by John Boyne
Afterward, it seemed polite to ask whether she wanted to join me for a cup of coffee and we made our way toward Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street, taking one of the booths by the wall as we tried our best to make conversation.
“I generally don’t like Bewley’s,” said Mary-Margaret, pulling a handful of napkins from the dispenser on the table and placing them on the seat beneath her bottom to avoid any contamination. She wore her hair in a bun at the back of her head and, although she was dressed like a representative from the Legion of Mary, there was no denying that she was pretty enough if you liked that sort of thing. “The seats can be terrible sticky. I don’t think the girls clean them after people drop their crumbs. That wouldn’t be my standard at all.”
“But they do make a good cup of coffee,” I said.
“I don’t drink coffee,” she said, taking a sip from her tea. “Coffee is for Americans and Protestants. Irish people should drink tea. That’s how we were brought up after all. Give me a nice cup of Lyons and I’m content.”
“I don’t mind the occasional cup of Barry’s myself.”
“No, that’s from Cork. I only drink Dublin tea. I wouldn’t risk something that’s made the journey up on the train. They do a lovely cup of tea in Switzer’s café. Have you ever been there, Cyril?”
“No,” I admitted. “Why, is that somewhere you go a lot?”
“Every day,” she said, beaming with pride. “It’s very convenient for those of us employed by the Bank of Ireland on College Green and it has a more elite clientele, which seems only right and proper. I don’t think the bank directors would be at all happy if they saw me in any old street café.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, you’re looking great anyway. That was a mad day all the same, wasn’t it? The day Julian got kidnapped.”
“It was very disturbing,” she replied, shivering a little, as if someone had just walked over her grave. “I had nightmares about it for months afterward. And when they started delivering his body parts—”
“That was terrible,” I agreed.
“How is he anyway?” she asked me. “Are you still in touch?”
“Oh yes,” I said, quick to assert our ongoing alliance. “He’s still my best friend. And he’s very well, thanks for asking. He’s in Europe at the moment but he sends me the occasional postcard. I’ll see him when he gets back. We phone each other sometimes too. I have his parents’ phone number here, look.” I took out my address book and flicked through to the Ws, displaying the Dartmouth Square address that had once been mine. “He has my number too. And if he can’t get me he always leaves a message with my flatmate and he passes it on.”
“Settle down, Cyril,” she said, frowning a little. “It was just a question.”
“Sorry,” I replied, feeling a little embarrassed by my enthusiasm.
“He got over it then?” she asked.
“Got over what?”
“The kidnapping, of course.”
“Oh yes. He’s never been the type to let something like that get him down.”
“And the loss of a toe, finger and ear?”
“He still has nine of each. Well, not nine ears obviously. He only has one ear left but it’s more than some people have, I suppose.”
“Who?” she asked, frowning at me. “Who has less ears than that?”
I thought about it. No one sprang to mind. “His father only has one ear too,” I said. “They have that in common at least. The IRA shot one of them off a few months before the kidnapping,”
“They’re a terrible shower, the IRA,” she said. “I hope you don’t have anything to do with them, Cyril Avery?”
“I do not,” I said, shaking my head quickly. “I don’t have any interest in things like that. I’m not political at all.”
“I suppose he walks with a limp, does he?”
“Who?”
“Julian. And him with only nine toes. I suppose he walks with a limp?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, uncertain whether he did or not. “If he does, I’ve never spotted it. To be honest, the only thing that really bothers him is the ear. Obviously his hearing is only half as good as it could be and he looks a bit odd without it, but he grew his hair long and it covers the right-hand side of his head, so no one really notices. He still looks amazing.”
Mary-Margaret gave a little shudder. “The directors of the Bank of Ireland don’t allow any of their male employees to wear their hair long,” she said. “And I don’t blame them. It looks a bit too Nancy-boy for me. And I prefer a man with two ears. One ear wouldn’t be my standard at all.”
I nodded and glanced around the café for the nearest fire exit and to my horror caught the eye of a student priest sitting with two older priests a few seats away from us, drinking a Coca-Cola and eating an Eccles cake. I recognized him from the back row of the Metropole Cinema where I had sat next to him during a screening of A Man for All Seasons a few nights earlier. He’d placed his overcoat on his lap and I’d given him a hand-job in the dark. The smell of it after he came was only rancid and people had started to turn around and stare at us, so we had no choice but to make a run for it just as Richard Rich was taking the stand to betray Thomas More. We both flushed red as we saw each other and turned away.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Mary-Margaret. “All the blood has rushed to your face.”
“I have a bit of a cold,” I told her. “The fever comes and goes.”
“Don’t be giving me any of your germs,” she said. “I don’t want to come down with anything. I have my job to think of.”
“I don’t think it’s catching,” I said, taking a sip from my coffee. “I was very sorry to hear about Bridget, by the way,” I told her. “You must have been very upset.”
“Well,” she said in a firm voice, putting her cup down and looking directly at me. “Naturally, I was very sorry to hear that she had died and the circumstances were, of course, appalling but the truth is that I had cut my ties with her sometime before.”
