COLM

It was a sunny day, and Father Byrne sipped at his cup of tea, across from Jean-Pierre at the patio table. He had looked out over Colm’s carefully segmented beds of now growing vegetables and herbs, and had already examined with interest the greenhouse that Colm had built at the base of the garden.

In the past few weeks, Colm had spent most of his time working on the garden – the solar panels were now installed on the roof, as was their water run-off system in the gutters, and as usual, he’d sorted out a simple irrigation system for the crop beds that ran in rows in the back garden, and from the ceiling in the greenhouse from a box of old shower heads an artist he’d met on Grafton Street had had stocked away.

The greenhouse was a decent size, dominating the far end of the back garden, and he’d been careful to reinforce its walls as much as possible, with Jean-Pierre’s enchanting assistance. He had some good photos, too, of Jean-Pierre perched on the top of the greenhouse’s sloping rooves, one leg hanging down from the central roof beam, his tongue sticking out of his mouth as he carved the slate on top of it with intricate symbols.

They had this sort of thing down pat, after so many homes, so many greenhouses, so many gardens, but he always liked to make sure he was watching when Jean-Pierre scaled rooves regardless just in case he fell. It was one thing, when he was falling from a great height – he could throw his wings out and glide – but a fall from six feet, from ten? Jean-Pierre had broken more than enough bones in his lifetime for Colm to want to see him break any more.

The back garden, at least, was pretty much complete in its design – the greenhouse was built, his seeds were sown and his plants set to root, the compost bin was made, reinforced, and in place, and as well as laying down a small, square patio coming off the porch and the kitchen windows, with a table and chairs, he’d set up a pull-down awning so that Jean-Pierre and Asmodeus could sit outside with their books even when it rained – and, more crucially as summer came in, so that Jean-Pierre wouldn’t burn in the sun.

As well as completing the enchantment for both yards, ensuring that all the fencing was primed and reinforced against rot, certain pests both magical and mundane, and other incidental damage, Jean-Pierre had created a few gaps in the wood for hedgehogs and foxes, and had given Colm very clear instructions as to the sort of birdfeeders he wanted to hang from the trees.

Already, the back garden looked as though it had come quite to life – it was just a shame, Colm supposed, that the front yard was so bare so far, but he’d start planting a few more rows of vegetables soon, and he’d fill the rest with flowers and herbs.

He said much of this to Father Byrne, who listened with polite interest – throughout the process of blessing the house, he had been stiff and overly formal, but now that the conversation had turned to gardening, he seemed the slightest bit more at ease.

“You grew up in a keen gardening household, I take it?” Father Byrne asked, and Colm smiled, shaking his head.

“I grew up not too far from Cathair Dónall, spent a lot of my years there on one fishing boat or other, and when not fishing, working with sheep and cattle, so. I learned how to grow vegetables later.”

“And you, you don’t garden?” Father Byrne asked Jean-Pierre, who smiled, one finger idly circling the rim of his mug.

“I came to this earth from a wheat farm,” he said softly, “but I confess, Father, I am far better at arranging flowers than encouraging them to grow.”

Father Byrne did not laugh, but he gave a small smile. It was the weak smile of a man out of practice, and Colm felt the hopelessness, the despair, that radiated from the man in waves. Asmodeus didn’t always pick out exactly the same sort of priest, and Colm knew that – the last two had been angry, angry with the priesthood, with the Pope, with God.

Colm didn’t know that James Byrne was capable of anger – the capacity for it seemed to have been long-since beaten out of him.

There wasn’t anything to be done about it – and, Jean-Pierre had pointed out last night, half-asleep as Colm had watched a film that Jean-Pierre had picked,  that sometimes, after Asmodeus was done with them, the men he selected were better off.

Colm thought “better off” was debatable, to say the least.

“Oh,” said Father Byrne, stiffening like a cat met with a stranger as Asmodeus stepped out from the door of the new porch, the step letting out a subtle, quiet creak as his weight touched against it. “We usually like to have all the residents in a home present for the house blessing.”

