The Heart's Invisible Furies

by John Boyne

Darling, take a lover if you want, it makes no difference to me. If you need cock, there’s plenty of it out there. Big ones, small ones, perfectly formed ones, misshapen ones. Bent ones, curved ones, straight ones. Young men are basically walking erections and any one of them would be happy to stick it in someone as beautiful as you. Try a teenager if you like. They’d be only too delighted and you know they could go five or six times a night without even stopping to take a breath.

her death saddened me a great deal. I didn’t have sex for almost two weeks afterward out of respect for her memory.

“What you know about women,” replied Maude, “could be written in large font on the back of a postage stamp and there’d still be room for the Lord’s Prayer.

Max was living proof that it doesn’t matter if people love you or loathe you; as long as they know who you are, you can make a good living.

I knew almost nothing of homosexuality, except for the fact that to act on such urges was a criminal act in Ireland that could result in a jail sentence, unless of course you were a priest, in which case it was a perk of the job. I

There are no homosexuals in Ireland. You might have got it into your head that you are one but you’re just wrong, it’s as simple as that. You’re wrong.”

I would be normal if it killed me.

I loved Julian; I had sex with strangers.

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.

A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt had once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face.

“It’s not easy losing someone,” she said. “It never goes away, does it?” “The Phantom Pain, they call it,” I said. “Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.”

And at the end, when the entire congregation broke into applause, I realized that I was finally happy.