The Gifts

by Karen Perry

  ‘Jaysus, he’s getting a bit worked up,’ someone said.

  And it was true. I could see the colour rising in his face as he leaned forward in the seat, barely able to contain himself. Where had it come from, his passion, his social conscience? Like those around me, I’d had no inkling he held such strong principles or beliefs. As I watched, I noticed something else. Everyone had fallen silent. The whole pub was watching: pints were left untouched, each drinker’s attention arrested by the man on the screen, with his smart suit and his media-friendly features, pounding the table and berating us for our failings, urging us not to allow this depression to change our fundamental values, not to allow our human decency to crack under the strain. The studio audience had fallen silent, too, and I had a sudden flash of memory: Luke as a boy, waist deep in the river, vines hanging down from the trees overhead. I felt it then as I watched him up there on the screen – the tightening about my throat – which was strange, because we hardly knew each other now, not really.

  He finished what he was saying and there was a pause. Into the brief silence, a man at the bar raised his pint to the telly. ‘Hear, hear.’ As the studio audience broke into applause, people around me raised their glasses, nodding, and for the rest of the night, it was all anyone could talk about.

  The next day, the airwaves were clogged with news of Luke and his Late Late Show performance. The papers were full of it. Unlike some stories that have a brief moment, then fade from the public consciousness, this one seemed to stick. It was no surprise when word came down from the editor-in-chief that someone had to write a profile of Luke for the paper. I just hadn’t realized the job would fall to me.

  I finish my drink, pick up my bag and go out into the afternoon sun. The rain has cleared and I have the half-formed intention of taking a walk along the canal, knowing that the fresh air and exercise will help clear my thoughts. Instead I sit at a picnic table outside the Barge and email the office, telling them I’ve gone home, sick. After that I switch off my phone and spend the afternoon sipping Coronas and eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table, until the shadows start to lengthen and the air grows chilly. Reggae drifts down from an open window nearby, with traffic noise rising from the streets beyond.

  This time yesterday I was applying make-up and pinning up my hair, a red dress laid out on the bed, with an evening bag containing my invitation. A fund-raiser at the Morrison. Not something I desperately wanted to go to, but Luke would be there, with some others I was supposed to be researching. It was out of duty more than pleasure that I headed into the city.

  By the time I arrived the party was in full flow, well-dressed and -groomed bodies pressing against each other, imbibing champagne, waitresses in starched white shirts and aprons passing among them with trays of canapés. All of us crammed together in a room on the top floor of a hotel, the windows giving onto the roofs, spires and cranes that punctuated the city’s skyline. Luke and Julia Yates, the glamorous couple, were in the midst of the throng, and I watched them from afar: their practised smiles, the way they worked the room together, in a carefully choreographed routine, their sheen of confidence and privilege. I felt a creeping sense of envy. No, not envy. Rather, it was as though I was confronted with a mirror reflection of myself: a thirty-seven-year-old woman with nothing of permanence in her life. No husband, no children, no home of her own. An apartment she rents – just another in a long list of places she has tried and failed to make into a home. Her job the one constant in her life that keeps her tethered to the earth. There have been times lately when she’s felt that sense of displacement nudging into her work. Even in the office, where she feels safe, she is still in danger of slipping off.

  I kept my smile bright, and made my way through the crowd, escaping onto the terrace for air, to suck oxygen back into my body and try to calm the shaking in my hands. I sipped my champagne and felt fury curdle within me, fury at myself. Why had I come to this party? How on earth did I think I might fit in here? At this stage of my life I should know by now when to leave well enough alone.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts.’

  I turned. He was standing outside the glass doors. He closed them behind him so that the noise of the party was contained, and I watched as he came towards me, grinning. My heart was beating fast as he approached. Neat and unruffled in his black tuxedo, hair smoothed off his handsome face, he had a glass of champagne in each hand and offered one to me. ‘Looks like you’re running dry.’

  The air had done nothing to dispel my unease. Luke smiled but I couldn’t make out whether it was genuine or just that he was better than me at covering up his discomfort.

  ‘I was waiting for you to come and say hello,’ he added.

  ‘You could have come over to me,’ I said, defensive.

  ‘True.’ He stood alongside me and looked out across the city.

  ‘I had the feeling we were studiously avoiding one another, Katie.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  And yet I felt the pull between us, and knew he felt it too, just as I knew he was equally aware of the past, which threatened every contact between us. Even the most casual encounter seemed charged with fear, regret or some other elusive emotion.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be here,’ he said. ‘After our last conversation, I thought you’d keep your distance.’

