The Boy That Never Was Read online

  The crunching sound as I walked through the snow put a smile on my face. There must have been two or three inches of it, and, by the looks of it, I was the first to venture out on our street. When I got to the van, the old Volkswagen’s door wouldn’t open. I tugged at it, finally wrenched it open, started the engine and went back for a kettle of water to pour over the windscreen. I loved the old orange van. Robin had pleaded with me not to buy it. Had it broken down once? Had it stalled, stuttered or wavered in its time? No. It had been fail-safe and hardy. We had even slept in it. I won’t pretend that it was comfortable, but it could have been. I put the key in the ignition and turned the engine over a couple of times before backing out of the driveway slowly, cautiously, feeling the snow compacting under the tyres.

  I got into town that cold, beautiful morning with little bother. The roads were deserted, and I made good time, parked outside the studio on Fenian Street and walked down to the basement for what would be, I imagined, the last time.

  The studio had at one time been a basement flat, but Spencer had gutted it. The walls were bare, the floor concrete. The toilet cistern gurgled all day and all night too, whenever I slept over. I had an old mattress, a couch, a kettle, and a camping stove. I liked the place to be this bare, and I stretched my canvases and stuck them on the floor to work on them. I didn’t use an easel. I didn’t use a palette. Sometimes I didn’t use brushes. I used sticks and knives or broken glass to create the paintings. The sparseness of the place let my imagination do its work, and I’d sketched, drafted and completed canvas after canvas here. And now it was all over.

  I didn’t have a system as such, but I spent the morning packing the van with canvases, frames, paints in pots and tubes, brushes, sticks, catalogues and finished and unfinished paintings. I don’t consider myself sentimental, but I did feel a twinge. The studio had served me well since we had moved back from Tangier. I’d produced all my new work there. It had added up to two solo shows and a bunch of group efforts. Spencer, who had made some shrewd business decisions in the past, owned the building and lived on the top floor. He’d rented the studio to me for a song. He also liked to remind me that he was my landlord and that I was his tenant. By eleven a.m., I had been there for over two hours. That was when he rang.

  ‘This is your landlord speaking. Eviction orders are in motion.’

  ‘You’re a funny man,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t need you to tell me that.’

  He arrived ten minutes later to help, wearing a black silk dressing gown and a pair of old leather slippers, a cigarette dangling from his lips. I say he arrived to help: he brought a snare drum and a crate of beer. ‘I’m the boy who bangs the drum,’ he said.

  ‘Start lifting.’

  ‘I could have been a wealthy man if I had charged you what I should have for this place.’

  ‘You were a wealthy man.’

  ‘I worked it out last night. I could have had quite the stash put away.’

  ‘I’m afraid renting one small basement to a friend was not your downfall.’

  ‘Here we go – now you’re going to tell me … you, the lowly tenant.’

  My phone rang.

  It was Diane, the manager of the gallery I show at. ‘You won’t reconsider?’

  ‘I’m packed.’

  ‘You know I think it’s a mistake.’

  ‘So you told me.’

  ‘And not only because I won’t be able to stop by … but business-wise.’

  ‘It’s done.’

  Diane wanted all manner of things then. I told her I had to go.

  ‘Who was that?’ Spencer asked.

  I wasn’t inclined to hear the tirade he would inevitably deliver about Diane if I told him it was her, so I lied. ‘Just Robin,’ I said.

  ‘The lovely.’

  When Spencer had lifted his last box and chosen a painting he liked the look of – ‘Either I’ll sell it for you or take it as a Christmas present’ – I stopped what I was doing and made us a pot of coffee.

  ‘The strongest coffee this side of the Liffey,’ Spencer said. He took a silver flask from his pocket and poured.

  ‘Whatever that means.’

  ‘This is what it means.’ He held the flask out to me, but I covered my cup.

  ‘Driving,’ I said.

  ‘Why anyone would want to drive on a day like today is beyond me.’

  ‘Have you forgotten? I’m moving out.’

  ‘Now, listen to me. I have a question for you.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said, wrapping a number of brushes in a rag.

