by John Boyne
“Fuck off,” she said.
“You fuck off,” he replied.
“You can’t smoke in here,” she repeated, raising her voice now.
“I’m not smoking,” he insisted. “I’m just rolling them for later.” He shook his head and looked across at me before glancing at my mother. “Have you had fifty years of this?” he asked me and I stared back at him. Did he think my mother was my wife? I didn’t know what to say, so simply shook my head and turned back to look out the window.
“The trains are very comfortable these days, aren’t they?” said my mother, pretending that none of that had happened at all.
“They are,” I said.
“Not like in my day.”
“No?”
“Of course, it’s years since I was on a train. And when I left Goleen first, I took the bus, not the train. It was all I could afford.”
“That was where you first met Jack Smoot, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“No, it’s where I met Seán MacIntyre. Jack was waiting for us at the other end.” She sighed a little and closed her eyes for a moment as she traveled back in time.
“Have you spoken to Jack lately?” I asked.
“About a month ago. I’m planning my next trip over.”
I nodded. We’d told each other almost every detail of our lives but had always avoided mentioning one particular night in Amsterdam almost thirty years earlier; it seemed easier not to talk of it even though we both knew that we’d been there.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
“Of course,” she said. “What is it?”
“Why did you never go back?” I asked. “To West Cork, I mean. To Goleen. Back to your family?”
“Sure I couldn’t have, Cyril. They threw me out.”
“No, I know that. I mean later on. When tempers had softened.”
She raised her hands in an uncertain gesture.
“I honestly don’t think anything would have been different even if I had,” she told me. “My father was not a man to change his mind on anything. My mother wanted nothing to do with me. I wrote to her a few times but she never replied. And my brothers, except perhaps for Eddie, were always going to side with Daddy because they each wanted the farm when he was gone and didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. And of course, Father Monroe would have chased me out of town on the back of a donkey if I’d dared to show my face. And your father…well your father was certainly never going to help me.”
“No,” I said, looking down at the table and scratching away at a mark there in a nervous gesture, one that took me back in time to the Dáil tearoom many years ago with Julian Woodbead. “No, I suppose not.”
“And the second reason,” she continued, “was an even more basic one. Money. It wasn’t easy to travel in those days, Cyril, and what little I had I was saving in order to be able to survive. If I wanted a holiday, I took a couple of days in Bray, or if I was feeling adventurous, maybe I went as far south as Gorey or Arklow. And then, in time, I started going to Amsterdam every few years. The truth is, Cyril, that I never gave it much thought. Once I was gone, I mean. I never thought about going back. I never wanted to. I put it all behind me. Until today.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
Another noise from across the aisle and I stared at the young couple who, without my noticing, had moved seats so they were sitting next to each other. He had his arm around her now and she was leaning into his shoulder, her eyes half shut in tiredness as he reached down and kissed the crown of her head. At that moment, they looked like a picture postcard. Give it an hour, I thought, give it one shake of the train on the tracks and they’ll be at each other’s throats again.
“Young love,” I said, smiling at my mother as I nodded my head in their direction.
“Been there,” she said with a shrug and a roll of her eyes. “Done that. Bought the T-shirt.”
Kenneth
We’d waited a few weeks to meet again after that day in the hospital chapel. It was possible, of course, that it had been pure coincidence, that the use of that phrase a little hunchbacked Redemptorist nun was just chance. Could it have been hers at first and somehow been adopted by Charles and Maude as if it had traveled across the city along with my small body? Or had Charles just thought the same thing and these had been the obvious words to use? And even the date of birth could have been happenstance. How many children, after all, were born in Dublin on the same day each year? And yet somehow I knew immediately that this was no coincidence; that we had been in each other’s lives all these years without ever realizing who the other one was.
But, of course, our timing was terrible. My mother had just lost one son; she wasn’t ready to deal with the implications of potentially finding another only a few hours later. She grew terribly upset when I sat down and told her what I suspected, and finally I had no choice but to call her daughter-in-law, whose number the hospital gave me, and dispatch her in a taxi for home. Afterward, I waited a couple of weeks to write to her—I didn’t attend Jonathan’s funeral, as much as I wanted to—making it clear that I needed nothing from her and that I was not one of those unfortunate souls seeking retribution for my abandonment many decades earlier. I simply wanted to talk to her, that was all, and for us to get to know each other in a way that we hadn’t to date.
And in time, she replied.
Let’s meet, she said. Let’s meet and talk.
And so we met in Buswells Hotel, across the road from Dáil Éireann, one Thursday evening after work. I could barely keep still all day, so anxious was I about what lay ahead, but once I crossed the road I began to feel strangely at peace. The bar was fairly empty, save for the Minister of Finance sitting in a corner of the room with his head in his hands, apparently weeping into his Guinness, and I turned away from him, not wanting to get involved with whatever madness was going on over there. I looked around and saw Mrs. Goggin, as I still thought of her, sitting on the other side of the room, and gave her a wave as I approached and she smiled back nervously. She had a cup of tea in front of her that was almost empty and I asked her whether she wanted another.
