A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  ‘He was crying,’ I said, feeling that I might start myself at any moment. ‘I thought it might cheer him up.’

  ‘Did you offer him the ice-cream to entice him out of the store?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Sure I only said it to him when we were outside.’

  ‘And where were you taking him?’

  ‘He said his mother had gone up Wicklow Street so I thought we could take a look for her. I saw one of your colleagues up ahead. I was going to leave him with a Garda.’

  ‘But you didn’t. You held on to him.’

  ‘We hadn’t got there yet! And then I heard his mother coming out of Brown Thomas, running towards us. Please, Garda, I need to use the bathroom. I must be allowed.’

  He made a few more notes in his pad and told me to wait where I was, as if there was any possibility of me leaving. He left me sitting there alone for the guts of an hour, writhing in agony, my bladder feeling as if it was going to explode inside me. When he came back in, I was seated in the corner of the cell, my head in my hands, weeping.

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ he said angrily before leaning out towards the corridor. ‘Joey, get a mop and bucket, will you. The suspect’s pissed himself.’

  ‘Are you happy now?’ I asked, looking up at him, my humiliation complete. ‘Are you satisfied with what you’ve made me do?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up and sit in that chair there,’ he said, pointing at the chair I’d been sat on before moving to the corner. My trousers were soaking and after his colleague came in to dry the puddle on the floor he disappeared again for a moment before returning with a pair of blue tracksuit bottoms with a white stripe running down the side. ‘Put them on,’ he said.

  I took my trousers off, utterly shamed, and did as I was told. It didn’t help much as most of the damage was on my underwear. After that, he took down all my personal information and said that he would be in touch with me later, that he needed to interview the mother and the boy. He told me not to even think of leaving Dublin without contacting him and I wondered whether they would be taking my passport off me.

  As I left Pearse Street Garda station, the lad behind the counter looked up and hissed something under his breath.

  ‘Paedo’.

  ‘What was that?’ I asked, spinning around, furious and upset. This was the second time today that I had been so abused. First the boys on the Luas and now a Garda, who was supposed to be there to protect me, not to call me names when I’d been wrongly arrested and left without any facilities until I’d had no choice but to wet myself. ‘What was that you said to me?’

  He looked up, all innocent, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I said nothing,’ he lied.

  Thankfully, I received the call the following morning, shortly after ten o’clock Mass.

  ‘Mr Yates?’ said a bored voice on the other end of the phone and I knew immediately who it was.

  ‘Father Yates,’ I replied.

  ‘Right, yeah, whatever, I have some news for you.’ No stating of his name. Not a word of a greeting. Was this the way that they were trained down there at Templemore? ‘We’ve spoken with the boy and with his mother and we won’t be pursuing any charges against you at this time. The boy has confirmed your story and apparently the mother believes him.’ He gave a short, rather bitter laugh and I could tell that although Kyle’s mother might have had faith in her son, he didn’t.

  ‘You said at this time,’ I replied, trying to keep the relieved tone out of my voice; I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of hearing how difficult this had been for me. ‘Does that mean you might return to it at a later date?’

  There was a long pause. I wondered whether the Garda was trying to find a way to keep me stewing. Finally he sighed. ‘The case is over,’ he said. ‘We won’t be pursuing it any further. You might think twice before you try picking up little boys you find in department stores. OK, Father?’ he added, spitting out the word like sour milk.

  But there was nothing to be gained by looking for further trouble or antagonizing him. He held all the power. And I held none.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  I hung up and went into the kitchen, filled the kettle and turned it on for a cup of tea, aware all the time that my hand was shaking badly. A moment later, I turned the kettle off again and poured myself a small brandy, then moved into my study, where I lifted a set of rosary beads, given to me in Rome thirty-three years earlier by the Patriarch of Venice, and held them tightly in my hands. It was early but I needed that drink and the sensation of it flowing down my throat and warming me from the inside was a settling one. I was grateful for it.

