Beneath the Earth

by John Boyne

  He turned back to me with a shrug, as if to say that it was no easy thing being as brilliant as him.

  ‘Did you read my novel?’ he asked me.

  ‘I did,’ I said.

  ‘And what did you think of it?’

  ‘I thought the reviews were a little cruel, to be honest. I didn’t think it was as bad as they made out.’

  His face darkened a little and he took a long drink from his pint. ‘I never read reviews,’ he said.

  ‘Then why do all the good ones show up on your Facebook page?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ he said. ‘Someone is probably hacking my account.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.

  ‘Does what hurt? Being hacked? I imagine my phone is being hacked, you know. Bloody tabloids. They hate all of us’ – he made inverted comma symbols in the air – ‘“celebrities”.’

  ‘Bad reviews,’ I said. ‘Do you find them depressing?’

  ‘It’s better than getting no reviews, I suppose.’

  I felt a stab of pain in my chest; that was unkind of him.

  ‘Most reviews are written out of professional jealousy,’ he continued, apparently oblivious to my discomfort. ‘The so-called journalists who write them know that I’m the best thing in this town and they hate me for it. The only reviews I read are the ones published in the French papers. They value literature in France. Not like here. But look, darling Mulligan, it is good to see you again after all these years. We’ve gotten older, haven’t we? You’ve changed so much. I don’t think I would have known you if you’d walked past me on the street. You used to have such a boyish complexion.’

  ‘When I was a boy, I suppose,’ I agreed. ‘And I’m glad you’ve decided to accept what happened with your hair. The shaved look suits you. I’d shave this mop off if I could. It takes so much upkeep.’

  ‘But it helps to cover up the wrinkles on your forehead,’ he said. ‘And your acne cleared up too, I see. God, you were just plagued by that as a teenager, weren’t you? Remember how you could never get a girlfriend?’

  I nodded – this was a painful memory – and glanced at my watch.

  ‘Do you have someplace to be?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I was just checking the time.’

  ‘What time is it? I never wear a watch. I can’t bear to feel trapped by an artificial conceit.’

  ‘I’m not sure time is an artificial conceit,’ I said. ‘The sun goes round the earth, the day grows steadily brighter, then darker. It’s not complicated. And it’s almost nine o’clock.’

  ‘The sun doesn’t go round the earth, darling,’ he said. ‘Strike that, reverse it, as Mr Wonka said. But I’m sure you just misspoke. Anyway, look, I haven’t said how sorry I was to hear of your mother’s death.’ He reached across and took both my hands in his. For a moment I thought he was going to kiss them. ‘I’m so very, very sorry,’ he said, looking me directly in the eyes.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Natural causes, was it?’

  ‘Yes, thankfully. She died in her sleep.’

  ‘Not murdered then?’

  I stared at him, uncertain that I had heard him correctly.

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Why on earth would she have been murdered?’

  ‘No reason. But there are so many disturbed individuals abroad these days. I’m always nervous of some Catcher in the Rye-wielding maniac approaching me in a dark alley late at night and wanting to connect his narrative to mine in some homicidal way. I have no desire to be a martyr to art. When I think of what happened to John …’ He shook his head, pained to the core.

  ‘John who?’

  ‘John Lennon.’

  ‘You call him John?’ I asked. ‘Were you friends? Weren’t you nine when he died?’

  ‘There’s a connection, you know? It’s hard to explain to someone who isn’t an artist. Any more.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Trust me,’ he replied. ‘You’re better off out of it.’

  ‘Am I? That’s good to know.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m sure it won’t come to that. The chances of me being murdered are slim.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Really?’ He looked up, apparently pleased by the idea.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘The evening my mother died, we opened her will.’

  ‘Was there a codicil?’ he asked. ‘I’ve always loved the word codicil. Someday I plan to write a novel called The Codicil of Agnès Fontaine. I have no idea what it will be about but it’s a magnificent title, don’t you think? Promise me you won’t breathe a word of it to anyone.’

