I twisted the gold ring, newly placed on the fourth finger of my left hand. It came loose a little too easily and I held it in the palm of my hand, judging its weight, before laying it on a side table next to an unopened bottle of red wine. Alice and I had spent an entire Saturday afternoon shopping for the rings and it had been fun; we’d spent more money than we’d intended and by the end of the day, when we were having dinner, I felt such strong affection toward her that I had begun to wonder whether our friendship might ultimately blossom into love. But of course I was deluding myself, for love was one thing but desire was something else entirely.
A part of me regretted having told Julian anything; another part resented the fact that I had been forced to hide my true self for so long. He’d said in the church that if I’d told him the truth from the start he wouldn’t have cared but I didn’t believe that for a moment. Not for a single moment. When we’d first shared a room at Belvedere College, he would have asked for a transfer if I had explained my feelings for him. And even if he had shown any kindness or understanding toward me at the time, word would have soon got out and the other boys would have made my life a misery. The priests would have expelled me and I would have had no home to go to. If only Charles and Max had never met, I told myself. If only the lives of the Averys and the Woodbeads had never intersected in the first place. My nature might not have turned out any different but at least I wouldn’t have found myself in this terrible mess. Or would there have simply been another Julian; was there someone else like him out there somewhere under whose spell I would have fallen? Another Alice? It was impossible to know. Trying to understand it all was giving me a headache.
I walked toward the pair of French doors that opened onto the balcony, peering outside tentatively like a minor member of the Royal Family when the crowds have all gone home. Looking across the treetops into the parkland of St. Stephen’s Green was a vantage point that I had never enjoyed before. But this was Dublin, the nation’s capital. The place of my birth and a city I loved at the heart of a country I loathed. A town filled with good-hearted innocents, miserable bigots, adulterous husbands, conniving churchmen, paupers who received no help from the State, and millionaires who sucked the lifeblood from it. Glancing down, I watched as the cars drove around the Green, the horses and traps filled with tourists, and the taxis pulled up to the hotel. The trees were bursting into full verdure and I wished that I could simply spread my arms and take flight, soar above them and look down on the lake before ascending into the clouds like Icarus, happy to be scorched by the sun and disintegrate into nothingness.
The sun was out and I removed my jacket and waistcoat, throwing them back into the living room, where they landed on the side of a chair. My shoes felt tight on my feet and I kicked them off too, followed quickly by my socks, and the feeling of the stone balcony beneath my bare feet was curiously invigorating. I breathed in the fresh afternoon air and a sense of calm began to take me over.
Had the balcony extended farther across the street, I would have been able to walk out and turn my head to the left to see the corners of Dáil éireann, where Julian and I had enjoyed one of our earliest adventures together. Farther ahead, farther than I could possibly see, I might have spotted Dartmouth Square and the house where I had been reared, the same one that Maude and I had been forced to quit in disgrace after Charles’s incarceration and where I had laid eyes on Julian for the first time after watching in bewilderment as Alice ran screaming from my adoptive mother’s second-floor office. Where I had fallen in love, before I even knew what those words meant.
As I dwelled on these memories and felt the breeze lift my sprits, it seemed entirely natural for me to take my shirt off and allow the wind to blow against my chest. In fact, it was so pleasurable, so hypnotic, that I undid my belt and removed my trousers, feeling neither shame nor self-consciousness, until I was standing there several hundred feet above the streets of Dublin wearing nothing but my underwear.
I glanced to my right but the buildings at the northern tip of the Green prevented me from enjoying a clear view of the flat on Chatham Street where I had once lived with Albert Thatcher and been forced to deal with the sound of his headboard banging against my wall night after night. To go back seven years, I thought, and do things differently.
I had gone this far, I told myself. What had I to lose? I reached down and removed my underwear, kicking them back inside the room, and felt a little giddy as I stood on the balcony, leaning over, and stared across the top of the city, naked as I had been on the day of my birth.
Had I been able to see forever, I could have looked out to the other side of Dublin itself, through Kildare and Tipperary and onward to Cork City, then into the toe of the country at Goleen itself where, although I did not know it at the time, my grandparents were being buried side by side that same afternoon, having being run over by a speeding car as they left the funeral Mass of Father James Monroe, the man who had banished my mother from the town some twenty-eight years earlier. I would have seen my six uncles standing next to each other at the gravesides as they ever did in ascending order of age and stupidity and my own father, the man who had planted me in my mother’s womb, standing nearby, accepting the condolences of neighbors and wondering whether he would be expected to buy a round of drinks for everyone when they made their way to Flanavan’s pub later.
I would have seen it all, had I been able to see, but I could see none of it because I had spent my entire life blind and deaf and mute and ignorant, devoid of any senses save the one that governed my sexual compulsions and that had brought me to this terrible place from which, I was certain, there could be no return.
It was easy to lift my body to the top of the barrier and swing my legs over the side. So easy that I wondered why I had not done it years before. I looked down at the street below, at my own nakedness hovering above it, not a soul looking up to the heavens to watch me. I rocked back and forth a little, allowing my center of gravity and the breeze to do their work. My hands gripped the ironwork and then, gradually, they started to loosen.
Let go, I told myself.
Let go.
Just fall…
I took a deep breath and the last thought that I allowed to pass through my mind was not about my mother, my adoptive parents, Julian or any of the strangers that I had been forced to fuck in darkness over the years. My last thought was directed toward Alice. In apology for what I had done to her. At how it would take this to set her free again. And somehow I felt entirely at peace as I took my hands away and allowed my body to lean forward.
And then a child’s voice, calling from the street below: