The Boy That Never Was (8 page)

‘Every time Diane is mentioned, you do this. Every fucking time.’

‘Do what?’

‘Bring on the big freeze. Give me the thin-lipped, disapproving look. It pisses me off.’

‘I’ve got good reason to disapprove.’

‘Why? She’s never done anything to you. So far as I can see, she’s only ever been nice and polite to you.’

‘Ha!’ I gave out a shout of mocking laughter. ‘Oh yes, very nice. God, Harry, you’re so blind. Nice to me? Every word she says to me is tainted with her condescension. I am the little wife of the great man, and doesn’t she love to remind me of it.’

‘It’s all in your head, Robin.’

‘All in my head, oh sure. Tell yourself that. Don’t you remember the one time she was in this house, and some of my old canvases were stacked against the wall, and she deigned to look through them and give me her professional opinion? Don’t you recall what she said?’

He gave me a weary, guarded look and drank deep from his coffee cup.

‘She cast her imperious gaze over them and told me that they were sweet.
Sweet, cosy, and parochial
– that’s what she said.
Parochial!
She actually used that word!’ As I thought of those words, I remembered again how small she had made me feel. I had seen my work through the sneer of her gaze and felt the awful deflation of failure.

‘So she didn’t like your stuff. So what?’

I held his gaze for a moment, and then, in a low voice, I said, ‘I don’t like the way she looks at you.’

Instantly he straightened up and slammed his cup on the counter. Giving me a dark look, he turned to leave.

‘I don’t have time for this crap.’

I stood there shaking my head, my hands squeezed into fists as the blood pumped hotly through my body.

‘That’s right, Harry. Walk away. God forbid you should stay and actually talk about it.’

‘We’ve been through this before! There’s nothing to talk about, apart from your paranoia.’

‘My
paranoia
? How dare you!’ My anger was brimming over, taking possession of every pocket of space within my body. I felt swollen with fury. ‘I am not paranoid! I know the two of you were fucking! I know it, Harry! I might not know the details, when it began or how long it went on for. I don’t even know if you’re fucking her still! But I know you two have been together, even if I can’t prove it. And it’s not paranoia, and fuck you for saying that it is! The very least you could do is show me just a little bit of respect and admit to it instead of lying to my face and dismissing me as some paranoid, neurotic little wife!’

‘That would make you happy, would it? That would get you off my back? All right then – I fucked her. There now. Happy?’

He spat the words at me and held his hands up in a gesture of mock surrender.

‘Make a joke of it then,’ I said, shaking my head and looking at him anew. ‘But you weren’t always like this. I never would have suspected you of sleeping with someone else – never. Not until Dillon –’

‘Don’t you mention him,’ he growled, raising a finger in warning. ‘Don’t you bring him into this.’

‘Is that why you do it?’ I went on regardless. ‘Does fucking around take your mind off the guilt? Does it numb the pain? Does it help to blot out the details of that night even for just a brief instant?’

He stared at me from the doorway. He looked tired, bleary and wild with pent-up rage. I wondered if there was a bottle somewhere in the garage, in among his things, that he would go to now and draw strength from.

‘Don’t be so bloody stupid,’ he said in a thick voice, then closed the door softly behind him.

It took me a long time to calm down after that. I felt my anger stalking around inside me like a big cat, clawed and dangerous. It snarled and paced, and I felt restless and distracted.

We don’t often argue, Harry and I. Neither one of us likes confrontation. But that day, in the kitchen, I was taken by a sudden rage, and, if I am honest, it had nothing to do with Diane. God knows, we have had that argument often enough. Nor did it have anything to do with the studio or what I saw as Harry’s adolescent sulk at having to give it up. Him and his bloody ground rules. The real root of my anger that day concerned my pregnancy and Harry’s apparent ambivalence towards it. No – more than that: his studied refusal to engage with it, whatever he said otherwise.

With Dillon he had wanted to know everything. Back then, he had pored over the pregnancy book I had found at Cozimo’s. He was relentless in his questioning, eager for details of the changes I was feeling. He had encouraged me to keep a diary, documenting my pregnancy so that we would always have some way of remembering it, long after the details had faded from memory. At that early stage, he was already planning for posterity. He had wanted so badly to
connect with the life growing inside me that it almost broke my heart. It almost suffocated me.

Now he seemed unable to connect with me or the pregnancy. He was caught up within his own thoughts, distracted by something he wouldn’t share with me. And what bothered me most, the thing that niggled away at me constantly, was worrying just what – or who – was causing his distraction.

Later that week, when there was a lull in activity at the office, I slipped out and walked briskly down Parliament Street, out on to Dame Street. I had spent the morning digitizing up drawings for one of the senior architects, and my eyes were watering from staring too long at the screen. Lately, I seemed to be doing little more than data-entry work, and it was getting to the point where even working on door schedules sounded exciting. But as the most junior member of the staff in a small practice, I had little choice in what work I did, and I knew, deep down, that I was lucky to have a job at all.

A heavy snow had fallen during the night, and the city felt blanketed – muffled. There was an air of desertion about it. What traffic there was moved slowly, and people picked their way carefully through the snow and the slush. It took me half an hour to reach Trinity College, and fifteen minutes more to make my way across the slippery cobblestones and the cricket pitches, out to the Lincoln Gate. I hadn’t thought of it until then, but my journey led me on to Fenian Street and past Harry’s recently vacated studio. It was just around the corner from Holles Street and the hospital. I looked up as I passed, up at the closed, opaque windows. I half-expected to see Spencer’s leathered features staring out. But the windows were blank, reflecting the dull glare of the sky. As I passed, I thought of Harry. Our argument had been patched up and yet something remained, like a lingering smell.

I reached the hospital and was directed to a prefabricated building behind an archway – the clinic I would be attending for my check-ups. At first glance it seemed a flimsy, temporary structure, not weighty enough for the serious business of having a baby. Inside, a hassled woman whose hair had been scraped back in a ponytail took my details and then set about putting together a folder for me. I watched in amazement as she amassed a sheaf of variously coloured pages, hastily leafing through and stabbing different sheets with labels in the harried yet bored manner of someone who has done this a thousand times. Then she handed it to me, along with an appointment card, and asked me to wait. Several minutes later, I was taken to a cramped office, where a brisk but cheerful woman proceeded to register me in more detail.

‘First baby?’ she asked brightly.

‘Second.’

‘Ah, so you know what you’re about, then.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Boy or girl?’

For a second, I was confused, and she looked up at me and said, ‘Your first child. Is it a boy or a girl?’

‘Boy.’

‘Ah. How old?’

I swallowed hard. After all this time, I am still not good with questions like that. My mouth went dry, my tongue sticking to my palate. I thought of Dillon, an involuntary memory of him in those last days before we lost him. His soft hair, how it curled about his neck; his chubby limbs, dimples on the knuckles of his fleshy little hands. That was how I thought of him – how I remembered him: a little boy, forever trapped in childhood.

‘Three,’ I said.

She smiled warmly, then directed her gaze from me to her computer monitor.

‘I’m sure he’ll be very excited to find out he’s going to have a brother or sister.’

‘Yes,’ I said weakly.

‘Now then. You’ve opted for combined care, so you’ll need to fill out this form and send it off to the Health Service Executive.’

The rest of the appointment was a blur, for I spent the whole time worrying about how I had lied about Dillon. Not an outright lie, but a lie of omission. Why had I done that? Because I could not bear to watch her face losing its brightness and taking on a mournful, sympathetic look, that’s why. I have been treated to that look more times than I care to think about. But then, throughout the course of the interview, I began to worry that the lie might have consequences, later on, throughout my visits here. I began to imagine coming in here and bumping into this kindly woman and having her ask about my pregnancy and did my son know about it yet, asking me in a corridor crowded with expectant women and their partners, all half-listening, watching idly, and then I would have to explain that Dillon had died, and the very thought of mentioning a dead child in front of a group of pregnant women seemed outrageous.

‘– and that will all happen at your first appointment. Now, let me write the date down on your appointment card, so you won’t forget.’

