by John Boyne
I tried not to laugh. It didn’t seem like her standard at all. “I don’t know what she knew or didn’t know,” I said.
There was a tap on the door, a young Garda looked inside and the sergeant excused himself, leaving Charles and me alone together.
“So,” he said, breaking the silence after a minute or two. “How have you been anyway?”
“Grand,” I said.
“And school is going well?”
“Yes.”
“Work is hell. I’m in there all day and half of the night. Did I tell you that I’m getting married again?”
“No,” I said, surprised. “When?”
“Next week, actually. To a very nice girl named Angela Manningtree. A chest out to here and legs that go all the way down to the floor. Twenty-six years old, works in the civil service, Department of Education, or does until the wedding anyway. Quite intelligent too, which, actually, I rather like in a woman. You must meet her sometime.”
“Will I be invited to the wedding?” I asked.
“Oh no,” he said, shaking his head. “It will be quite a small affair. Just friends and family. But I’ll make sure to introduce you to her the next time you’re on school holidays. I’m not quite sure what Angela’s actual relationship to you will be. She won’t be your stepmother or your adoptive stepmother. It’s a mystery. I might consult someone in the legal profession for the actual term. Max is the best lawyer I know but I suppose now wouldn’t be the right time. You have a cut above your eye, by the way. Were you aware of that?”
“I was, yes.”
“Did one of the kidnappers do that to you as you battled valiantly to save your friend from their clutches?”
“No,” I said. “An old woman hit me with her umbrella.”
“Of course she did.”
The door opened again and Sergeant Cunnane came back in, flicking through some pages that he held in his hand.
“Cyril,” he said. “Did Julian have a paramour apart from this Bridget girl?”
“A what?” I asked.
“A girlfriend.”
“No,” I said. “Not that I know of anyway.”
“The thing is, we’ve discovered a number of letters in your room, addressed to Julian. They’re quite…suggestive in their way. Erotic, you know? Dirty stuff. About the way this girl feels about him and the things she wants to do to him. But the problem is they’re unsigned.”
I stared at the table and tried to think of anything that would stop my face from bursting into flames. “I don’t know anything about them,” I said.
“I tell you what,” he said. “If Mrs. Cunnane had half the imagination that this girl has, I’d be taking early retirement.”
Both he and Charles burst out laughing at this and I looked down at my shoes, praying that the interview would come to an end soon.
“Anyway, this all looks harmless enough,” he said. “It probably has nothing to do with the kidnapping. Still, we have to follow up every lead.” He turned the pages and read some more, his lips moving as his eyes flickered across the words and finally he frowned when he reached something he didn’t understand.
“What does that mean, do you think?” he asked, showing the letter to Charles and pointing something out, and my adoptive father whispered something in his ear. “Christ alive,” said the sergeant, shaking his head in disbelief. “I never heard of such a thing. What type of a woman would do something like that?”
“The very best type,” said Charles.
“Mrs. Cunnane certainly wouldn’t but then she’s from Roscommon. Well, whoever this lassie is she wants to do it to Julian Woodbead.”
“Ah to be young again,” said Charles with a sigh.
“Can I go now?” I asked.
“You can,” said Sergeant Cunnane, gathering his papers. “I’ll be back in touch if I have anymore questions. And don’t worry, young Cyril, we’re doing everything we can to find your friend.”
I left the room and looked up and down the hallway for Bridget and Mary-Margaret but they were nowhere to be seen and so I waited for Charles, who seemed surprised to see me still standing there, and we walked out onto Pearse Street together.
“Well, goodbye,” he said, shaking my hand. “Until next time!”
“Have a good wedding,” I told him.
“Very kind of you! And I hope they find your friend. I feel for Max, really I do. If I’d had a son and the IRA had kidnapped him, I’d be desperately upset. Goodbye for now, Cyril.”
“Goodbye, Charles.”
And with that I turned right and made my way across the road and over O’Connell Street Bridge, back in the direction of Belvedere College, where, I felt certain, further punishment would await me.
Ordinary Decent Sins
Having issued instructions as to where the £100,000 was to be left, the kidnappers signaled their disappointment at not receiving it by sending the little toe from Julian’s left foot to the house on Dartmouth Square the following Tuesday. In an unnecessarily cruel gesture, they addressed the package to his younger sister Alice, who, upon opening the blood-soaked wrapping paper, probably ran screaming from the house with the same degree of hysteria as she had during that unexplained incident seven years earlier.
We want our money,
or next time it’ll be something worse.
Best regards.
In response, Max issued a statement to the effect that he couldn’t raise the amount required in such a short space of time, an assertion that was flatly contradicted by the Dublin Evening Mail, who claimed that he had liquid assets worth more than half a million pounds that could be withdrawn from the bank with only twenty-four hours’ notice. Elizabeth Woodbead, Julian’s mother and my adoptive father’s erstwhile lover, appeared on the television news with tears rolling down her face, begging for her son’s release. She wore a chunky locket around her neck and some of the boys in my class speculated that it contained Julian’s detached toe, a possibility that seemed too disgusting to contemplate.
