The Boy That Never Was (24 page)

Harry had moved too fast for him to react. Too fast for him to step out of the shadows and announce himself, while he was still wrestling with his indecision. Now he stood alone among the books, berating himself for his hesitation. Robin and the boy were upstairs. The thought struck him, and this time he did not pause; curiosity drew him to the stairwell, and he began to climb. Silence greeted each step, and it felt as though he was the only occupant of the place, although still he hoped to find Robin there. Disappointment touched him as he pushed open the door and surveyed the empty living room. She was not there. Nor was the boy.

Garrick looked around at the low couch, the paintings stacked in the corner. Cooking smells greeted him, and he saw evidence of Harry’s efforts in the kitchen: the chopping board, the couscous, the half-full bottle of gin. And it was as he was contemplating the bottle that the earthquake hit. It slammed against the foundation of the building, sending shock waves up through his feet, into his body. Thrown against a wall, he staggered to the nearest doorway, a bolt of alarm charging through him as the walls wavered and swayed around him. Every pot and plate in the kitchen was flung to the floor. The oven door flew open and a joint of meat tumbled out of it. The crashing and splintering of crockery and glass continued in the living room, where plates hanging on the wall slid down to the floor and the glass-topped coffee table shattered. Great cracks appeared in the walls and
the ceiling, fissures that moved at an alarming speed. Skidding and swerving, he made his way back the way he had come, fuelled now by the knowledge that the place was going to collapse. He was sure of it. And just before he reached the stairs, he glanced down the corridor and saw the door open into the bedroom and the sleeping form that lay there.

The earthquake stopped. The building seemed to rock on its hinges, and Garrick moved quickly to the bedroom. He looked down at the boy, his sleeping son, but the stillness was momentary. Around him, the walls continued to creak and moan, and there was another sound coming up beneath it – the breaking apart of the very masonry that held the place together.

Did he know what he was doing? Even now, he cannot be sure. Perhaps. Some half-baked notion of saving one son’s life where he had been powerless to save the other. It was not heroic. It was instinctive. Garrick had no other thought in his head than to snatch the child from that damn building and get him outside, to safety. Swiftly, he bundled the boy in the sheet and hurried down the steps. He needed to get him away from here, and as he passed through the bookshop and reached the door, he heard the rending of wood above his head and felt the walls around him crumble. He slammed his body against the door with all the force he could muster, and they found themselves outside in the night air, where he heard the first screams and cries from the street beyond.

He didn’t look back at the fallen building. Instead, he began to run, no thought in his head but to get away from there. All of Tangier, it seemed, was running. A river of people flowing down the hill, tributaries streaming down lanes and alleyways.

Sweat had matted his hair to his forehead; his lungs were on fire. But still he ran, pressed by an urgent need to get
the boy to safety. On and on he went, pressing through the dust and the smoke that filled the air, not stopping for anything, no thought in his mind about right or wrong. He was powered, now, by a new emotion. Rage. Convinced already of Harry’s negligence, his culpability, he ran through the streets of the old quarter, past the shops and the cafés – so much of it a shattered mess of detritus left by the quake – not stopping until he reached the seafront.

He should bring the boy to a hospital, he thought. He should try to find Robin. But instead he found himself back at his hotel, which remained standing, a testament to its solidity. The guests were huddled in frightened groups in the lobby, and as he scanned their faces for Eva, his heart hammering loudly in his chest, he saw her coming towards him, her face pale, her eyes fixed on the boy. Neither of them said a word, and they slipped away from the others, unnoticed.

Their room was in darkness, the electricity having failed. Leaning back, he closed the door behind himself, then advanced into the room. He laid the boy gently on the bed, and as he did so, Eva struck a match. From somewhere, she had found a candle, and in the wavering light, the white coverlet seemed to glow. She came and stood beside him, and it was only then, as he looked at her stricken face and then at the boy asleep in front of them, that he drew his hands over his face and sucked breath into his gasping lungs and thought to himself, Jesus Christ, what the hell have I done?