I handed it to her, watching her neat writing fill up a white square, still thinking I should say something to clarify things, something about Dillon.

‘So, when you come back for your appointment, go straight up the stairs there, and the nurse will see to you. Okay?’

‘Right. Thanks.’

I left her to her cheerful administration, still chewing my lip with indecision and regret, and that is when I heard my name being called.

‘Robin? Is it you?’

A woman in a blue dress with a neat, round bump like a Christmas pudding was approaching me with a hesitant, timorous smile. Her auburn hair was swept over one shoulder. Her face was crazy with freckles. It was a face I knew but couldn’t locate in memory.

‘It’s Tanya,’ she said. ‘From the Sitric Gallery? We met at your husband’s exhibition some years ago?’

‘Tanya. Yes. Yes, of course. I’m so sorry.’

‘That’s all right!’ she laughed, adding, ‘Pregnancy has a tendency to scramble your brain, doesn’t it?’

‘I suppose it does. When are you due?’

‘March. And you?’

‘Not till the summer. I’m actually just here to register.’

‘Ah,’ she said.

For a moment, neither of us said anything, both tacitly acknowledging the awkwardness of the situation. It is something you hope won’t happen – bumping into someone you know when going to register your pregnancy. Not yet ready to share your news, and yet there is no denying it once caught on the premises of an ante-natal clinic. I had the strange, almost shamefaced feeling of being caught with my hand in someone else’s purse.

‘How is Harry, anyway?’

‘He’s good, thanks. Busy,’ I added, remembering now what Harry had told me. ‘He mentioned that you might be interested in looking at some of his new work.’

A look of mild consternation crossed her face.

‘When he met you last weekend,’ I went on. ‘He was quite excited, in fact, although he’d kill me for saying as much. But you know he’d love the chance to exhibit again at the Sitric.’

The look on her face stopped me. Consternation had changed to genuine confusion, and she was shaking her head slowly.

‘You must be mistaken, Robin. I haven’t seen Harry in ages. In fact, it’s a good two years, at least, since we last met.’

‘Oh,’ I said, momentarily thrown. ‘Well, perhaps it was someone else from the Sitric Gallery that he was referring to. There’s another girl who works there – Sally or Sarah? I forget!’

I laughed, yet still she looked at me strangely.

‘The Sitric Gallery has closed,’ she said softly.

‘What?’

‘Another victim of the recession,’ she continued with a little mirthless laugh. ‘No one has money to spend on art any more.’

My mind raced. The Sitric had closed? My thoughts whirred back over what Harry had said – Tanya from the Sitric. The day of the march. I was sure that was who he had mentioned.

‘Well,’ she said, shrugging. ‘It was nice to see you. And please give Harry my best. Perhaps, when things pick up, our paths might cross again.’

‘Yes,’ I said with a smile. ‘Good luck.’

As I walked away, picking my way carefully through the snow, I thought about Harry, about what he had said, and wondered why he had lied. And if he hadn’t seen Tanya the day of the march, then who had he seen, and why did he not want to tell me?

Perhaps I was mistaken. I told myself that it was possible he had meant someone else from a different gallery and I had
just misheard or misinterpreted his remarks. But even as I turned the thought over in my mind, I knew it wasn’t true. He had lied to me. And I remembered how he’d been that day – agitated, distracted – and the memory stayed with me on the long, slow walk back to the office, creasing itself into a little furrow of worry: one more to add to the rest.

I woke up to ‘Fairytale of New York’ playing on the radio. That was it. As soon as you heard ‘Fairytale’, you knew Christmas was on its way. I felt rough. I felt like the scumbag in the song. The strung-out tones were fitting. Nothing like Shane MacGowan singing how he could have been someone on a bleak Monday morning in December to make you think of taking to the drink again. Hair of the dog was on my mind.