  ‘I promise,’ I said. ‘I’ve already forgotten it.’

  ‘Thank you, darling. So am I to assume that your mother left me something?’

  ‘No. Why would she do that?’

  ‘It seemed like a natural deduction from the way the conversation was going, that’s all. And you must remember, your mother and I were very close when I was a child. I stayed in touch with her all those years while you were off inter-railing around Europe or whatever it is that you were doing. In many ways, she was more of a mother to me than my father ever was.’

  This was not as bizarre a statement as it might sound. Arthur’s mother died when he was a baby and in her absence his father had been left to play both parental roles. A hugely accomplished transvestite, very popular within both the club scene and the more progressive elements of the media, Arthur’s father switched between genders every seven days, being a father to his son one week and a mother to him the next. He was a strong believer that a child needed both parents. And he was a magnificent father, as far I recall, taking him to soccer matches and letting him stay up late on school nights, but really an atrocious mother. She suffocated him.

  ‘That’s nice of you to say, Arthur,’ I said. ‘I know she was very fond of you.’

  ‘Don’t you hate the way fond as a synonym for foolish has become arcane?’ he asked me.

  ‘I didn’t know that it ever was.’

  ‘Oh yes. You find it throughout Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. Ben, Kit, Will, John – they all used it. Anyway, I’m not surprised. I suppose I was like the son she never had.’

  ‘Well, she had me.’

  ‘I visited her book club once, did she tell you that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Such elegant ladies. Powdered and perfumed. All of a certain age, of course, but still bristling with sexuality. I had offers, you know.’

  ‘I’d rather not hear about them, thanks.’

  A roar went up from the football table and then there was much placing of heads in hands while one sole traitor to their cause – wearing different colours to his comrades, I noticed – stood up and pointed at the screen, shouting ‘Get in!’ over and over at the top of his voice.

  ‘In her will, she asked that you say a few words over her grave. Nothing too … elaborate, mind you. Or lengthy.’

  ‘Did she specify that?’

  ‘No, that was me. But I think it’s what she meant.’

  ‘I would be honoured,’ he said, bowing his head slowly. ‘When does the dreadful event take place?’

  ‘Tuesday morning.’

  He finished off the rest of his drink and nodded. ‘Email me the details and I’ll be there. Until then, mon semblable, mon frère, I bid you adieu.’ And with that, he was gone, sweeping through the door, his black cloak flaring out behind him like Dracula off on a night-hunt.

  ‘Tosser,’ I muttered under my breath.

  Naturally, my sister was appalled at the idea of Arthur even attending the funeral, let alone speaking at it. ‘I heard him on the radio a couple of weeks ago,’ she told me, ‘saying how he’d spent years trying not to write because he knew how painful it would be. And I don’t think he meant for readers. I’d never heard such nonsense.’

  ‘Have you read his novel?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘And what did you think?’

 
; ‘Oh, it’s terrible,’ she said. ‘Absolutely ghastly. So wildly overwritten that it’s almost a parody of itself. It never simply rains; the clouds dissolve in the glaucous firmament, weeping their lachrymosity upon the heads of the aberrant populace. No one is ever happy, instead they feel a warmth building inside their coccyx and rising through their alimentary canal as a sensation of well-being extends its octopus-like tentacles through the capillaries producing a sensation close to orgasm.’

  ‘Thank you, Audrey,’ I said. ‘I’d rather not hear you use that word.’

  ‘Does the idea of my having orgasms frighten you, Pierce?’

  ‘It does if I’m in the room. Now can we move on, please? There’s nothing to be done. I’ve asked Arthur, and more importantly Mother asked Arthur, so we should do what she wanted.’

  ‘Can we give him a time limit at least?’

  ‘I’ve told him to keep it short.’ I took a sip from my coffee and recalled something, a bad memory rising from the mausoleum. ‘Didn’t you take Arthur to your Debs?’ I asked after a moment. ‘This person you so despise. Didn’t you go out with each other for a while?’

