The Boy That Never Was (19 page)

When I woke, I didn’t know where I was. My mouth was parched. I reached for water, but what I noticed was that the gun had shifted from my chest. I did not know where it was. And I must have been sweating. My clothes had stiffened, and I was shivering. And most surprising of all was that when I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and looked up, above me stood Garrick.

I drove with my foot to the floor, heedless, reckless, a tightness running the length of my body, all the muscles and sinews taut with fear. Already, I knew that I was too late; that somewhere in the snowy stillness of the Wicklow Hills, Harry had got there before me, venturing into an unfamiliar place, opening up the Pandora’s box of my past. I had a flash, then, of his face, pale and shadowy, his voice a hoarse shell of bewilderment. Oh God, I thought, please let it be all right. Please let it not be too late. But in a way I knew that I was beyond all that. For I knew that I would have to tell him.

I thought about how to tell him, how to ease him into understanding. I wanted to say that I remembered it as a series of happenings, a sequence of events. The time we had together was so short. And yet, things grow in memory, don’t they? Small things become magnified, take on a new significance. There was so much intensity.

I wanted to tell him how I found it difficult, all these years later, to put my finger on when it started. There must have been a point at which I made a decision. I realized that. I didn’t fall into it – people don’t, however much they like to protest their innocence in these things. You make a choice. At some point, you get to decide. All of this, I wanted to tell him.

As I drove out of Dublin and saw the jagged rock of the Sugarloaf gleaming white on that cold, snowy morning, I began to imagine how I might explain it to Harry, and all at
once I was transported back to another time, another place, when I was a different person, when all of this began.

You won’t want to hear this, Harry. But I know you. You will ask for details, bravely claiming that you want to know, that you need to know. Only I wonder if, deep down, that is true. Can you cope with the sharp pain of such intimacies? Can anyone? You once told me that truth is in the details. We were talking about art – a very safe conversation. This is so much deeper than that. In real life, details can cut you to the quick, wound you beyond all repair.

A crackle on the line. Interference, like thunder in the air.

‘This evening,’ he said. ‘Will you come?’

I twisted the phone’s cord around my finger. I looked around, but the bar was almost empty. There was no one to overhear.

‘Where?’

‘The Mendoubia Gardens. Under the arch. After the call to prayer.’

I drew in my breath. A trickle of sweat ran over my chest. I felt it tracing a path down my breastbone.

‘So, you’ll be there?’

‘I’ll be there.’

All day it had been still and dry. Now a cool breeze was coming in off the ocean. A line of pink clouds hovered above the horizon. I hurried through the tumbling streets of the medina, listening to the noises coming from the windows above me that opened out on to the alleyways: raised voices, the clatter of pots and pans. Cooking smells reached me, fishy and spicy. Close by, the imam had ascended the minaret, and I heard the call to prayer echoing above the roofs.

I reached the Grand Socco and made my way to the gardens. I was there before him and took my place beneath the
archway, trying to look casual and inconspicuous. A group of teenage boys were hanging around nearby, whispering and giggling and casting glances in my direction. I pulled my scarf up over my head and tried to look aloof. The blood was thundering in my head.

I moved away from the arch and took a seat on a bench, among the fig trees and dragon trees, and watched for him with a growing sense of anxiety. He arrived just as I was about to give up on him. I saw him entering the gardens, scanning the shaded space, looking for me. He had his hands in his pockets. He sauntered, with a kind of rolling gait. His expression didn’t change when his eyes settled on me, and he sat down next to me.

We didn’t speak. Instead, we sat side by side, watching the comings and goings underneath the archway. I felt one of us should say something, but I was afraid to speak, afraid my voice would emerge as a nervous squeak. Wordlessly, he offered me a cigarette, and I leaned in to his lighter, cupping my hand around his. The touch was brief and electrifying. We drew away from each other. The shadows thrown on the ground grew long as the sun sank behind the buildings. My heart was beating loudly; I was tense with trying to appear casual. I was utterly aware of his breathing next to me. When he reached out and took my hand, it was so startling, I almost recoiled. His hand was large and cool. It held mine loosely, carelessly. A squeeze then, and he leaned towards me, his face so close to mine I could feel his breath along my cheek, along my collarbone.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

He took me through unfamiliar streets. We passed strangers who barely registered us. My cheeks were burning. I was terrified we would meet someone who knew me, who knew you.
He held my hand the whole time. His step was longer than mine, and I had to hurry to keep up. Just once, he turned and looked at me, and I managed the briefest of smiles.