Beside me, the bed was stone cold. Robin must have been up for a while. I stumbled into the bathroom and got the water going. Standing under the shower with the jets of water spraying painfully across my face, I thought of what my life had come to, the point in the path that I was at. I thought of my work, the opportunities that were opening up to me now with this trip I was about to take. I was off to London for a meeting with a gallery about a show I might do, a follow-on from
The Tangier Manifesto
. A part two, if you like. I was nervous but excited, too, conscious of all the possibilities swirling about me. I thought of Robin and the baby growing inside her. I thought of this old house and the future that lay within it. All of these things flitted across the corridors of my mind. But a shadow was cast over them. The shadow of the boy I had seen. His face rose up amid the steam of the hot water, and I turned away from it, flicking off the water and stepping out of the tub. I did not shave, just dressed quickly, grabbed a few things and threw them into an overnight bag.

Robin called up the stairs to me:

‘Harry? Are you ready?’

‘Yep,’ I said, taking the stairs two at a time, pressed by a sudden need to get going.

‘I’ll drop you at the airport.’

‘What? In this snow?’

‘It’s not too bad. We can go for breakfast in the airport before your flight.’

‘Okay. If you’re sure?’

She gave me a warm smile of reassurance, then skipped past me to the van. As I locked up, I could hear her turning the engine over, bringing it to life.

‘Tickets? Passport? Wallet?’ she said as I got in beside her.

‘Check, check and check.’

She seemed so breezy that morning. An air of optimism hovered around her, giving off warmth on that cold, cold day. I felt so grateful for it in that moment that it was enough to dispel all my thoughts about the boy, about what I had seen or what I thought I had seen. Delusions, that’s what they were, brought on by guilt or fatigue or a combination of both.

Robin had turned her head to back out of the driveway when I saw the expression on her face change, the frown forming on her forehead. I turned, too, and saw the long snout of the old Jag pulling up, blocking our exit. I heard the creak of a hand brake and watched as the door opened and Spencer stepped out, fag clamped in his mouth, loose strands of uncombed hair lifting in the breeze.

‘Great,’ Robin declared in a flat tone as he raised a hand in salute.

‘I’ll get rid of him,’ I said.

She looked at me with a weary expression. ‘If only it were that simple.’

He was at the driver’s window now, tapping on the glass. Dutifully, she wound it down. I could smell his breath cutting across her, bitter and sharp.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Airport.’

‘Come on. I’ll give you a lift.’

He turned and stalked back to the Jag, not waiting for an answer.

Robin stared at her knuckles, her hands still gripping the steering wheel.

‘Sorry, love,’ I said, and I kissed her goodbye. She sighed. ‘I’ll make it up to you. Forget breakfast at the airport – I’ll take you out somewhere nice when I’m back.’

Robin didn’t respond. I climbed out of the car, feeling like I had let her down again, and stepped into Spencer’s. He had on a camelhair coat. Peeking beneath the lapels was a flash of black silk: he was still wearing his dressing gown. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked like he had not slept in a month.

‘Are you sure you’re okay to drive?’

‘What? Course I am,’ he said, holding up a breathalyser. ‘I have the system sussed.’

He drove so I had to clutch the door handle. My foot pressed to brake more than once. But we made it with time to spare.

‘I have talked with McDonagh, my mate in the Guards, and he has managed to source the CCTV for the hours in question. It’s all digitized these days.’

‘Oh. Right. Excellent.’

‘The man owed me a favour, so here, my friend, are half a dozen DVDs.’

I looked at the stack of them, bound with an elastic band, and a tide of mixed embarrassment and regret washed over me. Why had I asked him for these? What purpose could they possibly serve? At that moment, my suspicions seemed so patently absurd, let alone my desire for some amateur sleuthing.

‘These were not easy to come by, favour or no. Seems like they are hot property. Austerity measures, protests. Forget
The Tangier Manifesto
, that’s what you should call your next show.’

‘
Austerity Measures
?’

‘Bingo.’

‘Maybe I will.’

‘Listen, you’ll have to analyse those discs yourself. McDonagh may have owed me one big favour, but he was not about to look through three hundred hours of people walking up and down O’Connell Street.’

‘Three hundred hours?’

‘Give or take. There’s, like, three or four cameras, so … I don’t know, you do the maths.’

