by John Boyne
“It’s a bit delicate, Father,” I said.
“That’s what the confessional is for, son,” he said. “Don’t worry, you’re not talking to me, you’re talking to God. He sees everything and he hears everything. You can have no secrets from him.”
“Do I have to say it then, Father?” I asked. “Will he not know anyway?”
“He will. But he wants you to say it out loud. Just for clarification purposes.”
I took a deep breath. This had been a long time coming but here it was. “I think I’m a bit funny, Father,” I told him. “The other boys in my class are always talking about girls but I never think about girls at all, I just think about boys, and I think about doing all sorts of dirty stuff to them like taking their clothes off and kissing them all over and playing with their things and there’s this one boy and he’s my best friend and he sleeps in the bed next to mine and I can’t stop thinking about him all the time and sometimes when he’s asleep I pull my pajamas down and I have a right go at myself and I create an unholy mess in the bed and even after I do it and think that I might be able to go to sleep I start thinking about other lads and all the things I want to do to them and do you know what a blowjob is, Father, because I started writing stories about the lads I like and particularly about my friend Julian and I started using words like that and—”
There was an almighty crashing sound from opposite me and I looked up, startled. The shadow of the priest in the darkness had vanished and in its place a beam of light was streaming in from up above.
“Is that you, God?” I said, looking up toward its source. “It’s me, Cyril.”
From outside the confessional, I heard shouts and opened the door to peep outside. The priest had fallen out of his box and was lying on the floor, clutching his chest. He must have been at least eighty years old and the parishioners were leaning over him, crying out for help as his face began to turn blue. One of the floor tiles had broken in two next to his head.
I looked down at him, my mouth open in bewilderment, and he slowly raised a gnarly finger and pointed it at me. His lips parted and I saw how yellow his teeth were as he began to dribble down his chin.
“Am I forgiven, Father?” I asked, leaning over him, trying to ignore the stench of his breath. “Are my sins forgiven?”
His eyes rolled in his head, his entire body gave one great convulsion, he let out a roar and that was it, he was gone.
“God bless us, Father’s dead,” said an elderly man who had been kneeling on the floor, supporting the priest’s head.
“Do you think he forgave me?” I asked. “Before he croaked, I mean?”
“He did, I’m sure of it,” said the man, taking my hand now and letting the priest’s head fall rather hard against the marble floor, a tinny sound echoing around the church. “And he’d be happy to know that his last act on this earth was to spread God’s forgiveness.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling cheered by this. I left the church as the ambulance men made their way inside. It was an unusually sunny day and, truth be told, I did feel absolved, even if I knew that the feelings that I had hidden inside myself wouldn’t be going away anytime soon.
The next morning, I awoke to the news that Julian had been found. A group of Special Branch officers had followed leads that led them to a farmhouse in Cavan and he was discovered locked in a bathroom while his three captors slept outside. One was killed in the ensuing fracas and the other two were under arrest. Missing a toe, a thumb and an ear, the rest of him was still intact and he had been taken to hospital to begin his recovery.
Had I been a person of more religious scruple, I might have believed that God had answered my prayers, but the fact was, before going to sleep that night I’d already committed a few more sins, so instead I put it down to good detective work on the part of An Garda Síochána. It seemed like the most convenient explanation to me.
1966 In the Reptile House
Like Soft Pillows
Although the strict routine was drearily repetitive at times, I found its familiarity strangely comforting. Every morning my alarm would sound at six o’clock precisely and I would engage in a little light onanism before rising at a quarter past. Being first in line to the shared bathroom meant there was no risk of the water turning cold and when I emerged, bare-chested and with a towel wrapped around my waist, there was Albert Thatcher, the young accountant who had the room next to mine, wearing a pair of Y-front briefs and a sleepy expression, which was not an entirely disagreeable way to start the day. Albert and I had been lodgers at the home of an elderly widow, Mrs. Hogan, on Chatham Street for more than a year, moving in only weeks apart, and we generally got along quite well. The building itself boasted a rather odd design. One flat had been purchased by Mrs. Hogan’s late husband some thirty years earlier as a rental property and after his death a dividing wall had been removed to create two upstairs bedrooms. Mrs. Hogan and her son, Henry, however, lived in the house next door—the former entirely mute, the latter completely blind—and yet between them they monitored our comings and goings with all the efficiency of a government intelligence agency. Like conjoined twins, the two were never seen apart, Henry’s arm permanently attached to his mother’s as she led him to and from Mass every morning and up and down the street for his evening constitutional.
