A History of Loneliness

  He sighed and looked away, staring out towards the city-centre apartment buildings and office blocks. What was going on inside that confused head of his? I had no idea.

  ‘Not to mention what you’ve done to the rest of us,’ I said quietly. ‘You and all the men like you. Did you never think what it would mean to those of us who tried our best? Those of us who had a calling?’

  He laughed at me. ‘You think you had a calling, Odran?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘You only think that because your mammy told you that you did.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘She may have put the idea there, but the fact is, she was right. I did have a calling. This is what I was meant to do.’

  He shook his head, saying nothing as if he was listening to the rantings of an imbecile.

  ‘I should have reported you long ago,’ I said.

  ‘You should have what?’

  ‘Back in Clonliffe,’ I replied, all self-righteous now. ‘I saw you. When you took your shirt off. The big bruises on your shoulder.’

  He frowned, as if he had no idea what I was talking about. ‘You’ve lost me, Odran,’ he said.

  ‘Daniel Londigran,’ I said. ‘The night O’Hagan was sent off to see his dying mother. It was you that leaped on him. He tried to fight you off. He was expelled on account of it.’

  He stared at me for a moment, the wheels turning, before letting his mouth fall open in surprise and allowing a laugh to escape his mouth. ‘Danny Londigran?’ he said. ‘Are you joking me?’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘You haven’t a clue, Odran. Do you realize that? You haven’t a fucking clue.’

  ‘I know that you tried to assault him and he got the better of you. He gave you a dig and you ran away in fright.’

  He laughed again and shook his head. ‘Danny Londigran,’ he said calmly, ‘was no more suited to be a priest than I was. He had a regular supply of pornographic magazines slipped into him by a cousin of his that the pair of us used to look at together and eventually it went further. It was women we were looking at, Odran, you realize that, don’t you? But we used to touch each other in our frustration. One night, when his cell-mate was away, Father Livane came in when we were talking and trying everything we could to console each other for the dilemma we’d found ourselves in. Sure, Danny didn’t want to be there any more than I did. Father Livane comes in, the lights are off, Danny in his fright gives me an almighty puck and off I charge. And of course he had to turn in a story to explain it all. You think I attacked him?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Are you joking? I did nothing to him that he wasn’t doing to me.’

  I looked away; I was uncertain of my response. ‘And I’m to believe that, am I?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘You can believe anything you like for all the difference it makes to me. Do you think it matters now?’

  ‘You’ve ruined it, can’t you see that?’ I said, raising my voice in frustration. ‘There’s none of us will ever be trusted again.’

  ‘Maybe that’s for the best,’ said Tom. ‘Don’t you think this country would be better off if the Catholic Church just got the hell out of it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t. And how can you say that, after everything—’

  ‘Those people ruined my life,’ he said, his voice deep and angry. ‘They ruined it, Odran, can’t you understand that? They took a poor, innocent seventeen-year-old boy who knew nothing of the world and locked him away in a prison for seven years. They told me that everything that made me human was shameful and dirty. They taught me to hate my body and to feel that I was a sinner if I looked at a woman’s legs while she walked along the road in front of me. They threatened to expel me from Clonliffe if I so much as talked to a girl when we were out at UCD and my father threatened to kill me if they ever did. And don’t think he wouldn’t have, because I’m telling you now, he would have come into my room on my first night home and put a pitchfork through my head if I’d said that the priests wouldn’t have me back. They twisted me and distorted me, they made sure that I had no release for any of the natural desires that a human being has, and then they didn’t give a damn if I didn’t know how to live a decent life.’

  ‘They did nothing to you that they didn’t do to me,’ I said, leaning forward angrily. ‘Nothing that they didn’t do to hundreds of other boys. And we didn’t end up doing what you did. Is it such a terrible thing to be a good priest, Tom? Would that not have been enough for you? It was for me.’

  He laughed and shook his head. ‘A good priest?’ he asked. ‘Is that what you think you are? But sure Odran, you’re hardly a priest at all.’

  I stared at him, baffled.

  ‘Odran,’ he continued, his voice calm now, as if he was explaining a complex idea to a child, ‘you were ordained more than thirty years ago and you never spent a single day in a parish until Jim Cordington put you in my place after I had to leave.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘It is true. Of course it’s true. You locked yourself away in that school of yours for twenty-five years, teaching English and shelving your library books, and never did a single thing that a good priest, as you put it, is supposed to do. You hid away from the world. You’re still hiding away from it. If you’d wanted to be a teacher, why didn’t you just go out and get your H.Dip and be a teacher? If you’d wanted to be a librarian, why didn’t you go and get a degree in Library Sciences and work out there on Kildare Street? You call yourself a priest, do you? You’re not a priest. You never were.’

  I stared down at the floor. ‘I’ve taken care of thousands of boys in that school,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ve been a good friend to them. A good chaplain.’

