The Boy That Never Was

by Karen Perry

  Not long into the appetizer I excused myself and went to the bar, where I ordered a brandy and then an espresso. I was under the impression that this might keep me awake. I was wrong. Daphne prodded my resting head with her finger as the main course arrived. ‘Come on, sleepy, wake up and eat.’

  I roused myself and went to the gents and splashed water on my face. When I returned, everyone looked surprised to see me. Pretty quickly, Ian and Clive excused themselves. ‘Have to be up early,’ they said. Daphne dangled her gallery credit card and suggested a cocktail bar. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘because we both really need another drink.’

  I felt wretched. A text from Robin said she was missing me. I tried to text back; I typed that I had had a good night and was on my way back to my hotel room, but for some reason, the text would not send. Then I said I was in bed. Didn’t send. Then I rang. Bad idea, but no answer. So I left it. Face the music tomorrow.

  Lloyd Cole was blasting through the speakers of the cocktail bar we walked into. He was asking us all if we were ready to be heartbroken.

  ‘Your show is going to be great,’ Daphne slurred into my ear. She ordered a bottle of champagne. The lights were kaleidoscopic. The music was so loud it pounded in my chest. And then I thought of the child mummy, alone now in the dark, echoey space of the deserted museum, its mother in another sarcophagus in a glass case with thousands of miles separating them. My heart brimmed with a new and sudden grief. Then Daphne looked into my eyes and said, ‘Are you ready to be heartbroken?’

  When I woke up, two texts were waiting. One from Daphne. It said sorry. The other was from Robin: ‘You probably know this already, but your flight has been delayed. You’ll be lucky to get home today or tomorrow.’

  I swallowed some painkillers and crawled back into bed. Images from the night before flashed in and out of my mind. Daphne might as well have been Diane. I tried to lose myself inside these meaningless trysts, as if such a loss of control could help me forget about Dillon. But it didn’t help. It just made everything worse.

  When I woke again, it was dark.

  I showered and went out to get more booze. There was no point in trying to work through the hangover; I needed the hair of the dog. I needed the dog’s bollocks.

  Back at the hotel, The X Factor was on TV. The world was falling apart. Ireland was bankrupt. I had seen my dead son. But all the whole of fucking Ireland and the UK were talking about was The X Factor. So I sat there, sipping from a bottle of no-name whiskey, guilt scratching around inside me, ill to my core, watching a flurry of lights and hysterical voices.

  It was all too much – too loud and too bright. I flicked off the TV and went back to the CCTV footage. I had to. It was what I was there to do, in a way. I took the postcard of the child mummy and stuck it to the wall by the desk. I ordered room service and watched another two hours of footage, barely touching the food. All I was good for now was alcohol.

  I drank whiskey and watched. At some stage, I checked my e-mail. In my inbox, I recognized the usual slew of gallery invitations and junk mail. There was an e-mail from Diane, too. I didn’t open any of these. But one e-mail stood out. Under Sender it read, ‘COZ’. In the subject heading were the following words: ‘Tangier Manifesto’. The message was to the point: ‘Daphne tells me you’re in London. It would be lovely to see you. – C.’

  I hailed a taxi and handed over the slip of paper.

  The car drove carefully from one traffic light to the next, its headlights ghosting through the snow. The streets were almost deserted. I wasn’t sure where we were going. The roads seemed to narrow and twist. I closed my eyes and almost fell asleep.

  When the taxi stopped, I thought there must be some mistake. It was not what I had expected: a housing estate in the East End.

  ‘Are you sure this is right?’ I asked.

  The taxi-driver nodded his head and pointed to the meter.

  When I paid him, he handed the piece of paper back to me, and I stepped out into the cold again.

  I checked the number on the door and shook my head. This couldn’t be right, could it? A small, terraced house. Cozimo here? I was perplexed.

  I rang the doorbell.

  ‘Harry, you are most welcome.’ It was Cozimo; his face was in shadow, and he seemed to be shorter than I had remembered, but there he was, beckoning me to follow him, repeating to me, ‘Most welcome.’

  The voice was as grandiloquent as it had been in Tangier, but it was also more shrill somehow. I followed him down the narrow passageway, listening to the shush shush of his leather slippers, the weary drag of his feet over the tiled floor. We entered a cluttered living room where a fire was lit, but I felt little heat from it.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ I said.

