The Boy That Never Was

by Karen Perry

  I went to the sink and left his mug there. Then I fished in the cupboard for a pint glass and, as I was filling it with water, I looked up and caught sight of him outside in the garden. He was drawing deeply on his cigarette; then he breathed out a plume of smoke into the cold morning air. And what he did next was this: he took the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it on the snow. He stood perfectly still with his head bent, as if staring at the butt on the ground. Then he closed his eyes and brought both hands up to cover his face. His bent neck, the slump of his shoulders, his face hiding in those cupped hands. Something about it made me go cold. It was a gesture of despair.

  ‘Freezing out there.’

  He closed the back door behind him and stood there shivering.

  I found the packets in the cupboard. The tablets plinked as they hit the water, and I handed him the glass, and he swallowed down the contents with a groan, as though the effort had drained him of any last scrap of energy.

  I put my hand against his brow and felt the heat there despite the enveloping cold. Then I leaned in and wrapped my arms around him, pressing my body against his, needing to feel close to him to dispel the despair that still clung to him.

  ‘I know something that’s good for a hangover,’ I said slowly, and when I drew back, he met my smile with a broad grin of his own.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I reached up and kissed him then, slowly, savouring the taste of him, sour with alcohol and cigarettes, but I didn’t care. My desire for him licked like a flame inside me.

  And so it was not until later, when we lay against each other in our bed, naked and exhausted, a quiet contentment falling over us like a happy sigh, that I remembered our phone call of the previous day.

  ‘Harry?’ I said, watching the strand of my hair that he was idly spiralling around his finger.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘You never did tell me.’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘Yesterday, on the phone, you said something had happened.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Remember? When you rang to ask me to come and meet you? You said something had happened. But you never said what it was.’

  ‘Didn’t I?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought I did.’

  ‘So?’

  He stopped playing with my hair and rubbed a finger in his eye, frown lines puckering his brow.

  ‘I bumped into someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Eh, Tanya – that girl from the Sitric Gallery. The one with all the freckles. Do you remember her?’

  ‘Vaguely. And?’

  ‘And we got talking and I told her about the stuff I’ve been working on …’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘And she sounded interested.’

  I pushed myself up on to my elbows to look at him.

  ‘Do you think they might give you a show?’

  He saw my eager expression and let out a burst of laughter.

  ‘Look at you, counting your unhatched chickens.’

  ‘Seriously, Harry. Do you think they might?’

  His laughter died away, and he gave me a slow, hazy smile.

  ‘They might. They just might.’

  Then he pulled me back down to him, and we lay in silence for a minute, both of us considering the possibilities.

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Go to sleep, baby.’

  I felt the weight of his arm slung over my hip and the tickle of his rough chin nestling into my neck.

  ‘We’re so lucky, Harry.’

  His body lay cupped around mine, so I couldn’t read his expression.

  ‘Yes,’ he said slowly, before drifting away to sleep. ‘Yes, we are.’

  5. Harry

  The first time we met Cozimo, he had been knocked over by a passing bicycle on one of the narrow alleys of the medina. His straw hat lay beside his outstretched body. He didn’t cry out or seem inconvenienced in any way. Staring blankly upwards as if considering his predicament, he was humming something to himself. When I bent down to see if he was all right, he looked up at me and said, ‘It’s not like I’ve been drinking.’

  I reached my arm down, and he grabbed it and I lifted him up. Robin handed him his hat.

  ‘Your health,’ he said, reaching into his waistcoat. He took a swift slug from a small silver flask before blurting out that he was ‘much obliged’. But as he turned to walk away, he fell to the ground like a deck of cards. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, never losing his decorum, ‘you could call me a taxi or an ambulance, even.’ He was very polite, always polite.

  We went with him to the hospital, much to his surprise. It was Robin’s idea. The hospital was small and unclean. Robin spoke good French and told a nurse how we had found the man. By this stage, Cozimo was somewhat delirious and speaking – or, rather, slurring – in a number of different languages and at one stage humming and what can only be described as chirruping in a language resembling Arabic.

