“Look, Mammy, that man has no clothes on!”
I pulled back in fright. My hands gripped the ironwork once again. I heard shouts from the people on St. Stephen’s Green, screams, excitement and delirium, hilarity and horror. I looked down as the crowd gathered and the vertigo that had eluded me before kicked in now, almost causing me to fall when I didn’t want to, and it took all my strength and focus to swing around, to ignore the shrieks and laughter from below as the people of the city caught sight of me. I fell back into the room and lay gasping on the carpet and couldn’t quite understand why I was naked. A moment later, the phone rang.
I lifted it, expecting either the voice of the hotel manager or a Garda Síochána, summoned in from the street beyond. But no, it was just Alice. Calm, completely unaware of what I had just tried to do, her tone filled with compassion and love.
“There you are,” she said. “What are you doing up there? I thought you said you’d only be a few minutes.”
“Sorry,” I told her. “I left my wallet up here, that’s all. I’m on my way back down now.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t come down. I’m coming up. There’s something I want to talk to you about. It’s important.”
This again, I thought. “What has Julian said?” I asked.
There was a long pause. “We’ll talk upstairs,” she said. “When we’re alone.”
“Let me come down to you.”
“No, Cyril,” she insisted. “Just stay where you are, all right? I’m on my way up.”
And with that she was gone. I put the receiver down and looked down at my wedding suit, scattered on the floor now. It would only be a couple of minutes before she was walking through the door. And others would surely be here in less time than that when the crowd from the street reported what they had seen. So I did the only thing that I could think of. I reached for my suitcase, pulled out a change of clothes and threw them on. Pulling open the hand luggage I had brought with me for the honeymoon, I took out the only things I needed: my wallet and my passport. I put a hat on and pulled it down over my forehead, glancing at my wedding ring where I had left it but deciding not to pick it up. Leaving the room, I didn’t go toward the staircase but to the other end of the corridor, to the elevator that the staff used when bringing room-service meals up and down between the floors.
Glancing back down the corridor as the doors sealed shut behind me, I felt certain that I saw a burst of white, a billowing cloud of wedding dress, as Alice appeared at the top of the staircase. But then I was locked into silence and transported down into the bowels of the building, where a private staff entrance led me out onto the corner of Kildare Street. A crowd had gathered. They were looking up toward the roof of the building, waiting for the crazy naked man to reappear, half of them hoping that he would be saved, half of them hoping that he would jump.
There was nothing left for me here, I knew that much. So what else could I do but follow my own advice and get out of town?
PART II
EXILE
1980 Into the Annex
By the River Amstel
I could see the argument taking place from halfway down the street. A giant of a man wearing a heavy overcoat with fur trim across the shoulders and, perversely, a tattered gray-tweed deerstalker hat. Next to him, a young boy, perhaps a third his size, in denim jeans and a dark-blue jacket with a white T-shirt underneath. They were arguing loudly, the boy shouting at the older man, his arms flailing in the air as he grew more and more enraged. When the man spoke, his tone was obviously controlled but indisputably more threatening. After a moment, the boy turned around to storm off but before he could get more than a few feet away the man reached out and grabbed him roughly by the collar, pinning him up against the wall and punching him hard in the stomach. The boy crumpled to the ground, his knees rising to protect himself from further assault when he fell to the wet pavement. He turned his head and his body jerked forward as he vomited into the gutter. When he was finished, the man reached down and dragged him back to his feet before whispering something in his ear and discarding him roughly, the boy’s body falling back into the pool of sick as his attacker walked away into the darkness. Throughout all of this I had held back, having no desire to get involved in a street fight, but now that the boy was alone I made my way quickly toward him. He looked up in fear as I approached and I could see tears streaming down his face. He was young, fifteen at most.
“Are you all right?” I asked, reaching a hand out to help him up, but he flinched, as if I was intent on hurting him too, and pushed himself back toward the wall. “Can I help you?”
He shook his head, pulling himself painfully to his feet, and with one arm pressed against his wounded stomach shuffled away, turning the corner in the direction of the Amstel River. I watched him go before putting the key in my door and stepping inside. The whole incident had taken only a minute or two, and just as quickly I put it out of my mind, giving no further thought to what had caused the fight or where the boy might go next.
Pulling Myself out of the Shit
Incredibly, I never learned to ride a bicycle until I lived in Amsterdam.
For some, the sight of a man in his mid-thirties cycling unsteadily around the Vondelpark while another ran behind, ready to catch him should he fall, was like something out of a Chaplin film, but this was how I spent many weekend afternoons during the summer of 1980. After causing a multiple pile-up near the Rijksmuseum and almost sliding beneath the axles of a tram in Frederiksplein, I was advised to sit for my Verkeersdiploma, which most children passed by Grade Seven in school, and failed three times—a record, I was told, by the disbelieving instructor—receiving stitches in my right knee after a particularly nasty collision with a lamppost before finally passing and being given the uncertain freedom of the roads.