The Boy That Never Was (5 page)

‘Harry, come on. We’ve been through all this before. Dillon is dead. He was killed by an earthquake in Tangier.’ She enunciated each word slowly and carefully, as if talking to a child.

‘They never found a body.’

‘Well, there were lots of people in that earthquake whose remains were never found. That doesn’t mean they all survived and were spirited away to different countries, given new identities and began living different lives.’

I heard the mocking tone in her voice as I crossed the floor.

‘I saw him.’

‘Have you asked yourself, if by some miracle your son did manage to survive an earthquake, how on earth he could have made his way to Dublin, of all places?’ Her question lingered in the air. ‘It’s just not possible, Harry, is it? You’re stressed, under pressure … It’s not the first time. When you were in the hospital, in St James’s, didn’t I visit you?’

I turned and gave her one last look, and in a voice that I struggled to keep calm and firm, I said, ‘Diane, I saw him.’

She didn’t even look up. She just shook her head and drained her glass. But I had had enough. I needed to get out of there. I was late and wanted desperately to see Robin. I stood, walked away and, without a backward glance, I let the door slam behind me.

I drove to Slattery’s too fast. The van slid on one corner, but I held it together and drove more slowly until I found a parking space outside the pub. I knew Robin would be there. I was full of nerves. I wasn’t sure what I would tell her, but as soon as I saw her I could see that Robin had something to tell me.

She looked up at me expectantly as I approached the corner booth. She said nothing about me being late, just raised her face to accept my kiss. As I drew away, she smiled and handed me a menu and began to talk. I took the seat opposite her, eased my coat from my shoulders and felt the hammering of my heart as I considered what I was about to say.

‘I’ve ordered champagne,’ she said. ‘You don’t mind, do you? I know it’s extravagant, but still.’

‘What’s the occasion?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘A girl doesn’t always need an excuse to order champagne.’

‘True.’

She must have heard the doubt in my voice. She leaned across and took my hand and said, ‘I’m just happy. Isn’t that worth celebrating?’

I looked at her then, and I don’t know if it was the strangeness of the day or the renewed guilt I felt over Diane, but it was as if I were seeing my wife with fresh eyes. In the shadowy dimness of the pub, she seemed to radiate a warmth. I felt the turmoil inside me grow calm. I loved how she had eased into her thirties, growing into herself, becoming the woman I loved and not just the girl I had fancied. Dillon’s loss had aged us both; there was no doubt about that. When I looked at photographs of the two of us in Tangier, we seemed to be kids. We were students when first we met. Bright-eyed and all that. Now, well, yes, there were lines of age on her face, lines of sadness. In the dark blue-grey of her eyes, I saw an extra depth of melancholy, but not despair; instead, there was a depthless sympathy, a forgiving and timeless patience. The difference between us was, whereas I looked ragged and rough around the edges, Robin had aged gracefully.

‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said.

We raised our glasses to each other, and I drank and felt the bubbles fizz on the back of my tongue. For a brief instant, the room seemed to swirl. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I noticed that Robin’s drink was untouched.

‘So, what’s your news? You sounded frantic.’

I didn’t know what to say. The expectant look in her eyes, the champagne – it unnerved me momentarily.

She was staring at me. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine. Tired, that’s all.’

‘Are you sure? You look flushed.’

‘Do I? It’s probably just the heat in here after the cold outside.’

The look of concern lingered on her face.

‘I’m fine, really. It’s the champagne.’ And I reached across for her hand, felt the answering squeeze, and she smiled.

But I wasn’t fine. I was overrun by a strange mixture of emotions. One moment I felt elated: I had seen Dillon, after all. The next I sank into the depths of something I couldn’t quite climb out of. I knew that I had to tell her, but I couldn’t find the right words. I wanted to reveal the news carefully, so that she would trust the news I gave her and believe me. But part of me dreaded her reaction. A big part of me. While she was talking, I waited for the right moment to tell her, the pause in conversation when I could reveal what was on my mind. That our son was alive. That he was close by. That he was, after all these years, finally within our reach. But after one drink and then another, it was she who told me what she had wanted to tell me all day.