  His tone, initially jokey, had softened. We were standing together as the last of the sunset cast the roofs of Dublin in a soft glow. I saw the glint of gold on his finger, and watched his hand move to cover my own.

  He left it where it was and I made no attempt to move mine. Further down the terrace, a group of smokers were sharing a joke. Their laughter reached us as we stood on the balcony, the shadows deepening in the streets below.

  ‘It sounded like it might be fun.’

  ‘You don’t look like you’re having fun, Katie.’

  ‘But what about you?’ I said, slipping my hand out from under his. ‘The golden boy. The man of the moment.’

  A flash of disappointment crossed his face. Then he laughed and made a swatting gesture, as if to bat my words away. It was hard to fathom. At one moment he was a businessman who’d had a couple of lucky breaks. At the next he had been catapulted into an exalted position – man of the people, champion of the masses, his finger on the public pulse. All it had taken was one high-profile interview on national television. The right words spoken at the right time.

  ‘So where will it all lead?’ I asked, watching him over the rim of my champagne flute. ‘Leinster House? A seat in government? Or how about the presidency? You know, I can see you and Julia settling into life in the Phoenix Park.’

  I was joking, of course: there was too much in Luke’s past for him to pull off a successful political career.

  ‘Jesus, Katie, come off it!’ He laughed. ‘Politics isn’t my bag, you know that.’

  But there was something in the way he said it that made me look closely at him. Faint shadows under his eyes, tension in the way he held himself. I wondered whether he had bitten off more than he could chew. But before I could ask him about it, he said, ‘I heard from Nick.’

  His brother.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He rang a few days ago, out of the blue.’

  Anxiety stirred in the pit of my stomach.

  ‘Is he still in Nairobi?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded, then said, ‘Did you know he’s getting married?’

  My mouth went dry.

  ‘An American he met over there, apparently. Another hippie drop-out by the sound of it. They’ve known each other about five minutes.’ He drank some champagne. ‘The wedding is tomorrow.’

  Before I could answer, there was movement behind us. The glass door opened and someone came out. Luke instantly drew away from me.

  ‘Christ, it’s hot in there,’ the man exclaimed, coming towards us and giving Luke a friendly slap on the shoulder. I recognized him at once – Damien Rourke, a self-made multi-millionaire who still
resembled a rumpled grocer. He had taken a white hankie from his pocket and was mopping his brow with it, before turning his attention to me. ‘You, is it?’ he asked, in an unfriendly way.

  I had once penned a not, entirely, flattering piece about him. ‘In the flesh.’

  ‘Still writing for that rag, are you?’ he asked, with a grin.

  ‘A girl’s gotta make a living somehow.’

  He snorted, and the conversation moved on. For a while, we talked about politics and the economics of the European crisis. A ribbon of grey cloud hung above the horizon as the sun dipped low. I tried not to glance too much at Luke, conscious of his quiet confidence and the contours of his handsome face. Nick’s getting married. Nick: dark hair falling over his forehead, that introspective gaze and the shy smile, as if something funny or touching had just occurred to him that he didn’t wish to share.

  I smiled and nodded along with the conversation, sipped from my glass, all the while feeling numb and telling myself there was no reason why this news of Nick should get to me in this way.

  Now, as I sit drinking another Corona, watching the swans gliding along the canal, I think of Nick and try to imagine him waiting at the top of the aisle for some nameless, faceless woman. There had been a bond between us once, Nick and me – I have the scar to prove it. Yet we’re strangers now. I have the urge to text him, to tell him that I’m happy for him, though that doesn’t come anywhere close to describing the emotion passing through me.

  Get a grip, I tell myself sternly. Don’t indulge yourself with this maudlin bullshit. I get up from my seat and leave my half-empty beer bottle. Walking briskly back towards the city, I pull my jacket about me, crossing my arms over my chest, as if a cold wind is blowing, even though it’s still warm and, although night has fallen, there’s barely the whisper of a breeze coming off the canal.

  I climb into bed and fall into a sleep that feels like oblivion.

  When I wake to the sound of someone banging on my apartment’s front door, it feels like the middle of the night. I get up and go to open it, my head still swimming with fatigue. Reilly’s familiar bulk stands under the halo of light cast by the bare bulb above his head.

  ‘Reilly? What is it? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I tried calling but your phone is switched off.’

  ‘It’s the middle of the night, for Chrissakes!’

  ‘It’s eight a.m., Katie,’ he says, a wrinkle of concern in his voice. ‘Are you okay? I can’t say you look it.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I reply, embarrassed now, pulling my robe tight around me.