  ‘We did not go out with each other,’ she said, turning on me. ‘We did nothing of the sort. Yes, I invited him to my Debs but only because Steven Slipton broke his leg the previous week and couldn’t come.’

  ‘Slipton,’ I said, recalling a tall, rather handsome young man who looked a little like Richard Harris in his prime. ‘I always thought that was a funny name.’

  ‘Ironically, he broke his leg after he—’

  ‘Slipped somewhere, yes. I guessed. Still, you asked Arthur. Of the other two million or so penis-enabled humans in Ireland, you went after him.’

  ‘I’m not proud of it,’ she admitted, sitting down and offering the closest thing to a smile I had seen since she’d discovered Mother dead in her bed, a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey clutched in her stiffening hands. She would never discover how it turned out now.

  ‘You loved him,’ I said. ‘You loved Arthur. You wanted to undress him and do dirty things with his naked body.’

  ‘Actually, I did,’ she said. ‘After the Debs. Out the back of the Burlington car park.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ I said, putting my cup down. ‘I was kidding. You don’t mean that you actually had sex with him?’

  ‘Of course I had sex with him,’ she said. ‘It was my Debs. It would have been rude not to. And you can say whatever you like, you and he were inseparable when you were children.’

  ‘That was a long time ago. Before he became an insufferable ass.’

  ‘He told me that you used to compare penis sizes.’

  ‘What is his obsession with that? That never happened.’

  ‘He told me he won too.’

  I rolled my eyes.

  ‘Which,’ she added, ‘speaking from first-hand experience does not say very much about you.’

  ‘I’ll have you know that there’s a certain milkmaid in Tittmoning who could contest that opinion. She’s told me many times that I have nothing to worry about, that I’m perfectly average.’

  ‘Well lucky her. And if you don’t want to hear about my orgasms, I don’t want to hear about your perfectly average penis.’

  ‘You brought it up,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Did I? You pervert, Pierce. I’m your sister.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant and you know it.’

  ‘Nothing can happen between us, you realize that, don’t you? We’d have three-headed children.’

  ‘Oh shut up.’

  She sniggered and looked out the window where her dog, Frisky, was living up to his name by attempting to mate with a bougainvillea. Perhaps aware that he was being watched, he stopped his rutting momentarily, hung his head in a this-is-what-I’m-reduced-to-since-you-won’t-get-me-a-bitch-of-my-own way, and got back to it. He looked like he was having fun, at least.

  ‘If he says anything inappropriate or just keeps banging on with no end in sight, then I’ll tell him to stop,’ said Audrey.

  ‘Is that what you did on your Debs night?’

  ‘I’m serious, Pierce. Why did Mother want him to talk anyway? What on earth was going through her mind?’

  I shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘She could be rather sentimental at times.’

  ‘Not in her choice of reading material, she couldn’t. Maybe she liked the idea of a celebrity appearing as she was lowered down.’

  ‘A celebrity?’ I laughed, outraged by such liberties being taken with the English language. ‘You’re kidding, right? Arthur’s not a celebrity. He’s just a writer. And he’s only got one book to his name so far.’

  ‘Well, that’s how he likes to think of himself, isn’t it? And perhaps Mother felt the same way. He has received a lot of attention for his work, you know.’

  ‘Stalin received a lot of attention for his work too. It didn’t make it any good.’

  Leaving the kitchen, I wandered upstairs into Mother’s room, where the windows had been flung open to release the smell of stale, dead woman. Someone had covered a mirror with a black negligee. I hadn’t been in this room very much since I was a teenager and it still felt a little out of bounds to me, but as I looked around at the picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall, the plastic holy water vessel shaped like Jesus on the cross and the collection of erotic fiction on the bookshelves, I felt like I was being transported back to childhood, when Arthur and I would rummage around in here looking for Christmas presents. We’d do the same thing in his house, taking out his father’s dresses and prancing around in front of the mirror like a couple of cheerful young benders until he caught us and chased us out.

