The Boy That Never Was (26 page)

On a late afternoon in September, I find myself sitting alone outside a café in the heart of the medina. It is the kind of place that appeals to the tide of tourists who browse through the stalls of the Petit Socco, looking for a refuge from the fierce trade of that market, the haggling and the hassling, the guides and the touts, seeking out a chair in which to sip mint tea while watching the world go about its business here in Tangier. The waiter, a young Moroccan with a quick smile and distracted eyes, listens while I tell him my order, then gives a dismissive nod and wanders off in an unhurried manner. All around me are Americans, Italians, French nationals and Australians, some still bearing enthusiastic looks, others with the slump of the weary traveller, all on plastic seats pulled up to rickety tables that front the square, bathed now in the gentle heat of the declining sun, the shadows lengthening as evening draws in.

Of all the people in this busy place, I am the only one who sits alone.

The coffee I ordered comes, plonked down without ceremony.

‘
De rien,
’ my waiter intones without feeling when I thank him, then drifts away to another table, his tray held aloft, skimming the heads of the customers seated around me.

I take a sip, then fiddle with my mobile. One of the women at the next table leans in to impart some confidential information to her partner, who then swivels in his chair and gives me a brief, appraising look before turning away. I am distinctly aware, in this moment, that I am a
woman alone in this place. It is at once strange and yet familiar, too. The sights and smells reach some inner part of me, caressing the touchstone of memory, stirring it up again. The grand silhouettes of the tall palm trees that line the perimeter of the Petit Socco, black against the evening sky and its puckering of grey clouds scudding the horizon, the gentle lull in commerce that takes place at this hour of the day before the evening traders arrive to set up their stalls, the smell of exhaust fumes from waspish mopeds mingling with the sharp cleansing scent of the mint tea being brewed up and down this strip of cafés – all of it blends and rises up around me in a miasma of familiarity. And yet there is something profoundly wrong about being alone here in this place, in this city, where so often I had been with Harry.

But then, of course, I am not alone. My children are with me. Right now, they are at the Mendoubia Gardens with their uncle Mark and his girlfriend, Suki. An hour has passed since I watched them go, that happy group, the boy carried aloft on his uncle’s shoulders, the baby kicking her legs in her pram. I had kept my eyes on them until they disappeared from view, an involuntary clutch about my heart as I lost sight of them. An hour, and only now, with the coffee warming my throat, do I start to relax. Yet still I keep my mobile within easy reach, one eye watchful for an incoming call or text.

‘Take some time to yourself,’ Mark had said to me. ‘Make the most of us while we’re still here.’

‘I don’t know,’ I had said, chewing my lip, reluctance pulling me back.

‘We’ll be gone tomorrow, and then you’ll be wishing you had let us take the children off your hands while you still had a chance.’

And so I had put my fear aside and let them go.

I am unused to being alone, not quite sure of what to do with myself. There is no book in my hands to amuse or distract me. I fiddle with a sachet of sugar, sip from my cup and all at once, without warning, I am back there, on that cold winter day, in that lonely abandoned place, pulled by the drag of memory, and I recall with piercing rawness the events of that terrible day.

We hurried down the steps, down, down into the shadowy garden, grey in the dim light. The snow lay thickly about the house, and I laboured to plough my way through it, my heart beating high and light in my chest, the metallic taste of blood in my mouth from where I had chewed the inside of my cheek in those nervous moments before fleeing the house. My coat was too hot, the sheer weight of it hampering my movements. Sweat formed under my clothing. My whole body felt liquid and heavy. And underneath my ribs, my heart hammered away with fear and uncertainty. Every step I took put distance between us and the danger that was contained within that house. But I had left Harry behind.

