The Boy That Never Was (12 page)

I asked him to explain.

‘They are a special and peculiarly honest and insightful deck.’

I laughed and reached for the cards.

‘They will tell you things you do not want to know. They have told me things I did not want to know.’

My hand retreated. ‘Like what?’ I whispered.

‘Can you ever imagine me back in London?’

We both laughed then, but in Cozimo’s laughter there was a knowingness. I could see it in his eyes, too. He kept on smiling and picked up the cards and slipped them quickly into his breast pocket, as if to say,
‘Safer here.’

Somehow, in Javier’s hands the tarot looked more trustworthy, less severe, and so I succumbed to something inside me, some need, some indefinable pull, and asked for a card reading, and without any small talk Javier took the cards into his hands and shuffled them languorously. Now, there are several readings you can get with a tarot pack: a twelve-card spread, a horseshoe spread, a full spread, and so on. But this time, Javier said, ‘It will be a one-card reading.’

He held the deck out to me. I hesitated, then chose. I had picked the Sun card, one of the Major Arcana. On it was an image of an infant riding a white horse under the sun, with sunflowers in the background. In the child’s hand was a red flag. The sun looked down with a human face.

I caught my breath and nearly told Javier everything – about Dillon, about the child mummy, about Tangier. It seemed as if images of children were all around me, as if they were trying to tell me something, to help me. But I held my tongue, and Javier started his forecast.

‘The Sun card,’ he said, ‘is considered by many to be the best card in the tarot. It is associated with attained knowledge. The conscious mind prevails over the fears and illusions of the unconscious. Innocence is renewed through discovery, bringing hope for the future.’

Javier didn’t so much tell you your future; he interpreted the cards for you. He had insight, a sense of things. Ultimately, he left it up to you to make out of the reading what you would. But he gave you clues and indicators to suggest ways of interpreting decisions that had to be made. Some things
were more specific. He told me there was a strong pull from a foreign land. He said I was still working something out. That it remained unresolved. That it would come to a head soon. But that I must have an open heart. He said the sun was a positive symbol. I don’t recall what else he said. He didn’t say, ‘You’re going to find your son.’ But he did say, ‘There is a child, and it is no longer yours.’ That hurt. I think he saw that. I was sweating, trying to stop my hands from shaking. Jesus, I don’t know what was happening to me right then.

Before I left, Javier gave me a green amulet. ‘For luck,’ he said. I nearly hugged him, I was so far gone. He saw me blinking at a copy of a book on his table. It was
The Book of the Dead
. ‘Take it,’ he said, and I did, thanking him. I walked through Dublin in a daze, my fingers worrying the stone. All these people out? How did they get here? How did they make it through the snow? I stopped to listen to a man sing ‘On Raglan Road’. When the fellow sang, ‘I loved too much and by such, by such is happiness thrown away,’ I felt a lump in my throat. Fuck, I felt as if I was falling to pieces. Had anybody touched me right then, I would have disintegrated.

I don’t know why, but I didn’t think I could go home right away. Even though I knew Robin wanted me to. In a quiet basement bar off Grafton Street I ordered a drink, took the postcard of the child mummy out of my pocket and looked for information about it online on my phone. What I came across was something about how green magic protected a child mummy: the discovery of a rare mummified child with a bright green amulet stone, once thought to hold magical powers, had led archaeologists to believe that the ancient Egyptians thought that the colour green would protect children from unwanted influence and ensure their health in the afterlife.

Was that, I wondered, why Javier gave me the amulet? Maybe it was a gesture; it was to protect me, to protect Dillon because he was still alive. That was how I saw it. That was how it made sense to me. You know, I’d never believed Dillon had died in the earthquake, though Robin had tried for months, for years, to persuade me that he had. Eventually I had to pretend that I accepted that he had in fact died, but not before I had filed missing persons reports both in Tangier and in Ireland. I made calls, wrote letters and e-mails, contacted my local politicians, joined survivors’ and victims’ support groups online and listened to and read whatever news I could in the months that followed the earthquake, seeking survivors’ stories and information about bodies found, alive or dead.