On the rare occasions when they ventured upstairs, looking for overdue rent, perhaps, or returning shirts that Mrs. Hogan ironed at a rate of tuppence for five, we would hear their four feet slowly ascending the staircase, the mute leading the blind, and Henry, who seemed to have no interest in anything, would ask the questions that his mother, an inveterate busybody, wanted answered.
“Mammy says there were strange noises coming from upstairs a week last Tuesday,” he said once in a typical exchange while Mrs. Hogan nodded furiously, craning her neck to see whether we had marijuana plants growing in the living room or prostitutes asleep in one of our beds. “Mammy doesn’t like strange noises. They unsettle her something awful.”
“It can’t have been us,” I replied. “A week last Tuesday, I went to the pictures to see Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles and Albert was out dancing at the Astor Ballroom in Dundrum.”
“Mammy says the noises kept her awake,” Henry insisted, his eyes rolling in his head as they tried to latch onto something that might restore his view on the world. “Mammy doesn’t like being kept awake. Mammy needs her sleep.”
“Were you kept awake yourself, Henry?” asked Albert from where he was lying on the sofa reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the unfortunate young man jumped in surprise, turning his head in the direction of the voice. Perhaps he’d been unaware that someone else was even in the room.
“When Mammy is awake, I am awake,” he replied, offended now, as if we had accused him of being a bad son. “She’s a martyr to the hemorrhoids. When they’re acting up, neither of us can get a wink.”
The noises in question were, most likely, not of my making at all but of Albert’s, who was something of a lady’s man and rarely went a week without bringing a girl home for what he called a bit of “slap and tickle, how’s your father, say no more,” which was torturous for me because his headboard was loosely fitted on the other side of the wall to my own and this meant that when he was riding a girl the endless banging would keep me awake, just as Mrs. Hogan’s piles prevented her from sleeping. I had a bit of a crush on Albert too, which didn’t help, but this was more a consequence of our daily proximity than anything else, for he wasn’t particularly good-looking.
I left the flat every morning at half past seven to make my way toward the Department of Education on Marlborough Street, stopping only for a cup of tea and a fruit scone along the way, and was usually at my desk on the first floor by a quarter past eight. I had been working there for almost three years by now—ever since leaving Belvedere College in a blaze of mediocrity—thanks in part to the good offices of my adoptive father’s third and now-estranged wife—this was how we determined I
should refer to her in conversation—Angela, who had been a popular figure at the department until her marriage to Charles when, as the law dictated, she was forced into retirement.
Things had ended badly between the pair less than a year after their wedding when, in an act of uncharacteristic generosity, Charles had invited me to accompany them to the South of France for two weeks’ holiday. I had met Angela only once in advance of the trip but from the moment we arrived in Nice we got along famously; so well, in fact, that I woke one morning to find her climbing into bed next to me, naked as the day she was born, and as I was naked too the entire scene turned into something of a West End farce. I cried out in surprise and, upon hearing the door open, ran headlong to the comfort of the wardrobe until Charles wrenched the doors open to find me cowering inside.
“The funny thing is, Cyril,” he said in his most withering tone as I sat curled in the corner, my hands modestly covering my groin, “I’d have a lot more respect for you if I came in here and you were taking her up the Khyber Pass. But no, that’s just never going to be you, is it? You just run and hide. A real Avery would never do that.”