“What will you be having?” she asked. “Will you be having a drink?”
“I might have a pint,” I said. “I have a thirst on me after the day’s work.”
“Then perhaps you’d be good enough to get me one too.”
“A pint?” I asked, surprised. “Of lager?”
“Of Guinness,” she said. “If you don’t mind. I might need it.”
Somehow it made me happy that we were both going to be drinking; it would take the edge off, I decided.
“Sláinte,” I said when I returned, lifting my pint, and she lifted hers too and we clinked glasses, failing to look each other in the eye as one is supposed to do at such moments. I didn’t know what we were expected to do next and for a while we sat quietly, making small talk about the weather and the condition of the soft furnishings.
“Well now,” she said at last.
“Well now,” I repeated. “How have you been?”
“As well as can be expected.”
“It’s a terrible loss that you’ve suffered.”
“Yes.”
“And your daughter-in-law and the girls?”
She shrugged. “They’re remarkably strong, all of them,” she said. “It’s the thing I most admire about Melanie. But I hear her at night, crying in her bedroom. She and Jonathan loved each other very much. Of course, they were together since they were just teenagers, the pair of them, and he should have had many decades ahead of him yet. But then, you know what it is to lose someone too young, don’t you?”
“I do,” I said. I had told her about Bastiaan many years earlier when she was still employed in the tearoom.
“Does it ever get any easier?” she asked.
I nodded. “It does,” I said. “You reach a point where you realize that your life must go on regardless. You choose to live or you choose to die. But then there are moments,
things that you see, something funny on the street or a good joke that you hear, a television program that you want to share, and it makes you miss the person who’s gone terribly and then it’s not grief at all, it’s more a sort of bitterness at the world for taking them away from you. I think of Bastiaan every day, of course. But I’ve grown accustomed to his absence. In some ways it was more difficult to get used to his presence once we started going out.”
“Why is that?” she asked.
“Because it was new to me,” I said, considering it. “I messed up everything when I was young. So when I finally found myself in a normal, healthy relationship I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. Other people learn those tricks so much younger.”
“He left them very well provided for all the same,” she said. “Jonathan, I mean. So there’s that to be grateful for. And Melanie is a wonderful mother. I’ve been living there since Christmas. But it’s time I went back to my own place. I’m going back next week, in fact.”
“You keep talking about your daughter-in-law,” I said. “But how are you? How are you coping?”
“Well, I’ll never get over it,” she said with a shrug. “A parent never could. And somehow I have to find a way to cope with that.”
“And Jonathan’s father?” I asked, for I had never heard her mention him.
“Oh he’s long gone,” she said. “He was just a man I met. I can barely remember what he even looked like. The thing is, Cyril, I wanted a child, a child that I could keep, and I needed a man’s help to make the baby. He wandered in and out of my life over the course of one night and that was as much as I ever knew of him or wanted to. Does that make me sound like a terribly wanton woman?”
“It makes you sound like someone who wanted to be in charge of her own destiny. Who didn’t want anyone telling her what to do ever again.”
“Perhaps,” she said, considering this. “Anyway, the thing is, Jonathan was all that I needed from then on. He was a good son. And I think I was a good mother.”
“I’m sure you were.”
“Does that make you angry?”
I frowned. “Why would it?” I asked.
“Because I wasn’t a good mother to you.”
“I have no interest in blaming you for anything,” I told her. “I said as much in my letter. I’m looking for no argument nor do I want any unpleasantness. I’m too old for that. We both are.”
She nodded and looked on the verge of tears. “Are you sure about that?” she asked. “You’re not just saying it?”
“I really am. There doesn’t have to be any drama here. None at all.”
“You must have had very loving parents to feel that way.”
I thought about it. “Actually, they were very strange parents,” I told her. “Neither of them were what you might call conventional people. And they had an extremely peculiar approach to parenting. Sometimes I felt as if I was little more than a tenant in their house, as if they weren’t entirely sure what I was even doing there. But they never mistreated me, nor did they ever do anything to hurt me. And perhaps they loved me in their own way. The concept itself might have been slightly alien to them.”
“And did you love them?”
“Yes, I did,” I said without hesitation. “I loved them both very much. Despite everything. But then children usually do. They look for safety and security, and one way or another Charles and Maude provided that. I’m not a bitter person, Mrs. Goggin,” I added. “I have no bitterness inside me at all.”
“Tell me about them,” she said.
I shrugged. “It’s hard to know where to start,” I told her. “Charles was a banker. He was quite rich, but he was always cheating on his taxes. He went to prison a few times for it. And when he was younger he always had a string of women on the side. But he was good fun. He was always telling me that I wasn’t a real Avery, though. I think I could have done without that.”
“That sounds quite mean on his part.”
“I honestly don’t think that he was trying to be cruel. It was more a matter of fact. Anyway, he’s dead now. They both are. And I was with him when he went. I miss him still.”