  And here on the dresser was a photograph of Mother with Father, both staring straight at the camera with no smiles on their faces, like a couple from a nineteenth-century portrait, all gloomy-eyed and horror-struck. And here a photo of Mother with Audrey and me. And here, to my surprise, one of her and Arthur at Butlin’s. When on earth had they gone to Butlin’s together? She’d never taken me to Butlin’s.

  At the graveyard, before starting his eulogy, Arthur requested that all cell phones be turned to silent or switched off and under no circumstances should photographs be taken. Also, he insisted that whatever he said in the next ten minutes – my heart sank at those words – should be forgotten by everyone after the burial and not reproduced by any means, including but not specifically limited to print or digital formats.

  He was incorrect with his timings. In the end, he spoke for almost twenty minutes, by which time I imagine even my mother, decomposing in her ligneous sarcophagus (as Arthur himself might say), was probably growing restless. The priest, a pasty-faced fellow supporting himself on a crutch, was becoming visibly unstable, while several grieving friends and relatives were checking their watches, hoping that this would come to an end soon and we would be allowed to go to the pub.

  Convinced by some veiled threats that Arthur made later in the day concerning lawsuits against those who infringed the copyright on his eulogy, I will refrain from reproducing his words, other than to say that they were what you might expect from a preening narcissist. There were an extraordinary number of mentions of how close he and my mother had once been, how he had come to see her in the nursing home before she died, where they had talked of Flaubert – fact: my mother was never in a nursing home and certainly never read a book in translation in her life, unless you count Fifty Shades of Grey, which was certainly not originally written in English – and how his life seemed a little more hollow, empty and vacant now without her presence. Correct me if I’m wrong but all three of those words essentially mean the same thing – is it a tautology? – so his literary skills may not be quite as good as he believes. He also managed to recount a joke that he had shared with Haruki Murakami at a festival in Shanghai the previous summer before shaking his head and saying ‘Oh, Haruki!’ with quiet delight. The joke was, of course, in Japanese and I glanced at Xi-Go Luan, who ran a debating society that my mother had been in
volved in for many years, and was rewarded with the expected look of bewilderment on her face.

  Finally it ended, my mother was lowered down and Arthur shook my hand before pressing his cheeks against Audrey’s, saying, ‘Sweet girl, you can stop running now,’ before moving on to greet each of the mourners individually.

  ‘He’s not coming to the pub, is he?’ asked Audrey as we got back into the car.

  ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘He knows which one it is anyway. And he asked me something about paparazzi earlier, so I expect that means he’ll be showing up.’

  ‘Christ on a bike,’ she replied, shaking her head and looking out the window. ‘What did you think anyway? Did it go all right? Would she be happy with us?’

  ‘I think we did her proud,’ I said.

  ‘What does the word fluguent mean?’ asked Audrey, frowning a little.

  ‘Fluguent?’

  ‘Arthur used it in his monologue. Fluguent. What does it mean?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘And periphical?’

  ‘Sorry, no clue.’

  ‘What about cordentious?’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I think that means wanker.’

  ‘I’ve never heard any of those words before,’ she said. ‘Why does he use them, do you think? Why can’t he just talk like a normal human being?’

  ‘The answer’s really in the question there, don’t you think?’

  ‘But what’s wrong with him? I don’t remember him being such a moron when he was younger.’

  ‘Back when you were dating, you mean?’

  ‘Really, Pierce? On the day of our mother’s funeral?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘He was always a little odd, I suppose. But this dose of celebrity—’

  ‘He’s not a celebrity,’ I insisted. ‘He’s a writer. And not even a very good one.’

  ‘I thought you said you hadn’t read his book.’

  ‘I skimmed through it.’

  ‘This dose of celebrity,’ she continued, ‘seems to have turned him into a complete fool. How can anyone take him seriously when he carries on as he does?’

  ‘Strangely enough, people seem to,’ I said. ‘His publishers must, after all. And his literary agent. He’s spoken on the radio quite a few times. What do you expect? The world is full of idiots.’