by John Boyne
“That’s not true,” I said, blushing a little, for as exciting as it sounded I found it hard to imagine that anyone would actually do such a bizarre thing.
“Of course it is,” he said. “You’re so naïve, Cyril. We’ll have to knock that out of you one day. You need a woman, that’s what you need.”
I turned away and my mind flitted to an image of Julian in our room every night, undressing for bed. The casual way he discarded his clothes, the complete lack of inhibition he showed as he stripped naked and slowly, casually, provocatively put on his pajamas while I pretended to read and tried not to make it obvious that I was watching from over the top of my book to capture another part of his body in my memory. A vision of him coming over to my bed to give me a blowie filled my mind and I struggled not to whimper in longing.
“Excuse me,” said a voice from halfway down the tearoom, and I turned to see a woman of about thirty marching toward us. Her hair was tied up on her head and she was wearing a different uniform to the one that the waitresses wore, a more professional outfit. I glanced at the metal badge pinned above her right breast that bore the words: Catherine Goggin, Manageress. “Are those pints of Guinness that you boys are drinking?”
“They are,” said Julian, barely looking up at her. His interest in girls did not extend this far up the age ladder. She might have been his great-grandmother for all the interest he had in her.
“And how old are you both?”
“Sorry,” said Julian, standing and picking up his jacket from behind the chair. “No time to chat. I have a meeting of the parliamentary party to attend. Are you right there, Cyril?”
I stood up too but the woman pressed a hand firmly down on both our shoulders, pushing us back into our seats.
“Who served you these drinks? Sure you’re only children.”
“I’ll have you know that I’m the TD for Wicklow,” said Julian, who seemed to be working his way slowly down the east coast of the country.
“And I’m Eleanor Roosevelt,” said the woman.
“So why does your name badge say Catherine Goggin?” asked Julian.
“You’re with the school party that came in this morning, aren’t you?” she asked, ignoring his question. “Where’s your teacher? You shouldn’t be wandering the corridors of Dáil Éireann alone, let alone drinking alcohol.”
Before we could answer, I saw Bridget running over to our table, her face red and flustered, and behind her in hot pursuit was the irate face of Father Squires, followed by our four award-winning classmates.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Goggin,” said Bridget quickly. “He said he was a TD.”
“And how could you possibly believe that?” asked Mrs. Goggin. “Sure would you take a look at them, aren’t they only children? Do you have no more sense than a sweeping brush? I’m away on my holidays to Amsterdam next week, Bridget; do I have to spend all my time there worrying that you’re serving alcohol to minors?”
“Get up, the pair of you,” said Father Squires, pushing his way between the two women. “Get up and shame me no more. We’ll have a conversation about this when we’re back at Belvedere, so we will.”
We stood up again, both a little embarrassed by how things had turned out, and the manageress turned on the priest furiously. “Don’t be blaming them,” she said. “Sure aren’t they just causing trouble the way any kids will? You’re the one who’s supposed to be looking after them. Letting them loose in Leinster House,” she added, shaking her head in disgust, “where the business of the nation is conducted. I don’t think their parents would be too happy to know they were down here supping pints of Guinness when they should have been learning, do you? Well, Father, do you?”
Father Squires stared at her in utter astonishment, as did we all. It’s unlikely that anyone had ever spoken to him like this since the moment the collar first went around his neck, and for his accuser to be a woman was the worst insult of all. I could hear Julian chuckling beside me and knew that he was impressed by her audacity. I was impressed myself.
“You’ll keep a civil tongue in your head, Missy,” said Father Squires, poking a finger into her left shoulder. “You’re addressing a man of the cloth, you know, not one of your boyfriends from Kehoe’s public house.”
“My boyfriends, if I had any, would surely have more sense than to let underage boys wander the corridors unsupervised,” she said, refusing to be intimidated by him. “And I won’t be poked and prodded by priests, do you hear me? Those days are long behind me. So take care not to touch me again. Now, this is my tearoom, Father, I’m in charge of it and you’re to take this pair out of here right now and leave the rest of us to get on with our work.”