‘Right you are. Thanks again. You’re a mate.’

‘I’ve been called worse.’ He parked. ‘Look, are you going to buy me a drink or what?’

‘What about the car?’

‘I’ll leave it. And …’

‘And what?’

‘Say it was stolen or something, I don’t know.’

I checked in, and we went to the nearest bar.

‘So?’ Spencer said, an expectant look on his face.

‘What?’

‘Are you going to tell me what the fuck this is all about?’ He pointed at the discs, then reached for his pint.

I knew I couldn’t tell him. Mostly, because I was embarrassed – afraid, perhaps, of the conclusions he might draw from my behaviour, the references he might make to all the trouble in my past. Besides, he had not known Dillon. Not really. He had visited Tangier once, shortly after the birth, and we had spent a memorable weekend wetting the baby’s head. He had been the only friend to make it over and he’d
seemed genuinely happy for us. After that, he’d doted on Dillon but from afar, sending gifts and cards. He hadn’t been anything as official as a godfather, but he’d held a special status for Dillon. He’d been ‘Uncle Spencer’.

Before I had a chance to dodge the question, Spencer butted in: ‘You know there’s more than fifty fucking CCTV cameras in the city centre? Not to mention the rest of the country. Big Brother is watching you.’

‘You said it.’

‘What about our civil rights?’

‘Spencer, you don’t give a fuck about civil rights.’

‘How do you know? How do you know I don’t care about my civil rights?’

‘You are just looking to pick a fight.’

He glared at me as if I had insulted his mother.

‘You’re contrary today,’ I added.

‘No, I’m not.’

My phone rang. It was Diane. She knew about the Golden Clock gallery in London, but I did not really want her involved. I did not want her on the scent, representing me as if she owned me. The more distance I had from her, the better. I let the phone keep ringing. Spencer picked it up and saw Diane’s name. He pressed the reject button. ‘The less said, the better.’

I agreed.

More beers arrived.

‘You’re in a generous spirit,’ I said.

‘It’s my Christmas cheer.’ He picked my phone up again and logged on to the web comic Wheel Spinning Hamster Dead. ‘That’s us, my friend. That’s Ireland.’

‘Yeah, that’s hilarious, Spence. Really charming stuff,’ I said.

‘There’s no app for loneliness,’ he quipped.

‘You’re jealous you don’t have an iPhone,’ I said, but the truth was, I couldn’t afford it myself. Money was tight. My
overdraft had an overdraft. We had been given a house, but it was a poisoned chalice of sorts. The place’s upkeep threatened to wring us dry. It had leaks and draughts. This was broken, that was malfunctioning. I’d never say this to Robin, but we had inherited a wreck. ‘It’ll make a good home,’ she’d said. ‘It’ll serve us well. Why can’t you be more excited?’ I know I sound like a miserable sod, but it was the sense of not having earned it, or made it ourselves, that sat uneasily with me. We’d even taken out a mortgage to buy Mark’s half, to do the place up; taken out a mortgage on a house that had been given to us. Utter madness. And yet, mortgages, phones, none of it mattered – not right then. The glimmer of possibility still flickered and shone. Hope, I suppose you might call it.

‘You realize all the music you own is from the 1980s?’

‘Yeah?’

‘You sad fucker. Your music-listening life ended in 1989.’

‘Well, they are the vintage years.’

‘Howard Jones, Nik Kershaw. Please.’

‘The Cure, The Smiths.’

‘Lloyd Cole.’

‘Fucking love Lloyd Cole.’

‘Lost weekend in a hotel in Amsterdam.’

‘Story of my life.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two figures – a woman and a child – and I spun in my chair to look at them. But the boy was younger than he should be, only about three or four, and the woman was different too, the wrong hair colour, the wrong height.

I turned back and saw Spencer staring at me.

‘What is with you today, bud?’ he asked, looking me square in the face.

‘Nothing.’

‘You’re twitchy as hell.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Yes, you are. Every time someone walks past, you’re swinging around in your seat. Are you expecting someone?’

