“I can’t,” I said, repeating his own phrase. “Sorry.”
“No problem,” he replied with a shrug. It had been nothing more than a fuck for him, one of many probably. There would be another tomorrow night, and another at the weekend, and another during the week after that. A moment later, he was gone and a part of me didn’t care if Albert, Mrs. Hogan or her blind son opened their doors to find him leaving but there was no uproar from downstairs and it seemed that he had escaped without notice.
There Are No Homosexuals in Ireland
A few days later, I made an appointment with a doctor. His name was Dr. Dourish, his practice located in a row of red-bricked houses in Dundrum, a part of the city that I did not know well. There were a number of doctors that had some association with the civil service and from whom we could receive favorable rates, but not trusting the rules of their profession within Catholic Ireland I was nervous of exposing myself—either literally or metaphorically—to anyone who might reveal my secret to my employers. I had hoped that he might be young and sympathetic toward my situation and was disappointed to find that he was well into his sixties, close to retirement age and looked about as friendly as a teenage boy woken for school on Monday morning. He smoked a pipe throughout our consultation, picking tiny shreds of tobacco from his yellow teeth that he deposited in an ashtray on the desk that he did not seem to have emptied in sometime. A St. Brigid’s cross on the wall made my heart sink a little, not to mention the statue of the Sacred Heart behind his desk containing a flickering bulb that gave it a rather ghostly aspect.
“Mr. Sadler, is that right?” he asked, picking up the file his secretary had given him and for which, naturally, I had provided a false name.
“That’s right,” I said. “Tristan Sadler. That’s my name. Always has been since the day I was born.”
“And what can I do for you today?”
I looked away, glancing toward the bed that stood against one of the walls and on which I wished that I could lie, like a psychiatric patient, while he stood behind me. I wanted to recount my woes without having to see the expression on his face. The inevitable disgust.
“Do you think I could lie down?” I asked.
“Why?”
“I’d prefer it.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not for patients. It’s where I have my afternoon nap.”
“Right. I’ll stay where I am so.”
“If you would.”
“I wanted to talk to you,” I said. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”
“Well of course there’s something wrong with you. Sure why else would you be here? What is it?”
“It’s a little delicate.”
“Ah,” he said, smiling a little and nodding his head. “Do you mind if I ask how old you are, Tristan?”
“I’m twenty-one.”
“Would it be a matter of an intimate nature?”
“Yes.”
“I guessed as much,” he said. “You’ve caught something, am I right? The women in this city have gone to hell, if you ask me. Dirty little pups, all of them. We should never have given them the vote, if you ask me. It gave them ideas.”
“No,” I replied. I had, of course, caught one or two things in recent times but I had another doctor, one on the Northside, that I used during those moments and he always prescribed me something that sorted the problem out quickly. “No, it’s nothing like that.”
“All right then,” he said with a sigh. “So what is it then? Spit it out, man.”
“I think…the thing is, Doctor, I haven’t quite developed in the way that I’m supposed to.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“I suppose I mean that I’m not as interested in girls as I should be. As other lads my age are.”
“I see,” he said, his smile fading now. “Well, that’s not as abnormal as you might think either. Some boys are late developers. Is it not a big priority for you then? The old sex, I mean.”
“It’s a very big priority,” I told him. “It’s probably my biggest priority. I think about it all day long from the minute I wake up in the morning until the minute I go to bed. And then I dream about it. Sometimes I even have dreams where I go to bed and I have dreams in my dreams about it.”
“Then what’s the problem?” he asked, and I could tell that he was growing frustrated by my obfuscation. “Can you not get a girlfriend, is that it? You’re not a bad-looking fellow. I’m sure there’s lots of girls who’d be happy to do a line with you. Are you shy, is that it? Do you not know how to talk to them?”
“I’m not shy,” I said, finding my voice now and determined to get it out and damn the consequences. “And as it happens I have a girlfriend, thank you very much. But I don’t really want one is the thing. It’s not girls that I think about, you see. It’s boys.”
There was a long silence during which I didn’t dare to look up at him, focusing instead on the carpet beneath my feet and where it had worn thin from the amount of people who had sat in that same seat over the years, dragging their shoes back and forth in anxiety, grief or depression. The silence continued for so long that I feared Dr. Dourish had died of shock and that I had another corpse on my conscience. Finally, however, I heard him push his seat back and I glanced up as he walked over to a cabinet, unlocked it and removed a small packet from the top shelf. He closed the door again, relocked it and sat down, placing the mysterious package on the desk between us.
“First,” said Dr. Dourish, “you mustn’t think that you’re alone in your affliction. There have been plenty of boys who have had similar feelings over the years, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. Perverts, degenerates and sickos have existed since the dawn of time, so don’t for a minute think that you’re anything special. There are even some places where you can get away with it and no one bats an eyelid. But the important thing for you to remember, Tristan, is that you must never act on these disgusting urges. You’re a good, decent Irish Catholic boy and…you are a Catholic, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, even though I had no allegiance to any religion.
“Good lad. Well, unfortunately you’ve been cursed with a terrible sickness. Something that falls on random people for no apparent reason. But you must not think for a moment that you are a homosexual, because you aren’t.”
I flushed a little at the utterance of that dreaded and proscribed word, which was almost never spoken in polite society.
“Yes, it’s true,” he continued, “that there are homosexuals all over the world. England has lots of them. France is full of them. And I’ve never been to America but I imagine they have more than their share too. I wouldn’t think it’s all that common in Russia or Australia but they probably have some other repulsive thing to compensate. But here’s what you have to remember: There are no homosexuals in Ireland. You might have got it into your head that you are one but you’re just wrong, it’s as simple as that. You’re wrong.”