The Boy That Never Was (10 page)

More than anything, I wanted to tell him how I had seen Dillon.

Through the walls, I could hear a dog barking. Cozimo looked up at me. He smiled weakly. Had he lost his teeth? His face was shrunken.

‘I’m afraid of dogs,’ he said, quite blankly and unfamiliarly.

I felt a little weepy. I wanted the old Cozimo back. I wanted his strong, blithe spirit back.

‘I meant to keep in touch,’ I said.

There was a long, strange silence. The haunting tones of the cello echoed through the small living room. I felt claustrophobic and short of breath.

‘I saw something yesterday, in the British Museum. A child mummy. It looked like Dillon.’

‘Ah,’ he intoned, nodding thoughtfully, a sad smile coming over his face.

My heart was beating high up in my chest, and I felt his little eyes alight on my face, curious now, snagged by my hesitation.

‘And I saw him. I saw Dillon, too. In Dublin. At least, I think it was him.’

Cozimo sat forward now, his eyes narrowed with concern or suspicion. I was unnerved by the look but ploughed on regardless. I told him where it had happened. I told him about the woman, about calling out, about how the boy had turned around and looked at me, and the fleeting instance of recognition in his eyes. I told him all of it and then I paused, hearing his breath rasping across the distance of space between us.

He didn’t speak, and I let out a nervous laugh and said, ‘I feel like I’m going out of my mind, Coz. My dead son resurrected. I know it sounds unlikely.’

‘Very unlikely,’ he said, not unkindly, but something sank within me nonetheless. I gazed into my empty glass and felt my grief plumbing a new depth, before he added, ‘But not impossible.’

I looked up then and caught his gaze, which was unreadable, and waited for him to say something more.

He exhaled slowly and uneasily. ‘There were things I knew which perhaps I should have told you.’

‘Like what?’

‘I’m not sure it matters now.’

His lungs wheezed and rattled, and he shrugged his narrow shoulders, his face set in an expression of weary acceptance.

‘Maybe it does matter?’

‘I’m tired,’ he said sadly.

I’d leaned in to press him on the point, to prod him to reveal what was bothering him, when I heard a key unlock
the front door. Then somebody walked down the hallway and into the living room.

‘This is Maya,’ Cozimo said by way of introduction. ‘Do you remember each other?’

I looked up and saw a short Spanish woman in her early forties. I did not remember her, nor did Maya say anything about knowing me. She took off her coat, threw a log on to the fire and took the glass from Cozimo.

‘It’s nice to meet you …’

‘Harry.’

‘Harry … but Cozimo is not to drink.’ She put his glass down on the table and, without reproach, said, ‘He needs to rest now.’

Cozimo smiled indulgently. ‘But Harry has only just got here.’

Maya placed a footstool beneath Cozimo’s feet and fixed a blanket over his legs.

‘He and Robin and their son, Dillon, lived above my bookstore.’

Maya said nothing. Cozimo looked to me with something like pity in his eyes.

‘Before the earthquake. Everything changed after that. It still haunts me, Harry.’

‘Yes.’

‘But we had some good times, didn’t we, Harry?’

The desire to press him about what he had said, what he had intimated, drained from me. Maybe because he had mentioned Dillon to Maya, because he had said the word ‘earthquake’. Maybe I didn’t think in his state of health he would be able to handle it. I lost my nerve and let it go.

‘The nights we had chez Cozimo.’ He seemed to sink into a reverie, further into the chair, further into himself.

Maya stood, waiting for me.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I will call tomorrow.’

‘Thank you for coming, Harry,’ he said after a moment, now looking into the fire. The cello suite had ended, and the needle of the record player lapped over the lip of the final groove of the record with the sound of a lulling tide coming in.

I gathered up my coat, and Maya walked me to the door.

‘I do hope we see each other again,’ Cozimo said, his voice barely audible, before I walked back into the snow.

I picked my stuff up from the hotel and reached the airport only to discover that my flight had been cancelled.

‘The morning looks better,’ an attendant told me.

I went in search of somewhere to sit or lie down. Bodies were strewn about the airport as if after some kind of natural disaster.

I found a corner and threw my coat over myself, but it was too cold to sleep. I dug my computer out and pressed play. Time passed in a deadening blur. Sometime in the hour after dawn, my head fuzzy with fatigue, the sky beyond the airport terminal turning from black to violet, sounds of an industrial vacuum humming over the cold, hard floor, something on the screen made me sit upright. Two spectral figures, a boy and a woman, hand in hand, walking up O’Connell Street among the protesters.

