The Boy That Never Was (3 page)

I walked along with the protesters and thought about joining in with the chanting and the singing. The crowd moved and flowed along the thoroughfare, pooling by the General Post Office, where a stage had been set up, and from behind the outstretched arms of Jim Larkin’s statue, a large screen flickered with the black-and-white footage of demonstrations
from the past. Ghostly images. The past resurrected, played out once again in a strange and unearthly light, sending shivers up my spine.

Then up on stage, where everyone’s attention was now directed, a man took the microphone, rallied the crowd to cheers and boos and introduced a woman, who sang a long and ranting song of remonstrance. The guitar shook in her hands. A helicopter flew over the crowd, and for a few moments the noise of its turning blades drowned out the singing.

I was caught in a throng of people, swaying this way and that. I suppose I allowed myself to be carried away with it all. Joining in with the applause and chanting. Adding my voice to the chorus of others. The woman finished her long lament to cheering and whistles. ‘We’ve been sold down the river!’ the man with the microphone boomed. ‘It’s time we stood up for ourselves!’ He introduced another woman; she told her story, about hospital cuts and waiting lists. And then a man took the microphone and told his story, about small communities and closing post offices. And another man told his story, and so on, a line of people on the stage, each with their own tale, and every tale greeted with roars from the crowd, applause and cheering, heads nodding and arms raised in solidarity.

Time passed; how much time, I don’t know. But after a while, I began to grow weary and hoarse. Somebody somewhere was beating a drum, and I felt the reverberations of it in my head and started to think about leaving. The strangeness of that morning – the surprise of snow, the clearing of my studio, whiskey poured into an empty stomach, Spencer’s hands on those drawings, and now the push and roar of the crowd.
Bang, bang, bang
went the drum. It was too much. I was hungry and tired. I needed to get home, or to the warmth of Slattery’s. I needed to see Robin.

As I turned to go, I noticed a flash of colour. A scarf wound around a woman’s neck, the ends of it loose and billowing in the breeze. A diaphanous material, silk perhaps, the colour blue like smoke on the air. The woman, tall and attractive, was holding a boy by the hand, the two of them walking purposefully up O’Connell Street. The boy turned and looked at me, and everything slowed right down. The drumbeat stopped. The roaring hushed. The crowd fell away. In that moment, there was nothing but me and the boy, our eyes holding each other’s.

Dillon.

My heart gave a frightened beat. I sucked in my breath, and the blood roared into my ears.

My son. My lost boy.

Someone passed in front of me, and for an instant I lost sight of my son, and into that sudden vacuum, it all came rushing back: the clamour and screech of the crowd, the thundering pulse of the drum, the push of bodies and the oppressive hovering of the helicopter above us.

I strained to see him again, sweating profusely as I began to push through the crowd. The blue scarf rose like a puff of smoke, and I felt a kind of panic. I pushed people out of the way, jostled and shoved to get past, driven by a new and unfamiliar urge. I was heckled: ‘Hey, watch it, pal.’ ‘Calm the fuck down.’ ‘What’s your hurry, chief?’ But I didn’t care. I heaved and shimmied, dodged and darted my way through the slew of people. It was hard going. But it didn’t stop me. Nothing, I felt, could stop me.

After all these years when I had hoped and wondered, searched and questioned, after all these years when I had followed the smallest of clues, walked through the solemn streets of Tangier, kept sleepless vigils in unholy places and been disappointed time after time by a trail gone cold, he’d
presented himself to me. He’d walked past me. Now, of all times, when I’d least expected it, he was there, before me, in Dublin, a place he had never been.

The crowd seemed to thicken and clot about me. The atmosphere changed. It grew hostile and forbidding. I was working hard to keep them in my sights – the boy and the woman – to hold on to them as I battled my way through. Their pace had quickened. They walked at a clip; distance began to open up between them and me.

‘Dillon!’ I screamed. ‘Dillon!’

I can’t be sure whether he heard me or not, but there was a moment when it felt like he turned in response to my shout, and our eyes met. There, among the heaving crowds, his blue eyes somehow found mine, at least for a split second. Was there a hesitation, a moment of resistance on his part, an instance of recognition? I can’t say, though I have asked myself since a million times or more. And as quickly as he turned to look at me, he was gone. Swept away from me all over again, my son, my disappeared boy, leaving me trapped in the crowd, caught like a piece of meat in a snake’s body, stunned and struggling to get out.

