A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  ‘I’m not sure what to do with that?’ he replied in that irritating, American manner, turning a statement into a question.

  ‘This Odran boy is a gay,’ said Ann.

  ‘It’s an adjective, not a noun,’ said Evan.

  ‘It’s a what?’ she asked, turning to look at him.

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘He’s quite open about it,’ said Ann, looking at me again. ‘Not an ounce of shame.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘And is this Odran boy in your class at school?’

  ‘God, no,’ said Evan, sneering as if this was a terrible insult. I might as well have asked whether he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

  ‘But he does go to school? He’s not a grown man?’

  ‘Gross. And yeah, of course he goes to school. He’s not a … I dunno … a delinquent or whatever. He just doesn’t go to my school. He goes to a proper school. You know, one with girls.’

  I tried to process this. I will admit, I was confused.

  ‘You don’t like your school?’ I asked him.

  ‘Of course I don’t. The boys are all Neanderthals. All they talk about is rugby, jerking off and pussy.’

  Ann gasped and I closed my eyes for a moment so as not to look at her. I might have known boys his age well, but usually, when they said things like this, their mothers weren’t sitting right next to them.

  ‘Evan, come on,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said quickly. He shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I only meant that Odran goes to a school where the focus isn’t like that, you know? Where they’re not afraid all the time.’

  ‘You think the boys in your school are afraid?’

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, Father, I think they are collectively shitting themselves.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the fact that they’re actually smarter than they let on.’

  I thought about it. ‘I don’t get you,’ I said.

  ‘The boys in my school are clever,’ he explained. ‘You know it, I know it. We’re a smart group. We’ve been well educated. We come from good homes. We’re smart enough to know that two years from now we’ll all be out of school and those boys who are the kings of the rugby pitches right now will spend the rest of their lives processing people’s mortgages or working in the same school they’re about to leave. They’re shitting themselves that their precious little lives are about to come to an end when everyone else’s, the ones who didn’t have a life in school, are about to begin.’

  I nodded. He was right. It wasn’t an original observation. I’d witnessed it many times myself.

  ‘But what has this to do with your friend Odran?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing specifically,’ he said, after a pause. ‘I mean I was just saying he goes to a good school, that’s all. You asked whether he was in my class at school. Well, he isn’t. That’s the short answer.’

  ‘He’s a gay,’ insisted Ann.

  ‘Would you stop with the a gay thing?’ said Evan.

  ‘And you’ve formed a relationship with this boy?’ I asked him, ignoring Ann.

  ‘Well, we’re not getting married or anything. But yeah. I have.’ He hesitated for a moment, as if he was uncertain about whether he wanted to say what he was thinking out loud. ‘He’s great,’ he added finally.

  ‘And you’re upset about this, Ann?’ I asked, turning to look at his mother, who was staring at the carpet with an expression on her face that mirrored the pain she was presumably feeling inside.

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you be?’

  I shrugged. ‘If you’d asked me that question ten years ago,’ I said, ‘I might have had a different answer. You know, I have a nephew who’s gay.’

  ‘Ah stop it, Father,’ she said, waving a hand in the air dismissively. ‘You do not.’

  ‘I do,’ I replied.

  ‘You do not.’

  I wasn’t sure how else to put it. ‘I do,’ I repeated. ‘Really, I do.’

  ‘Ah would you get on with yourself. You don’t have to say that to make me feel better.’

  I turned to look at Evan, who was watching me with interest. ‘I really do,’ I told him with a shrug.