At that point, I still had a choice. I had not strayed so far that I couldn’t go back. The most I was guilty of was an error of judgement, a momentary weakness. My infidelity did not go beyond the holding of hands. My mind was flying on ahead, tumbling recklessly into the future, into the next few hours. I allowed myself to be led in that way, without question; I was surrendering to my desires, and to his. I was no innocent. I was not naive. I knew well what would come next. When he led me up the stairs and into the dim shadowy space of his rooms, I was breathless with expectation. When he pushed the door shut behind him and took hold of me roughly, slamming me against the wall, and I felt the length of his body pressing urgently against mine, I knew that every word spoken, every look exchanged between us from the moment we’d first met, had been leading, inevitably, inexorably, to this.

There was a light on when I got home. I saw it as I reached the return and climbed the last few steps. I stopped at the door, taking one breath and then another, trying to calm myself. My hand went to my hair, and I smoothed it down, arranging it about my shoulders. I touched my neck, the place where it pulsed, where he had fixed his mouth. I touched it as though my fingers could trace the raised outline of a kiss, sweet and savage.

I pushed open the door. The light was too bright; it hurt my eyes, and I turned it off. The room was empty. I put down my bag and crossed the floor to the bedroom. You were passed out, Harry, splayed across the bed, lying over the covers. I made no attempt to move you. When I climbed into bed, you didn’t stir. There was whiskey on your breath.
I looked at you through the darkness. Your animated face was at peace.

Yes, there was guilt. It lingered, but it was not enough. I pulled my gaze away from you and turned over on to my side. I think I slept.

The next time, I went straight to his apartment, where he was waiting for me. As soon as we were upstairs, the door closed behind us, he grabbed my arm and spun me around, his face on mine, hungry, greedy. He peeled my T-shirt off, then slid my skirt up my thighs, pushing me back on to the bed. We did not speak. His desire was urgent and tinged with aggression; it veered towards violence. He wrapped his hand in a swatch of my hair and yanked my head back, so that my neck was arched and offered up to him, and he sank his teeth into it. It left a mark that I would have to hide later.

The sun had moved across, leaving the room dim and shadowy. In the distance there were sounds of traffic, the angry whine of a scooter. But in that small, hot room, with its blank walls and twisted sheets, there was silence. My breath and his, entwined, laboured, gasping. He reached up to cover my mouth.

In company, I did not look at him. I refused to catch his eye. I laughed at other people’s jokes, smiled at whoever was talking. I engaged in conversation furiously, manically. I heard my own laughter, and it sounded false. The ghost of his mouth was on my breast, sweat on my back. My conscience like an iron band tightening about my head.

I lost interest in my art. Blank canvases stared back at me, accusingly. The brushes felt wrong in my hand. The hours passed like slow beasts. I was bored and restless. I couldn’t see
anything clearly; everything was cloudy, blurred. My faith in myself was draining away.

I dropped a jar of olives. The glass shattered into pieces on the tiled floor, the fruits careering off into every corner, like marbles bouncing and rolling.

‘What is with you?’ you asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘You’re not yourself.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You’re distracted. And clumsy.’

Your eyes swept over the mess on the floor.

‘Are you okay?’

Your hand on my back was solicitous and concerned.

‘I’m fine, Harry,’ I said, and moved away.

I bent down to hide my face from you, kneeling to clean up the mess.

A darkening room, a hush drawing over it. I lay beneath the slow whirr of the fan, my head resting on his chest, his hand in my hair, idly stroking. A brief moment of peace before I would have to rise up from those sheets and step into my clothes and go out into the dry night, leaving him behind me.

‘I want you to stay,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘But you won’t.’

‘I can’t.’

His silence was bullish, irritated. His body remained still, and yet I felt the stirrings of discontent within it.

This was a new thing. This growing need. This desire to linger afterwards. I felt the pull of him. My leave-taking was draining, weakening. I felt myself breaking up into pieces, disassembling. He had brought me to this.

‘You could leave him,’ he said.

The words hung over us, pulsing in the dry heat of the bedroom.

How long did it go on? A couple of months? Ten weeks? Not long. Not in the grand scheme of things, in the course of a whole adult life. Why is it that we measure our love affairs in temporal terms? A marriage that lasts forty years is viewed a success. But some things that are short can be more meaningful, in some ways more lasting than those that stretch out for a lifetime.

An evening at home. Cozimo came to our apartment for dinner. You and he sat and discussed a forthcoming trip to Seville while I prepared the meal. Lamb stew, dumplings, my fingers covered in flour. Lately, I had been concentrating my domestic efforts in the kitchen. Some need to nourish you, build you up, fortify you for what might break between us. Again, the guilt – it presented itself in strange ways.

I could hear your voices; I half-listened to the conversation, my attention drifting between the rooms, until my interest was snagged by a name.

‘Garrick gave it to me,’ Cozimo said.

I heard you let out a whistle of appreciation.

‘Jameson 1780,’ you said. ‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’

‘If you say so. I never developed much of a taste for whiskey. But I have never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth, either, so …’

His low voice, a dry chuckle.

‘So what was the occasion for the gift?’

‘He was clearing out his things. Giving away anything he didn’t want to take with him.’

I stopped what I was doing. I stood dead still, my whole being straining toward this conversation.

‘He’s left?’

‘Yes. I understand he took the boat last night.’

‘Do you know where he’s gone?’

‘He didn’t say. Home, perhaps.’

‘Wherever that is.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Do you think he will come back?’

I ached to hear the reply, but there was none. Not a verbal one, anyway. A shake of the head, perhaps, or a shrug of the shoulders.

‘Well, that’s just like him, isn’t it?’ you said, a sneer in your voice. ‘The mystery man. Disappearing without a trace.’

‘Yes.’

‘So what was his deal, Cozimo, hmm?’

‘I really could not say. But I think … I don’t know.’

‘What?’

‘I think there is a woman involved.’

‘Really?’ You perked up, interested now.

In the kitchen, my legs began to tremble.

‘Who? Someone here?’

‘No. Well, I’m sure he’s had his little trysts here. Who hasn’t? No, I mean back home, wherever home is for him. I always had the impression that he had someone waiting for him.’

A noise escaped from me. A cry of anguish, of betrayal. It was involuntary, and I put my hand to my mouth to stifle it.

‘Let me get some glasses,’ Cozimo said.

I turned away as he stepped behind me. I busied myself chopping onions so that he wouldn’t see my distress, my shaking hands.

He fumbled in a cupboard, searching for glasses. I couldn’t look at him. There was an ache in my stomach. I wanted to bend over and cry out. I heard the clink of glasses on the countertop, the unscrewing of a bottle. His hand was on my shoulder.

‘An aperitif, my dear?’

I looked at it, the gleam of light through the honey-coloured whiskey, the sweet, musky smell of it in my nostrils, and a wave of nausea surged up from deep inside me. I barely made it to the sink before I threw up.

The pain was physical, acute. A wound that had split open. The days stretched out endlessly. I was at turns furious, then weepy, then panicked. The sight of food turned my stomach. I was exhausted all the time. I called in sick to work and spent hours wrapped in the blankets, lying face down on our bed. I was too tired, too wrung out, to cry any more.

You worried. You sat on the edge of the bed, testing my brow for a fever.

‘We should get a doctor.’

‘What for?’ I asked. ‘It’s just a flu or something.’

‘You should eat something.’

‘Later, maybe.’

‘Some tea and toast, at least.’

‘Please, Harry, I just need to rest.’

What I wanted was to be left alone in a darkened room to wallow. I was depressed, broken-hearted. A doctor couldn’t do anything about that.

You looked down at me, worry lines furrowing your brow.

‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’

As soon as you said it, I knew it was true.

‘Are you?’ you repeated, eyebrows raised.

I drew myself up on to my elbows, stared at the pillow, furiously calculating dates.

Your hand was on my back. I turned to look at you, a slow smile starting on your face.