“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 actually 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.”