  Jonas had told me that he was gay a couple of years before and I had been uncertain what response he wanted from me at the time. In retrospect, I don’t believe that I acquitted myself well in the conversation. I was embarrassed, and slightly ashamed, not just at the idea of Jonas being homosexual but at the notion of him having any sexuality at all. To me, he was still just a boy; to think of him racked with desire for another person, or being desired in turn, hurt a little when these emotions were alien to me and I found myself unwilling to engage with him on the subject. I had tried, of course. I asked him how he knew and he said that he had known since he was nine years old, that the video of a song called ‘Pray’ by Take That had set off the alarm bells. You can blame Mark Owen, he said; I didn’t know what he meant by that and didn’t want to. I did, however, ask how long he’d been sure about it and he said that two years before, he’d fallen in love for the first time with a boy he knew from college, a visiting student from Seattle to whom he was very close. They had spent all their time together and eventually he had revealed his feelings to this boy in a conversation in the other fella’s flat; it hadn’t gone well. The boy who he thought was his friend was very cruel when the truth came out, Jonas told me. So cruel, in fact, that it had set my nephew back a considerable amount. I could tell when he told the story that it still hurt and I felt an anger towards a boy who would hurt a young lad, coming to terms with his own sexuality, for no other reason than because Jonas liked him too much. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have someone tell me that they were in love with me. But if they did, I hoped that I would show kindness towards them, regardless of who they were. I could scarcely imagine a more wonderful thing to hear.

  ‘He’s never even had a girlfriend,’ said Ann, glaring across at her son.

  ‘How do you know I’ve never had a girlfriend?’

  ‘Well, I know that you’ve never brought anyone home for their tea.’

  He laughed. ‘Mum, boys my age don’t bring girls home for their tea any more. Father, did you ever have a girlfriend? When you were my age, I mean.’

  I thought about it. There was Katherine Summers, of course. Did she count? ‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘Nothing serious.’

  ‘And did you ever bring her home for her tea?’

  ‘She wasn’t really that sort of girl,’ I said, trying to imagine Katherine and my mother sitting around a table together, struggling to make conversation with each other over the pork chops, Mam discussing the parish trip to Lourdes, Katherine talking about all the things she’d like to do to Al Pacino if she could get her hands on him.

  ‘Well then,’ said Evan.

  ‘I just don’t see what you have against girls,’ said Ann.

  ‘I don’t have anything against girls,’ said Evan. ‘I have plenty of friends who are girls.’

  ‘Then you should go out with one of them.’

  ‘You go out with one of them if it’s that important to you,’ he replied. ‘I’m already going out with someone. I can’t go out with two people at the same time. I’m not that sort of boy.’

  ‘Do you see, Father?’ asked Ann, appealing to me now. ‘Do you see what I have to put up with? He has an answer for everything.’

  I nodded and none of us said anything for a few moments. I looked at Evan, whose eyes were roaming around the room, taking in the names of the books on the shelves.

  ‘How’s school going anyway?’ I asked him. ‘Do you know what you want to be when you grow up?’

  His lip curled in disdain as he brushed his hair away again. I could tell that he valued any opportunity to do that. ‘When I grow up?’ he said sarcastically.

  ‘Cut the shit, Evan,’ I said, surprising myself, and I could see Ann’s eyes open wide and Evan himself looking at me
in astonishment. ‘Or don’t you know? It’s fine if you don’t. You’re young yet.’

  ‘I have ideas,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of ideas?’

  ‘Plenty of ideas.’

  ‘Like what? Seriously, I’m interested.’

  ‘I’d like to be a theatre director,’ he said. ‘It’s probably crazy, but that’s something I’d like to do.’

  ‘When was the last time you went to the theatre?’ I asked.

  ‘Last night.’

  I smiled. Good for him. He had me there. ‘And what did you see?’

  ‘God of Carnage at the Gate. They’ve decided to take a break from their regular rotation of The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman and The Field’.

  ‘My father was in The Plough and the Stars once,’ I told him. ‘In the Abbey.’

  ‘Really?’ His eyes opened wide; I could see that he was impressed, and in my vanity this pleased me.

  ‘He played the Young Covey. He got great reviews. How was it anyway? This play that you saw?’

  ‘Ah Father,’ he said, grinning at me. ‘You have to go see it. It had your one from ER in it and your man out of Father Ted. Dougal. These two awful couples. And their lives were just empty. All they cared about was stuff and trying to impress each other by how liberal they were. It can’t be summed up by how was it? It’s, like, a work of art, you know?’