  I sat down and before I knew what was happening I found myself in tears. Not for myself, I don’t think, nor for the horror of the previous twenty-four hours. But for how things had changed. There was a time when a priest was trusted, when you would bring a lost boy to the curate’s house, not to the Garda station. Now you couldn’t talk to a child without getting strange looks. You couldn’t run an altar-boy meeting without a parent present to make sure you didn’t start to fiddle with the little lads. And you couldn’t help a child who was upset and lost without everyone assuming that you were trying to abduct him and spitting the word paedophile in your face.

  You bastards, I thought to myself, thinking of those men who had ruined this life for me. The rosary beads in my hands snapped, the beads scattering everywhere, some under my chair, some beneath my desk, others rolling slowly across the floor. I stared at them. I felt no interest in picking them up.

  CHAPTER NINE

  1978

  I ARRIVED IN Italy at the start of 1978. I had never left Ireland nor travelled on a plane before and the excitement of both was intense. The passport had to be ordered – Mam dug out my birth certificate and brought it into Molesworth Street, standing in line for the guts of five hours before her turn came and making sure to tell the girl behind the counter why I needed it – and when it arrived I read every word of it as if it was a great piece of literature.

  That I should have been chosen from all the students in my year at Clonliffe College to undertake my final year of studies in Rome came as a surprise to me. Traditionally, one or two boys from each year were selected, but conventional wisdom had it that Kevin Samuels – ‘the Pope’ – would be offered the place. Or perhaps the Kerry lad, Seamus Wells, who had always been a great favourite of the priests and was a talented athlete as well as an accomplished scholar, which always stood well with the high-ups. But no, it was me. Yes, I had received a First with Distinction in my Philosophy degree at UCD and had performed consistently in my seminary exams – of which there were an extraordinary number – but I hadn’t allowed myself to think that I had a chance. I had an aptitude for languages though, having mastered Latin, French, Italian and a little German, and perhaps that was what swung it. Poor Kevin Samuels never got over the shock and didn’t even have the good grace to congratulate me. Curiously, the next time I heard from him was fourteen years later, when, to my astonishment, I received a letter from him asking whether I would officiate at his wedding to a girl he had met while hitch-hiking across America. This was a couple of years after he’d renounced his vows, of course. But that’s another story.

  ‘God only knows who they’ll give me now,’ complained Tom on the morning I left as he sat on his bed and watched me pack my belongings in the same suitcase I had unpacked six years earlier. We had stayed as cell-mates through all that time and had got to know each other as well as only those thrust into such close proximity – seminarians, astronauts or prisoners – can. ‘Some gobshite, probably.’

  ‘They’ll leave you on your own,’ I told him. ‘Sure there’s no one to put in here, is there?’

  ‘I suppose not. I’m going to miss you, Odran.’

  ‘We’re nearly finished anyway. Only a year to go.’

  ‘Still and all.’

  The truth was that I didn’t think I would miss him particularly. I was twenty-three years old by now. I had be
en living in the seminary since just after my seventeenth birthday and, as contented as I’d been there, an adventure was ahead of me; I had no intention of wasting my time worrying about who was or wasn’t going to be sharing a room with Tom Cardle in his final year. He’d changed over the course of our time at Clonliffe. He was no longer the angry, frustrated teenage boy that he had been when we first arrived. He had become resigned to his lot, and if he was not entirely happy about becoming a priest, at least he seemed to have made his peace with it. I’d stopped asking him why, if he was so miserable, he didn’t just leave, for he always gave the same answer: that his father would kill him if he did, and the beating that he had received after running away five years previously was proof enough of that.

  Looking back, I wonder where his courage was. Why did he not stand up to his father more? And why did the Spiritual Director at Clonliffe not recognize the frustration building inside him and take steps to make peace within the Cardle family while helping to build a different life, a life away from the priesthood, for a boy so patently unsuited to it? That was what the man was there for, after all.

