Up Glynn reared onto his hind legs. We too jumped to our feet. Then what? Then nothing. The five of us just stood around the table staring at him in alarm, waiting for instructions. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked, and we shuffled out of his way, biddable as sheep.
‘Go after him,’ Faye said in panic, ‘Go after him. We can’t leave him alone in that state.’
Glynn ploughed through the mill of students to the exit. Difficult, keeping up with him. It was quiet as a church out on the quad after the clamour of the Buttery. A large moon was rising over Botany Bay, the colour of the head of a pint. It seemed to possess no third dimension but was instead wafer thin, a communion host.
We were barely a few steps into the darkness when Aisling collapsed. I turned around to see her in a whimpering heap on the ground, a small whorl of trembling black fabric. Two tyre tracks of mascara scored her face as if something had mown her down. She gulped convulsively, sheer terror in her eyes, and pointed at the corner. ‘Look!’ she cried. ‘It’s here!’
Faye and Guinevere tried to pick her up, but she wouldn’t let them. ‘Look at it!’ she kept shrieking, thrusting her finger at the corner, but the corner was empty. There was nothing there. ‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ Antonia was chanting in the background, over and over like an unanswered phone. Glynn turned around and saw that he had lost his audience. We, like his gift, had abandoned him.
‘You,’ he said sharply.
I turned my head. ‘What?’
He muttered something under his breath, deliberately inaudible to force me to approach. He lured me around the corner and out of sight. ‘What?’ I said again.
‘That one. Your one.’
‘Guinevere?’
‘Yes, her.’ He laughed. ‘To think I thought she’d be one of those girls who look better with their clothes on than off.’
That did it. I took a run at him. He went down easy, not a bother. Nothing to it at all. I’d have straight out punched him only for my bad fist, so I shouldered him instead, and down the great writer went, face first, rigid, a statue toppling from its plinth, first slowly, then quickly, making a meaty, gristly sound upon impact with the cobbles.
He started laughing again once he got his wind back. I swung a good kick at his ribs. My foot connected not with bone but a dreary mass of fat. It was a disgusting sensation. I kicked him again to rid myself of it. He grunted. I didn’t feel any better. And I didn’t feel any worse. I hated the fucker, hated him. I hope he is reading these words.
‘State of you,’ I pronounced in lofty judgement over the writer’s bent back and hawked a gullier just shy of his face.
He stopped laughing at that and raised his head to regard me, a smile of sorts smeared across his face. It was the hapless oafish grin of a simpleton — Glynn’s front tooth had shattered on a cobble. A quivering string of snot-clotted blood dangled from his nostril, elongating and contracting with the rhythm of his breath. ‘State of you,’ I said again, but he didn’t retaliate, just nodded in what for all the world looked to be agreement, then lowered his head onto the smooth cobbles again and closed his eyes to rest. I think that’s all he wanted. Another good reason to wallow in self-pity. Or confirmation that he was a prick. I no longer cared. It was nothing to me. By the time we passed that way again, maybe half an hour later, helping Aisling who was doing her best to walk to her parents’ car — still doing her best, in spite of everything, God be good to her — Glynn was already gone, having sought cover in some dark corner to lick his wounds, as any animal might.
30 Ní bheidh ár leithéid ann arís
You’ll never see the like of us again
This is the order in which I said goodbye to them:
Aisling was the first.
She was gone before we knew it. Gone before she knew it either. St Pat’s psychiatric hospital wasn’t half as intimidating an institution as you might expect, and the VHI covered it, her mother told me, adding that I was so kind to visit, that all of us had been so kind. Aisling had been given a room of her own once they took her off the suicide ward, where she had been kept for just two nights. In the scale of things, this was very good news, apparently. Her wing was filled with tranquillised women in slippers and dressing gowns, some still carrying their handbags about. They bore the muted, slightly sheepish demeanour of drinkers in an early house. ‘You should see the anorexics upstairs,’ Aisling confided, enunciating her words with a slow deliberateness that was neither characteristic nor necessary. ‘Mother of God.’
Antonia had spent a whole summer on that same ward two years previously, also being treated for clinical depression, which is where they got her started on exploring her creativity, painting at first, or ‘daubing’ as she called it, since she showed no aptitude. The writing suited her better. Though this information was offered with the best of intentions, I don’t see how Aisling could possibly have taken heart from it. Antonia was far from cured. Nor could I fathom how two individuals enduring such diverse symptoms could both be diagnosed with the same condition. But then, I wasn’t a doctor. Maybe Aisling wasn’t telling us the full story regarding what had gone wrong with her. Maybe she hadn’t been told the full story either.
It goes without saying that we barely knew her without the stark make-up, hardly recognised her in colour. We saw the few spots she’d been trying to conceal all year. They weren’t so bad, after all that, nowhere near as bad as I’d imagined. You’d scarcely notice them at all, really, but there was no right way of telling her, so I didn’t.
She was dressed in a pair of pink flannel pyjamas printed with teddy bears, a small cross-legged bundle on the bed, overcome with shyness. I felt like I’d come to babysit. Already she was changing, fading. She would not be herself much longer. The hospital would cure her of being Aisling. I missed her then, a crippling pang, though she was still right there beside me, sort of.
I gave her the Walkman bought from Giz in the end, and a Bowie compilation. The Ziggy years, not the Eno stuff, to be on the safe side. The girl had enough on her plate. She had told us once, in the early days before any of us really knew one another, that she didn’t believe anything bad could happen to you while you were listening to David Bowie. I dismissed the statement as foolish at the time, but the bad things she’d been referring to took place in her head, so her theory made sense, when you thought about it.
Her face lit up. ‘Guess what?’
‘What?’
‘Professor Glynn came in to see me today.’ A diffident trace of pride in her voice.
‘Really? That was decent of him.’
‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘He showed up with a bunch of flowers and a black eye.’ She nodded at her bedside locker. Amongst the Get Well Soon cards was a vase of white roses.
‘A black eye?’
She nodded. ‘And a broken tooth.’
I was surprised when she started to snigger. Surprised and relieved. A flash of her old self. Not gone yet, so. Not yet. Crippling, as I say.
He never saw his attackers. That’s the story he put about. At least four of them had set upon him from behind and kicked the tooth right out of his head. He’d gotten the better of them in the end, overpowering them with a left hook followed up by a sharp right, but that’s why he hadn’t been there to help when she’d collapsed, he wanted Aisling to know. He’d since made a speedy recovery and was right as rain, he had assured her bravely.