Free All Names Have Been Changed by Claire Kilroy Page A

Angela. My guess is that it was a gender thing. Glynn definitely looked uncomfortable. The pins appeared with increasing frequency, and in places the son was adamant they hadn’t been the day before: a scattering of them on the mantelpiece, a sprinkling in the box of tissues, a lone embroidery needle lying in ambush between the sheets of his unmade bed. Mostly, the son located the pins by sitting on them. No matter how carefully he checked the cushions before lowering his apprehensive backside, a pin would surely prick the seat of his pants until one day his arse was pierced so deeply and so deliberately that tears of confused pain sprang to his eyes.The son dropped his head into his hands and wailed. ‘Oh Mammy,’ is what he said. Dialogue was never Antonia’s forte.
    Once the tears started, there was no stopping them. The son wept until day became night became day again. His head changed colour several times (I’m paraphrasing). The pins stayed put in their pincushion after that. You had to hand it to Antonia. It was a very dramatic climax.
    Aisling read aloud a poem, the content of which I recall in no detail – it seemed to erase its own shifting nature as soon as it was spoken, a palimpsest, I suppose you would call it – but each of us, Glynn included, registered the roiling aftershock of its dark inaccessibility, its staunch brevity, its confident deployment of the word apotropaic (adj. supposedly having the power to avert an evil influence or bad luck), introducing to Aisling’s dynamic a radical element. She scared me, that girl. I think she scared herself.
    She read the poem with such gravity that we knew in our bones it was the real thing. Not that Aisling’s poem was the real thing – not one of us, if we were honest, understood a word of it – but that one day she would write poetry equalling her conviction. Her voice became progressively deeper, more incantatory, as she read, not fully emanating from her narrow chest but someplace altogether lower, smothered beneath those swathes of black clothes, as if an act of paranormal channelling were underway. She did not hold her manuscript in her hand, but instead left it on the table, her arms dangling limply by her side, her head hanging no more than a few inches from the page. You couldn’t see her face behind that blue-black curtain of hair. She could have been anyoneunder there. This was no way to give a reading. We’d all attended Glynn’s events. He had shown us how it was done.
    Aisling did not look up for a reaction when the poem was finished, just turned the page a 180-degree angle, face down, as if it were attached to the table by a hinge. It seemed that she was closing a door, shutting out what had seconds earlier rampaged squalling amongst us. Despite its impact, that page occupied practically no mass, barely impinging on the room at all. It was so innocent, in fact, so blameless and white, and attractively tactile in that way paper is, that I experienced a moment of disorientation, having glimpsed the chaos encrypted on the other side. The round silence which followed her reading was broken by a small grunt of approval from Glynn, a small surprised grunt of approval.
    Faye had brought in a short story about two little old ladies attending a piano recital in the National Concert Hall on Earlsfort Terrace. The first section detailed the pains the pair took getting dressed up beforehand, their appraisals of their reflections in the age-mottled mirrors which had once held images of their girlhood selves, the admiring glances they hoped their elegant (if dated) clothes and jewellery might attract. They separately, in their respective homes, envisaged the entrance they would make, imagined themselves in various social contexts, rehearsed the lines they might deliver upon encountering old acquaintances not seen in years. The two old ladies realised that they were nervous. Recent unspecified losses had shaken their confidence, and this trip to the