  ‘And you, my friend.’ I was expecting an embrace, but instead Cozimo held out his hand with the old grandeur I remembered, the way a king or pontiff might. And sure enough, there was a dazzling ring on his hand. I was going to make a joke about kneeling and kissing the stone when I saw the speckled and frail hand tremble. I took his hand gently then and held it for a moment.

  ‘It’s been too long, Coz.’

  ‘It has,’ he said, somewhat out of breath. He wore an old paisley dressing gown and seemed somewhat lost within it. ‘Please sit.’ He went to shift a stack of yellow newspapers from the couch on to the thinly carpeted floor. I noticed that his face was marked with deep grooves; it looked like a map of wrong turns, detours and cul-de-sacs. I felt as if you could almost trace its contours of sadness, joy and disappointed ambition. There was only a faint glimmer in his eyes, no sparkle. The mischievous joy had gone. As if to accentuate the loss, the low hum of a cello came from a stereo buried in one corner of the room.

  ‘Here, let me,’ I said.

  He took a step back and let himself fall into an old, dark-red leather armchair.

  ‘You must tell me all your news, but first let me get you something to drink.’ He tried to hoist himself up.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Just point me in the right direction.’

  He did so and placed a fresh cigarette into a gold cigarette holder.

  There was a bottle of gin on the table, but there was not enough for two glasses. ‘The fridge,’ he said. ‘There’s another bottle and some tonic in the kitchen. Do you mind?’

  Gone were the martinis; it was gin and tonic now.

  I walked into the dark and cold kitchen. The fridge was almost bare. A carton of milk, some soft cheese and a tub of yogurt. Jesus, I wondered, was this the same man at all?

  The soles of my shoes stuck to and unstuck from the linoleum. On the yellow wall by the fridge, there was a dust-covered mirror and, next to it, a collage of framed photos. Many were of Cozimo looking dapper and smiling, cheering or lending his salutations to the company at hand. One Polaroid showed a group of us: me and Robin, Cozimo, Simo, Garrick, and Raul. It looked ancient and faded, as if the sun had shone too long on its flimsy surface. What struck me most was how happy Robin looked. I didn’t know why, but something about the photograph bothered me.

  Without wanting to dawdle, I found the bottles and brought them back to the living room. Cozimo’s eyes were closed. His skin had lost the tinge of the sun and gained the hue of jaundice. His head swayed back and forth in a gentle motion – to the music, I supposed, though his syncopated nodding was not keeping time. He opened his eyes as I started to pour the gin.

  ‘No ice, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ I said and sat down. Much of the clutter in the room looked like it had come from Tangier: trinkets, souvenirs, paintings – one of the casbah and the complex of castles on the hill overlooking the city. Another painting displayed three figures at dusk; they stood, facing the viewer, as if the painting were in fact a photograph. Was it one of Robin’s? It must have been – the deep ochre hues were all hers, and she’d gone through a period when she’d etched her paintings with words. Somewhere in this painting, in its skyscape, were the words ‘love’ and ‘dusk’. I had a va
gue memory of Robin giving the painting to Cozimo after he had first let us stay at the apartment. It took me unawares. It had been so long since I had seen it. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied a tarot deck on the table, too.

  ‘You have a show?’

  ‘Upcoming.’

  ‘The Tangier Manifesto?’

  ‘A sequel.’

  ‘I will be a guest of honour.’

  I smiled, and he reached out to hand me his glass. ‘This time make it a double, Harry, for God’s sake.’

  I laughed.

  I wasn’t sure what to say or how to ask – but I desperately wanted to know how he had found his way back to London. I was about to pose the question when he must have read my mind, because he said, ‘There’s something about returning to where one first started, I suppose.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You know, I remember less and less of Tangier, but I can’t get its smell of sulphur out of the nostrils. Strange, isn’t it?’

  I was going to say something about Tangier, something about the earthquake, when he asked about Robin.

  ‘She’s … good, very good,’ I said, looking toward the painting. Cozimo seemed to smile, but I couldn’t be certain. ‘We have a nice place in Dublin, not far from the sea.’

