The Boy That Never Was

by Karen Perry

  Robin called up the stairs to me:

  ‘Harry? Are you ready?’

  ‘Yep,’ I said, taking the stairs two at a time, pressed by a sudden need to get going.

  ‘I’ll drop you at the airport.’

  ‘What? In this snow?’

  ‘It’s not too bad. We can go for breakfast in the airport before your flight.’

  ‘Okay. If you’re sure?’

  She gave me a warm smile of reassurance, then skipped past me to the van. As I locked up, I could hear her turning the engine over, bringing it to life.

  ‘Tickets? Passport? Wallet?’ she said as I got in beside her.

  ‘Check, check and check.’

  She seemed so breezy that morning. An air of optimism hovered around her, giving off warmth on that cold, cold day. I felt so grateful for it in that moment that it was enough to dispel all my thoughts about the boy, about what I had seen or what I thought I had seen. Delusions, that’s what they were, brought on by guilt or fatigue or a combination of both.

  Robin had turned her head to back out of the driveway when I saw the expression on her face change, the frown forming on her forehead. I turned, too, and saw the long snout of the old Jag pulling up, blocking our exit. I heard the creak of a hand brake and watched as the door opened and Spencer stepped out, fag clamped in his mouth, loose strands of uncombed hair lifting in the breeze.

  ‘Great,’ Robin declared in a flat tone as he raised a hand in salute.

  ‘I’ll get rid of him,’ I said.

  She looked at me with a weary expression. ‘If only it were that simple.’

  He was at the driver’s window now, tapping on the glass. Dutifully, she wound it down. I could smell his breath cutting across her, bitter and sharp.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘Airport.’

  ‘Come on. I’ll give you a lift.’

  He turned and stalked back to the Jag, not waiting for an answer.

  Robin stared at her knuckles, her hands still gripping the steering wheel.

  ‘Sorry, love,’ I said, and I kissed her goodbye. She sighed. ‘I’ll make it up to you. Forget breakfast at the airport – I’ll take you out somewhere nice when I’m back.’

  Robin didn’t respond. I climbed out of the car, feeling like I had let her down again, and stepped into Spencer’s. He had on a camelhair coat. Peeking beneath the lapels was a flash of black silk: he was still wearing his dressing gown. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked like he had not slept in a month.

  ‘Are you sure you’re okay to drive?’

  ‘What? Course I am,’ he said, holding up a breathalyser. ‘I have the system sussed.’

  He drove so I had to clutch the door handle. My foot pressed to brake more than once. But we made it with time to spare.

  ‘I have talked with McDonagh, my mate in the Guards, and he has managed to source the CCTV for the hours in question. It’s all digitized these days.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Excellent.’

  ‘The man owed me a favour, so here, my friend, are half a dozen DVDs.’

  I looked at the stack of them, bound with an elastic band, and a tide of mixed embarrassment and regret washed over me. Why had I asked him for these? What purpose could they possibly serve? At that moment, my suspicions seemed so patently absurd, let alone my desire for some amateur sleuthing.

  ‘These were not easy to come by, favour or no. Seems like they are hot property. Austerity measures, protests. Forget The Tangier Manifesto, that’s what you should call your next show.’

  ‘Austerity Measures?’

  ‘Bingo.’

  ‘Maybe I will.’

  ‘Listen, you’ll have to analyse those discs yourself. McDonagh may have owed me one big favour, but he was not about to look through three hundred hours of people walking up and down O’Connell Street.’

  ‘Three hundred hours?’

  ‘Give or take. There’s, like, three or four cameras, so … I don’t know, you do the maths.’

  ‘Right you are. Thanks again. You’re a mate.’

  ‘I’ve been called worse.’ He parked. ‘Look, are you going to buy me a drink or what?’

  ‘What about the car?’

  ‘I’ll leave it. And …’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Say it was stolen or something, I don’t know.’

  I checked in, and we went to the nearest bar.

  ‘So?’ Spencer said, an expectant look on his face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you going to tell me what the fuck this is all about?’ He pointed at the discs, then reached for his pint.

  I knew I couldn’t tell him. Mostly, because I was embarrassed – afraid, perhaps, of the conclusions he might draw from my behaviour, the references he might make to all the trouble in my past. Besides, he had not known Dillon. Not really. He had visited Tangier once, shortly after the birth, and we had spent a memorable weekend wetting the baby’s head. He had been the only friend to make it over and he’d seemed genuinely happy for us. After that, he’d doted on Dillon but from afar, sending gifts and cards. He hadn’t been anything as official as a godfather, but he’d held a special status for Dillon. He’d been ‘Uncle Spencer’.

  Before I had a chance to dodge the question, Spencer butted in: ‘You know there’s more than fifty fucking CCTV cameras in the city centre? Not to mention the rest of the country. Big Brother is watching you.’

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘What about our civil rights?’

  ‘Spencer, you don’t give a fuck about civil rights.’

  ‘How do you know? How do you know I don’t care about my civil rights?’

  ‘You are just looking to pick a fight.’

  He glared at me as if I had insulted his mother.