  ‘It wasn’t a trick question, Evan,’ I said. ‘I only meant did you enjoy it?’

  He shrugged. ‘I did.’

  ‘He took this Odran fella,’ said Ann.

  ‘And did he enjoy it?’

  ‘He doesn’t get theatre,’ said Evan, frowning as if he was trying to figure this out for himself. ‘He says he feels self-conscious in the silence. He prefers movies. Big action stuff, you know? Bruce Willis. Tom Cruise. All that shit.’

  ‘But did he enjoy it?’

  ‘I think he did.’

  ‘Ann,’ I said – time to cut to the chase – ‘You’re upset about this friendship? Between Evan and Odran?’

  ‘I am, Father. I’m beside myself.’

  ‘Please don’t define it as a friendship,’ said Evan, irritated now. ‘It’s not a friendship.’

  ‘You’re not friends?’

  ‘Yes, of course we’re friends. But that’s not what it is. It’s a relationship. It probably won’t last, we’re too young, but we’re not like … you know, mates or something.’

  ‘Can you put a stop to it, Father?’ asked Ann.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘And if I could, I wouldn’t.’

  She looked at me in surprise.

  ‘Ann,’ I said, smiling at her. ‘I don’t know what you want from me. Evan is sixteen years old. You are sixteen, aren’t you, Evan?’ I asked, looking at him for clarification.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So he’s friends with this boy. They went to the theatre together. They didn’t hold up the Bank of Ireland in Dundrum.’

  ‘Father, I caught them together,’ she cried, her eyes starting to fill with tears. And there she was, Mam walking into my bedroom, Katherine Summers climbing out from beneath me. The offer of the lollipop. Father Haughton being called to see me.

  Father Haughton. I felt my stomach turn at the memory of it. He was not someone I ever thought about. I had made a point of trying to forget.

  ‘Ah stop it, Ann,’ I said, my voice rising so that I was almost shouting at her. ‘Stop it now.’

  ‘Father!’

  ‘Evan, you’re a smart lad, I can see it in you. Have you thought about letting your mother meet this Odran lad one day? Going for a coffee together or something?’

  He barked out a laugh. ‘I’m not sure they’d get along.’

  ‘Well, they won’t if you don’t introduce them properly, that’s for sure. Listen to me, Evan, do you want to speak openly? Do you want to speak honestly? Do you want to, yes or no?’

  He hesitated, perhaps surprised by the rise in my temper, but finally nodded. ‘I have been speaking honestly,’ he said.

  ‘You like boys, am I right? That’s where your interests lie?’

  He looked away. He turned his face to the wall and stared at a photograph that was hanging there, taken the day before my father died. And there was Mam and Dad smiling at the camera outside Mrs Hardy’s rented chalet, while Hannah, little Cathal and I stood in front of them, big cheesy smiles on our faces.

  ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘I do, I suppose.’

  ‘Well then, Ann,’ I said. ‘You must make your peace with it.’

  A long silence ensued. I watched Ann. Her face contorted in a hundred thousand different ways. She looked at me; she turned to look at her son. It crossed my mind to wonder what hardships she and her husband had gone through in an attempt to have a child of their own, and how long it had taken them to find a child to adopt, how arduous a journey that must have been. It was instinctive to her, like it was with all these women, to fight against difference, to seek conformity, because they were terrified, terrified out of their skins what it might mean to be different, but there it was, he had said the words out loud, he could not have been clearer, and fair play to her, she responded in kind.

  ‘All right then,’ she said, surrendering, tears forming in her eyes. ‘It’s a new world, Father, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is, Ann,’ I said, reaching across to take her hand. ‘It is indeed.’

  ‘Can I ask you something, Father?’ said Evan as the pair of them left a little later.

  ‘You can.’

  ‘Is it right what I heard? Is Jonas Ramsfjeld your nephew?’

  I smiled in my vanity; how I loved the association! ‘He is,’ I said.

  ‘Wow,’ said Evan, shaking his head, suitably impressed. ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Smart,’ I said. ‘Quiet.’

