by John Boyne
“Get off him!” cried my mother, throwing herself on the man as Smoot emerged from the bedroom with a hurley stick, a red and white sticker affixed to it showing two towers and a ship sailing between them, and charged toward their attacker. He hadn’t put a stitch of clothes on and even in the drama of the moment my mother was shocked by the hair that covered his torso, so unlike the chests of Seán, my father or any of her brothers, and the long, still-glistening manhood that shook between his legs as he advanced on them.
The man roared as the hurley hit him in the back but it was an ineffective blow and he pushed Smoot away with such force that the younger man fell backward over the sofa and into the doorway of the bedroom beyond, where, she realized now, the boys had been lovers since the day the bus had arrived in Dublin from Cork. She had heard of such people. The boys in school made fun of them all the time. Was it any wonder, she asked herself, that Smoot had never wanted her there? It was to be their love-place, that was it. And she was the cuckoo in their nest.
“Jack!” cried my mother, as Peadar MacIntyre—for that was the man’s name—took his son by the head once more and kicked his body with such barbarous force that she could hear the sounds of ribs cracking. “Seán!” she screamed, but when the boy’s head twisted toward her his eyes were wide open and she knew that he had already departed this world for the next. Still and all, she would not allow more injury to come to him and ran back across the room, determined to pull the man away, but with her first attempt he took her by an arm and, in a quick movement, gave her a mighty kick that sent her through the open doorway and tumbling down the staircase, each step, she told me later, making her feel an inch closer to death herself.
Landing with a crash on the ground below, she lay on her back for a moment, staring up at the ceiling, gasping for breath. Inside her belly, I protested strongly at the insult and decided that my time had come, and my mother let out a ferocious scream as I broke free of the womb and began my first journey.
Pulling herself to her feet, she looked around. Another woman in her position might have opened the front door and thrown herself out onto Chatham Street, roaring for help. But not Catherine Goggin. Seán was dead, she was certain of that, but Smoot was still up there and she could hear him pleading for his life and then the sounds of violence, the screams of pain, the curses that lashed down on the boy’s head as Seán’s father attacked him too.
Crying out with every movement, she dragged herself up the first step, up another and another until she had ascended halfway. She screamed as I made my presence felt and there was something in her mind, she told me later, that said I had waited nine months, I could wait another nine minutes. She continued her climb, entering the flat with perspiration running down her face, water and blood seeping down her legs, frightened by the image of the madwoman in the mirror opposite with the bedraggled hair, split lip and torn dress. From the room beyond, Smoot’s cries were growing less pronounced as the kicks and the whips of the stick continued, and she stepped over Seán’s body, glancing quickly at the open eyes on his once-beautiful face, and had to stop herself from crying out in grief.
I’m on my way, I thought as she moved forward purposefully, looking around the room for a weapon before her eyes landed on the hurley that Smoot had dropped on the floor. Are you ready for me?
One swift swing was all it took, God love her, and Peadar MacIntyre lay knocked out. Not dead—he would live for eight more years, in fact, eventually choking on a fishbone in his local pub, the jury having set him free, finding that his crime had been committed under the extreme provocation of having a mentally disordered son—but unconscious, and my mother and I threw ourselves down on Smoot’s body, the poor lad’s face muddled with the beating, his breath disordered, close enough to death now too.
“Jack,” she cried, cradling his face in her lap and then letting out a blood-curdling shriek as everything in her being told her to push, to push now, and my head began to emerge from between her legs. “Jack, stay with me. Don’t die; do you hear me, Jack? Don’t die!”
“Kitty,” said Smoot, the word muffled as it emerged from his mouth along with a couple of broken teeth.
“And don’t fucking call me Kitty!” she roared, screaming once again as more of my body squeezed itself out into the August night.
“Kitty,” he whispered, his eyes beginning to close, and she shook him as the pain racked through her body.
“You have to live, Jack,” she cried. “You have to live!”
And then she must have passed out, for silence was restored to the room until a minute later, when I took advantage of the peace and quiet to push the rest of my tiny body onto the filthy carpet of the upstairs flat on Chatham Street in a bundle of blood and placenta and slime. I waited a few moments to gather my thoughts before opening my lungs for the first time and with an almighty roar, one that must have been heard by the men in the pub below who came running up the staircase to discover the cause of such a racket, announced to the world that I had arrived, that I was born, that I was part of it all at last.
