The Boy That Never Was (16 page)

‘Don’t walk away from me, Robin. You’ve got to listen. You’ve got to understand.’

I whirled around to face him, finding a pocket of strength from the anger churning inside me.

‘All I understand is that you’ve had too much to drink.’

‘What? No! No, listen. I’m not drunk –’

‘Well, then you’re insane. Either way, I don’t want to hear it!’

My father stood up. He nodded to my mother, who was looking from one of us to the other with a tight face of anxiety. ‘Come on, Avril. Let’s make a start on those dishes.’

They brushed past Harry, but he hardly seemed to notice them, he was staring at me so intently.

‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked him, feeling tired and sorry for myself and in no way prepared for this situation. ‘Why are you trying to sabotage this day?’

‘I’m not trying to –’

‘You didn’t want my parents to come, I know. You hate Christmas. But this? To do this? To say these things to me? About Dillon?’ I shook my head vehemently, feeling emotion rising up my throat. ‘Harry. It’s too much.’

He stood there for a moment, weighing things.

‘Wait here,’ he said, and left the room.

I dropped into my chair, made a nest of my arms on the table and rested my head there. I felt I could sleep for a week and still it wouldn’t be enough.

He came back with his laptop, and I raised my head wearily as he fired it up and fiddled with a DVD, scanning through until he found what he was looking for.

‘There!’ he said triumphantly, and turned it so I could see.

A grainy image taken from a CCTV camera showed a woman with a boy, walking hand in hand. Harry pressed play,
and I watched as their images flickered across the screen, briefly showing them walking towards a car.

‘Do you see?’ he asked.

‘It’s just a boy,’ I said. ‘It could be anyone.’

‘I was there, Robin. I saw him. It was Dillon. I swear on my life it was.’

The brightness in my husband’s eyes was frightening. I felt myself shrinking from it.

‘And this! Look.’ He flicked through images on his iPhone, pausing when he reached the one he wanted. Another blurry picture of a seven- or eight-year-old, taken from a distance, the boy facing the camera this time, a faint expression of curiosity on his face. ‘Can’t you see the similarity? Look at his chin. Look at his eyes.’

I began to cry then. I couldn’t help it. The thought of Harry going out into the world, day after day, convinced that his son was still alive, taking photos of random boys in the mistaken belief that they were – all of them – his dead child, was just too sad for me to bear.

‘Dillon died,’ I said. ‘There was an earthquake, and he died. It was awful. And I miss him every day, just as much as you do. But, Harry, he’s gone.’ I put my hand on his arm and added quietly, ‘You have to let him go.’

‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ he went on, as if I had never spoken. ‘What if he didn’t die? There was never a body. They pulled other bodies out of the rubble but not his. Doesn’t that tell you something? Doesn’t that make you even slightly suspicious?’

I watched him with growing horror as he laid out his case.

‘What if Dillon didn’t die but was kidnapped instead? Think about it. Whoever abducted him would have the perfect cover. Who would ever suspect? What if all these years he’s been growing up and living somewhere else, with other
people acting as his parents? What if all this time we thought he was dead, our boy was really alive?’

His face strained with the effort of telling me this, a vein pulsing at his temple. I thought of all the pictures he had drawn over the years, pictures of Dillon, a reimagining of how our son would have grown and developed. It seemed dreadfully sad – this pathetic attempt at keeping a dead boy alive.

‘Can’t you hear yourself, Harry? Don’t you know how crazy you sound?’

He drew his arm away from me then, ferocity in the gesture.

‘I’m not crazy. I know what I saw.’

‘You want to believe he’s alive because you can’t accept that he’s dead.’

‘Because I don’t believe he is dead.’

‘Jesus Christ, Harry. Enough! I understand why you’re doing this. I know you’ve been under strain these past few weeks, what with moving your studio, worrying about money, and now the baby, but –’

‘It’s got nothing to do with the baby!’

‘Doesn’t it? Isn’t it possible that this pregnancy has triggered something inside you, some fear of getting hurt again? Bringing a new child into the world and falling in love with it and the risks involved in that, after the pain we suffered with Dillon?’

‘For fuck’s sake!’ he hissed, getting up so swiftly I had to reach to stop his chair from toppling over.

He paced to the window, talking all the time, saying that this had nothing to do with the pregnancy or anything else.

