by John Boyne
‘Well, as you said yourself, Your Grace, sometimes we cannot stick to our promises.’
The smile remained fixed but he shook his head. ‘Not going to happen,’ he said. ‘Deal with it.’
I tried not to laugh. How old was he anyway? Forty? Forty-five? Deal with it?
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said.
‘I am right.’
‘After all, it’s not as if Cardinal Cordington asked me to take on Tom Cardle’s old parish so he could move him to a safe house, is it?’
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘I’m only saying,’ I said. ‘All this talk about a criminal investigation into the cardinal is a terrible thing. It wouldn’t have happened in John Charles McQuaid’s time, I can tell you that. Of course, the DPP have said that they don’t have enough evidence to press charges against him. And a good thing too. He says he didn’t know anything about Tom’s abuses and I for one believe him, don’t you? Although now I come to think of it, the day I sat in this office, when he originally asked me to move, he did imply differently. He started to tell me something, but then thought better of it. He said it was delicate and not for public consumption. What do you suppose he was referring to?’
‘You’re treading on very dangerous ground here, Father Yates,’ said the Archbishop quietly, glancing for a moment at a phone that was vibrating away on his desk before picking it up, sliding a finger across the casing and setting it down again.
‘How so?’ I asked. ‘It’s not as if something like that would ever get out, is it? Although he’d have a lot of explaining to do if it did, don’t you think? This office would bear the brunt of most of it, I’d say. Not that I’d talk about it, of course. To a journalist. Or …’ – and I paused for a moment to utter the three dreaded syllables that the Irish Church despised more than any other – ‘to RTÉ.’
The truth was that I’d had enough. I’d submitted to them all my life – first to Father Haughton and my mother, then to the Archbishop of Dublin, then to Monsignor Sorley and the cardinals in Rome, who forced a silence on me in September 1978 when I should have spoken out, then to the Polish Pope, who dismissed me before my time and whose rules I obeyed for decades before I realized what kind of man he really was – and I was damned if I was going to submit any longer. And certainly not to a young pup like this who hadn’t even been in the job a wet weekend. With his bloody iPhones and his iPads and his twittering nonsense. I’d had enough. Sure hadn’t the whole country had enough?
‘What age are you now, Father Yates?’ he asked finally. ‘Fifty-five?’
‘Fifty-eight.’
‘And when do you think you’ll be retiring? Sixty?’
‘Ah no, sure I’m very healthy. Let’s say sixty-five. Like anyone else in Ireland.’
‘Seven years then.’
‘And in my case with no time off for good behaviour.’
‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’ he asked, glaring at me, and I looked away. There was no point pushing my luck.
‘I was good at my job in that school,’ I told him, trying to sound conciliatory now. ‘I was happy there. And I was told that I could go back. I want to go back. Will you just let me go back, please? Would it really matter that much to you?’
He sighed, defeated, and threw his hands in the air. I thought of Henry II wishing that someone would rid him of this turbulent priest and thanked God that there wasn’t an axe man waiting for me on the blocks. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘You can go back for the new term in September if you’re that insistent.’
Whatever? Did this man spend all his evenings watching American television shows or what? He was a middle-aged man speaking like a spoiled child.
But the long and the short of it was that I got to go home. To my old room, my old colleagues, my old library. The books were all over the place, of course. The categories completely confused. With the help of a couple of lads from the fourth year we got it whipped back into shape over the course of a few weeks, and I gave two younger lads who were whizz-kids on the computer the task of setting up a catalogue of everything that we had on the shelves. They were delighted with themselves and told me about Excel spreadsheets and databases and all sorts of things until I said, ‘Lads, I don’t have the slightest interest in anything you’re telling me; just get it done and thanks very much.’
All my old students were long gone, of course. The boys who had been in the first year when I left were in Trinity now, or UCD, or further afield, fighting with the Taliban. There were new boys and they were surprised by an old man like me appearing among them, even if the rumour did go round that I’d spent twenty years here before taking a leave of absence. They didn’t know that I was only across on the other side of the Liffey. I heard one lad saying that I’d been living with a woman in Glasthule and the relationship had fallen apart. Another lad said no, that I’d been a TD for the Green Party and had lost my seat at the election. A third said that I used to be married to Twink and a fourth that I hadn’t been here as a priest at all, that I’d been a nun, and had undergone gender-reassignment surgery in the intervening years. They had a high opinion of me, I thought. I’d never done anything as exciting as that in my life. More’s the pity.
When Hannah died just after Christmas, I stood at the altar of the Good Shepherd church while Jonas and Aidan, Marthe, Morten and Astrid sat in the front pew and I told stories about my sister and the life we’d shared together.
I told them how she had written to Robert Redford every week from the end of 1973, when she watched him kissing Barbra Streisand outside the Plaza Hotel in New York City at the end of The Way We Were, until late in 1974 when she decided that she wasn’t going to waste her time on him any more. It had cost her a fortune in international stamps, I said, and where she got the money from I did not know, but not once did Robert Redford reply and wasn’t that a great shame all the same? A little postcard would have made her day.
