by John Boyne
‘Were you at the pictures?’ I asked as we strolled along, me wheeling the bike on my left-hand side so I was walking next to her. I had read somewhere that you should always let a girl walk on the inside so if a car lost control of itself as it came towards you, then you would go under its wheels and not herself.
‘I was,’ she said. ‘It’s such a shame there’s only one screen. In London most cinemas have at least three.’
‘Is it London you’re from then?’
‘Yes. Have you been there?’
‘I’ve never been anywhere,’ I said. ‘I went over to the Northside once, but I got in trouble on account of it.’
‘The Northside?’ she asked, her face crinkling up so that small lines appeared at the top of her nose, her accent reminding me of Anthea Redfern from The Generation Game. ‘Do you mean across the Liffey?’
‘I do,’ I said.
‘What’s it like over there?’
‘Not much different to here,’ I said. ‘Only they’re poor and we’re rich. And we have the even-number buses and they have the odd.’
‘Are we rich?’ she asked in surprise. ‘I mean, are you rich?’
‘Compared to them, we are.’
‘What does your father do?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘He’s dead. He drowned down at Curracloe beach when I was nine.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Wexford.’
She considered this and I quite admired the fact that she didn’t bother to offer condolences. It wasn’t as if she had known him, after all; it wasn’t as if she really knew me. ‘Did he leave you a fortune?’ she asked.
‘No, but he had the life insurance,’ I told her. ‘And Mam works in a shop now.’
‘What sort of a shop?’
‘Clerys on O’Connell Street.’
‘Oh yes, I’ve been there,’ she said. ‘Wonderful hats. Pricey though. What does she do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never thought to ask. She used to work for Aer Lingus before she was married, but they said she was too old to go back to them after my dad died.’
We continued along in silence for a while and I tried to think of things to say. I didn’t know any girls, except for Hannah, of course, so had no idea what to say to one. I went to De La Salle school and there were no girls let in there. Katherine seemed content with the peace, however, strolling along and occasionally humming to herself, but the quiet still made me feel awkward.
‘Was the picture any good?’ I asked her eventually.
‘Which picture?’
‘The Godfather’.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, nodding her head quickly. ‘It was awfully good. Terribly violent though. It was all about this Italian-American family who are all gangsters and they’re at war with other gangsters and there’s enormous amounts of shooting in it, but the men are terribly handsome.’
‘Are they?’ I asked. ‘I wouldn’t know.’ It seemed important to me, somehow, to make this assertion.
‘James Caan is in it,’ she said. ‘Do you know James Caan?’
‘I don’t,’ I admitted.
‘Oh he’s just delicious. Bad to the bone, of course, but irresistible. And he has a younger brother who I could just eat with a spoon. I don’t know what his name is. But there’s someone in it for the boys to look at too. Diane Keaton. Do you know her?’
‘I don’t know any of the film stars,’ I said. ‘I don’t move in those circles.’ I smiled at her, trying to be funny, and she considered this for a moment before throwing her head back and laughing.
‘Oh yes, I see,’ she said, and for a moment I thought I could have been talking to Princess Anne. ‘Oh, that’s awfully good. You’re a funny little thing, aren’t you?’
I frowned, uncertain whether I liked this description of myself.
‘Is there a bit in Sicily?’ I asked.
‘There is,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Someone said something about it to me once.’
‘You’re thinking about the part where Michael gets married, aren’t you? To this sweet little numbskull of a Sicilian girl and she takes her clothes off in front of the camera. She exposes her bosom,’ she added in a serious voice before bursting out laughing again. ‘I’m surprised the censor over here let it through. Half the audience whooped and hollered, the filthy animals. You’d think they’d never seen a pair of tits before.’
‘Ah right,’ I said, looking away, sorry I’d brought it up now.
‘What was the last film you saw?’ she asked me, poking her index finger in my side and making me jump. I had to think about it. It had been that long since I’d been to the pictures.
‘101 Dalmatians,’ I said. ‘Mam took my sister and I to the Adelphi to see it before Christmas.’
