The Heart's Invisible Furies

by John Boyne

In Goleen, there was only the working man, his wife and their children. No one was rich, no one was poor and the world maintained its stability by allowing the same few hundred pounds to pass back and forth from business to business, from farm to grocery store and from wage packet to public house on a regular basis.

But for all that we had, for all the luxury to which we were accustomed, we were both denied love, and this deficiency would be scorched into our future lives like an ill-considered tattoo inscribed on the buttocks after a drunken night out, leading each of us inevitably toward isolation and disaster.

“What’s sex?” I asked. “You really don’t know?” he asked. “No,” I said, and he took great delight in describing in detail actions that to me seemed not just unpleasant and unsanitary but possibly criminal.

“Every man is afraid of women as far as I can see,” said Julian, displaying an understanding of the universe far beyond his years. “That’s true,” she said. “But only because most men are not as smart as women and yet they continue to hold all the power. They fear a change of the world order.”

“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.

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 remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves,” she said with a shrug. “Perhaps that has something to do with it.”

“I think they’re what are commonly referred to as socialites,” she said, her voice dripping with disdain. “The dictionary definition would be a bunch of self-regarding, narcissistic, physically attractive but intellectually hollow individuals whose parents have so much money that they don’t need to do a day’s work themselves. Instead, they go from party to party, desperate to be seen, while gradually corroding from the inside out, like a spent battery, due to their lack of ambition, insight or wit.”

“It’s as if she understood completely the condition of loneliness and how it undermines us all, forcing us to make choices that we know are wrong for us.

No woman is ever truly seduced. It’s a mutual decision on the part of the seducer and the seduced.

What was I even doing here? Years of regret and shame began to overwhelm me. A lifetime of lying, of feeling that I was being forced to lie, had led me to a moment where I was not only preparing to destroy my own life but also that of a girl who had done nothing whatsoever to deserve it.

You won’t understand this but it’s something that every girl realizes at some point in her life, usually when she’s around fifteen or sixteen. Maybe it’s even younger now. That she has more power than every man in the room combined, because men are weak and governed by their desires and their desperate need for women but women are strong. I’ve always believed that if women could only collectively harness the power that they have then they’d rule the world. But they don’t. I don’t know why. And for all their weakness and stupidity, men are smart enough to know that being in charge counts for a lot. They have that over us at least.”

My mother had been hounding me about it for years, encouraging me to go to a gym, but there was something comforting to me about it. I was an elderly man, after all, with the kind of girth one expected from an elderly man.

“It’s the best thing to do with your enemies. And anyway, they lost, didn’t they? By a landslide. Their day is over. They’re the past. They’re history. Just a bunch of bigots screaming into the void, desperate to have their voices heard. They were always going to lose. And you know what? The world didn’t fall off its axis when it happened. So stop being so angry. It’s over. You won, they lost.”