by John Boyne
I twisted the gold ring, newly placed on the fourth finger of my left hand. It came loose a little too easily and I held it in the palm of my hand, judging its weight, before laying it on a side table next to an unopened bottle of red wine. Alice and I had spent an entire Saturday afternoon shopping for the rings and it had been fun; we’d spent more money than we’d intended and by the end of the day, when we were having dinner, I felt such strong affection toward her that I had begun to wonder whether our friendship might ultimately blossom into love. But of course I was deluding myself, for love was one thing but desire was something else entirely.
A part of me regretted having told Julian anything; another part resented the fact that I had been forced to hide my true self for so long. He’d said in the church that if I’d told him the truth from the start he wouldn’t have cared but I didn’t believe that for a moment. Not for a single moment. When we’d first shared a room at Belvedere College, he would have asked for a transfer if I had explained my feelings for him. And even if he had shown any kindness or understanding toward me at the time, word would have soon got out and the other boys would have made my life a misery. The priests would have expelled me and I would have had no home to go to. If only Charles and Max had never met, I told myself. If only the lives of the Averys and the Woodbeads had never intersected in the first place. My nature might not have turned out any different but at least I wouldn’t have found myself in this terrible mess. Or would there have simply been another Julian; was there someone else like him out there somewhere under whose spell I would have fallen? Another Alice? It was impossible to know. Trying to understand it all was giving me a headache.
I walked toward the pair of French doors that opened onto the balcony, peering outside tentatively like a minor member of the Royal Family when the crowds have all gone home. Looking across the treetops into the parkland of St. Stephen’s Green was a vantage point that I had never enjoyed before. But this was Dublin, the nation’s capital. The place of my birth and a city I loved at the heart of a country I loathed. A town filled with good-hearted innocents, miserable bigots, adulterous husbands, conniving churchmen, paupers who received no help from the State, and millionaires who sucked the lifeblood from it. Glancing down, I watched as the cars drove around the Green, the horses and traps filled with tourists, and the taxis pulled up to the hotel. The trees were bursting into full verdure and I wished that I could simply spread my arms and take flight, soar above them and look down on the lake before ascending into the clouds like Icarus, happy to be scorched by the sun and disintegrate into nothingness.
The sun was out and I removed my jacket and waistcoat, throwing them back into the living room, where they landed on the side of a chair. My shoes felt tight on my feet and I kicked them off too, followed quickly by my socks, and the feeling of the stone balcony beneath my bare feet was curiously invigorating. I breathed in the fresh afternoon air and a sense of calm began to take me over.
Had the balcony extended farther across the street, I would have been able to walk out and turn my head to the left to see the corners of Dáil Éireann, where Julian and I had enjoyed one of our earliest adventures together. Farther ahead, farther than I could possibly see, I might have spotted Dartmouth Square and the house where I had been reared, the same one that Maude and I had been forced to quit in disgrace after Charles’s incarceration and where I had laid eyes on Julian for the first time after watching in bewilderment as Alice ran screaming from my adoptive mother’s second-floor office. Where I had fallen in love, before I even knew what those words meant.
As I dwelled on these memories and felt the breeze lift my sprits, it seemed entirely natural for me to take my shirt off and allow the wind to blow against my chest. In fact, it was so pleasurable, so hypnotic, that I undid my belt and removed my trousers, feeling neither shame nor self-consciousness, until I was standing there several hundred feet above the streets of Dublin wearing nothing but my underwear.
I glanced to my right but the buildings at the northern tip of the Green prevented me from enjoying a clear view of the flat on Chatham Street where I had once lived with Albert Thatcher and been forced to deal with the sound of his headboard banging against my wall night after night. To go back seven years, I thought, and do things differently.
I had gone this far, I told myself. What had I to lose? I reached down and removed my underwear, kicking them back inside the room, and felt a little giddy as I stood on the balcony, leaning over, and stared across the top of the city, naked as I had been on the day of my birth.
Had I been able to see forever, I could have looked out to the other side of Dublin itself, through Kildare and Tipperary and onward to Cork City, then into the toe of the country at Goleen itself where, although I did not know it at the time, my grandparents were being buried side by side that same afternoon, having being run over by a speeding car as they left the funeral Mass of Father James Monroe, the man who had banished my mother from the town some twenty-eight years earlier. I would have seen my six uncles standing next to each other at the gravesides as they ever did in ascending order of age and stupidity and my own father, the man who had planted me in my mother’s womb, standing nearby, accepting the condolences of neighbors and wondering whether he would be expected to buy a round of drinks for everyone when they made their way to Flanavan’s pub later.
I would have seen it all, had I been able to see, but I could see none of it because I had spent my entire life blind and deaf and mute and ignorant, devoid of any senses save the one that governed my sexual compulsions and that had brought me to this terrible place from which, I was certain, there could be no return.
It was easy to lift my body to the top of the barrier and swing my legs over the side. So easy that I wondered why I had not done it years before. I looked down at the street below, at my own nakedness hovering above it, not a soul looking up to the heavens to watch me. I rocked back and forth a little, allowing my center of gravity and the breeze to do their work. My hands gripped the ironwork and then, gradually, they started to loosen.