  ‘You’re contrary today,’ I added.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  My phone rang. It was Diane. She knew about the Golden Clock gallery in London, but I did not really want her involved. I did not want her on the scent, representing me as if she owned me. The more distance I had from her, the better. I let the phone keep ringing. Spencer picked it up and saw Diane’s name. He pressed the reject button. ‘The less said, the better.’

  I agreed.

  More beers arrived.

  ‘You’re in a generous spirit,’ I said.

  ‘It’s my Christmas cheer.’ He picked my phone up again and logged on to the web comic Wheel Spinning Hamster Dead. ‘That’s us, my friend. That’s Ireland.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s hilarious, Spence. Really charming stuff,’ I said.

  ‘There’s no app for loneliness,’ he quipped.

  ‘You’re jealous you don’t have an iPhone,’ I said, but the truth was, I couldn’t afford it myself. Money was tight. My overdraft had an overdraft. We had been given a house, but it was a poisoned chalice of sorts. The place’s upkeep threatened to wring us dry. It had leaks and draughts. This was broken, that was malfunctioning. I’d never say this to Robin, but we had inherited a wreck. ‘It’ll make a good home,’ she’d said. ‘It’ll serve us well. Why can’t you be more excited?’ I know I sound like a miserable sod, but it was the sense of not having earned it, or made it ourselves, that sat uneasily with me. We’d even taken out a mortgage to buy Mark’s half, to do the place up; taken out a mortgage on a house that had been given to us. Utter madness. And yet, mortgages, phones, none of it mattered – not right then. The glimmer of possibility still flickered and shone. Hope, I suppose you might call it.

  ‘You realize all the music you own is from the 1980s?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You sad fucker. Your music-listening life ended in 1989.’

  ‘Well, they are the vintage years.’

  ‘Howard Jones, Nik Kershaw. Please.’

  ‘The Cure, The Smiths.’

  ‘Lloyd Cole.’

  ‘Fucking love Lloyd Cole.’

  ‘Lost weekend in a hotel in Amsterdam.’

  ‘Story of my life.’

 
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two figures – a woman and a child – and I spun in my chair to look at them. But the boy was younger than he should be, only about three or four, and the woman was different too, the wrong hair colour, the wrong height.

  I turned back and saw Spencer staring at me.

  ‘What is with you today, bud?’ he asked, looking me square in the face.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’re twitchy as hell.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Yes, you are. Every time someone walks past, you’re swinging around in your seat. Are you expecting someone?’

  ‘No!’ I said, indignant and flustered. ‘Here, finish this for me. I’ve got to head out.’

  The flight boarded after a delay. The hold-up had something to do with de-icing the runway and the wingtips. If you thought too much about it all, you’d never go anywhere. I got on to the plane and sat down beside a woman whose first greeting to me was ‘Cold enough for you?’

  Her perfume was so strong I could taste it. Even the gin and tonic I ordered did not help. Across the aisle, a man was coping with a crying child. He dipped the child’s dummy into his drink and popped it into the child’s mouth. The child stopped crying. The man saw me watching, smiled and gave me a wink. I turned away. It seemed that everywhere I looked, there were children. I couldn’t escape from them.

  By the time I made it to London, it was too late for the meeting. I rang Daphne, and we rescheduled for the next afternoon. I had the half-formed notion to take in some of the sights, a museum maybe, or a walk down by Waterloo Station. But drinking so early in the day had left a fug of inertia within me, so instead, after checking into my hotel, I lay on my big boat of a bed, flicked on the telly and spent a mindless twenty minutes watching Nigella Lawson spoon one creamy concoction after another into her mouth. Spencer’s DVDs sat on the bedside table. I tried to ignore them, but I felt their presence nonetheless, drawing me to them like a scab demanding to be picked. It was a bad idea and I knew it, but after a while I turned the TV off, switched on my computer and fed the first DVD into the slot.

  At first, I watched with half-hearted amusement. The images were grainy and of poor quality. I paged through a magazine, aware of the flickering movements across the screen, my attention snagging occasionally before it drifted away again. I’ll turn it off in a minute, I said to myself, but the minutes became hours, and soon I found myself ejecting a disc only to replace it with another. Trapped by boredom or torpor, my magazine discarded, I let myself get sucked into that screen and the images it conveyed.

  One shot showed the Liffey. Three men rocked back and forth in a boat, waving banners. I had missed that one on the day. But there it was. I made instant coffee with the small kettle in the corner of the room. I kicked off my boots and propped the computer on a pillow. Hours passed, and the footage became a blur, people milling this way and that. Talking, moving on. It grew tedious.

  The computer was like a hot rock on the bed. Wary of burning the hard drive out, I turned it off and took a break. I had watched hours of footage, and I was tired, but that didn’t stop me from going out. A beer at the hotel bar and then out to wander. I didn’t really know where I was going, but it was a chance to get out and clear my head. The city was under a veil of snow. Solitary walkers passed in lonely silhouette as they crossed the deserted parks. Black cabs moved slowly over a tide of slush. I wandered from bar to bar, images of the demonstration streaming through my head, before I looped back to the hotel with pains in my calves and knees from walking so carefully and sank dog-tired into bed.