  Tom could never talk about his father without becoming angry. His hands would twist into fists and once or twice when I engaged him on the subject he became so incensed that I thought he was going to make himself ill. He had a temper on him and talk of his family would only incite his fury.

  We had a physical altercation only once, when I punched him on the nose, sending him toppling back to his bed with blood pouring down his face. It was in our second year and I had just confided in him the story of my summer in Wexford in 1964.

  ‘Lucky you,’ he said. ‘I wish my father had killed himself.’

  Punch.

  In fairness to him, he apologized afterwards. It was a thoughtless remark, unworthy of him, but it remained with me. The tone of voice he’d used. The fact that he really meant it.

  Another line I remember: Tom remarking to me that the one good thing about Clonliffe was that he could sleep through the night. He said that from the age of nine to the day he left Wexford, he was either woken after midnight by his father or he woke himself, in anticipation of the man coming through the door.

  ‘What was he doing there?’ I asked him and he turned away.

  ‘Ah, Odran,’ was all he said before going outside and disappearing off to wherever he took himself when he was feeling low.

  ‘Sure we’ll see each other again, Tom,’ I told him as I left Clonliffe for the last time. ‘And just think, when we do we’ll be priests at last.’

  ‘Oh happy day,’ he said, smiling a little as he shook my hand, the closest we would ever come to any physical display of affection.

  Mam and Hannah came to Dublin Airport to see me off and said they’d stay in the viewing lounge to watch the plane depart. I’d been to JWT at the top of Dawson Street a few weeks earlier with the money Canon Robson had given me for my ticket and had even bought myself a pair of sunglasses in Switzer’s, for I heard that it was sunny in Rome the whole year round. When they saw me coming in wearing my cassock they rolled the red carpet out and gave me a discount.

  ‘Do you think you’ll get to meet the Pope?’ Mam asked me and I told her that I doubted it but I would certainly see him when he gave his weekly blessing on a Sunday morning in St Peter’s Square or at the regular Wednesday audiences. And I’d surely attend some of his Masses and hear his homilies.

  ‘But he’s hardly going to be found wandering down the streets in the evening in search of a bowlful of spaghetti, is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Will you have to eat Italian food all the time?’ she asked.

  ‘I will, of course.’

  ‘What about your stomach?’

  ‘What about it?’

  She pulled a face. ‘I’d have more respect for mine,’ she said. ‘You can’t trust foreign food. But look, son, take a photo if you see him.’

  ‘If I see who?’

  ‘The Pope!’

  ‘I couldn’t, Mam,’ I said. ‘Not in a church.’

  ‘No one will know. Send me back the roll of film and I’ll get it developed. There’s a shop I know on Talbot Street that says they can get them done within two weeks or there’s no charge. I’ll get a second set and send them on to you.’

  I said that I would do my best and kissed them both goodbye. Hannah was twenty by now and had been with the Bank of Ireland on College Green for two years already. It was good enough money, she told me, but she didn’t want to end up there for life. Mam said that it didn’t matter where she worked, for one day she’d be married and starting a family of her own and her husband would never allow her to have a career if he had anything about him at all.

  ‘You could come visit me,’ I told my sister, feeling for the first time a sense of apprehension at what lay ahead, the possibility of loneliness.

  ‘We will,’ said Mam. ‘On your special day.’ One of the great advantages of a final year in Rome was that you were ordained by the Pope himself in St Peter’s. ‘But write, Odran, son. Write every week. And don’t forget the photos.’

  I wore the uniform of the seminarian on the plane and because of this, the stewardesses invited me to board first, along with the children and the infirm, and I was given a seat at the front. At Fiumicino, I was met by Monsignor Sorley, who had been head of the Collegio Irlandese, the Pontifical Irish College in Rome, for more than twenty years. The information I had been given was that I was to be taken directly to the college, shown my room and given the timetable for my classes, which would not, Canon Robson had informed me, be all that different from the classes I had studied in Dublin; they would simply be undertaken in Italian. And in a sunnier climate, he added with a smile. And rather than shepherd’s pie or chops and potatoes for my dinner, I would be eating pizza, spaghetti bolognese and lasagne.