I contacted Interpol, the Moroccan police force, the Guards. The best I got, the only thing I got, was ‘Your son died tragically in an earthquake. The building was destroyed. It was swallowed by the earth. It was an act of God.’

Robin left Tangier three weeks after the earthquake. I don’t think I ever forgave her for that. I stayed for another few weeks. ‘He could have survived,’ I said.

Robin shook her head. ‘Harry, don’t.’

‘I’m not leaving him,’ I said.

But Robin was having none of it. She said, ‘It’s the grief, Harry. The grief is unbalancing you.’ The grief had ravaged me, I’ll admit that. But her protestations were not enough to assuage my doubts. How could she know he had not, by some strange circumstance, survived the earthquake?

‘Hundreds died,’ she said, as if statistics were somehow the answer.

Then she told me she wanted to have a service for Dillon when I got back to Ireland.

‘What kind of service?’ I asked.

‘A service,’ she said.

‘A funeral?’

She said nothing.

‘Because we can’t have a funeral if he is not dead.’

‘Harry.’

‘Or if we do not know …’

I was ordering another drink when my phone lit up. It was a message from Diane. She must have rung right through to my voicemail. ‘I know you were in London. Word travels. Harry, call me. I miss you.’ I ignored the message and turned my phone off. I watched the snow start to fall again. The Met Office’s forecasting skills were weak. It fell heavier that day than they had predicted. It fell and fell, heavy, luxurious and effacing snow. Their equipment was unsound or their interpretations too narrow. I knew Javier’s readings of what was to come had a vagueness about them. I’m not a fool. But they suggested rather than dictated; they imagined rather than declaimed. And that postman from Donegal had as much accuracy, if not more, in his predictions of the snow. I remember him saying that when the sun shines on to the Blue Stack Mountains and down to the lowlands and it turns a reddish-brown colour, that’s a sign of snow. He’d said something about the sheep and the cattle going mad too, shaking themselves, coming down from the mountains. That, too, was a sign.

The signs were there. What mattered was how you interpreted them. Suddenly, involuntarily, a memory came back to me as I sat there watching the snow: We are in Tangier. I am lying in bed with Dillon. We have the television on. It is a news bulletin. ‘Is she speaking to us?’ says Dillon about the newsreader. I tell him she is talking about a political party. ‘They can come to my party,’ he says. He will be three next week. ‘That’s very good of you,’ I say. He strokes my face.
From one cheek to the other. Intimately, lovingly. He says, ‘Daddy, I love your beard.’ He says, ‘Daddy, I love you.’

I finished my drink and walked up the stairs from an alcoholic underworld and wondered about where the licence plate would lead. What pathway would it take me on? Was the sun to shine? And the boy on the horse, was that Dillon?

In the end, Harry was gone for four days. When he finally got home, he appeared in the doorway dark-eyed and bleary, several days’ worth of stubble shadowing his face. He looked like someone troubled, someone who was letting himself go, a shadow of the man he’d once been. And I thought back to how he had been in Tangier – so vibrant and alive, full of bright colour, awake and instinctive, inquisitive and hungry. Not this tired, worn-out, beaten-down person with a hollow stare. Part of me strained towards him with a terrible pity for all he had become.

After I told him what had happened – the bleeding, the hospital, the threatened miscarriage – he sat down heavily on the couch beside me and stared blankly ahead. He didn’t say a word. And then he lowered his head into his hands and started to cry. Silent tears. I didn’t see his face, only his body shuddering and his hands shaking.

‘Harry.’

‘I’m sorry, Robin.’

‘Baby, don’t say that. Come here. Show me your face.’

I felt the pull of his resistance, but slowly he yielded to me, letting me take his hands in mine, looking down shyly, unable to meet my gaze.