1952 The Vulgarity of Popularity
One Little Girl in a Pale-Pink Coat
I first met Julian Woodbead when his father called to the house on Dartmouth Square to discuss ways to keep his most valuable client out of prison. Max Woodbead was a solicitor, a very good one by all accounts, with an insatiable desire to mix in the highest echelons of Dublin society and an office on Ormond Quay, close to the Four Courts. From his window, he enjoyed a view across the Liffey toward Christ Church Cathedral and liked to claim, somewhat unconvincingly, that whenever he heard the bells ring he would fall to his knees and say a prayer to the late Pope Benedict XV, who had ascended to the throne of St. Peter on that same September day in 1914 that he was born. My adoptive father had hired him after a series of misadventures concerning (but not limited to) gambling, women, fraud, tax evasion and an assault on a journalist from the Dublin Evening Mail. The Bank of Ireland, where my father held a prominent position as Director of Investments and Client Portfolios, had no particular rules about how its employees spent their time when they were not at their desks, but they took a dim view of the bad publicity that he was bringing their way. In recent months, he had been seen gambling thousands of pounds at Leopardstown Races, been photographed coming out of the Shelbourne Hotel with a prostitute at four o’clock in the morning, fined for urinating over the side of the Ha’penny Bridge while he was in his cups, and given an interview on Radio Éireann in which he said that the country’s finances would be in a better position if the Brits had shot the Minister for Finance, Seán MacEntee, after the Easter Rising, as they’d originally planned to do. He’d also been castigated for attempting to kidnap a seven-year-old boy on Grafton Street, a trumped-up charge as he had simply taken him by the hand and dragged him across to Trinity College under the impression that the frightened child, who shared my height and hair color but was unfortunately a mute, was me. An affair with an actress of some renown was suggested by the Irish Press, who made their disapproval clear by reprimanding him for “extra-marital shenanigans with a lady of the theater when his own wife, who our more literary readers might know has some small celebrity of her own, is recovering from a distressing bout of cancer of the ear canal.” The upshot was that the Department of Revenue launched a formal investigation into my father’s accounts and, to no one’s surprise, discovered that he had been cheating on his tax returns for years to the tune of more than thirty thousand pounds. Immediate suspension from the bank followed and The Man from the Revenue announced that he intended to use the full power of the judicial system to make an example of him, at which point Max Woodbead, inevitably, was called.
Of course, when I say “my father,” I don’t mean the man who handed two green pound notes to my mother outside the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in Goleen seven years earlier to soothe his conscience. No, I mean Charles Avery, who, along with his wife, Maude, opened their home to me after signing a sizable check to
the Redemptorist convent for all their help in the matter of finding a suitable child. From the start, they never pretended to be anything other than my adoptive parents and, in fact, schooled me in this detail from the time I could first understand the meaning of the words. Maude claimed that this was because she didn’t want the truth to come out at a later date and for me then to accuse her of deceit, while Charles insisted that it was because he wanted to be clear that, while he was happy to go through with the adoption for his wife’s sake, I was not a real Avery and would not be looked after financially in adulthood in the manner that a real Avery would have been.
“Think of this more as a tenancy, Cyril,” he told me—they had named me Cyril for a spaniel they’d once owned and loved—“an eighteen-year tenancy. But during that time there’s no reason why we shouldn’t all get along, is there? Although if I had a son of my own, I’d like to think he would have been taller than you. And shown a little more skill on the rugby field. But I suppose you’re not the worst. God only knows whom we might have got. Do you know, at one point there was even a suggestion that we take in an African baby?”
The relationship between Charles and Maude was cordial and business-like. They had little to do with each other most days, exchanging no more than a few cursory sentences necessary to the efficient running of the household. Charles left every morning at eight o’clock and rarely returned before midnight, when he invariably spent a minute or two on the porch, trying to fit his key into the lock and not caring if he reeked of drink or cheap perfume. They didn’t sleep in the same room or even on the same floor, nor had they ever done so since my arrival. I never once saw them hold hands, or kiss, or say that they loved each other. But for all that, they never fought. Maude’s way of dealing with Charles was to treat him like an ottoman, of no use to anyone but worth having around, while Charles showed scant interest in his wife but found her presence both reassuring and unsettling, much like Mr. Rochester must have felt toward Bertha Mason as she rattled around the attic of Thornfield Hall, a relic from his past that remained an inexorable part of his daily life.
They had no children of their own, of course. An early and vivid memory is of Maude confiding in me that there had been a little girl once, a year after she and Charles were married, but she had endured a difficult labor and not only had the child, Lucy, died, but a subsequent operation meant that she would not be able to get pregnant again.
“A blessed relief in so many ways, Cyril,” she remarked, lighting a cigarette and staring out into the fenced park at the center of Dartmouth Square, on the lookout for intruders. (She loathed non-residents appearing in the gardens, despite the fact that they were, strictly speaking, public property, and was known for rapping on the windowpanes and shooing them away like dogs.) “There is simply nothing more disgusting than the naked body of a man. All that hair and such terrible smells, because men don’t know how to wash themselves properly unless they’ve been in the army. And their secretions, which seep forth from their appendages when aroused, are repellent. You’re lucky that you will never have to endure the indignity of relations with the male member. The vagina is a much purer instrument. I feel an admiration for the vagina that I simply have never felt toward the penis.” If I recall correctly, I was around five years old when she passed this piece of wisdom on to me. Perhaps it was because both Charles and Maude spoke to me in such an adult manner, apparently forgetting (or failing to notice) that I was just a child, that my own vocabulary grew quicker than other children’s my age.
