by John Boyne
“We won’t get caught.”
“How do you know that? And do you want to be the one explaining it to the boss if we do?”
My shoe slipped a little on the pavement and they turned in my direction, leaving me with no choice but to step out of the doorway and stride past them, hoping that they would not turn aggressive.
“What were you doing there?” asked the younger man, marching over. “Were you listening to us?”
“Leave it, Tommy,” said his friend, and I took the opportunity to walk on, faster now, and to my relief they didn’t follow me. Crossing over the Ha’penny Bridge, I aimed for one of the hidden corridors off Abbey Street where I had enjoyed a few clandestine encounters in the past and sure enough there was someone waiting there, smoking a cigarette as he leaned against a lamp post, and he signaled, tipping a finger to his cap as he saw me. When I got closer, however, I could see that he was old enough to be my grandfather and turned on my heel, cursing my luck. I began to resign myself to the idea of returning home unsatisfied when I remembered the public toilets toward the north end of O’Connell Street, the same place in which Julian had been propositioned some seven years earlier.
I had only ever had sex in a public toilet twice before, the first by accident—if one can have sex by accident—when I was seventeen and had been caught short walking past Trinity College and ran inside to the second-floor bathroom of the arts block for a piss. Standing at a urinal while one of the students washed his hands nearby, I grew conscious of the fact that he was staring at me. I looked around nervously but when he smiled I got an instant erection, the urine splashing off the wall and back against the crotch of my trousers. He laughed, then nodded in the direction of one of the cubicles, and I had followed him inside for my official deflowering. The second time was on a night as disappointing as this one, when I had been forced into a public convenience on Baggot Street for a deeply unsatisfying session with a boy my own age who burst forth like Vesuvius into my palm the moment I touched him. The seedy nature of these places meant that I preferred to stay away from them but I was desperate and so walked in the direction of Nelson’s Pillar, wanting nothing more than to get the act over with so I could go home to bed.
Again, I had the distinct impression that I was being followed so I stopped, looking around anxiously, but could see no one behind me, save for a few drunks settling themselves against the walls of the GPO with blankets and cardboard boxes. Still, I kept my wits about me as I got closer to the toilet and saw the gate leading from the street lying open, its seductive light beckoning me inside.
I made my way down the steps and as I turned the corner into the black-and-white tiled room, I glanced around, disappointed to find there was no one there. I sighed and shook my head, ready to admit defeat, and was about to leave when a lock turned cautiously in one of the cubicles and a door opened to reveal a frightened-looking lad of around eighteen, wearing spectacles and a hat pulled down over his forehead. He peeped out like a nervous puppy growing accustomed to new surroundings and I looked back at him, waiting for some signal that we were there for the same reason. It was possible, of course, that he had simply been using the facilities and was about to wash his hands and leave. To say anything and be proven wrong could lead to disaster.
I gave him about thirty seconds and he didn’t move at all, just stared at me, but when I saw his eyes move up and down my body I knew there was nothing to worry about.
“I don’t have much time,” I said, and to my surprise, after all I’d been through tonight, I found that I was no longer in the mood. I was standing in an underground cellar, surrounded by the stench of piss and shit, and condemned to finding some desperate form of affection with a complete stranger. My shoulders slumped in defeat and I pressed my thumb and forefingers to the corners of my eyes. “It’s not fair, is it?” I said quietly after a moment, uncertain whether I was saying it to him, to myself or to the universe.
“I’m frightened,” said the boy, and I pulled myself together, feeling pity for him. He was trembling; it was obvious that he was new at this.
“Do you ever just want to kill yourself?” I asked, looking him directly in the eyes.
“What?” he said, looking confused.
“There are times,” I told him, “when I feel like taking a bread knife and just driving it into my heart.”
He said nothing, looking around in bewilderment, before finally turning back to me and nodding.
“I tried it last year,” he said. “Not a bread knife. It was a different way. Tablets. But it didn’t work. I had to have my stomach pumped.”
