by John Boyne
“You have my word, Mrs. Avery,” said Julian, performing a little bow at the waist that made her smile, an event almost as rare as a solar eclipse. “You write novels, don’t you?” he asked then.
“That’s right,” she said. “How did you know that?”
“My father told me. He said he hasn’t read any himself because you mostly write about women.”
“I do,” she admitted.
“Might I ask why?”
“Because the male writers never do. They don’t have the talent, you see. Or the wisdom.”
“Julian’s father is here to see Charles,” I said, keen to turn the conversation away from chairs and books. “When I discovered him downstairs, I thought he might like to come up to see my room.”
“And did you?” asked Maude, sounding astonished by the concept. “Did you want to see Cyril’s room?”
“Yes, very much so. He has a lot of space up here, doesn’t he? I envy him that. And that skylight is wonderful. Imagine being able to lie in bed at night and look up at the stars!”
“Someone died up here once, you know,” said Maude, sniffing the air, which was already filled with carcinogens from her cigarettes, as if hoping for the last olfactory vestiges of death.
“What?” I asked, appalled. “Who?” This was the first time I had heard this.
“Oh I can’t remember. Some…man, I think. Or possibly a woman. A person, shall we say. It was all such a long time ago.”
“Was it natural causes, Mrs. Avery?” asked Julian.
“No, I don’t think so. If memory serves, he, she or it was murdered. I’m not sure if the killer was ever caught. It was in all the papers at the time.” She waved her hand in the air and some ash fell on my head. “I can’t remember the details very well,” she said. “Was there a knife involved? For some reason, I have the word knife in my head.”
“A stabbing!” said Julian, rubbing his hands together in glee.
“Do you mind if I sit down, Cyril?” asked Maude, pointing at the bed.
“If you must.”
She sat and smoothed down her skirt, fishing another cigarette from her silver case. Her fingers were long and bony, the skin almost translucent. I would have only needed to look a little closer to make out the joints between the phalanges.
“Do you have a light?” she asked me, holding a fresh cigarette in my direction.
“No, of course not,” I said.
“I bet you do,” she said, turning to Julian and allowing her tongue to move slowly across her upper lip. Had I been a little older I would have realized that she was flirting with him and he was flirting right back. Which, of course, is a little disturbing in retrospect considering the fact that he was just a child and she was thirty-four by then.
“I might have some matches,” he replied, turning out the contents of his pockets onto my bedspread: a piece of string, a yo-yo, a florin, the Ace of Spades and, indeed, a match. “I knew it,” he said, smiling at her.
“Aren’t you a useful little thing?” she replied. “I should lock you up and never let you go.”
Julian struck the match off the sole of his shoe and when it lit first time I found it hard to conceal my admiration. He held it out to Maude, who leaned forward, keeping her eyes locked on his as the cigarette began to spark, and then she sat back again, her left hand poised on the mattress behind her. She continued to stare at him before turning her face toward the ceiling and blowing a great cloud of white smoke in the air, as if she was preparing to announce the election of a new Pope.
“I was writing, you see,” she declared after a moment, apropos of nothing. “I was writing my new novel and I could hear voices up here. It was simply too distracting. My train of thought derailed. And so I thought I would come up to see what all the fuss was about.”
I raised an eyebrow skeptically. It seemed unlikely to me that Maude had heard us talking from the floor below, particularly when we had scarcely been making any noise at all, but perhaps her hearing was more finely attuned than I realized, despite her now-resolved cancer of the ear canal.
“Do you enjoy being a writer, Mrs. Avery?” asked Julian.
“No, of course not,” she said. “It’s a hideous profession. Entered into by narcissists who think their pathetic little imaginations will be of interest to people they’ve never met.”
“But are you successful?”
“It depends on how you define the word success.”
“Well, do you have a lot of readers?”
“Oh no. Heaven forefend. There’s something terribly crude about a popular book, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” said Julian. “I’m afraid I don’t read very much.”
“Neither do I,” said Maude. “I can’t remember the last time I read a novel. They’re all so tedious and writers do go on at such length. Brevity is the key, if you ask me. What was the last book you read?”
“Five Have a Wonderful Time,” said Julian.
“Who wrote that?”
“Enid Blyton.”
She shook her head as if the name meant nothing to her.
“Why don’t you want people to read your books, Maude?” I asked, a question that I had never put to her before.