Father Squires, looking as if he was about to have a series of heart attacks, a nervous breakdown and a stroke all at the same time, turned on his heel and marched away in full dudgeon. He could barely speak, the poor man, and I don’t think he did until we were safely back on the grounds of Belvedere College, when, of course, he let rip at me and Julian. As I stood to leave the tearoom, however, I glanced back at Catherine Goggin and couldn’t help but smile at her. I had never seen anyone put a priest in his place in the way that she had just done and thought the whole thing had been better than the pictures.
“Whatever punishment is coming my way,” I told her, “it was worth it just to see that.”
She stared at me for a moment before bursting out laughing.
“Go along now, you little demon,” she said, reaching forward and ruffling my hair.
“You’re in there,” whispered Julian in my ear as we left the tearoom. “And there’s nothing better than an oul’ one for teaching a young dog a few tricks.”
Max’s Right Ear
In the early autumn of 1959, Max Woodbead wrote an article in the Irish Times condemning Éamon de Valera—a man he despised—and his government for relaxing its policy on the internment without trial of suspected IRA members. End their imprisonment by all means, he wrote, his words appearing next to a particularly obnoxious photograph of him sitting in the garden of what had once been my home, wearing a three-piece suit, a luxurious white rose spilling out from his buttonhole while he studied a plate of cucumber sandwiches that lay before him, but rather than letting an assortment of misguided patriots and uneducated thugs roam the streets to cause carnage with their guns and bombs, it might be more beneficial to simply line them up against a wall and shoot them, just as our erstwhile overseers did to the leaders of the Easter Rising when they dared to challenge the divine authority of His Imperial Majesty, King George V. The piece received extensive coverage across the media and as levels of outrage increased he was invited onto Radio Éireann to defend his position. Butting heads with a rabidly Republican interviewer, he claimed that it had been a dark day for Ireland when the country had severed its ties with England. The brightest minds in Dáil Éireann, he claimed, would never be as sharp as the dimmest eggheads in Westminster. Those who were taking part in the Border Campaign he condemned as cowards and murderers and, in one of his more self-satisfied moments (and one that he had surely rehearsed in advance to ensure maximum provocation), suggested that a sustained Luftwaffe-style blitzkrieg of the border along the counties of Armagh, Tyrone and Fermanagh would put an end to the terrorist activities of the Irish people once and for all. Asked why he possessed such fervently pro-English views when he had been born in Rathmines, he almost burst into song as he pointed out that his family had been one of the most prominent in Oxford for centuries. He seemed truly proud to admit that two of his ancestors had been beheaded by Henry VIII for opposing the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and that another had been burned at the stake by Queen Mary herself—unlikely—for tearing down signs of Roman idolatry at Oxford Cathedral.
“I was the first of my family to be born in Ireland,” he said, “and this was only because my father moved here to practice law after the end of the Great War. And as the Duke of Wellington, who I think we would all agree was a magnificent man, said: Just b
ecause a man is born in a stable, this does not make him a horse.”
“Maybe not a horse, but an ass for certain,” declared Father Squires the following day in class, haranguing Julian for Max’s treasonous sentiments. “Which makes you a hinny or a mule.”
“I’ve been called worse,” said Julian, not looking in the least affronted. “The thing is, there’s no point trying to equate my father’s political opinions with my own. He has so many, you see, while I have absolutely none.”
“That’s because your head is empty.”
“Oh I don’t know,” he muttered under his breath. “There’s a few idle thoughts in there somewhere.”
“Would you, as a proud Irishman, at least condemn him for the things he said?”
“No,” replied Julian. “I don’t even know what you’re so incensed over. I never read the papers and I don’t own a radio, so I have no idea what he said to cause all of this fuss. Was it something to do with ladies being allowed to swim at the Forty Foot? He does grow enraged whenever that subject comes up.”