I looked about myself, at the scrubby bushes and wiry trees black against the snow, and had no idea where to go, or what to do then. Eva had stopped, and I felt a corresponding hesitation within her, as she paused and stared back at the house, her arm still held protectively about the boy. When I saw the fear and suspicion in his eyes, it caused a tightening about my heart. I couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t resist the urge to glance down at his face, to check again that it was really him, that it was really my son, the boy who was dead. Eva held his hand, avoiding my gaze, and yet I felt no anger towards her. That would come later, when it was all over and I realized
the great wrong that had been done to us, the theft of those precious years, the breaking of a bond that might forever be beyond repair. But in that moment, I was still occupying a place of disbelief and a surging emotion that I couldn’t quite identify: relief? Joy? The blasting away of all my sorrow? The boy who was dead, the boy who had been claimed by the earth, now returned to me, older, changed, but living, breathing. At that moment, it was all that mattered.

I stayed close. I didn’t want to take my eyes off them, and yet something made me look back – a sense of foreboding, perhaps – and as I did so I saw Harry standing there at the top of the steps, his tall body framed by the shadow of the doorway, and every particle of my being strained to go to him. It was all I could do to hold myself back. Just a glimpse was all I got. Then a car drew up, and there were raised voices, slamming doors. Everything happened too quickly. I saw the glint of gunmetal in my husband’s hand, watched in horror as he raised and pointed that weapon at a man bounding up the steps towards him. The man paused, his hands held up in a gesture of surrender. Then Harry took a step back and the door closed and the house swallowed him up and a plunge of terror went through me – a shiver of dread – as I realized with an empty gravity that I might not see him alive again.

The man turned and bounded down the steps toward us, and I saw Spencer’s sagging features contorted into a grimace of anxiety.

‘Get down!’ he shouted as he came, and I felt the urgency in his voice and the weight of his body pressing on me, pinning me down. Eva, Dillon – all three of us were held there by his grip as he kept shouting at us to stay down, his voice enraged, it seemed to me, or maybe it was fear I heard. The
cold dampness of the snow clawed its way through my clothing. I felt nauseous and weak and dreadfully scared. At the same time, I was in the grip of a surreal sensation – that this was happening not to me but to someone else. That I was merely watching another woman flung on to the snow, in the grip of near hysteria. That it was not me who kept glancing fearfully across at the son she had presumed dead, but someone else, someone ghostly and drawn, someone whose foundations had just been rocked.

And then the clouds above us seemed to part, the hard brightness of the winter moon breaking through and falling on the snow. It made me feel dizzy, disoriented, as if my head had been held underwater for a time and now emerged, gasping for breath, panicked and unsure of everything. The door was half-open suddenly, and Spencer was moving quickly back towards it, and it was as I watched him bounding up those steps that I heard it. A sharp crack in the middle distance that disturbed the air. I looked up at the house. Holding my breath, I could hear nothing, only the boy’s breathing beside me. A cold, hard fear came down over me then, and my body began to tremble and shake.

‘Oh Jesus,’ I heard Eva say. ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’

I caught the urgency and high note of fear in her voice, and, seized by a new panic, I stared hard at the house, at the door that was ajar, at the shadows that moved there, shapes coming out of the darkness, announcing themselves as figures. Spencer was inside now, kneeling by the door. All that was visible of him was his hunched form, the soles of his shoes. He turned then, and I saw his face as a streak of fear.

‘Call an ambulance!’ he cried out, before twisting away from us.

‘Oh God!’ Eva cried. ‘Oh my God!’

She fumbled for her phone and began punching in digits and I heard the shrill panic in her voice, and I knew all about that panic, that innate fear realized, yet still I didn’t give voice to it.

In my head, I was willing him to stand up, willing the door to swing back and reveal my husband to me, standing, unharmed, safe. Someone was lying on the floor – I couldn’t see who – and a voice inside me repeated over and over with the pleading insistence of a prayer,
Let it not be Harry. Let it not be him.

How long did I wait there? How long did I kneel in the snow, straining with hope and fear? My whole life stilled and condensed and sharpened down to that one moment in time, that one fervent desire.

And then the door opened a little more and a face announced itself from within the gloom, and I saw Garrick standing there, his face drawn, his hand to his mouth, bewildered, uncertain. I saw him, and the knowledge hit me with full force.

My heart clenched, and I opened my mouth wide and felt the screams coming out of me and filling the air, echoing off every tree and wall and icy surface in that cold, wintry space and coming back at me redoubled.

