“Who?” asked Julian.
“The Man from the Revenue. What do you suppose he looks like?”
He frowned, uncertain what she meant. I thought about it too and despite my youth I felt sure that there were many men employed by the Department of Finance, and possibly even the occasional woman.
“Wouldn’t there be a group of them?” I asked. “Each of whom looks after different cases?”
“Oh no,” said Maude, shaking her head. “No, as far as I know there’s only one. Busy fellow, I imagine. Anyway, the point is your father is here to keep my husband out of jail, isn’t he? I’m not saying a spell inside wouldn’t do Charles the world of good but I’d be obliged to visit, for form’s sake if nothing else, and I don’t think I could do that. I imagine they’re rather unpleasant places, prisons. And I don’t think you can smoke in there.”
“I think you can,” I said. “Don’t prisoners use cigarettes as currency?”
“And to fend off potential attacks by homosexuals,” said Julian.
“Well, quite,” agreed Maude, who didn’t seem in the least shocked by Julian’s choice of words. “But I don’t think Charles need worry too much about that, do you? His best days are behind him.”
“Homosexuals in prison aren’t picky, Mrs. Avery,” said Julian. “They’ll take whatever they can get.”
“No, but they’re not blind either.”
“What’s a homosexual?” I asked.
“A man who’s afraid of women,” said Maude.
“Every man is afraid of women as far as I can see,” said Julian, displaying an understanding of the universe far beyond his years.
“That’s true,” she said. “But only because most men are not as smart as women and yet they continue to hold all the power. They fear a change of the world order.”
“Is Charles going to jail?” I asked, and even though I had no great affection for the man the idea made me uneasy.
“That’s up to Julian’s father,” said Maude. “On how good he is at his job.”
“I don’t know much about my father and your husband’s business,” said Julian. “He only brought me with him today because I set fire to a curtain last week and I’m not allowed to be in the house on my own anymore.”
“Why did you do that?”
“It was an accident.”
“Oh.” She seemed satisfied by this response and stood up now, pressing the cigarette out on my bedside table, leaving a scorch mark in the wood that would never disappear. Glancing around she seemed astonished by the very existence of the room and I wondered where she thought I’d been sleeping for the past seven years. “So this is where you hide away, Cyril, is it?” she asked dreamily. “I often wondered.” She turned and pointed at the bed. “And I suppose this is where you sleep.”
“It is,” I admitted.
“Unless it’s ornamental,” said Julian. “Like your mother’s chair.”
Maude smiled at both of us and made her way toward the door. “Do try to keep it down, boys, if you can. I intend to return to my writing now. I believe the train is reapproaching the station. I might get a few hundred words down if I’m lucky.”
And with that, to my great relief, she left us alone.
“What a peculiar lady,” remarked Julian, taking his shoes and socks off now and, for no explicable reason, jumping up and down on my bed. I looked at his feet and noticed how neatly trimmed his toenails were. “My mother’s nothing like yours.”
“She’s my adoptive mother,” I pointed out.
“Oh yes. Did you ever meet your real mother?”
“No.”
“Do you think your adoptive mother is secretly your real mother?”
“No,” I said. “What sense would that make?”
“How about your adoptive father then?”
“No,” I repeated. “Definitely not.”
He reached over and took Maude’s discarded cigarette from the table and drew noisily on the filter, pulling a face as he held it dangerously close to the curtain. Now that I knew he had form when it came to burning draperies, I watched him warily.
“Do you think your father is going to jail?” he asked me.
“My adoptive father,” I said. “And I don’t know. I suppose he might do. I don’t know much about what’s going on except that he’s in a spot of bother. That’s how he refers to it anyway.”
“I was in jail once,” said Julian casually, falling down on the bed now and stretching out as if he owned the place. His shirt had come loose from his trousers, revealing his navel and stomach, and I stared at them, rather fascinated by his pale skin.
“You were not,” I said.
“I was,” he said. “I swear.”
“When? What did you do?”
“Not as a prisoner, of course.”
“Oh,” I said, laughing. “I thought that’s what you meant.”
“No, that would be ridiculous. I went with my father. He was representing a man who murdered his wife and he brought me with him to the ’Joy.”
My eyes opened wide now in fascination. I had a peculiar obsession at that age with murder stories and a visit to the ’Joy, the colloquial term for Mountjoy Prison, was a common threat that teachers used to admonish us. Our every misdeed, from forgetting our homework to yawning in class, resulted in the promise that we were likely to end our days there at the end of a hangman’s noose, despite the fact that capital punishment wasn’t actually legal in Ireland anymore.
“What was it like?” I asked.
“It smelled of toilets,” he said, grinning, and I giggled in appreciation. “And I had to sit in the corner of a cell when they brought the man in and my father started asking him questions and making notes and saying that he needed to clarify a few things so he could explain them to the man’s barrister, and the man asked does it matter that my wife was a dirty slut who put it about with every Tom, Dick and Harry in Ballyfermot, and my father told him that they would be doing everything they could to impugn the victim’s character, as there was a good chance that a jury would forgive a man a murder if the victim was a whore.”
I gasped. I’d never heard such words spoken aloud before and they filled me with horror and excitement. I could have sat there all afternoon listening to Julian, so great an impression was he making on me, and would have asked manymore questions about his experience at the prison only at that moment the door opened again and a tall man with ludicrously bushy eyebrows poked his head inside.
“We’re going,” said the man, and Julian jumped up immediately. “Why are you not wearing your shoes or socks?”
“I was trampolining on Cyril’s bed.”
“Who’s Cyril?”
“I’m Cyril,” I said, and the man looked me up and down as if I was a piece of furniture he was considering acquiring.
“Oh, you’re the charity case,” he said, sounding uninterested. I didn’t have any answer to this and by the time I thought of something clever to say they had both left the room and were making their way downstairs.
A Great Love Affair