‘Please spare me your diagnosis, Robin, and do me the favour of actually considering that what I’m saying might actually be true!’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I am not going down that road with you again, Harry.’

‘What?’

‘The last time. Those weeks you spent in St James’s. All those counselling sessions we went through together – dredging up the past, picking over the memories. God! You promised me – do you remember? You promised me that there would be no more of it. No more wild notions or crazy ideas. You told me that you accepted that Dillon was dead. You told me, Harry. You made me a promise. And now I find out that you have been lying to me all these years?’

‘I haven’t been lying to you –’

‘I found the pictures.’

He froze.

‘The pictures you drew of Dillon.’

Still he didn’t respond.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

‘They’re just pictures,’ he said with a shrug. ‘That’s got nothing to do with this.’

‘Yes, it does! Don’t you think I understand? You have been keeping him alive in your head all this time –’

‘No, I haven’t –’

‘All this time, perpetuating this fantasy that he didn’t die that night, that he didn’t get crushed to death in his sleep, all because your conscience won’t allow you to!’

I stopped, both of us staring at each other, stunned.

‘My conscience?’ he asked slowly.

‘Yes,’ I said firmly, driven inevitably towards what I would say next. ‘This is about your guilt, Harry. Your guilt and nothing else.’

He looked at me, speechless.

‘I want to ask you something,’ I said quietly. ‘Something I’ve never asked you before. And I really want you to answer me truthfully. Would you do that for me?’

I swallowed hard, but he just kept looking at me, not saying anything.

‘That night – before the earthquake hit – did you give him something to make him sleep?’

He let out a sigh and hung his head, and when he lifted it again, it held an expression of weariness, of exasperation.

‘Not this, Robin.’

‘You had said you’d stopped. When I took you back. You told me you’d never do that again. But –’

‘But?’

His voice was defiant, but I could see the creep of fear around his eyes, and so I went on.

‘It was my birthday, you were making a meal, and when I rang to say I’d be late and you said he was asleep already, there was something in your voice, something … I don’t know, but I’ve never been able to shake it from my head. Your voice. It sounded … guilty. I’m right, aren’t I, Harry? You drugged him, and it meant that when the earthquake happened, he could not rouse himself to escape. I know it’s true. Try and tell me that it isn’t.’

I said this quietly but with defiance, and something about his expression changed. He became grave and strangely still.

‘Say it,’ he said quietly.

‘Harry –’

‘Just say it.’

And then I felt it bubble up, pushing its way to the surface, demanding to be spoken – the dark thing I had kept inside me since the night of Dillon’s death, the thing so black and ugly that I couldn’t bear to shed light on it, to give voice to it, for fear that it would destroy what was left between us.

My tears broke, and it came out in a gulping sob: ‘Why did you leave him there? Why could you not have taken him with you? Jesus Christ, Harry! You left him! You left him there, my little boy. My baby boy. You left him to his death!’

As soon as I said it, I knew I had gone too far.

He held me there for a moment longer with his cold stare, as I wept in front of him. Then he walked past me. A moment later I heard the front door slam shut behind him, and the choking sound of the van starting, the angry hiss of the wheels turning over in the snow.

Then there was silence.

I sat still for a moment, paralysed by the shock of what I had done, what I had said. All this time I had kept that thought inside myself, and now that it was out I imagined I should feel something – relief, guilt, regret? Instead, I just felt numb.

The slow opening of the kitchen door revealed my mother’s face peeking nervously at me.

‘Robin? Are you okay?’

I shook my head and started to cry again, and she came and leaned over me, holding my head against her chest and stroking my hair.

‘It will be okay,’ she whispered, over and over. And I remembered how she had said this to me once before, after Dillon died. I remembered standing in the arrivals hall at Dublin Airport, all those people staring as I cried my eyes out, my mother rocking me back and forth, repeating those words to me: ‘It will be okay. You will be okay.’

And I was okay. It had taken time. It had taken a lot of time. And I’d thought that we had finally turned a corner. But now I knew that I had been mistaken. While I’d believed we were moving on, the wound had been festering in the dark all the time.

‘Come on, sweetheart. Pull yourself together.’

I drew my head away from her. All I wanted was for them to go home and let me go upstairs and sleep. I looked up at my mother, overcome by a sensation like dozens of needles prickling my face.

She regarded me with a pinched, anxious expression.

‘Come into the kitchen.’

I followed her through the door and watched as she went and stood by the kitchen counter, chewing her lip, her brow knotted.

