A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  ‘What do you mean you don’t know who Rafa Nadal is?’ he asked in disbelief when he sought my opinion as to whether Roger Federer’s armful of Grand Slam titles would ever be beaten. ‘He’s famous all over the world.’

  ‘Is he a footballer?’ I said, teasing him, for I knew full well who Nadal was but his irritation could be amusing to behold. And anyway, I thought calling him Rafa was an awful affectation. Were they friends or something? ‘Does he play for Man United?’

  ‘He does on his tits,’ said Father Cunnane, who liked to say things that he thought would scandalize me. ‘He’s a tennis player. Spanish lad.’

  ‘Ah right,’ said I.

  ‘Are you telling me you haven’t heard of him?’

  ‘I don’t know much about the tennis,’ I said. ‘My nephew Aidan is a great fan of Liverpool Football Club though. Or he was when he was a boy anyway.’ Whether or not Aidan was still interested in such things was a mystery to me for I had not laid eyes on him since his father’s funeral ten years earlier, when he had sat and brooded, displaying little emotion despite the fact that he had been close to Kristian. He had been contemptuous towards me that day, calling me Father over and over again with such disdain in his voice that it had upset me, for I had never shown the boy anything but kindness in his life, but I had put his rudeness down to grief. And despite several attempts in the intervening years to reconnect with him, we had fallen out of touch, and whether or not he was still on the sites in London was a thing I did not know.

  ‘Liverpool?’ said Father Cunnane in disbelief, practically spitting on the ground, the word poison on his lips. ‘Where are we, 1985? Sure Liverpool are long gone. We’ll hear no more of Liverpool, not in our lifetimes.’

  Father Cunnane, like Tom Cardle, was a Wexford lad, but for some inexplicable reason he followed West Ham United with a passion that bordered on the religious. Posters of the team’s players adorned the walls of his small apartment as if he was still a teenager and he was rarely seen outdoors without a claret and blue scarf wrapped around his neck. He came from the Ferrycarrig area, about ten miles from the beach where my father had taken his own life. Once, with drink in him, he told me of his own childhood and teenage years, of how he was a champion swimmer and took part in something called an Iron Man competition, but had received a calling from God and entered the seminary at the age of twenty-two, dropping out of an engineering course at the University of Limerick to undertake the philosophy course at Maynooth instead.

  ‘And this calling,’ I asked him. ‘How did it come to you?’

  ‘I was taking a walk up Sinnott’s Hill one afternoon,’ he told me. ‘And what did I see in front of me but a burning bush, and then the clouds parted and the voice of the Lord spoketh unto me and said Would you ever become a priest like a good lad’. He waited for a few moments, enjoying the baffled expression on my face, before bursting out laughing. ‘I’m only yanking your chain, Odran,’ he said then, punching me on the upper arm. ‘You don’t mind me calling you Odran, do you? Sure we might as well go by first names when there’s just the two of us. No, I’ll tell you now if you want to know. I had no designs on the priesthood at all, to be honest with you. I wasn’t even an altar boy when I was a lad. My parents took us all to Mass, of course – sure they had to or no one in the parish would have come into their shop – but it didn’t mean anything to me or to them. And the thing is, I was a terrible man for the women and the gargle, I won’t deny it, so it never would have crossed my mind to have a life like this. But wait till I tell you what happened. My brother Mark, older than me by a year to the day, he had a motorcycle accident and ended up in Wexford hospital on a life-support machine. No one knew whether he’d pull out of it or not. The doctors said they couldn’t even confirm if there was any brain activity going on. But Mark and I had always been fierce close, fierce close, and when things were looking bad I found myself in the hospital one afternoon, distraught mind, the whole nine yards, and I walked past the chapel and thought, sure what harm could it do? So in I went and got down on my knees and said a prayer to Himself up above, and I asked Him would he ever look after Mark and bring him back to us safely, and if He did, then there was surely nothing that I wouldn’t do for Him in return. And I felt something, Odran. I swear to God that I felt something move inside me. Deep down in my guts. I knew at that moment that if I wanted my brother restored to me, then I should devote my life to God, to His service, that I should give the women a swerve for ever more, and when I stepped back out of that chapel into the hospital corridor, it was like I had been reborn.’

  ‘And your brother?’ I asked, intrigued by this story, for I had never had such a revelation myself; I had simply been told that I had a vocation and had never thought to question it. ‘What about Mark? Did he get better?’

  ‘No, he died,’ he said, shaking his head, his face shadowing now with a lingering pain. ‘It was a terrible thing. He died, the poor fella. But I couldn’t go back on my word. But I didn’t blame Him for what had happened. And whatever it was that had stirred me in that chapel wasn’t going anywhere, so I paid a call on the Bishop of Ferns shortly after that and asked him whether he thought I should do something about it, and he gave me a number to call and so here I am, ten years later. What do you think of that?’

  What could I think of it? We all came to the priesthood in different ways. It was not for me to question any of it.

  ‘Now tell me this, Odran,’ he added a moment later. ‘Who do you fancy for the World Championship this year, Fernando Alonso or Sebastian Vettel?’