‘Harry,’ she said. Whenever she uses my name directly, I know it is something important. Usually, it’s something serious. She wants to, as gently as she can, suggest that I drink less, or spend more time at home, or consider going away with her for the weekend, or have dinner with her parents. Oh fuck, I thought, not Christmas; she wants us to have Christmas with her folks. She’s going to pay the bill and plead.
Please, Harry
, she’ll say.
Do this for me.

But she did not ask me. Instead, she said, quite matter-of-factly, ‘Harry, I’m pregnant.’

I stared at her. Not in surprise, really. Shock, more like.

She gave me a nervous smile, then bit down on her lip. ‘Did you hear what I said?’ she asked softly.

I had heard. It was crystal clear. But somehow I couldn’t respond. My mind filled and surged; it opened like a dam, a dam spilling out doubt and quandary. Finally I managed, ‘I don’t know what to say.’

I felt a strange mixture of emotions. Something rose in me, a wild excitement. I was to be a father again. Seeing Robin look so happy, radiating new possibilities for the future, made me doubt myself. It dispelled the thoughts that suggested that I did not want her to be pregnant. She reached out her hand, and the gesture brushed away my doubts, dismissed the afternoon, my visions, because that is what they must have been. The trickle of doubt I had felt over my sighting of the boy now strengthened. It became a rushing river. All my certainty was washed away, and with it my fury at the Guard’s inaction, my guilt over Diane, my own frustrated urge to comb the streets of Dublin to find my missing boy. The image dwindled and faded.

‘You’re going to have to say something, you know,’ Robin said.

I knew in that moment that I would not tell her about Dillon. About what I thought I had seen that day,
who
I had seen. I would have to keep that from her, because what she had told me made it so much more unlikely.

I said, ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘Believe it,’ Robin said. ‘It’s true. It’s going to happen. Harry, I’m so –’

I thought she was going to say ‘happy’, but she didn’t. She said something that surprised and puzzled me. She said, ‘– relieved. I’m so relieved.’

She was close to tears. Her hands were shaking. I got out of my seat and rounded the table. I slipped in beside
her and took her in my arms, felt the warmth of her there, the brush of her hair against my face. I whispered to her that it was wonderful news, that I couldn’t believe it. I tried to say all the right things, to use all the right words. I felt her hands on my back, the pressure of her fingertips against my spine, and all my hopes seemed to anchor themselves to her.

For the rest of the night, we talked about the baby. We talked about dates, night feedings and nappies, yet all the time, the ghosting image of Dillon wavered in and out of my consciousness. I could see, at different points in the night, his gaze, unsure but still and fixed.

Later, I stood in the bedroom, and the world spiralled about me as I tried to make sense of everything in and outside my head.

Robin got into bed. In her hands was a book, a book on pregnancy. I had never seen it before. Or had I? Was it an old one? Was it the one she had found in Cozimo’s secondhand bookstore in Tangier?

‘Are you coming to bed?’ she asked, putting down the book. She smiled. Her hands beckoned me to her, and I found myself reaching for her and pulling my clothes off within her embrace. Our bodies knew each other’s pulse, and we moved this way and that and found the groove and spell our love had known for so long. Her hands held me firm against her, her fingertips sinking into my back. Spent, we lay side by side, breathing heavily and sweating. Robin turned over and gradually fell into a deep sleep. After some time, I got out of bed and went to the bathroom.

On the way back to bed, I found a bottle of water on the floor, knelt and drank every last drop. I lifted myself on to the bed. Robin stirred. Her arm reached for me. I could see
the book about pregnancy on her side of the bed. The spine of the book wavered in my tired mind until it became any number of book spines, and before I knew it, I was falling surely and fitfully asleep, with the image of Cozimo and his dusty bookstore spinning and swirling in my already dizzy head.

