by John Boyne
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, and now he leaned back in, a gesture whose meaning was all too obvious to me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I miss him, of course. A great deal. We should have had a long future together yet and that was stolen from us. But I’ve come to terms with it. Life happens and death happens. Do you know something?” I added, a thought coming into my head. “I’ve just realized that I’m forty-nine years old and yet this is the first time I’ve ever gone on a date in Ireland with another man.”
He frowned a little and took a long drink from his beer. “You’re in your fifties?” he asked. “I thought you were younger than that.”
I stared at him, wondering whether he was a little hard of hearing. “No,” I said. “I’m forty-nine. I just said.”
“Yes, but you don’t mean that you’re really forty-nine, do you?”
“What else would I mean?”
“Jesus, you’ve been off the dating scene quite a while, haven’t you? The thing is, most men looking for other men claim to be younger than they really are. Especially older men. If you meet a man from a personal ad and he says he’s in his late thirties, that means he’s pushing fifty and thinks he can get away with thirty-nine. Delusional, most of them, but you know. Whatever. When you said you’re forty-nine, I assumed that meant you were mid to late fifties in real life.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I really am forty-nine. I was born a few months after the war ended.”
“Which war?”
“The Second World War.”
“Oh, that one.”
“Well, not the First.”
“No. Obviously not. You’d be, like, a hundred then.”
“Well, not quite.”
“Close enough.”
“Do you meet a lot of people from personal ads?” I asked, wondering how he had done in history at school.
“From time to time,” he said. “I met a lad a couple of weeks ago, he said he was nineteen but when he showed up he was almost my own age. He was wearing a Blondie T-shirt, for Christ’s sake.”
“I used to have one of those,” I said. “But why would you want to meet someone who you thought was nineteen anyway?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” he said, laughing. “I’m not too old for a nineteen-year-old.”
“Well, I suppose that’s a matter of opinion. But what would you have in common with a boy that age?”
“We don’t need to have anything in common. It wasn’t his conversational skills that I was after.”
I nodded, feeling a little uncomfortable. “Anyway, it just seems surprising to me, that’s all,” I said. “If you’re attracted to younger men, then why did you ask me out?”
“Because I’m attracted to you too. I’m attracted to lots of people.”
“OK,” I said, trying to process this and wishing for all the world that Bastiaan was sitting across from me drinking a beer and not this tosser.
“So how old are you?” I asked finally.
“Thirty-four.”
“So does that mean you’re really thirty-four?”
“It does. But I’m twenty-eight when I meet people.”
“You’re meeting me right now.”
“Yes, but that’s different. You’re older. So I can be my own age.”
“Right. And have you had many relationships?”
“Relationships? No,” he said, with a shrug. “That’s not really where my focus has been over the last ten years or so.”
“Where has your focus been?”
“Look, I’m a normal guy, Cyril. I like getting laid.”
“Fair enough.”
“Don’t you like getting laid?”
“Of course. I mean I did. Once.”
“When was the last time?”
“Seven years ago.”
He put his pint down and stared at me, his eyes opening wide. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he asked.
“I told you, that’s when Bastiaan died.”
“Yeah but…you’re telling me that you haven’t had sex since then?”
“Is that so strange?”
“It’s fucking weird is what it is.”
I said nothing; I wondered whether he realized how rude he was being.
“You must be fucking gagging for it,” he said, his voice rising a little, and I noticed a couple at the next table looking at us in disdain. Some things didn’t change.
“I’m not really,” I said quietly.
“Yeah, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“If you really are forty-nine, then you’re way too young to be closing up shop.”
“I am forty-nine,” I insisted. “And funnily enough you’re the second person to say something along those lines to me over the last few days.”
“Who was the first?”
“Mrs. Goggin.”
“Who’s Mrs. Goggin?”
I rolled my eyes. “I told you before. The lady from the tearoom.”
“What tearoom?”
“In Dáil Éireann!”
“Oh, yes, you said something about her before. She was retiring, wasn’t she?”
“Yes. You were there!”
“Oh that’s right. I remember now. I think it made her night when I showed up but I couldn’t stay.”
“I said hello to you and you ignored me.”
“Didn’t see you. Did she do it anyway?”
“Did she do what?”
“Retire.”
“Yes, of course she did. Why else would she have a retirement party?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Lots of people say they’re retiring but they never do. Look at Frank Sinatra.”
“Well, she has,” I told him, growing exhausted now by the conversation. “Anyway. I suppose you’re single, are you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“The fact that you asked me out.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Well, sort of.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m open to offers,” he replied, grinning at me. “If anyone was to make one.”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, taking the opportunity to go to the bathroom for a few moments to myself. When I came back, there were two more beers on the table and I reconciled myself to the fact that I would have to stay a little longer.
