A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  ‘Mrs Kilduff,’ I said, uncertain what I was going to say next, but she interrupted me anyway.

  ‘Don’t say my name,’ she hissed. ‘And get off this bench right now, do you hear me? I don’t want you sitting anywhere near me. You disgust me.’

  I nodded and stood up, turning to walk away, but before I could, I thought I should at least say something to try to atone for what I had done. ‘I hope Brian is doing all right,’ I said. ‘I hope he’s found a way to cope with whatever happened to him.’

  She stared at me as if I was insulting her on purpose. ‘Are you trying to hurt me?’ she asked. ‘Is that what you’re doing? Are you deliberately trying to be cruel?’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly, failing to understand. ‘I only meant—’

  ‘Sure Brian is dead these last fifteen years,’ she told me. ‘He hanged himself in his bedroom. I went up one day after school to fetch him down for his dinner and there he was, his little legs dangling in the air, the poor dog staring up at him not knowing what to do. He killed himself. So tell me now, are you proud of yourself, Father? You and your pal in there? Are you proud of yourselves? Of all the things you and your pals have done? Do you even care?’

  I did not go straight home but stopped instead at Roche’s, a rather squalid-looking coffee shop on Ormond Quay, not far from the Four Courts. A regular gathering place for solicitors and barristers, I imagined, for space was set aside in a corner for those wheelie-bags more common in airports and railway terminals but which I had begun to notice members of the legal profession using to transport huge volumes of paperwork with them from office to courthouse whenever a case was reported on the Six One News.

  I found an empty table, ordered a strong coffee and stared out of the window for a few moments, watching the people go by: the workers, the businessmen, the students on their way down to Trinity College. And I wondered what my young self would think if I could return thirty-five years to Clonliffe College in 1973 and tell him that the unhappy boy in the bed next to mine would one day be put on trial by the Republic of Ireland for the systematic abuse of young boys who had been entrusted into his pastoral care. That he would be accused of touching them, of molesting them, of penetrating them, of performing unspeakable acts upon them and forcing them to perform the same upon him in return. What was it that had twisted his mind to such things? Were they there from the start, implanted in his psyche while still in the womb, or did they come later? Was there a way to blame his father, who had surely damaged him in some way, and if there was, would that even be fair, for surely a man was responsible for his own actions, regardless of what had happened to him growing up. Bad things, awful things, could be visited upon you in your youth – I knew that as well as anyone – but it did not mean that you allowed yourself to act without conscience. Why did he have such a desperate need for flesh, and for young flesh at that, when the rest of us did not? Was it the fault of the priests who taught us? Was there a way to blame them? And what did any of it matter now anyway, for Tom Cardle was in the dock at last and could hurt no one any more. I could not envision his story reaching a happy conclusion.

  I had not felt so lost since that night in Rome in 1978, the night when the woman from the Café Bennizi left me to wander the streets of the capital alone for hours while the Pope sat in his bedroom, awaiting his cup of tea, perhaps being visited by a menacing presence intent on causing him harm, perhaps simply being summoned home by a God whose creations had become a mystery for a simple man to comprehend.

  In that moment, I did what I always did at moments of crisis or desperation in my life. I reached into my satchel and removed my Bible, a book that over the years had occasionally offered me answers but more often than not had left me with questions, but which had never failed to distract my mind and offer some comfort. I owned a few Bibles, of course, given to me over the years by friends or purchased on visits to places of pilgrimage as mementoes. But this Bible, the one I opened now, was the oldest one of all, given to me by my mother when I left her house for the seminary all those years ago, a handsome volume encased in black leather with a stamp on the inside cover stating that it had been bought in the Veritas Religious Bookstore on Lower Abbey Street for twenty-two pence in April 1972. It was well thumbed for it had travelled with me everywhere over the years, but it was a sturdy creature and not a page in it was loose. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I opened it randomly, hoping that a passage, a story or a parable would emerge and speak to me, guiding me back from my unhappiness to a place of understanding.