  The plan, however, had changed and Monsignor Sorley told me that he was taking me to a café instead, for he wanted to sound me out about something before we went to the college. I wondered what was wrong, whether I had already done something to disgrace myself. I had drunk two cans of Harp on the plane, such was my level of excitement; had this something to do with it? Perhaps I was to be sent back to Clonliffe and Kevin Samuels was already on the next plane headed towards the Eternal City.

  ‘We hear great reports of you from Canon Robson,’ he said as we sat outside a café on the Via dei Santi Quattro, close to the college itself but with a narrow view of the Colosseum at the end of the street, its tumbling stonework and narrow entryways incredibly close, the noise of gladiators, lions, terrified Christians and bloodthirsty Romans ringing in my ears. I remembered my Robert Graves and wanted to run towards it, charge into the centre of its history, open my arms wide and proclaim that I had arrived here to meet my destiny. ‘He tells me you’re the cream of the crop. There’s high hopes for you, Odran.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Are you an ambitious lad?’

  I thought about it and shook my head. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘And yet here you are,’ he smiled, opening both hands before me. ‘Whose dead body did you have to crawl over to get chosen?’

  I sat back, surprised by his choice of words. ‘Believe me,’ I told him, ‘it was as big a surprise to me as it was to everyone else. We all thought it would be the Pope.’

  ‘The Pope?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said quickly, flushing. ‘Just a lad in the seminary. He had it all up here.’ I tapped my forehead. ‘We thought it would be him.’

  ‘Would you be willing to take on a challenge, do you think?’ he asked, leaning forward and slurping down an espresso.

  ‘A challenge?’

  ‘Something that requires brains, reliability and a great deal of discretion.’

  I hesitated; I felt I was being led down a road that I might regret walking upon. But what else could I say but ‘Of course, Monsignor.’

  ‘Good man. But look, before I tell you what it is, you must understand that if you don’t feel suited
to it, you can always say no. And we’ll find someone else. Canon Robson says you’re the man for the job, but you might not want it and no one will think less of you if you don’t.’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘A position has come up,’ he said, leaning forward and lowering his voice. ‘A job, of sorts. It shouldn’t interfere with your studies, and if it does then it will be taken off you. Every year a seminarian from a different college is assigned to the Vatican to perform certain crucial functions for a twelve-month period. It’s a few hours out of your day, nothing more than that. Seven days a week, though. There are no days off. You won’t be able to take any holidays either.’

  ‘I’m happy to undertake any work that you assign to me, Monsignor,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a different nationality every year,’ he explained. ‘1976, there was this awful Icelandic fella in the job. Nose in the air, he had. Last year, there was a lovely little Indian lad. Now it’s our turn. It’s alphabetical, you see. The only thing is, you’ll be sleeping there instead of at our place so you’ll miss out on the day-to-day life of the College. They’ll give you a room. It’s not much of a room, to be honest. More a mattress in an alcove. Can you handle that?’

  I stared at him. ‘A mattress in an alcove, Monsignor?’ I asked.

  ‘It sounds worse than it is.’ He shrugged and thought about this for a moment before shaking his head. ‘Actually, it doesn’t. It sounds exactly like what it is. And you’ll have to trek across to us every day on a bus for your classes and then trek back again at night. Which will take a bit of time. Are you up for it, Odran?’

  ‘I am, Monsignor,’ I said. ‘But what is it? What will be expected of me?’

  He smiled. ‘Well that’s the thing,’ he said. ‘Don’t fall off your seat now.’

  I did sleep in the Irish College that night. The Monsignor brought me down the road to that great white mansion, where I had a bath and a night’s rest, and the following morning drove me across Rome and along the banks of the Tiber, entering Vatican City by the Via della Conciliazione, my first view of St Peter’s Square reducing me to silence.