Three days later, a second parcel arrived, left overnight outside the Woodbeads’ front door, and this time they waited for the police to arrive before opening it. Inside was the thumb from Julian’s right hand. Still Max refused to pay and at Belvedere College a group of us gathered in my room, the official place of pilgrimage for those with an interest in the case, to debate why he was being so callous.
“He’s obviously a skinflint,” said James Hogan, an uncommonly tall boy who was known to have a serious crush on the actress Joanne Woodward, with whom he had been conducting a one-way relationship by post for more than a year. “Imagine not caring that your own son has been mutilated!”
“It’s hardly mutilation,” said Jasper Timson, a keen piano-accordion player who had the room next to ours and who was constantly annoying me by finding reasons to talk to Julian on his own. On one occasion I had come into our room to discover the two of them sitting side by side on Julian’s bed with a bottle of vodka between them, laughing so uproariously that my jealousy had nearly exploded into a fight. “And I think Julian can survive with nine toes and nine fingers.”
“Whether he can survive or not is hardly the point, Jasper,” I said, ready to attack him if he continued to speak in so thoughtless a fashion. “It must have been terrifying for him. Not to mention painful.”
“Julian’s a tough cookie.”
“You barely know him.”
“I know him quite well, as it happens.”
“No, you don’t. You’re not his roommate.”
“I know he’s the kind of guy who if he was giving someone the kiss of life, he’d use tongue.”
“Take that back, Timson!”
“Oh shut up, Cyril! You’re not his bloody wife, so stop carrying on as if you are.”
“Have you noticed that the body parts are getting bigger?” asked James. “I wonder is his thing bigger than his thumb.”
“It’s much bigger,” I said, without thinking, and they all stared at me, uncertain how to react to
this intimate announcement. “Well, we share a room,” I said, blushing a little. “And anyway, things are always bigger than thumbs.”
“Peter’s isn’t,” said Jasper, referring to his own roommate, Peter Trefontaine, the curious curvature of whose thing Julian had remarked upon on that fateful afternoon in the Palace Bar. “It’s tiny. And yet he’s always flashing it around our room as if he’s got something to be proud of.”
The third delivery came exactly a week after the kidnapping and, in their cruelest gesture yet, the box contained Julian’s right ear.
He looks just like his daddie now,
said a note written on the back of a John Hinde postcard, the one with the two redheaded children standing on either side of a donkey laden down with turf in the bog lands of Connemara.
But this is our last warning.
If we don’t get our money, next time it’ll be his head.
So pay heed to us now and have a pleasant weekend.
A second press conference was held, this time in the Shelbourne Hotel, and any sympathy that the gathered media had previously felt for Max had clearly vanished now that Julian had been deprived of three body parts. The general feeling, reflected in the country at large, was that here was a man who valued money over his own child and so angry was the nation that an account had been set up in the Bank of Ireland where people could donate their own money to help fund the ransom. Apparently it already stood at almost half the requested amount. I only hoped that Charles hadn’t been put in charge of it.
“I have heard many criticisms of late regarding my actions in this affair,” declared Max, sitting upright at the press conference and wearing a Union Jack tie for added provocation. “But it will be a cold day in hell when I give a penny of my hard-earned money to a group of vicious Republicans who believe their cause can be furthered by the kidnapping and torture of a teenage boy. If I was to give them what they want, it would only be used to buy guns and bombs which in turn would be employed against the British forces that quite rightly occupy the land north of the border and should be reinstated in the south. You can chop my son up into little bits,” he added, somewhat unwisely, “and post him back to me in a hundred Jiffy bags and I still won’t give in to your demands.” There was a long pause as he shuffled a few papers on the desk before him—he had obviously veered away from the prepared script—before piping up again. “Obviously I don’t want you to actually do that,” he said. “I was speaking metaphorically.”
While all this was going on, the greatest manhunt in the history of the state was being led by Sergeant Cunnane, and Julian had, within the space of a week, become perhaps the most famous person in Ireland. Gardaí in every county were following leads, checking farmhouses and deserted barns for anything that might give them a clue as to the whereabouts of the kidnappers but without success.
School continued as normal and the priests insisted that we pray for our missing classmate before each lesson, which meant eight prayers a day, not including our regular morning and evening benedictions, but it seemed as if God was either not listening or was on the side of the IRA. Bridget gave an interview to the Evening Press in which she said that she and Julian were on the most intimate terms and that she had never had a boyfriend who was so polite or so respectful as him. Not once did he ever try to take advantage of me, she said between sobs, and I expected her nose to start growing, so outrageous were her lies. I don’t think such impure thoughts ever crossed his mind.