The woman stops to look into a window. The boy is pulling at her. They walk on. They reach the top of O’Connell Street.

And then the DVD ends.

My heart was racing, and my mouth was dry. Jesus, I thought. That’s them. That’s him. That’s Dillon. I did see him. I am not going mad. I rewound. The software on the computer allowed me to zoom in on them. Yes, it was him. Tears
welled in my eyes. I felt a curious mixture of joy and fear, panic and relief.

I scrambled furiously to find the next disc, slotted it into the computer, and feasted once again on the sight of my son. I could see them as they ambled up O’Connell Street; a car was waiting for them. It was an old red Ford. I strained to see the licence plate. I paused the video and scrambled among the mess in my bag for a pen and paper. I could not quite make out the numbers. The battery on my computer was about to die. Still, I rewound, pressed play again. I had the year, 01. I had the county letters, and the next four digits were there. The last digit was blurred, though, vague and indistinct. I rewound the disc, played it once more. Finally I had it.

When I got home that Wednesday evening, the street was in darkness. House alarms were screaming a few doors up, and a dog was going nuts in somebody’s rear garden. There was a dull ache in the small of my back as I unlocked the front door and stepped inside, flicking the light switch redundantly up and down.

‘Great,’ I said aloud to the dim, empty hall. ‘Just great.’

I knew there was a flashlight somewhere in the kitchen, and I fumbled through the hall, inching my way along, the dark all around me growing black and dense. In the kitchen, things were a little brighter. The moon was casting a cold glow on the garden, which remained covered in snow. The light reflected off it gave a blue sheen to the hard surfaces of the countertops and cupboards. I fished in the drawers until I found a small black flashlight and some candles and matches, and for the next ten minutes I set about filling the rooms of the house with flickering light. The place was freezing, so once I had completed that task, I lit the radiant heater in the kitchen and set a fire in the fireplace of the sitting room, and another one in the narrow fireplace of our bedroom, my need for light and warmth overpowering my worry over the risk of setting the place ablaze. I rooted through the mess of clothes strewn around the bottom of our wardrobe until I found one of Harry’s woollen sweaters big enough to suit my purpose and, having wrapped myself in it, I burrowed my nose into the rough knit of the sleeve and inhaled the musky scent of cigarettes and the chemical odour of oil
paint, which seemed the very essence of Harry himself, and felt warmed and comforted.

There was something nostalgic about being plunged into darkness like this. It reminded me of power cuts when I was a kid, back in the eighties, when Ireland was in a deep recession. I had a memory of being huddled around the kitchen table, playing Scrabble by candlelight with my mother and father and brother.

But there was no one to play Scrabble with that night. Harry was stuck in London, stranded by the snow. In general, I don’t mind being alone. There are times, in fact, when I crave it. In Tangier, when we were living in that space, eating together, sleeping together, working together, it felt claustrophobic, stifling. I had to get out of there regularly, away from those rooms, away from Harry even. Just to be by myself for a while. He has a powerful presence. He fills a room. Sometimes I felt the force of his personality so strongly, the relentless punching of it, I thought that if I didn’t get away from it, my sense of myself would become so porous that I would lose myself in him. But that night, sitting there in the red glow of the heater, I became aware of how large this house was. The high ceilings, the cavernous rooms above and behind me. Space and more space. I felt the first pang of loneliness.

I rang Harry, but it went through to his voicemail.

‘Hey there, you. Hope all’s going well in London. I’m sitting here in the cold and dark in the middle of a blackout. It really is the eighties all over again. Hope it’s luminous where you are. Anyway. I miss you. Ring me if you get a chance.’

I hung up and thought about my message, hoping I sounded upbeat and not needy or lonely. Harry would hate that.

The power cut meant I couldn’t cook, so I grazed on stuff from the fridge – a yogurt, the ends of different cheeses, a slice of melon that was almost dried out, a couple of squares of chocolate. There was nothing much else to eat in the house, and it left me feeling light and insubstantial. But the snow made me reluctant to venture out again, and I couldn’t be bothered getting a pizza delivered. I sat at the kitchen table, feeling restless.