When I woke on that snowy Sunday morning, I was immediately aware of what had gone between us the night before – my revelation and all that followed. In the quiet of the early-morning bedroom, I lay there and thought about it, about what it would mean for us, about how things would be different now. It was as if the house itself felt changed. It seemed enveloped in a new calm. This house, with its ancient walls, its creaky floors, its shifts and moans, had always seemed to be a living, breathing thing. Sentient, almost. The life force of the previous inhabitants had seeped into the raw materials of the house, the sheen of their spirits adding another layer to the multiple layers of paint and varnish and the stains of generations. But on that Sunday early morning, as I silently pulled back the covers and put my feet to the floor, I listened to the silence around me, and it was as if the breathing of the house had slowed, had grown easy. There were no creaks or moans as I got out of bed and padded across the floor, closing the door softly behind myself, leaving the room and Harry sleeping peacefully together.

Downstairs, I put the kettle on and looked about. I was taken with a new energy, a sense of urgency about my need to tackle the house. This restlessness rumbled about inside me as I walked from room to room, assessing the varying degrees of dilapidation and making a mental list of what needed to be done. I looked through the doorway that led into the garage, and in the half-light I could see the
cold, quiet space that would soon become Harry’s studio. It seemed to be waiting for him to begin, and I thought of how this room would soon be transformed into a place of creativity, of art, and I pictured Harry working away in here, deep in concentration, a quiet contentment possessing him and seeping out to every corner of our home. I thought of this, and felt a tingle of excitement pass through me: things were about to change.

The kettle whistled; I turned away, back towards the kitchen. I put a mug on the counter, and it was as I was pouring water over the teabag that it came for me – that old memory, swooping down out of nowhere – and all at once I was standing once again in that tiny bathroom in Tangier.

It had been hot. Even in that room, the one cool spot in the apartment, the air had felt heavy and dull with heat. Outside, in the hallway, I could hear Harry pacing up and down. Every couple of minutes, his footsteps stopped, and I knew that he was right there, right on the other side of the door, and that he was listening for me, for some clue as to what was going on. I had locked him out, had told him to wait, but his impatience and his barely contained excitement seemed to push up against the closed door. I could feel the insistence of it. Inside, I held myself very still, sweat gathering on my forehead and upper lip as I stared down at the white stick in my hand.

‘Well?’ he asked through the door. ‘Have you done it yet?’

His voice hit a nerve. Something inside me seemed to plummet.

‘Just a minute,’ I said, my voice thin and stretched.

I needed to compose myself.

I put the stick down and leaned against the sink. It felt cold to the touch. I would have liked, then, to lie down on
the tiled floor and press my face and body to the cool ceramic. I was so tired I could have fallen asleep right there, right then, and maybe, when I woke, I would have found that everything was all right, everything was as it should have been. I could have been myself again.

‘The instructions said you’d know within two minutes.’

That insistence again, the weight of it pressed against the door.

‘Come on,’ he said, tapping softly but impatiently. ‘You’re killing me here.’

There was a mirror above the sink. The face that stared back at me was pale and drawn. The eyes had a haunted look to them.

Robin, I said to myself. What on earth have you done?

I left the teabag on the draining board, my hand shaking. Get a grip, I told myself sternly. The tea made, I took it with me to the armchair drawn up to the window and I sat down and stared out at the frozen garden, feeling the mug warm between my hands. The memory had rattled me. Why had it come to me now? And in its wake, I felt unsettled, deflated, my energy draining away, leaving me in a lethargy of discontent. One memory followed another. They tumbled up from the past, demanding recognition. I sipped my tea and allowed my mind to wander.

I thought of that first pregnancy, the craziness of it. Stumbling and lurching from month to month, my mind struggling to catch up with the changes sweeping through my body. Harry had accepted it far more quickly and easily than I had. He had jumped at the possibility of a baby – pounced on it. From the very start of my pregnancy with Dillon, Harry was there, ambushing me with his eager anticipation, his hunger for it. And yet, last night, when I’d told him my news, he had not been like that at all. Instead he had grown still and silent.
He had stared at the table in front of him for the longest time, and I had felt the reluctance coming off him in waves. What was it he had said?