  He was practically on top of me before I knew it. A man in his twenties, twenty-five or twenty-six at most. Tall, with a pair of piercing blue eyes that were astonishing to behold. Dressed in a suit but with the whisper of a tattoo – a thick, curlicued blackness – creeping out from beneath the left-hand side of his collar.

  ‘What’s that you’re reading there?’ he asked me.

  I looked up in surprise. ‘Come again?’ I asked.

  ‘That book,’ he replied, pronouncing it to rhyme with duke instead of took. Where was his accent from, I wondered. A working-class area of Dublin. ‘What is it? Give us a look at it.’

  I turned it over so that he could see the cover and he sneered at me.

  ‘You won’t find any answers in there,’ he said.

  ‘I have in the past,’ I said.

  ‘Believe in magic, do you?’

  I looked around, wondering whether anyone else was paying attention to us, but the other customers were all fully engrossed in their conversations and if anyone was listening, they probably wouldn’t want to get involved anyway. ‘Sure I’m just having a coffee,’ I said quietly, turning away from him and looking out of the window again.

  ‘Isn’t it well for you?’ he said bitterly.

  ‘Good luck now,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you be wishing me good luck, you fuckin’ pervert. I don’t want your good luck, all right?’

  I remained silent, feeling the tension begin to grow inside me, starting at the pit of my stomach and working its way up. The coffee cup was shaking a little in my hands and I tried to steady it, not wanting to show any fear or intimidation. But then I was a fifty-three-year-old man, unused to physical altercations, and had no idea how to get through such a thing. I thought the sensible plan here was to look out of the window, not rise to his bait, until he grew bored and left me alone.

  ‘You’re a priest,’ he said.

  ‘Well spotted,’ I replied.

  ‘Are you up there supporting your man?’

  ‘Which man is that?’

  ‘Your man up there in the Four Courts. The rapist. Are you up there to give him moral support, is it?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know any man in the Four Courts,’ I said. ‘Sure I’m just sitting here having a cup of coffee and minding my own business.’

  He stood over me for another minute, starting to fume. For a moment I thought he was going to walk away, but no, he sat down opposite me instead.

  ‘Ah here,’ I said, looking over to the man working behind the counter, hoping that he would see what was going on in his café and step in to help. ‘This isn’t on. Will you not leave me alone?’

  ‘Sure what am I doing to you?’ he asked, opening his arms innocently. ‘It’s a free country, isn’t it? A man’s allowed to sit down. We’re only chattin’.’

  I looked into my cup. I was nearly finished anyway, but I was damned if I would give him the satisfaction of standing up and walking away.

  ‘Now if I was a betting man,’ he said, ‘then I would say you came into Dublin to have a look at your man in the dock and say a prayer over him and try to frighten the jury into finding him not guilty.’

  ‘Which man is that?’ I asked again.

  ‘Ah yeah, it’s a big mystery to you, isn’t it, you prick? You haven’t a clue who I’m talking about. Give us a look at your Bible there.’

  ‘I will not.’

  ‘Give us a look at it, I said,’ he
growled, grabbing it off the table before I could stop him and starting to leaf through it.

  ‘Give it back,’ I said impotently. ‘It doesn’t belong to you.’

  ‘Ah here, would you look at this,’ he said, laughing as he turned to the inscription on the front page. ‘To Odran, from Mammy. Sure isn’t that sweet? Your oul’ one gave you this, did she? When was it, the day you got ordained?’

  ‘Give it back here,’ I insisted.

  ‘I’ll post it on. Give us your address, Father, and I’ll send it back to you when next I’m in the GPO.’

  ‘You’ll give it back to me now, you pup,’ I said. ‘Come on now, that’s enough of this.’

  He held it out to me, and when I went to reach for it, he pulled it back like a child.

  ‘Ah sorry, Father, I’m only messin’,’ he said, offering it to me again, but once more he pulled it back and laughed in my face.

