A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  Jonas shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t stay in touch with Jason. Why, do you stay in touch with Donlan?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘How long did he get?’

  ‘Six years, if I remember right,’ I said and Jonas laughed.

  ‘Jason got twelve,’ he said. ‘Funny that, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it depends on your definition of funny,’ I replied, grateful that the food had arrived for I didn’t like the tension in this conversation. ‘So I saw you on the Late Late,’ I said, eager to change the subject.

  He smiled, pleased. ‘Did you?’

  Where had that shy, nervous teenage boy of ten years before gone, I wondered. Disappeared off to another place. Now I could sense nothing but superiority in his attitude. Pure arrogance. A need to succeed and to be seen to be succeeding. He wanted people to notice him. Why was that so important to him when it was obvious that he’d already made a good life for himself?

  ‘I did. You’ve never thought of taking to the stage, have you? You had himself in pieces.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where do you get the confidence at all? When you were a young lad you were awful shy.’

  ‘I fake it,’ he said. ‘To be honest with you, I was drunk.’

  ‘You were what?’

  ‘Well, tipsy. I’d had a couple in the Stag’s Head before going over and then there was a lot of booze in the Green Room. I got stuck in.’

  ‘And Peter O’Toole was on after you.’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘Did you get to talk to him?’

  ‘I did. Briefly.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘I don’t know. Old? He didn’t seem to know what he was doing there. He asked me for the loan of fifty quid.’

  ‘Did you give it to him?’

  ‘I did not. I’d never see it again.’

  ‘How’s the book doing anyway?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s only been out a week,’ he said. ‘We shall see.’

  I’d been walking up Grafton Street only a few days before and saw what looked like twenty posters for it in the window of Dubray Books, just across the way from HMV. Half of them were of the book jacket, half were of Jonas himself. In the poster he looked like one of those lads from the Calvin Klein ads, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, one hand in his hair, looking at the camera as if he was surprised to see it there. I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like for the writers who didn’t look like him. Whether the publishers would even let you in the door these days if you looked like a normal person.

  ‘And are you working on something new?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘This and that,’ he said, chewing thoughtfully on a piece of broccoli. ‘Hard to describe.’

  I sighed. Perhaps he didn’t like me. Perhaps he was just rude.

  ‘So, your mam,’ I said eventually.

  ‘My mam,’ he repeated, nodding.

  ‘I saw her the other day.’

  ‘I know. I was there the day after you. One of the nurses said you’d been.’

  ‘She’s not getting any better, is she?’

  He looked at me and frowned, perhaps a little surprised by my question. ‘She’s not going to get any better, Odran, you know that.’

  ‘I mean she seems to be going downhill fast. She didn’t know me at all for the first twenty minutes, then she came to and was clear as daylight. Then she asked whether Kate Bush was still out in the hallway, and if she was, would I ever get her an autograph.’

  Jonas laughed, despite himself. ‘Kate Bush?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s what she said. Maybe she’d heard her on the radio earlier.’

  ‘Probably. I don’t think Kate Bush spends much time out in the Chartwell Home, do you?’

  I didn’t bother to reply to this. I sipped my beer. I picked at my salad.

  ‘Himself outside,’ I said. ‘Is he a friend of yours?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mark, was it?’

  Jonas frowned. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Is he your – what do they call it – your partner?’

  ‘Christ, no,’ said Jonas, appalled. You’d swear I’d just accused him of dating Dana.

  ‘Well I don’t know, do I?’

  ‘He’s just a friend, that’s all. Not even that. An acquaintance, more than anything else. He’s written a novel.’

  ‘Has it done well?’

  ‘It hasn’t done anything yet. He’s looking for a publisher. He wants me to help him.’

  ‘Is it any good?’

  He shrugged. ‘I haven’t read it.’

  ‘Do you plan on reading it?’

  ‘Not if I can avoid it.’

  I nodded and ate some more of my lunch. I was irritated by his arrogance. Finally, this: ‘Did no one ever help you when you were starting out, no?’

  ‘Not a single person.’

  I turned my head and looked out of the window at the people going by, mostly people Jonas’s age, all chatting away and looking happy in their lives. It crossed my mind that my nephew, for all his success and his money, his film and his book after book after book, was far less contented than any of them.

  ‘And is there anyone special in your life?’ I asked, knowing full well that a person who spoke like that was struggling to find happiness.

  He smiled at me. ‘Do you really want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.’

  ‘No one in particular,’ he said. ‘I’m happy as I am.’

  I asked no more questions on this subject. It wasn’t that I was uncomfortable with Jonas’s homosexuality, it was just that I had no experience of it, nothing to compare it to. Was I supposed to act as though it was the same as a man and woman, or was that patronizing? And if I acted as if it was something different, was that insulting? The whole thing was a minefield. You couldn’t say anything, that was the truth of it. These days, you couldn’t leave the house without offending someone. Jonas and I had never spoken of it in any depth, but he spoke of it occasionally in interviews, grudgingly, as if he couldn’t quite understand why anyone would care who shared his bed. And in his four novels – I hadn’t read the new one yet – he’d only written about it once and that was the book that had made his name. There was a time when it felt like you couldn’t move for people reading it.