“I’m not Catholic,” Asmodeus murmured, not taking his eyes away from Byrne for a moment, and then added, with a steel-sharp smile, “I just thought I’d come say hello.”

In the early evening light, no doubt dressed in the tightest red shirt he could find in his wardrobe – although all of Asmodeus’ shirts were tight, and even his thick woollen cardigans were tailored – Asmodeus looked unspeakably, inhumanly perfect, his teeth white, his skin shining coldly under the warmth of the sunlight, his green eyes shining.

Byrne radiated a gut-stabbing twist of want, of desire, before the wave of self-loathing quickly followed, and the priest seemed to all but drown in it. Watching his lips part, his tongue shifting dumbly in his mouth, Colm took fleeting pity on him, and said, “This is our brother, Father Byrne, his name is Ashley. Ash, this is Father Byrne.”

Byrne shakily put his mug of tea aside, and hurriedly shook Asmodeus’ hand, as though he thought Asmodeus’ hand might burn him.

“Pádraic speaks very highly of you,” Asmodeus said, keeping hold of Byrne’s hand just a second longer than he needed to, and again, the inner grapple between want and shame came off of Byrne in waves. “He said your Mass on Friday was beautifully delivered.”

“You— You know the Giolla Chríosts?”

“Of course,” Asmodeus said smoothly, finally releasing Byrne’s hand and feigning complete innocence as Byrne snatched back his hand, holding it against his belly.

“They’re our cousins,” Jean-Pierre said softly, and Byrne nodded his head, not looking pleased.

“Well, I, ah, I need to drive back to St Fiachra’s for our evening’s work. Thank you kindly for your hospitality, Colm, Jean-Pierre.”

“Oh, Father,” Asmodeus said, sweet as poisoned honey, “I hate to impose on you, but could I ask you to give me a lift? You needn’t make any unnecessary stops – I was going to be going in St Fiachra’s direction in any case.”

Cold terror crystalised in Byrne’s chest, and Colm wondered at the strength of the man’s dislike for himself, felt own his fingers twitch with the need to reach out and try to ease some of that off him, but Asmodeus met Colm’s gaze over Byrne’s shoulder, and Colm spread his hand in a gesture of peace. He knew better than to get between a man and his meal, and while he didn’t know precisely what Asmodeus got out of this particular exercise, he tried to tell himself it was much like that.

“Of course,” said Byrne, powerlessly.

Asmodeus’ fingers brushed the front of Byrne’s black shirt, and Colm heard the priest gasp.

“You’re very kind, Father Byrne. Please, do lead the way.”

Jean-Pierre reached for Asmodeus’ wrist before he passed back into the house, and Asmodeus paused to look at him. Colm wondered, for a moment, if Jean-Pierre was actually going to tell him to stop – if Jean said it, Asmodeus actually might budge – but Jean just said, in a wheedling tone, “Will you pick me up some pineapple juice?”

“Yes,” Asmodeus said, squeezing Jean’s hand, and Colm suppressed the urge to roll his eyes as Asmodeus closed the door quietly behind him, stepping into the house after Byrne.

“The priest in Thessaloniki killed himself. Do you think Father Byrne will?” Jean-Pierre asked quietly.

“The one in Thessaloniki was a monk, not a priest – and no, or at least, Asmodeus won’t encourage him to.”

“He encouraged the monk to?”

“He’d raped four women. The only reason Asmodeus didn’t kill him himself was because he’s fussy about the mess.”

Jean-Pierre looked thoughtful, drawing his knees up to his chest and leaning back in his chair, his arms wrapped loosely around his legs. “I’d have done it,” he said quietly. “If I’d known. But Father Byrne isn’t like that, is he?”

“I don’t think so,” Colm said quietly. “I only got impressions, but…” the dark room again, too tight, too confining, the stone painful under his knees; the split down his back from the belt; the hand on the back of his neck as his head was shoved down against the desktop, the tears hot on his cheeks… “I don’t think he’s ever hurt anybody in his life. Been hurt. Not the other way around.”

