The Boy That Never Was

by Karen Perry

  That was all perfectly reasonable. Perhaps I was just imagining the hint of aggression in his voice.

  I let it go.

  He began piling chairs up in a corner, clearing a space in the middle of the floor.

  ‘Want me to help?’

  ‘What? Have my pregnant wife haul some furniture about?’ he asked, flashing a grin at me. ‘What kind of a dick would that make me?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll make some coffee.’

  It was giving up the studio that had brought it about – this minor estrangement of ours. He had always been sensitive to his environment, his work space in particular. I had expected him to react badly to the move. It needled me a little that he could not accept it with good grace, but the argument was not worth having.

  I filled the coffee pot with water and spooned the coffee into the basket and wondered how long this little rift would continue. His moods could sometimes last for days. It was as I set the coffee to boil on the hob that he stepped into the kitchen. He stood by the doorway, his hands in his pockets, looking sheepish. His tousled hair, the way his eyes swept over the floorboards – he was a little boy again, ready to confess, needing to be forgiven, and I felt a tug on the thread that held us together, pulling me back to him.

  ‘I am happy about the baby, Robin,’ he began quietly. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he went on, ‘now that I’m working here in the house, and now that you’ve a shorter working week and will be at home more, I think we should have some ground rules.’

  ‘Ground rules?’ I said, confused.

  ‘Yes.’

  And I realized that what I had thought was sheepishness was something other than that. He looked shifty. He looked sly.

  ‘I need my space, Robin. I need privacy in order to work. You can’t just walk in for a chat whenever you’re feeling bored or lonely.’

  Anger began to rise inside me like mercury in a thermometer.

  ‘So what should I do?’ I asked, keeping my voice cool and level. ‘Should I knock first? Make an appointment for coffee? Tiptoe around my own house?’

  ‘Come on, Robin, don’t be like that.’

  ‘I’m not being like anything. You’re the one who’s acting weird.’

  ‘Look, all I’m asking is that you treat my work space here the way you treated the studio in town.’

  ‘Like a sanctum, you mean?’

  ‘Not a bloody sanctum,’ he snapped. ‘You never popped in for coffee there, did you? Never just dropped by for a quick chat.’

  ‘You never let me.’

  He stared at me. ‘Why do you do that? Say things like that. I never let you. Making me out to be some kind of control freak.’

  The coffee pot was spitting and hissing, and I turned and removed it from the heat, placing the cups on the counter with a clatter.

  ‘You don’t have to make this into a big thing, Robin,’ he said.

  I felt those words, the accusation they held, release into the air like a tiny puff of poison. Something snapped within me, and I knew I was going to ask him one of the questions I had never asked but always wondered about.

  ‘Why didn’t I have a key to your studio?’

  ‘What?’ He looked wary, confused.

  ‘A key. You never gave me one.’

  ‘Why would you need –’

  ‘Diane had one.’

  Her name hung between us like a threat. Her name in my mouth felt sharp. Everything about Diane is sharp, from the pointed tips of her Cupid’s bow mouth down to the spike of her heels.

  ‘That’s different,’ he said softly, stepping past me and pouring coffee into his cup.

  ‘How is it different?’

  Raising his voice and speaking slowly, as though talking to a child, he said, ‘She needed to have access to my paintings when I wasn’t there, that’s why.’

  ‘Does this mean she’ll have a key to this house?’

  ‘Of course not. What the fuck is wrong with you today, Robin?’

  My eyes flared and I felt my heart thrum with fury.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’

  ‘Every time Diane is mentioned, you do this. Every fucking time.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Bring on the big freeze. Give me the thin-lipped, disapproving look. It pisses me off.’

  ‘I’ve got good reason to disapprove.’

  ‘Why? She’s never done anything to you. So far as I can see, she’s only ever been nice and polite to you.’

  ‘Ha!’ I gave out a shout of mocking laughter. ‘Oh yes, very nice. God, Harry, you’re so blind. Nice to me? Every word she says to me is tainted with her condescension. I am the little wife of the great man, and doesn’t she love to remind me of it.’