  The novel is called Spiegeltent and is set in Australia, of all places, a country that I know Jonas feels a particular affinity to. It’s a short book, the shortest of all his books, and takes place over the course of a single weekend when the central character, a young Irishman exiled there in an attempt to find work, sees an advertisement for a concert to be given by a musician he had vaguely known in Dublin some ten years before. The gig is to take place in a spiegeltent – all wood, canvas and mirrors – in Sydney’s Hyde Park a week later. He buys a ticket and in the meantime gets a message to the musician, who recalls their brief friendship, and they arrange to go out afterwards for a few drinks. A lot of the action in the book is taken up with the narrator sitting in the second row of the spiegeltent listening to the musician, staring at him, remembering traumatic events that took place in Dublin many years before, events that the musician was, through a mutual friend, distantly connected to. The narrator is gay and so, by coincidence, is the musician. Nothing has ever happened between them, although the narrator had a deep crush on him long ago, and as he sits there he is transfixed by the delicate nature of the young man’s music and his almost overwhelming beauty. The singer is rather small in stature and, despite the fact that he’s in his late twenties, his face is that of a choirboy. The narrator is lost. He feels as if every moment of his life has led him to this day. He thinks of all the difficulties he has faced since his childhood, all the dark moments that have bookmarked his life, and they appear to be addressed, one after another, by the young man’s songs. Afterwards, they find a bar, they drink beer and the narrator ha
ngs on every word the musician says. He wants to tell him that although they barely know each other, he feels a longing for mutual understanding. He is desperate to touch him. He believes that this musician, with his pale-blue trousers that don’t quite go to his trainers, his ankles that are visible as he sits on his stool, his undersized guitar in his hands as he plays his songs, is someone he is supposed to know, but he struggles to say anything, for the strength of his feelings is so overwhelming that he believes that to describe them would make him sound either trite or histrionic and would scare the musician away. He simply cannot win; he cannot say anything for fear of saying the wrong thing. Finally, another man comes over to the table with his girlfriend. They have also been at the spiegeltent. They have also heard the young musician and they insist on buying a round of drinks. The twosome becomes a foursome, although neither of the newcomers has any interest at all in the narrator. Finally the musician says that he should leave, that he has to sing again the following evening and should take care of his throat, and that he must go back to his hotel. The narrator is about to suggest that he walk him there, thinking that he might find words along the way to express how he feels, but no, the young couple, tourists both, by a terrible coincidence are staying in the same hotel as the musician and suggest that the three of them take a taxi together. Within a minute they are all gone, vanished with a suddenness that takes the narrator by surprise, and he is left alone. Later that night, the young musician sends him a text; he asks whether the narrator will come to his show the next night, but he says no, that he’s too busy, that he has to work. But this is a lie and instead he sits in his apartment and weeps. He can’t bear the physical proximity that a second evening would draw him into. But the following evening, as the concert ends, his feet take him to the spiegeltent once again and it’s there that the story takes an unexpected twist.

  Look, I’m paraphrasing. I’m doing it no justice at all. What Jonas wrote was a lot better.

  ‘Your mam,’ I said again.

  ‘My mam,’ said Jonas.

  ‘The doctors told me that things might be taking a fast turn from now on.’

  ‘She has the best care.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I see her every week, you know. Twice a week, sometimes.’

  ‘I know you do, Jonas,’ I told him. ‘I’m not criticizing. You’re a good son.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Have you heard from Aidan at all?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s grand.’

  ‘Is he still in London?’

  ‘God, no. It’s years since he was there.’

  I looked across at him in surprise. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘But where does he live if not in London?’

  Jonas hesitated and took a sip of his water. ‘He hasn’t told you?’ he asked.

  ‘Would I be asking you if he had?’

  He looked embarrassed. ‘It’s not for me to say.’

  ‘To say where he’s living?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it a state secret? Is he in the witness-protection programme?’

  ‘Odran—’

  ‘Why won’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because if he wanted you to know, then I suppose he would have told you.’

  I stared at him in disbelief. ‘But why wouldn’t he want me to know?’ I asked.

  ‘You’d have to ask him that.’

  ‘Well how can I if I don’t know where he is?’

  He shrugged and looked bored by the turn the conversation was taking.

  ‘What has Aidan got against me? Would you tell me that at least?’

  ‘You’d have to ask him that,’ he repeated.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ I said, sitting back in my chair. ‘Jonas, would you just tell me where your brother lives, for pity’s sake?’

  ‘Lillehammer,’ he said finally, relenting.

  ‘Lillehammer? In Norway?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Near your grandmother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I shook my head. ‘Well that’s the first I’ve heard of this. You talk then, the two of you?’

  ‘Of course we talk. We’re brothers.’

  ‘Well I’m his uncle and I never hear from him.’

  Jonas swallowed. ‘He’s so busy,’ he said. ‘His business has really taken off. And then there’s Marthe and the children.’