  I woke to the sound of my laptop humming. It blazed on the bed beside me as my head pounded. In the bathroom I gargled with mouthwash, then swallowed painkillers. No stomach for breakfast. I took my bag and walked towards Soho.

  I was miles too early for the meeting, but I couldn’t spend another second in that hotel room. I needed to get away from my laptop and those DVDs. They contained nothing there but images to feed my already overextended delusion. It was unhealthy. I had to clear my head, to focus on the future. The past held only heartache.

  With a view to killing some time, I wandered into the British Museum and found myself straying into the Egyptian exhibition. The painkillers had worked to a degree, but my head felt fuzzy, clotted with too many thoughts. I tried to concentrate on what I was viewing, but there was too much coming at me, elbowing for room in my crowded brain. I walked around in a daze, untouched, unmoved, until I came across the mummy of a child, from Hawara, Egypt, and stopped suddenly, riveted.

  The mummy had been discovered in an excavation of a Roman cemetery near the pyramid at Hawara towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was elaborately wrapped, and there was a portrait of the child sketched into the outer layers of the wrappings. Over the torso of the mummy, a shroud had been painted with various scenes of the Egyptian religious tradition. The sky goddess Nut was at the top. I read the placard and learned that the child was the offspring of a woman whose mummy was housed in the Cairo Museum. Something about that caused an unexpected stab of pain. The child in London, the parent in Cairo. Separated, even in death.

  I gazed at the mummy for a long time. For a while I could not understand why it commanded my attention, why it caused my heart to quicken. The placard said the portrait had been done in tempera on linen. The large eyes and dark hair were spellbinding. And then it dawned on me: it was the portrait of the boy’s face that took my breath away. It was astonishing. The boy’s face was so similar to Dillon’s that I felt as if someone was playing a cruel joke on me. The universe, the cosmos, what was it saying to me? I don’t know. But maybe not; maybe it was a reassuring message. I wanted to reach through the glass and touch the child’s fragile bindings.

  I looked about myself, as if to say, Do you see this, do you see the boy prince from Hawara?

  He is my son.

  I felt elated. My mind raced. My hands shook. I caught sight of my reflection in the glass case and saw tears coursing down my cheeks.

  I read the placard again, hungrily this time, scouring it for information, for some kind of pointer or clue. I don’t think it was any coincidence that the man who’d discovered this child mummy, a man called Petrie, had described Egypt as ‘a house on fire, so rapid was the destruction’. A house on fire. If that wasn’t a sign, then what was it? It was all coming together. Petrie also wrote: ‘I believe the true line of research lies in the noting and comparison of the smallest details.’

  The smallest details. I thought of the DVDs, which, without realizing, I had slipped into my bag, and felt them drawing me back to them like a magnet.

  I was ready to give up on the gallery when Daphne texted a confirmation through to my phone.

  I took a photo of the child mummy with my phone and tore myself away from that bright face. On my way out, I bought a postcard of the child and placed it in my jacket. I walked to the gallery with a strange sense of elation and desertion. It felt like I was floating.

  Daphne was charming, all lovey-lovey and full of yes, darling, of course, darling, let me give you a tour of the gallery, darling. There wasn’t that much to see, but I suppose I was seeing history, or at least that’s what they kept telling me. History, they seemed to be clinging to history, her and her assistant, Ian. This building … blah blah blah. I heard none of it. Dillon and the child mummy of Hawara were melding in my mind.

  I sat in the boardroom with Daphne, Ian and a man named Clive to talk about the future, my future. It was flattering how seriously they were taking me. My head was pounding. I tried hard to pull myself together. They dithered about, getting coffee and notes and slides and other nonsense while I plugged my computer in and went through another section of CCTV. I became engrossed. I was back there on the day. The light, cold and heavenly. The strange and ghostly movement of the people up and down O’Connell Street. It looked almost funereal, a great procession for the dead or of the dead.

  ‘New project?’ Clive asked, leaning over me, wa
tching the footage on my computer screen.

  ‘I love it,’ Daphne said. Clive and Ian were quick to join in.

  ‘You’re moving into video.’

  ‘Good choice.’

  ‘A collage?’

  ‘CCTV.’

  ‘Big Brother.’

  ‘Genius.’

  What the fuck?! I looked at them and closed over my PC. ‘Let’s get down to business,’ I said.

  They all sat back down at the oval table and began their agenda. The shows, the rights, the sales, the cut, the five-year plan. Ian went to get more coffee. Daphne suggested wine, and I nodded my consent. I drank, and they kept talking.

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Yes?’

  Jesus, had I fallen asleep? Were they waking me up? What had they been talking about?

  ‘You were considering?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I was.’

  My phone rang. It was Robin. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Good, yes, very good.’

  ‘And you’re –?’

  ‘At the gallery. Long meeting.’

  ‘Late night?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘I’ll call you back.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  The concern in her voice touched something deep inside me, and I hung up quickly, afraid that if I held on, she might tap into some well of pain within me.

  Daphne, Ian and Clive brought me to a posh restaurant after the meeting. I struggled to be sociable and say the right things. The bottle of wine at the gallery had levelled me off, but I needed something else to give me a second wind.