“For the same reason that I don’t walk into strangers’ houses and tell them how many bowel movements I’ve enjoyed since breakfast,” she said. “It’s none of their business.”
“Then why do you publish them?”
“One has to do something with them, Cyril, doesn’t one?” she said with a shrug. “Otherwise what’s the point of writing them at all?”
I frowned. This didn’t make sense to me but I didn’t want to pursue the subject. I wanted her to go back downstairs and leave Julian and me to our incipient friendship. Perhaps he’d ask to see my thing again and take his out for a second viewing.
“Your father is here to save the day, isn’t he?” asked Maude, turning to Julian again and patting the space on the bed beside her.
“I’m not sure,” said Julian, taking the hint and sitting down. I was surprised and annoyed to see him staring at her legs. Everyone has legs, I thought. What was so special about Maude’s? “Does it need saving?”
“The Man from the Revenue is after us,” she replied, her tone suggesting that she was confiding in one of her closest friends. “My husband, Cyril’s adoptive father, has not always been as diligent with his finances as he might have been and it seems that his misdemeanors have finally caught up with him. I keep a separate accountant myself, of course, to look after the tax issues with my books. Fortunately, as I sell so few I don’t have to pay anything. It’s a blessing in some ways. As it happens, I give my accountant more than I give The Man from the Revenue. Has he been to your house at all?”
“Who?” asked Julian.
“The Man from the Revenue. What do you suppose he looks like?”
He frowned, uncertain what she meant. I thought about it too and despite my youth I felt sure that there were many men employed by the Department of Finance, and possibly even the occasional woman.
“Wouldn’t there be a group of them?” I asked. “Each of whom looks after different cases?”
“Oh no,” said Maude, shaking her head. “No, as far as I know there’s only one. Busy fellow, I imagine. Anyway, the point is your father is here to keep my husband out of jail, isn’t he? I’m not saying a spell inside wouldn’t do Charles the world of good but I’d be obliged to visit, for form’s sake if nothing else, and I don’t think I could do that. I imagine they’re rather unpleasant places, prisons. And I don’t think you can smoke in there.”
“I think you can,” I said. “Don’t prisoners use cigarettes as currency?”
“And to fend off potential attacks by homosexuals,” said Julian.
“Well, quite,” agreed Maude, who didn’t seem in the least shocked by Julian’s choice of words. “But I don’t think Charles need worry too much about that, do you? His best days are behind him.”
; “Homosexuals in prison aren’t picky, Mrs. Avery,” said Julian. “They’ll take whatever they can get.”
“No, but they’re not blind either.”
“What’s a homosexual?” I asked.
“A man who’s afraid of women,” said Maude.
“Every man is afraid of women as far as I can see,” said Julian, displaying an understanding of the universe far beyond his years.
“That’s true,” she said. “But only because most men are not as smart as women and yet they continue to hold all the power. They fear a change of the world order.”
“Is Charles going to jail?” I asked, and even though I had no great affection for the man the idea made me uneasy.
“That’s up to Julian’s father,” said Maude. “On how good he is at his job.”
“I don’t know much about my father and your husband’s business,” said Julian. “He only brought me with him today because I set fire to a curtain last week and I’m not allowed to be in the house on my own anymore.”
“Why did you do that?”
“It was an accident.”
“Oh.” She seemed satisfied by this response and stood up now, pressing the cigarette out on my bedside table, leaving a scorch mark in the wood that would never disappear. Glancing around she seemed astonished by the very existence of the room and I wondered where she thought I’d been sleeping for the past seven years. “So this is where you hide away, Cyril, is it?” she asked dreamily. “I often wondered.” She turned and pointed at the bed. “And I suppose this is where you sleep.”
“It is,” I admitted.
“Unless it’s ornamental,” said Julian. “Like your mother’s chair.”
Maude smiled at both of us and made her way toward the door. “Do try to keep it down, boys, if you can. I intend to return to my writing now. I believe the train is reapproaching the station. I might get a few hundred words down if I’m lucky.”
And with that, to my great relief, she left us alone.
“What a peculiar lady,” remarked Julian, taking his shoes and socks off now and, for no explicable reason, jumping up and down on my bed. I looked at his feet and noticed how neatly trimmed his toenails were. “My mother’s nothing like yours.”