My father was standing with his back to the sink, one hand covering his mouth, his eyes fixed on me with a grave expression. I had expected voices of concern, words of comfort. But the minute I laid eyes on my father’s face, I knew this was something different.

‘What?’ I asked him. ‘What is it?’

‘You need to come home with us.’

‘For God’s sake, Dad.’

‘I can’t leave you here. I
won’t
leave you here.’

‘This is my home!’

‘Robin,’ my mother said slowly, ‘we all saw how he was behaving.’

‘He’s just a bit stressed right now …’

‘It’s his old trouble,’ my father continued, his expression solemn, something ponderous in his voice. ‘This paranoia or neurosis or whatever it is he suffers from. It’s back. But it’s worse this time.’

‘Oh, Dad …’

‘Robin, I want you to come home with us.’

‘But Harry might come back …’

My father stepped away from the sink and came towards me then. I felt the firmness of his grip on my upper arms, the intensity of his gaze as his eyes searched my face.

‘Yes, he might,’ he whispered. ‘And that’s exactly what frightens me. Now, please, love. Get your things.’

I drove without thinking, my eyes swimming with tears, so that I could barely see the road. A fire burned in my head. I heard myself gulping liquid breaths, great heaving sobs emerging from my chest and filling the cold space around me.
You drugged him. You left him to his death.
Over and over, her voice played in my head. Words of accusation that cut to the quick, cut to the very heart. The look on her face – regret mingling with a ferocious anger, eyes ablaze. My foot pressed down on the accelerator, as if I was trying to drive away from the words, trying to escape the heat of accusation, the burden of memory, the echo Robin’s words had created in my mind. It was as if all those burning questions were again rekindled.
You left him! You left him there, my little boy. My baby boy
. All the insomniac hours I had spent thinking the same thoughts, asking myself the same questions, came back to me in a dark wave that threatened to drown me.

The roads were practically empty. Hardly a sinner out. A few cars. One or two couples walking before or after dinner. Otherwise, it was a ghost town. I drove down to the coast, the light still strong, though it wouldn’t be for long. The snow had been pushed on to the verge into great mounds that were starting to turn black. The wind was up, and the spray from the water was high and blowing skywards.

I parked at the rocky inlet at Sandycove and tried to pull myself together. Switching off the engine, I heard the whine of the wind, the roll and hiss of the waves. My tears had stopped, but something remained. A line had been crossed.
Words spoken that could not be erased from memory. My thoughts teetered and brimmed, and fear nipped in about the edges – fear that maybe Robin was right. Maybe all this really was a figment of my imagination? The product of a guilty mind to protect myself from the awful thing I had done.

I needed to clear my head. But my mind was racing. I sat in the van, watching the waves come in and out. I breathed deeply. I tried to calm myself, to still my shaking hands. I reached into the glove compartment for the flask I kept there. I gave it a good shake to see if there was still some left, unscrewed the top and gulped. The whiskey made me shiver and gag. The second gulp eased me.

There were a few people in the water. Splashing about and swimming out to the rocks. My father used to bring me here, to the Forty Foot, before Christmas dinner. Just the two of us. We always had a late dinner on Christmas Day. There are fewer people, he’d say, and I knew by the way he said it that he meant it as a good thing.

Caught by a sudden impulse, I reached into the back and grabbed a towel that had been stuffed into one of the moving boxes. Then, leaving the van behind, I made my way down to the water. With all the food I had eaten and the wine I had drunk, with the nervy distraction and anxiety I was feeling, it was probably the worst thing I could have done: gone for a swim. But that’s what I am telling you: I was not thinking straight. I was determined. And the questions had gathered again, gathered to a chorus of accusation:
You, why, you, you.

I made my way to the rocky changing area, a concrete shelter with stone benches. A man in a pair of orange trunks was beating his chest. ‘It’s the only thing for you.’ He pointed to the woman sitting beside him. She had a scarf wrapped around her head and a mildly amused look. ‘As for my wife,’
he said, ‘there are two chances of her getting into that water: Bob Hope and no hope.’

She nodded to me, and the man chuckled and started to sing, ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas’. Their cheer bounced off me. I was impervious to anything but my own loneliness.