  That night we left him sedated and cheerful. When we returned to see him the next day, he was garrulous and appreciative. Robin asked if there was anything we could do for him.

  ‘There is one thing,’ he said.

  ‘Anything,’ she said, taking a shine to him or feeling sorry for him or some mixture of the two.

  ‘Can you check on the shop?’

  The shop was his bookshop. Robin, of course, said yes. She is always talking to strangers and saying yes. She doesn’t know how to say no. Generous to a fault.

  He handed us the keys and a scrap of paper with the address. ‘It’s in a state, but it’ll be good to know it is still standing.’

  We took off in a taxi and found ourselves travelling through a network of narrow streets until the car stopped and the driver pointed. ‘You walk now,’ he said, and we did and found the old building tilting at the end of a small laneway. We let ourselves in – into the ramshackle old bookshop, into Cozimo’s life, and into, without knowing it at the time, what would become our home for the next four years. You see, one upshot of Robin’s generous spirit was that Cozimo offered us, by the time he was leaving hospital, a place to stay. ‘It’s my pleasure. You’d be doing me a favour.’

  ‘We can’t,’ Robin said.

  ‘You visited me every day.’

  And that was the start of our time in Tangier, something that began as a dream and ended a nightmare. I can’t tell you everything that happened there. I can give you an idea, a sense of what the place was like – that’s all. I’d go mad if I had to delve into all the details again. It’s strange, because I remember it now as if it were someone else’s life. To put it simply: we had wanted to come to Tangier because of the light.

  Back then, both of us were artists. After art college, we had travelled a bit through Europe – Spain mostly – ending up in Tarifa on the Costa de la Luz. We liked its hippy feel, it was cheap, and it gave us a chance to paint with the luminous coastal light of Andalusia. The century was drawing to a close, and after a weekender in Tangier, where we celebrated the start of the new millennium, we knew it was for us. The cultural mix was more interesting, and more importantly, there was something magical about the light there. It wasn’t until we returned to Ireland that Robin gave up on her art. After Dillon, she somehow lost the heart for painting. Maybe she associated the painting with him. She kind of co-opted his contributions to her paintings, you know, included them as part of the process. Ours was a free household. We weren’t fussy about the paintings. If Dillon wanted to dip his hands in and spread them about the canvas, well, so be it. At least, that’s how it became. Sure, when I started, I liked to have a closed-off space, but as I realized that Dillon was less of a distraction and more of an asset, I loosened up and let him throw whatever dollop of paint my way whenever he wanted.

  I think Cozimo liked the idea that there were two artists living in his apartment. ‘Talk about landing on your feet,’ I said to Robin, but she thought it a poor choice of words after Cozimo’s accident.


  ‘Some broken ribs, maybe an internal thing or two, they don’t know. How could they? Tangier is a wonderful place to live, but not if you are a medical patient. Or a medical specimen, as they would have it.’

  Cozimo talked with an affected English accent. The sinking couch in the apartment was where a prince of Morocco had been conceived, he whispered confidentially to us, lounging and downing his pills with a heady mixture of cocktails. He liked martinis most of the time, and he could often be heard calling out for vermouth.

  ‘Where is the vermouth? Olives, where are the olives?’

  We were intrigued by this eccentric yet austere-looking man. His hair was receding at the front, but he wore it long at the back. He wore slippers and silk trousers. We visited him in the hospital every day for a week before he came to convalesce with us. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘stay – we’ll come to some sort of arrangement.’

  ‘Arrangement?’ I said a little dubiously.

  ‘A rent agreeable to both parties.’

  I remember Robin asking him, in those early days, how long he had been in Tangier. He answered her while mixing another martini. ‘Since God was a child, my dear,’ he said. ‘Since God was a child.’

  That’s the way he spoke. He was theatrical. He owned the bookshop, but it seemed to do very little trade. Was it a front, a hobby, something to keep the lord himself occupied? ‘One can’t be sure,’ he said, answering my indirect question obliquely on one of those smouldering afternoons. ‘The truth is, I can hardly remember when or why I opened the place myself.’