“It’s one thing when he picks the cruel ones and wants to break them,” Jean-Pierre said quietly. “I don’t see why he feels the need to pick broken ones and break them further.”

As if you’re any better, Colm almost said, but thought better of it.

“Are you going to stop him?” Colm asked.

“No,” Jean said. “Are you?”

“Richer than my blood to try.”

Jean nodded, and Colm felt the pensive shift in the other man’s mood, moving forward, closer. Jean-Pierre didn’t say anything, just looked up to meet Colm’s gaze, and Colm said, in a quiet voice, “You want to go do something?”

“Do something?”

“Bowling and the arcade?” Jean-Pierre hesitated, his brow furrowing, and Colm added, “There’s no point waiting for him. Even if we were here when he came home, we wouldn’t want to hear it, and he wouldn’t want to tell us.”

“You think he’s going to fuck him?”

“I don’t know, Jean. Probably. It’s what he does.”

Standing reluctantly to his feet, Jean leaned on Colm’s arm as they made their way back into the house. “I just wish I knew what he was thinking sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Colm said lowly. “Me too.”

*     *     *

AIMÉ

There was a three for ten on craft beers, which would be all well and dandy, if Aimé cared even remotely about the taste of the beer he drank, which in all truth, he didn’t. He wasn’t entirely sure he had many taste buds left. If it wasn’t wine, it didn’t matter.

The only reason he drank beer in the park was because it was easier for the guards to shrug off than a bottle of wine, which was naturally what he preferred, and what he tended to drink in the comfort of his own home. There was the vodka, but that was really for emergency scenarios, such as talking to his mother on the phone, or meeting her in person or, not irregularly, thinking about her.

And as for his father – well, one needed stronger stuff than alcohol to deal with that, and he couldn’t buy it in an off-license.

He was tapping his card against the machine when the bell over the door rang, and he heard the angel say to his brother, “Yes, I remember how to make it, but why can’t you do it?”

“Because the last time I tried that boy nearly went blind, and you make it taste nicer.”

“What sort of Irishman are you?”

“You want to talk nation to nation? Without looking at that shelf behind you, tell me three kinds of wine.”

In the reflected screen of the glass casing over the expensive whiskeys behind the sales counter, Aimé saw Jean pout, pushing out his pretty lips and looking at his brother with a mulish expression on his face. “… Touché. I’ll make your poitín.”

The brother – Colm, of course – smiled, putting his hands in a loose prayer position and pointing them at the other man. Under his arm, held between his hip and his elbow, was a toy black rabbit. “Thank you.”

Aimé packed his wine into a paper bag, loosely settling it under his arm, and stepped aside, ostensibly to look at the raffle the off-license was doing to raise money for the local children’s hospital, and he picked his pen out of his pocket, writing down his name and number on the piece of paper as he watched Jean lean back against one of store’s columns, his arms loosely crossed over his chest, his expression bored.

He wasn’t even feigning interest as Colm picked through the craft beers on sale, examining and comparing them carefully, his brow furrowed in thought.

It would be easy, Aimé supposed, to walk up to him, and say, “So, you don’t drink?” It would be easy, too, to comment on his jumper – an oversized woollen object emblazoned with TIOCFAIDH ÁR LÁ, which the cashier was eyeing uncertainly, and which Aimé knew belonged to Colm, because he had seen him wearing it a few weeks back, and it could have fit Jean twice over. It would be easy if he was drunk enough.

At the moment, he was astoundingly, painfully sober.

“Here,” he muttered to the cashier, handing over a ten Euro note and taking his raffle tickets.

“Good luck,” the cashier said.

“I don’t win things like that,” Aimé said, with a grin, watching the cashier laugh. “But it’s for the kids, right?”

“Sure, man. G’night.”

He made sure to look past the angel as he left the store to find his bike.

It was going to rain soon.

*     *     *

COLM

“I’m going to go get a car tomorrow. You want to come?”

“Why?”