Maude had a career of her own, for she was the author of a number of literary novels, published by a small press in Dalkey. A new one appeared every few years to positive reviews but minuscule sales, something that pleased her enormously, for she considered popularity in the bookshops to be vulgar. In this endeavor, Charles was never anything but supportive and rather enjoyed introducing her as “my wife, the lady novelist Maude Avery. Never read a word of her work myself but, God bless her, she keeps on churning them out.” She wrote all day, every day, even Christmas Day, and rarely emerged from her study except to prowl around the house in a haze of cigarette smoke, looking for boxes of matches.
Why she wanted to adopt a child at all is a mystery to me, as she showed no interest whatsoever in my well-being, although she was never actively unkind or cruel. However, I couldn’t help but feel deprived of affection and once, when I came home in tears to tell her that one of my school friends, the boy who sat next to me in Latin class and with whom I often ate my lunch, had been run over and killed by a bus on Parnell Square, she simply remarked that it would be ghastly if anything like that happened to me, as they had gone to so much trouble to find me in the first place.
“You weren’t the first one, you know,” she said, lighting another cigarette and taking a long drag as she counted off the babies on her left hand. “There was a girl in Wicklow to whom we paid a sizable amount of money but when the baby was born it had a peculiar-shaped head and I simply hadn’t the energy. And then there was another in Rathmines who we took on approval for a few days but the baby just cried all the time and I couldn’t bear it so we sent her back. And then Charles said he would accept no more girls, only a boy, and so I was stuck with you, darling.”
I was never hurt by these types of remarks, for she didn’t mean them maliciously; it was simply her way of speaking and, having never known anything different, I accepted that I was just a living creature who shared a house with two adults who rarely acknowledged each other. I was fed, clothed and schooled, and to complain would have shown a level of ingratitude that probably would have baffled them both.
Only when I reached an age where I was old enough to understand fully the concept of natural and adoptive parents did I break one of our home’s golden rules and enter Maude’s study uninvited to inquire as to the identities of my real mother and father. When I located her through the miasma and managed to clear my throat enough to speak, she simply shook her head in bewilderment, as if I had asked her to tell me the distance to the nearest mile between the Jamia Mosque in Nairobi and the Todgha Gorge in Morocco.
“For heaven’s sake, Cyril,” she said, “that was seven years ago. How on earth would I recall? Your mother was a girl, I know that much.”
“And what happened to her?” I asked. “Is she alive?”
“How should I know?”
“Don’t you even remember her name?”
“It was probably Mary. Aren’t most Irish country girls called Mary?”
“So she wasn’t from Dublin?” I asked, seizing on this piece of information like a tiny nugget of gold discovered at the heart of a placer deposit.
“I really couldn’t tell you. I never met her, never communicated with her and never knew the first thing about her other than the fact that she had allowed a man to engage in carnal relations with her, resulting in a child. That child being you. Now look, Cyril, can’t you see that I’m writing? You know you’re not supposed to come in here when I’m at work. I lose my train of thought if I’m interrupted.”
I always called them Charles and Maude, never “Father” and “Mother.” This was on Charles’s insistence as I wasn’t a real Avery. It didn’t bother me particularly but I know it made other people uncomfortable and once, in school, when I referred to them thus, a priest punched me around the ears and told me off for being modern.
I faced two problems at an early age, one of which might have been the natural result of the other. I was cursed with a stutter that seemed to have a mind of its own—it would be there some days and disappear on others—and it had the ability to drive both my adoptive parents to distraction. It stayed with me until the age of seven when, on the same day that I met Julian Woodbead, it vanished forever. How these two events are connected remains a mystery to me but the damage to my confidence was already done and I found myself painfully shy, nervous of most of my classmates, with the exception of that one child who had been squashed beneath the wheels of the number 16 bus, horrified by t
he prospect of speaking in public and simply incapable of conversing with anyone lest my affliction rear its head and cause people to laugh at me. It bothered me greatly, for I was not by nature a solitary person and I longed for a friend, someone to play games with or share my secrets. Occasionally, Charles and Maude would host a dinner party where they would come together as Husband and Wife, and on such occasions I would be brought down and passed around from couple to couple like a Fabergé egg they’d purchased from a descendant of the last Russian Tsar.
“His mother was a fallen woman,” Charles liked to say. “And we, in an act of Christian charity, took him in and gave him a home. A little hunchbacked Redemptorist nun brought him to us. If you ever want a child, the nuns are the people to call, that’s what I say. They have plenty of them. I don’t know where they keep them all or how they get them in the first place but there’s never a shortage. Introduce yourself to our guests, Cyril.”
And I would look around the room, at six or seven couples dressed in the most extraordinary clothes, bedecked with jewelry, each of whom stared at me as if they expected me to sing a song, perform a dance, or pull a rabbit out of my ear. Entertain us, their expressions said. If you can’t entertain us, then what is the point of you anyway? But in my anxiety I would be unable to utter a word and I would simply look down at the ground and perhaps start crying, and then Charles would wave me away and remind the room that I wasn’t his son at all, not really.
When the scandal broke, I was seven years old and became aware of it due to the comments of my classmates, most of whose fathers worked in similar environments to Charles and who took great pleasure in telling me that he was for the high jump and would surely be jailed before the year was out.