  ‘You’ll please tell her ladyship, queen of the damned, that you have vacated the crucible of creativity and forsworn my great generosity.’

  ‘Has anybody ever told you that you are a verbose fucker?’

  ‘Don’t insult me.’

  ‘I don’t mean to. Are you talking about Diane?’

  ‘If that’s what you want to call her. I like –’

  ‘She knows well I’m moving out,’ I said, reaching for Spencer’s flask and splashing a dash into my cup. I felt, in that moment, in need of something to steady the sudden and unexpected quiver of nerves.

  ‘But you know what I’m afraid of? Late at night, she’ll come round here looking for you. She’ll find me instead, and then what? She’ll try to sink her teeth into me as well. She will try to suck the blood out of me.’

  ‘The way I see it, someone’s already beaten her to it. Have you looked in the mirror?’

  ‘You cruel fucker.’

  ‘I tell the truth.’

  Spencer shook his head. I watched as he lit another cigarette, then stood up and sauntered around the empty space. A hollow feeling had come over the room; and I felt lonely. The whiskey burned a hole in the coldness of my stomach, and I watched as Spencer stopped and peered into one of the few boxes still waiting to be loaded into the van. Plucking the cigarette from his lips, he reached down and began rifling through the sheaf of drawings held there, and I felt my insides contract with grief and rage. They were my drawings of Dillon. He picked one out and held it up in front of him, examining it through narrowed eyes. Before he had a chance to comment, before he could say anything at all, I was on my feet and crossing the room, snatching the drawing from his hands.

  ‘Those aren’t for you,’ I said sharply, turning away so that he couldn’t see the burning in my cheeks or the tremble of my hands. I placed the drawing back with the others, my fingers lingering briefly.

  I felt his silence and reckoned that he was considering whether to say anything. He knew me well enough to understand when to back off. Then I heard the slow shuffle of his slippers, the scraping of a cup against the table as he reached for his coffee and downed what was left of it.

  ‘Does this have a name?’ he asked, and I looked and saw him holding aloft the canvas he had chosen.

  It was one of my Tangier paintings: indistinct figures, a market square, the sun’s light beating weakly in the background. In the distance, the sea.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll give it one,’ Spencer said. He pointed to his snare drum. ‘And I’ll pick that up later.’

  ‘Mind yourself,’ I said, and he was gone.

  The door slammed shut, and I waited a moment or two before returning to Dillon’s box. It was a large wooden container, aluminium hammered around the corners. I dipped my hands in and took out a handful of loose sheaves and looked at them. For a brief moment, I considered throwing them away, destroying them. I had a vision of a burning barrel. All those images turning to dust. Put it behind you. Get on. These are the things people have said to me. Reasonable people. People who cared about me and my well-being. People who cared about Robin, cared about us.

  All that time I had kept my grief hidden, but still those sketches continued; something I didn’t fully understand had drawn them out of me, guiding my hand across the page, time and again. Somehow, I couldn’t seem to stop myself. And I don’t know how long it was, that day, I sat there looking at them
. I didn’t weep. Instead there was a wholly other feeling. I’m not sure I can describe it. A feeling of recognition. The sketches were the truest thing I had drawn in years. I don’t believe in the soul, but if I did, I would say there was a soul within those pencilled lines.

  My sketches of Dillon were all dated. And I sat there sifting through the years, sifting through the hundreds of pencil drawings and charcoal impressions I had of the boy as he might have aged. The boy. Do you hear me? Call him what he was: my son.

  These sketches were not something I had painted. They were not something I had shown anyone, not even Robin. Especially not Robin. The drawings were a secret. That is why I could not bear to hear Spencer’s voice saying anything about them. I don’t know why, but on some level they had kept me going.

  So I didn’t bundle them up and burn them. I laid them out carefully in their dated order, spread them out across the concrete floor. I had tried to capture my son as he might have been, getting older with each month, with each year. And as I stood there, looking from one to the next, there he was again, growing before my eyes.

