“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s like having a wonderful voice but only singing to an audience of deaf people.”
“I don’t think that’s the way she viewed art,” I said. “Popularity didn’t interest her. She had no desire for her novels to be read. She loved language, you see. She loved words. I think she only felt truly happy when she was staring at a paragraph for hours at a time and trying to refine it into a thing of beauty. She only published her books because she didn’t like the idea of all that hard work going to waste.”
“What a load of old nonsense,” he said, dismissing what I had said as if it was scarcely worth his consideration. “If I was a writer, I would want people to read my books. And if they didn’t, I would feel that I had failed.”
“I’m not sure that I would agree,” I said, surprised to find myself contradicting him but I wanted to defend Maude’s beliefs. “To be honest, I think there’s more to literature than that.”
“Have you read any of them?” he asked me. “Your mother’s novels, I mean?”
“My adoptive mother,” I said. “And, no, I haven’t. Not yet.”
“None of them?”
“No.”
He laughed and shook his head. “But that’s appalling. She was your mother, after all.”
“My adoptive mother.”
“Stop saying that. You should try Like to the Lark. It’s wonderful. Or The Codicil of Agnès Fontaine. There’s an extraordinary scene in that book where two girls bathe together in a lake and they’re totally naked and there’s so much sexual tension between them that I guarantee you won’t get to the end of the chapter without pulling Percy out for the old five-finger shuffle. I adore lesbians, don’t you? If I were a woman, I would absolutely be a lesbian. London is full of lesbians, or so I hear. And New York. When I’m older, I’m going to go over there, become friends with a few of them and ask can I watch them when they’re doing it. What do you suppose they do exactly? I’ve never been quite sure.”
I stared at him and felt myself growing a little unsteady on my feet. I had no answer to any of this and, truth be told, I wasn’t entirely sure that I knew what a lesbian was. As excited as I had been about Julian’s arrival at Belvedere, I began to think that perhaps we were operating on completely different levels of consciousness. The last book I had read was a Secret Seven.
“Do you miss her?” he asked me, closing his emptied suitcase now and pushing it under the bed next to his runners.
“What’s that?” I asked, my mind on other things.
“Your mother. Your adoptive mother. Do you miss her?”
“A little, I suppose,” I admitted. “We weren’t very close, to be honest. And she died only a few weeks before Charles got out of prison, which was almost five years ago now. I don’t think about her very much anymore.”
“And what about your real mother?”
“I don’t know anything about her,” I said. “Charles and Maude said they had no idea who she was. They got me from a little hunchbacked Redemptorist nun when I was only a few days old.”
“What killed her? Maude, I mean.”
“Cancer,” I said. “She’d had it a few years before in her ear canal. But then it started again in her throat and tongue. She smoked like a chimney. I almost never saw her without a cigarette in her hand.”
“Well, that might do it. Do you smoke, Cyril?”
“No.”
“I don’t like the idea of smoking. Have you ever kissed a girl who smoked?”
I opened my mouth to reply but language escaped me and to my horror I could feel the blood rushing toward my penis in response to such candid conversation. I let my hands drop before my crotch, hoping that Julian wouldn’t be as conscious of my excitement as he was of the priests who had beaten him in Blackrock.
“No,” I said.
“It’s awful,” he said, pulling a disgusted face. “You don’t get the taste of the girl at all, just that foul nicotine.” He paused for a moment and stared at me, half-amused. “You have kissed a girl, though, haven’t you?”
“Of course,” I said, laughing with the insouciance of one who’s been asked whether he has ever seen the ocean or traveled on an airplane. “Dozens of them.”
“Dozens?” he said, frowning. “Well, that’s a lot. I’ve only kissed three so far. But one of them let me put my hand down her brassiere to touch her breast. Dozens, you say! Really?”
“Well, maybe not dozens,” I said, looking away.
“You haven’t kissed anyone at all, have you?”
“I have,” I said.
“No, you haven’t. But that’s all right. We’re only fourteen, after all. It’s all in front of us. I intend to live a long and healthy life and fuck as many girls as I can. I’d like to die in my bed, aged one hundred and five, with a twenty-two-year-old bouncing up and down on top of me. And what are the chances of kissing anyone in here anyway? It’s all boys. I’d rather kiss my granny and she’s been dead for nine years. But look, do you want to help me unload my books? They’re in that box over there. Can I mix them in with yours or would you rather I put them on a separate shelf?”
“Let’s mix them in together,” I said.
“All right.” He stood back and looked me up and down again and I wondered whether perhaps another button had come undone. “Do you know, I think I do remember you now,” he said. “Didn’t you ask me whether you could see my thing?”
“No!” I said, appalled by the accusation, which, after all, was entirely false considering it was him who had asked to see mine. “No, I didn’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure,” I said. “Why would I want to see your thing? I have one of my own, after all. I can see it whenever I want.”
“Well, there was definitely a boy who asked me around that time. I’m sure it was you. I remember the room and it’s Alice’s room now.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” I insisted. “I have absolutely no interest in your thing and never have had.”
“If you say so. It’s a very nice thing anyway. I can’t wait to start using it in the way that God intended, can you? You’ve gone quite red, Cyril,” he added. “Not frightened of girls, are you?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all. If anything, they should be frightened of me. Because I want to, you know…have lots of sex with them. And stuff.”
“Good. Because I suppose we’ll have to be friends, you and I, since we’re sharing a room. We could go on the hunt together sometimes. You’re not a bad-looking fellow, after all. There might be a few girls who could be persuaded to let you do it with them. And of course, they’re all crazy about me.”
The TD from Dublin Central