I said nothing, which seemed to disappoint him even more, and he turned his fury on Angela, who was still lying in bed, the sheet fallen to her waist exposing her breasts. She seemed bored with the whole scenario and was rotating one finger around her left nipple in an insouciant manner while whistling “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” discordantly. An argument ensued, too tedious to recount, and the upshot was that on their return to Dublin they went their separate ways and an application was made in the London courts for a speedy divorce. (Charles had had the foresight to marry in England in anticipation of such an eventuality. His track record with marriage, after all, was not exemplary.) In the meantime, however, as I was lazing around and not doing very much with my time, Angela tried to make amends for embarrassing me by putting in a word on my behalf with her former employers. I received a phone call inviting me in for an interview, which came as something of a surprise as she had neglected to tell me, and without ever thinking for a moment that I would like to be a civil servant, I woke up one morning and that’s exactly what I was.
The work itself was incredibly boring and my colleagues a little irritating, the engines of their days fueled by personal and political gossip. The office I worked in was large with a high ceiling, an old stone fireplace in the center of one wall and a portrait of the Minister, relieved of two of his chins, hanging above it. A desk was positioned in each of the four corners, their occupants facing the center of the floor, where a single table stood, supposedly for departmental meetings but, in reality, rarely used.
Our supposed leader was Miss Joyce, who had been working as a civil servant in the department since its foundation forty-five years earlier in 1921. She was sixty-three years old and, like my late adoptive mother Maude, was a compulsive smoker, favoring Chesterfield Regulars (Red), which she imported from the United States in boxes of one hundred at a time and stored in an elegantly carved wooden box on her desk with an illustration of the King of Siam on the lid. Although our office was not much given to personal memorabilia, she kept two posters pinned to the wall beside her in defense of her addiction. The first showed Rita Hayworth in a pinstriped blazer and white blouse, her voluminous red hair tumbling down around her shoulders, professing that “ALL MY FRIENDS KNOW THAT CHESTERFIELD IS MY BRAND” while holding an unlit cigarette in her left hand and staring off into the distance, where Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin were presumably pleasuring themselves in anticipation of erotic adventures to come. The second, slightly peeling at the edges and with a noticeable lipstick stain on the subject’s face, portrayed Ronald Reagan seated behind a desk that was covered in cigarette boxes, a Chesterfield hanging jauntily from the Gipper’s mouth. “I’M SENDING CHESTERFIELDS TO ALL MY FRIENDS. THAT’S THE MERRIEST CHRISTMAS ANY SMOKER CAN HAVE—CHESTERFIELD MILDNESS PLUS NO UNPLEASANT AFTER-TASTE” it said, and sure enough he appeared to be wrapping boxes in festive paper for the likes of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, who, I’m sure, were only thrilled to receive them.
Miss Joyce sat in the corner to my right, the section of the room that got the best light, while in the corner to my left sat Miss Ambrosia, an incredibly vacuous and highly unfocused young woman of about twenty-five who liked to shock me by flirting outrageously and regularly recounting her multitudinous sexual exploits. She generally had at least five men on the go, everyone from barmen to dance-hall entrepreneurs, show jumpers to pretenders to the Russian throne, and had no shame in juggling them like some nymphomaniacal circus act. Every month without fail there would be a day where she would be found weeping at her desk, claiming that she had “spoiled herself” and that no man would ever want her now, but usually by teatime she would sit up suddenly, make a rush to the Ladies’ toilets and return wearing a relieved expression, informing us that her Auntie Jemima had come to visit for a few days and she’d never been so happy to see her. This baffled me and on one occasion I inquired as to where her Auntie Jemima lived, for she seemed to make it her business to be in Dublin every month for a few days. My colleagues burst out laughing and Miss Joyce remarked that she too had once had an Auntie Jemima but that she had last visited during the Second World War and she didn’t miss her one little bit.
