The Boy That Never Was (13 page)

‘Yep.’

‘Here, hold it for me a sec,’ she said, dumping the heavy dish into my arms and rooting in her bag for her wallet, and it was as I stood there, clasping the dish to my chest, that I saw him. My heart beat wildly, and the casserole dish almost slipped from my grasp.

He was leaning forwards, peering with great concentration at a display of coffee machines, and as I moved towards him,
he looked up and I caught the sudden flash of consternation crossing his face.

‘Hello,’ I said, trying to sound calm, trying to keep cool, but all the while I stared at him, not really believing it to be true. Everything about it was wrong: the wrong time, the wrong place. After all these years, here he was standing before me, in a department store in Dublin – it seemed incongruous, perverse almost.

The look on his face changed then, something about it closing down. A defensive look.

‘Don’t you know me?’ I asked with a nervous smile. He was still just standing there, spooked into silence, and I felt my face burning.

‘Of course I know you, Robin.’

My mouth was dry as paper, my body steaming under my clothes.

He looked older, his hair running now to grey at the temples, lines fanning out from his eyes, and two deep creases travelling from either side of his nose down to the corners of his mouth, like brackets. His clothes looked expensive and warm. I found myself more distracted by this than by the rest of his appearance. I guess it was because I had never known him to wear anything other than cotton or linen, fabrics flimsy and cool enough to cope with the muggy Moroccan heat. It was disorienting, seeing him muffled up in cashmere and wool.

‘What are you doing here?’ I blurted out, the words sounding rude and abrupt. I was flustered, acutely aware of Liz looking up from her bag, her eyes passing over this tall stranger with the American accent who had brought flaming colour into my cheeks.

‘Shopping,’ he remarked with a shrug that seemed to express discomfort more than nonchalance. ‘Same as you, I guess.’

‘No, I mean in Ireland.’

‘I know. I was just kidding.’ His eyes flickered over me, and I felt my cheeks glowing crimson and regretted my lack of make-up, my choice of shoe, the shabbiness of the coat I was wearing, my dishevelled hair.

‘Eva’s mom is sick. We came over to be with her.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.’

He shrugged then. ‘She’s old.’

‘Is she in the hospital?’

‘Yeah. That’s why I’m in here,’ he added, his gaze wandering briefly around at the brightly lit store. ‘Killing time while Eva visits.’

‘And your son?’

‘He’s with her,’ he said quickly, his eyes looking past me to a point over my shoulder.

Something froze inside me. The shock of seeing him again robbed me of even a solitary thing to say. Beside me, Liz cleared her throat, and I turned to her, distracted, and saw her offering him an inquisitive smile and watched as they introduced themselves, shaking hands across me, but it was all a blur, too bizarre to be real, and there followed a long, awkward pause before he nodded with an air of finality and said he’d better get going. He told Liz it was nice to have met her, and then he fixed his eyes on me and I felt his penetrating stare.

‘It was good to see you, Robin.’

‘Yes. You, too.’

He turned and walked quickly away, and it was only as I watched his retreating form that all the things we should have said to each other came rushing back to me: he hadn’t inquired after Harry, we had barely talked at all about Eva or Felix; I hadn’t asked how long he might stay.

‘So?’ Liz demanded, looking for gossip. ‘Are you going to tell me who that long, cool drink of water is or not?’

He was at the top of the escalator, not turning to look back. A few seconds later, he was gone.

‘He’s no one,’ I said flatly, but my heart was racing. ‘Just someone I used to know in Tangier.’

I remember it. I remember it like it happened yesterday.

A café near the Place de France. The air stale with smoke. Shadows gathering in the corners where the walls met the ceiling. A lizard skittering over the floor. Cozimo was reclining languidly on a couch; Harry was leaning forwards, leafing through some old book of Cozimo’s with a growing excitement. They were all there – Sue, Elena, Peter, our little coterie of expats – and others whose names and faces I have since forgotten. I was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, sipping my beer in a silent rage.

‘You’re very quiet tonight,’ Cozimo said, and I looked up to find his bright little eyes fixed on me with an inquisitive stare.

‘She’s sulking,’ Harry said, not looking up from his book. ‘Cozimo, these pictures are amazing. Where did you get this book?’