What happened next was not planned. It was the restlessness that started it. I browsed the Internet until the battery of my laptop ran out. Then I tried reading, but the candle kept wavering, and I had to squint to make out the text, so pretty soon I gave up, sat back and looked about. I looked at the old cupboards, at the paint peeling off them. I looked at the long tube of the fluorescent light fixture on the ceiling, which was coated in the grime of generations but was dark now, the kitchen strangely silent without its constant buzzing or the sibilant hum of the fridge. I looked around at everything I wanted to get rid of, to peel off and strip away, to throw out and paint over, and then my eyes came to rest on the door to the garage.

As I sat there staring at it, I began to think of the distance that had sprung up between me and Harry lately. He’d seemed harsh in recent days – surly and morose. And I was skittish with nerves. There was a coolness between us, a sensitivity that seemed to cling to our conversations, so that I felt the need to tread carefully, that each word spoken between us was laden with meaning, that the most innocent facial expression or casual gesture could be misread out of all proportion. I don’t know why, but the thought came to me then that all of it could be made right if I were to go into the garage now, into the space that was becoming his studio. I had a half-formed notion that if I were to spend some time
there alone, among his work, among the things he created his art with, I would gain some new understanding of him, some feeling of empathy that would soften things between us. Perhaps it was snooping. And certainly there was an air of distrust between us that might have driven me in there. Or maybe it was just curiosity. Either way, it got me out of my chair, holding on to my candle in a jar as I pushed the door open, flicking the light switch out of habit, and stepped down into that cold concrete room.

I don’t know what it was I went looking for. I really don’t. And standing there with my candle held aloft, looking about at the heaped-up pile of junk in one corner and the spread of contents from Harry’s studio sprawled all over the ground like a spillage, I said to myself, Robin, this is ridiculous. You are being ridiculous.

But instead of backing out of the room, I stepped in further and found a place to rest my candle. It was freezing in there. I took Harry’s jacket from its hook on the back of the door and slipped my arms into the sleeves. Then, hands on hips, I looked around, trying to work out where to start. There were some plastic crates stacked against one wall, and it was to these I went first. One contained the fax machine. Another held coils and coils of wires and cables, and batteries that skittered and rolled as I lifted the crate and put it to one side. The crate underneath contained paperwork, and I sat down cross-legged on an old roll of carpet and set about going through it, anxiously scanning each receipt, each fax and letter and bill, anything that might give me some clue as to why my husband was behaving in such a strange manner. I must have spent a half-hour going through it, growing colder and more exasperated with each minute. And guilty. The shade of guilt grew darker the more I looked. At this stage, I was snooping. I could admit that much to
myself. And at the end of it all, I’d barely turned up anything. A receipt for a night out at La Cave that amounted to almost three hundred euros was the only incriminating thing. Well, that and a cryptic fax from Diane: ‘What a night! A triumph! You were really something … as always. Dx.’

I sat there looking at it. ‘Bitch,’ I said aloud to the empty room. ‘Poisonous bitch.’ And taken with a cold rage, I held the corner of the fax to the flame of my candle and watched it blacken and crinkle, the flame eating up the page. There was a bucket in the corner by the stack of canvases, and I took the smoking page over and dropped it there, watching the last of it shrivel and burn against the cold enamel. There was some satisfaction in that, but still the restlessness lingered, and as I looked about I saw a wooden box, the corners sealed with hammered metal. It was half-hidden by a roll of canvas, stashed away beneath some storage shelves. Drawn to it, I set my candle down on the ground beside it, moved the canvas to one side and slid the crate out from beneath the shelf. As I pulled it towards me, I felt the roll of the bottle within, heard the clink of the glass against something metal. I reached inside and, from among the rolled-up sketches, pulled out an almost empty bottle of Lagavulin. I stared at the honey-coloured liquid gleaming in the light of the candle. It was so obvious and expected, it made me suddenly depressed. Why had I gone looking through all this stuff? What had I hoped to find? I should have known that nothing good would have come of it, that all I could possibly find was something else to cause me pain. With a heavy heart, I put the bottle back, and it was as I leaned forwards to push the crate back into its hiding place that I caught sight of it. It made me stop cold. I held my breath.

The first one I drew from the box was dated April 2005. Barely a month after Dillon had died. It was a pencil sketch,
and the likeness was so clear and immediate it caused a tightening around my heart. Those eyes so black and luminous in the round saucers of sockets. Harry had used a pencil with a soft nib, and this softness made Dillon’s eyes seem dreamy and plaintive, as though they were looking out from beneath a film of water. His mouth was open a little, a smudge on the lips giving them the appearance of wetness, as if he had just licked them. A faint flick of the pencil had given his chin a cleft – the chin dimple I had worried so much about. His hair was tousled, as if he’d just been woken from sleep. I stared hard at the sketch. It was a mask of innocence.