The final member of our group, Mr. Denby-Denby, sat directly across from me and more often than not, when I looked up, I found him watching me with the intensity of a serial killer deciding how best to disembowel his victim. He was a rather flamboyant fellow in his mid fifties who wore colorful waistcoats and matching bow ties and, in speech and manner, conformed to the traditional stereotype of the homosexual, although, of course, he would never have admitted to such an orientation. He wore his hair in a bouffant style and it was a curious shade of sickly yellow, more a chartreuse than anything else, although his eyebrows were closer to maize. Every so often, with the same regularity as the visits of Miss Ambrosia’s Auntie Jemima, he would come into work with his hair brighter than ever, practically luminescent, and we three would stare at it, trying not to laugh, and he would look back defiantly, daring us to say a word. I almost fell off my seat in amazement one afternoon when he mentioned the existence of a Mrs. Denby-Denby in Blackrock and a gaggle of little Denby-Denbys—nine of them! Nine!—whom he and his wife had produced with astonishing regularity from the mid 1930s into the late 1940s. The possibility of him engaging in coitus with a woman took me by surprise but the fact that he had done it on at least nine occasions—nine!—was almost too much for my mind to take in. It gave me hope for my own future.
“Here he comes,” said Mr. Denby-Denby, sitting erect in his chair as I strolled through the door that fine spring morning debuting a new jacket I had recently purchased in anticipation of the good weather. “Twenty-one years old and never been kissed. Do you know who you remind me of, Mr. Avery? Botticelli’s St. Sebastian, that’s who. Have you ever seen it? You must have. Have you, Miss Joyce? Hangs in the State Museum in Berlin. Stripped down to his skivvies and with half a dozen arrows poking out of his body. Absolutely divine. There’s a lesser version by Il Sodoma but we won’t speak of that.”
I threw him an irritated look, my first of the day, and sat at my desk, unspooling the copy of the Irish Times that awaited me every morning and turning the pages for anything that might have relevance to our work. From the first day I had arrived in the department, I had resented Mr. Denby-Denby’s presence, for although he was even more deeply closeted than I, his willingness to make little secret of his true sexual orientation both embarrassed and confused me.
“Look at those lips, Miss Joyce,” he continued, putting a hand to his heart and fluttering it above his fuchsia waistcoat as if he was about to pass out in the throes of desire. “Like soft pillows. The type you, Miss Ambrosia, probably dream of buying in Switzer’s if you can save up enough money.”
“Why would I need to buy pillows, Mr. Denby-Denby?” asked Miss Ambrosia. “Sure as often as not
my head’s lying on someone else’s.”
“Oh, get her!” cried Mr. Denby-Denby, and I rolled my eyes. In the office next door there were three quiet gentlemen, Mr. Westlicott Sr., his son Mr. Westlicott, and his grandson Mr. Westlicott Jr., a family triumvirate who observed the same formality of address as we did, calling each other “Mr. Westlicott” at all times, and I rather hoped that someone in there would retire or get run over by a bus so I could transfer into their company. And perhaps one or other of them might adopt me and I could be a Mr. Westlicott too; I was sure to have more success with adoption the second time around than I’d had the first.
“Less tittle-tattle, please, and more work,” said Miss Joyce, lighting up a Chesterfield (Red), but no one paid any attention.
“So tell us, Mr. Avery,” said Mr. Denby-Denby, leaning forward now, his elbows on the table, his head balanced on his hands. “What mischief did you get up to over the weekend? Where does a handsome young puppy go these days when he’s straining at the leash?”
“Actually, I went to a rugby match with my friend Julian,” I replied, doing my best to assert my rugged masculinity. “And on Sunday I stayed home and read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
“Oh, I don’t read books,” said Mr. Denby-Denby, waving this remark away as if I had expressed an eccentric interest in Middle Eastern symbolism or the origins of trigonometry.
“I’m reading Edna O’Brien,” said Miss Ambrosia, lowering her voice lest any of the Mr. Westlicotts overheard her and reported her for vulgarity. “She’s pure filth.”
“Don’t let the Minister hear you say that,” said Miss Joyce, blowing a perfect O of smoke from her lips. It was impossible not to stare as it rose toward the light fitting and slowly evaporated into the air before sneaking its way in to pollute our lungs. “You know what he thinks about women who write. He won’t have them on the curriculum.”