A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

‘Sure I won’t do any harm,’ I told him. ‘I’ve seen you do it. I know what to do.’

  ‘In my job, you have to think of all the people who trust you,’ he said. ‘Who put their lives in your hands. Just imagine if any of them got hurt on account of your negligence. Or mine. Would you want that on your conscience? Knowing you were responsible for so much pain?’

  I didn’t see the sense of it at the time and told him so, and finally he said that I could come back on the day that the war in Europe came to an end and he’d let me have a go of it then, because that’s what the old man who worked the levers when he was a boy had said to him sixty years before. When I reported this back to my father he had just laughed and shaken his head. ‘Sure the war in Europe ended in 1945, son,’ he told me. ‘But stand still there now, for there’ll surely be another one along before too long.’

  I wondered now whether that railway box was still there; there was no reason it wouldn’t be. The old man would be long dead, of course. And while there had been nothing to match the carnage of the Second World War, there had been revolutions in Hungary and Romania, a civil war in Greece, the Soviets had driven their tanks into Prague, and the Troubles in our own place showed no sign of coming to an end.

  What else? What else … what else … what else …?

  Away ahead of me was a clean stretch of sand and I walked close to the water’s edge, allowing the waves to rush over my bare feet as they danced in and out like a young one engaged in a hop jig. A group of teenagers in bathing suits were throwing a frisbee around, boys and girls together, and I kept my eyes off them, dreading the frisbee coming in my direction, for I would surely make a fool of myself if I stretched an arm up to catch it. A big gorgeous dog, a golden retriever belonging to one of them, was racing around and having great sport, waiting his chance, for whenever one of the kids did not reach far enough, or another took pity on the hound, the frisbee would sail above our heads into the Atlantic Ocean and off he’d charge into the sea to retrieve it; no matter who had thrown or missed it, the dog always returned it to the same boy, who heaped praise upon his head, and I supposed that this was his master, a fine-looking lad with a smile on his face that suggested he’d never known a day’s trouble in his life.

  Did he come from another planet, I wondered, to be so carefree?

  A few couples were stretched out on the sand, desperate for a bit of colour in that rare thing we call a sunny Irish summer’s day. A woman sat rubbing lotion on herself while wearing a pair of Jackie Onassis-style sunglasses and the type of wide-brimmed hat you always saw Princess Margaret wearing when they poured pictures of her into the tabloids to sneer at her vulgarity.

  A man was engaged in some sort of yoga-like activity and making a holy show of himself.

  I could sense that some of the beachcombers, old and young, were looking at me out of curiosity.

  ‘Would you not take your collar off, Father, and loosen up a bit?’ cried one woman, but she meant it kindly, there was not an ounce of malice in her tone, and I raised a hand to acknowledge her as I kept on my way.

  And then I saw them up ahead. Another family, the last on the beach, it seemed, for above where they had placed themselves the sun was not shining with as much enthusiasm. Two parents, three little children, the boy and the girl digging a moat around a sandcastle while the infant tried to help but was pushed back time and again, an unkindness that led to tears. The mother and father did their best to restore order as the last of the sandwiches were put away, the empty Tayto bags replaced in the basket, the cans of 7-Up crushed and thrown into a plastic bag so they would not seep whatever drops remained into the cushioned lining of the hamper. And I watched as the father in the group stood up and spun around, a full three-sixty as they say, and kissed his wife on the head and pulled the two eldest children to him, hugging them tightly before taking the youngest fella by the hand, declaring that he was going to teach this boy to swim or what good was being down here at all, and I felt a surge of fright and ran towards them, calling to the man to stop, to come back, to let go of that child’s hand and send him back to his family. And they all turned, all five of them, to hear me roar, staring at me as if I was little more than a joke, and in fact a moment later they all started laughing, laughing like maniacs as they pointed at me, but then the closer I got the more their smiles faded, and with them their legs and arms and heads and bodies until they disappeared altogether, for of course they hadn’t been there at all. They hadn’t been there in twenty-six years and it was too late to go calling for any of them now.