“And your mother?”
“Adoptive mother,” I said.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “She was your mother. Don’t be unkind.”
Something about the way she asserted that brought tears to my eyes. Because of course she was right. If anyone had been my mother, it was Maude.
“Maude was a writer,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I do,” she said. “I’ve read most of her books.”
“Do you like them?”
“Very, very much. Her work has great compassion. She must have been a very caring woman.”
I laughed, despite myself. “She really wasn’t,” I said. “She was a lot colder than Charles. She spent most of her time in her study, writing and smoking, emerging only occasionally in a fog to terrorize any visiting children. I think she just about tolerated my presence in the house. Sometimes she saw me as an ally and sometimes as an irritation. She’s been dead a long time now, though. Almost fifty years. I think about her a lot, though, because one way or another she’s become so much part of the Irish consciousness. The books, the films. The fact that everyone seems to know her. You know she’s on the tea towel now?”
“The tea towel?” she asked. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a writers’ thing,” I explained. “Do you know that picture, eight old men who were supposed to be the best of the best? Yeats, O’Casey, Oliver St. John Gogarty, the lot of them. The same picture is on posters and mugs and table settings and coasters. Maude always said they’d never let a woman on the tea towel. And for years, she was right. But then they did. Because she’s right at the center of it now.”
“It’s not much of a legacy,” she said doubtfully.
“No, probably not.”
“And you had no brothers or sisters?”
“No,” I said.
“Did you want any?”
“It might have been nice,” I said. “I’ve told you about Julian in the past, of course. I suppose he was like a brother of sorts. Until I realized that I was in love with him. I only wish that I’d got to know Jonathan.”
“I think you’d have liked him.”
“I’m sure I would have. I liked him on that one occasion that we met. It seems quite cruel that you and I have only made this connection between us as a result of his death.”
“Well, Cyril,” she said, leaning forward and surprising me by her choice of words. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in more than seven decades of life, it’s that the world is a completely fucked-up place. You never know what’s around the corner and it’s often something unpleasant.”
“That’s quite a cynical view of the world, Mrs. Goggin,” I suggested.
“I’m not sure it is,” she said. “And I think we might have to move past Mrs. Goggin now, don’t you?”
I nodded. “I’m not quite sure what I should call you,” I said.
“How about Catherine?”
“Catherine, then,” I said.
“I never let anyone call me that in the Dáil,” she said. “I needed to have authority in there. I remember once when Jack Lynch called me by my first name and I looked him right in the eye and I said, Taoiseach, if you ever call me by that name again you’ll be banned from the tearoom for a month. The next day, I received a bunch of flowers and an apology note addressed to Mrs. Goggin. Nice man,” she added. “Of course, he was from Cork too. Like me. But I didn’t hold it against him.”
“I never would have dreamed of calling you by your first name,” I said. “I was terrified of you. Everyone was.”
“Me?” she asked, smiling. “Sure I’m a sweetheart. I can remember you when you were a little boy,” she added. “Do you remember that day you came in with your pal and pretended to be old enough to drink and I had to run you out of the place?”
“I do,” I said, laughing as
I remembered the joy that Julian could offer in those days with his mischief and his cheek. “But you took down one of the priests while you were at it.”
“Did I?”
“You certainly did. I don’t think anyone had ever spoken to him like that before. Let alone a woman. I think that was the thing that infuriated him the most.”
“And good for me,” she added.
“Good for you.”
“He was the boy who was kidnapped, wasn’t he?” she asked.
“That’s right. Not long after that, actually.”
“That was such a big story back in the day. They cut off one of his ears, didn’t they?”
“One of them,” I said. “And a finger. And a toe.”
“Terrible,” she said, shaking her head. “The papers were so cruel about him when they found out how he died.”
“It was disgusting,” I said, feeling the anger grow inside me. I had said that I felt no bitterness but whenever I remembered this I found that dangerous emotion lurking deep within my soul. “No one had spoken about him in years and they took such pleasure in telling the country what had happened to him. I remember a woman calling in to a radio show to say that she had felt such sympathy for him when he was a child but now she only felt disgust. It would be better for everyone, she said, if all the gays were rounded up and shot before they could spread their disease.”
“But he wasn’t gay, was he?” she asked.
“No, he wasn’t.”
“Poor boy,” she said. “But then that’s Ireland for you. Do you think the place will ever change?”
“Not in our lifetime,” I said.
To my surprise, a moment later she placed her head in her hands just like the Minister for Finance on the other side of the room, and I reached across to her, worried that I had said something to upset her. “Mrs. Goggin,” I said. “Catherine, are you all right?”
“I’m grand,” she said, taking her hands away and offering me a half-smile. “Look, Cyril, there must be things you want to know. Why don’t you just ask me?”
“I don’t want to know anything that you don’t want to tell me,” I said. “Like I said, I’m not looking to cause you any trouble or pain. We can talk about the past or we can simply forget about it and look toward the future. Whatever you prefer.”