“She’s my adoptive mother,” I pointed out.
“Oh yes. Did you ever meet your real mother?”
“No.”
“Do you think your adoptive mother is secretly your real mother?”
“No,” I said. “What sense would that make?”
“How about your adoptive father then?”
“No,” I repeated. “Definitely not.”
He reached over and took Maude’s discarded cigarette from the table and drew noisily on the filter, pulling a face as he held it dangerously close to the curtain. Now that I knew he had form when it came to burning draperies, I watched him warily.
“Do you think your father is going to jail?” he asked me.
“My adoptive father,” I said. “And I don’t know. I suppose he might do. I don’t know much about what’s going on except that he’s in a spot of bother. That’s how he refers to it anyway.”
“I was in jail once,” said Julian casually, falling down on the bed now and stretching out as if he owned the place. His shirt had come loose from his trousers, revealing his navel and stomach, and I stared at them, rather fascinated by his pale skin.
“You were not,” I said.
“I was,” he said. “I swear.”
“When? What did you do?”
“Not as a prisoner, of course.”
“Oh,” I said, laughing. “I thought that’s what you meant.”
“No, that would be ridiculous. I went with my father. He was representing a man who murdered his wife and he brought me with him to the ’Joy.”
My eyes opened wide now in fascination. I had a peculiar obsession at that age with murder stories and a visit to the ’Joy, the colloquial term for Mountjoy Prison, was a common threat that teachers used to admonish us. Our every misdeed, from forgetting our homework to yawning in class, resulted in the promise that we were likely to end our days there at the end of a hangman’s noose, despite the fact that capital punishment wasn’t actually legal in Ireland anymore.
“What was it like?” I asked.
“It smelled of toilets,” he said, grinning, and I giggled in appreciation. “And I had to sit in the corner of a cell when they brought the man in and my father started asking him questions and making notes and saying that he needed to clarify a few things so he could explain them to the man’s barrister, and the man asked does it matter that my wife was a dirty slut who put it about with every Tom, Dick and Harry in Ballyfermot, and my father told him that they would be doing everything they could to impugn the victim’s character, as there was a good chance that a jury would forgive a man a murder if the victim was a whore.”
I gasped. I’d never heard such words spoken aloud before and they filled me with horror and excitement. I could have sat there all afternoon listening to Julian, so great an impression was he making on me, and would have asked manymore questions about his experience at the prison only at that moment the door opened again and a tall man with ludicrously bushy eyebrows poked his head inside.
“We’re going,” said the man, and Julian jumped up immediately. “Why are you not wearing your shoes or socks?”
“I was trampolining on Cyril’s bed.”
“Who’s Cyril?”
“I’m Cyril,” I said, and the man looked me up and down as if I was a piece of furniture he was considering acquiring.
“Oh, you’re the charity case,” he said, sounding uninterested. I didn’t have any answer to this and by the time I thought of something clever to say they had both left the room and were making their way downstairs.
A Great Love Affair
The question of how Charles and Maude met, fell in love and got married was one that fascinated me throughout my childhood. Two people who could not have been more ill-suited to each other’s company had somehow managed to find each other and sustain something resembling a relationship while apparently feeling no interest or affection for the other whatsoever. Had it always been that way, I wondered? Had there ever been a time when they looked at each other and felt desire, respect or love? Was there a moment when they realized that this was the person they wanted to be with over all others? And, if not, why on earth had they committed to a shared life? It was a question that I asked each of them at different times during our acquaintance and the answers I received could not have been more different:
Charles:
“I was twenty-six years old when I met Maude and there wasn’t any part of me that was looking for either a girlfriend or a wife. I’d been down that road before and the whole thing had proved insufferable. You probably don’t know this, Cyril, but I was married when I was only twenty-two and widowed a couple of years later. Oh, you did know? Well, there are all sorts of rumors going around about how Emily died but let me make one thing very clear: I did not murder her. And no charges were ever brought to suggest that I did, despite the best efforts of a certain Sergeant Henry O’Flynn of Pearse Street Garda Station. There was never a shred of evidence to suggest anything untoward took place but the engines that power Dublin are lubricated by exactly this kind of irresponsible tittle-tattle and a man’s reputation can be destroyed overnight if you’re not willing to fight back. The truth is, Emily was a lovely girl, very personable if you like that sort of thing, but she was also my first girlfriend, the girl to whom I lost my virginity, and no man with any sense should marry the girl to whom he loses his virginity. It’s like learning to drive in some clapped-out old banger and then holding on to it for the rest of your life when you’ve developed the skill to handle a BMW in rush-hour traffic on a busy Autobahn. A few months after the wedding, I realized that I couldn’t possibly be satisfied with one woman for the rest of my life and started to cast my net a little wider. Look at me, Cyril; I’m a ridiculously good-lookin