‘I won it in a card game,’ he answered quickly, his eyes still on me.

I wondered if this was true. I wondered whether half the words that came out of that dry little mouth contained the slightest grain of truth.

‘Why are you sulking? Surely you have not been arguing? You are both too young and too beautiful to waste time on such nonsense.’

‘Christmas,’ Harry said, casting a glance in my direction before returning to his book.

I rolled my eyes and let out a small sigh of exasperation. I hated the way Harry did that – shared our arguments with
everyone else. He couldn’t respect the privacy of our conflicts, didn’t even seem to understand why I should want them to remain just between us.

‘Christmas?’ Cozimo repeated, confusion clouding his sharp features.

‘She’s pissed off because I won’t go home for Christmas.’

Cozimo looked from one of us to the other, his palms held up to signify his lack of understanding. Why should something so trivial cause us to argue?

‘Harry, please don’t,’ I said in a low voice, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

‘Robin is your typical Irish atheist. There is no God except at Christmas. And then it’s all about the baby Jesus and midnight Mass and the turkey or goose dinner with the family and all that bullshit.’

‘It’s not bullshit.’

‘It’s “Ave Maria” and “O Holy Night” and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” until you want to kill yourself.’

‘Stop it, Harry.’

‘And of course you can’t have Christmas in a warm climate,’ he went on. ‘Even though Jesus was from the Middle East. No, no. Christmas must be cold. It must be celebrated with trees native to Scandinavia. You don’t tart up your mantelpiece with olive branches or palm leaves. It’s holly and ivy all the way.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

I looked up. I didn’t know the voice – low tones and the slow drawl of an American accent. The face was new to me, too. Cold blue eyes, high cheekbones, a cleft chin beneath a wide, unsmiling mouth, blond hair worn long and slick, swept back off his face to reveal a widow’s peak. A face that was knifelike and sharp, yet there was no denying he was handsome in a boyish kind of way. His age was difficult to
guess at – he could be twenty-one or forty-four. He lounged on a sofa, holding himself perfectly still, his shoulders giving a slight shrug as he repeated his question.

Harry looked up at him and let out a soft chuckle.

‘Don’t tell me. It’s got you all misty-eyed too, huh? Feeling a longing for the snowy hills of Vermont, are we?’ he asked, not unkindly.

Again the shrug. ‘Sure. Why not? Christmas means home to me. Home and family. Although I’m from Oregon, not Vermont.’

‘Vermont. Oregon. What does it matter? Surely you’d prefer to be here in Tangier, where life is real, where life is happening, than wrapped up in some Coca-Cola-inspired festivities with a bunch of relatives you can hardly bear to be in the same room with?’

‘Yeah, I understand why you might think that. And I respect that that’s the way you feel. But I have to admit that those Coca-Cola ads really get me going. They always have. It’s the same with Budweiser Christmas ads. If that makes me some kind of consumer sucker or sad fuck, then whatever; so be it.’ His hands rose in a brief gesture of
mea culpa
. He added, ‘And I happen to like my relatives, too. I guess that makes me really uncool, huh?’

Harry was staring at him, mystified. I could see that he didn’t know what to make of this guy with the casual manner, his direct approach, his ‘I am who I am and I don’t give a fuck what you think’ attitude. I could tell Harry felt a longing to mock him, and yet this man, this stranger, could not be easily dismissed as another sap, another dim American. His quiet conviction and solid confidence gave me to understand that he was the type of man to stand his ground, the kind who would not back down from confrontation. He had a direct stare that might be seen as a challenge.

I don’t remember much else about that night. I know that I didn’t speak to him – Garrick – nor he to me.

The days and nights passed, and Harry and I reached a kind of unspoken truce on the subject of Christmas. I agreed to stay in Tangier with him, and sometime in the New Year we would have my parents over – a compromise then.

I saw him sometimes – Garrick – in the bars and cafés we used to go to, mixing with the same crowd. Another hanger-on, another one of Cozimo’s eclectic gang, although even in a crowd, he always seemed alone to me, aloof and isolated. We never spoke, and I felt he hardly noticed me. I noticed him, though – the tall, faintly bored American with the piercing gaze. I learned about him through tidbits of gossip I gleaned from other people’s conversations. The picture that emerged was incomplete and conflicted. He was a rich kid, a trust-fund baby, with nothing to do except wander around Europe and North Africa, spending his money. He was a poet, a philosopher, an art dealer. He worked for an NGO. He had dropped out of Cambridge or Yale or the Sorbonne. He had been a successful financier before burning out and growing disgusted with capitalism. He had lost his wife in a tragic accident and was looking to lose himself in Tangier. Like so many others drifting through this continent, he was running away from himself.

