The Boy That Never Was (2 page)

Robin was still asleep when I left the house. I wanted to wake her, to tell her about the fresh arrival of snow. But when I turned from the window and saw her lying there, her hair spread over the pillow, the gentle rise and fall of her breathing, eyes closed and her face at peace, I decided against it. She had been tired lately; at least, that is how it had seemed to me. She had complained of headaches and of not sleeping well. And so I let her be, closing the bedroom door softly behind me. I walked downstairs, took the empty wine bottles from the kitchen table, placed them outside and went out without breakfast or coffee. There was no need to leave a note. She would know where I was.

The cold air was refreshing. I had the same regret having drunk so much the night before that I’ve had on many other occasions, but in the crisp, cold air, I experienced a renewed sense of well-being. I was full of good intentions. I was going to turn over a new leaf, get healthy, live my life more fully and honestly. It wasn’t just the morning air. Hadn’t I said as much to Robin the night before?

‘You’re a man with good intentions.’

‘The best of.’

Robin smiled when I said this. Hers was a generous smile, a smile that recognized the weakness within me and forgave it all the same. After Dillon, her gentleness had not dissipated, when it easily could have. I would not have blamed her. She had not become hardened. She had mostly remained herself, despite everything we had been through.

Though there were times when something she said or did came as such a surprise that it gave me pause and made me consider my wife anew.

‘That’s what you call being married,’ my friend Spencer once told me. As a single man, or
bachelor
, as he liked to insist, he often had insights into married life. To the complaint one day that my wedding ring was too tight, his pithy reply was: ‘It’s supposed to be.’

Robin and I still talked the way we used to, still opened up to each other, but like with any couple which has been together for a long time, there comes a point, sometimes, in a night’s conversation when you anticipate what the other person is going to say and you stop listening and you go to bed. And that night – last night – well, that was exactly what happened. I was mid-flow when Robin stood up abruptly, leaned over and silenced me with a kiss before saying, simply and blankly, ‘Good night.’ I shouldn’t have let it bother me. I had been gabbling, talking nonsense most probably, and her sudden departure from the kitchen turned me to another bottle of wine and another late night.

Today, however, was different. Today was to be a day of new beginnings. The snow was there to announce it, to wake and remind me of our fresh start. I was closing up shop and locking the doors to my central Dublin studio. ‘The end of an era,’ Spencer had joked. From now on, I was going to work from the garage at home. It would save us the much needed cash to renovate the house we had recently moved into. It had once been Robin’s grandparents’ house, and now it was ours. For Robin, the house held memories. And though the suburbs of Monkstown were a far cry from our time in Tangier or even the times we had spent in Dublin together, I was not ungrateful. It’s a big old house. And Robin had plans. She wanted to get her hands dirty. Her
excitement was infectious. What could I say but yes, yes, let’s get our hands dirty.

The crunching sound as I walked through the snow put a smile on my face. There must have been two or three inches of it, and, by the looks of it, I was the first to venture out on our street. When I got to the van, the old Volkswagen’s door wouldn’t open. I tugged at it, finally wrenched it open, started the engine and went back for a kettle of water to pour over the windscreen. I loved the old orange van. Robin had pleaded with me not to buy it. Had it broken down once? Had it stalled, stuttered or wavered in its time? No. It had been fail-safe and hardy. We had even slept in it. I won’t pretend that it was comfortable, but it could have been. I put the key in the ignition and turned the engine over a couple of times before backing out of the driveway slowly, cautiously, feeling the snow compacting under the tyres.

I got into town that cold, beautiful morning with little bother. The roads were deserted, and I made good time, parked outside the studio on Fenian Street and walked down to the basement for what would be, I imagined, the last time.

The studio had at one time been a basement flat, but Spencer had gutted it. The walls were bare, the floor concrete. The toilet cistern gurgled all day and all night too, whenever I slept over. I had an old mattress, a couch, a kettle, and a camping stove. I liked the place to be this bare, and I stretched my canvases and stuck them on the floor to work on them. I didn’t use an easel. I didn’t use a palette. Sometimes I didn’t use brushes. I used sticks and knives or broken glass to create the paintings. The sparseness of the place let my imagination do its work, and I’d sketched, drafted and completed canvas after canvas here. And now it was all over.