“Guy at the dealership is gay.”

“You want to use me as bait to get a cheaper price on your car?”

“I wouldn’t call you bait, Jean. More like… window dressing.”

“You can’t do it yourself?”

“I’m not his type.”

Jean-Pierre considered the question, his lips loosely pressed together, his fingers tapping against the chair in front of him. The bus was mostly empty, at this time of the evening – most people were heading into the city, not out of it – and they sat together toward the front of it.

Bowling had been good, Colm thought – they’d had a good time, and Jean had won enough tickets on the machines in the arcade to take home a ridiculously large teddy rabbit, which he now had in his lap, one arm wrapped around it to keep it in place.

It had been strange, going out while Asmodeus was still home. Most of the year, Asmodeus was travelling all around the world, came back only for the holidays, but while he was home, the three of them normally did everything together – it had felt like a strange preview of events to come, when Asmodeus was off on the other side of the world, just the two of them together.

“Yes,” Jean-Pierre said, “if we can go to the Tayto Park this winter – when Benedictine is here for Christmas.”

God save Colm O’Beaglaoich from his brother’s love of theme parks. How it could be possible that the man should set foot on a boat and immediately be ready to vomit his guts out, but have no issue being strapped into a motorised death trap and spun in every direction, Colm would never know – and Benedictine, he well knew, was even more of a thrill-seeker than Jean was.

“Christ, Jean.”

“Those are my terms,” Jean said simply, looking out of the window. “You can choose to accept them or not.”

“Accepted,” Colm muttered, and Jean shook his hand when Colm begrudgingly offered it.

“You don’t have to come on the rides,” Jean said. “Benedictine isn’t scared of them like you are.”

“I’m not scared of them—”

“You were scared of the log flume in Paris.”

“It was a thirteen metre drop!”

“That’s not so high.”

“Not for a man that can fly, no!” Colm hissed, and Jean laughed, tipping his head back against the chair’s headrest, and squeezing his toy rabbit against his chest. “Can I ask you a question?”

Jean pursed his lips. “About Asmodeus?”

“No,” Colm said. “Why, you’re worried I’m gonna ask you about him?”

“No,” he said haltingly, fidgeting in his seat. “No. Just…”

“You don’t want to talk about it.”

“No.”

“Okay. It’s not about that.”

“Bon.”

“It’s about that man in the off-license.”

“What man?”

Jean-Pierre was good at feigning innocence. He was a good actor in general, was skilled beyond measure at almost every aspect of day-to-day theatre, and Colm knew that he could disappear into a crowd with ease, could look like a completely different person given a second to change his hair and put on someone else’s coat, but in conversation like this, the deception was keener, somehow. Jean didn’t widen his eyes or exaggerate his expression: he just looked at Colm with curious interest writ on his face, and if Colm didn’t know Jean-Pierre inside-out, perhaps he might have been convinced.

“The one with the broken nose and the paint stains on his jeans. He was in that restaurant a while back, too, and we’ve seen him in the supermarket.”

“Oh,” Jean said conversationally, once more looking out of the window, and not at Colm’s face. “His name is Aimé Deverell – he reads philosophy at Trinity.”

“How do you know that?”

“I asked around. And once he dropped his wallet.”

“Dropped it?”

“Mmm.”

“From his pocket?”

“I presume so.”

“Into your delving fingers?”

“You’re a very suspicious man.”

“And you’re a pickpocket.” Jean-Pierre inhaled, watching the streets pass the by as the bus rolled onward, and Colm said, “He keeps staring at you. You know he does that, right? He keeps popping up wherever we go.”

“I know.”

“Is he stalking you?”

“No.”

Colm frowned. “Are you stalking him?”

“He paints in Stephen’s Green every day, so it’s not like I have to go looking,” Jean-Pierre said, now examining his painted fingernails. “I was talking to some students in the park, and then I looked him up on Facebook. Apparently he started a course in finance at Maynooth, but two years in he dropped out after he was hospitalised, and now he’s studying here. He’s a good artist. He paints landscapes and still life.”

