“Just let go,” I whispered back.
“Alice…” he said as his body relaxed into my embrace, and I held him for what felt like a very long time, even though it was probably no more than a couple of minutes, as his breathing began to slow down and eventually fade away. I held him until Bastiaan came in and checked the monitor and told me that it was over, that Julian was gone, and I continued to hold him for a few more minutes until it was time to stand up and let the nurses do their job. And then we took the elevator down to the ground floor, left the hospital and Bastiaan raised a hand to hail a cab, and in that moment I made the biggest mistake of my life.
“No,” I said. “The rain has stopped. Let’s walk. I need some fresh air.”
And so we started to walk home.
Central Park
We walked in silence across the avenues and into Central Park.
“I forgot his address book,” I said, stopping in the middle of one of the tree-lined pathways. “I left it in his bedside locker.”
“Do you need it?” asked Bastiaan.
“I promised I’d phone Alice. His sister. I have to tell her.”
“You can get it tomorrow. His personal items will be collected.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, I have to tell her tonight. We have to go back.”
“It’s late,” said Bastiaan. “And you’re upset. Wait until tomorrow.”
I started to shake with the cold and before I knew it I was weeping uncontrollable tears.
“Hey,” said Bastiaan, pulling me to him and wrapping his arms around me. “Don’t cry. I’m here for you. I’ll always be here for you. I love you.”
And then a voice called out: “Hey, faggots!”
And I turned around to see three men running toward us.
But I don’t remember anything else after that.
PART III
PEACE
1994 Fathers and Sons
One of Them
During the early 1950s, when my adoptive father Charles had first spent time as a guest of the Irish government in Mountjoy Prison, I had never been allowed to visit. Of course, I was just a child at the time and Maude had no interest in the three of us undertaking any embarrassing or cathartic reunion behind bars, but the idea of entering a prison had intrigued me ever since a seven-year-old Julian had revealed to me how Max had permitted him to sit in with him while he conferred with a client who’d murdered his wife. To the best of my knowledge, Maude never visited either, despite weekly visiting orders coming her way. Rather than discarding them, she made a point of keeping each one, creating a neat pile on the telephone stand by the front door of our small apartment, and when I once asked her whether she was ever going to use one of those precious tickets for their intended purpose, she responded by slowly removing the cigarette from her mouth and extinguishing it in the center of the pile.
“Does that answer your question?” she asked, turning to me with a half-smile.
“Well, perhaps I could visit,” I suggested, and she frowned as she opened her cigarette case to remove her sixty-fourth smoke of the day.
“What a strange thing to say,” she replied. “Why on earth would you want to do something so perverse?”
“Because Charles is my father. And he might welcome the company.”
“Charles is not your father,” she insisted. “He’s your adoptive father. We’ve told you that time and again. You mustn’t get ideas, Cyril.”
“Still, a friendly face—”
“I don’t think you do have a friendly face, though. To be honest, I’ve always thought you have a rather sour countenance. It’s something you might want to work on.”
“Someone he knows then.”
“I’m sure he’s getting to know plenty of people,” she said, lighting up. “From what I understand, there’s a great sense of community in prisons. A man like Charles will probably do very well for himself in there. He’s never had any difficulty ingratiating himself with strangers in the past. No, it’s out of the question, I’m afraid. I simply couldn’t allow it.”
And so I had never gone. But this time, during Charles’s second experience behind bars, I was a grown man, almost fifty years of age, and needed no one’s permission. So when the visiting order arrived, I felt quite excited by the prospect of seeing how the criminal classes were treated.
It was a fine Dublin morning and, although I was no longer able to undertake very long walks because of my leg, I decided that a few kilometers would be all right and took my crutch from where it hung next to the front door before making my way down Pearse Street to cross the Liffey over O’Connell Street Bridge, remaining on the left-hand side of the street as I always did in order to avoid the area near Clerys department store where I had once inadvertently caused the deaths of both Mary-Margaret Muffet and a hard-working, if homophobic, member of An Garda Síochána. Nelson’s Pillar was long gone, of course. After the IRA had toppled the admiral from his pedestal, the remaining structure had been taken down in a controlled explosion that had been so ineptly planned that it had blown out half the windows of the shops on O’Connell Street, causing thousands of pounds’ worth of damage. But the memories remained and I didn’t care to relive them.
At the top of the street, I passed the Irish Writers’ Center, where only a few weeks earlier I had attended the launch party for Ignac’s fourth children’s book, the latest in his hugely popular series about a time-traveling Slovenian boy that had captured the imagination of children (and many adults) around the world. All the Dublin writers were there, of course, and when word got around the room as to the identity of my adoptive mother, several came over to introduce themselves, asking questions about her novels that I had no way of answering. A publisher inquired as to whether I might like to write the foreword to an anniversary edition of Like to the Lark, but I declined, even when he told me there was two hundred pounds in it for me if I did a good job. A journalist whom I had seen several times on The Late Late Show informed me that Maude was Ireland’s most overrated writer, that women could never be trusted with the novel form, and proceeded to spend ten minutes explaining why until Rebecca, Ignac’s wife, came over and rescued me, for which I was eternally grateful.