  One advantage to parish life, I found, was that my days were often more varied than they had been at Terenure, where a rigid timetable was in place throughout term-time, a college schedule that became only a little more tractable during the holidays for those of us who lived on the grounds.

  Some days I had meetings with parishioners, others I might have some parish administrative work to look after. There might be a wedding to prepare for on the weekends and a marriage class, God help me, to give in advance of it. One of the elderly parishioners might be sick and require a home visit; there would be last rites to say or a prayer to be offered over a loved one, struggling for breath or wasting away from a disease. On Friday afternoons there were the altar-boy meetings, where the Masses would be divided up among the lads, and on Tuesday afternoons I kept a little time for myself, for I had a weekly visit that I never missed and that neither of my colleagues knew anything about, for they had never shown any interest in where I disappeared off to that day.

  Tuesday meant a trip on the bus – easier than driving – and a short walk from the bus stop to Hannah’s nursing home, where I would stay with her for an hour while she reeled in and out of sensibility. One day she might recount events from our shared childhood which she remembered without a single forgotten detail; on another she might tell me a story about a woman she had met while she was serving time in Mountjoy, when my sister has never had so much as a conversation with a Garda in her life. She might ask me whether the Taoiseach was outside in the corridor because she had those papers that he was asking for – you’re sitting on them, Odran, would you get up before you destroy them? I never met Jonas there – we had an agreement that there was no point in him going to visit his mother when I was already by her side – and he usually went on a Wednesday and a Saturday morning, unless he was out of the country on a book tour or away at a literary festival somewhere, and good God that boy seemed to spend more of his time doing both of these things than I thought could be good for him.

  Today, however, was not Tuesday. I would not be seeing my sister nor trying to pull her towards a lucidity that evaded her. It was a Wednesday and I was due to see a parishioner of mine, Ann Sullivan, in the afternoon. I knew Ann a little – she was one of a team of four middle-aged women who looked after the flowers in the church and gave it a hoover every morning after ten o’clock Mass – and she had cornered me a couple of days earlier in Spar to ask whether I might have time to
see her during the week, and I had said of course. It was obvious by the expression on her face that she had something on her mind.

  ‘I might bring Evan with me,’ she said.

  ‘Evan?’

  ‘My young lad.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ I had a vague idea of who she meant. Her son, about sixteen years of age, I thought, dragged to Mass against his will every Sunday morning and whose seat would most likely be empty in another year or two. ‘Of course. Please do.’

  ‘And my husband, Seánie.’

  ‘How is Seánie these days? I don’t see him at Mass very often.’

  ‘Don’t start me on that, Father,’ she said. ‘I have bigger problems right now.’

  ‘Well if I can help at all, I’ll be happy to. Shall we say Wednesday at four?’

  She nodded; I could see how much it hurt her to admit that there was a family problem and wished that I had more abilities at my job, for whatever it was that was worrying her, I hoped that I could help.

  ‘Can I bring anything, Father?’ she asked.

  ‘Bring anything?’

  ‘A few biscuits, maybe? What do you like, the chocolate digestives?’

  It was all I could do not to laugh. ‘Ah no, you’re grand, Ann,’ I said. ‘Just bring yourselves. I can dig out a few biscuits myself if we get hungry.’

  ‘Right so,’ she said, scurrying away.

  Sure enough, the doorbell rang at the appointed time and there was Ann Sullivan outside my door, dressed in her Sunday best and with a fresh haircut, with the boy Evan standing by her side, staring at the ground, and no sign of Seánie at all.

  ‘He had to work,’ Ann explained as I made a pot of tea. ‘A lastminute thing came up on one of my brother’s houses. You know he’s an architect, don’t you, Father? Seánie does a lot of foreman jobs for him.’

  I smiled and didn’t enquire any further; I didn’t believe a word of it. Seánie was one of those men who had no interest in the church, and good luck to him with that, so I hadn’t expected him to show up anyway.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Evan,’ I said, trying to be friendly with him, for there was no reason for either of them to be here unless it was because of the boy.

  ‘Right,’ he said, staring at the ground and sliding his runners around the floor as if he was performing a private dance. I watched him, trying to decipher the expression on his face, expecting to see pain there of some sort, for most of the young lads looked half-traumatized these days, as if they’d spent the last couple of years working down the mines or labouring in a Gulag, but I could see none. If anything, he looked quite placid. And bored. It occurred to me that he didn’t resemble his mother in the slightest, who was a plain sort of woman, but then I think someone had mentioned to me once – possibly Ann herself – that he was adopted. He was a good-looking boy, with blond hair divided down his forehead like curtains the way they do in the boy bands on the telly. He reminded me a little of Jonas. A younger Jonas. He had that Norwegian look that defined both my nephews, who had taken after their father rather than my sister. I wondered for a moment whether Evan’s natural ancestry might not be Scandinavian as well.

  ‘So how can I help you both?’ I asked, opening my hands wide. Ann looked away, embarrassed, perhaps regretting having come here at all now.

  ‘It’s Evan,’ said Ann.

  ‘Actually,’ said Evan, looking up now and smiling at me, all white teeth and dimples, ‘it’s not me at all. It’s Mum.’