The next one was dated November 2005. We would have been back in Ireland by then, trying desperately to piece together a life for ourselves from the shards and fragments left in his absence. Harry had drawn this one as if Dillon had been caught by surprise. His body was facing one way; only his head turned to stare back at the artist. And in this sketch the pencil used had been harder, darker. Sharp lines carved out the hollow stare, picking out the questioning shine of his eyes, the straight line of his closed mouth. His hair was a little longer; it curled under at the nape of his neck.

May 2006 then. Again, the same hard pencil, the same sharp lines. This time Dillon was facing the artist full-on. And there was something angry about his face. His eyes seemed flatter, colder. A feeling of distance had come into this drawing, and I couldn’t tell exactly how. The hair was even longer, more dishevelled. It had a grubbiness that suggested a tougher existence, mirrored in the look in Dillon’s eyes. A defensive look.

The sketches continued. They went on and on. Year after year. And each one showed him a little older. Each one showed him a little more distant, a little harder. Something about his face seemed to be closing itself off, shutting itself
down, so that by the time I reached the last one – dated July 2010 – it was as if the very spirit of my son had been extinguished. A hard, sharp face stared out at me. All the softness had been erased; the innocence had disappeared. I saw a tough, angry boy. A boy who looked like Dillon. But not the Dillon I knew, not the Dillon I remembered, not the Dillon I loved.

The light came on, and I gave a little cry of shock. With the electricity restored, I was plunged into the stark brightness and, looking around, I saw that I was kneeling in a corner of the garage surrounded by all the sketches of Dillon. Under the harsh light of the bare bulb, with all those portraits scattered in a semi-circle around me, as though they were closing in, I experienced a tightening under my ribs like panic.

‘Why?’ I said aloud. ‘Why has he done this?’

All these sketches, all these years. The labour and the longing that must have gone into them. I looked at the wooden box he had shoved in under the shelves – that he had hidden – and thought of all the pain he kept squirrelled away, hidden from my view, and it filled me with sadness and that age-old remorse. Slowly, I gathered the pictures together and put them in their box, pushing it back in place and returning the roll of canvas so that the box was once more obscured. It was as if I had never touched them.

I couldn’t sleep. For hours, I tossed and turned, trying to find a cool spot on the pillow. My limbs kept creeping across the mattress, trying to find Harry’s sleeping form. I have always found it difficult to sleep when alone. I stared up at the dark ceiling and tried to drag my mind out of the corridors it kept travelling down. Ancient, dusty passages filled with shadows. Tangier. Old memories, old faces – Cozimo, Raul, Garrick …
One memory I kept returning to was a night in Tangier during the time when Harry and I were separated. It was not a long separation – three or four weeks. Long enough to feel lonely. Long enough for my anger to bloom and then wither. Dillon was three years old at the time – I mention this, because he was the cause of our estrangement. Or, rather, it was what Harry did to him that prompted my furious response, that caused me to snap and throw him out of our house.

Those pills.

I can still remember it. The horrible plunging feeling when I held them in my hand and realized what Harry had been doing.

Cozimo had taken him in, of course. Cozimo, his friend and ally. An accomplice of sorts. And it was Cozimo who came to me after three or four weeks to plead Harry’s case and ask me to take him back.

I remember the night. The alleys dark and quiet. The soft sounds of Dillon playing quietly with toys in his bed. Cozimo sprawled on the couch, languorously sipping the martini I had grudgingly made for him. All the while I sat opposite him, my arms folded across my chest, unsmiling and staring implacably at him, quietly enraged by his presence – the gall of the man.

‘You know you won’t be able to keep this up for ever,’ he remarked.

‘Won’t I?’

‘No, of course not, my dear. You are angry, and that is fine. You have every right to be.’

‘Yes, I am aware of that, Cozimo.’

He ignored the pointed remark and continued: ‘But such anger is exhausting. It will wear you down. And the single unalterable fact remains that you love Harry and Harry loves you, and that, as they say, is that.’

He raised his eyebrows as if to say,
end of argument
, and sipped his drink, sinking a little deeper into the sofa.

‘I would question the “unalterable” part of your statement.’

He smiled and gave a little wheeze of a laugh.

‘Your love for each other has been tested, granted.’