“I’d say it’s a lot different now,” I said, sitting down and hoping to start a sensible conversation with him. “Being gay in Ireland, I mean. When I was younger, it was near impossible. We had a terrible time of it, to be honest. It’s easier these days, I imagine.”
“It’s not, actually,” he said quickly. “The laws are still against us; you still can’t walk down the street holding a man’s hand without risking getting your head caved in. There’s a few more bars, I suppose, it’s not just the George anymore, and things aren’t quite as underground as they once were but no, I don’t think it’s any easier. Maybe it’s not so hard to meet people, though. You find a few things online sometimes. The odd chat room or dating page.”
“On what?” I asked.
“Online.”
“What does that mean? On what line?”
“The World Wide Web. Have you not heard of it?”
“A little bit,” I said.
“It’s the future,” he told me. “One day we’ll all be online.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know. Looking stuff up.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “Can’t wait.”
“My point is that it’s not much better than it used to be but maybe it’ll get there. We need some serious changes to the law but that’ll take time.”
“If only we knew somebody who worked in politics,” I said. “Someone who could make a stand and get the ball rolling.”
“I hope you’re not thinking of me. That’s a vote loser. I wouldn’t touch something like that with a barge pole. Anyway, kids these days are a lot more comfortable in their own skin. They ac
tually come out to people, which is a very nineties thing to do, if you ask me. Did you ever come out to your parents?”
“I never knew them,” I told him. “I was adopted.”
“Well, your adoptive parents then?”
“My adoptive mother died when I was just a child,” I said. “I never actually told my adoptive father that I was gay but, due to a set of circumstances which I won’t bore you with right now, he found out when I was twenty-eight. He never really cared, to be honest. He’s an odd fish in many ways but he doesn’t have a bigoted bone in his body. What about you?”
“My mother’s dead too,” he said. “And my father has Alzheimer’s, so there’s no point.”
“Right,” I said. “And what about your brothers and sisters? Have you told them?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think they’d understand.”
“Are they older or younger than you?”
“Older brother, younger sister.”
“But that generation, your generation, they don’t care so much about these things, do they? Why don’t you just tell them?”
He shrugged. “It’s complicated,” he said. “I’d rather not get into it.”
“All right.”
“Shall we have another drink?”
“Go on so.”
While he was at the bar, I watched him, unable to decide whether my being here was a good or bad idea. I found him slightly obnoxious but I also couldn’t deny the fact that I found him physically attractive and, as I started to realize, that spark inside me hadn’t quite died away yet, as much as I’d tried to extinguish the flame. The fact that he’d been interested enough to ask me out in the first place had been flattering me. He’d only been elected to the Dáil at the most recent election but there was a lot of talk about him being a potential future minister. He’d made some good speeches, impressed his party’s leadership and was a regular on the current affairs shows. At the next reshuffle, he was almost guaranteed a junior ministry at least. And that would be a first, I realized. A gay man rising through the ranks of Irish politics. De Valera would turn in his grave. And still, with all of that ahead of him, he’d asked me out.
“Why did you choose the Yellow House?” I asked, when he sat down again. “You live over on the Northside, don’t you?”
“I do,” he said.
“So why over here?”
“I thought it would be more convenient for you.”
“Sure I live on Pembroke Road,” I said. “We could have gone to the Waterloo or somewhere.”
“I don’t like drinking in my own constituency,” he said, changing his answer. “People come up to me all the time over there and ask me about potholes and electricity charges and will I come to their kids’ sports day at school to hand out the medals, and you know, I really couldn’t give a fuck about any of that stuff.”
“But isn’t that the job of a TD?”
“It’s part of it,” he admitted. “But not the part I’m interested in.”
“So what part are you interested in?”
“Climbing the ladder. Reaching the highest rung that I can.”
“And doing what?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean when you get to the top of the ladder, what’s it all for? You can’t just want to have power for its own sake, surely?”
“Why not? In the end, I want to be Taoiseach. And I’m pretty sure that I can go all the way. I have the brains. I have the ability. And the party’s behind me.”
“But why?” I asked. “What do you actually want to achieve in politics?”
He shook his head. “Look, Cyril,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. I want to do right by my constituents and by the country. I mean that would be, you know, great, I suppose. But can you think of any other profession where you would ask such a question? If I was starting off as a teacher in a school and I said I’d like to be principal one day, you’d say Good for you. If I was a postman and said I’d like to run An Post, you’d say that you admired my ambition. Why can’t it be the same with politics? Why can’t I just seek advancement and try to get to the top and then, when I’m there, if I can do something positive with it, then that’s great, and if I can’t, sure I’ll just enjoy being the top man.”