  ‘Really?’ he laughed. ‘Tell me this then. Over the course of an average year, how many teenage boys have come to you with some emotional problem that they thought you could help them with? Five? Three? One? None? I’d say it was none, was it? And if they did, I’d say you’d be running off down the corridor to make sure the Brontë sisters were still being kept together.’

  I stood up, walked over to the window and stared out across Dublin. From where I was standing, it was a filthy city. The Liffey ran black, the streets were a shambles, the buildings were falling down. Roadworks were everywhere and the cars were beeping and honking at each other as they tried to make their way along. Somewhere down there, young men were passing money to each other and going back to bedsits to tie tubes around their arms and fill their veins with the only thing that could give them some release from the misery of the place. Old women were turning down their gas heaters, for they couldn’t afford to keep warm and pay the property tax and at least if they froze to death then they wouldn’t be sent to prison for non-payment. Teenage boys were standing on the quays late at night, looking out for some lost soul who might throw them twenty euros to kneel down before them with their pants around their ankles. The pubs were full of young men and women, graduating from universities, filled with fear as to what in God’s name they would do with their lives now that there wasn’t a job to be found in the country; where were they to go? Canada? Australia? England? The famine ships were being brought back and they knew they had to board them and leave their families behind. Men were retiring from their jobs after forty years and having to scrimp and save because their pension funds had been wiped out by a bunch of Fianna Fáil crooks who everyone would vote for again in a couple of years’ time anyway. And over there, at the airport, a group of men from Europe were flying in to tell us that we hadn’t the sense to govern ourselves any more and so they were going to do it for us. And for all of us, for all of these people, this was what Ireland had become: a country of drug addicts, losers, criminals, paedophiles and incompetents. What was it Aidan had said to me that night in the Oslo bar? I would never live in that country again. Ireland is rotten. Rotten to the core.

  Aidan.

  I turned around and looked at Tom, who, having defined my life for me, seemed pleased to have gained the upper hand. r />
  ‘But Aidan,’ I said, feeling the tears spring up behind my eyes again, for I would never be able to forgive myself, let alone him, for what had happened there. ‘Why Aidan? Why my nephew, Tom? We were friends, you and I. How could you have done it?’

  He had the good grace to turn away then, unable to look at me.

  ‘Answer me,’ I insisted. ‘I have a right to know. I don’t understand how you could have—’

  ‘Sure you’re as much to blame there as I am,’ he said.

  ‘I am? How?’

  ‘I told you that I was happy to go back to the school with you that night. You should have insisted.’

  ‘I wasn’t to know that you were going to go into his room when he was asleep, was I? I wasn’t to know what you were going to do to him.’

  He cocked his head a little to the side and offered me something approaching a smile. ‘Weren’t you, Odran?’ he asked quietly. ‘Are you telling me that you never suspected?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t,’ I shouted. ‘If I’d have known then I never would have—’

  ‘You know it’s just the two of us here,’ he said. ‘You can lie to yourself if you like, but there’s not much to be gained from it. Trust me, that’s a lesson that I’ve learned well over these last few years.’

  I stared at him. ‘Tom,’ I said, my face growing red with anger, ‘you can’t imagine that I knew anything about this. About what you were like. About—’

  ‘You were down there that week in Wexford,’ he told me. ‘When the Kilduff boy vandalized my car. Sure you were the one who turned him in to the Gardaí.’

  ‘I thought he was just acting up, like kids do,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know where his anger came from.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Really, Odran?’

  ‘Yes, really!’

  ‘And all those times that I was being moved from parish to parish, you never wondered even for a moment why that might be?’

  ‘Look, there were rumours that priests who were being moved regularly were up to all sorts, I knew that much, but I never thought that you—’

  ‘You see, I think you knew everything, Odran,’ he said quietly. ‘And I think you never wanted to confront me about it because that was a conversation that was beyond your abilities to have. I think you were complicit in the whole thing. Sure all you’re good for is putting the Dickens books before the Hemingway books and keeping the Virginia Woolfs for the end. I think you knew it all.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said and I could hear how half-hearted the words sounded even to my ears.

  ‘And I think that on the night of your mother’s funeral you knew well that it wasn’t sensible to leave me there with your nephew, but you did it anyway. Because it was easier to do that than to cause a scene.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I whispered.

  ‘I think you’re just like everyone else, even though you’ve played the holier-than-thou your whole life. You knew it, you kept it secret and this whole conspiracy that everyone talks about, the one that goes to the top of the Church, well it goes to the bottom of it too, to the nobodies like you, to the fella that never even had a parish of his own and hides away from the world, afraid to be spotted. You can blame me all you like, Odran, and you’d be right to, because I’ve done some terrible things in my life. But do you ever think of taking a look at yourself? At your own actions? At the Grand Silence that you’ve maintained from the very first day?’ He shook his head and stood up, reached for his cane and turned his back on me as he went towards the cavity in the wall that led to the tiny kitchen.

  ‘Go on, Odran,’ he said. ‘Go on out of here now and leave me to unpack. There’s nothing left for us to say to each other.’