They talked deep into the night. In whispered conversation, he explained to her what had happened, about going back to Cozimo’s shop, about the earthquake hitting and about finding the boy. He told her how he had run and kept on running until he got back here. She did not say to him:
why? Why on earth did you risk your life? Nor did she ask what he’d been doing going back to that place, or why he had brought the boy here, instead of returning him to his parents. She just watched as he spoke, her face calm and inscrutable, nodding slowly to draw him on.

‘We should contact his mother,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

But he just sat in his chair, and she didn’t mention it again.

The boy lay still on the bed. Garrick watched as his wife went over to check on him for the sixth or seventh time in the hour since he had laid him down. She pulled the sheet up to his chin, adjusting the coverlet. Her hand went instinctively to his sleeping head, her fingers in the soft curls, and he remembered how she had done this with Felix, and the gesture seemed completely natural and, at the same time, so unbearably sad that he had to look away.

‘Should we call a doctor?’ she asked anxiously.

‘He seems okay. We should let him sleep.’

She kept her eyes fixed on the boy, her arms folded across her chest as she lingered by the bed.

‘He’s sound asleep.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And he didn’t wake when you picked him up?’

‘Nope.’

‘He stayed asleep the whole way back here?’

He stared at the floor, feeling the ache in his muscles and bones. He knew that she was staring at him, waiting for an answer. The incredulity was there in her voice.

‘I think he’s been given a sleeping pill.’

‘What?’

The word shot out of her like an accusation. He raised his head to meet her gaze, furious and indignant and disbelieving, as he had been.

‘How do you know this?’ she demanded.

He twisted his watch around his wrist.

‘Dave?’ she said, and he knew that he would have to tell her.

So he went to the minibar and fixed two whiskey and sodas, and she came and sat by him and listened with her drink cradled in her hand while he explained about Robin, about the phone call in New York, about what she had told him.

In the hush of the room, her shock was palpable.

‘To do that to a child,’ she intoned, shaking her head. ‘And the earthquake. He might have been killed.’

‘I know.’

‘Such negligence,’ she went on, her gaze again drawn back to the boy.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘And she
knew
about it and still took him back?’ Eva asked, her head whipping around to face him, as if it had only just occurred to her.

He nodded, and she gave out a sharp exhalation, a little huff of fury, and he felt the ripples of her anger, as well as the unspoken thing:
What kind of mother would leave her child open to such a risk?

He was aware of the awkwardness between them that occurred whenever they spoke of Robin – his own shame and her low, simmering anger at the mention of this other woman. But that evening, there were no recriminations, no cool silences between them. Outside, the city was on fire. Sirens screamed all night. But inside their hotel room, he felt the tightening of a bond, each of them drawing towards the other, towards the unexpected thing that had presented itself to them.

She asked him about Harry, and he gave her a broad outline of his character, as he had perceived it during that time
when he and Harry had been on friendly, if somewhat distant, terms.

‘He’s not a bad guy, I guess. Just a bit caught up in himself.’

‘Hmm. Sounds like a real gem.’

Encouraged by her sarcasm, by her implicit refusal to see Harry as anything but the bad guy, he began to tell her of his distrust, his niggling doubts about the man who was raising his son. Not that there was anything he could have done about it. Just little things.

‘Like what?’ she asked.

In the dimness of the room, her eyes were sharp and glinting. They were observing him closely, hungry for all he was telling her, the idea being nourished by every character flaw, every little mistake and misdemeanour he could summon about Harry.

Neither of them had given voice to the idea yet, but it was there between them. Already it was taking shape.

After a while, he told her she should get some sleep. The truth was, he was so overwhelmed that the room seemed to tip and veer about him. The enormity of what they were contemplating disoriented him; he was afraid that if he stood up, he might fall over. He told her to sleep in the bed with the boy, while he stretched out on the couch. It was not long before sleep took them, but just before it did, he observed his wife nestling up against the small, curled shape in the bed, her arm briefly suspended over the boy, a hesitation there lest the weight of her arm about him wake him up. Instead, her hand rested briefly on his little shoulder, tracing down to the crook of his arm and then silently withdrawing.

He didn’t know how long he slept. But when he woke, she was standing over him.

‘What?’ he asked, for he sensed the tension in her, a slow uncertainty about her face. ‘Is something wrong?’