  ‘Can someone help me here?’ I called, looking around, and for the first time, the solicitors and barristers and the man behind the counter looked in our direction. ‘Please,’ I beseeched them. ‘This man here is bothering me.’

  ‘Sure I’m doin’ nothin’,’ he said, appealing to his audience, who had more sense than to intervene anyway.

  ‘You want it back, do you, Father?’ he asked me.

  ‘I do, yes,’ I said, not looking him in the eye. To do so would, I felt, provoke him even further.

  ‘You want it back?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Here, you can have it so.’ And with that he pulled his right arm back, the hand tightly gripping the leather-bound Bible that my mother, poor woman, had probably spent one of the happiest hours of her life choosing for me in the Veritas Bookstore, and hit me a clatter with it across the side of my head, knocking me off my seat and opening a cut above my right eye as I fell to the floor, collapsing heavily in a pool of spilled tea and half-trod chips. He threw the Bible on top of me then as I heard chairs being pulled back all around me, useless people, for they were preparing not to help me but to defend themselves. I looked up, frightened and alone, and he spat at me, a great mouthful of phlegm that landed half on my cheek and half in my mouth, and I reached up to wipe it away and to spit the rest of it out and came back with a handful of blood from where my face had connected with the side of the table on the way down.

  ‘Fucking paedophile!’ he roared. Did I not live with that word every day of the week these days, one way or another? Hadn’t the two words paedophile and priest become irrevocably attached to each other in some unholy way?

  ‘Get out, you,’ called the café owner to my assailant, but sure he was already halfway out the door; what good was the man’s bravery now?

  ‘Are you all right, Father?’ said one of the barristers, a young woman, coming towards me now and helping me to my feet. I put a hand to my eye, which was throbbing painfully, and it came back stained with more blood. ‘Has this something to do with that priest being tried up above?’

  ‘I don’t know any priest being tried up above!’ I roared at the top of my voice, causing her to jump back, palms outstretched defensively as if I planned on assaulting her like the man had assaulted me. ‘I don’t know anything about it, do you hear me?’

  I never went back to the courtroom, but I followed the trial daily in The Irish Times. There was a lot of evidence to be heard, and in the end it lasted almost three weeks. At first, it was front-page news; gradually it was demoted to pages four or five, where the domestic crimes were reported. And then, on the last week, there was a day when the jury retired to consider their verdict and it was back on the front page, albeit low down on the page, the journalists speculating about the outcome. I read each report carefully, even though it hurt me to do so. The things they said that he had done were wicked and I could not believe that Tom Cardle could have done any of it, and yet I believed that he had done all of it and more, if that makes any sense at all.

  And then one morning I turned on Pat Kenny after ten o’clock morning Mass only to hear that the verdict had been returned. Guilty, of course. A unanimous decision. Apparently a cheer went up in the courtroom when the foreman announced it. Some of the victims were present, of course. They had all given their testimony, the country had listened to them at last, and they were allowed in to hear what the people said in response. Their families too, those parents and siblings who had suffered alongside their damaged loved ones. The shouts went up and, according to a reporter in The Irish Times, it recalled the crowds cheering in the Colosseum when the emperor twisted his hand, his thumb pointing downwards in the direction of hell.

  Further to that, he reported that while the judge tried to silence the courtroom, Tom Cardle bent over a little in the dock and took his head in his hands, and I ask you now whether there is something wrong with me for I felt a sympathy towards him still, despite everything he had done, despite his viciousness and his cruelties and the misery he had brought into the world. For to think of him standing there alone, with a wasted life behind him and God only knew what horrors awaiting him in jail, made my heart ache, but this was not something that I could have explained to anyone for they would have looked at me with revulsion, as if I was complicit in his deeds, when I abhorred them entirely. But I hate to think of a man alone, no matter what he has done.

  If I cannot see some good in all of us and hope that the pain we all share will come to an end, then what kind of priest am I anyway? What kind of man?