‘No!’ I said, indignant and flustered. ‘Here, finish this for me. I’ve got to head out.’

The flight boarded after a delay. The hold-up had something to do with de-icing the runway and the wingtips. If you thought too much about it all, you’d never go anywhere. I got on to the plane and sat down beside a woman whose first greeting to me was ‘Cold enough for you?’

Her perfume was so strong I could taste it. Even the gin and tonic I ordered did not help. Across the aisle, a man was coping with a crying child. He dipped the child’s dummy into his drink and popped it into the child’s mouth. The child stopped crying. The man saw me watching, smiled and gave me a wink. I turned away. It seemed that everywhere I looked, there were children. I couldn’t escape from them.

By the time I made it to London, it was too late for the meeting. I rang Daphne, and we rescheduled for the next afternoon. I had the half-formed notion to take in some of the sights, a museum maybe, or a walk down by Waterloo Station. But drinking so early in the day had left a fug of inertia within me, so instead, after checking into my hotel, I lay on my big boat of a bed, flicked on the telly and spent a mindless twenty minutes watching Nigella Lawson spoon one creamy concoction after another into her mouth. Spencer’s DVDs sat on the bedside table. I tried to ignore them, but I felt their presence nonetheless, drawing me to them like a scab demanding to be picked. It was a bad idea and I knew it, but after a while I turned the TV off, switched on my computer and fed the first DVD into the slot.

At first, I watched with half-hearted amusement. The images were grainy and of poor quality. I paged through a magazine, aware of the flickering movements across the screen, my attention snagging occasionally before it drifted away again. I’ll turn it off in a minute, I said to myself, but the minutes became hours, and soon I found myself ejecting a disc only to replace it with another. Trapped by boredom or torpor, my magazine discarded, I let myself get sucked into that screen and the images it conveyed.

One shot showed the Liffey. Three men rocked back and forth in a boat, waving banners. I had missed that one on the day. But there it was. I made instant coffee with the small kettle in the corner of the room. I kicked off my boots and propped the computer on a pillow. Hours passed, and the footage became a blur, people milling this way and that. Talking, moving on. It grew tedious.

The computer was like a hot rock on the bed. Wary of burning the hard drive out, I turned it off and took a break. I had watched hours of footage, and I was tired, but that didn’t stop me from going out. A beer at the hotel bar and then out to wander. I didn’t really know where I was going, but it was a chance to get out and clear my head. The city was under a veil of snow. Solitary walkers passed in lonely silhouette as they crossed the deserted parks. Black cabs moved slowly over a tide of slush. I wandered from bar to bar, images of the demonstration streaming through my head, before I looped back to the hotel with pains in my calves and knees from walking so carefully and sank dog-tired into bed.

I woke to the sound of my laptop humming. It blazed on the bed beside me as my head pounded. In the bathroom I gargled with mouthwash, then swallowed painkillers. No stomach for breakfast. I took my bag and walked towards Soho.

I was miles too early for the meeting, but I couldn’t spend another second in that hotel room. I needed to get away from my laptop and those DVDs. They contained nothing there but images to feed my already overextended delusion. It was unhealthy. I had to clear my head, to focus on the future. The past held only heartache.

With a view to killing some time, I wandered into the British Museum and found myself straying into the Egyptian exhibition. The painkillers had worked to a degree, but my head felt fuzzy, clotted with too many thoughts. I tried to concentrate on what I was viewing, but there was too much coming at me, elbowing for room in my crowded brain. I walked around in a daze, untouched, unmoved, until I came across the mummy of a child, from Hawara, Egypt, and stopped suddenly, riveted.

The mummy had been discovered in an excavation of a Roman cemetery near the pyramid at Hawara towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was elaborately wrapped, and there was a portrait of the child sketched into the outer layers of the wrappings. Over the torso of the mummy, a shroud had been painted with various scenes of the Egyptian religious tradition. The sky goddess Nut was at the top. I read the placard and learned that the child was the offspring of a woman whose mummy was housed in the Cairo Museum. Something about that caused an unexpected stab of pain. The child in London, the parent in Cairo. Separated, even in death.