To me, he was a distraction. Nothing more.

Life went on. I worked hard at my painting, although I knew I was floundering. Tangier had not turned out to be the artistic awakening for me that it was for Harry. I was often lonely. I went to Internet cafés frequently, needing to touch base with home, with my friends. A strange envy took hold of me whenever they e-mailed back the news of their continuing lives, their new jobs, their fledgling careers, the money they were earning, the mortgages they were taking
on, the men they were meeting and falling in love with and getting engaged to, the babies they were making. I felt outside of it all. I felt as if life was happening elsewhere. I kept all of this to myself. With Harry, it was different. I had never seen him so happy – so alive. The work he was producing was vibrant and passionate and evocative, light and colour dancing through his paintings. You looked at them and felt yourself getting pulled in.

One evening in late December, I came back to our flat feeling that strange sense of emptiness that often took me after hearing from home. I climbed the stairs and entered the living room and came upon a scene I had not expected to find. Cozimo was sprawled on the couch, peeling an orange; Garrick was sitting opposite him, hands held in his lap, passing one thumb over the other in a slow meditation. And in the middle of the room, Harry was struggling with a Christmas tree. He was stuffing sweaters around the trunk in an effort to get it to sit up straight in a bucket.

‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.

‘There you are!’ he exclaimed, crawling out from underneath the branches. He looked from the tree to me. ‘Well, what do you think? Is it straight?’

‘What do I think?’ I looked at the little tree, the straggly branches, the bald spots where the needles had been completely shed. It was a small miracle, this little spruce in the middle of dusty Tangier. ‘Baby, it’s wonderful! It’s amazing! How on earth did you get it?’

I rushed to him and wrapped my arms around his neck and reached up to kiss him about his head, moved to this public display of affection by the thoughtfulness of his gesture. And he laughed at me in an almost bashful way and caught me about the waist.

‘Calm down there,’ he said, swooping down to kiss me on the mouth. ‘But don’t thank me. I had nothing to do with it. Your fellow Christmas obsessor is responsible for this.’

I looked across. He was staring at the tree. His thumbs had stopped moving. And then he raised those gleaming blue eyes, and it seemed as if that was the first time we had ever looked at each other. He lifted a hand in greeting, and the corners of his mouth moved to give the briefest of smiles. He held me there for a moment before I had to turn away.

I went to the bedroom to drop my bags and take off my shoes. I sat on the bed and held my face in my hands and felt my cheeks hot with the blood rushing to the surface.

Back in the living room, Cozimo was draping orange peel over the branches by way of decoration.

‘That won’t do,’ I told him. ‘This tree deserves to be properly dressed.’

I set about rooting through my art supplies and Harry’s for any bits and bobs I could fashion into baubles and ornaments to string from the branches. Harry got some beers from the fridge, and the men began to talk of a forthcoming trip to Casablanca in the New Year, and soon I felt forgotten in my solitary work.

Later, as he was leaving, he came and stood alongside me as I hung my improvised decorations on the branches.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked quietly.

‘It’s wonderful.’

‘I wasn’t sure. You seemed reserved. I couldn’t tell if you approved.’

‘I do like it,’ I said, before adding softly, ‘I love it.’

And then I brought my eyes up to meet his, and he was gazing at me so intently, in a way I had never experienced
before, like his eyes were reaching right into me, trying to touch some hidden point inside me. I had to make myself keep looking. I had to force myself not to turn away.

‘Good,’ he said, nodding. And I found him so solemn in that moment. Solemn with a trace of sadness. I felt his remoteness. He seemed unknowable.

He left, and I carried on as before, dressing the tree, accepting another beer, sharing a joint with the others on the couch. But something had changed in me. The person who went to bed that night was not the same person who had awoken that morning. The person who went to bed that night was someone sleepless and fretful, with a dark longing growing within her.