by John Boyne
“I can’t,” I said, repeating his own phrase. “Sorry.”
“No problem,” he replied with a shrug. It had been nothing more than a fuck for him, one of many probably. There would be another tomorrow night, and another at the weekend, and another during the week after that. A moment later, he was gone and a part of me didn’t care if Albert, Mrs. Hogan or her blind son opened their doors to find him leaving but there was no uproar from downstairs and it seemed that he had escaped without notice.
There Are No Homosexuals in Ireland
A few days later, I made an appointment with a doctor. His name was Dr. Dourish, his practice located in a row of red-bricked houses in Dundrum, a part of the city that I did not know well. There were a number of doctors that had some association with the civil service and from whom we could receive favorable rates, but not trusting the rules of their profession within Catholic Ireland I was nervous of exposing myself—either literally or metaphorically—to anyone who might reveal my secret to my employers. I had hoped that he might be young and sympathetic toward my situation and was disappointed to find that he was well into his sixties, close to retirement age and looked about as friendly as a teenage boy woken for school on Monday morning. He smoked a pipe throughout our consultation, picking tiny shreds of tobacco from his yellow teeth that he deposited in an ashtray on the desk that he did not seem to have emptied in sometime. A St. Brigid’s cross on the wall made my heart sink a little, not to mention the statue of the Sacred Heart behind his desk containing a flickering bulb that gave it a rather ghostly aspect.
“Mr. Sadler, is that right?” he asked, picking up the file his secretary had given him and for which, naturally, I had provided a false name.
“That’s right,” I said. “Tristan Sadler. That’s my name. Always has been since the day I was born.”
“And what can I do for you today?”
I looked away, glancing toward the bed that stood against one of the walls and on which I wished that I could lie, like a psychiatric patient, while he stood behind me. I wanted to recount my woes without having to see the expression on his face. The inevitable disgust.
“Do you think I could lie down?” I asked.
“Why?”
“I’d prefer it.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not for patients. It’s where I have my afternoon nap.”
“Right. I’ll stay where I am so.”
“If you would.”
“I wanted to talk to you,” I said. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”
“Well of course there’s something wrong with you. Sure why else would you be here? What is it?”
“It’s a little delicate.”
“Ah,” he said, smiling a little and nodding his head. “Do you mind if I ask how old you are, Tristan?”
“I’m twenty-one.”
“Would it be a matter of an intimate nature?”
“Yes.”
“I guessed as much,” he said. “You’ve caught something, am I right? The women in this city have gone to hell, if you ask me. Dirty little pups, all of them. We should never have given them the vote, if you ask me. It gave them ideas.”
“No,” I replied. I had, of course, caught one or two things in recent times but I had another doctor, one on the Northside, that I used during those moments and he always prescribed me something that sorted the problem out quickly. “No, it’s nothing like that.”
“All right then,” he said with a sigh. “So what is it then? Spit it out, man.”
“I think…the thing is, Doctor, I haven’t quite developed in the way that I’m supposed to.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“I suppose I mean that I’m not as interested in girls as I should be. As other lads my age are.”
“I see,” he said, his smile fading now. “Well, that’s not as abnormal as you might think either. Some boys are late developers. Is it not a big priority for you then? The old sex, I mean.”
“It’s a very big priority,” I told him. “It’s probably my biggest priority. I think about it all day long from the minute I wake up in the morning until the minute I go to bed. And then I dream about it. Sometimes I even have dreams where I go to bed and I have dreams in my dreams about it.”
“Then what’s the problem?” he asked, and I could tell that he was growing frustrated by my obfuscation. “Can you not get a girlfriend, is that it? You’re not a bad-looking fellow. I’m sure there’s lots of girls who’d be happy to do a line with you. Are you shy, is that it? Do you not know how to talk to them?”
“I’m not shy,” I said, finding my voice now and determined to get it out and damn the consequences. “And as it happens I have a girlfriend, thank you very much. But I don’t really want one is the thing. It’s not girls that I think about, you see. It’s boys.”
There was a long silence during which I didn’t dare to look up at him, focusing instead on the carpet beneath my feet and where it had worn thin from the amount of people who had sat in that same seat over the years, dragging their shoes back and forth in anxiety, grief or depression. The silence continued for so long that I feared Dr. Dourish had died of shock and that I had another corpse on my conscience. Finally, however, I heard him push his seat back and I glanced up as he walked over to a cabinet, unlocked it and removed a small packet from the top shelf. He closed the door again, relocked it and sat down, placing the mysterious package on the desk between us.
“First,” said Dr. Dourish, “you mustn’t think that you’re alone in your affliction. There have been plenty of boys who have had similar feelings over the years, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. Perverts, degenerates and sickos have existed since the dawn of time, so don’t for a minute think that you’re anything special. There are even some places where you can get away with it and no one bats an eyelid. But the important thing for you to remember, Tristan, is that you must never act on these disgusting urges. You’re a good, decent Irish Catholic boy and…you are a Catholic, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, even though I had no allegiance to any religion.
“Good lad. Well, unfortunately you’ve been cursed with a terrible sickness. Something that falls on random people for no apparent reason. But you must not think for a moment that you are a homosexual, because you aren’t.”