  ‘It’s all in your head, Robin.’

  ‘All in my head, oh sure. Tell yourself that. Don’t you remember the one time she was in this house, and some of my old canvases were stacked against the wall, and she deigned to look through them and give me her professional opinion? Don’t you recall what she said?’

  He gave me a weary, guarded look and drank deep from his coffee cup.

  ‘She cast her imperious gaze over them and told me that they were sweet. Sweet, cosy, and parochial – that’s what she said. Parochial! She actually used that word!’ As I thought of those words, I remembered again how small she had made me feel. I had seen my work through the sneer of her gaze and felt the awful deflation of failure.

  ‘So she didn’t like your stuff. So what?’

  I held his gaze for a moment, and then, in a low voice, I said, ‘I don’t like the way she looks at you.’

  Instantly he straightened up and slammed his cup on the counter. Giving me a dark look, he turned to leave.

  ‘I don’t have time for this crap.’

  I stood there shaking my head, my hands squeezed into fists as the blood pumped hotly through my body.

  ‘That’s right, Harry. Walk away. God forbid you should stay and actually talk about it.’

  ‘We’ve been through this before! There’s nothing to talk about, apart from your paranoia.’

  ‘My paranoia? How dare you!’ My anger was brimming over, taking possession of every pocket of space within my body. I felt swollen with fury. ‘I am not paranoid! I know the two of you were fucking! I know it, Harry! I might not know the details, when it began or how long it went on for. I don’t even know if you’re fucking her still! But I know you two have been together, even if I can’t prove it. And it’s not paranoia, and fuck you for saying that it is! The very least you could do is show me just a little bit of respect and admit to it instead of lying to my face and dismissing me as some paranoid, neurotic little wife!’

  ‘That would make you happy, would it? That would get you off my back? All right then – I fucked her. There now. Happy?’

  He spat the words at me and held his hands up in a gesture of mock surrender.

  ‘Make a joke of it then,’ I said, shaking my head and looking at him anew. ‘But you weren’t always like this. I never would have suspected you of sleeping with someone else – never. Not until Dillon –’

  ‘Don’t you mention him,’ he growled, raising a finger in warning. ‘Don’t you bring him into this.’

  ‘Is that why you do it?’ I went on regardless. ‘Does fucking around take your mind off the guilt? Does it numb the pain? Does it help to blot out the details of that night even for just a brief instant?’

  He stared at me from the doorway. He looked tired, bleary and wild with pent-up rage. I wondered if there was a bottle somewhere in the garage, in among his things, that he would go to now and draw strength from.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid,’ he said in a thick voice, then closed the door softly behind him.

  It took me a long time to calm down after that. I felt my anger stalking around inside me like a big cat, clawed and dangerous. It snarled and paced, and I felt restless and distrac
ted.

  We don’t often argue, Harry and I. Neither one of us likes confrontation. But that day, in the kitchen, I was taken by a sudden rage, and, if I am honest, it had nothing to do with Diane. God knows, we have had that argument often enough. Nor did it have anything to do with the studio or what I saw as Harry’s adolescent sulk at having to give it up. Him and his bloody ground rules. The real root of my anger that day concerned my pregnancy and Harry’s apparent ambivalence towards it. No – more than that: his studied refusal to engage with it, whatever he said otherwise.

  With Dillon he had wanted to know everything. Back then, he had pored over the pregnancy book I had found at Cozimo’s. He was relentless in his questioning, eager for details of the changes I was feeling. He had encouraged me to keep a diary, documenting my pregnancy so that we would always have some way of remembering it, long after the details had faded from memory. At that early stage, he was already planning for posterity. He had wanted so badly to connect with the life growing inside me that it almost broke my heart. It almost suffocated me.

  Now he seemed unable to connect with me or the pregnancy. He was caught up within his own thoughts, distracted by something he wouldn’t share with me. And what bothered me most, the thing that niggled away at me constantly, was worrying just what – or who – was causing his distraction.