  The crowds returned the following morning for the sentencing, and the ecstasy of the crowd gave way to catcalls and disbelief when the judge announced that Tom would serve only eight years for his crimes, that he would undergo therapy while residing at Arbor Hill prison, that he would be placed on the sex offenders list for the rest of his life and that he would be obliged to keep the Gardaí aware of his location on a weekly basis until the day that he died. Eight years! The spectators were incandescent with rage.

  The media lapped it up, of course. The radio and television stations had their top people outside the courthouse, shoving their microphones in the victims’ faces, hoping that their pain could be converted into sound bites for the lunchtime news. And they did speak, many of them, eloquently, passionately, but with a barely concealed wrath. Their sense of injustice was to the fore and they spoke with dignified contempt of the man who had turned their lives into an interminable darkness, who continued to make their lives hell, and one man – a very decent-looking fellow, surrounded by his family and loved ones, a beautiful wife whose arm was wrapped around his shoulders – could scarcely contain his tears as he said ‘Eight years?’ over and over. ‘Eight years?’ As if he couldn’t believe what he’d heard in the courtroom. As if it made no sense to him that he could suffer so much and that his abuser could be punished so little.

  ‘And sure he’ll be out in four or five,’ said another man, pushing his way to the front, and the people around him nodded and I sat forward in my chair, for who was it? Only the lad who had thumped me with my own Bible in the coffee shop on Ormond Quay. ‘That’s all he’ll serve,’ he shouted. ‘For everything that bastard did to me and to these people here. Four fuckin’ years? Do you hear me, RTÉ?’ he asked, his deep-blue eyes staring directly out towards the viewers seated in their living rooms, and to their credit, the national airwaves did not censor a word of his speech when they repeated it endlessly over the coming days. ‘Are you listening to me, People of Ireland? All of yous out there? Do you see what we’re going through here? Four or five years is all he’ll end up with, a man who has destroyed our lives. And then he’ll be free, he’ll wander among yous and he’ll do it again unless you get them out, do you hear me? Get them all out! Pull down the churches! Tell them to pack their bags and get themselves off to the airports or the ferries, but we want to see the back of them. Are you listening, RTÉ? Are you listening, people of Ireland? We want a clean country from now on. Get them out! Get them out! Get them out!’

  And the crowd picked up the chant and roa
red it down the streets, their voices carrying north across the trees to the President in the Áras and south towards the families walking their dogs in Marlay Park, east towards the workers emptying the shipping containers at Dublin port and all the way west to the Aran Islands, where the weather-beaten old men driving their horses and traps could carry the message to the furthest edges of the country and the tourists could carry it back to New York, Sydney, Cape Town and St Petersburg with them, telling the world that Ireland had finally had enough.

  That was the simple message the newspapers carried the following morning when they showed nothing on their front pages but a confused and bewildered-looking Tom Cardle being bundled into a police van and a headline above that was persuasive in its simplicity.

  GET THEM OUT!

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  2012

  MY BLACK SUIT hung in my wardrobe and my white starched collar rested on my bedside table, ready for my return. I had not packed them for I would not need them. Where I was going, and considering who I was going to meet, to wear the symbols of my profession could prove a catastrophic error of judgement.

  Waiting in the parochial house that morning for the taxi to arrive, I felt uncomfortable in the regular, everyday clothes that I’d chosen to wear. Glancing at myself in the mirror, I imagined various scenarios that strangers might consider when they first saw me: my wife had been dead for a year and I was risking the first solo holiday since our marriage thirty years before; my editor was sending me to a literary festival to interview a famous writer whose work had recently begun to appear in English; my firm was dispatching me to Europe for a week to oversee production at our underperforming plant in Munich. Any of these things might have been possible in a different life, had my choices been different.

  I was fooling myself, of course. No one gave me a second glance at the airport; sure why would they when I looked just like everyone else?