  Enough, I told myself, and, hunkering down, I picked them up and slowly returned them to their calendar of despair. The lid closed over the box, and I carried it out and locked the studio behind me.

  I decided to leave the van where it was. The thought of driving home and having to empty the damn thing just made me feel tired. Instead, I walked along while following the hum of a low-flying helicopter as it circled above O’Connell Street. My plan was to get something to eat, to fill the gaping hole in my stomach, but I was entranced by the whirr of blades overhead and found myself instead walking down O’Connell Street and meeting the demonstration against the government head-on. Caught up in my own private drama, I had forgotten that the protest was taking place at all. On another day, I might have made a point of being there, adding my voice to the collective exasperation at the government. Fury, even. I was as angry as the next man. All over the country, people were united in their feelings of frustrated anger at the bailout. The terms were stringent, so in a way I was glad to be walking down O’Connell Street, an accidental protester of sorts.

  There were no cars, no traffic, but thousands of people marching and chanting and bellowing in protest. News crews from around the world placed their cameras along the protesters’ route. Tourists stopped to take photographs and video footage. Wherever they were from, what they saw can’t have been that surprising. Ireland’s financial woes were international news, after all.

  The Guards were out in force, too. They wore luminous yellow jackets over their uniforms and huddled in twos and threes at intervals along the route, chatting and stamping the ground to keep warm. They didn’t have much to do. The demonstration was good-natured and benign. For all the rage, there was a dignified restraint to it. As a protest, it was more mannerly than riotous. One protester held a home-made placard that read, REPUBLICAN IRA: EUROPE OUT, BRITS OUT. The letters had been scrawled in a black marker. On a piece of paper slipped under your front door, it might have looked threatening. But on the end of a stick in the middle of a peaceful demo, it just seemed pathetic and out of place.

  I walked along with the protesters and thought about joining in with the chanting and the singing. The crowd moved and flowed along the thoroughfare, pooling by the General Post Office, where a stage had been set up, and from behind the outstretched arms of Jim Larkin’s statue, a large screen flickered with the black-and-white footage of demonstrations from the past. Ghostly images. The past resurrected, played out once again in a strange and unearthly light, sending shivers up my spine.

  Then up on stage, where everyone’s attention was now directed, a man took the microphone, rallied the crowd to cheers and boos and introduced a woman, who sang a long and ranting song of remonstrance. The guitar shook in her hands. A helicopter flew over the crowd, and for a few moments the noise of its turning blades drowned out the singing.

  I was caught in a throng of people, swaying this way and that. I suppose I allowed myself to be carried away with it all. Joining in with the applause and chanting. Adding my voice to the chorus of others. The woman finished her long lament to cheering and whistles. ‘We’ve been sold down the river!’ the man with the microphone boomed. ‘It’s time we stood up for ourselves!’ He introduced another woman; she told her story, about hospital cuts and waiting lists. And then a man took the microphone and told his story, about small communities and closing post offices. And another man told his story, and so on, a line of people on the stage, each with their own tale, and every tale greeted with roars from the crowd, applause and cheering, heads nodding and arms raised in solidarity.

  Time passed; how much time, I don’t know. But after a while, I began to grow weary and hoarse. Somebody somewhere was beating a drum, and I felt the reverberations of it in my head and started to think about leaving. The strangeness of that morning – the surprise of snow, the clearing of my studio, whiskey poured into an empty stomach, Spencer’s hands on those drawings, and now the push and roar of the crowd. Bang, bang, bang went the drum. It was too much. I was hungry and tired. I needed to get home, or to the warmth of Slattery’s. I needed to see Robin.

  As I turned to go, I noticed a flash of colour. A scarf wound around a woman’s neck, the ends of it loose and billowing in the breeze. A diaphanous material, silk perhaps, the colour blue like smoke on the air. The woman, tall and attractive, was holding a boy by the hand, the two of them walking purposefully up O’Connell Street. The boy turned and looked at me, and everything slowed right down. The drumbeat stopped. The roaring hushed. The crowd fell away. In that moment, there was nothing but me and the boy, our eyes holding each other’s.