  I took the path above the beach back towards the village and as I made my way towards Larkin’s I saw a general trade store – beach balls, buckets and spades, toys in the window, packets of tea, biscuits, every sort of thing you might want – and the sign above it offered the unusual name of Londigran’s, and I remembered a boy at the seminary all those years ago by the name of Daniel Londigran, only he had been from Dun Laoghaire so it could not have been his family who owned it. Still, it recalled him to me and I wondered what had ever become of him. I knew many of the priests around the parishes of Ireland, particularly those of my age group, but I had never heard his name since the extraordinary business that had seen him moved out of Clonliffe in the middle of our third year and relocated to St Finbarr’s College in Cork, a geographical switch that had never happened in living memory.

  Daniel Londigran made an allegation which was considered so deceitful and morally reprehensible that the Canon said he could not stand to look at him and that if he would not leave aside his vocation, then he was to be sent to the other side of the country, for he had no place in his seminary. His cell-mate was a lad called O’Hagan, who had been put on a train to Dundalk for a week as his mother was getting herself ready to die in a hospital bed. While he was gone, young Londigran claimed that while he’d been asleep in his bed one night – alone in the room, of course – a fella had come in wearing a black woolly hat pulled down over his face, climbed on top of him and put a hand across his mouth to stop him from crying out. He said that it was too dark to see who it was and he couldn’t even tell whether it was a boy or a priest, for by that time some of the boys were grown men and some of the priests were slight enough. An altercation had ensued, according to Londigran; whoever the intruder was had pulled at the boy’s pyjamas and tried to relieve him of them, but Londigran, who was no slouch, was standing for none of that nonsense and delivered a mighty blow to the intruder’s shoulder which sent him running from the room and disappearing down a corridor.

  By the time Londigran was out again, whoever it was was long gone. The next day, the boy put in a complaint and the Canon said that nothing like that had ever happened at Clonliffe College and never would, that this boy Londigran was a deceitful sort and probably a sex maniac and for him to stay would only have been a corrupting influence on the other boys. He had to go, that was the long and the short of it. He had to go to Cork. I, for one, felt sorry about it, for Londigran was a decent fellow who I had always got along well with and he played a strong game of backgammon, which interested me at the time, but he was also devoted to his studies and was a fierce advocate for the speaking of Latin; the poor boy was distraught that Vatican II had put the pipes on that in the Church and had even written a letter to Pope Paul asking whether it might be reinstated. His parents came across from Dun Laoghaire to protest the Canon’s decision and I don’t think the poor man had ever seen anything like it – his authority questioned! He gave them all short shrift and sent them on their way with a flea in their ears. And that was the end of that. I might have written to Londigran when he got to Cork, had I the strength of character, but I was afraid that one of the priests might intercept my letter and report me to the Canon and I had no desire to be branded a sex maniac too and put on the next 14 bus back to Churchtown, and so I did nothing and that was the end of that.

  But that was Londigran. Londigran from Dún Laoghaire. And here again was a Londigran’s shop in Wexford. I wondered whe
ther Tom ever passed by, and if he did, what thoughts went through his mind.

  The guest bedroom in the parochial house was situated at the front of the house, a small box-room with barely enough space for a single bed, a narrow wardrobe and a statue of the Sacred Heart on the wall. There was a photograph of the Polish Pope over my bed, his hands clasped in prayer, gilt-framed, looking like butter wouldn’t melt. Tom’s room was at the back of the house, while Mrs Gilhoole had the largest one of all, with an en-suite attached, and she told me before I went up to bed that her room was inviolable.

  Inviolable!

  I don’t know what she took me for.