I woke to find Harry sitting on the edge of the bed, pushing his feet into his shoes and reaching for his jacket. Pretending to sleep, I secretly watched from my nest of blankets, taking pleasure in the sight of him slipping his cigarettes into his shirt pocket, his wallet into the back pocket of his jeans – his morning ritual – before pushing himself up and rising to meet his reflection in the mirror. His height meant he had to bend down to examine his appearance, passing a hand roughly through his hair. His hands were large and powerful, paint and pigments permanently caught around the nails, and his body appeared lean and angular in the cold light of the morning. I watched as he ran his fingers over his unshaven jaw, dark with three days of stubble, held by the same fascination that had bound me to him when first we met, sixteen years ago.

Opening the curtains, he sucked in his breath with amazement. Beyond him, I could see the tree outside our window weighed down with snow. On the windowpane there was a bloom of frost, and he ran his hand over it and looked out.

It was the last Saturday of November, and the first snow had fallen. I watched him at the window, and the glare of sunlight reflected off the white surface of the garden below seemed to illuminate his face, briefly clearing it of all traces of the burden he had been carrying for some time. He was thirty-six years old, though he looked older, but that morning his delight at the sudden snow – the surprise of it, lying thick and unspoiled, making everything clean and new – was
so open and unabashed and boyish that it brought a smile to my lips. I was about to drop my pretence and say his name, maybe join him at the window, wrap my arms about him, whisper against his ear, ‘Don’t go, my love,’ then drag him back into the warm funk of our bed, when I remembered how Dillon used to sleep between us.

Something cold slipped down into my stomach, and instantly I knew I would not go to him. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t. Instead I had to lie very still with my eyes closed, concentrating hard on shutting out the image that had entered my head. The softness and warmth of our son’s little body lying between us. The sound of his breathing. The smell of him.

My mind came down on the image like a steel trap.

I stayed where I was. I kept my eyes closed.

The moment passed, and I lay listening to Harry padding quietly down the stairs and felt the twinge of regret at not keeping him here. Still, I had held it together. That was the important thing. I would make it up to Harry later. Besides, there was something I had to do first. From downstairs came the clink of bottles and the sound of the door closing after him. Eventually the van coughed and spluttered to life, and then he was gone.

With Dillon, I knew it right away. It was as if I woke up one morning and all the molecules in my body had shifted slightly during the night – a small, almost imperceptible restructuring – so that I felt different, but in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I felt changed. Within days the nausea started – waves of it at any time of the day or night. And along with it came a sweeping tiredness so that I, who had always had difficulty finding sleep, suddenly found myself nodding off at bus stops, in bars, over dinner with friends.
I felt it – I felt him – even before I realized I was late. With Dillon, I felt like my body had been pounced on by pregnancy. This time seemed different. I was over a week late, and there were no symptoms – no nausea, no sudden assaults of fatigue. It was different from the first time, and I was grateful for that. Because I didn’t want this pregnancy, this baby, to remind me of Dillon. I had put all that behind me.

Ten minutes after I listened to Harry’s old Volkswagen groaning and screeching out of the driveway, I sat shivering in the bathroom, staring at the thin pink line that confirmed my suspicion.

‘Steady,’ I told myself, feeling my heart rocking in my chest. ‘Take it easy, Robin.’

I put the wand down, washed my hands at the sink and looked at myself in the small, cracked shaving mirror. I’m normally quite pale, but that morning the face that looked back at me was flushed, blood rushing up from my neck and suffusing my cheeks with colour. I put my fingers to my face and smiled. A murmur of happiness started inside me. I began to laugh. In that cold, damp bathroom, with my breath clouding out on the air, I hugged my arms about myself. A brand-new life. A fresh start. I felt it like the blanket of clean, white snow outside making everything new.