‘I can’t believe you went through all that on your own.’

He looked at me then, and I felt I had a chance in that one moment to make things right between us.

‘I have been so angry with you, Harry,’ I began tentatively. ‘All that time you were away, I kept trying to call you. Last
night I left messages, sent texts, and yet there was no response from you. I couldn’t believe you would be so callous – so cold. And after the way we left things, well … you can imagine what I was thinking. Things have not been good between us lately, not really. Ever since you moved your studio. Ever since I told you about the baby.’

He shook his head and stared at the floor. I saw the movement of muscle along his jaw as he clenched his teeth, but still I went on.

‘I had the impression that you viewed your London trip as a welcome escape from me.’

‘That’s not true, Robin.’

‘Isn’t it? In these last days, I’ve felt that I’ve been losing you.’

He didn’t say anything, or try to deny it.

‘You’ve felt it, too?’ I asked, and he nodded slowly. I found my lip starting to tremble, the tears coming unbidden, but I swallowed them away.

‘We can’t lose each other, Harry. Not now. Not after everything we’ve been through.’

‘I don’t want to lose you, Robin. It’s just that …’

He stopped, and I had the notion that he was on the verge of telling me something, confessing something to me, and I thought again of the drawings of Dillon and all the secret pain he kept hidden from me. I took his face in my hands and looked into his eyes.

‘This is a new start for us, Harry. A new beginning. This baby is real. It is happening. When I saw that ultrasound, that little heartbeat, it made me realize – all the other shit doesn’t matter. This is what matters. So I’m not going to ask you about London. I’m not going to demand an explanation as to why you didn’t return my calls or why you’ve been so distant lately. We need to put all of that behind us. Because this is
our future.’ I reached for his hand and placed it on my belly, still flat, and yet I thought of the child embedded deep within me, the little bean nestling into the soft layers of my body, silently growing in the darkness. ‘I know you weren’t happy about the pregnancy – no, please, let me finish. I know you weren’t. But if you had been there, Harry. If you had seen what I saw, I know you would feel differently. This child isn’t Dillon. No one will ever take his place. But we can still have this baby and love him or her as much as we loved Dillon.’

‘I know. I know.’

‘Listen to me now, Harry. No more lies. No more deceits. I don’t want us to keep things hidden from each other. We used to be so open with each other. We used to be able to tell each other anything. Do you remember?’

‘I remember. I just can’t seem to remember when that stopped.’

He looked up at me then, his eyes so plaintive and forlorn, and I experienced a rush of guilt so strong, it almost made me tell him.

The moment passed. We sat together. I felt his hand moving over my tummy. I heard the logs in the open fire cracking and spitting.

‘A new start, Harry.’

‘Yes,’ he said. And then he fell silent.

It snowed again – heavier and softer than the earlier fall of snow. For the first time in many years, we would have a white Christmas. I watched it come down, heavy and thick, filling up the garden, easing a soft blanket over every surface, every shrub and bush, clinging to the crooks of branches and the tiles of the roof, frosting the windowpanes. We had the fires lit all the time. We tried to keep the house warm and our spirits light, and yet still the cold air crept in through crumbling
window frames, whistling through the cavities in the brick-work. The tide of Christmas parties swept us along, and I felt an attendant tiredness, irritability I put down to pregnancy hormones and the pressures of work. The office had grown more stressful. A project we had successfully bid for had fallen through, and there was talk of coming pay cuts.