I didn’t have a system as such, but I spent the morning packing the van with canvases, frames, paints in pots and
tubes, brushes, sticks, catalogues and finished and unfinished paintings. I don’t consider myself sentimental, but I did feel a twinge. The studio had served me well since we had moved back from Tangier. I’d produced all my new work there. It had added up to two solo shows and a bunch of group efforts. Spencer, who had made some shrewd business decisions in the past, owned the building and lived on the top floor. He’d rented the studio to me for a song. He also liked to remind me that he was my landlord and that I was his tenant. By eleven a.m., I had been there for over two hours. That was when he rang.

‘This is your landlord speaking. Eviction orders are in motion.’

‘You’re a funny man,’ I said.

‘I don’t need you to tell me that.’

He arrived ten minutes later to help, wearing a black silk dressing gown and a pair of old leather slippers, a cigarette dangling from his lips. I say he arrived to help: he brought a snare drum and a crate of beer. ‘I’m the boy who bangs the drum,’ he said.

‘Start lifting.’

‘I could have been a wealthy man if I had charged you what I should have for this place.’

‘You
were
a wealthy man.’

‘I worked it out last night. I could have had quite the stash put away.’

‘I’m afraid renting one small basement to a friend was not your downfall.’

‘Here we go – now you’re going to tell me … you, the lowly tenant.’

My phone rang.

It was Diane, the manager of the gallery I show at. ‘You won’t reconsider?’

‘I’m packed.’

‘You know I think it’s a mistake.’

‘So you told me.’

‘And not only because I won’t be able to stop by … but business-wise.’

‘It’s done.’

Diane wanted all manner of things then. I told her I had to go.

‘Who was that?’ Spencer asked.

I wasn’t inclined to hear the tirade he would inevitably deliver about Diane if I told him it was her, so I lied. ‘Just Robin,’ I said.

‘The lovely.’

When Spencer had lifted his last box and chosen a painting he liked the look of – ‘Either I’ll sell it for you or take it as a Christmas present’ – I stopped what I was doing and made us a pot of coffee.

‘The strongest coffee this side of the Liffey,’ Spencer said. He took a silver flask from his pocket and poured.

‘Whatever that means.’

‘This is what it means.’ He held the flask out to me, but I covered my cup.

‘Driving,’ I said.

‘Why anyone would want to drive on a day like today is beyond me.’

‘Have you forgotten? I’m moving out.’

‘Now, listen to me. I have a question for you.’

‘Go on,’ I said, wrapping a number of brushes in a rag.

‘You’ll please tell her ladyship, queen of the damned, that you have vacated the crucible of creativity and forsworn my great generosity.’

‘Has anybody ever told you that you are a verbose fucker?’

‘Don’t insult me.’

‘I don’t mean to. Are you talking about Diane?’

‘If that’s what you want to call her. I like –’

‘She knows well I’m moving out,’ I said, reaching for Spencer’s flask and splashing a dash into my cup. I felt, in that moment, in need of something to steady the sudden and unexpected quiver of nerves.

‘But you know what I’m afraid of? Late at night, she’ll come round here looking for you. She’ll find me instead, and then what? She’ll try to sink her teeth into me as well. She will try to suck the blood out of me.’

‘The way I see it, someone’s already beaten her to it. Have you looked in the mirror?’

‘You cruel fucker.’

‘I tell the truth.’

Spencer shook his head. I watched as he lit another cigarette, then stood up and sauntered around the empty space. A hollow feeling had come over the room; and I felt lonely. The whiskey burned a hole in the coldness of my stomach, and I watched as Spencer stopped and peered into one of the few boxes still waiting to be loaded into the van. Plucking the cigarette from his lips, he reached down and began rifling through the sheaf of drawings held there, and I felt my insides contract with grief and rage. They were my drawings of Dillon. He picked one out and held it up in front of him, examining it through narrowed eyes. Before he had a chance to comment, before he could say anything at all, I was on my feet and crossing the room, snatching the drawing from his hands.