I told them how when we were children we had spent a week at Curracloe beach, our whole family together, and I, with the help of our younger brother Cathal, had buried her in the sand up to her armpits and she’d screamed and begged to be set free and Mam had clattered me across the back of my legs for my trouble and said that was how accidents happened.
I told them how when I was in Rome she would send me the occasional care package from Dublin, filled with things that I missed but couldn’t get in Italy – Tayto crisps, Lucozade, Barry’s Tea, Curly Wurlies – and how much those packages meant to me, even though they must surely have cost even more than all the letters to Robert Redford.
I told them how she had brought two fine boys into the world and reared them well. There’s one of them now, I said, pointing towards the front pew, running his own business in Norway, a loving husband and father. And there’s the other one, I said, writing all those books and making a name for himself and sure didn’t everyone love his novels, especially the young people, even if they were filled with effing and blinding and all sorts of mad sex, and the congregation roared with laughter as Jonas put his head in his hands, as embarrassed as a teenager again, the poor lad.
I told them how she had met her husband, Kristian, when he came into the Bank of Ireland on College Green every afternoon to exchange Norwegian kroner into Irish punts, and how one day he hadn’t phoned her when he said he would and so she’d taken the bit between her teeth and phoned him herself, and didn’t our mother unplug the socket from the wall after that for she said that no decent girl would call a boy on the telephone of her own volition. And how they’d married young and lost each other young and that was a tragedy but they were reunited now, at least I believed that they were, and they could spend eternity together, for no two people I had ever known had loved each other more.
And I told them about her struggle with her mind over the last ten years of her life and how unfair it had been and how at times like that they might have expected a man like me, with the beliefs I held, to say that it was all part of God’s plan, but t
hat I couldn’t say that to them because I wasn’t sure if it was true, and if it was then I didn’t understand any of it, for she had fallen ill when she was still a young woman and the disease had taken her and there seemed to be no justice in any of that.
And later, when we were all gathered together in her house, it felt strange to me to be the last surviving member of my family – Dad was long gone, little Cathal had been taken for no good reason whatsoever, Mam had collapsed in the church and now Hannah was lost to me too – but I realized that I was not one, I was part of six, and I would have to work at maintaining that. And when I asked Aidan could I take Morten and Astrid to the pictures the next day he said I could and that if I didn’t mind giving them their tea too that would be a great help as there was a lot of work to be done clearing out his mother’s home. I resolved on the spot that I would make sure that I was a part of their lives from now on. Sure the flights back and forth to Norway weren’t that expensive anyway and the train journey north offered beautiful scenery.
Before parting that night, Jonas said that we should have lunch together when he got back from his trip to America and I said that was fine. He pulled out his phone and I pulled out mine – I did indeed – and he said how’s the twenty-sixth of next month, that’ll give me time to recover from the jetlag, and I shook my head and said no, the twenty-sixth was no good for me, could we make it another day for I had an appointment in my diary for the twenty-sixth, and he said that was grand and we chose a different date and I knew that I would look forward to it enormously.
The morning of the twenty-sixth came and I wrestled with my conscience about what I was going to do. I could leave well alone and get on with my day; stay in the school and immerse myself in my work. Jonas’s publisher had sent me two boxes of books for the library and they needed sorting and cataloguing. Why would I go through with this plan, after all? I could tell no one afterwards, of course, least of all my nephews, who would see it as a betrayal, but it was not as if I would ever want to talk about it. But my mind was made up and so off I went.
It felt as if the world and its mother had been gathered at the Four Courts five years before when Tom Cardle had been bundled into a police van and taken off to Mountjoy prison, but the media showed no sign of interest in his release. A new set of national obsessions – the recession, the bankers, the death of a woman for no good reason in a hospital that was supposed to take care of her – had taken over, and for the most part criminal cases involving priests were receiving less attention. It was just more of the same, that’s what people thought; how could it be news any more?
I sat in my car, looking at that forbidding building across the road and imagining the horrors that went on behind its stone walls, and when the doors opened, a young man emerged, a rough-looking type in a bright white tracksuit, and a girl jumped out from behind a tree, leaped into his arms and the pair of them started to practically procreate in the middle of the street. I looked away and was glad of it when they hailed a taxi and drove off.
A few minutes later, the doors opened again and there he was. Had he passed me on the street, I’m not sure I would have recognized him. He was five years older than the last time I’d seen him – I had never once visited him in prison – but looked two or three times that amount. He’d grown terribly thin and his eyes were sunk into the back of his head. His hair, which had always been thick and black, was almost completely white. He walked with a limp, aided by a cane; I had heard on the grapevine that he had been badly assaulted one day in the prison yard and the legs kicked from under him and there was talk at one point that he might not walk again, but here he was now, hobbling across the road, looking left and right for traffic as I sat motionless, not raising my hand in greeting as I watched him.
He was an old man. A convicted paedophile. A sex offender.