“Oh right,” I said. “Did you have a falling-out of some sort?”
“Let’s just say that we were very different types.” She hesitated for a moment but then seemed to throw caution to the wind. “The truth is, Cyril, Bridget Simpson was a tarty piece and I didn’t care to be around that sort of element anymore. I lost track of the number of men with whom she had relations. I said to her, Bridget, I said, if you don’t clean up your act, you’ll meet a terrible end, but she didn’t listen to me. She said that life was for living and that I was too uptight. Me! Uptight! Can you imagine it? Sure I only live for a good laugh. Anyway, it was when she started involving herself with married men that I said enough was enough. I put my foot down and told her that I would have nothing more to do with her if she carried on with that sort of malarkey. The next thing I heard she’d been killed in a car crash in Clonmel.”
“I heard it was Clontarf,” I said.
“Well, one of the Clons. I went to her funeral, of course, and lit a candle for her. I told her poor mother that she should take comfort in the fact that Bridget had taught us all a great lesson. That if you live a dissolute life, then you can expect to meet a horrible death.”
“And how did she take that?”
“The poor woman was so grief-stricken she couldn’t say a word. She just stared at me in shock. She probably blamed herself for bringing her daughter up without any sense of decency.”
“Or maybe she thought you were being a little insensitive?” I suggested.
“No, I don’t think it was that at all,” she said, appearing baffled by this remark. “Read your Bible, Cyril Avery. It’s all in there.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes and I noticed the student priest standing up and making his way toward the doors, throwing an anxious look in my direction as he fled. For a moment, I felt a certain sympathy for him and, just as quickly, I felt it for myself too. Then I wondered whether he was signaling that he was off to the pictures and if he was, how
quickly I could escape Bewley’s Café and follow him.
“Can I ask you a question, Cyril?” asked Mary-Margaret, and I looked back at her, trying to stifle a yawn. I wondered why I hadn’t just gone back to the office after the interview and avoided all of this.
“You can,” I said.
“Where do you go to Mass?”
“Where do I go to Mass?”
“Well, you have two ears on you anyway even if your pal doesn’t. Yes, where do you go to Mass?”
I opened my mouth in surprise, searched for an answer, couldn’t find one and so closed it again. The truth was that I never went to Mass. The last time I had been in a church was seven years earlier when I’d killed a priest by telling him all the perverted thoughts that went through my head.
“Mass,” I repeated, hedging for time. “Are you a big Mass-goer yourself then?”
“Of course I am,” she said, frowning so hard that her forehead divided into five distinct lines, like the staff on a piece of sheet music. “What do you take me for? I go to Baggot Street every day. They do a lovely Mass there. Have you ever been to the church on Baggot Street?”
“No,” I said. “Not that I can recall.”
“Oh you must go sometime. There’s a wonderful atmosphere to the place for one thing. The scent of incense mixed with the smell of dead bodies is only breath-taking.”
“Sounds lovely.”
“It is. And Father gives a wonderful sermon. He’s a real fire-and-brimstone type, which I think is just what Ireland needs right now. There’s all sorts out there these days. I see them in the bank all the time. Students coming in from Trinity College wearing next to nothing, their hands in the backs of their boyfriends’ denim jeans. You don’t own any denim jeans, do you, Cyril?”
“I have one pair,” I said. “But they’re a bit long on me. I don’t wear them very often.”
“Throw them away. No man should be seen in a pair of denim jeans. Of course, I see the whole world from my position on the foreign exchange desk at the Bank of Ireland, College Green. I had a divorced woman from England in last week, would you believe? I made my disapproval clear, I don’t mind telling you. And there was a young man in only yesterday going around more like a girl than a boy. Oh, the way he spoke! He was one of those, of course,” she added, bending her right hand at the wrist. “I refused to serve him. I told him he could go to the Allied Irish Bank if he wanted his money changed. They cater to that class of person there. He caused such a fuss. Do you want to know what he called me?”
“Not really,” I said.
“A b-i-t-c-h,” she said, leaning forward and spelling the word out quietly. She shook her head then and looked away. “I’m still not the better of it,” she added after a moment. “Anyway, I asked the security guard to throw him out. And do you know what he did then?”
“No,” I said. “Since I wasn’t there.”
“He started crying! He said his money was as good as anyone’s and he was sick of being treated like some second-class citizen. I told him that if I had my way he wouldn’t be a citizen at all. Of course, we all started laughing at him then, the customers too, and he sat down on one of the benches with a miserable look on his face as if we were in the wrong! They should lock all the Nancy-boys up, if you ask me. Put them out on one of the islands off the west coast where they can do no harm to anyone but each other. But anyway, Cyril, what we were talking about? Oh yes, where do you go to Mass?”
“Westland Row,” I told her, for want of a better answer. It was hard enough to keep up with her list of prejudices without trying to think of a Dublin church of which she might approve.
“Oh, that’s a beautiful building,” she said, surprising me by not dismissing it for being too tall, too wide or having too many letters in its name. “A lovely bit of stonework in there. It’s on my list every year on Holy Thursday when I do my Visita Iglesia. I wonder if I’ve ever seen you in there?”