  I brought The Commitments up to bed with me, hoping that it might send me to sleep, but of course it did the opposite, it kept me awake. I suppose that was the intention. Finally though, Joey ‘The Lips’ planted a kiss on Imelda Quirke and I could keep my eyes open no longer and turned the page down to mark my place before switching off the bedside lamp, cursing the fact that Tom had made me drink four pints of Guinness and two whiskeys, for the whole mixture was playing like Fossett’s Circus in my stomach and I dreaded to think the head that would be on me in the morning. I closed my eyes, yawned, reached for sleep.

  Before it could come, I heard a noise in the street below. Something difficult to define. Was it a cat, perhaps? No, not right for a cat. But there it was again. It was a most peculiar sound and I climbed out of bed, parting the curtain just a little to see who or what was out there. At first I could see nothing, but then I made him out. A man. No, a boy. A young boy. What was a young boy doing out on the street at this time of night? Where were his parents? And was he in his pyjamas? He was indeed. A pair of red pyjama bottoms and a black top with white sleeves. I leaned forward, almost pressing my face to the glass. It was Brian Kilduff. The boy who had come to see Tom earlier. What was he at? He leaned down. He took something from his pocket. Was it a Stanley knife? It was. I could make out the yellow moulding in the moonlight. The boy had a Stanley knife in his hands and was unleashing the blade. He was making his way around Tom’s car, slicing each tyre, one after the other, and I watched the vehicle sink to the ground, one corner at a time, until the whole thing was on the level again, at which point the boy moved away, apparently satisfied with his vandalism, and looked up towards the presbytery with a blank expression on his face.

  I stepped back quickly, pulling the net curtain in front of me so that he could not see me, and when I took the courage to look out again, there he was, running back down the street towards his own house in his bare feet, his damage done. I got back into bed and didn’t know what to think.

  But there’s the lie. Because I did know what to think. Only I could not bring myself to think it.

  Just as I could remember the day that poor Londigran was sent back down to Cork, and going to bed that night, looking over as Tom took his shirt off and seeing the great blossoming bruise on his shoulder, the purple on the outside, the green in the centre, the white skin surrounding it. And me lying there, saying not a thing.

  And the guilt now, as I think of it.

  The guilt. The guilt, the guilt, the guilt.

  It is so strong that at times I can understand what my poor father felt when he woke up in his depression and decided that this was the day that he would go down to Curracloe beach, that this was the day he would say goodbye to his loved ones, that this was the day he would push one of us under the water until the fight was gone out of the child and he could set off in the direction of Calais, with no hope of arriving alive.

  It is so strong that there have been moments in recent years when I have wondered whether I should make my own way down there to Curracloe beach and let that be the end of the matter.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  2007

  HANNAH WAS SURPRISINGLY cheerful on the day she moved into the Chartwell Home, a specialist facility for patients with developing dementia. She was enjoying one of her more lucid periods at the time, but one of the curious aspects of the disease was how it could occasionally allow the victim a few hours’ respite, like a benevolent employer, leaving the patient more like her old self again. But then, just when you might be having a sensible conversation together, just when it seemed as if the monster had disappeared, the clouds would gather and she would stare into your face as if you were an intruder in her home – ‘Who are you?’ she would scream, hands clutching at the side of her chair. ‘What are you doing here? Get out!’ – and it might be weeks or even months before clarity was returned to her.

  Was it me she was screaming at in those moments, I often wondered, or the disease?

  It had started in 2001, only a year after Kristian’s death, when she began having difficulty remembering names and faces, but it didn’t progress quickly at this point. But then, sometime towards Christmas of 2003, she took a downhill turn and began making mistakes at work which led to disciplinary proceedings – her immediate supervisor showed scant consideration for her years of service and seemed determined to find a way to have her removed – and ultimately she made a shocking error that left the bank tens of thousands of euros out of pocket, and not only was she fired on the spot, but there was talk of a prosecution against her. It was Jonas who insisted then that there was something wrong and we took her to a specialist unit at St Vincent’s, where, over the course of a few months, a team of doctors conducted cognitive testing, telling her to fill out a series of questionnaires which seemed to be full of daft and often repetitive questions, along with memory trials and language games that left her irritable. She said that they made her feel like a five-year-old again. They took blood samples, checked her calcium levels, investigated her diet for vitamin deficiencies, performed scans on her brain. And finally, when the diagnosis was made, the slow crawl towards losing her for ever began. She was stoical enough, it has to be said; at the time she seemed more concerned with clearing her name at the bank and putting Mrs Byrne in her place than anything else, although it’s possible that she relied on this pyrrhic victory to cover up for her fears.

