“Even when they were cutting parts of you off?” I asked.
“Well, no. Not then. Although Damien never did that. In fact, he threw up when they cut my ear off. We get along very well now as it happens. He’s due for release in about ten years. I daresay I’ll take him out for a pint. Forgive and forget, that’s my motto.”
“Well, good for you,” said Nick. “No point holding a grudge, is there?”
I felt utterly uncomfortable sitting next to him, because, although we didn’t know each other well, he had seen a side of me that the others hadn’t. Shortly after I’d started working at RTé, a party had been organized for the spurious reason of celebrating Dana winning the Eurovision Song Contest and a large group of us had ended up in a city-center pub in the small hours of the morning. I was already three sheets to the wind when I found myself out in a back alley taking a piss and a moment later Nick appeared in the laneway too. I had never even fancied the man but, depressed and horny, I took a chance and made a lunge for him before he could even start what he’d come out there to do, pressing him back against the wall and kissing him while grabbing his hand and pushing it down toward my cock. He went with it for about half a minute before shaking his head and pushing me away.
“Sorry, Cyril,” he said, looking at me with something approaching pity. “You seem like a nice fella but you’re just not my type.”
I sobered up almost immediately. I had never, ever been rejected and was dumbfounded that my advances should be rebuffed. In those days, homosexuals took what they could, where they could and were glad of it. Attraction was considered a bonus but never a requirement. When I woke late the next afternoon, the memory slowly returning to me like a ghastly nightmare that wouldn’t go away, I was horrified by what I had done. I considered handing in my notice immediately at RTé but it had taken too long for me to find a job that paid enough to allow me to live alone and the idea of going back to sharing with someone was unbearable. And so I pretended that it had never happened and in the three years since then had done my best to avoid him. But it was impossible to shake the knowledge that whenever he looked at me he understood me better than anyone else alive.
“So let me get this straight,” said Martin, looking toward me and Julian. “You two have known each other since your school days, is that right?”
“We shared a room for six years,” said Julian.
“I bet Cyril loved that,” said Nick, and I threw him a filthy glance.
“Although, actually, we first met when we were seven,” I pointed out, wanting to stress just how long we had been in each other’s lives. “His father came to my house to meet with my adoptive father and I found Julian lurking in the hallway.”
“Cyril always tells me that,” said Julian. “I don’t remember it.”
“Well I do,” I said quietly.
“I remember some lad when I was that age asking whether we could show each other our cocks but Cyril claims that wasn’t him.”
The three lads spluttered over their pints and Nick put a hand to his face. I could see his shoulders shuddering with laughter. I didn’t bother to repudiate it again.
“And you’re the best man?” asked Stephen, when the teasing died down.
“I am,” said Julian.
“How’s the speech coming along?”
“It’s almost there. I hope no one’s too sensitive. It’s a bit blue at times.”
“Ah, Julian,” I said, pulling a face. “I asked you to keep it clean.”
“Don’t worry, it’s mild enough,” he said, grinning at me. “Alice would kill me if I said anything out of order. So here’s to Cyril anyway,” he added, lifting his pint, and the others did too. “A lifelong friend and, twenty-four hours from now, my brother-in-law. My sister’s a very lucky woman.”
“She must have done something wonderful in a previous life,” added Nick as he clinked his glass against mine.
Alice
Although Alice’s and my paths had crossed occasionally over the years, our romantic relationship had only begun some eighteen months earlier at a party to mark Julian’s departure to South America for a six-month trek across the Andes. This was probably his most infamous escapade, as it involved traveling with his girlfriends at the time, a pair of Finnish twins by the names of Emmi and Peppi who, he claimed, had been conjoined at birth and were only separated by an American surgeon when they were four years old. It was true that whenever I looked at them they seemed to be leaning toward each other at a slightly unnatural angle.
Only two years my junior, Alice had matured from a somewhat awkward adolescence into an incredibly beautiful young woman, a female version of Julian himself, sharing the fine cheekbones and deep-blue eyes that had first drawn my adoptive father Charles to their mother Elizabeth, rather than the bulbous nose and amphibian-like eyes that they might have inherited from Max. She did not, however, share her brother’s promiscuous ways, having spent seven years dating a young medical student named Fergus, a relationship that had come to an end on the morning of their wedding when he telephoned just as she and Max were leaving Dartmouth Square for the church to tell her that he couldn’t go through with it. Cold feet was his predictable and boring explanation and within a few days he had disappeared off to Madagascar where, it was said, he was still working as a junior doctor in a leprosy clinic. I remember running into Julian by chance a few days later on Grafton Street and can still recall the distressed expression on his face as he told me what had happened. He loved his sister deeply and the notion of someone hurting her was unbearable for him.
“Don’t feel you have to sit with me, Cyril,” said Alice as we looked over toward the corner of the bar where Julian was seated like the meat in a Finnish sandwich while a group of his friends ogled them enviously, longing for a bite. “If you’d rather go over there with the boys, I’m perfectly content with my book.”
“They’re all strangers to me,” I said. “Where did he find them anyway? They look like the cast of Hair.”
“I think they’re what are commonly referred to as socialites,” she said, her voice dripping with disdain. “The dictionary definition would be a bunch of self-regarding, narcissistic, physically attractive but intellectually hollow individuals whose parents have so much money that they don’t need to do a day’s work themselves. Instead, they go from party to party, desperate to be seen, while gradually corroding from the inside out, like a spent battery, due to their lack of ambition, insight or wit.”
“You’re not a fan then?” I asked, and she just shrugged. “Still, it sounds like more fun than getting up at seven o’clock every morning and traipsing across the city to sit behind a desk for eight hours. What are you reading anyway?” I asked, noticing the corner of a book poking out from her bag, and she reached down to retrieve a copy of John McGahern’s The Dark. “Isn’t that banned?”