The diocese had arranged a flat for him, an awful place off Gardiner Street, four floors up and with an elevator that had a permanent out-of-order sign attached to it, and I wondered how he’d manage to get up and down with the bad leg. He was to collect a pension and live quietly. He was to give no interviews. He was to keep up with the court’s order in terms of making sure the Gardaí knew where he was at all times. He was to see his probation officer weekly. He was not to make contact with anyone in the hierarchy, but he could attend any church that he wanted and confession, of course, was a sacrament open to everyone should he choose to avail himself of it.
‘Odran,’ he said, opening the passenger door. ‘You came for me.’
‘I said I would.’
I had written to him a month earlier, when his release date was set, and said that I would be outside to drive him wherever he needed to go. I kept my note short and on point, as they say, and made no reference to the letters that he’d occasionally sent me during his incarceration, nor to the fact that I had ignored every single one of them. Not knowing how many people might be waiting outside the jail, I told him the make and model of my car and said I’d stay inside, keep the engine turned over, and he should look out for me. I felt like a bank robber, a criminal ready to flee the scene of the crime.
‘It was good of you,’ he said, sitting in the passenger seat and closing the door. He sighed and shut his eyes for a moment. He was free at last; I suppose he was taking that idea in. ‘How are you keeping anyway?’
He turned to smile at me as if I had just arrived down to visit him after a long absence in one of his parishes. One of his many parishes.
‘I’m grand,’ I said. ‘You?’
‘Never better. Never better.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘Glad to be back in the real world.’
‘We’ll go so.’
We drove along in silence, me wondering whether I should have left him to find his own way there and him thinking who knew what thoughts. At least he had the decency to stay quiet and not pretend that things were normal between us.
I pulled up outside his new flat and we made our way up the stairs, letting ourselves in with the key that had been given to me by the archdiocese the day before. It was awful. Small and damp, wallpaper peeling off the walls, noise coming from the flat next to his, music roaring down from above. I think I’d have preferred to jump out of the window than to stay here, and he caught the expression of horror on my face.
‘Don’t be worrying,’ he said. ‘It’s better than what I’m used to.’
There was that, I suppose.
‘I wasn’t worrying,’ I told him. ‘I’d only worry if it was me who had to live here. It’ll do for you, I imagine.’
He nodded and sat down on one of the two armchairs. ‘You’re angry with me, Odran,’ he said quietly.
‘I should go.’
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘We’ve only just got here. Stay a few minutes.’
‘Only a few,’ I said, sitting down. ‘The traffic will build up.’
‘You’re angry with me,’ he repeated after a lengthy pause. I almost laughed at the understatement.
‘I don’t understand you, Tom,’ I replied. ‘That’s the truth of it.’
‘Sure I don’t understand myself. I’ve spent the last five years trying to.’
‘And did you come to any conclusions?’
He shrugged. ‘My father had a lot to do with it.’
‘Your father?’ I said, a quick, bitter laugh escaping my lips. ‘Your old dad and his tractor?’
‘Don’t judge me too quickly,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what he was like.’
‘It had nothing to do with him. It was all you.’
He nodded and looked out of the window for a moment; it was a rotten sight, but at least it was a view. He had had none for years.
‘Have it your way,’ he said.
‘Well sure you had it your way long enough. I suppose it’s someone else’s turn now.’
He turned to look at me, fixing me with a stare, and I saw there was little fear in his eyes, just exhaustion. I had no idea what he had gone through in jail and I didn’t want to know, but I
suspected that there were times when he had been forced to defend himself physically, times when he would have had the upper hand, more times when he wouldn’t.
‘Is there something you want to say to me, Odran?’ he asked. ‘Because I appreciate the lift over here, but if you only want to have a go at me—’
‘Did you never think it was wrong?’ I asked. ‘The things that you were doing?’
He considered this, but shook his head. ‘I don’t think I ever thought about it in that way,’ he said. ‘Concepts of right and wrong, they didn’t come into it much.’
‘And the children, you never thought of how much you were hurting them?’
‘Sure wasn’t I little more than a child myself?’ he asked.
‘At the start, maybe. By the end, not at all.’
‘But once I’d started, you see, there was no getting away from it. I should never have been a priest, that’s the truth of it. Christ almighty, I don’t even believe in God. I don’t think I ever did.’
‘No one forced you to be a priest.’
‘That’s not true,’ he snapped. ‘I was absolutely forced into it. I lived in fear of my father, who insisted that this was the life for me. You were forced into it yourself. Don’t pretend that you weren’t.’
‘You could have left.’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘You ran off once.’
‘And he brought me back on the tractor, remember?’
‘You could have refused.’
‘I couldn’t. You didn’t see what happened on the days in between.’
‘You were seventeen,’ I insisted. ‘You could have taken the ferry to England. Started a new life.’
‘Odran, you may never believe anything that I tell you again, but believe this: you have no idea what you’re talking about. None. You don’t have the first concept of what my childhood was like. Of all the things that happened to me in the years before I arrived at Clonliffe. None.’
‘And I don’t want to know,’ I told him. ‘Nothing that happened to you back then makes anything that you did acceptable. It doesn’t justify anything. Can’t you see that?’
