“Ten to one would be more fair. Sure look at him, he’s already almost out for the count.”
“Get away from him!” came a voice out of nowhere, a woman’s voice, as the manageress from the tearoom appeared, parting the crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea. “What’s going on here?” she cried with all the authority of someone who had been there longer than any of them and who knew she’d be there long after they were all voted out of office. “You, Charles Haughey,” she said, pointing to the Minister of Agriculture, who was standing on the sidelines, a pound note hovering in the air that he quickly returned to his wallet. “What are you all doing to this poor boy?”
“Don’t be worrying, Mrs. Goggin,” purred Haughey, stepping forward and placing a hand on her arm that she quickly shook off. “It’s only a bit of high spirits, that’s all.”
“High spirits?” she asked, raising her voice. “Look at him! There’s blood pouring from his eyebrow. And here, in the seat of parliamentary democracy. Have you no shame, any of you?”
“Calm yourself, dear lady,” said Haughey.
“I’ll calm myself when you and your thugs get off this corridor, do you hear me? Go on now or I swear to God that I’ll call the Gardaí on the lot of you.”
I looked up and saw the smile fade from Haughey’s face. He looked as if he wanted to do to her what the Press Officer had done to me but then he closed his eyes for a moment, waited until he had control of his temper, and when he opened them again he was perfectly composed.
“Come along, men,” he said, turning to the scrum, who seemed willing to take their orders from him. “Leave the lad alone. We’ll leave the bitch from the tearoom to clean up the mess. And the next time you see me, sweetheart,” he added, reaching out and taking Mrs. Goggin’s chin in his hand and holding it tightly, spitting a little as he spoke to her, “you’ll keep a civil tongue in your head. I’m a patient man but I don’t put up with backchat from whores. I know who you are and I know what you’re like.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” she said as she pulled away from him, trying to sound brave but I could hear the anxiety in her voice.
“I know everything about everyone,” he said, smiling. “That’s my job. Good day to you now. Have a pleasant afternoon.”
I sat up slowly, my back against the wall as they moved away, and put a hand to my mouth where I could taste blood. When I took it away again, my palm was red, the result of a cut on my upper lip.
“Come along with me,” said Mrs. Goggin, helping me to my feet. “Come into the tearoom till I get you sorted out. You’ve no need to worry. What’s your name anyway?”
“Cyril,” I said.
“Well, don’t be worrying, Cyril. We’ll have the place to ourselves, so no one will be looking at you. Everyone’s going to the chamber to hear the Minister’s speech.”
I nodded and followed her inside as I remembered the afternoon that Julian and I had walked through these same doors seven years earlier during our school trip, drinking pints of Guinness while he passed himself off as a TD for whichever Dublin constituency he was pretending to represent at the time. And I was certain that this was the same woman who had come over to chastise us for underage drinking but ended up attacking Father Squires for leaving us with the run of the place instead. Fearless in the face of authority, she had proved her worth to me twice now.
I sat down at a table by the window and she returned a moment later with a glass of brandy, a bowl of water and a damp facecloth that she used to wipe the blood off my face. “You’ve no need to worry,” she said, smiling at me. “It’s just a scratch.”
“No one has ever hit me before,” I said.
“Drink that down now. It’ll do you the power of good.” As she took the cloth away, she looked into my eyes and frowned for a moment, sitting back as if she saw some expression there that she recognized, before shaking her head and dipping the cloth into the bowl again. “How did it start anyway?”
“It’s this business with the Minister for Education,” I told her. “The Press Officer has probably had a rotten morning and was looking for someone to take it out on. He thought I was one of them, you know.”
“One of who?”
“A queer.”
“And are you?” she asked in so casual a tone that she might have been asking me what the weather was like outside.
“Yes,” I said, the first time I had ever admitted this aloud to another person, the word out of my mouth before I could even try to drag it back.
“Well, it happens,” she said.
“I’ve never told anyone that before.”
“Really? So why did you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just felt like I could, that’s all. That you wouldn’t mind.”
“Why would I mind?” she asked. “It’s nothing to do with me.”
“Why do they hate us so much anyway?” I asked after a lengthy pause. “If they’re not queer themselves, then what does it matter to them if someone else is?”
“I remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves,” she said with a shrug. “Perhaps that has something to do with it.”
I said nothing and sipped on my brandy, wondering whether it was even worth my while returning to the office that afternoon. It probably wouldn’t be long before news of what had taken place reached Miss Joyce and although no member of the government could technically fire a member of the civil service, there were ways around these things and my position was probably even more tenuous than either Mr. Denby-Denby’s or the Minister’s. When I looked up, I saw that Mrs. Goggin’s eyes had filled with tears and she had taken her handkerchief from her pocket to wipe them away.
“Don’t mind me,” she said, attempting a smile. “It’s just that I find this kind of violence very upsetting. I’ve seen it before and I know where it can lead.”
“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” I asked.
“Tell them what?”
“What I just told you. That I’m not normal.”
“Ah Jesus,” she said, laughing as she stood up. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re none of us normal. Not in this fucking country.”
The Muffets