‘I can’t believe it.’

Now, sitting in my armchair by the window, the mug of tea cooling in my hands, those words came back to me, and I felt the chill echo of them in that silent room. I considered again what that reluctance might mean. I told myself that it was the suddenness of the news, coming on a day that had been difficult for him, what with moving out of his studio and all the complex emotions that entailed. I told myself that after Dillon, even good news brought on a strange mix of feelings. I told myself that, given time and space, he would come around to the idea.

And I knew from experience that it was best not to push it. Better to let these things lie. He was a man with a particular vulnerability. I knew the signs. Funny, the things you learn about yourself when a tragedy takes over your life. Who would have thought that I would turn out to be the strong one, while Harry fell to pieces.

A creak of floorboards overhead alerted me to his rising. I sat there listening to his movements in the bedroom, a pause before the groan of the door, and then the sound of him coming down the stairs.

‘Jesus, you look terrible,’ I said as he emerged from the hallway, a greenish tinge to his skin, his eyes bleary and bloodshot. He was holding himself carefully, as if every movement threatened the delicate balance of his hangover and it was a great effort to keep himself from veering over the precipice.

‘Tea,’ he croaked, his voice hoarse from a dozen cigarettes. ‘I feel like something’s died in my mouth.’

‘Kettle’s just boiled.’

I watched him there, pouring hot water into a mug, and I had the thought that the years might have fallen away and we could be students again. From where I was sitting, he seemed the same tall, somewhat gangly youth, with that unruly dark hair, the square set of his shoulders, a skittish energy running the length of his long, taut body. But I wasn’t eighteen any more, and he wasn’t twenty. He tossed the teabag and spoon into the sink and grimaced as his mouth met with the lip of the cup. Then he came and sat down opposite me, giving out a great sigh as he did so, running a hand over his face, rubbing his eyes, and I remembered how agitated he had been the night before, his eyes darting around the room, unable to settle. He has cold blue eyes, like shallow water touched by sunlight. One iris is flecked with an amber flame. Last night they had seemed very bright, but now, in the cold light of morning, they looked dull and ringed with fatigue.

He leaned forwards, putting his mug on the floor by his feet, then straightened up, taking his cigarettes from his pocket.

‘Harry,’ I said, watching him put one to his mouth, a wry smile starting on my lips. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’

He looked up, puzzled. And then he saw my amusement, and the confusion cleared from his face.

‘Christ. The baby! I’d forgotten.’

He shook his head and laughed, returning the cigarette to its pack, and then sat there, a little stunned, as if processing anew the information, and all the while I looked on, willing him to be pleased, willing him to show some indication that he could be happy about this.

And then he ran a hand through his hair and said, ‘A baby. I still don’t believe it,’ and the smile broke out on his face – a grin that sliced through the hangover and the tiredness and the tension – and this time the words seemed to have a
different meaning. It seemed, in fact, that what he meant was that he couldn’t believe his luck. That after all we had gone through, to be given a second chance, the gift of this new little life – it seemed too much to grasp.

I felt an answering jump of excitement inside.

‘You’re not angry, are you, Harry?’

‘Angry? No! Of course not. Why would I be? I’m a little surprised, that’s all, but not angry. Not in the least.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Robin, it’s great news. I’m thrilled. I swear.’

He said it and smiled and reached for my hand, and we sat like that for a moment, and I believed he was pleased. I really did.

‘So how are you feeling? Any nausea? Any sickness?’

‘No, nothing at all. I feel absolutely fine – great, in fact.’

‘Lucky you,’ he said, referring to his hangover.

For a while we talked about the pregnancy, picking up our conversation from last night. We discussed what hospital should we go to, what kind of care we wanted, when should I tell them at work, what would we do once the baby was born.