There is one room in this house that is devoid of any evidence of DIY. It is a sanctuary, a place to avoid the snaking cables of power tools that lie like nests of vipers across the bare floors, or the scarred walls where half-hearted attempts at stripping wallpaper have been started and then abandoned, or where tiles have been hammered away, leaving globs of old tile adhesive and flaking plaster. We use this one room as an office, and it was to this room that I went, still wrapped in
my bathrobe, long socks pulled up over my knees. I sat there, shivering in front of my MacBook, scanning the Internet for an ovulation calendar, a menstrual cycle graph, some means of indicating when this child might have been conceived. Then I checked the calendar on my phone and flicked back through the weeks. I did all this as if someone were watching me – making a great show of my careful calculations – when really I knew. I put down my phone and closed my MacBook. At the window, I watched the skeletal tree filling up with snow. I had known all along.

It was the anniversary. Our annual celebration had reached its sixth year. It was something we’d decided one night not long after he was gone. The two of us sitting together in a café, nothing stronger than coffee between us, and Harry hammering the table with his fist, tears in his eyes, hissing angrily that he did not want us to be defined by the tragedy we had suffered. He refused to live his life governed by grief, to become one of those people paralysed by the past, caught in the amber of loss. He said it, and I watched him shaking with grief, barely able to control it, and I put out my hand to steady him. I held on to his arm, whispering to him, as he sobbed, that we didn’t need any anniversary Masses or weekly visits to a grave to get us through this. No reliving of all the fond memories; it would not bring Dillon back. Instead, I suggested that we would have one day every year – Dillon’s birthday – and it would be a day of celebration, just the two of us. He looked up at me then, caught by the idea, and listened as I went on: Each year, on that day, for the rest of our lives, no matter what happened between us in the future, on that one day we would go somewhere together for a meal, for a night, for a drink and a long walk; we would talk about him, about how much we had loved him, about how happy
he had made us; we would get drunk, we would make love, we would cry, we would do whatever was needed to get through that day. It was a chance to distil and contain all the love and longing left after him.

Dillon was three years old when he died. And every year since we have observed this anniversary. Strange, as we no longer celebrated or even acknowledged our own birthdays. After what happened in Tangier, I couldn’t.

A month ago. Driving to Kilkenny, where we were booked to spend the night in a stately home – log fires and tartan rugs and stags’ heads mounted over the billiards table, that kind of thing – we were talking about how some people would think us morbid, the way we still celebrated our son’s birthday five years after he had died.

‘Take your brother, for instance,’ Harry said.

‘Mark? You’ve spoken to Mark about this?’

‘No, but he did ask me once in that awkward way of his whether he should, “you know, send birthday cards for Dillon and stuff”.’

Harry had drifted into a mock imitation of Mark, with his halting speech and the nervous way he chewed his lip whenever dealing with something serious. I feigned shocked indignation, then broke into laughter, telling him to stop taking the piss out of my brother.

‘No, seriously, Robin! And as for your mother – Christ! When I told her we were going to Kilronan House for the night, she began waxing lyrical about how she had seen an article about it in
Image Interiors
and how some friend from her bridge club raved about it, and when I said that we were going there to celebrate Dillon’s birthday, her face kind of froze in horror. Seriously! I’m not making this shit up. It was
like a death mask. That waxwork of Robespierre’s head after the guillotine. That’s what she reminded me of.’

‘Stop. You love her really. Admit it.’

He smiled, and I turned my attention back to the countryside viewed through the windscreen.

Something was nipping at the edges of my happiness. All the way from Dublin, I had harboured the feeling that I had forgotten something, and we were halfway to Kilkenny when I realized what it was: my birth control. I didn’t say anything to Harry, just sat there biting my lip and jigging my crossed legs, watching fields and hedgerows strip past and trying to calculate how great a risk would it be if I took my pill tomorrow at lunchtime, when we got back home, rather than at nine o’clock that night, when I would normally take it. Was fifteen hours a big risk? Surely not. Not after nine careful years?

I told myself that as soon as we got home the next day, the minute I walked into the house, I would go upstairs and pop my pill.

Only I didn’t.

We got home after a night of too much wine, of making drunken, messy, soppy love. We both felt tired, and a little sad as we always did after that day, yet renewed as well, somehow fortified by it. I went upstairs and I stood in the bathroom, looking at the foil pack of pills, seven empty blisters, fourteen bulging. I stared at the tiny letters –
SAT

– printed on the foil, and I thought to myself: no.