“Let’s just go home,” I said.
“I can’t go home,” he told me. “They threw me out.”
“Who did?”
“My parents.”
“Why?” I asked.
He looked down at the ground, embarrassed. “They found something,” he said. “A magazine. I had it sent over from England.”
“Then let’s just go for a walk,” I said. “We can walk and talk. Do you fancy that? Do you want to just go somewhere and have a chat?”
“All right,” he said, smiling at me, and I felt an immediate affection for him, not desire, not lust, just affection.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He thought about it. Peter was what he came up with.
“I’m James,” I said, reaching out a hand, and he took it and smiled again. It was at this moment that I realized that in all the encounters that I had ever had with strangers I had never looked into anyone’s eyes before. I could remember some faces, some haircuts, some shoes, but the color of their eyes?
And that was the moment when I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. I turned around, my hand still holding his, as a uniformed member of An Garda Síochána appeared before me, the self-congratulatory smile on his fat, smug face mixing with the contempt that he felt for me and my kind.
“Well, what do we have here?” he asked. “A couple of Nancy-boys, is it?”
“Garda,” I said, releasing the boy’s hand. “This isn’t what it looks like. We were just talking, that’s all.”
“Do you know how many times I’ve heard that line, you dirty queer?” he asked, spitting on the floor at my feet. “Now turn around there till I put the cuffs on you and don’t try anything or I’ll beat the living shit out of you and there’s not a soul in the land who would blame me for it.”
Before I could move I heard more footsteps and then, to my horror, a familiar face appeared in the doorway and I knew that I hadn’t been wrong when I left Chatham Street. Someone had been following me all the way here. Someone who knew that I wasn’t being completely honest with her.
“Mary-Margaret,” I said, staring at her as she put her hands to her mouth, looking from one of us to the other in disbelief.
“This is the Gents’ toilets,” said Peter, rather pointlessly considering the situation. “There shouldn’t be any women in here.”
“I’m not a woman,” she snapped, raising her voice as she turned on him with a fury that I had never seen before. “I’m his fiancée!”
“You know this fella, do you?” asked the Garda, turning to her now, and the boy saw his opportunity and ran forward, pushing the older man aside and almost knocking Mary-Margaret off her feet as he made a break for it. He was up the stairs and gone before any of us could move.
“Come back here, you!” called the Garda, looking up the stairs, but he knew it was pointless to follow. He was well over fifty and in bad shape; the boy would be halfway down O’Connell Street by now and gone forever.
“Well, I’ve got one of you anyway,” said the Garda, turning back to me. “Are you ready for three years inside, son? Because that’s what your type gets.”
“Cyril!” cried Mary-Margaret, bursting into tears. “I knew there was something wrong. I knew it. But not this. I didn’t think it would be this. I never suspected you were a pervert.”
I barely heard her as the future passed quickly before
my eyes: the newspaper reports, the court case, the inevitable guilty verdict, the indignities I would be subjected to in Mountjoy Prison. The possibility that I could even be murdered in there. Stories like that circulated all the time.
“Oh, Cyril, Cyril!” cried Mary-Margaret, her face in her hands. “What will Daddy say?”
“Please,” I said, turning to the Garda, ready to throw myself on his mercy. “Let me go. I swear I won’t do anything like this again.”
“Not a chance in the world,” he replied, pulling back and hitting me across the face.
“Hit him again, Garda,” cried Mary-Margaret, her face red with humiliation and anger. “The filthy article.”
And he did as he was asked, punching me so hard that I fell against the wall, my cheek colliding with the top of one of the urinals, and I heard the sound of something cracking within, followed by an instant numbness on the left-hand side of my face. When I turned back, a tooth fell from my mouth and we all watched as it bounced across the floor before settling on the edge of an open drain, hovering there with the impertinence of a golf ball that has reached the very edge of the hole but decided not to fall in.
