“Have a good wedding,” I told him.
“Very kind of you! And I hope they find your friend. I feel for Max, really I do. If I’d had a son and the IRA had kidnapped him, I’d be desperately upset. Goodbye for now, Cyril.”
“Goodbye, Charles.”
And with that I turned right and made my way across the road and over O’Connell Street Bridge, back in the direction of Belvedere College, where, I felt certain, further punishment would await me.
Ordinary Decent Sins
Having issued instructions as to where the ￡100,000 was to be left, the kidnappers signaled their disappointment at not receiving it by sending the little toe from Julian’s left foot to the house on Dartmouth Square the following Tuesday. In an unnecessarily cruel gesture, they addressed the package to his younger sister Alice, who, upon opening the blood-soaked wrapping paper, probably ran screaming from the house with the same degree of hysteria as she had during that unexplained incident seven years earlier.
We want our money,
or next time it’ll be something worse.
Best regards.
In response, Max issued a statement to the effect that he couldn’t raise the amount required in such a short space of time, an assertion that was flatly contradicted by the Dublin Evening Mail, who claimed that he had liquid assets worth more than half a million pounds that could be withdrawn from the bank with only twenty-four hours’ notice. Elizabeth Woodbead, Julian’s mother and my adoptive father’s erstwhile lover, appeared on the television news with tears rolling down her face, begging for her son’s release. She wore a chunky locket around her neck and some of the boys in my class speculated that it contained Julian’s detached toe, a possibility that seemed too disgusting to contemplate.
Three days later, a second parcel arrived, left overnight outside the Woodbeads’ front door, and this time they waited for the police to arrive before opening it. Inside was the thumb from Julian’s right hand. Still Max refused to pay and at Belvedere College a group of us gathered in my room, the official place of pilgrimage for those with an interest in the case, to debate why he was being so callous.
“He’s obviously a skinflint,” said James Hogan, an uncommonly tall boy who was known to have a serious crush on the actress Joanne Woodward, with whom he had been conducting a one-way relationship by post for more than a year. “Imagine not caring that your own son has been mutilated!”
“It’s hardly mutilation,” said Jasper Timson, a keen piano-accordion player who had the room next to ours and who was constantly annoying me by finding reasons to talk to Julian on his own. On one occasion I had come into our room to discover the two of them sitting side by side on Julian’s bed with a bottle of vodka between them, laughing so uproariously that my jealousy had nearly exploded into a fight. “And I think Julian can survive with nine toes and nine fingers.”
“Whether he can survive or not is hardly the point, Jasper,” I said, ready to attack him if he continued to speak in so thoughtless a fashion. “It must have been terrifying for him. Not to mention painful.”
“Julian’s a tough cookie.”
“You barely know him.”
“I know him quite well, as it happens.”
“No, you don’t. You’re not his roommate.”
“I know he’s the kind of guy who if he was giving someone the kiss of life, he’d use tongue.”
“Take that back, Timson!”
“Oh shut up, Cyril! You’re not his bloody wife, so stop carrying on as if you are.”
“Have you noticed that the body parts are getting bigger?” asked James. “I wonder is his thing bigger than his thumb.”
“It’s much bigger,” I said, without thinking, and they all stared at me, uncertain how to react to this intimate announcement. “Well, we share a room,” I said, blushing a little. “And anyway, things are always bigger than thumbs.”
“Peter’s isn’t,” said Jasper, referring to his own roommate, Peter Trefontaine, the curious curvature of whose thing Julian had remarked upon on that fateful afternoon in the Palace Bar. “It’s tiny. And yet he’s always flashing it around our room as if he’s got something to be proud of.”
The third delivery came exactly a week after the kidnapping and, in their cruelest gesture yet, the box contained Julian’s right ear.
He looks just like his daddie now,
said a note written on the back of a John Hinde postcard, the one with the two redheaded children standing on either side of a donkey laden down with turf in the bog lands of Connemara.
But this is our last warning.
If we don’t get our money, next time it’ll be his head.
So pay heed to us now and have a pleasant weekend.
A second press conference was held, this time in the Shelbourne Hotel, and any sympathy that the gathered media had previously felt for Max had clearly vanished now that Julian had been deprived of three body parts. The general feeling, reflected in the country at large, was that here was a man who valued money over his own child and so angry was the nation that an account had been set up in the Bank of Ireland where people could donate their own money to help fund the ransom. Apparently it already stood at almost half the requested amount. I only hoped that Charles hadn’t been put in charge of it.
“I have heard many criticisms of late regarding my actions in this affair,” declared Max, sitting upright at the press conference and wearing a Union Jack tie for added provocation. “But it will be a cold day in hell when I give a penny of my hard-earned money to a group of vicious Republicans who believe their cause can be furthered by the kidnapping and torture of a teenage boy. If I was to give them what they want, it would only be used to buy guns and bombs which in turn would be employed against the British forces that quite rightly occupy the land north of the border and should be reinstated in the south. You can chop my son up into little bits,” he added, somewhat unwisely, “and post him back to me in a hundred Jiffy bags and I still won’t give in to your demands.” There was a long pause as he shuffled a few papers on the desk before him—he had obviously veered away from the prepared script—before piping up again. “Obviously I don’t want you to actually do that,” he said. “I was speaking metaphorically.”