  ‘So it’s both of you then,’ I said, grinning, and in fairness to him, Evan allowed himself a small laugh, a bounce in his shoulders, while Ann shook her head, purse-lipped.

  ‘It’s not me,’ she insisted. ‘It’s him.’

  ‘It’s not,’ replied Evan calmly. ‘Sure I’m grand.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ said I, and Evan looked across at me and gave me a quizzical look, as if he wasn’t entirely sure what to make of me.

  ‘What age are you, Father?’ he asked.

  ‘Evan, don’t ask Father that,’ snapped Ann.

  ‘It’s fine, I don’t mind,’ I replied. ‘I’m fifty-five.’

  ‘You must take care of yourself, do you?’ he asked. ‘I would have said late forties at the most.’

  I opened my mouth to answer him but could think of nothing to say. I wasn’t sure what to do with that comment.

  ‘My dad’s the same age as you,’ continued the boy. ‘But you’d never think it to look at him. He’s a fat bastard.’

  ‘Evan!’ said Ann.

  ‘Well he is. I’m not saying it behind his back, Father. I’ve said it to his face. He never stops eating and he doesn’t take any exercise. I’m worried that something will happen to him. But he just laughs when I say it. I love my dad, but the fact is that he’s a fat bastard and I don’t want him to have a heart attack.’

  ‘Evan, would you stop?’ said Ann. ‘Honestly, Father, I don’t know why he comes out with these things. Seánie’s not overweight at all.’

  ‘He is,’ said Evan with a shrug.

  ‘He’s not.’

  ‘He’s a house.’

  ‘Is that what you’re here to talk about?’ I asked. ‘You’re worried about your dad?’

  ‘That’s not it at all,’ said Ann, leaning forward. ‘That’s just Evan being peculiar.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Well look, why don’t you tell me what brings you here today? Whatever it is, I’d like to be able to help.’

  ‘I can’t, Father,’ she said, looking away. ‘I just can’t.’

  I closed my eyes for a moment and exhaled. A vision passed before my eyes: the library at Terenure College, a place where I would have given anything to be at that moment. Chaos in the stacks. Someone shelving William Golding’s Rites of Passage trilogy in the wrong order. Claire Kilroy’s novels mixed up with Claire Keegan’s stories. It was at moments like this that I wished I was there to fix things, instead of here, having to dig deep to discover some personal problem that I would probably be unable to solve anyway. Why did they come to me anyway, me who knew nothing of life?

  ‘This is a safe place,’ I said finally, sounding like one of those American therapists you see on the television programmes. I’d watched Gabriel Byrne in one of them the night before; he was only mighty. I’d watched six episodes without a break. ‘You can say what you like in here, both of you. It will stay within these walls.’

  Ann drew in a deep breath and seemed to be building herself up to something. ‘Father,’ she said finally, sitting up straight and looking me directly in the eye. ‘We need to talk about Evan.’

  I was taking a sip of my tea at the time and I came close to embarrassing myself; I don’t think she knew why I was laughing, but the boy did because he caught my eye and smirked.

  ‘Are you all right, Father?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘The tea went down the wrong way.’

  ‘There’s something wrong,’ continued Ann.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong,’ said Evan. ‘Not with me anyway. On the contrary, everything is pretty good right now.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ she said, parroting him and shaking her head.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Oh stop it, Evan, would you? You’re not impressing anyone.’

  The boy looked at me, baffled. ‘All I said was on the contrary,’ he said.

  ‘Just behave,’ said Ann.

  ‘I am behaving,’ said Evan. ‘Father, does it seem like I’m not behaving to you?’

  ‘Ann,’ I said, ignoring his question, ‘why don’t you tell me what exactly has you so worried?’

  ‘Evan has a … he has a friend,’ she said after a lengthy pause.

  I looked from mother to son in bewilderment. Evan had a friend. Well, good for him. Was this something to be worried about? Did I need to alert the Six One News?

  ‘A friend,’ I said.

  ‘A good friend,’ clarified Ann.

  ‘A very, very, very good friend,’ agreed Evan.

&nb
sp; ‘You’ve lost me,’ I said.

  ‘They spend too much time together,’ said Ann quickly.

  ‘But isn’t that what friends do?’ I asked, confused.

  ‘Oh come on, Father,’ said Evan, his calm demeanour slipping a little; he looked irritated now. ‘Don’t play dumb.’

  ‘What if I’m not playing?’ I asked. Whatever it was, whatever was going on here, I felt that I was handling it right so far. But then I was used to lads his age, I’d worked with them for years. They didn’t scare or intimidate me. I knew the cut of them, I knew the smell of them. There was nothing they could say that could shock or embarrass me, no matter how hard they tried.

  ‘It’s not right,’ said Ann.

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Evan with a long theatrical sigh, sweeping the hair off his face in a gesture that I suspected he’d spent hours perfecting in the mirror. ‘I have a boyfriend,’ he drawled in a bored tone of voice. ‘His name is Odran. We’re hanging out. And there it is. The world hasn’t come to an end or anything.’

  ‘Odran is my name,’ I said and he simply stared at me, blinking a little in surprise.