She laughed again, she seemed to love laughing, and slapped the top of my arm. ‘No, seriously,’ she said.
‘Seriously what?’
‘What was the last film you saw?’
‘Amn’t I after telling you?’
I wondered for a moment whether she was hard of hearing, but then, seeing the expression on my face, she took the lollipop from her mouth and my eyes fixated on the thin sliver of saliva linking her lower lip to the cherry orb and she stopped smiling. ‘Oh I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought you were joking. 101 Dalmatians. Yes, well. Was it any good?’
‘It was great,’ I said. ‘There’s all these dogs, you see, and this awful oul’ one who wants to kidnap them and—’
‘Yes, I know the story,’ she said. ‘You must come to the cinema with me some time. We need to broaden your horizons, Odran. Do you think Last Tango in Paris will play in Dublin? They say it’ll be banned. It’ll be showing at every cinema in the West End. Perhaps we could hop on a ferry and have an adventure.’
I thought my face might explode now. I’d heard all about Last Tango in Paris; everyone had. There was not a boy in my school who didn’t want to see it. All it took was a mention of butter for the classroom to explode in hysterics.
‘Are you blushing, Odran?’ she asked, teasing me.
‘I am not,’ I insisted. ‘It’s a hot day, that’s all.’
‘It is, yes,’ she agreed. ‘Too hot to keep walking. Any chance of a backer?’
‘A what?’ I asked, looking at her half horrified, half overcome with desire.
‘A backer. You know. You cycle, I sit behind you on the saddle. I wrap my arms around your waist so I don’t fall off. Come on, it’s too far to walk back and I’ve no money for a bus.’
‘All right,’ I said, knowing there was nothing I could do. Katherine Summers wanted a backer on my Grifter and I had no choice but to say yes.
It was no easy task to cycle the pair of us along from Harold’s Cross to Churchtown and the sweat fairly poured off my back and through my T-shirt as I pushed my feet on the pedals. I hated to think of her having to put up with that, but she didn’t seem to mind. Throughout the whole journey Katherine kept her hands firmly attached to my waist, just above my hips, her fingers pressing tighter when we went over bumps, and once, as we soared down the hill on the Rathfarnham Road, I took my feet off the pedals and let my legs stretch out like wings and she leaned forward and wrapped her arms around my stomach, screaming in delight, her fingers connecting before me as her head rested on my left shoulder, the sound of her laughter in my ears. At another, she dug her hands down a little so the fingertips intertwined just beneath my T-shirt, touching my bare skin above my shorts, and I thought I might crash the pair of us into an oncoming number 16. When we turned on to the Braemor Road I saw Stephen Dunne from my own year at school walking along and when he saw the cut of the two of us on the bike the mouth fairly fell open on him and I couldn’t resist shouting, ‘How are you, Stephen?’ and Katherine repeated the same words, mimicking my accent badly, and Stephen, too intent on staring, walked directly into a lamp-post, bouncing back like something out of a Charlie Chaplin film, which made the two of us burst out laughing. As I
finally turned into Katherine’s front driveway I saw Mrs Rathley coming down the street with her shopping trolley, watching the two of us carefully, but I looked away. Sure none of this had anything to do with her. She could glare all she liked.
‘That was fun,’ said Katherine, sweeping her hair back and smiling at me as she stepped off. ‘Will you take me again?’
‘I will,’ I said. ‘If you want me to.’
She thought about it for a moment and looked me up and down without an ounce of shame. I grew self-conscious of my Penneys shorts and Donald Duck T-shirt. I looked like a child. But something about my innocence must have appealed to her, for she nodded and smiled at me. ‘Of course I want you to, Odran,’ she said. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’
Over the days that followed, I noticed that Mam seemed a bit distant with me and I wondered whether Mrs Rathley had told her what she had seen and she was upset about it. She didn’t like the new neighbours, I knew that. She didn’t like people who lived in sin. She didn’t like girls who walked up and down the Braemor Road in short skirts and tennis shoes with lollipops hanging out of their mouths. And she didn’t much care for English people who had turned their backs on the Pope, she said, just so a fat old king could marry a strumpet. But what I had on my side, I knew, was her inability to bring the matter up with me in any direct way, for that would be acknowledging that Katherine Summers and I had any acquaintance at all.