  I remained where I was for a few moments, unable to move, but then focused my eyes on the door and walked towards it. I could feel my collar tightening against my throat and felt an urge to rip it off and throw it away.

  ‘We won’t be seeing each other again, I imagine?’ he asked, turning back to look at me as I opened the door to the outside world, and I shook my head.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t be back.’

  ‘Right so,’ he replied, turning away as if we did not have forty years of history between us. ‘I’ll wish you well so.’

  ‘I’ll pray for you, Tom. Despite it all.’

  He laughed and turned away from me. ‘Pray for yourself,’ he said. ‘You need it more than I do.’

  I looked around the flat one last time. ‘This is an awful place,’ I said, unable to comprehend what could have led the boy that he once was to somewhere like this. He would stay here, I imagined, for the rest of his life. He would be found here, some day, dead.

  ‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘But I’ll survive.’

  ‘Will you be lonely?’

  ‘I will, of course,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘But then I have a history of loneliness, Odran. Don’t you?’

  There are no boarders in my school; did I say that before? Years ago, there were. Up until the early 1980s, I think. They closed down that part of the building a year or two before I arrived, when parents fell out of the habit of sending their boys away for the week and everyone had a car anyway.

  Because of that, and because of the size of the building, it can be a fierce lonely place at night. Every sound echoes through the corridors, every breeze rattles a doorframe or shakes a window. If you had a mind that turned towards ghost stories, then this would be a place to unsettle you.

  Anxious in my thoughts, I took a notion to take a late-night drive over to the grotto in Inchicore, the same grotto that I had been visiting for so many years and where I had once seen a priest and his mother crying together in pain at the realization of what he had done and who he had hurt and how he would one day have to pay for his crimes.

  It was dark when I arrived, as dark as it had been that night, but deserted, a half-moon offering enough brightness for me to find my way towards the statues.

  At first, I kneeled and tried to pray, but I could find no prayers. And then, without intending to, I found myself lying on the ground, face down, the cold of the earth against my cheek, just like that man who was tortured by his own actions. I closed my eyes and realized that I could stay at my school no longer. Despite how long I had wanted to return, it was time to move on, to find another life, either inside or outside the Church. I could hide behind those school walls no longer.

  I thought of that moment almost forty years ago, in Wexford, when I had desperately wanted to operate the barriers at the railway crossing. In my job, you have to think of all the people who trust you, the railway keeper had said to me. Just imagine if any of them got hurt on account of your negligence. Or mine. Would you want that on your conscience? Knowing you were responsible for so much pain?

  But once, in his anger, Aidan had asked me whether I thought I had wasted my life and I had told him no. No, I had not. But I had been wrong. And Tom Cardle had been right. For I had known everything, right from the start, and never acted on any of it. I had blocked it from my mind, time and again, refused to recognize what was staring me in the face. I had said nothing when I should have spoken out, convincing myself that I was a man of higher character. I had been complicit in all their crimes and people had suffered because of me. I had wasted my life. I had wasted every moment of my life. And the final irony was that it had taken a convicted paedophile to show me that in my silence, I was just as guilty as the rest of them.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Early readers of the manuscript offered valuable advice. For that, many thanks to Con Connolly, Claire Kilroy and Thomas Morris.

  I’m indebted for their constant support and encouragement to my agents, Simon Trewin, Eric Simonoff and all at William Morris Endeavor, as well as my editor Bill Scott-Kerr, whose skills and insight helped the book immeasurably. Thanks also to Larry Finlay, Patsy Irwin and all at Transworld.

  In my research, I gained a valuable insight into the life of a priest from several members of the clergy in Dublin w
ho wish to remain anonymous, but I’m grateful for their openness and their willingness to discuss frankly the cover-up of child sexual abuse in Ireland over the years. Thanks, too, to those in Rome, Oslo and Lillehammer who provided assistance during my research trips there.

  And above all, much love to the most important people in my life: my parents, Seán and Helen Boyne, my sisters, Carol and Sinéad, Rory, Jamie and Katie, and my husband Con.

  It’s impossible to estimate the number of children who suffered in Ireland at the hands of the Catholic Church, nor is it easy to guess the number of dedicated and honest priests who have seen their lives and vocations tarnished by the actions of their colleagues.

  This novel is dedicated to all these victims; may they have happier times ahead.

  About the Author

  John Boyne was born in Ireland in 1971. He is the author of nine novels for adults and four for younger readers, including the international bestsellers The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which has sold more than six million copies worldwide, The Absolutist and, most recently, Stay Where You Are and Then Leave. His novels are published in over forty-five languages. He is married and lives in Dublin.

  www.johnboyne.com

  @john_boyne

  Also by John Boyne

  NOVELS

  The Thief of Time

  The Congress of Rough Riders

  Crippen

  Next of Kin

  Mutiny on the Bounty

  The House of Special Purpose

  The Absolutist

  This House Is Haunted

  NOVELS FOR YOUNGER READERS

  The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

  Noah Barleywater Runs Away

  The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket

  Stay Where You Are and Then Leave

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