  Dillon.

  My heart gave a frightened beat. I sucked in my breath, and the blood roared into my ears.

  My son. My lost boy.

  Someone passed in front of me, and for an instant I lost sight of my son, and into that sudden vacuum, it all came rushing back: the clamour and screech of the crowd, the thundering pulse of the drum, the push of bodies and the oppressive hovering of the helicopter above us.

  I strained to see him again, sweating profusely as I began to push through the crowd. The blue scarf rose like a puff of smoke, and I felt a kind of panic. I pushed people out of the way, jostled and shoved to get past, driven by a new and unfamiliar urge. I was heckled: ‘Hey, watch it, pal.’ ‘Calm the fuck down.’ ‘What’s your hurry, chief?’ But I didn’t care. I heaved and shimmied, dodged and darted my way through the slew of people. It was hard going. But it didn’t stop me. Nothing, I felt, could stop me.

  After all these years when I had hoped and wondered, searched and questioned, after all these years when I had followed the smallest of clues, walked through the solemn streets of Tangier, kept sleepless vigils in unholy places and been disappointed time after time by a trail gone cold, he’d presented himself to me. He’d walked past me. Now, of all times, when I’d least expected it, he was there, before me, in Dublin, a place he had never been.

  The crowd seemed to thicken and clot about me. The atmosphere changed. It grew hostile and forbidding. I was working hard to keep them in my sights – the boy and the woman – to hold on to them as I battled my way through. Their pace had quickened. They walked at a clip; distance began to open up between them and me.

  ‘Dillon!’ I screamed. ‘Dillon!’

  I can’t be sure whether he heard me or not, but there was a moment when it felt like he turned in response to my shout, and our eyes met. There, among the heaving crowds, his blue eyes somehow found mine, at least for a split second. Was there a hesitation, a moment of resistance on his part, an instance of recognition? I can’t say, though I have asked myself since a million times or more. And as quickly as he turned to look at me, he was gone. Swept away from me all over again, my son, my disappeared boy, leaving me trapped in the crowd, caught like a piece of meat in a snake’s body, stunned and struggling to get out.

  2. Robin

/>   I woke to find Harry sitting on the edge of the bed, pushing his feet into his shoes and reaching for his jacket. Pretending to sleep, I secretly watched from my nest of blankets, taking pleasure in the sight of him slipping his cigarettes into his shirt pocket, his wallet into the back pocket of his jeans – his morning ritual – before pushing himself up and rising to meet his reflection in the mirror. His height meant he had to bend down to examine his appearance, passing a hand roughly through his hair. His hands were large and powerful, paint and pigments permanently caught around the nails, and his body appeared lean and angular in the cold light of the morning. I watched as he ran his fingers over his unshaven jaw, dark with three days of stubble, held by the same fascination that had bound me to him when first we met, sixteen years ago.

  Opening the curtains, he sucked in his breath with amazement. Beyond him, I could see the tree outside our window weighed down with snow. On the windowpane there was a bloom of frost, and he ran his hand over it and looked out.

  It was the last Saturday of November, and the first snow had fallen. I watched him at the window, and the glare of sunlight reflected off the white surface of the garden below seemed to illuminate his face, briefly clearing it of all traces of the burden he had been carrying for some time. He was thirty-six years old, though he looked older, but that morning his delight at the sudden snow – the surprise of it, lying thick and unspoiled, making everything clean and new – was so open and unabashed and boyish that it brought a smile to my lips. I was about to drop my pretence and say his name, maybe join him at the window, wrap my arms about him, whisper against his ear, ‘Don’t go, my love,’ then drag him back into the warm funk of our bed, when I remembered how Dillon used to sleep between us.

  Something cold slipped down into my stomach, and instantly I knew I would not go to him. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t. Instead I had to lie very still with my eyes closed, concentrating hard on shutting out the image that had entered my head. The softness and warmth of our son’s little body lying between us. The sound of his breathing. The smell of him.