I turned to look at my attacker, who was nursing the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other, and I stepped back, fearing that he would hit me again. I weighed up the possibility of punching him instead and making my escape but even in my distress I knew that this would be pointless. I might be able to overcome him but Mary-Margaret would surely report me and then they would come for me eventually. And so I gave in.
“Fine,” I said, defeated, and the Garda reached out, taking me by the shoulder, and we ascended the steps together toward the street. Breathing in the cool night air I glanced toward the clock that hung outside Clerys department store from which every Dubliner set his or her watch. It had just turned one thirty in the morning. Three hours earlier I had been in the pub with my newly engaged friends. An hour before I had been in bed. I looked toward Mary-Margaret, who was staring at me with utter hatred on her face, and shrugged.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t help what I am. It’s the way I was born.”
“Fuck you!” she roared.
Before I could register my surprise at her words, an extraordinary noise burst from overhead, as if the heavens had opened and transformed themselves into a cacophonous thunder, and all three of us looked up in fright.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” cried Mary-Margaret. “What in God’s name was that?”
The noise seemed to diminish for a moment but then it grew louder and as I stared up I saw the statue of Admiral Lord Nelson teetering on his pillar, his expression more furious than ever, and it seemed to me that he had come to life as he leaped from his pedestal, his arms and head exploding from his body as the stone shattered above us.
“Look out!” cried the Garda. “The pillar’s coming down.”
He let go of me as we scattered, the stones began to fall, and I heard the noise of the great sculpture exploding into fragments and starting to rain down onto O’Connell Street.
This is it, I thought. This is the moment of my death.
I ran as fast as I could, somehow escaping the blocks of stone as they crashed to the ground, breaking into hundreds of pieces, shrapnel raining down on my back and head. I waited for unconsciousness, sure that it would bring my tormented life to an end at any moment. When I stopped running and turned around to look back, the street was at peace once again but the area where the three of us had been standing was invisible now under a cloud of smoke. In the heat of the moment, all I could think about was those moments when, as a child, I had entered Maude’s study uninvited and been unable to find her in the fog.
“Mary-Margaret!” I cried, my voice turning into a roar as I ran back.
As I got closer to where we had been standing, I stumbled over a body and looked down and there was the Garda who had arrested me, flat on his back now, his eyes wide open, dead to the world. I did my best to feel sorry for him but in my selfishness I couldn’t. He was gone and it wasn’t my fault, there was no more to it. There would be no arrest. No public humiliation.
I heard a sound to my left and there was Mary-Margaret lying under a great boulder, Nelson’s nose pressed to her cheek as if he was having a good sniff of her perfume, one of his eyes lying on the ground staring at her. She was still breathing but I could tell from the gasping in her throat that she hadn’t long left.
“Mary-Margaret,” I said, taking her hand. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“You’re a filthy article,” she hissed, blood seeping from her mouth as she struggled to get the words out. “Not my standard at all.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
And then, a moment later, she was gone. And so was I, running down O’Connell Street for home. There was no point staying there. I knew one thing for sure: that this was the end of it. There would be no more men, no more boys. It would just be women from now on. I would be like everyone else.
I would be normal if it killed me.
1973 Keeping the Devil at Bay
Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em
Julian arrived at my flat just before eight o’clock wearing a tie-dyed shirt open halfway down his chest, a pair of hip-hugger jeans and a purple Nehru jacket. Although his hair was cut into a close crop, reminiscent of Steve McQueen in Papillon, he eschewed the requisite sideburns, which only brought attention to his missing right ear. Around his neck he wore a chain of mixed shells and beads which, he told me, he’d purchased from a centenarian stall holder in Rishikesh when he and a former girlfriend had traveled there to meet the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The colors picked up the sparkle from a psychedelic ring on his right hand that he had stolen from Brian Jones when they were coming down from an LSD high in Arthur’s nightclub on East 54th Street two weeks earlier.