On the nights when I was left alone in our room, one hand behind my head, the other down the front of my pajamas bottoms, as I lay in Julian’s bed staring up at the ceiling, I began to come to terms with who I was. I had known from as far back as I could recall that I was different from other boys. There was something inside me that longed for the intimate friendship and approval of my peers in ways that others never did. It was a disease that the priests referred to from time to time as one of the most venal of all sins and they told us that any boy wicked enough to have lustful thoughts about another boy would surely go straight to hell and spend eternity there, burning in the raging fires as the Devil sat alongside him laughing and poking him with his trident. There were so many times that I had fallen asleep in that room, my mind filled with lurid fantasies about Julian, whose head lay on a pillow not ten feet from my own, his mouth half open as he dreamed, but now my fantasies were not sexual but gruesome. I thought of what his kidnappers might be doing to him at that moment, which body part they would sever next and how awful it must have been for him every time they took a saw or a pair of pliers to his body. I had always known Julian as a brave soul, a happy-go-lucky fellow who never let the world weigh him down, but what fifteen-year-old boy could possibly go through such an ordeal and come out the same person?
After much soul-searching, I decided to go to confession. I thought that perhaps if I prayed for his release and confessed my sins then God might see fit to take pity on my friend. I didn’t go to the church at Belvedere, where the priests would have recognized me and probably broken the seal of the confessional to have me expelled. Instead, I waited until the weekend and made my way into town alone, heading toward Pearse Street and the large church that stood next to the train station.
I had never been there before and was a little overawed by the grandeur of the place. The altar was laid for the following day’s Masses and candles were lit in rows of a dozen or more on brass stands. It cost a penny to light one and I threw two ha’pennies into the box before selecting one and placing it in the front row center, watching as the flame flickered for a few moments before settling. Kneeling on the hard floor, I said a prayer, a thing I had never done with any solemnity before. Please don’t let Julian die, I asked God. And please stop me from being a homosexual. Only when I stood up and walked away did I realize that that had been two prayers, so I went back and lit a second candle, which cost me another penny.
There were a couple of dozen people scattered around the pews and staring into space, all of them old, and I walked past them looking for a confession box with a light on. When I found one, I stepped inside, closing the door behind me, and waited in the darkness for the grille to slide open.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said quietly when it did, a gust of body odor rushing toward me with such force that I reared back and hit my head against the wall. “It has been three weeks since my last confession.”
“What age are you, son?” asked the voice from the other side, which sounded quite elderly.
“Fourteen,” I said. “I’ll be fifteen next month.”
“Fourteen-year-old boys need to go to confession more than once every three weeks,” he said. “I know what you lads are like. Up to no good every minute of the day. Will you promise me that you’ll go more often in the future?”
“I will, Father.”
“Good lad. Now, what sins do you have to confess to the Lord?”
I swallowed hard. I had been going to confession fairly regularly since my first communion seven years earlier but not once had I ever told the truth. Like everyone else, I simply made up a collection of ordinary decent sins and rattled them off with little thought before accepting the obligatory penance of ten Hail Marys and an Our Father afterward. Today, however, I had promised myself that I would be honest. I would confess everything and if God was on my side, if God really existed and forgave people who were truly contrite, then he would recognize my guilt and set Julian free without any further harm.
“Father, over the last month I have stolen sweets from a local shop on six occasions.”
“Holy God,” said the priest, appalled. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I like sweets,” I said. “And I can’t afford them.”
“Well, there’s some logic to that, I suppose. And tell me, how did you do it?”
“There’s an old woman who works behind the counter,” I said. “And all she does is sit and read the newspaper. It’s easy to take things without her noticing.”
“That’s a terrible sin,” said the priest. “You know that’s probably that good woman’s livelihood?”
“I do, Father.”
“Will you promise me never to do such a thing again?”
“I will, Father.”
“All right then. Good lad. Anything else?”
“Yes, Father,” I said. “There’s a priest in our school who I don’t like very much and in my head I call him The Prick.”
“The what?”
“The Prick.”
“And what in God’s name does that mean?”
“Do you not know, Father?” I asked.
“If I knew, would I be asking you?”
I swallowed hard. “It’s another word for a…you know, for a thing.”
“A thing? What do you mean, a thing? What class of a thing?”
“A thing, Father,” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I leaned in and whispered through the grille. “A penis, Father.”
“Holy God,” he repeated. “Did I hear you right?”
“If you thought I said a penis, then, yes, you did, Father.”
“Well, that is what I thought you said. Why in God’s name would you call a priest in your school a penis? How could he possibly be a penis? A man can’t be a penis; he can only be a man. This makes no sense to me at all.”
“I’m sorry, Father. That’s why I’m confessing it.”
“Well, whatever it is, just stop doing it. Call him by his proper name and show a bit of respect to the man. I’m sure he treats all the lads in your school well.”
“He doesn’t, Father. He’s vicious and he’s always beating us up. Last year he put a boy in the hospital for sneezing too loud in class.”
“I don’t care. You’ll call him by his proper name or there’ll be no forgiveness for you, do you understand me?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Right then. I’m almost afraid to ask but is there anything else?”
“There is, Father.”
“Go on so. I’ll hold on to my chair.”