‘Those aren’t for you,’ I said sharply, turning away so that he couldn’t see the burning in my cheeks or the tremble of my hands. I placed the drawing back with the others, my fingers lingering briefly.

I felt his silence and reckoned that he was considering whether to say anything. He knew me well enough to understand when to back off. Then I heard the slow shuffle of his slippers, the scraping of a cup against the table as he reached for his coffee and downed what was left of it.

‘Does this have a name?’ he asked, and I looked and saw him holding aloft the canvas he had chosen.

It was one of my Tangier paintings: indistinct figures, a market square, the sun’s light beating weakly in the background. In the distance, the sea.

‘No.’

‘I’ll give it one,’ Spencer said. He pointed to his snare drum. ‘And I’ll pick that up later.’

‘Mind yourself,’ I said, and he was gone.

The door slammed shut, and I waited a moment or two before returning to Dillon’s box. It was a large wooden container, aluminium hammered around the corners. I dipped my hands in and took out a handful of loose sheaves and looked at them. For a brief moment, I considered throwing them away, destroying them. I had a vision of a burning barrel. All those images turning to dust.
Put it behind you. Get on.
These are the things people have said to me. Reasonable people. People who cared about me and my well-being. People who cared about Robin, cared about us.

All that time I had kept my grief hidden, but still those sketches continued; something I didn’t fully understand had drawn them out of me, guiding my hand across the page, time and again. Somehow, I couldn’t seem to stop myself. And I don’t know how long it was, that day, I sat there looking at them. I didn’t weep. Instead there was a wholly other feeling. I’m not sure I can describe it. A feeling of recognition. The sketches were the truest thing I had drawn in years.
I don’t believe in the soul, but if I did, I would say there was a soul within those pencilled lines.

My sketches of Dillon were all dated. And I sat there sifting through the years, sifting through the hundreds of pencil drawings and charcoal impressions I had of the boy as he might have aged.
The boy
. Do you hear me? Call him what he was: my son.

These sketches were not something I had painted. They were not something I had shown anyone, not even Robin. Especially not Robin. The drawings were a secret. That is why I could not bear to hear Spencer’s voice saying anything about them. I don’t know why, but on some level they had kept me going.

So I didn’t bundle them up and burn them. I laid them out carefully in their dated order, spread them out across the concrete floor. I had tried to capture my son as he might have been, getting older with each month, with each year. And as I stood there, looking from one to the next, there he was again, growing before my eyes.

Enough, I told myself, and, hunkering down, I picked them up and slowly returned them to their calendar of despair. The lid closed over the box, and I carried it out and locked the studio behind me.

I decided to leave the van where it was. The thought of driving home and having to empty the damn thing just made me feel tired. Instead, I walked along while following the hum of a low-flying helicopter as it circled above O’Connell Street. My plan was to get something to eat, to fill the gaping hole in my stomach, but I was entranced by the whirr of blades overhead and found myself instead walking down O’Connell Street and meeting the demonstration against the government head-on. Caught up in my own private drama, I had
forgotten that the protest was taking place at all. On another day, I might have made a point of being there, adding my voice to the collective exasperation at the government. Fury, even. I was as angry as the next man. All over the country, people were united in their feelings of frustrated anger at the bailout. The terms were stringent, so in a way I was glad to be walking down O’Connell Street, an accidental protester of sorts.

There were no cars, no traffic, but thousands of people marching and chanting and bellowing in protest. News crews from around the world placed their cameras along the protesters’ route. Tourists stopped to take photographs and video footage. Wherever they were from, what they saw can’t have been that surprising. Ireland’s financial woes were international news, after all.

The Guards were out in force, too. They wore luminous yellow jackets over their uniforms and huddled in twos and threes at intervals along the route, chatting and stamping the ground to keep warm. They didn’t have much to do. The demonstration was good-natured and benign. For all the rage, there was a dignified restraint to it. As a protest, it was more mannerly than riotous. One protester held a home-made placard that read,
REPUBLICAN IRA
:
EUROPE OUT
,
BRITS OUT
. The letters had been scrawled in a black marker. On a piece of paper slipped under your front door, it might have looked threatening. But on the end of a stick in the middle of a peaceful demo, it just seemed pathetic and out of place.