  The apartment was large, with three rooms. In the back room, where we painted, there was a stack of old typewriters. ‘I used them once, I think,’ Cozimo told us. ‘Now I collect them. I must have used them once. Maybe I wrote a book on one of them.’ He balanced his gold cigarette holder between his fingers like Garbo and blithely flicked the ash on to the ground.

  Tangier. It was another world away. Another lifetime. We had freedom. We had Dillon. We had everything we wanted. Yes, we arrived without Dillon. And we plunged into life in Tangier without him, but in a way, I remember that time as if he had been there all along. Laughing, mischievous, unfettered.

  We worked hard there, but we enjoyed ourselves, too. And even though one painting followed another, it seemed as if the days were longer, languorous, hazy and golden, that we had time for everything we wanted to do.

  We wrote The Tangier Manifesto there. It was a co-authored missive of free living. A poster stuck to one wall of the kitchen. We scratched mottoes, dictums, words of encouragement, reminders, jokes and phrases we heard:

  Paint or die.

  Wake early.

  Meditate.

  God give me the strength to lead a double life.

  Milk, please, we need milk!

  Sometimes the phrases were crossed out, and over time ‘paint at first light’ was replaced by ‘bottle at 3 and 6 a.m.!, Harry’s turn!’ Or: ‘nappies, we are out of nappies and the water has been cut off.’

  But more often than not, they were madcap phrases of the moment: ‘What is Buddha?’

  The next day the answer might be scribbled by the same person or someone else: ‘Three pounds of flax!’

  Thinking back now, it seemed as if Robin never fully believed in Tangier. Maybe she thought it was too good to be true. Maybe it was. Maybe she thought, life can’t be like this. Of course, her mother didn’t help. Ringing her all the time. Asking her to come home. Guilt-tripping her. ‘Your father’s sick.’ ‘I miss you.’ Or ‘How can you deal with the heat of that country while you’re pregnant? That’s no place to bring up a child!’ And so on, ad nauseam.

  Her one and only visit was a complete train wreck from start to finish. Jesus, what can I tell you now? The essentials are: her flight was delayed. I was to meet her. Robin had picked up a few hours working in Caid’s Bar, so she’d sent me. I waited for the plane dutifully. It was delayed further. I went for coffee. I went for a drink. The plane landed. We missed each other. Robin’s mother did not speak to me when I saw her later that night. Neither did she like our digs, so she wasted money on a four-star hotel an expensive taxi ride away. She spent the weekend weeping, beseeching Robin to come home. ‘Beseeching’ I say, because she is the kind of woman to use the word ‘beseeching’. I thought she might develop a rapport with Cozimo, but she found him small and vile. Her words. The weekend passed dismally, and Robin accompanied her mother back to the airport, and I never said goodbye.

  Robin hardly ever mentioned the visit, and we settled back into our life. But I knew, or I sensed at least, that the wobbles were there in Robin. Her mother had only exacerbated her anxiety. It was not the middle-class life our parents might have expected of us, but we were doing what we had dreamed about in college. Tangier was not an expensive place to live, and we had, from what I had made from my first show out of college, enough to get by on, I reckoned, for at least three years. That had been the plan, but within eighteen months of our arrival there, Robin told me she was pregnant.

  Not that that changed things for me. I was elated. But when she suggested moving back to Ireland, I resisted, to put it mildly. ‘Why would we go back?’ I said. ‘What have we got to go back to?’

  ‘Family.’

  ‘Your family?’

  It wasn’t hard to figure out why I did not get on with Robin’s parents. They resented me for taking their daughter away from them, away from Ireland, away from everything cosy and comfortable. An artist has to go away, I told Robin. She didn’t disagree, and I remember talking at length on the subject. She wasn’t objecting, but it didn’t stop me from making my point, even after we had absconded.

  But I’d always suspected that Robin had her eye on our return. Whereas I wasn’t sure I would ever go back. What for?