“Ladies being…” Father Squires stared at him in disbelief, and I wondered how long it would be before his stick appeared to make mincemeat of my friend. “This has nothing to do with ladies being allowed to swim at the Forty Foot!” he roared. “Although it’ll be a cold day in hell when that is allowed to happen. That’s nothing more than a bunch of shameless hussies getting their kicks by parading around half naked.”
“Sounds all right to me,” said Julian with a half-smile.
“Have you not been listening to a word I’ve been saying? Your father is a traitor to his own people! Do you feel no shame for that, no?”
“No, I don’t. Isn’t there something in the Bible about sons not being put to death for the sins of their fathers?”
“Don’t quote the Bible at me, you bloody West Brit brat,” said Father Squires, storming down to our table and standing over us so I could smell the sweat that followed him around like a guilty secret. “And what it says is that they shall both be put to death for their own sins.”
“That sounds a bit harsh. And I didn’t quote it anyway. I paraphrased it. And obviously got it hopelessly wrong too.”
This was the type of back-and-forth which seemed to annoy most of our classmates, turning Julian into a rather unpopular figure, but the way he challenged Father Squires delighted me. He was arrogant, certainly, and had no respect for authority but he made his pronouncements with such insouciance that I found it impossible not to be charmed by him.
So vocal was Max, however, on his condemnation of the IRA that perhaps no one should have been too surprised when, a few weeks later while leaving Dartmouth Square one morning for an appointment at the Four Courts, an attempt was made on his life. A gunman, hiding in the center of the gardens—Maude would not have been happy—fired two bullets in his direction, one lodging in the woodwork of the front door, the other skimming past the right side of his head, tearing his ear off and coming perilously close to what I suppose would be considered his brain. Max ran back inside screaming, blood pouring down the side of his face, and barricaded himself in his study until the Gardaí and the ambulance arrived. At the hospital, it became quite clear that no one had any sympathy for him whatsoever and even less interest in tracking down his intended assassin and so, when he was released, half deaf and with an inflamed red scar where his right ear used to be, he hired a bodyguard, a burly man with the look of a more muscular Charles Laughton and who went by the name of Ruairí O’Shaughnessy, a surprisingly Gaelic title for one in whose hands Max was placing his life. Wherever Julian’s father went, O’Shaughnessy went too, and they became quite a familiar pair around Inn’s Quay. Unbeknownst to any of us, however, was that, having failed to kill him for his verbal insults, the IRA had decided to try something a little more imaginative next time to punish him. A far more daring project was in the works, where Max was not the target at all.
Borstal Boy
Having enjoyed our brief escape from the clutches of Belvedere College during Julian’s short-lived career as a TD, we decided to try our luck on the outside more often. Soon we were visiting city-center cinemas for afternoon matinées or strolling through the grounds of Trinity College to gawp at the Protestants, who seemed to have been dehorned by some benevolent shearer upon admission. We were drawn to the record and clothes shops along Henry Street, despite the fact that we could afford very little, and when Julian stole a copy of Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! from a market stall, we ran all the way back to school, delirious with the exhilaration of youth.
A few weeks after our visit to the Dáil, we were walking along O’Connell Street one afternoon, having fled Parnell Square after a particularly tedious geography class, and I felt a spontaneous burst of joy that I had never quite known before. The sun was out, Julian was wearing a short-sleeved shirt that accentuated his biceps, and my pubic hair had finally kicked in. Our friendship had never been closer and hours stretched before us where we could talk and exchange confidences, excluding anyone and anything from our tiny universe that didn’t interest us. For once, the world seemed to be a place filled with possibilities.
“What shall we do today?” I asked, pausing by Nelson’s Pillar and using the shade from the pedestal to keep the sun from my eyes.