I flushed a little at the utterance of that dreaded and proscribed word, which was almost never spoken in polite society.
“Yes, it’s true,” he continued, “that there are homosexuals all over the world. England has lots of them. France is full of them. And I’ve never been to America but I imagine they have more than their share too. I wouldn’t think it’s all that common in Russia or Australia but they probably have some other repulsive thing to compensate. But here’s what you have to remember: There are no homosexuals in Ireland. You might have got it into your head that you are one but you’re just wrong, it’s as simple as that. You’re wrong.”
“It doesn’t feel as simple as that, Doctor,” I said carefully. “I really think that I might be.”
“But were you not listening to me?” he asked, smiling at me as if I was a complete ignoramus. “Amn’t I after telling you that there are no homosexuals in Ireland? And if there are no homosexuals in Ireland, then how on earth could you be one?”
I thought about it, trying my best to locate the logic in his argument.
“Now,” he continued. “What makes you think that you’re one of them anyway? A dirty queer, I mean.”
“It’s pretty simple,” I said. “I’m both physically and sexually attracted to men.”
“Well, sure that doesn’t make you a homosexual,” he said, opening his hands wide in a gesture of acceptance.
“Doesn’t it?” I asked, a little baffled by this. “I thought it did.”
“Not at all, not at all,” he said, shaking his head. “You’ve just been watching too much television, that’s all.”
“But I don’t own a te
levision,” I said.
“Do you go to the pictures?”
“I do.”
“How often?”
“Once a week usually.”
“Well, that will do it. What was the last picture you saw?”
“Alfie.”
“I don’t know that one. Was it any good?”
“I liked it,” I said. “Mary-Margaret said it was disgusting and that Michael Caine ought to be ashamed of himself. She said he was a filthy article with no respect for himself.”
“Who’s Mary-Margaret?”
“My girlfriend.”
He burst out laughing again and sat forward, refilling his pipe and lighting it with a series of stop-start puffs as the tobacco flamed from red to black and back again. “Would you listen to yourself, Tristan,” he said. “If you have a girlfriend, then you’re definitely not a homosexual.”
“But I don’t like my girlfriend,” I pointed out. “She’s judgmental and critical of everything and everyone. She’s always telling me what to do and orders me about like I’m a dog. And I never look at her and think she’s pretty. I can’t even imagine wanting to see her with her clothes off. Whenever I kiss her, I feel like throwing up afterward. And sometimes I look at her and just wish she’d meet someone else and drop me so I wouldn’t have to be the one to do it. Also, she has this weird smell. She says washing too often is a sign of pride.”
“But sure we all feel that way about the women,” said Dr. Dourish with a shrug. “I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve wanted to slip something into Mrs. Dourish’s hot chocolate at night so that she wouldn’t wake up in the morning. And I have access to everything I’d need too. I could write a prescription for poison and there’s not a jury in the land would question it. But that doesn’t make me a homosexual, does it? How could it be? I love Judy Garland and Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. I never miss any of their pictures.”
“I just want it to stop,” I said, raising my voice in frustration. “I want to stop thinking about men and be just like everyone else.”
“Which is why you came to see me,” he replied. “And I’m glad to say that you’ve come to the right place, because I can help you.”
My heart lifted a little and I looked across at him hopefully. “Really?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of the small package he’d placed on the desk between us. “Pick that up like a good man and open it.”
I did as instructed and a small syringe with a long, pointed needle, about the size of my index finger, fell out.
“Do you know what that is?” asked Dr. Dourish.
“I do,” I said. “It’s a syringe.”
“Good lad. Now, I want you to trust me, all right? Give the syringe to me.” I handed it across and he nodded toward the bed. “Go over there and sit on the edge.”
“I thought that wasn’t for patients?”
“I make an exception for degenerates. And take your trousers off first.”
I felt anxious about what was going to happen next but did as I was told, letting my trousers fall around my ankles and sitting where he had told me. Dr. Dourish approached me, holding the syringe in his right hand in a rather threatening way.
“Now take your underpants off,” he said.
“I’d rather not,” I said.
“Do as you’re told,” he said, “or I won’t be able to help you.”
I hesitated, embarrassed and nervous, but finally did as instructed and tried not to look at him as I sat there, naked from the waist down.
“Now,” said the doctor. “I’m going to call out some names to you and I want you to react to them in whatever way feels natural to you, all right?”
“All right,” I said.
“Bing Crosby,” he said, and I didn’t move, just looked at the wall ahead, thinking of the night I’d gone to see a re-release of High Society with Mary-Margaret in the Adelphi Cinema on Abbey Street. She’d been disgusted by the whole thing, asking what kind of dirty tramp would divorce one man for another and then go back to the first one on the day of her second wedding. It showed a lack of moral conviction, she claimed. Which was not her standard at all.
“Richard Nixon,” said Dr. Dourish then, and I grimaced. There was talk that Nixon was going to be running for President again in 1968 and I hoped that he wouldn’t. There was something about seeing that face in the newspapers every morning that put me off my breakfast.