I suppose you might say that it was then that I made my decision. At that moment, it felt like the right thing to do. I didn’t discuss it with Harry; I knew already what his answer would be. In the past, whenever I had broached the issue, it had always been met with a refusal.

‘I wouldn’t trust myself.’

That was what he always said. But the look in his eyes when they met mine said something else: that really what he was afraid of was the thought that I couldn’t trust him with another child. Not after Dillon.

But I did trust him. I understood somehow that it was guilt that held him back from wanting another baby, as if he needed to punish himself for leaving Dillon alone that night. And after five long years of watching him trapped and struggling with the burden of his self-loathing, I felt that something had to be done to release him from it.

I flushed the pills down the toilet. What the hell, I told myself as I watched the water swirling in the bowl, each little blue tablet washed away. Let’s just see what happens. That was a month ago, and in all that time I hadn’t said one word about it to Harry. I kept searching for the right moment to bring it up, but it never came. Now the fuse was lit, and it was too late for a discussion. And when I considered that in the coolness of our little office on that snowy morning, I felt the first quiver of doubt passing through me.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, love. I’m glad I caught you.’

‘Mum. How are you?’

‘Frozen. Your father keeps turning off the heat. All this talk of austerity has gone to his head.’

I sat on the bottom step of the stairs and cradled the phone to my ear. In the background I could hear the clink of cutlery against crockery and pictured my mother at the kitchen table with her blonde hair neat as a wig, her face fully made up, and a cashmere shawl draped over her shoulders as she wrapped herself around a steaming mug of coffee.

‘The only room in the house with any warmth is the kitchen. Jim has this notion that if we turn off the range we won’t be able to turn it back on again.’

‘And I suppose you’re happy to perpetuate that myth?’

‘Of course. Not a word to him, now, do you hear me?’

‘Your secret is safe.’

‘How about you, love? How are you coping with this cold weather?’

‘Well, I’m sitting here in the hall, and there’s a crack above the front door and the back door won’t close properly, so it’s a bit like sitting in a wind tunnel.’

‘I can imagine. That creepy old house. I feel cold just thinking about it. Why you didn’t find yourselves a nice modern place with insulation and central heating is beyond me. I said it at the time, but you insisted on buying Mark’s share of that house and living in it. There was no reasoning with you. And I know, I know,’ she said, cutting me off before I could offer my defence. ‘It was Granny’s house, and you didn’t want a stranger living in it.’

‘We love this house, Mum.’

‘Love is all very well. I just hope you are warmly dressed.’

‘I’m wearing tights under my jeans, and a thermal vest underneath a flannel shirt and a fleece.’

‘You sound like a dustbin man. What are you two doing with yourselves today, anyway?’

I stared at the scraper in my hand.

‘I’m stripping wallpaper, and Harry’s gone into town.’

‘Oh.’ There was the slightest pause, and then she said, ‘He hasn’t gone on that march, has he?’

The march. The Irish populace rising up in protest at the government and the banks and the IMF and the EU and all the other bogeymen who claimed to be rescuing us. I could see my mother clearly, fingering her pearls like
worry beads, a look of distaste spreading across her face at the shameful prospect of her son-in-law caught on TV looking militant behind an Irish Congress of Trade Unions banner or tossing a petrol bomb or attacking a Guard with a bottle.

‘No, Mum. He’s gone into the studio. He’s clearing out the rest of his stuff today, remember?’

‘Ah. Yes, I’d forgotten.’ Then, after a pause, she added, ‘He’ll miss that place.’

‘I know. It’s hard for him.’

‘Still,’ she continued, more briskly now, ‘no point wasting money on rent for a big cold cellar in town when you have all that unused space at home.’

‘Yes, Mum,’ I replied, but even as she said the words and I knew they made sense, I felt that small niggle of doubt, and thought of how quiet Harry became lately any time we talked of moving his work space to the garage adjoining the house. He loved his studio. He loved the solitude and privacy of it. I knew that. But it didn’t make financial sense. And then I remembered that last night, as we were standing alongside each other at the sink, doing the dishes, I had offered to help with the move. ‘No, Robin,’ he had said, his voice deadened and flat, his eyes fixed on the dish in his hand, and I had felt the defeat coming off him in waves. With a sudden twinge of remorse, I’d sensed that perhaps it was a mistake. He could be so vulnerable.