by John Boyne
“I suppose what you’re saying is that you’ve had sex,” I said.
“I have, yes,” she said. “And I’m not ashamed to admit it. That’s not going to be a problem, is it? You’re not going to get all judgmental on me, are you?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “It makes no difference to me how carelessly some people want to cast themselves into the fires of hell for all eternity.”
“What?”
“I’m kidding.”
“You better be.”
“But have there been many?” I asked, intrigued.
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose not. But I’d like to know anyway.”
“Well, let’s put it this way,” she said. “More than the Queen. Less than Elizabeth Taylor.”
“How many?” I insisted.
“Do you really want to know or are you just being a pervert?”
“A little of both,” I said.
“Three, if it matters that much to you,” she said. “My first was with a friend of Julian’s when I was eighteen. My second—”
“A friend of Julian’s?” I said, interrupting her. “Who?”
“Well, maybe I shouldn’t say. I suppose he might be a friend of yours too.”
“Who?” I repeated.
“I actually don’t remember his surname,” she said. “I met him by chance, on a night out with Julian just after I got my Leaving Cert results. It was at a party in someone’s house. His name was Jasper. He played the piano accordion. Of course, no one should play the piano accordion in public, they should be made to do it on some desert island somewhere, but as it turned out he played it rather well. I remember thinking that he had very sexy fingers.”
“Not Jasper Timson!” I said, sitting forward in shock.
“That’s the one,” she said, clapping her hands in delight. “Well done, you! Oh, I suppose that means you do know him then.”
“Of course I know him,” I said. “We went to school together. Are you actually telling me that you lost your virginity to Jasper Timson?”
“Well, yes,” she said with a shrug. “You have to lose it to someone, don’t you? And he was sweet. And good-looking. And he was there, which somehow was enough for me at the time. Look, Cyril, you said you didn’t mind.”
“I don’t mind. You know he lives in Toronto now, with his…” I paused and made quotation marks in the air with my fingers, “his boyfriend.”
“Yes, Julian told me,” said Alice, laughing as she sat back with a slight giggle.
“He tried to kiss him too once, you know.” It was all I could do not to burst out laughing.
“Did he? Doesn’t surprise me. It would only have surprised me if he hadn’t tried to kiss him. Anyway, I knew he was a homosexual even then. He confided in me that he thought he was but he wasn’t absolutely certain. Anyway, we were both young, we liked each other, I wanted to lose mine before another day passed, so I suggested we give it a go.”
“And what did he say?” I asked, stunned by all of this.
“Oh he jumped at the offer. And so we both leaped into bed. And it was fine. We both got what we wanted out of it. I got to pop my cherry and he got to realize that he was definitely not interested in doing that ever again. At least not with a girl. We shook hands afterward and went our separate ways. Well, metaphorically speaking. We didn’t literally shake hands. I mean, I suppose we might have done but I can’t imagine it. We probably kissed each other on the cheek. Which I think he preferred to where he had been kissing me. Anyway,” she continued, sounding as if she wanted to bring this conversation to a rapid end. “After Jasper, there was a boy who I dated for a few months, an aspiring actor who was most definitely not a homosexual, unless he was torturing himself by trying to have sex with every girl in Dublin. And then, finally, Fergus, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “Good old Fergus.”
“We only got onto this topic,” she continued, “because I said that I want us to sleep together when Max and Samantha go to London.”
“Christ, you’re just mad for it, aren’t you?” I said.
“Shut up, Cyril,” she said, slapping my hand with her own. “You’re only pretending to be annoyed. So what do you say?”
“What room do you sleep in?”
“What?”
“In Dartmouth Square. Don’t forget, I grew up there.”
“Oh yes, of course. Well, my room is on the second floor.”
“Julian told me you had my old room. On the top floor.”
“I moved down a flight. All those stairs!”
“Well I’m not doing it there,” I said quickly. “That was Maude’s bedroom. There’s just…I couldn’t. I really couldn’t.”
“Fine. We can go up to the top floor if you prefer. Into your old bedroom. How does that sound?”
I thought about it and nodded reluctantly. “All right,” I said. “Yes, well I suppose so. If it’s that important to you.”
“It should be important to both of us.”
“It is,” I said, sitting up straight now and thinking, Fuck it; if Jasper Timson—who was even more of a homosexual than I was, considering he had an actual boyfriend—could do it, then so could I. “I’m in. I mean I will be in. No, that’s all wrong, I don’t mean I’ll—”
“Relax, Cyril. It’s fine. Shall we say Saturday? Around seven o’clock.”
“Saturday,” I agreed. “Around seven o’clock.”
“And have a bath before you come over.”
“Of course I’ll have a bath,” I snapped. “What do you take me for?”
“Sometimes boys don’t.”
“You have a bath,” I said. “Remember, I know where you’ve been.”
She smiled. “I knew you’d be willing when you saw how important it was to me. That’s one of the things I love about you, Cyril. You’re not like other boys. You’re sensitive to my feelings.”
“Yes, well…” I said, knowing that the days ahead would be long ones for me.
