“Stop it, Julian,” said Bridget. “You’re embarrassing Mary-Margaret.”
“I’m not embarrassed,” she insisted, her face turning puce now. “I’m repulsed. There’s a difference.”
“No more talk of things so,” said Julian, taking a long drink from his pint. “Although it might interest you to know that many years ago, when Cyril here and I were only children, he asked whether he could see my thing.”
“I did not!” I cried, horrified. “He asked me!”
“There’s no shame in it, Cyril,” he said, smiling. “It was just youthful high jinks, that’s all. It’s not like you’re a queer or anything.”
“I did not ask to see his thing,” I repeated, and Bridget spat a little of her Snowball on the table as she started laughing.
“If this is the sort of conversation we’re going to have—” said Mary-Margaret.
“I didn’t!” I insisted.
“In fairness, I have a very nice thing,” said Julian. “Cyril will tell you.”
“How would I know?” I said, blushing furiously.
“Because we share a room,” he replied. “Don’t pretend you haven’t looked. I’ve looked at yours. You have quite a nice one yourself. Although it’s not as big as mine. But it’s bigger than Peter Trefontaine’s even when you don’t have a stiffie, which, let’s face it, isn’t very often. You’d be the first to admit that, wouldn’t you, Cyril?”
“Oh my stars,” said Mary-Margaret, looking as if she was about to faint. “Bridget, I want to go home.”
“Actually, Mary-Margaret, you’re the only one around this table who hasn’t seen my thing,” said Julian. “Which I suppose makes you the odd one out.”
There was silence as we all took in what he had said. I felt my stomach slowly dip and realized that for all of our escapes from Belvedere College together, sometimes Julian escaped alone, or—worse by far—escaped with someone who was his sexual peer and with whom he could go in search of girls. The notion that he had a life outside our life, outside our friendship, was deeply hurtful to me. And the realization, as it slowly dawned, that Bridget had seen his thing, whether this meant she had simply touched it or looked at it or given him a blowie or gone all the way with him was almost too much for me to bear. For the first time since I was a child, I felt like a child.
“You’ve an awful mouth on you,” said Bridget, half-embarrassed, half-aroused by his words.
“Well, you have a great one on you,” he replied, leaning forward and smiling, and before any of us knew what was happening they were kissing. I glanced down at my drink, trembling a little before lifting it to my lips and finishing it off in one go, then stared around the room as if nothing at all was happening.
“Isn’t the ceiling work very intricate?” I asked, looking up so I didn’t have to watch the pair of them pawing away at each other.
“My mother is in the Legion of Mary,” declared Mary-Margaret. “I don’t know what she’d say to this kind of carry-on.”
“Relax,” said Julian, as they separated and he sat back with a contented look on his face. A look that said I’m young, I’m good-looking, I like girls and they like me; there is no end to the amount of fun I’m going to have once I leave the shackles of a secondary education behind me.
“Do you like the tearoom, Bridget?” I asked, desperate to change the subject.
“What?” she said, looking at me in bewilderment. She seemed unsettled by the passionate kiss and had a look on her face that suggested she wanted nothing more than for me and Mary-Margaret to leave her and Julian alone so they could go wherever they had gone in the past to do whatever they had done. “What tearoom?”
“The tearoom you work in,” I said. “What other tearoom would I be talking about? The tearoom in Dáil éireann.”
“Oh right,” she said. “Sure we’re splitting our sides all day, Cyril, with laughter. Ah no, I’m only teasing you, it’s all right. The TDs are a smarmy bunch and most of them can’t resist slapping your arse when you walk past them but they tip well because they know that if they don’t, Mrs. Goggin will sit them at a rotten table the next day and they’ll never get to ingratiate themselves with a minister.”
“Was she the one who had the go at us in the Dáil that day?” asked Julian.
“It was, yeah.”
“Christ, she was some piece of material.”
“Ah no,” said Bridget, shaking her head. “Mrs. Goggin is one of the good ones. She demands a lot from her staff but works harder than any of us at the same time. And she never asks anyone to do anything that she won’t do herself. She has no airs and graces, unlike some in that building. No, I won’t hear a word said against her.”
“Fair enough,” said Julian, chastised. “To Mrs. Goggin,” he said, raising his pint.
“To Mrs. Goggin,” said Bridget, raising hers too, and what choice did Mary-Margaret and I have but to join in.
“Do you have a Mrs. Goggin in the Bank of Ireland?” asked Julian.
“No, we have a Mr. Fellowes.”
“And do you like him?”
“It’s not my place to have an opinion on my superiors.”
“Is she always this cheerful?” asked Julian of Bridget.
“The smell of piss is getting worse in here,” she said in reply. “Should we sit somewhere else, do you think?”
We looked around but the Palace had grown busy with the work crowd and we were lucky to have a seat at all.
“There’s nowhere else,” said Julian, yawning a little as he made way into his next pint. “Christ, we’re lucky enough to have kept this table for so long. The regulars would have every right to tip us off it.”
“Do you mind?” said Mary-Margaret.
“Do I mind what?”
“Not taking the name of the Lord our God in vain.”
“I don’t mind in the slightest. Why, did he drop in to your desk on the foreign exchange at the Bank of Ireland, College Green, after his lunch to tell you that he doesn’t like it?”
“Have you not read the Ten Commandments?” she asked.
“No, but I’ve seen the film.”
“Bridget, this is beyond the beyonds. Are we to sit here all evening and listen to this gibberish?”
“For what it’s worth,” I said, feeling the room begin to spin a little, “the capital of Papua New Guinea is Port Moresby.”
“What?” said Mary-Margaret, looking at me as if I was an imbecile before turning to Julian. “Is this fella soft in the head or what?” she asked.
“Do you suppose Yul Brynner has a baldie head or does he shave it for the films?” he said in reply.
“Bridget!”
“He’s only having a laugh, Mary-Margaret,” said Bridget. “Don’t mind him.”
“I don’t like jokes about Yul Brynner,” said Mary-Margaret. “Not when he gave such an impassioned performance as the Pharaoh Ramses. I’d prefer that we show him a little more respect, if you don’t mind.”
“Is he a friend of yours then?” asked Julian. “You have friends in high places all the same. God, Yul Brynner, Mr. Fellowes.”
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” said Mary-Margaret, which didn’t seem to me to have any bearing on what we’d just been talking about.
“But I’m the Lord,” said Julian.