“Warren Beatty,” he said, and this time my face lit up. I had loved Warren Beatty ever since I’d seen him opposite Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass a few years earlier and had been first in line for Promise Her Anything when it had opened in the Carlton the year before. Before I could contemplate his beauty any further, however, I found myself leaping off the bed in unexpected agony, tripping over my feet as my trousers conspired to take me down, and I fell to the floor, writhing in agony and clutching my groin. When I finally dared to take my hands away, there was a tiny red mark on my scrotum that had not been there five minutes earlier.
“You stabbed me!” I cried out, looking across at Dr. Dourish as if he was insane. “You stabbed me in the balls with your syringe!”
“I did indeed,” he said, bowing a little as if he was accepting words of gratitude. “Now get up here, Tristan, so I can do it again.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” I said, struggling to my feet and weighing up whether I should punch him in the face or just make a run for it. I must have been a comical sight standing there in the middle of his surgery with my cock hanging out, my trousers hanging off me and my face red with fury.
“You want to be cured, don’t you?” he asked in a benevolent, avuncular tone, ignoring my obvious distress.
“I do, yes,” I said. “But not like this. It hurts!”
“But this is the only way,” he said. “We will train your brain to associate feelings of lust toward men with the most intense pain. That way you will not allow yourself to feel these disgusting thoughts. Think of Pavlov’s dog. It’s a similar principle.”
“I don’t know Pavlov and I don’t know his dog,” I said, “but unless either of them has been stabbed in the balls with a syringe I don’t think they can have any idea what I’m feeling right now.”
“Fine,” said Dr. Dourish with a shrug. “Continue with your sordid fantasies. Live a life that is dominated by disgusting and immoral thoughts. Be an outcast from society for the rest of your days. It’s your choice. But remember, you came here for help and I am offering help. It’s up to you whether or not you accept it.”
I thought about this and as the pain subsided I slowly—very, very slowly—made my way back toward the bed and sat down, trembling and close to tears. I gripped the side of the bed and closed my eyes.
“Very good,” he said. “Now, let’s try again. Pope Paul VI.”
Nothing.
“Charles Laughton.”
Nothing.
“George Harrison.”
And if there were any patients awaiting their turn outside I daresay they turned on their heels and ran when they heard the sounds of my screams piercing the plasterwork and threatening to tear down the walls. When I stumbled out, half an hour later, barely able to walk and with tears rolling down my cheeks, the surgery was empty except for Dr. Dourish’s secretary, who was seated behind her desk, writing a receipt.
“That’ll be fifteen pence,” she said, handing the docket across, and I reached carefully—very, very carefully—into my pocket for the money. Before I could retrieve it, however, the door to the doctor’s office opened and, worried that he was going to come at me crying “Harold Macmillan! Adolf Hitler! Tony Curtis!” I wondered whether I should make for a run for it.
“An extra three pence for a syringe, Annie,” said Dr. Dourish. “Mr. Sadler is taking one with him.”
“Eighteen pence then,” she said, and I put the money on the table and limped out, glad to breathe the fresh air of Dundrum. Making my way down the street towar
d the shopping center I stopped at a bench and sat down, adjusting myself to find a comfortable position, and put my head in my hands. A young couple, the wife showing early signs of pregnancy, stopped when they saw me and asked whether I was all right, whether there was anything they could do for me.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Thank you, though.”
“You don’t look all right,” said the woman.
“That’s because I’m not. I’ve just had a man stab a needle into my scrotum about twenty times over the course of an hour. And it hurts like hell.”
“I’d imagine it would,” said the man nonchalantly. “I hope you didn’t pay for that kind of treatment.”
“I paid eighteen pence,” I said.
“You could get a good night out on that if you were careful,” said the woman. “Do you need a doctor? There’s one down the road if—”
“It was the doctor who did it,” I said. “I just need a taxi, that’s all. I want to go home.”
“Helen,” said the man. “Keep an eye out for a taxi. The poor man can hardly stand.” And no sooner had she turned around and raised her hand in the air than one came our way and pulled in.
“Nothing is worth this kind of upset,” said the woman as I climbed into the backseat. She had a kindly face and there was a part of me that wanted to weep on her shoulder and tell her all my woes. “Whatever’s wrong with you, don’t worry. It’ll all come good in the end.”
“I wish I had your confidence,” I said, closing the door as the car pulled away.
Before the Whole Car Could Go Up in Flames
A few weeks later, the Minister was caught with his pants down.
A supposedly happily married man who dragged his wife and children to Mass with him every Sunday morning, he could usually be found standing in the church grounds afterward, regardless of the weather, shaking hands with his constituents and promising to see them all at the GAA match the following weekend. A country TD, he’d stayed in his Dublin flat at the weekend only to be discovered in the early hours of Sunday morning being sucked off in his car by a sixteen-year-old drug addict who had only been released from serving six months for public order offenses in the Finglas Child and Adolescent Center earlier that day. The Minister was arrested and brought to Pearse Street Garda Station, where he refused to give his name and did the usual routine of demanding all their badge numbers, insisting that none of them would have a job by the end of the day. When he tried to leave, he was bundled into a cell and left to stew.