“Anything is possible,” I said. “But most things are unlikely.”
“And tell me this and tell me no more,” she added, taking another sip from her tea and pulling a face. It seemed that even the tea was conspiring against her now. “What do you do with yourself?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m assuming that you have a good job somewhere?”
“Oh right, yes,” I said, telling her about my work at the Department of Education, and her eyes lit up immediately.
“Now, that’s a great career to have,” she said. “Almost as good as working in a bank. You simply can’t go wrong with the civil service. They can’t fire you for one thing, even if times are hard and you’re completely incompetent. Daddy always wanted me to join the civil service but I said, Daddy, I’m an independent young woman and I’ll find my own position, and find it I did on the foreign exchange desk at the Bank of Ireland, College Green. But I always think the great thing about the civil service is that you can go in there at twenty years old, spend every day of your life behind one desk and before you know it you’re an old man and it’s all behind you and the only thing left to do is die. There must be great security in that.”
“I hadn’t really thought about it that way,” I said, feeling a curious mélange of mortality and misery at the idea. “But I suppose you’re right.”
“Did I ever tell you that my Uncle Martin was a civil servant?”
“Well, no,” I said. “But then we’ve only just met again.”
“He was a wonderful civil servant. And a lovely man. Although he had a twitch in his cheek and I don’t like a man with a twitch. It makes me uncomfortable.”
“Does he still work there?” I asked. “Maybe I might know him?”
“No,” she said, tapping her temple. “He got the dementia,” she told me, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. “He can’t remember who he is half the time. The last time I saw him he thought I was Dorothy Lamour!” She barked a laugh and looked around, shaking her head in delight before her face turned stony with disgust once again. “Would you take a look at her?” she said.
I turned to glance in the direction in which she was staring and saw a young girl making her way down the center aisle of Bewley’s, a young stunner who was defying the weather by wearing as few clothes as possible. The eyes of every man in the place were on her behind as she passed. Almost every man anyway.
“Mutton dressed as lamb,” said Mary-Margaret, curling her lip. “That wouldn’t be my standard now at all.”
“Would you like a cream cake to go with your tea?” I asked.
“No, thank you, Cyril. Cream doesn’t agree with me.”
“Right.” I checked my watch and saw that we had already been in the café for seven minutes, which I thought was long enough. “Well, I suppose I better be getting back,” I said.
“Getting back where?”
“Back to work,” I said.
“Oh listen to you,” she said. “Mr. Hoity-Toity.”
I had no idea what she meant by this. It didn’t seem like such a bizarre idea that I should return to work, since it was only three o’clock in the afternoon.
“It was nice to see you again, Mary-Margaret,” I said, extending my hand
“Hold on there now, you, till I give you my phone number,” she said, reaching into her bag for a pen and paper.
“Why?” I asked.
“But sure how else would you be able to call me if you didn’t know what my number was?”
I frowned, uncertain what she was getting at. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you want me to call you? Was there something you needed to ask me? Because I can stay a little longer if there is.”
“No, we’ll save something to talk about for next time.” She scribbled down a number and handed it across to me. “It’ll be better if you call me than the other way around. I wouldn’t be the type to phone a boy. But I won’t be waiting by the telephone for you either, so don’t get any notions on that score. And if Daddy answers, tell him that you’re a civil servant from the
Department of Education, because he’ll approve of that. Otherwise he’ll give you short shrift.”
I stared at the piece of paper in my hand and didn’t know what to say. This was entirely outside of my realm of experience.
“Call me on Saturday afternoon,” she said. “And we’ll make plans for Saturday night.”
“All right,” I said, uncertain what I was getting myself into but confident that I had no choice in the matter.
“There’s a picture that I want to see,” she told me. “It’s playing in the Metropole. A Man for All Seasons.”
“I’ve seen that one,” I said, not adding that I’d had to leave just as Richard Rich was betraying his mentor for Wales because I needed to wash the smell of ejaculate off my hands.
“Well I haven’t,” she said. “And I want to.”
“There’s lots of other pictures on,” I said. “I’ll have a look in the paper later and see what’s what.”
“I want to see A Man for All Seasons,” she insisted, leaning forward and glaring at me.
“Right so,” I said, standing up before she could pick up a knife and do to me what the IRA had done to Julian. “I’ll call you on Saturday so.”
“At four o’clock. Not a minute earlier.”
“Four o’clock,” I said, turning around and making my way out of the café, the perspiration already starting to cause my shirt to stick to my back. Walking back to work in the sunshine, I considered the situation. Without ever having intended to, and without even wanting such a thing, it seemed that I had a girlfriend. And my girlfriend was Mary-Margaret Muffet. Apparently I was her standard. On one hand the idea terrified me, for I had no knowledge of how to behave with a girl and even less interest in finding out, but on the other this was a great development in my life, for it meant that there was a chance I could be just like everyone else and no one would be suspicious of me. And thank God, I wouldn’t have to join a seminary, which I’d been vaguely considering as an answer to all my problems for about a year now.