I kept my hands off myself for the rest of the week and didn’t go anywhere near the side streets or parks that were my regular nighttime haunts, wanting to be as randy as possible come the big moment. I tried to put it out of my head that no matter what happened then, even if it all went well, there was still that fifty years that Alice had mentioned ahead of us to think about too. In my foolishness, I decided that was a bridge I’d cross when I got to it.
And as things turned out, Saturday night went better than I could ever have predicted. I felt a genuine warmth toward her anyway, an affection bordering on the romantic if not quite the sexual, and there had been many times when I had enjoyed the prolonged kissing sessions in which we engaged. I insisted on the lights staying off, of course, for I wanted to get to know her body first by touch before being confronted with the reality of it, and although it was not what I wanted—it was soft to the touch, not muscled and hard as I liked, and smoother than I had ever imagined skin could be—I somehow found myself lost in the novelty of it and performed in a way that I think could best have been described as “perfectly adequate.”
“Well, that’s a start, at least,” said Alice when it was over.
She hadn’t reached any sort of climax, of course, although I had. Which seemed rather ironic to me, all things considered.
A Sign
When I woke, the sun was being a total bollix, pouring through the window and scorching through my eyelids. I hadn’t even bothered to draw the curtains on my return a few hours earlier, collapsing facedown and fully clothed on the sofa, where the combination of a hangover with an awareness of my predicament now made me feel as if my last moments were upon me. I closed my eyes, desperate to return to sleep, but was quickly hauling my sorry carcass toward the bathroom, unsure whether I needed to piss or vomit. In the end I settled for both, concurrently, before making my way nervously to the mirror. Dracula would have felt less fear examining his own reflection.
Of course, I looked terrible, like
the victim of some random act of overnight violence, mugged and left for dead before being inexplicably brought back to life by a malevolent physician.
I hoped that a long hot shower might help me to recover but an immediate and permanent end to world hunger would have been more likely. It was a quarter to eleven by now and I was due at the church by twelve. I imagined Alice in Dartmouth Square, putting her dress on, surrounded by bridesmaids, while they each tried not to make inappropriate references to what had happened the last time they’d gathered for such an event.
Suddenly, the realization of how to solve all my problems hit me. It would involve losing all my friends, including Julian—especially Julian—but in time they would see that it had been for the best and they would surely forgive me. Taking a handful of loose change from the bedside table I put on my dressing gown and dragged myself to the payphone in the corridor, dialing the number before I could change my mind. When Max answered, I pressed the A button, heard the coins tumble into the chamber and swallowed, racking my brain for the right words.
“Hello?” he said, sounding as if he’d already had a drink or two, despite the early hour. “Max Woodbead?” In the background I could hear laughter, the sounds of girls’ voices and of glasses clinking together. “Hello?” he repeated. “Who’s there? Speak up, for Christ’s sake, I haven’t got all day.”
But I said nothing, hanging up and returning to my room, knowing that it was no good.
Twenty minutes later, I was making my way toward the church in Ranelagh, growling at anyone who happened to smile in my direction and the lads who shouted from their cars that I was beginning a life sentence. Feeling ill again, I paused and, realizing that I still had a good half hour to spare, took a detour into a teashop at the corner of Charlemont. It was busy but there was an empty table in the corner and I sat there, by the window, ordering a large, strong cup of coffee and two glasses of water, both filled with ice, and began to relax a little as I sipped them, watching the students making their way into town, the businessmen heading for their offices, the housewives wheeling shopping bags toward Quinnsworth, and wondered whether there had ever been a moment when my life might have taken a different turn. How had Jasper Timson, a fucking piano-accordion player for Christ’s sake, ended up living with his boyfriend in Toronto, while I was preparing to marry a woman in whom I had no sexual interest whatsoever? When was the exact moment that I might have found some courage and for once in my life done the right thing?
Right now, I told myself. This is it! This is the moment! There’s still time!
“Give me a sign,” I muttered to the universe. “Just something to give me the courage to walk away.”
I jumped as a hand touched my shoulder and looked around to see a woman and a small child standing next to me, glancing toward the empty seats at my table.
“You don’t mind, do you?” she asked. “Only there isn’t anywhere else.”
“Be my guest,” I said, although I would have preferred to have been left alone.
The child—a boy of about eight or nine—sat down opposite me and I glared at him as he took in my wedding suit and seemed amused by it. He was very neatly dressed, wearing a white shirt beneath a blue tank-top, and his hair was carefully combed with an immaculate side-parting. He looked like he could have been the kid brother of the young Nazi who sang “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in Cabaret, the last film that Alice and I had gone to together. The boy was carrying four books in his hands and he laid them out on the table before him, apparently deciding which one merited his attentions the most.
“Can I ask you a favor?” asked the woman. “You wouldn’t look after Jonathan for me for a few minutes, would you? I just need to use the facilities, then I have a phone call to make and then I’ll be ordering some tea. Are you getting married today? You’re dressed for it.”
“In about an hour,” I said, certain that I recognized her from somewhere but unable, just at that moment, to place her. “And who’s Jonathan?”
