He ran at me then, lifting me off the chair and pinning me up against the wall, one hand holding me there by the collar while the other pulled back, clenched into a fist. It was trembling in rage. Had he hit me right at that moment, I know that he would have killed me.
“If you ever say that to me again,” he hissed. “If you ever say anything like that to me again, I swear to God they will be the last words you ever speak. Do you understand me?” I let my body go slack and nodded as he stepped away from me. “What the fuck is wrong with you people?” he asked me. “Why do you have to lie about everything? Hide everything? Why not just tell the truth? What the fuck is wrong with simply being honest with people from the start?”
I laughed bitterly and looked away. “Don’t even try going down that road, Julian,” I said, ready to fight back now if I had to. “You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. But then people like you never do.”
There was a tap on the door and we both turned as the priest glanced inside, a cheerful smile on his face.
“Your bride awaits you, young man,” he said, his grin fading only a little as he saw my slightly disheveled state. I looked at Julian, pleading with him to set me free, but he looked away and walked toward the door.
“Make sure you comb your hair before you come out here,” he said, the last words he would speak to me for many years. “Remember where you are. And what you’ve come here to do.”
Crazy Naked Man
Three hours later, a respectable married man at last, I found myself standing in the Horseshoe Bar of the Shelbourne Hotel making small talk with the President of Ireland, éamon de Valera. His presence at the reception was an incredible coup for Max, whose obsession with social climbing had become even more pathological in recent years, although the great man had declined to attend the ceremony itself earlier in the day, citing an unmissable appointment with his chiropodist. The former Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, was there too, keeping a careful distance from Charles Haughey, who was standing by the bar giving an uncanny impression of one of those unsettling fairground figures, carved from porcelain, whose bodies remain still while their eyes move slowly around the room. Sport was represented by Tipperary’s Jimmy Doyle, who had won six All-Ireland hurling medals for his county over recent years, literature by Ernest Gébler and J. P. Donleavy, while at a table in the corner my adoptive father’s new wife, Rosalyn, was sucking up to Maureen O’Hara, who smiled politely but kept checking her watch, no doubt wondering when might be a good time to ask the concierge to hail her a taxi.
I found it impossible to concentrate on what Dev was saying, for my attention was focused almost exclusively on Julian, who was standing next to an anxious-looking Archbishop Ryan, while one of the bridesmaids did her best to engage him in conversation. Usually he would have been flirting away—Julian, that is, not the Archbishop—wondering whether he should take her back to his room for a quickie before dinner or wait until afterward when he could put a bit more time and effort into the seduction, but for once he appeared completely uninterested. Whenever I caught his eye, he gave me a look that combined disappointment and murderous intent before turning away and ordering another drink. There was a part of me that wanted to take him aside to explain why I had done the things I had done, or indeed hadn’t done, but I knew there was no point. There was nothing I could say that would make him forgive me, nothing that could possibly excuse my actions. Our friendship, such as it had been, was over.
When I finally managed to escape the President, who was holding forth in quite graphic terms about the state of his bunions, I looked around for a quiet corner where I might find a canapé fork to stick through my heart. Whichever way I turned, however, I found myself being leaped upon by another of our three hundred guests, most of whom were complete strangers to me, each one wanting to shake my hand but let me know that I had condemned myself to fifty years of trying without success to satisfy the little woman.
“Tonight’s the night, eh, boy?” said the old men whose leery smiles I wanted to punch off their wrinkly old faces. “Getting a few pints into you to build up the auld energy, wha’?”
“You’ll be starting a family soon,” said their wives, practically lactating at the idea of my impregnating Alice at regular intervals over the years ahead. “Have three in three years, that’s my advice to you. A boy, a girl and an either/or. A gentleman’s family. And then let that be an end to the whole filthy business.” One even leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “After that, I would suggest separate bedrooms. To keep the Devil at bay.”
I felt surrounded by people and noise, overwhelmed by the stench of perfume and alcohol and suffocated by the haze of cigarette smoke. I was like a child trapped at a carnival, unable to find my way to the exit, my heart starting to beat faster as the crowds closed in around me. Finally, battling forward in the direction of the lobby, I turned to find Alice standing next to me, looking equally dazed and uncomfortable. She smiled but I noticed the shadow of some private anxiety crossing her face.
“We should have kept the numbers down, shouldn’t we?” I said, leaning in and having to shout to make myself heard. “I don’t know who half these people are.”
“Friends of Max’s,” she said, shaking her head. “It didn’t look so bad on paper but I can barely find time to talk to my actual friends. The average age is sixty-plus. There’s a man over there wearing an actual colostomy bag outside his trousers.”
“Not anymore. A child ran into him and burst it.”
“Oh Good Lord. It’s a wedding!”
“We could sound the fire alarm,” I suggested. “And then choose who we let back in afterward. They need to have all their own hair and teeth and a reasonable chance of looking good in the photographs later.”
She gave me a half-smile but didn’t seem pleased.
“I knew I shouldn’t have given him free rein,” she muttered. “I should have learned from—oh God, sorry, Cyril.”
“What?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“No, tell me.”
She had the good grace to look embarrassed. “I was going to say that I should have learned from last time,” she said. “Until I realized what an inappropriate thing that was to say, today of all days.”
“Oh trust me,” I said. “It’s tame compared to some of the things I’ve said today.”
“People keep giving me money too,” she added. “In envelopes. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. So I gave them all to him,” she added, nodding toward the bar.
“Charlie Haughey?” I said, raising my voice, appalled. “You gave all our money to him? We’ll never see it again! It’ll all be sent up North to the Provos!”
“Julian,” she said, shaking her head. “I gave it to Julian.”
“Oh. All right. That’s not so bad, I suppose.”