“He wanted to talk to you today. He was radiating desire like a beacon.”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean, yes?”

“I mean, yes. I know.”

“Are you waiting for him to approach you?”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to. This isn’t your area of expertise, is it?” It wasn’t as catty or angry as Jean-Pierre was capable of being, but it was sharp enough that Colm took pause, and he touched his brother’s cheek, looking at his face when Jean leaned his face into Colm’s palm. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“You’re going to approach him?”

“Yes, probably.”

“But not yet?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I want him to stew.”

“And in the meantime, you’re making sure your paths keep crossing?”

“Tonight was a coincidence,” Jean said. “But otherwise… yes.”

“Why him?”

Jean-Pierre’s face fell, and he looked suddenly stricken as he looked to Colm’s face. “You don’t like him?”

Colm had no idea how to respond to the consternation. “I don’t know, I don’t know him. But he’s… Well, he’s not— is he attractive? His nose has been broken—”

“So has yours.”

“His eyes are different colours – they’re different sizes. His ears are too big for his head, his mouth is crooked, his fingers are yellow with fag tar. You like all that? You don’t think he’s ugly?”

“Basically every man is ugly compared to me,” Jean-Pierre said, as if it was the most reasonable thing to say in the world, and Colm leaned his fist against his mouth to keep from responding to it immediately. “And I like his face. I like his hands, too – and he has strong thighs.”

“There something wrong with him?”

“Oh, yes,” Jean said sagely. “Lots of things.”

This sort of thing was beyond Colm’s understanding. He’d had sex before, certainly – he’d had sex with men, women, had sex with other people entirely. Sex was… sex. It was alright, he thought. He liked the intimacy of it, liked the way people relaxed and got vulnerable when they were having sex, but he didn’t have, he didn’t think, the drive that some people had for it.

He definitely didn’t understand Asmodeus – Asmodeus had sex with all kinds of men, would pick people up regularly just for sex, and then he’d carve out a special routine for sex with men of the cloth, if he thought sex would help them lose faith in the priesthood. Mostly, anyway. There was one man in England, an antiques dealer, Colm knew, that Asmodeus had sex with regularly, and he wasn’t a priest or a monk – he was, Colm was fairly certain, an atheist – and Colm didn’t understand that relationship either.

And Jean, Jean liked romance. He liked to find the perfect man for himself, and keep him for decades, assuming all went well – he liked the commitment from a man, liked being the centre of his life and attention, liked to have someone devoted to him.

That was how Asmodeus had explained it. There was an irony, really, in Colm needing Asmodeus to interpret the emotions of Jean-Pierre.

Aimé wasn’t good-looking, and just from seeing him in passing, Colm was certain he was an alcoholic, and knew that he smoked like a chimney: this was without even considering the emotions that came off him, the anger, the loneliness, the powerlessness, the fatigue, the sheer, weighted depression.

“He has no affection for life at all,” Colm said quietly. “He’s depressed, and an addict.”

“Yes,” Jean-Pierre agreed. “Yes, I know.”

“And if you save him from all that, what, he loves you more?”

“I don’t really think about that,” Jean said softly. “This is our stop.”

Colm didn’t get the opportunity to pursue that particular line of questioning. Jean was a master of evasive manoeuvres.

Asmodeus was lying on the sofa when they got home, and Jean-Pierre clambered directly on top of him, sitting on top of his chest as Asmodeus dropped his book aside.

“Did you fuck him?” Jean asked.

“I’m not going to answer that,” Asmodeus said bluntly. “Pádraic and Bedelia are coming over for dinner on Thursday.”

Colm saw the conflict in Jean’s face, torn between the want to know more about whatever Asmodeus was doing to that priest, whatever tactics he was employing to work him over – but he wanted to meet Pádraic and Bedelia, it seemed, more than he wanted to know about Byrne.

“Okay,” Jean-Pierre said, finally.

Talk turned to what they’d serve for dinner.

Colm didn’t protest.