  To say it was not an ideal place to bring up a child just suggested you were from somewhere else. Dillon’s first years passed in a blur of night feedings, sleeplessness and walking, always walking, in a buggy, in my arms, on my shoulder, whatever it took to get him to sleep.

  Cozimo was bewildered but charmed by the presence of a child. He lived within walking distance of the bookshop in a detached and gated house he was curiously private about, and though we saw him nearly every day since our first meeting, he rarely asked us to his home. That was something Robin and I talked about, but never with Cozimo. He was generous enough as it was and brought gifts for Dillon on a regular basis, but he looked at the boy strangely, as if he had never encountered a child before. ‘Amusing little things, aren’t they,’ he said to me once after I found him blowing smoke into Dillon’s face. ‘Doesn’t like that,’ he said wryly.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t imagine he does,’ I said, assuming Cozimo’s arch tone. There were plenty of oddities about Coz. Where was he from? Where had his money come from? What was his own house like? Why did he spend so much time with us at the apartment? We had our own theories about him, but Cozimo for the most part remained elusive, and though I can say that he was probably my best friend from that time, I also feel like I hardly knew him. Take, for example, his bizarre interest in the occult.

  I’m not sure how he persuaded me, but one night he wanted to have a séance. ‘I have some questions for the dead,’ he said. The truth was that he was off his head most of the time, and I suppose I was overindulging myself. Tangier was a transit point for all sorts of drugs; the place was drenched in them. There were parties where you could hardly avoid cocaine, pills, hash – anything you wanted or had ever heard of was there.

  ‘I don’t think Robin will be into it,’ I said to Coz.

  ‘Okay, so we’ll do it when she is out.’

  After work, Robin often liked to walk at night. I’m not saying it was safe or that I approved, but she took in the sights, cleared her head and very often went to an Internet café or somewhere she could make or receive a phone call. She liked to stay in regular contact with her parents, and when I say ‘regular’, I mean every second day. I did not have that probl
em. Even if my parents had been alive, I don’t think I would have been in touch that often. But it was Robin’s business. In any case, that and her work at the bar allowed me to join in with the séances. I remembered something about Yeats getting involved in séances, way back when, and I thought Cozimo’s flighty idea might generate some ideas for my own work, my painting, and that it might be some fun. Yes, I was curious. And I was high.

  The thing was, before that first séance, Dillon had fallen asleep on the dinner table at the apartment. I know it sounds strange, but things were free and easy and out of kilter. The large oak table we ate at also had a dip at the end of it, where Dillon sometimes climbed. I often put a cushion up there, and late at night he would climb up and fall asleep. I think he was about two when we had this first séance. Two Spanish sisters I had never met before and a local couple Cozimo had befriended the previous week were there, too. ‘What about Dillon?’ Cozimo asked. ‘Can you put him to bed?’

  ‘I’d hate to wake him,’ I said.

  Dillon was a bad sleeper. Straight and simple. In the past it had had nothing to do with teething or growth spurts or the noise from outside, the hawkers or touts, the music from across the street, the heaving mass of the city, none of it; he was like his father, pure and simple, a bad sleeper. No, wait a minute; he was worse. Probably, if we had gone to check it out, we would have been told it was some kind of condition. But we didn’t. We struggled on. It was like this: he could stay awake for hours. I’m talking all night. Now, Robin and I had been night owls, back in our college days, but in Tangier we were super-conscious of the light, the daylight. We had to have as much of it as possible. That’s what we had come for. That’s what made the paintings possible. The strange and beautiful light of Tangier, its radiant and dusty history.

  But we became exhausted. Missing the morning light because of lack of sleep made me sick. I started taking pills either to keep me going when I woke or to get me to sleep at night so I could be up to catch that fiery dawn light I wanted in my paintings. Cozimo had a cabinet full of pills. In one pencil case, he kept the pills he needed for a week; a generous soul, he offered me pretty much what I wanted or what he thought I needed. Of course, I didn’t tell Robin about taking these pills. But to paint, to be ready for the canvas, I needed to be there; I couldn’t afford to be exhausted from lack of sleep.