“Other than that, it’s been a quiet few months,” he said, looking me up and down with a frown. “But why aren’t you dressed yet? We’re going to be late.”
“I am dressed,” I replied. “Look at me.”
“Well, you’re wearing clothes,” he agreed. “But not the type that a twenty-eight-year-old man with any sense of style would wear on a night out, especially when they’re going to a stag party. Who did you get them from anyway, your dad?”
“I’ve never met my dad,” I said.
“Your adoptive father then,” he replied with a sigh. “Honestly, Cyril, must you say that every single—”
“Charles and I don’t share clothes,” I said, interrupting him. “We’re completely different sizes for one thing.”
“Well, you’re not going out looking like that. Or rather, I’m not going out with you looking like that. Come on, you must have something in there that doesn’t make you look like Richard Nixon’s less fashionable younger brother.”
He marched past me and when he opened the door to my bedroom I felt panic course through my body, such as one might feel while inserting a faulty plug into a damaged socket. My mind scrambled as I tried to recall whether I had left anything incriminating on display in there. I prayed that my autumn 1972 edition of Modern Male, featuring a swarthy boxer on its cover wearing nothing but a pair of bright-red gloves, was safely locked away in the second drawer of my bedside locker, accompanied by the issue of Hombre that I’d ordered from a carefully worded advertisement on the back page of the Sunday World just after Christmas. I’d spent two weeks panicking over its arrival, fearing that some religious zealot with X-ray eyes from Dublin Airport Customs would seize the package and rip the degenerate publication from its wrapping before making an outraged phone call and sending the Gardaí to my door. And then there was the issue of Vim that I’d stolen from an adult shop masquerading as a Unionist meeting-place on a day trip to Belfast six months earlier. On the journey home, stopped at border control, I’d stuffed it down the back of my trousers but, luckily for me, the inspectors seemed content to confiscate two gross of condoms from an elderly grandmother who was dis
guising her bad intentions in a Legion of Mary outfit.
I’d planned on putting all these magazines into a paper bag the following morning and disposing of them in a dustbin a few streets from my flat, a final farewell to a way of life that I was leaving behind. Standing there now, afraid to move as my friend rummaged around my bedroom, I reasoned with myself that Julian would have no cause to open the locker, so I was probably safe. It was shirts and jeans he was looking for, after all, not the type of knick-knacks and trifles that were generally kept in such places. But still, there was something lingering at the back of my mind, some slight disquiet that I had not been as careful as I should have been, and it came back to me at the same moment that he appeared before me in the doorway, holding a magazine with such distaste that it might have been a soiled handkerchief or a used prophylactic.
“What the fuck is this, Cyril?” he asked, staring at me in bewilderment.
“What’s what?” I said, trying my best to sound innocent of all wrongdoing.
“Tomorrow’s Man,” he said, reciting the words printed across the cover. “The International Magazine of Body-Building. Don’t tell me you’ve taken that up, have you? Everyone knows that’s just for queers.”
I gave an enormous stretch, simulating fatigue in the hope that this might explain the pulsating redness that had come into my cheeks.
“I’ve been putting on a bit of weight lately,” I said. “I thought it might help me to lose it.”
“Where? On your eyebrows? Sure there’s not a pick on you, Cyril. If anything, you look malnourished.”
“Sorry, yes, that’s what I meant,” I told him. “I want to put weight on, that’s it. Some muscle. Lots of muscle. Lots and lots of muscle.”
“You just said that you wanted to lose it.”
“I got confused,” I said, shaking my head. “I can’t think clearly today at all.”
“Well, I suppose that’s understandable considering what’s happening tomorrow. Jesus, would you take a look at this fella,” he said, pointing to the muscle-bound youth adorning the front of the magazine wearing nothing but a green posing pouch, his hands behind his head as he flexed his muscles and stared off into the distance, apparently lost in thought. “Some mothers do ’ave ’em, am I right?”