‘We’ll have to do something about this place,’ he said, casting his eyes about the room, as if noticing for the first time the snaking cables, the holes in the walls, the whole shambolic array of projects started and stalled.

‘Jesus, where to begin,’ he added.

‘If we can just work out the more pressing things that need to happen, and focus on them.’

‘Right. Well, you’d better make a list.’

‘Me?’

‘You are the architect, sweetheart,’ he remarked, not unkindly, and yet I felt a slight sting in his words.

My decision to study architecture after returning from Tangier had not rested easily with Harry. I had tried to explain
to him my need for something stable, something dependable in my life, in my career, and while on one level he seemed to understand, I’d always felt that a part of him resented me for my change of heart. It was as if he perceived some kind of accusation in my decision to abandon my art for the safety of a profession, while he continued with his. The truth was, I had needed, more than anything, to put Tangier behind me. To create a life utterly different from what we’d had there. I needed to forget. And while I had set about constructing my new existence, Harry had clung to what he had of the past. In his cold studio in Spencer’s basement, he’d persisted with his paintings of Tangier as if the world around him did not exist. It seemed, sometimes, as if he had never really left Morocco at all.

But that was not worth bringing up, particularly that morning, when he seemed focused on our future. So we talked about insulation and heating, about bathrooms and plumbing, about getting our bedroom in order so that we might make room for a cot.

‘A cot,’ he said as he finished his tea, giving his head a baffled shake. ‘That’s something I didn’t think I’d ever have to consider again. Can’t we just put the kid in a drawer?’

I took his empty mug from him and said, ‘Why don’t I get you some aspirin. Your hangover looks like it’s going to linger.’

‘Thanks, babe. I’ll just nip out for a smoke.’

I went to the sink and left his mug there. Then I fished in the cupboard for a pint glass and, as I was filling it with water, I looked up and caught sight of him outside in the garden. He was drawing deeply on his cigarette; then he breathed out a plume of smoke into the cold morning air. And what he did next was this: he took the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it on the snow. He stood perfectly still with his head
bent, as if staring at the butt on the ground. Then he closed his eyes and brought both hands up to cover his face. His bent neck, the slump of his shoulders, his face hiding in those cupped hands. Something about it made me go cold. It was a gesture of despair.

‘Freezing out there.’

He closed the back door behind him and stood there shivering.

I found the packets in the cupboard. The tablets plinked as they hit the water, and I handed him the glass, and he swallowed down the contents with a groan, as though the effort had drained him of any last scrap of energy.

I put my hand against his brow and felt the heat there despite the enveloping cold. Then I leaned in and wrapped my arms around him, pressing my body against his, needing to feel close to him to dispel the despair that still clung to him.

‘I know something that’s good for a hangover,’ I said slowly, and when I drew back, he met my smile with a broad grin of his own.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ I reached up and kissed him then, slowly, savouring the taste of him, sour with alcohol and cigarettes, but I didn’t care. My desire for him licked like a flame inside me.

And so it was not until later, when we lay against each other in our bed, naked and exhausted, a quiet contentment falling over us like a happy sigh, that I remembered our phone call of the previous day.

‘Harry?’ I said, watching the strand of my hair that he was idly spiralling around his finger.

‘Hmm?’

‘You never did tell me.’

‘Tell you what?’

‘Yesterday, on the phone, you said something had happened.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Remember? When you rang to ask me to come and meet you? You said something had happened. But you never said what it was.’

‘Didn’t I?’

‘No.’

‘I thought I did.’

‘So?’

He stopped playing with my hair and rubbed a finger in his eye, frown lines puckering his brow.

‘I bumped into someone.’

‘Who?’

‘Eh, Tanya – that girl from the Sitric Gallery. The one with all the freckles. Do you remember her?’

‘Vaguely. And?’

‘And we got talking and I told her about the stuff I’ve been working on …’

‘And …?’

‘And she sounded interested.’

I pushed myself up on to my elbows to look at him.