  Later that week, when there was a lull in activity at the office, I slipped out and walked briskly down Parliament Street, out on to Dame Street. I had spent the morning digitizing up drawings for one of the senior architects, and my eyes were watering from staring too long at the screen. Lately, I seemed to be doing little more than data-entry work, and it was getting to the point where even working on door schedules sounded exciting. But as the most junior member of the staff in a small practice, I had little choice in what work I did, and I knew, deep down, that I was lucky to have a job at all.

  A heavy snow had fallen during the night, and the city felt blanketed – muffled. There was an air of desertion about it. What traffic there was moved slowly, and people picked their way carefully through the snow and the slush. It took me half an hour to reach Trinity College, and fifteen minutes more to make my way across the slippery cobblestones and the cricket pitches, out to the Lincoln Gate. I hadn’t thought of it until then, but my journey led me on to Fenian Street and past Harry’s recently vacated studio. It was just around the corner from Holles Street and the hospital. I looked up as I passed, up at the closed, opaque windows. I half-expected to see Spencer’s leathered features staring out. But the windows were blank, reflecting the dull glare of the sky. As I passed, I thought of Harry. Our argument had been patched up and yet something remained, like a lingering smell.

  I reached the hospital and was directed to a prefabricated building behind an archway – the clinic I would be attending for my check-ups. At first glance it seemed a flimsy, temporary structure, not weighty enough for the serious business of having a baby. Inside, a hassled woman whose hair had been scraped back in a ponytail took my details and then set about putting together a folder for me. I watched in amazement as she amassed a sheaf of variously coloured pages, hastily leafing through and stabbing different sheets with labels in the harried yet bored manner of someone who has done this a thousand times. Then she handed it to me, along with an appointment card, and asked me to wait. Several minutes later, I was taken to a cramped office, where a brisk but cheerful woman proceeded to register me in more detail.

  ‘First baby?’ she asked brightly.

  ‘Second.’

  ‘Ah, so you know what you’re about, then.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Boy or girl?’

  For a second, I was confused, and she looked up at me and said, ‘Your first child. Is it a boy or a girl?’

  ‘Boy.’

  ‘Ah. How old?’

  I swallowed hard. After all this time, I am still not good with questions like that. My mouth went dry, my tongue sticking to my palate. I thought of Dillon, an involuntary memory of him in those last days before we lost him. His soft hair, how it curled about his neck; his chubby limbs, dimples on the knuckles of his fleshy little hands. That was how I thought of him – how I remembered him: a little boy, forever trapped in childhood.

  ‘Three,’ I said.

  She smiled warmly, then directed her gaze from me to her computer monitor.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be very excited to find out he’s going to have a brother or sister.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said weakly.

  ‘Now then. You’ve opted for combined care, so you’ll need to fill out this form and send it off to the Health Service Executive.’

  The rest of the appointment was a blur, for I spent the whole time worrying about how I had lied about Dillon. Not an outright lie, but a lie of omission. Why had I done that? Because I could not bear to watch her face losing its brightness and taking on a mournful, sympathetic look, that’s why. I have been treated to that look more times than I care to think about. But then, throughout the course of the interview, I began to worry that the lie might have consequences, later on, throughout my visits here. I began to imagine coming in here and bumping into this kindly woman and having her ask about my pregnancy and did my son know about it yet, asking me in a corridor crowded with expectant women and their partners, all half-listening, watching idly, and then I would have to explain that Dillon had died, and the very thought of mentioning a dead child in front of a group of pregnant women seemed outrageous.

  ‘– and that will all happen at your first appointment. Now, let me write the date down on your appointment card, so you won’t forget.’

  I handed it to her, watching her neat writing fill up a white square, still thinking I should say something to clarify things, something about Dillon.

  ‘So, when you come back for your appointment, go straight up the stairs there, and the nurse will see to you. Okay?’

  ‘Right. Thanks.’

  I left her to her cheerful administration, still chewing my lip with indecision and regret, and that is when I heard my name being called.

  ‘Robin? Is it you?’

  A woman in a blue dress with a neat, round bump like a Christmas pudding was approaching me with a hesitant, timorous smile. Her auburn hair was swept over one shoulder. Her face was crazy with freckles. It was a face I knew but couldn’t locate in memory.