  ‘Is he the only family you have?’

  ‘I have another nephew,’ I told him. ‘Aidan.’

  ‘And what’s he like?’

  ‘Angry.’

  He nodded and considered this.

  ‘Jonas Ramsfjeld is a really good writer,’ he said, casting weight on every word as if he wanted me to understand how deeply he meant it.

  ‘He is,’ I agreed.

  ‘Will you tell him I said so?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Spiegeltent is my favourite novel ever.’

  ‘Well, that might be pushing it a bit,’ I said. ‘But it is good though.’

  ‘It’s my favourite novel ever,’ he insisted. ‘Does he ever come to visit you?’

  ‘Here?’ I shook my head. ‘Not often, no. I think the presence of the church next door puts him off. But I see him a fair bit. Why do you ask?’

  ‘No reason,’ said Evan. ‘Will you tell him I said that he’s a really good writer?’

  I laughed and said that I would. So why didn’t I?

  Friday came and with it the meeting of the altar boys. Tom Cardle had been in charge of them for the two years he’d spent in this parish. In fact, he’d looked after the altar boys in all eleven parishes he’d worked in over twenty-eight years as a priest. Eleven parishes! It was unbelievable, really, when you look back. And of course when I took over from him the job landed on my shoulders.

  ‘I can’t be doing with those bloody boys,’ said Father Burton, who saw altar boys as a necessary evil of the Church, tolerating their presence on the altar but almost never speaking to any of them. ‘They’re always picking their noses or forgetting what Mass they’re supposed to be on.’ And Father Cunnane just wasn’t interested. He said he had enough to be doing without looking after a bunch of whingeing brats. So that only left me. And anyway, Archbishop Cordington had insisted that I take on the job.

  In truth, it wasn’t an onerous task. The boys – there were about twenty of them – met at the parish hall every Friday afternoon at four o’clock. They were aged between seven and twelve and were very conscious of the seniority within the group. At the start of every meeting, I would take my place at
the top of the hall and they would sit in two rows on either side of me. To my left, the most senior boy, Stephen, would sit, followed by his closest contemporary, Kevin. Between them, they would cast an eye over the younger lads, telling them to be quiet if they started chatting to each other. Both boys had recently turned twelve and I was awaiting their resignations any day now; I could see that they were growing embarrassed by their roles but were loath to let this part of their childhood go. They might have been young, but they had the sense to see that this would be the first of many instances of change in their lives. The boys sat not in order of age but in order of who had joined first. Those seated closest to me at the top of the right-hand row were the youngest, the most junior of all, the most frightened.

  There were twenty-three Masses to be organized: three a day, Monday to Saturday, and five on a Sunday. Some Masses – my early-morning ones, for example, could survive on one altar boy; Father Cunnane preferred to have two at ten o’clock so he wouldn’t have to clean up the altar after himself; every Mass on a Sunday required three. Don’t even get me started on the dramatics of Easter Week or the Christmas celebrations. I’d work my way along the line, each boy would choose the Masses he wanted, and that would be that, we’d say a prayer and go home. Job done.

  When I arrived on this particular Friday, most of the boys were already gathered outside the parish hall, huddled together under the awning to keep dry for it was fairly pouring down out of the heavens, one of the most torrential downpours that we’d had in Dublin in a long time and God knows we have a city here not renowned for its sunshine. I ran from my car, my bag held over my head to keep me dry, and took shelter with them, pulling the hall keys out of my pocket and looking around me, feeling a spring of irritation begin to bubble inside that I was to be kept waiting.

  ‘Father Yates,’ said one of the boys, Daragh, a middle-ranking lad who sat at the head of the junior row and was all ready to take his promotion to the seniors once Stephen and Kevin bit the bullet and said their goodbyes, ‘can we not go inside out of the rain?’

  ‘Sure a bit of rain never hurt anyone, Daragh,’ said I.

  ‘Father, you have the keys in your hand!’ said another boy, Carl.

  ‘Ah now,’ I replied, looking away from them all as the wind brushed the rain in on top of us.