“Cyril!” cried Mary-Margaret, bursting into tears. “I knew there was something wrong. I knew it. But not this. I didn’t think it would be this. I never suspected you were a pervert.”
I barely heard her as the future passed quickly before my eyes: the newspaper reports, the court case, the inevitable guilty verdict, the indignities I would be subjected to in Mountjoy Prison. The possibility that I could even be murdered in there. Stories like that circulated all the time.
“Oh, Cyril, Cyril!” cried Mary-Margaret, her face in her hands. “What will Daddy say?”
“Please,” I said, turning to the Garda, ready to throw myself on his mercy. “Let me go. I swear I won’t do anything like this again.”
“Not a chance in the world,” he replied, pulling back and hitting me across the face.
“Hit him again, Garda,” cried Mary-Margaret, her face red with humiliation and anger. “The filthy article.”
And he did as he was asked, punching me so hard that I fell against the wall, my cheek colliding with the top of one of the urinals, and I heard the sound of something cracking within, followed by an instant numbness on the left-hand side of my face. When I turned back, a tooth fell from my mouth and we all watched as it bounced across the floor before settling on the edge of an open drain, hovering there with the impertinence of a golf ball that has reached the very edge of the hole but decided not to fall in.
I turned to look at my attacker, who was nursing the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other, and I stepped back, fearing that he would hit me again. I weighed up the possibility of punching him instead and making my escape but even in my distress I knew that this would be pointless. I might be able to overcome him but Mary-Margaret would surely report me and then they would come for me eventually. And so I gave in.
“Fine,” I said, defeated, and the Garda reached out, taking me by the shoulder, and we ascended the steps together toward the street. Breathing in the cool night air I glanced toward the clock that hung outside Clerys department store from which every Dubliner set his or her watch. It had just turned one thirty in the morning. Three hours earlier I had been in the pub with my newly engaged friends. An hour before I had been in bed. I looked toward Mary-Margaret, who was staring at me with utter hatred on her face, and shrugged.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t help what I am. It’s the way I was born.”
“Fuck you!” she roared.
Before I could register my surprise at her words, an extraordinary noise burst from overhead, as if the heavens had opened and transformed themselves into a cacophonous thunder, and all three of us looked up in fright.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” cried Mary-Margaret. “What in God’s name was that?”
The noise seemed to diminish for a moment but then it grew louder and as I stared up I saw the statue of Admiral Lord Nelson teetering on his pillar, his expression more furious than ever, and it seemed to me that he had come to life as he leaped from his pedestal, his arms and head exploding from his body as the stone shattered above us.
“Look out!” cried the Garda. “The pillar’s coming down.”
He let go of me as we scattered, the stones began to fall, and I heard the noise of the great sculpture exploding into fragments and starting to rain down onto O’Connell Street.
This is it, I thought. This is the moment of my death.
I ran as fast as I could, somehow escaping the blocks of stone as they crashed to the ground, breaking into hundreds of pieces, shrapnel raining down on my back and head. I waited for unconsciousness, sure that it would bring my tormented life to an end at any moment. When I stopped running and turned around to look back, the street was at peace once again but the area where the three of us had been standing was invisible now under a cloud of smoke. In the heat of the moment, all I could think about was those moments when, as a child, I had entered Maude’s study uninvited and been unable to find her in the fog.
“Mary-Margaret!” I cried, my voice turning into a roar as I ran back.
As I got closer to where we had been standing, I stumbled over a body and looked down and there was the Garda who had arrested me, flat on his back now, his eyes wide open, dead to the world. I did my best to feel sorry for him but in my selfishness I couldn’t. He was gone and it wasn’t my fault, there was no more to it. There would be no arrest. No public humiliation.
I heard a sound to my left and there was Mary-Margaret lying under a great boulder, Nelson’s nose pressed to her cheek as if he was having a good sniff of her perfume, one of his eyes lying on the ground staring at her. She was still breathing but I could tell from the gasping in her throat that she hadn’t long left.
“Mary-Margaret,” I said, taking her hand. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“You’re a filthy article,” she hissed, blood seeping from her mouth as she struggled to get the words out. “Not my standard at all.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
And then, a moment later, she was gone. And so was I, running down O’Connell Street for home. There was no point staying there. I knew one thing for sure: that this was the end of it. There would be no more men, no more boys. It would just be women from now on. I would be like everyone else.
I would be normal if it killed me.
1973 Keeping the Devil at Bay
Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em
Julian arrived at my flat just before eight o’clock wearing a tie-dyed shirt open halfway down his chest, a pair of hip-hugger jeans and a purple Nehru jacket. Although his hair was cut into a close crop, reminiscent of Steve McQueen in Papillon, he eschewed the requisite sideburns, which only brought attention to his missing right ear. Around his neck he wore a chain of mixed shells and beads which, he told me, he’d purchased from a centenarian stall holder in Rishikesh when he and a former girlfriend had traveled there to meet the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The colors picked up the sparkle from a psychedelic ring on his right hand that he had stolen from Brian Jones when they were coming down from an LSD high in Arthur’s nightclub on East 54th Street two weeks earlier.
“Other than that, it’s been a quiet few months,” he said, looking me up and down with a frown. “But why aren’t you dressed yet? We’re going to be late.”
“I am dressed,” I replied. “Look at me.”
“Well, you’re wearing clothes,” he agreed. “But not the type that a twenty-eight-year-old man with any sense of style would wear on a night out, especially when they’re going to a stag party. Who did you get them from anyway, your dad?”
“I’ve never met my dad,” I said.
“Your adoptive father then,” he replied with a sigh. “Honestly, Cyril, must you say that every single—”
“Charles and I don’t share clothes,” I said, interrupting him. “We’re completely different sizes for one thing.”