  I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Do I tell him she is pregnant? I wondered. At the same time, I felt like he was going to tell me something, something important. He hesitated, dithered and gulped down his drink with awkward, uneven breaths, wheezing heavily. He was like an unwell, lame dog, lapping at his gin and tonic.

  I, too, felt on the brink of divulging something. The something of my year. I felt that, unlike Spencer, he would not make fun of me or doubt me. I felt that, unlike Robin, I could trust him fully to understand what I had seen. I knew he would understand.

  More than anything, I wanted to tell him how I had seen Dillon.

  Through the walls, I could hear a dog barking. Cozimo looked up at me. He smiled weakly. Had he lost his teeth? His face was shrunken.

  ‘I’m afraid of dogs,’ he said, quite blankly and unfamiliarly.

  I felt a little weepy. I wanted the old Cozimo back. I wanted his strong, blithe spirit back.

  ‘I meant to keep in touch,’ I said.

  There was a long, strange silence. The haunting tones of the cello echoed through the small living room. I felt claustrophobic and short of breath.

  ‘I saw something yesterday, in the British Museum. A child mummy. It looked like Dillon.’

  ‘Ah,’ he intoned, nodding thoughtfully, a sad smile coming over his face.

  My heart was beating high up in my chest, and I felt his little eyes alight on my face, curious now, snagged by my hesitation.

  ‘And I saw him. I saw Dillon, too. In Dublin. At least, I think it was him.’

  Cozimo sat forward now, his eyes narrowed with concern or suspicion. I was unnerved by the look but ploughed on regardless. I told him where it had happened. I told him about the woman, about calling out, about how the boy had turned around and looked at me, and the fleeting instance of recognition in his eyes. I told him all of it and then I paused, hearing his breath rasping across the distance of space between us.

  He didn’t speak, and I let out a nervous laugh and said, ‘I feel like I’m going out of my mind, Coz. My dead son resurrected. I know it sounds unlikely.’

  ‘Very unlikely,’ he said, not unkindly, but something sank within me nonetheless. I gazed into my empty glass and felt my grief plumbing a new depth, before he added, ‘But not impossible.’

  I looked up then and caught his gaze, which was unreadable, and waited for him to say something more.

  He exhaled slowly and uneasily. ‘There were things I knew which perhaps I should have told you.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I’m not sure it matters now.’

  His lungs wheezed and rattled, and he shrugged his narrow shoulders, his face set in an expression of weary acceptance.

  ‘Maybe it does matter?’

  ‘I’m tired,’ he said sadly.

  I’d leaned in to press him on the point, to prod him to reveal what was bothering him, when I heard a key unlock the front door. Then somebody walked down the hallway and into the living room.

  ‘This is Maya,’ Cozimo said by way of introduction. ‘Do you remember each other?’

  I looked up and saw a short Spanish woman in her early forties. I did not remember her, nor did Maya say anything about knowing me. She took off her coat, threw a log on to the fire and took the glass from Cozimo.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you …’

  ‘Harry.’

  ‘Harry … but Cozimo is not to drink.’ She put his glass down on the table and, without reproach, said, ‘He needs to rest now.’

  Cozimo smiled indulgently. ‘But Harry has only just got here.’

  Maya placed a footstool beneath Cozimo’s feet and fixed a blanket over his legs.

  ‘He and Robin and their son, Dillon, lived above my bookstore.’

  Maya said nothing. Cozimo looked to me with something like pity in his eyes.

  ‘Before the earthquake. Everything changed after that. It still haunts me, Harry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But we had some good times, didn’t we, Harry?’

  The desire to press him about what he had said, what he had intimated, drained from me. Maybe because he had mentioned Dillon to Maya, because he had said the word ‘earthquake’. Maybe I didn’t think in his state of health he would be able to handle it. I lost my nerve and let it go.

  ‘The nights we had chez Cozimo.’ He seemed to sink into a reverie, further into the chair, further into himself.

  Maya stood, waiting for me.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I will call tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you for coming, Harry,’ he said after a moment, now looking into the fire. The cello suite had ended, and the needle of the record player lapped over the lip of the final groove of the record with the sound of a lulling tide coming in.