  ‘I’ve never even met them,’ I said, feeling tears spring unexpectedly to my eyes. ‘Has Hannah met them?’

  ‘Sure he doesn’t bring them over to Ireland.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He doesn’t like coming home.’

  ‘But why not?’ I asked, pushing the point.

  He shrugged. ‘Like I said, he’s very busy.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know what I ever did to him,’ I said, hearing the sorrow in my own voice. ‘I always remembered his birthday, didn’t I? I remembered both your birthdays.’

  ‘I wouldn’t take it personally, Odran,’ he said. ‘Aidan’s just not that interested in keeping up old acquaintances.’

  ‘I’m not an acquaintance,’ I said, leaning forward angrily. ‘I’m his uncle, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not worried about it. I just find it hurtful, that’s all.’

  ‘Well you’re not the only one suffering.’

  I frowned. What did that mean? Was he talking about his mother? Sure didn’t I know that Hannah suffered. And that her two sons did too, seeing the state she’d found herself in.

  ‘I could call him, I suppose,’ I said eventually.

  ‘You don’t have his number.’

  ‘You could give it to me.’

  ‘I’d have to ask him first.’

  He looked at me with something approaching contempt on his face before laughing a little. To my surprise he reached forward, picked up my Heineken, took a long drink of it, and then replaced it on the table with neither an explanation nor an apology.

  ‘I’ll ask him if you want,’ he said. ‘Whatever makes you happy.’

  At which point a song I had heard many times on the radio during the last year came over the loudspeaker radio, a calm male voice singing with very little effort but a great deal of power, and I saw Jonas’s eyes close for a moment as he put a hand to his abdomen, in the way that someone would if they had just been kicked in the stomach. I knew how he felt. I couldn’t have been more wounded had he lifted me off the chair and held me by the neck with one hand while punching me in the face with the other. What had I ever done to these two boys to make them despise me so? How had I ever hurt them?

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ I said, looking away. ‘I’ll get it off you another time.’

  Aidan.

  I remember when Hannah and Kristian first started to despair over his behaviour. He was aged around eleven at the time, a couple of years younger than boys usually go off the rails, and was causing them no end of grief with his temper tantrums and his conduct at school. There’d been an incident with another boy, a boy who had been his best friend until a couple of weeks before. They’d had some sort of altercation and Aidan had fought the lad, knocking out one of his teeth, and it had taken all of Hannah and Kristian’s efforts to appease the poor boy’s parents. And then he’d slashed the tyres on the car of one of his teachers, a priest who had been at the school for thirty years and was due for retirement a few weeks later. Apparently, the poor man had stepped down early on account of it. For this, Aidan had been suspended, and the principal said that if he didn’t mend his ways he was for the high jump.

  It was Kristian who phoned me and asked whether I might have a word with the boy and my heart had sunk at the idea of it. I liked Aidan and got along with him well enough, but the truth was that I didn’t know him very well. One of my great failings in life – and I realize this as I get older – is what a terrib
le uncle I was to those two boys. Yes, I was always kind to them and yes, as I insisted to Jonas, I had never forgotten a birthday or a Christmas present, but I had not been truly present in their lives, had never given them a reason to care for me. Despite spending seven years in a seminary with young men, despite thirty years in Terenure teaching teenage boys, I always found it difficult to make a connection with Hannah’s children, as if the fact that she had a family life when I did not was a hindrance to me somehow. I’m not proud of this; there have been many occasions when I have told myself to work harder at building a relationship with Aidan and Jonas, but then time passed, too much time passed, and the opportunities faded away. So to be asked to have a word with Aidan when he was giving trouble to his parents was something that filled me with apprehension.

  ‘I can’t talk to him any more, Odran,’ Kristian told me in despair. ‘He’s in a planet of his own half the time.’

  ‘A world of his own,’ I said; one of Kristian’s more endearing traits was to get an idiom wrong occasionally, despite all his years living in Dublin.

  ‘Yes, a world of his own. Maybe another man, his uncle, can talk sense into him.’

  I promised to try, and sat down with all three of them one afternoon a few days later, Aidan clearly there against his will, and began by asking him whether there was anything worrying him.

  ‘The threat of global thermo-nuclear war,’ he replied immediately and I laughed; I had said something similar to Mam years before when she caught me in one of my moods.

  ‘Anything other than that?’ I asked. ‘Anything on a more personal level?’

  ‘That’s not enough?’ said he. ‘The possibility of mankind’s annihilation?’

  ‘Well it’s not a cheerful thought,’ I admitted. ‘But your pal in school isn’t responsible for any of that, is he? Or your teacher?’

  Aidan shrugged and looked away. He asked Hannah whether he could have a Club Milk and she said no, that it would spoil his dinner.

  ‘Your parents are fierce worried about you,’ I said.

  He snorted and shook his head.

  ‘They are,’ I insisted.

  ‘We are,’ repeated Hannah and Kristian in unison and the boy gave a great stretch, yawning in my face.