  ‘It’s Tanya,’ she said. ‘From the Sitric Gallery? We met at your husband’s exhibition some years ago?’

  ‘Tanya. Yes. Yes, of course. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right!’ she laughed, adding, ‘Pregnancy has a tendency to scramble your brain, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it does. When are you due?’

  ‘March. And you?’

  ‘Not till the summer. I’m actually just here to register.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said.

  For a moment, neither of us said anything, both tacitly acknowledging the awkwardness of the situation. It is something you hope won’t happen – bumping into someone you know when going to register your pregnancy. Not yet ready to share your news, and yet there is no denying it once caught on the premises of an ante-natal clinic. I had the strange, almost shamefaced feeling of being caught with my hand in someone else’s purse.

  ‘How is Harry, anyway?’

  ‘He’s good, thanks. Busy,’ I added, remembering now what Harry had told me. ‘He mentioned that you might be interested in looking at some of his new work.’

  A look of mild consternation crossed her face.

  ‘When he met you last weekend,’ I went on. ‘He was quite excited, in fact, although he’d kill me for saying as much. But you know he’d love the chance to exhibit again at the Sitric.’

  The look on her face stopped me. Consternation had changed to genuine confusion, and she was shaking her head slowly.

  ‘You must be mistaken, Robin. I haven’t seen Harry in ages. In fact, it’s a good two years, at least, since we last met.’

&n
bsp; ‘Oh,’ I said, momentarily thrown. ‘Well, perhaps it was someone else from the Sitric Gallery that he was referring to. There’s another girl who works there – Sally or Sarah? I forget!’

  I laughed, yet still she looked at me strangely.

  ‘The Sitric Gallery has closed,’ she said softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Another victim of the recession,’ she continued with a little mirthless laugh. ‘No one has money to spend on art any more.’

  My mind raced. The Sitric had closed? My thoughts whirred back over what Harry had said – Tanya from the Sitric. The day of the march. I was sure that was who he had mentioned.

  ‘Well,’ she said, shrugging. ‘It was nice to see you. And please give Harry my best. Perhaps, when things pick up, our paths might cross again.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said with a smile. ‘Good luck.’

  As I walked away, picking my way carefully through the snow, I thought about Harry, about what he had said, and wondered why he had lied. And if he hadn’t seen Tanya the day of the march, then who had he seen, and why did he not want to tell me?

  Perhaps I was mistaken. I told myself that it was possible he had meant someone else from a different gallery and I had just misheard or misinterpreted his remarks. But even as I turned the thought over in my mind, I knew it wasn’t true. He had lied to me. And I remembered how he’d been that day – agitated, distracted – and the memory stayed with me on the long, slow walk back to the office, creasing itself into a little furrow of worry: one more to add to the rest.

  7. Harry

  I woke up to ‘Fairytale of New York’ playing on the radio. That was it. As soon as you heard ‘Fairytale’, you knew Christmas was on its way. I felt rough. I felt like the scumbag in the song. The strung-out tones were fitting. Nothing like Shane MacGowan singing how he could have been someone on a bleak Monday morning in December to make you think of taking to the drink again. Hair of the dog was on my mind.

  Beside me, the bed was stone cold. Robin must have been up for a while. I stumbled into the bathroom and got the water going. Standing under the shower with the jets of water spraying painfully across my face, I thought of what my life had come to, the point in the path that I was at. I thought of my work, the opportunities that were opening up to me now with this trip I was about to take. I was off to London for a meeting with a gallery about a show I might do, a follow-on from The Tangier Manifesto. A part two, if you like. I was nervous but excited, too, conscious of all the possibilities swirling about me. I thought of Robin and the baby growing inside her. I thought of this old house and the future that lay within it. All of these things flitted across the corridors of my mind. But a shadow was cast over them. The shadow of the boy I had seen. His face rose up amid the steam of the hot water, and I turned away from it, flicking off the water and stepping out of the tub. I did not shave, just dressed quickly, grabbed a few things and threw them into an overnight bag.