“Naturally, I’m Jonathan,” said the little boy, extending his hand to me. “Jonathan Edward Goggin. And who might you be?”
“Cyril Avery,” I said, staring at the small hand that gave off a slight odor of soap before giving in and shaking it. “It’s fine,” I said to his mother. “I won’t let anyone kidnap him. I know the signs for that.”
It was obvious that she didn’t understand what I meant by that but she turned away regardless and made her way toward the doors at the other corner of the room while I looked back at the boy and he concentrated on his books. “What are you reading?” I asked him eventually.
“Well,” he declared with an enormous sigh, as if the weight of the world was upon his shoulders but he was trying to remain stoical about it. “I haven’t quite decided yet. I was at the library this morning, you see; it’s my regular day, and Mrs. Shipley the librarian recommended these three here, and she’s usually an excellent advocate of good storytelling, so I took her advice. This one seems to be about a rabbit who takes a baby fox as a companion but I can’t see how that could work because no matter how much kindness the rabbit shows the fox, eventually it will just grow up and eat him. This one here is about a group of children, distantly related I suspect, they usually are, who solve crimes on their summer holidays but I flicked through it on the way here and I found the word nigger in there and there’s a black boy in my class at school and he says that word is a very bad word and he’s an extremely good friend of mine, probably my third-best friend, so I might avoid it just to be on the safe side. And this one is some nonsense about the 1916 Rising and the thing is, I’m just not political. I never have been. So I might just go with this one here, which was the one I chose myself.” He held up the book and I glanced at the cover, an image of a boy standing tall, legs parted, holding a cockerel under one arm and a mysterious box under the other while what looked like refugees walked past in the background. The words The Silver Sword were printed in the top right-hand corner.
“What’s it about?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t really know,” he said. “As I haven’t started it yet. But the back cover says it’s about the war and children fleeing the Nazis. Do you know about the Nazis? I know all about them. They were the worst. Just awful, awful people without a shred of humanity between them. But here’s the thing, Mr. Avery—”
“Call me Cyril,” I said.
“No, I couldn’t do that. You’re really old and I’m just a child.”
“I’m twenty-eight!” I said, appalled and insulted.
“Wow,” he said, laughing. “That is so ancient. You’re like a dinosaur. Anyway, here’s the thing, as I was saying before you so rudely interrupted me, I prefer stories about things that really happened. And the war really happened, didn’t it, so I want to know about it. Did you fight in the war, Mr. Avery?”
“No,” I said. “On account of the fact that I was born a few months after it ended.”
“I find that very hard to believe,” said Jonathan, shaking his head. “You look so old that if you said you’d fought in the First World War, I wouldn’t have fallen off my seat in surprise!”
And with that he burst out laughing and continued to laugh for so long and so hard that I had no choice but to laugh along.
“Shut up, you little prick,” I said eventually, even though I was still laughing, and he switched to giggling now. “I have a hangover, that’s all.”
“You said a bad word,” he told me.
“I did,” I admitted. “I learned it in the trenches at Verdun.”
“Verdun was a battle in the First World War,” he announced. “It lasted eleven months and General von Hindenburg, who later became President of Germany, was in charge. I knew you were old. And what’s a hangover?”
“It’s when you pour so much drink down your throat that you wake up the next day feeling like the wreck of the Hesperus.”
I glanced around in search of his mother but there was no sign of her as yet.
�
�So are you looking forward to getting married?” asked Jonathan. “Don’t people usually do that when they’re much younger? Could you not find someone to marry you until now?”
“I’m a late developer,” I said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Give it a few years. Something tells me you’ll understand in time.”
“And you’re marrying a woman?”
“No, I’m marrying a train. The eleven-o-four from Castlebar.”
He frowned. “How can you marry a train?” he asked.
“There’s nothing in the constitution that says I can’t.”
“I suppose not. And if you love the train and the train loves you, then I suppose you should marry it.”
“I’m not marrying a train, Jonathan,” I said with a sigh, taking a long drink from my iced water. “I’m marrying a woman.”
“I knew it. You’re silly.”
“I am silly,” I admitted. “I’m about the silliest man you’ve ever met. I’m a complete fucking idiot, actually.”
“You said another bad word. I bet you’re going to have sex with your wife tonight, aren’t you?”
“How do you know about sex?” I asked. “You’re only about six.”
“I’m eight. And I’ll be nine in three weeks’ time. And I know all about sex, actually,” he added, not seeming the least embarrassed. “My mother told me all about it.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “When a mummy and a daddy love each other very much, they lie close together and the Holy Spirit descends upon them to create the miracle of new life.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Jonathan. “That’s not what happens at all.” At which point he proceeded to give me a very frank description of how a man and woman went about the business of fornicating, even telling me a few things that I had not known before.
“How on earth do you know all these things?” I asked him when he’d finished his rather graphic and stomach-churning lecture.
“My mother says that one of the problems in this country is that no one is willing to talk about sex because of the influence of the Catholic Church and she says that she wants me to grow up understanding that a woman’s body is something to be cherished, not something to be afraid of.”