‘Is everything all right with you, Odran?’ she asked me instead and I nodded and said that everything was grand, thanks. ‘Are your studies going well?’
‘They are.’
‘And there’s nothing worrying you?’
‘Global poverty?’ I said. ‘World hunger? Nuclear bombs?’
She frowned and shook her head. ‘Don’t try to be funny, Odran,’ she said. ‘It’s a deeply unattractive trait.’
Which didn’t matter to me in the slightest, for it wasn’t her that I was trying to attract.
Matters came to a head two weeks later when Mam was supposed to be in Clerys doing a Thursday late shift, which ran from noon until nine o’clock. Katherine was in the back garden with me, stretched out on a deckchair, her legs and feet bare, her toenails painted bright red, her face turned upwards as she appealed to the sun for a bit of brightness, the ever-present lollipop sticking out of her mouth. I was wearing a pair of blue jeans that I’d bought in Michael Guineys on Talbot Street with practically the entire contents of my piggy bank and a Beatles T-shirt because Katherine had already confided in me that by the time she was twenty-one she would be married to George Harrison – ‘only the world’s most handsome man and terribly spiritual too, not that it matters when you have a face like that’ – and I knew that it would appeal to her.
‘Don’t you ever wish we lived in a sunnier climate?’ she asked me. ‘I thought London was bad, but Dublin is even worse. We should live in Spain.’
‘You need to watch out for those Spanish lads,’ I said. ‘Just ask Sharon Farr.’
‘Who?’
I told her the story. I didn’t flinch from the provocative words and I didn’t blush either. I’d made an effort over the last couple of weeks to seem more grown up than I felt inside.
‘What a filthy little minx,’ said Katherine when I was finished. ‘I bet he was gorgeous though. They all are.’
‘Who?’
‘The Spanish boys. Little Miguel or Juan or whatever his name was. Ignacio,’ she added after a moment, sounding out the syllables slowly.
‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ I said once again, asserting my rigid heterosexuality. I’d said it about George Harrison too, even though I, who had no feelings in that way at all, had to admit that there was something about his face that was the work of a benevolent God.
‘Oh Odran,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘you do make me laugh. What shall we do? Are we going to sit out here all afternoon or are we going to find some trouble to get into?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What would you like to do? We could watch telly, but there won’t be much on this time of day. The Sullivans might be on, I suppose, although that’d make you want to hang yourself from the nearest light fitting. I could make you a jam sandwich if you like.’
‘A jam sandwich?’ she said, sitting up straight, her elbows on the seat behind her, and taking off her unnecessary sunglasses. ‘Odran Yates, you certainly know the way to a girl’s heart, don’t you? A jam sandwich? Does your mother know you have these impure thoughts?’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. ‘Well I don’t know what else to suggest,’ I said, and the truth was that in my innocence, I didn’t.
‘I’ll tell you what we could do,’ she said, looking me directly in the face.
‘What’s that?’
‘You could show me your bedroom. I’ve never seen it.’
I swallowed nervously, trying to picture what I’d left on the floor up there. My socks? My underpants? My swimming togs that I’d only used the day before and hung out to dry? They had an ‘S’ on the left buttock which was something to do with the designer but all the lads said it meant small. I’d already planned on throwing them away. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit of a mess up there.’
‘Let’s make it messier.’ She stood up and went through to the kitchen before looking back at me. ‘Well, are you coming or do you want me to look around your room all on my own? I dread to think what I might find.’
I jumped up and followed, my heart beating so hard through my chest that I thought it might leap right out and bounce along the kitchen floor, tripping her up and sending her sprawling. I ran up the stairs just as she chose the right door – it wasn’t difficult, it said ‘Odran’s Room’ outside, underneath a wooden picture of the Bash Street Kids – and marched inside.
‘Well,’ she said, looking around slowly. ‘So this is your lair. This is where it …’ – she lowered her voice – ‘All … goes … on.’