On a cold Thursday evening, Harry and I put on our hiking boots and trudged down through the snow to Blackrock College, where they were selling Christmas trees for the Society of St Vincent de Paul. We picked one out – a large, bushy thing – and half-carried, half-dragged it home. There was a silence between us that day that I couldn’t account for. I was tired and anxious. Our office Christmas party had taken place the previous night. Usually a lavish affair, this year it had consisted of a few drinks and some sandwiches in our local pub. I had felt like the only sober person there. At one point in the night, one of my colleagues, the worse for drink, had passed on a rumour he had heard that there would be lay-offs in the New Year. When I’d pressed him on the issue, he had given a hollow laugh and said, ‘CAD monkeys like me and you, I suppose.’ And then he saw the anxiety on my face and instantly changed the subject. I thought of mentioning it to Harry, and yet I didn’t want to worry him. He seemed caught up in his own thoughts that day, and I couldn’t quite muster the effort required to dispel the weight that was between us.

Back home, I sliced oranges and studded the slices with cloves, then baked them in the oven. The dried-out wheels I strung with twine and hung from the tree. The whole house seemed to smell of Christmas – the pine needles, the spices, the sweet orange tang – and my spirits lifted a little. Harry went up to the attic and brought down the lights for the tree and the box of decorations, and then he sat on the floor and
drank coffee laced with whiskey and watched me untangling the strings of lights.

‘That tree is fucking huge,’ he said, casting his eye over it. ‘I think we got carried away.’

‘It’s a big room.’

‘It’s not that big. You’d need a ballroom to fit that tree.’

‘I love it. I think it’s perfect.’

‘The angel will have vertigo. Maybe we should cut a bit off the branches?’

‘No! Leave it! Wait until I’ve the lights and the decorations on – then it won’t look so monstrous.’

‘Do you think that’s why they call it “trimming the tree”? Because you always end up hacking bits off it just to get it to fit in the room?’

‘No hacking bits off it, Harry. Just leave it be.’

I had the lights untangled and was standing on a chair, trying to loop them around the top of the tree.

‘Are you sure you should be doing that?’ Harry asked, watching me with a doubtful expression. ‘A woman in your condition?’

‘Oh, please. Don’t start that now.’

‘Start what?’

‘The overprotective routine.’

‘Why? Did I do that before?’

I turned and looked at him.

‘Harry? Are you serious? With Dillon, you hardly allowed me to move. I couldn’t leave the house without an escort. You’d have a fit any time I carried a few plates from the table to the sink!’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes!’ I laughed. ‘You were a nightmare.’

This was something new. Dillon had started creeping back into our conversations. For such a long time, I had closed my
mind to that whole chapter of my life. I had buried it deep down in the dark recesses of memory. But now, with this new life started inside me, I found I was able to open the door just a chink and let a little light in. Gradually, bit by bit, we were reclaiming ourselves as parents. We were reclaiming our son – our memories of him. The pain was still there – it never really went away – but it had softened. The sharp edges of it had grown blunt. I was finding that I could say his name and hear it said back to me without feeling that instant rush of sadness, that well of melancholy springing up.

‘So do you think you have enough decorations?’ Harry asked, peering into the large box stuffed full with angels and Santas, reindeer and bells and stars.

‘It is a big tree, need I remind you?’

He had picked out a wooden angel with movable arms, and with one finger he was causing the arms to rise and fall, rise and fall.

‘Seriously, how long have you been collecting this stuff?’

‘I don’t know. Years. What can I say? I love Christmas.’

‘Other people love Christmas. With you, it’s an obsession.’

He paused and looked down for a moment, his eyes growing dreamy with some old memory.

Then he said, ‘Do you remember that Christmas tree we had in Tangier?’

I stopped draping lights over the branches.

‘We must have been the only people in the whole of Morocco who had a real Christmas tree. Jesus!’

‘Yes,’ I said.

I stared at the string of lights in my hand.

Harry said something else, but I had stopped listening. I turned the lights over in my hands, and ever so slightly my hands began to tremble.

‘Robin? Are you all right?’

I looked down at him and saw the concern in his eyes. My hands were steady now, but something had come over me.

‘I’m tired,’ I said. Getting down from the chair, I dropped the lights on to the couch. ‘I’m going to lie down.’

I didn’t look at him as I left the room.