She was wearing one of his T-shirts over her underwear, and his eyes passed down her long, slim body, and then he saw that there was something in her hand.

‘Here,’ she said, giving it to him.

He sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. There were serious aches in three places along his spine, as if his body had been folded up like a piece of cardboard and was now trying to unfold itself. He looked down at the passport in his hand.

She was biting her lip, a kind of wild anxiety in her eyes as she watched him open the passport. Felix’s photograph stared out at him from the pages. Eva turned away and slunk back to the bed.

He had taken the photograph himself. Remembering it now, he flinched at his irritation, his growing frustration with the child, who had refused to sit still for him, who wouldn’t face the camera or, when he did, could not keep his face expressionless; that impish grin kept returning and spoiling the shot.

‘Goddamn it, Felix!’ he had shouted at the boy.

He thought of that and flushed with shame and remorse. He would give anything to have that moment back.

Eva was sitting, now, on the bed by the boy, whose little chest was rising and falling with his steady breathing.

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ she said to him. ‘How alike they look.’

The passport was in his hand. He checked. It was still valid.

In the bed, the boy was stirring. Garrick held his breath as he watched the boy’s eyes opening, his little body drawing up, his fists rubbing the sleep from his face. And when he looked about himself at the unfamiliar room, and then at
Eva and Garrick, the sleep fell away, and his expression became fearful.

‘Where’s my mummy?’ he asked, and something plunged within Garrick at the little voice emerging hoarse with sleep and panic.

If Eva felt any such misgivings, she hid them well beneath a blanket of composure.

‘Your mummy and daddy can’t be here right now,’ she said, her voice soft yet firm with reassurance. ‘They’ve asked us to mind you for a little while.’

The lie was delivered so gently, so easily, it left Garrick breathless.

She told him their names, and Garrick watched as the boy drew his legs up under the sheet, hugging his knees to his chest – a defensive gesture. He looked out at them beneath a fringe of brown hair, his eyes large and watchful. His chin trembled, and tears sprang suddenly within his eyes, and Garrick felt something sharp in his chest. Eva moved closer to the boy, her voice bright with cheerful reassurance.

‘Are you hungry, Dillon? What would you like for breakfast? Do you like croissants? Toast?’

He stared at her with suspicion, but the trembling in his chin seemed to have stopped – for now, at least.

‘How about a glass of milk and a nice sticky bun?’

He gave a little nod and hugged his knees in closer to his chest. She went to reach for him and he drew back instantly, and Garrick watched as his wife’s hands fell back into her lap, but her face held that same brightness, that sunny optimism.

‘Do you like boats, Dillon?’ she asked. The boy didn’t answer, just squirmed a little under the sheet and stared hard at the little hump that was his bent legs. Eva continued: ‘Later today, we might take a little trip on a boat – just the three of us. Would you enjoy that? And if you like, we can sit up on
deck and watch all the other boats and the gulls and the waves. Wouldn’t that be fun?’

Then she looked up at Garrick, and the fullness of her unspoken proposal struck him forcibly. He didn’t think of the consequences. Not then. Neither of them did. They told themselves that it was in the boy’s best interests. He would be better off with them, away from his parents and their negligence, their recklessness. They could give him a better life than the one he’d had, living in a hovel, a death trap, surrounded by hippies and potheads. They would love and cherish him and never take him for granted. With them, his life would be full of opportunities; he could achieve his potential, and nothing would be beyond his grasp. That was what they told themselves. But beneath all that was the knowledge of their own pain, of how they had been at rock bottom, and now there was this opportunity, this most unexpected way that they could be rescued.

How do you explain it to someone – the way to go about rebuilding your life around such a grand deception? Were he to read it himself in a paper – a shocking headline: couple steals child to replace dead son – he would imagine it as a sordid affair, both plotted and calculating. But it wasn’t like that. It was more the slow and steady accumulation of several small deceptions, one leading to another, until you became accustomed to it. A trickle of lies, each one told not out of any malice but out of an overwhelming need to protect the boy, to shield him from further pain. A period of grieving, of readjustment, until they could start on the serious yet joyful work of building their lives together – that little unit of three.