I thought about it. On one hand his argument sounded ridiculous but on the other, it was difficult to identify its flaws.
“You realize it’ll be difficult, though, don’t you?” I said. “Being gay, I mean. I don’t know whether Ireland is even ready for a gay minister yet, let alone a gay Taoiseach.”
“Like I said, I don’t put labels on myself. And of course there are ways around these things.”
I nodded, uncertain whether I really wanted to stay in his company much longer when a thought popped into my mind. It was like a light-bulb moment. “Can I ask you a question?” I said.
“Sure.”
“You don’t have a girlfriend, by any chance, do you?”
He sat back and seemed surprised by what I’d asked. “Of course I do,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I? I’m a good-looking man with a great job in the prime of my life.”
I shook my head. “You have a girlfriend,” I said, more of a statement than anything else. “So I presume she doesn’t care about your lack of labels either?”
“How do you mean?”
“Does she think you’re straight?”
“That’s kind of a personal question, don’t you think?”
“Well, you asked me out, Andrew. And we’re here on a date. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable of me to ask.”
He thought about it for a moment and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, she’s never asked any questions,” he said. “And sure what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” I said.
“What?”
“Next thing you’ll be telling me that you’re getting married.”
“We are getting married as it happens,” he said. “Next July. I think I can get Albert and Kathleen to come to the reception if I play my cards right.”
I started laughing. “You’re some chancer,” I said. “Why on earth are you marrying this poor girl if you’re gay?”
“I told you, I’m—”
“Not into labels, I know. But let’s use one just for a moment. Why are you marrying her if you’re gay?”
“Because I need a wife,” he said unapologetically. “My constituents expect that of me. The party expects that of me. There’s no way that I’m going anywhere unless I have a wife and children.”
“And what about her?” I asked, aware of the hypocrisy in my outrage but, in fairness, it had been twenty-one years since my own wedding day and I hadn’t deceived a single person about my sexuality since then.
“What about her? What do you mean?”
“You’re going to ruin some poor girl’s life because you don’t have the guts to tell the truth about yourself.”
“How will I be ruining her life?” he asked, looking genuinely baffled. “If I go all the way, we’ll be on state visits to Buckingham Palace and the White House and all sorts of places. Are you saying that’s a wasted life?”
“It is if the person you’re with doesn’t love you.”
“But I do love her. She’s a terrific person. And she loves me too.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” he said. “No one’s asking you to marry her.”
“True,” I said. “Look, to each their own. Do whatever makes you happy. Shall we finish these up anyway and get out of here?”
He smiled and nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “We can’t go back to mine, though. You live alone, though, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Why?”
“Will we go there?”
“Why would we go there?”
“Why do you think?”
I stared at him. “You’re not actually expecting us to spend the night together,
are you?” I asked.
“No, of course not,” he said. “Not the full night anyway. A couple of hours, that’s all.”
“No, thanks,” I said, shaking my head.
“Are you kidding me?” he asked, looking utterly confused now.
“No, not at all.”
“But why not?”
“Firstly, because we barely know each other—”
“Oh, like that’s a big deal.”
“No, maybe not. But you have a girlfriend. Sorry, you have a fiancée.”
“Who doesn’t need to know anything about this.”
“I don’t do that, Andrew,” I said. “Not anymore.”
“Do what?”
“I’m not interested in being part of a deception. I spent enough of my life lying to people and hiding away. I’m not going down that road again.”
“Cyril,” he said, smiling in such a way that made me know he believed his charm would always work. “Not to put too fine a point on it but you’re supposedly forty-nine years old, I’m only thirty-four and I’m offering it to you on a plate. Are you really telling me that you’re going to turn this opportunity down?”
“Afraid so,” I said. “Sorry.”
There was a long pause while he took this in and then he simply shook his head and laughed. “All right,” he said, standing up. “I’ll leave you to it so. What a complete waste of an evening. You blew it big time, my friend, that’s all I’m saying. And for what it’s worth, I have a massive cock.”
“I’m delighted for you.”
“You sure you don’t want to change your mind?”
“Believe me, I’m completely sure.”
“Your loss. But look”—he leaned over now and looked me directly in the eye—“if you ever tell anyone about this conversation, not only will I deny everything but I’ll sue you for libel.”
“A libel is written down,” I told him. “If I tell someone, then it would be a slander. Although it wouldn’t be anyway since it would be the truth.”
“Fuck you,” he said. “Don’t mess with me, all right? Remember, I know some pretty powerful people. That job of yours could be taken away from you without much difficulty.”
“Just go if you’re going,” I said wearily. “I have no intention of talking to anyone about this. The whole thing is just embarrassing. You don’t have to worry.”
