swimming stroke, the over-arm crawl, that the lot of us were to follow. He threw the workshop door open, and Aisling gasped, but I had seen it too this time, the demon that had been hanging like a bat behind the door all along. A blink of an eye, and it was gone.
29 The Importance of Being Earnest
The other three went on ahead with him to the Buttery. Aisling and I hung back by the dismal patch of shrubbery into which he’d tossed his hearing aid. We sucked down a cigarette each without speaking, fast as we were able, as if it were a race. What was wrong with me? What was wrong with her? The seagulls had started to scream.
‘I feel sick, Declan,’ she muttered.
I nodded. Indeed she looked sick. ‘We’d better go in, I suppose.’
‘Oh Jesus!’ she cried, and covered her mouth. I whipped around to see what had startled her this time. Sylvia. Their feral cat glared up at us reproachfully, a tiny, underweight slip of jet black and lollipop pink. It was unlike her to be out in broad daylight like this. It was unlike her to stand motionless.
At first I thought she was snarling at us. Her lip was curled back to reveal an expanse of livid pink, but when she turned to flee into the shrubbery — wait, it did not have the agility of flight, I cannot call it that — when she turned to saunter off, her gait uncharacteristically nonchalant, practically a swagger, I saw that the pink was not snarling lip but exposed flesh. The animal’s muzzle had been partially torn off. Her teeth were set needle-thin into her gums. She was panting. No, she was dying.
Aisling dropped her cigarette and took off into the shrubbery on her hands and knees, her widow’s weeds snagging on every twig and thorn, like there was a chance in hell of catching poor Sylvia, let alone saving her. ‘There’s nothing you can do for her,’ I kept telling her bent form, but I may as well have been talking to the wall.
It was a good quarter of an hour before Aisling gave up the hunt. God knows what crack in the earth Sylvia had slipped into to die. I reassured Aisling that she’d done her best, but the girl would not be comforted. ‘Did you see her?’ she kept asking me, her gaze unable to settle. It flitted about the bushes like a butterfly. ‘Declan, did you actually see her?’
‘Of course I saw her.’ I wasn’t sure I understood the point of the question. The cat had been standing right there in front of us, after all, half-savaged, panting, dying. How could you not see her?
Aisling bit at her cuticles. ‘We mustn’t tell Faye,’ she made me promise, then we smoked another cigarette each to seal the oath.
Glynn was well on by the time we joined them in the Buttery. It was barely five o’clock. He was shit-faced, rat-arsed, locked out of his tree. This is a stupid language. It was immediately evident that something wasn’t right. More wrong than usual, I should say. The others were exchanging meaningful glances over his head — there’d obviously been an incident in our absence. ‘Oh, here they are at last, Professor!’ Faye announced with forced gaiety, trying to jolly the fucker along, as if he were already enrolled in the nursing home. Glynn’s skin was the colour of an eyeball. His eyeball was the colour of skin. The glisten of dribble down his chin was new. In his paw was a pint which he clasped like a sceptre, the court of slobbering Glynn, king of porter. ‘Where the fuck have you two been until now?’ Antonia hissed under her breath.
‘Look who it is‚’ Glynn murmured blackly as we took our seats. He reached across the table and plucked a leaf from Aisling’s hair with a card-trick flourish, then turned to take me in, shaking his head. ‘At it again, you dirty little bollocks. You’re an awful man altogether, so you are.’
Aisling was wearing the manic grin she used to mask her profound self-consciousness, or to poorly mask it, rather. ‘We were smoking, Professor,’ she said, as if she had to explain herself to the likes of him.
‘Can’t a man have a drink?’ Glynn bellowed in protest, as if one of us had tried to stop him. As if any of us would have dared embark on such a course of action. The thought hadn’t entered our minds. It is possible that Glynn was dropping a hint — prompting us with one of his rhetorical devices to attempt to stop him drinking, seeing as he had long since gone beyond attempting to stop himself. Instead, Aisling went to the bar. What a disappointment we must have been to him.
Glynn watched Guinevere over the cream disc of the head of his pint, then caught me watching him over the cream disc of the head of my pint. He raised his sceptre in salute. ‘Playboy of the Western World, isn’t that right Dermot!’ He elbowed Faye in the ribs. ‘Get this one into bed and it’s a royal flush!’ His face twinkled, his gums sparkled, his eyes kindled, his brow darkened. I bridled and bristled, nettled and rankled, then drinkled and drankled some more.
Glynn coughed fleshily until it seemed his rotting lungs would come shooting out of his chest and land wetly on the table, still gasping, unable to bear it in there a minute longer. ‘Here, Professor,’ Antonia said, and dealt the old fuck a good sound clap on the back, that bit too forceful to be benevolent. He hocked up a mighty phlegm and gobbed it into the waiting lap of his hanky. It burst out with the ripe pop of a wine bottle being uncorked.