  She managed to stay at home for another few years after that, with a bit of help from the Health Service Executive and the money that Jonas had earned from his book royalties, so we hired a home-help to look after her, a young French nurse who demonstrated extraordinary patience and kindness. Aidan helped out too, of course, but his money always went directly into his brother’s account and when he came to Dublin to visit his mother I never heard anything about it until after he was gone back home again.

  ‘Did he not give you a call?’ Jonas would ask me, all innocent, and I would shake my head.

  ‘He did not.’

  ‘He said he would.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t.’

  ‘I don’t know, so.’

  And to be honest, I’d given up feeling troubled by this. If Aidan wanted to behave like that towards me when I had never done a bit of harm to him in his life then that was his own business. I had bigger things to worry about.

  But now, however, things had gone too far. The French nurse, God love her, endured an incident of violence that left her with a fractured wrist, and between us all we agreed that the time had come for Hannah to leave Grange Road altogether and move into a specialist facility where they could look after her and give her the care she needed.

  She knew exactly what was going on; she even agreed to it and signed the necessary paperwork, for over those couple of weeks she had a series of surprisingly good days. She didn’t force me or either of her sons to seek any kind of authority over her. She was only a young woman still, forty-nine years of age, and it seemed a cruel fate that would rob her of her mind and her reason when she could potentially live for another forty years, although this was a prognosis that the doctors assured us was unlikely for a woman with her condition. I could not contemplate her potential death, however; I had been robbed of enough things in my life without losing my beloved sister too.

  Until then, Jonas was still living in his mother’s house, despite th
e changes that had happened in his life. Success had come early to him – he was only twenty-one when Spiegeltent was published and became a surprise bestseller – and he was in demand for literary festivals around the world. He wanted to take advantage of the opportunities that were out there for him, but it was difficult when his mother was ill at home. He’d spent three months away from Dublin during the summer before his final year at Trinity, travelling to Australia, where he found work as a barman in the Rocks, but this was his only experience of life outside Ireland and I knew that he wanted to travel more, to see the world and let his various publishers pay for it. But he didn’t push the move, by any means. If anything, it upset him greatly, but he and I both knew that it was for the best, and if a bonus was that he could fully embrace the new life that his talents had brought his way, well then I didn’t think that that was something Hannah would begrudge him.

  ‘I’m going to have my own room, amn’t I, Odran?’ Hannah asked me as we drove, the three of us, towards the nursing home.

  ‘You are, of course,’ I told her. ‘Sure you’ve seen it already, do you not remember?’

  ‘I do, I do,’ she said, looking out of the window as we drove past Terenure College, where a swell of purple and black was making its way down a rugby pitch, the boys sweeping forward like waves along a beach as the tide came in, their upper lips jutting out over their teeth-guards like wolves baring their fangs. It had been more than a year since Archbishop Cordington had moved me from there and I missed it something awful. ‘It’s the one with the lilac wallpaper, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘And the chair in the corner with the scuff on the right leg.’

  ‘That’s your room at home, Mam,’ said Jonas, turning around in the passenger seat. ‘Your and Dad’s old room.’

  ‘But sure that’s what I’m talking about,’ she said, frowning.

  ‘No, you were asking about your room at the Chartwell. It’s painted light green and has a television hanging on one of the walls. Do you not remember you worried that it would fall down and break?’