Let go, I told myself.
Let go.
Just fall…
I took a deep breath and the last thought that I allowed to pass through my mind was not about my mother, my adoptive parents, Julian or any of the strangers that I had been forced to fuck in darkness over the years. My last thought was directed toward Alice. In apology for what I had done to her. At how it would take this to set her free again. And somehow I felt entirely at peace as I took my hands away and allowed my body to lean forward.
And then a child’s voice, calling from the street below:
“Look, Mammy, that man has no clothes on!”
I pulled back in fright. My hands gripped the ironwork once again. I heard shouts from the people on St. Stephen’s Green, screams, excitement and delirium, hilarity and horror. I looked down as the crowd gathered and the vertigo that had eluded me before kicked in now, almost causing me to fall when I didn’t want to, and it took all my strength and focus to swing around, to ignore the shrieks and laughter from below as the people of the city caught sight of me. I fell back into the room and lay gasping on the carpet and couldn’t quite understand why I was naked. A moment later, the phone rang.
I lifted it, expecting either the voice of the hotel manager or a Garda Síochána, summoned in from the street beyond. But no, it was just Alice. Calm, completely unaware of what I had just tried to do, her tone filled with compassion and love.
“There you are,” she said. “What are you doing up there? I thought you said you’d only be a few minutes.”
“Sorry,” I told her. “I left my wallet up here, that’s all. I’m on my way back down now.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t come down. I’m coming up. There’s something I want to talk to you about. It’s important.”
This again, I thought. “What has Julian said?” I asked.
There was a long pause. “We’ll talk upstairs,” she said. “When we�
��re alone.”
“Let me come down to you.”
“No, Cyril,” she insisted. “Just stay where you are, all right? I’m on my way up.”
And with that she was gone. I put the receiver down and looked down at my wedding suit, scattered on the floor now. It would only be a couple of minutes before she was walking through the door. And others would surely be here in less time than that when the crowd from the street reported what they had seen. So I did the only thing that I could think of. I reached for my suitcase, pulled out a change of clothes and threw them on. Pulling open the hand luggage I had brought with me for the honeymoon, I took out the only things I needed: my wallet and my passport. I put a hat on and pulled it down over my forehead, glancing at my wedding ring where I had left it but deciding not to pick it up. Leaving the room, I didn’t go toward the staircase but to the other end of the corridor, to the elevator that the staff used when bringing room-service meals up and down between the floors.
Glancing back down the corridor as the doors sealed shut behind me, I felt certain that I saw a burst of white, a billowing cloud of wedding dress, as Alice appeared at the top of the staircase. But then I was locked into silence and transported down into the bowels of the building, where a private staff entrance led me out onto the corner of Kildare Street. A crowd had gathered. They were looking up toward the roof of the building, waiting for the crazy naked man to reappear, half of them hoping that he would be saved, half of them hoping that he would jump.
There was nothing left for me here, I knew that much. So what else could I do but follow my own advice and get out of town?
PART II
EXILE
1980 Into the Annex
By the River Amstel
I could see the argument taking place from halfway down the street. A giant of a man wearing a heavy overcoat with fur trim across the shoulders and, perversely, a tattered gray-tweed deerstalker hat. Next to him, a young boy, perhaps a third his size, in denim jeans and a dark-blue jacket with a white T-shirt underneath. They were arguing loudly, the boy shouting at the older man, his arms flailing in the air as he grew more and more enraged. When the man spoke, his tone was obviously controlled but indisputably more threatening. After a moment, the boy turned around to storm off but before he could get more than a few feet away the man reached out and grabbed him roughly by the collar, pinning him up against the wall and punching him hard in the stomach. The boy crumpled to the ground, his knees rising to protect himself from further assault when he fell to the wet pavement. He turned his head and his body jerked forward as he vomited into the gutter. When he was finished, the man reached down and dragged him back to his feet before whispering something in his ear and discarding him roughly, the boy’s body falling back into the pool of sick as his attacker walked away into the darkness. Throughout all of this I had held back, having no desire to get involved in a street fight, but now that the boy was alone I made my way quickly toward him. He looked up in fear as I approached and I could see tears streaming down his face. He was young, fifteen at most.
“Are you all right?” I asked, reaching a hand out to help him up, but he flinched, as if I was intent on hurting him too, and pushed himself back toward the wall. “Can I help you?”
He shook his head, pulling himself painfully to his feet, and with one arm pressed against his wounded stomach shuffled away, turning the corner in the direction of the Amstel River. I watched him go before putting the key in my door and stepping inside. The whole incident had taken only a minute or two, and just as quickly I put it out of my mind, giving no further thought to what had caused the fight or where the boy might go next.
Pulling Myself out of the Shit
Incredibly, I never learned to ride a bicycle until I lived in Amsterdam.