  I gathered up my coat, and Maya walked me to the door.

  ‘I do hope we see each other again,’ Cozimo said, his voice barely audible, before I walked back into the snow.

  I picked my stuff up from the hotel and reached the airport only to discover that my flight had been cancelled.

  ‘The morning looks better,’ an attendant told me.

  I went in search of somewhere to sit or lie down. Bodies were strewn about the airport as if after some kind of natural disaster.

  I found a corner and threw my coat over myself, but it was too cold to sleep. I dug my computer out and pressed play. Time passed in a deadening blur. Sometime in the hour after dawn, my head fuzzy with fatigue, the sky beyond the airport terminal turning from black to violet, sounds of an industrial vacuum humming over the cold, hard floor, something on the screen made me sit upright. Two spectral figures, a boy and a woman, hand in hand, walking up O’Connell Street among the protesters.

  The woman stops to look into a window. The boy is pulling at her. They walk on. They reach the top of O’Connell Street.

  And then the DVD ends.

  My heart was racing, and my mouth was dry. Jesus, I thought. That’s them. That’s him. That’s Dillon. I did see him. I am not going mad. I rewound. The software on the computer allowed me to zoom in on them. Yes, it was him. Tears welled in my eyes. I felt a curious mixture of joy and fear, panic and relief.

  I scrambled furiously to find the next disc, slotted it into the computer, and feasted once again on the sight of my son. I could see them as they ambled up O’Connell Street; a car was waiting for them. It was an old red Ford. I strained to see the licence plate. I paused the video and scrambled among the mess in my bag for a pen and paper. I could not quite make out the numbers. The battery on my computer was about to die. Still, I rewound, pressed play again. I had the year, 01. I had the county letters, and the next four digits were there. The last digit was blurred, though, vague and indistinct. I rewoun
d the disc, played it once more. Finally I had it.

  8. Robin

  When I got home that Wednesday evening, the street was in darkness. House alarms were screaming a few doors up, and a dog was going nuts in somebody’s rear garden. There was a dull ache in the small of my back as I unlocked the front door and stepped inside, flicking the light switch redundantly up and down.

  ‘Great,’ I said aloud to the dim, empty hall. ‘Just great.’

  I knew there was a flashlight somewhere in the kitchen, and I fumbled through the hall, inching my way along, the dark all around me growing black and dense. In the kitchen, things were a little brighter. The moon was casting a cold glow on the garden, which remained covered in snow. The light reflected off it gave a blue sheen to the hard surfaces of the countertops and cupboards. I fished in the drawers until I found a small black flashlight and some candles and matches, and for the next ten minutes I set about filling the rooms of the house with flickering light. The place was freezing, so once I had completed that task, I lit the radiant heater in the kitchen and set a fire in the fireplace of the sitting room, and another one in the narrow fireplace of our bedroom, my need for light and warmth overpowering my worry over the risk of setting the place ablaze. I rooted through the mess of clothes strewn around the bottom of our wardrobe until I found one of Harry’s woollen sweaters big enough to suit my purpose and, having wrapped myself in it, I burrowed my nose into the rough knit of the sleeve and inhaled the musky scent of cigarettes and the chemical odour of oil paint, which seemed the very essence of Harry himself, and felt warmed and comforted.

  There was something nostalgic about being plunged into darkness like this. It reminded me of power cuts when I was a kid, back in the eighties, when Ireland was in a deep recession. I had a memory of being huddled around the kitchen table, playing Scrabble by candlelight with my mother and father and brother.

  But there was no one to play Scrabble with that night. Harry was stuck in London, stranded by the snow. In general, I don’t mind being alone. There are times, in fact, when I crave it. In Tangier, when we were living in that space, eating together, sleeping together, working together, it felt claustrophobic, stifling. I had to get out of there regularly, away from those rooms, away from Harry even. Just to be by myself for a while. He has a powerful presence. He fills a room. Sometimes I felt the force of his personality so strongly, the relentless punching of it, I thought that if I didn’t get away from it, my sense of myself would become so porous that I would lose myself in him. But that night, sitting there in the red glow of the heater, I became aware of how large this house was. The high ceilings, the cavernous rooms above and behind me. Space and more space. I felt the first pang of loneliness.