  ‘You didn’t come back to the office yesterday.’

  ‘I was sick.’

  I turn away and let him follow me into the flat, hear him closing the door, before he joins me in the kitchen. I flick on the coffee machine, then rest my head on the counter, feeling the ache that stretches from my temples to the small of my back.

  I can feel him watching me, so I straighten and busy myself with making coffee because, even though I like him, it feels strange to have Reilly in my kitchen. He’s unlike most of the men who have witnessed me making morning coffee in my bathrobe. Thick hair the colour of oatmeal, a reddish tinge to his beard, which fails to hide the deep lines on either side of his mouth, or the amusement that animates his face. Black leather jacket, grey shirt, faded blue jeans – the hack’s uniform: all of it out of place on him, somehow. I like to imagine that when Reilly goes home, he dons a smoking jacket and velvet slippers.

  He accepts a mug of coffee, then casts his eyes around my apartment. It’s all pitiful enough – two rooms painted in pastel shades, a galley kitchen and a bathroom the size of a cupboard, books stacked precariously against the wall and house-plants at different stages of decay. This has been home to me for the past four months, two rooms in a three-storey Edwardian red-brick villa, its façade tired and unloved, in the heart of Dublin.

  ‘When did you start doing house-calls, Reilly?’

  ‘You’re my first patient.’

  ‘Lucky me.’

  ‘I was worried, Katie. The way you left yesterday –’

  ‘I was sick …’

  He fixes me with a look that reminds me suddenly and painfully of my father.

  ‘Listen, Katie,’ he says, his voice lowered. ‘What happened yesterday… We were all appalled, repulsed by the thought of some sicko trying to squeeze a few quid from us for pictures of a corpse. But you… you were white as a sheet. And while the rest of us were discussing it, you bolted from the room, hardly stopping to pick up your bag. Eddie at the door said he’d never seen anyone take off out of there and across into Mother Kelly’s as fast.’ He pauses. ‘But, they were just pictures, Katie. And not the worst you’ve seen. You’re a tough cookie. Why did they upset you so much?’

  I couldn’t tell him. It would mean peeling away all the layers until we got to the one dark place I didn’t ever want to shine a light on. ‘Listen, Reilly,’ I say. ‘I appreciate your concern, really I do. But I’m fine. Honestly.’

  He looks at me in that considering way of his. ‘There’s something else,’ he says. ‘Luke Yates.’

  The way he says it makes the words dry up inside me. I see the hesitation on his face and it sends a jolt of alarm right through me.

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘You haven’t heard.’ A statement, not a question.

  ‘Tell me.’ My heart is pounding.

  ‘I’m sorry to do this, Katie,’ he says softly, ‘but Luke Yates is dead.’

  Critical Acclaim for

  THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS

  ‘Genuinely surprising’ GUARDIAN

  ‘A beautifully written, tense and twisty tale’ SUNDAY MIRROR

  ‘Taut, smartly written, empathetic and at times unbearably tense… The Boy That Never Was hits the bullseye’ THE IRISH INDEPENDENT

  ‘Cleverly written. A tense domestic thriller that is full of surprises. Dig a little deeper and you will find the broken heartbeat of this book which is the irreparable grief of the loss of a child’ MAIL ON SUNDAY

  ‘This is a debut novel that will catch fire’ NELSON DEMILLE

  ‘A truly remarkable novel. The Boy That Never Was is a pitch- perfect balance of driving plot and honest, complex human emotion. Written in a captivating, lyrical style and brilliantly structured, the story grips your heart from the first pages and simply never lets go’ JEFFERY DEAVER

  ‘The Boy That Never Was is that powerful thing, a beautifully written mystery driven by its exploration of the characters’ innermost hearts – of the inexorable ripples that loss sends out, and the terrible damage people can do to those they love most. Both as a crime novel and as an emotional journey, it’s gripping stuff’ TANA FRENCH

  ‘A twist-filled page-turner’ CLOSER

  ‘I shot through this in one sitting. Like Gone Girl, it’s told alternately by a husband and his wife. At the very beginning, something very shocking happens… It’s the most gripping thing I’ve read for ages’ EVENING STANDARD

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  ‘The Gifts’ was first published as part of the Sainsbury’s Dead Good edition of The Boy That Never Was. This edition published 2015

  ‘The Gifts’ copyright © Karen Gillece and Paul Perry, 2014

  Only We Know copyright © Karen Gillece and Paul Perry,
2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ISBN: 978-1-405-92428-3