‘It is,’ I said, sweeping a few things from the floor, desk and bed and throwing them mercilessly inside the wardrobe.
‘You have a lot of books,’ she said.
‘I like books.’
‘And a violin, I see. How come I didn’t know about that?’
‘Mam says when I play it, it sounds like a bunch of cats being drowned.’
‘Will you play it for me?’
‘No.’
‘All right, I won’t force you. Who’s that?’
I looked at the poster on the wall, a big orange dog with an oversized red tongue sticking out of his mouth. ‘It’s Pluto,’ I said.
‘Yes, I thought it was. You’re something of a puzzle, Odran, aren’t you?’ she asked, approaching me, and I didn’t step backwards.
‘Am I?’ I asked.
‘Have you ever kissed a girl?’
I shook my head.
‘Would you like to?’
I nodded my head.
‘Well why don’t you then?’
And so I did.
‘You’re doing it all wrong,’ she said a moment later.
‘Am I?’
‘Try it like this.’
I tried it like that.
‘That’s better. Shall we lie down?’
She lay on my single bed, stretching out, and I lay beside her, uncertain what was expected of me, nervous and frightened despite my growing excitement.
‘What is it with you and Walt Disney?’ she asked me between kisses.
‘What is it with you and dirty films?’ I countered and she smiled, pulling me closer to her.
I don’t know how long we lay there together, it might not have been for very long, but at some point I started to get the hang of this whole kissing malarkey, for she seemed to be enjoying it even if I could barely do so myself, so intent was I on not doing anything wrong. One of my hands reached up inside her T-shirt and she let me do a little exploring as hers went downwards and did a little exploring of her own. And as much as I was enjoying it, as turned on as I was by the whole thing,
I knew that my mind was confused and that I actually wanted her to leave, even if I couldn’t say the words out loud to make that clear. I didn’t want this at all, not now, not yet, even though there was many the night I’d lain in this same bed and imagined that I did. I was an innocent boy, of course, and these were innocent times. I had grown up in an innocent house. I was half in love with Katherine Summers, but what was it that made me wish that she would stop kissing me, stop touching me with those long slender fingers, that hoped she would just stand up and say something like Well that was rather nice, can I take you up on that jam sandwich now? and we could both go back downstairs and play a game of Monopoly instead. I looked at her and her eyes were closed and there was a faint groaning coming from somewhere deep inside her as she rolled on to her back, making it clear that she wanted me to lie on top of her, and I followed her lead, embarrassed by everything that was going on down below, and it was almost a relief – almost, but not quite – when the door opened without warning and there was Mam, home from Clerys with one of her headaches.
The three of us stayed motionless for perhaps twenty seconds until Katherine stepped lightly off the bed, adjusting her skirt and top before reaching into her pocket and holding a gift out for Mam.
‘Hello, Mrs Yates,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Would you care for a lollipop?’
That, if I am recalling these events correctly, was a Thursday afternoon, and to my surprise it was as late as the following Tuesday before Father Haughton arrived at the house. Mam was barely speaking to me, which was perfectly fine as far as I was concerned for I had no desire to discuss what she had seen. I was embarrassed, of course, but I felt no bravado, no sense of accomplishment that I had kissed a girl over and over, wandered my hands across her breasts and allowed her to touch me in a way that no one ever had before; that she had lain on my bed and rolled me on top of her, feeling the firmness of me, where only the loosening of my belt might have led to calamity.
Instead I felt a terrible confusion, not because I was ashamed but because it seemed as if this degree of physicality, which in my teenage daydreams was something I was certain that I longed for, was not meant for me. I was sure that I wanted sex with a girl, any girl, but given the opportunity it had felt somehow alien to my nature. And it wasn’t that I wanted a different girl, or a boy – it was nothing like that. I simply wanted to be left alone. To think. To read. To ask the questions of myself that none of my friends or family ever did. I thought of throwing myself in the Dodder – an over-reaction, of course, but such are the extremes one reaches when one is young and lost in bewilderment.