For some, the sight of a man in his mid-thirties cycling unsteadily around the Vondelpark while another ran behind, ready to catch him should he fall, was like something out of a Chaplin film, but this was how I spent many weekend afternoons during the summer of 1980. After causing a multiple pile-up near the Rijksmuseum and almost sliding beneath the axles of a tram in Frederiksplein, I was advised to sit for my Verkeersdiploma, which most children passed by Grade Seven in school, and failed three times—a record, I was told, by the disbelieving instructor—receiving stitches in my right knee after a particularly nasty collision with a lamppost before finally passing and being given the uncertain freedom of the roads.
My first extended solo cycle took place a few weeks later when I left the city for Naarden, a journey of about ninety minutes, where I was to meet Bastiaan’s parents, Arjan and Edda, for the first time. Bastiaan, who was taking the train from Utrecht after work, had promised to be there early in order to make the introductions, so I felt anxious when I arrived a little ahead of schedule. I had never met a boyfriend’s parents before and wasn’t sure about the etiquette of the situation. Even if I had been talking to the one member of my family who I presumed was still alive—Charles—I doubted that he would have even entertained the idea of such an encounter.
A long road, humped by unhelpful rocks and random potholes, led to the Van den Bergh farm and I found my unsteady cycling further threatened by a pair of dogs who came charging in my direction the moment they caught sight of me, barking loudly and offering no clue as to whether they were excited or enraged by my appearance. Although I generally liked dogs, I had never owned one and their ambiguous greeting, not to mention their determination to scamper around me, led to my falling off once again and landing in an enormous steaming pile of shit the scent and texture of which suggested that it had not long escaped the bowels of some aged incontinent cow. I looked down at my brand-new chinos and the Parallel Lines T-shirt that was my pride and joy and could have wept at the filthy brown streaks smeared across Debbie Harry’s perfect face.
“You fucking fuckers,” I muttered as the dogs came over and, feigning innocence, wagged their tails in acknowledgment of their small victory. The larger of the two cocked his leg and took a piss against my fallen bike, an indignity that I thought was a little much. Up ahead, I heard a voice call out a stream of words and narrowed my eyes to see a woman standing outside the farmhouse, hands on hips, waving toward me. From this distance, I couldn’t make out what she was saying but guessed that this was Bastiaan’s mother and had no choice but to pick myself up and, my attackers in tow, make my way toward her. As I got closer, I noticed her eyes were lingering in faint amusement on my soiled clothes.
“You must be the Irish boy,” she said, nibbling at her lower lip as she sized me up.
“Cyril,” I said, not bothering to extend my filthy hand. “And you must be Mrs. Van den Bergh.”
“Call me Edda,” she said. “You know that you’re covered in cow shit, yes?”
“I do,” I said. “I fell off my bike.”
“What kind of person falls off a bike? Have you been drinking?”
“No. Well, not today anyway. I had a few beers last night but I’m pretty sure they’re—”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, interrupting me. “In Holland, even drunk people can cycle without falling off. I’ve been known to fall asleep with my head on my handlebars and still make it home safely. Come inside. Arjan is at the top field but he’ll be down soon.”
“I can’t,” I told her, looking down at my ruined clothes. “Not like this anyway. Maybe I should go home and come back another day?”
“This is a farm, Cyril,” she said with a shrug. “It’s nothing we’re not used to. Come. Follow me.”
We went inside the house and I kicked my boots off at the door, not wanting to cause any unnecessary mess. She took me through the living room and down a narrow corridor that led to a bathroom before opening a nearby cabinet and handing me a towel that felt to the touch as if it had been used, washed, dried and returned to its shelf ten thousand times. “You can take a shower in here,” she said. “Next door is Bastiaan’s old bedroom and he still keeps some clothes in the wardrob
e. Change into something when you’re finished.”
“Thank you,” I said, closing the door behind me before turning to my own reflection in the mirror and mouthing the word Fuck with as much quiet intensity as I could muster. I stripped quickly and stepped into the stall—the water pressure was abysmal and the temperature had only two settings, freezing and scalding, but somehow I managed to wash all the crap from my face and hands, dissolving the single bar of soap into nothingness as I scrubbed myself. I turned around at one point to allow the water to cascade down my back and legs and, to my astonishment, could make out the figure of Mrs. Van den Bergh in the bathroom, lifting my soiled clothes from the floor and throwing them over her arm. Before leaving, she turned and stared directly at my naked figure before nodding in satisfaction and exiting the bathroom. Most odd, I thought. When I was finished, I peeped outside to make sure the corridor was empty before darting into the next room and closing the door behind me.
There was something faintly erotic about being alone in Bastiaan’s childhood bedroom and I couldn’t stop myself from lying down on the single bed that had been his for eighteen years before he left for university. I tried to imagine him falling asleep there as a teenager, fantasizing about bare-chested swimmers or floppy-haired Dutch pop stars as he embraced his sexuality instead of running from it. It was in this bed that he had lost his virginity at the age of fifteen to a boy from his local football team when he spent the night there after a cup final match. When he told me that story, a softness in his expression, a dampness in his eyes at the blissful memory, I had been torn between grudging respect and overwhelming jealousy, for I simply couldn’t compare my own early experiences with his. The fact that the boy, Gregor, remained a vague presence in his life still was astonishing to me, for until meeting Bastiaan himself I had never encountered a lover twice.