“No!” he cried. “That’s terrible! Wait, I remember now. He got attacked, didn’t he? By a gang of some sort. They beat him up and left him for dead.”
I sat up straight and closed my eyes, wondering how much more of this I would have to endure. “No,” I said. “That wasn’t Julian. That was Bastiaan.”
“Max told me that he was dead before he even got to the hospital.”
“Max didn’t tell you that,” I said. “I did. And anyway, that wasn’t Julian,” I repeated. “That was Bastiaan.”
“Who’s Bastiaan?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, shaking my head, even though it did matter. It mattered a great deal. “Look, Charles, I’m getting a little worried about you. Have you seen a doctor?”
“Not lately, no. Why do you ask?”
“You seem a little…confused, that’s all.”
“I’m not dementia, if that’s what you mean,” he said.
“You don’t have dementia,” I said. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“I’m not dementia,” he insisted, wagging a finger in my face.
“All right,” I said. “You’re not dementia. But look, I don’t think it would do any harm for a doctor to take a look at you.”
“Only if I can go to him,” he said. “Or her. I hear there are some wonderful lady doctors these days. Whatever’s next?” he added, laughing. “They’ll be driving buses and allowed to vote if someone doesn’t do something to stop them!”
“The prison isn’t going to allow you out on day release to see a doctor,” I said. “They’ll insist that one comes here instead. Unless you need tests. And you might, you know. You might need tests.”
“Well, you do whatever you think is best,” he said. “The only thing that’s really important to me is that when I get out of here, I can go home.”
“Where are you living now anyway?” I asked, for the truth was that I didn’t have any idea. Ever since his most recent divorce—his third, if my calculations were accurate, following his fifth marriage—he’d lived a rather nomadic existence.
“Where do you think?” he asked. “Dartmouth Square. The same place I’ve always lived. I love that house. They’ll carry me out of there in a box.”
“They probably won’t,” I told him. “Since you don’t live there anymore. It’s been decades since you sold it.”
“Just because I don’t live there,” he said, “doesn’t mean that I can’t die there. Use your imagination, why don’t you? What kind of writer are you anyway?”
“One who doesn’t write,” I told him.
“I refuse to die in prison like Oscar Wilde or Lester Piggott.”
“Neither of whom died in prison.”
“They would have if the fascists had had their way.”
“Look, leave it with me, all right?” I said. “I’ll figure it out. We’ve got six months after all.”
“Unless I get out early for good behavior.”
“Do me a favor, Charles,” I said. “Try not to be too good, all right? Serve out your time. It’ll make things a lot easier for me if you do.”
“All right,” he said. “I don’t mind. I’ll kick up a fuss over breakfast one day and that’ll keep me here till the bitter end.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate that.”
“No problem. Now, where shall we go today?”
“You’ll probably stay here,” I said. “Don’t you have art classes on a Tuesday afternoon?”
“I stopped doing them,” he said, pulling a disgusted face. “We were doing life drawing and this three-hundred-pound, morbidly obese passport forger with tattoos all over his body was posing in the nip for us. He even had the word Mother tattooed on his penis, which Freud would have had a field day with. It made me want to tear the eyes from my head. You’d probably have loved it, though. Or Max’s son, Julian. He would have been all over that.”
“Well, go back to your cell then,” I said. “And maybe have a nap. You might feel better when you wake up.”
“I will. I didn’t sleep at all well last night. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I thought I might go to see a film. I was supposed to be meeting Liam but he canceled on me. Again.”
“Who’s Liam?”
“My son.”
“I thought your son’s name was Inky or something?”
“You’re thinking of Ignac. He’s a different son.”
“Gosh, you really love the ladies, don’t you?” he asked, grinning in delight. “A real chip off the old block! How many children do you have by how many different women now?”
I smiled and stood up, reaching out to shake his hand. He took it, but his grip was nowhere near as firm as it had once been.
“I’m not dementia,” he told me again, quieter this time, and there was a pleading expression on his face as he said it. “I just get a little confused sometimes, that’s all. It’s old age. It comes to us all. It’ll come to you too, you mark my words.”
I said nothing, just walked away thinking how wrong he really was. Old age hadn’t come for Maude. Or for Julian. Or for Bastiaan. Or for the hundreds of young men and women I’d counseled in New York at the height of the plague years. Old age didn’t necessarily come for everyone at all. And I still didn’t know whether it would come for me.
Two Bars
The television was broken in my apartment, so I made my way along Baggot Street toward Doheny & Nesbitt’s to watch the match. There was great excitement over it, of course; once again the country was losing its collective mind and the same English players that were vilified on a Saturday afternoon when they played for Arsenal or Liverpool were now being worshipped because they found themselves in an Ireland jersey, thanks to their grandparents having got out of the country fifty years before.
The bar was as busy as I had expected it to be but after I ordered a pint I discovered a table in the corner with a good view of the screen. I leaned my crutch against the wall and, with a bit of time to kill until kick-off, took Ignac’s latest Floriak Ansen novel from my pocket and picked up where I’d left off the night before. In this one, our time-traveling hero had gone back to the Ice Age and was causing mayhem among the Eskimos, who were teaching him how to drill holes in the ice to catch fish, which was no good to him at all, as he was a strict vegetarian. I was only a few pages in when the volume went up and every head in the place turned to the massive screen hanging from the ceiling. The teams were coming out onto the pitch. As the anthems played, you could see the players squinting in the sunshine of Giants Stadium and the commentator made a few remarks about the heat and how it would surely be more advantageous to the Italians than it was to the Irish, who were not accustomed to such luxuries.
Glancing over toward the bar, I noticed a couple of young lads paying for their pints and turning around in search of somewhere to park themselves for the next couple of hours. As they looked in my direction, I caught the eye of one, and he caught mine in return, and I had no choice but to point out the empty seats at my table. He glanced at his friend for a moment before whispering something in his ear and a moment later they came over and sat down.