‘
C’est fini?
’

I look up at the waiter pointing to my empty cup, his voice shattering my reverie and claiming my attention, drawing me mercifully back to the present.

‘
Oui,
’ I say, then order another.

He casts his eyes briefly over me. I feel that he is looking at me properly for the first time and try to rearrange my features accordingly, smoothing them out to a flat expression, bringing them back from the shadowy depths of the past.

The people at the next table are lively, their voices raised, a farewell of some kind or other. A sudden crash and the shattering of glass as a waiter in the next café drops his tray, and all along the strip, the other waiters pause to cheer and applaud the mishap, drawing indulgent smiles from the tourists. My eyes follow them, flickering with interest, picking out the many faces among them in an involuntary sweep of the crowd.

The world is a different place for me now. I see it with fresh eyes. Danger lurks in familiar places. Harry is gone, killed instantly by a bullet that penetrated his heart. An accident, or so Garrick’s lawyers are pleading. The gun went off as the two men tussled for control of it. I try to imagine that moment: the charged atmosphere in that house, the two of them grappling, the sudden violence of the gun going off and the shock it must have caused. When I picture it, I see Harry’s eyes flying open, a look of naked surprise there before the pain clouds his face and his body folds in around the sharp, burning point of it. Luck was not on Harry’s side that day. There is a painful irony to his fate. It might have been either of them.

The child I had lost has been returned to me, changed, damaged, the bond between us broken. Every day is a battle to win his trust. The suspicion in his eyes that greets me causes my heart to clench with pain. And there is a new child – a girl – a living reminder of her father, with his dark hair and his wide, round eyes, solemn and appraising. She clings to me and I to her. She is my greatest comfort in all of this.

The baby was born in July, and it was a few weeks later, on a warm September afternoon, that I made my decision. We
were sitting together, my mother and I, in the kitchen of my parents’ house, looking out at the garden dappled in golden sunlight. My father was hunkered down beside the flower beds, pulling weeds and deadheading sweet peas. Dillon attended him, watching with a grave expression, dutifully handing over tools when they were called for. I studied the tension in his narrow shoulders, his quiet obedience, and felt vaguely unsettled. He had none of the mischief or vigour that a young boy should have. His stillness and compliance – the good boy that he was – worried me greatly. My head was swimming with exhaustion; every limb felt sodden and swamped, as if I were submerged in water, fully clothed, my soaked garments weighing me down. All I wanted was to let go of these thoughts and fears and constant anxieties and just sleep for more than three hours together. But I was also afraid of what might happen were I to let my guard down. My grief had not hit me yet, and I feared that a lowering of my defences would merely provide it with an opportunity to creep in and engulf me.

‘What about Hazel?’ my mother said, snagging my attention.

The baby was asleep in her arms, swaddled in a blanket, my mother’s eyes locked on her little face.

‘Hazel?’

‘Yes. I’ve always thought it a lovely name.’

‘I don’t think she’s a Hazel.’

‘Alannah then?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you have to call her something,’ my mother said after a moment, a note of impatience creeping into her voice. ‘We can’t go on calling her “baby”. She’s almost two months old.’

I felt her voice like a tiny hammer pinging against the roof of my skull and turned back to gaze out the window.

She was right, of course. I would have to give the child a name. But since I had lost Harry, I had become unmoored. My pregnancy had been a blur of confusion, the birth an episode of pain and distress and sudden joy arising from my grief. Since then, I had been drifting through the days and weeks. Things happened around me, but I found it difficult to focus my attention, to lock down hard on any one thing. A form of running away, I suppose, by refusing to confront what was there. But it was the only way I could cope with everything that had happened. Sometimes, a hazy oblivion seemed like a form of solace. I felt the weight of responsibilities tugging at me, but making a decision, one as important as the name my daughter would bear for the rest of her life, seemed beyond me.

Outside, my father was holding his cupped hand out to Dillon, and the boy peered down into it, his neck straining with curiosity. It must have been a worm, or an insect of some kind, for suddenly my father brought his hand close to Dillon’s face, which sent the boy reeling backwards, and then they both started laughing, and it was so surprising to see my son happy, so rare and unexpected, that my eyes filled with tears, and I had to look away.