“Well, actually—hold on,” said Julian, stopping abruptly by a staircase that led beneath the street to a public urinal. “Two minutes. Call of nature.”
I waited where I was, kicking my heels against the base of the statue and looking around. To my right, I could see the General Post Office, where Max Woodbead’s nemeses, the leaders of the 1916 Rising, had exhorted Irishmen and Irishwomen, in the name of God and of the dead generations, to answer a summons to the flag and strike for their freedom.
“You’re a good-looking lad,” growled a voice from behind me and I turned to see Julian grinning madly and starting to laugh when he saw the expression on my face. “I was down in the jacks,” he said, nodding back toward the Pillar, “and this man comes up to me while I’m taking a piss and says that to me.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I forgot that’s where all the queers hang out,” he said, shuddering. “In underground lavatories waiting for innocent young boys like me to come along.”
“You’re hardly an innocent young boy,” I said, glancing back toward the staircase, wondering who or what might ascend from there to drag Julian or me down into that dark underworld.
“No, but that’s what they look for. Guess what I did?”
“What?” I asked.
“I turned around and pissed all over his trousers. He got a good look at my thing but it was worth it. It’ll be hours before his pants are dry enough for him to come back up. You should have heard the names he called me! Imagine, Cyril! A dirty queer calling me names!”
“You should have hit him,” I said.
“No need for that,” he replied, frowning. “Violence never solved anything.”
I said nothing. Whenever I tried to agree with him on subjects of this nature, he always seemed to backtrack on me, leaving me baffled as to how I had got things so wrong.
“So,” I said, and we walked on, keen to put as much distance between us and the public toilet as possible while trying not to think about how awful it must be to have to go to such places to find anything approaching affection. “What shall we do today?”
“Let’s have a think,” he said cheerfully. “Any suggestions?”
“We could go take a look at the ducks in St. Stephen’s Green,” I suggested. “If we picked up a loaf of bread, we could feed it to them.”
Julian laughed and shook his head. “We won’t be doing that,” he said.
“Well, what if we walked down toward the Ha’penny Bridge? They say that if you jump up and down on it, it starts to rock. We could frighten the life out of the old women as they’re crossing it.”
“No,” said Julian. “Not that either.”
“Well, what
then?” I said. “You suggest something.”
“Did you ever hear of the Palace Bar?” he asked, and I knew at once that he’d already planned our afternoon for us and I would have no choice but to fall in line.
“No,” I said.
“It’s just off Westmoreland Street. All the students from Trinity College go there. And the oul’ fellas because they serve the best porter. Let’s go there.”
“A pub?” I said dubiously.
“Yes, Cyril, a pub,” he replied, brushing his hair back from his forehead and grinning. “We want an adventure, don’t we? And you never know who we might run into. How much money have you got on you?”
I fished around in my pockets and pulled out my change. Although I almost never saw him, Charles was fairly generous in my allowance, fifty pence arriving in my school bank account every Monday morning without fail. A real Avery, of course, would probably have got a pound.
“Not bad,” said Julian, totting it up in his head. “I’ve got about the same. We’ve the makings of a good afternoon there if we use it sensibly.”
“They won’t serve us,” I said.
“Of course they will. We look old enough. Well, I do anyway. And we have money, which is all that these places really care about. We’ll be fine.”
“Can we go see the ducks first?” I asked.
“No, Cyril,” he said, torn between frustration and amusement. “Fuck the ducks. We’re going to the pub.”
I said nothing—it was rare that the F word was employed by any of us and when it was, it signaled absolute authority. There was simply no going against the F word.
Just before we entered the pub, Julian stopped outside a pharmacy and dug around in his pockets, pulling out a piece of paper. “Give me two minutes,” he said. “I have to pick something up.”
“What?” I asked.
“A prescription.”
“A prescription for what? Are you sick?”
“No, I’m grand. I had to see a doctor the other day, that’s all. It’s nothing serious.”