On the last Saturday before Christmas, I was in the home-ware department of Brown Thomas with Liz, both of us attempting to cram all of our shopping into a couple of hours. Guilt plagued me as I eyed the price tags and thought about my mortgage repayments and my reduced working hours and wondered how on earth I was going to stretch my budget to buy presents for my family. I was flustered and hassled and overheating.

‘What do you think about this for Andrew’s mum?’ Liz asked, holding aloft a blue bread bin with a walnut lid. ‘It’s ridiculously expensive, but does it look it? I don’t want her to think I picked up some cheap tat for her, especially as she’s cooking Christmas lunch for my whole brood.’

‘It looks fine.’

‘Hmm.’ Liz frowned and returned the item to the shelf.

‘Can’t Andrew shop for his own mother?’

‘Ha!’ she laughed. ‘If I left it to Andrew, he’d just get her a gift card. Or, worse, he’d present her with a cheque.’

‘What’s he getting you?’

‘A gift card,’ she intoned humourlessly. ‘Don’t say it, Rob. I know – the romance is dead.’

I smiled and picked up a jug, turning it over to check the price.

‘How about you?’ she asked. ‘Are you still dead set on having your folks over for Christmas?’

‘Yep. It’s all arranged. The goose has been ordered, the wine and champagne have been bought –’

‘Fair play to you. Just don’t kill yourself.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, Robin, you know what I mean. Cooking, entertaining, preparing the house. You’re like Nigella Lawson on speed when it comes to these events. I just don’t want you overdoing it, that’s all. Not in your condition. Not after the scare you’ve had.’ She eyeballed my belly dramatically, and I laughed in response.

‘Relax. It’s nothing lavish. Just Christmas. And besides, Harry is digging in to help.’

‘Is he now?’ she remarked sceptically. ‘I bet he’s overjoyed at the prospect of Christmas with the in-laws.’

‘Actually, he’s been fine about it. I expected some resistance, but he’s been great. Brilliant, in fact. He’s taking care of the shopping and cleaning up the house. All I have to do is cook. So between us, we have it all covered.’

‘Good. Glad to hear it.’

She picked up a Le Creuset pot with an air of mild distraction and asked, over her shoulder, ‘How has the move worked out? Has he sorted out his studio yet?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ My mind went instantly to that box of sketches I had discovered, the drawings of Dillon, and I wondered whether they still sat there, hidden away in the dark. Since that night, I had not set foot in the studio. Resolve had gathered inside me to ignore all that. To put my back to it and face the future. That was what mattered now.

‘His London trip went well,’ I carried on in a voice full of optimism. ‘I think some work will come out of it.’

‘Oh yeah?’ She glanced across at me. ‘Well, that would be great. So long as he’s not spreading himself around too much. His work is wonderful, of course, but hardly prolific in recent years.’

‘Listen to you! Worrying about Harry’s workload.’

‘Yes, I do worry,’ she replied sharply, suddenly serious. ‘I don’t like the thought of him committing to things he can’t deliver on. Not with his history.’

‘Liz …’

‘Tell me to piss off and mind my own business if you like, but you’re my oldest friend, Robin, and I wouldn’t be that friend if I didn’t tell you that I worry about Harry when he’s put under pressure. I know how sensitive he is. And I can’t bear the thought of his old trouble returning. I hate to think of you having to go through all that again.’

‘It won’t,’ I said solemnly, and in that moment I believed it. ‘He’s fine. We’re fine. More than fine, in fact. All of that is behind us now.’

Instinctively, my hand went to my belly. She caught the movement and nodded slowly, her expression softening.

‘It’s funny, I didn’t think you guys would have another baby.’

‘Really?’

‘I wasn’t sure if either of you had the heart for another go on the merry-go-round.’

She smiled then, the brightness coming back to her face. Glancing down at the Le Creuset casserole dish in her hands, she remarked, ‘Right then. I’m getting this. She can always return it, can’t she?’