g man now, so you can only imagine what I looked like in my twenties. Women fell over themselves to get to me. And I was generous enough to let them approach. But Emily caught wind of my extra-marital shenanigans and completely overreacted, threatening to call the parish priest in, as if that was something that would concern me, and I said, Darling, take a lover if you want, it makes no difference to me. If you need cock, there’s plenty of it out there. Big ones, small ones, perfectly formed ones, misshapen ones. Bent ones, curved ones, straight ones. Young men are basically walking erections and any one of them would be happy to stick it in someone as beautiful as you. Try a teenager if you like. They’d be only too delighted and you know they could go five or six times a night without even stopping to take a breath. I meant this as a compliment but, for whatever reason, that’s not how she took it and she fell into a spiral of recrimination and depression. Maybe she had always suffered some sort of psychological affliction, so many women do, but within months she was taking medication to stop her going completely doolally. And then one day she swallowed a few too many pills just before she took a bath and down she went under the water, bubble bubble, goodnight and good luck to all. And, yes, it’s true that I inherited a lot of money from her, which is why all that gossip began in the first place, but I assure you that I had nothing to do with what happened that day and her death saddened me a great deal. I didn’t have sex for almost two weeks afterward out of respect for her memory. You see, here’s the thing, Cyril, and if I’d had a real son I would have ensured that he understood this: monogamy is simply not the natural state for man, and when I say man I mean man or woman. It just doesn’t make sense to manacle yourself sexually to the same person for fifty or sixty years when your relationship with that person can be so much happier if you give each other the freedom to enter and be entered by people of the opposite sex whom you find attractive. A marriage should be about friendship and companionship, not about sex. I mean what man in his right mind wants to have sex with his own wife? However, despite all that, when I laid eyes on your adoptive mother for the first time I knew immediately that I wanted her to be the second Mrs. Avery. She was standing in the lingerie section of Switzer’s department store when I saw her, running her hand along a railing of bras and panties, a cigarette hanging perilously close to the silk, and I walked up to her and asked her whether she needed any help choosing the right pair. My God, that woman had perfect tits! She still does. Have you ever taken a good look at your adoptive mother’s tits, Cyril? No? Don’t look so embarrassed; it’s the most natural thing in the world. We suckle them as babies and long to suckle them as adults. She slapped my face when I said that but that slap remains one of the most erotic moments of my life. I grabbed her hand and kissed the underside of her wrist. It smelled of Chanel No. 5 and Marie-Rose sauce. I suppose she’d just come from lunch and as you know she’s always been partial to a prawn cocktail. I told her that if she didn’t come to the Gresham Hotel with me that afternoon for a glass of champagne I would throw myself into the Liffey and she said, Drown for all I care and that she had no intention of spending a Wednesday afternoon getting drunk in a hotel bar with a strange man. And yet somehow I talked her around and we ended up taking a taxi to O’Connell Street and drinking not one but six bottles of champagne over the course of not one but six hours. Can you believe it? We were practically paralytic by the time we were finished. But not so paralytic that we couldn’t take a room in the hotel and make love for forty-eight hours with scarcely a break. My God, that woman did things to me that no woman before or since has ever done. Until you’ve been fellated by your adoptive mother, Cyril, you will not know what a quality blowjob really is. We were married within months. But once again time took its toll. Maude became more obsessed with her writing and I with my career. I grew bored of her body and I daresay she grew bored of mine. But whereas I sought comfort elsewhere it seemed that she had no interest in taking a lover and because of that she’s remained celibate for years now, which probably accounts for her moods. It’s true, we’re not the ideal couple but I loved her once and she loved me and somewhere inside us both lingers the shadow of two twenty-something sexual beings drinking Veuve Clicquot in the Gresham, laughing our backsides off and wondering whether we could ask the receptionist for a bedroom key or whether the police or the Archbishop of Dublin might be called if we did.”