I stripped. The woman took a sharp intake of breath, and her husband said something about ‘old school’. I walked naked towards the rocks, braced myself and jumped in. The water was freezing, and I sank with a gasp. Surfacing, I sucked air into my lungs and gave a yelp. I swam out a distance, then began to feel sluggish.
You drugged him. You left him to his death.
My stomach ached. I counted twelve strokes, thought about turning back, but as I did so, a sharp pain struck in my side. I braced myself, and the pain struck again.
Why did you leave him there? Why could you not have taken him with you?
In that moment, all the fight went out of me. I took a deep breath and relaxed. There was no point in struggling any more. My arms floated outwards and my head went under again. Strangely, the water didn’t seem so cold to me then. I pointed my toes and sank deeper into the sea. Down, down, I went, giving myself to the water, feeling it closing in above me, claiming me. My eyes opened, and I could see a dark, grainy sediment. It was like the texture and quality of the CCTV footage. Then my body shot upwards, towards the light, and I bobbed out of the water before going down again.
My baby boy
.
My baby boy
. This time, the water’s grainy texture yielded those very images I had saved and replayed for Robin. I felt like I could have kept on falling towards the seafloor, but I shot up again like some kind of buoy, and this time my head was not plunged back into the water’s steely embrace.

I swam back to shore and climbed out. The man in the orange trunks handed me my towel. ‘Here, have a wee dram
of that,’ he said, passing me a flask of hot coffee laced with whiskey. ‘You scared my wife off,’ he said.

I apologized. He laughed. ‘You’re all right?’

‘I am,’ I said, still shivering, and handed back his flask. The few who had been in the water when I’d first jumped in had disappeared. The man told me I was the last of the day. ‘You had me worried for a moment, bobbing up and down like that. Best to swim with someone watching.’ He wished me a good Christmas and headed off towards his car, where his wife was waiting. I felt their eyes on me as I walked back to the van.

I got dressed and called home. I don’t know why. The phone rang, but there was no answer. I pictured it clanging away in the empty house, echoing from room to room; the dusk settling, dessert half-eaten.

There in the car, I closed my eyes. I tried to put myself back in time. I tried to peer into the rubble with my mind’s eye to see the lifeless body of my boy. Dust clogged the image, and I struggled to find some sense of acceptance. My son’s body, pulled down into the yielding earth, covered over, decaying, turning to dust. I kept my eyes shut, trying to feel it, trying to believe it. But it would not come. Something within me prevented my accepting it. Instead, I opened my eyes and fumbled in my jacket. Hands shaking, I pulled out my phone.

There within my list of messages was the text from Spencer: ‘Is this him?’ The image attached showed a blurry and distant shot of the boy. I stared at the picture and felt a glow of conviction gather within me. It was him. I knew it was him.

I rang Spencer. ‘The address, I need the address.’

‘And a merry Christmas to you too. I’m not giving it to you over the phone, Harry. Why don’t you stop over tomorrow.’

I hung up.

The cold of the sea had entered my bones. My body shook. I looked at my hands; they were mottled and blue, and I couldn’t help but think of Cozimo’s hands, speckled with liver spots, frail, the hands of an old man, and I remembered his words to me: ‘Very unlikely. But not impossible.’ There was only one place I could go now. I eased the car back on to the road and headed into the city.

Spencer answered the door wearing socks, a Lloyd Cole T-shirt and a Santa hat. He was holding a can of beer. ‘Harry. Jesus, are you okay?’

I walked past him, into the warm fug of his flat, needing some heat to penetrate my bones. Spencer’s latest girlfriend, Angela, was sitting on the couch. I knew her from a long time ago.

‘Hello, stranger,’ she said.

She wore Spencer’s dressing gown, and the way her hair was tossed, she looked as if she had just climbed out of bed. I stood there, stunned and confused. At my elbow, Spencer looked sheepish, eyeing me with an air of mild apprehension.

‘Harry, is everything okay?’ he asked again.

Angela got up and reached for my arm. ‘You look cold, pet. Your hair is wet.’ She shot a glance at Spencer.

‘Christmas swim,’ I said, laughing, but the laugh came out hollow and forced, and I saw the look of alarm that passed between them. I was hanging by a thread.

‘Christ, Harry,’ Spencer said. ‘Sit down there and I’ll get something to warm you up.’

Smoke wafted from the kitchen.

‘The turkey is incinerated,’ Angela said.

Spencer shrugged. ‘Burnt to a sausage.’

‘I don’t care,’ Angela said. ‘I’m going to have a shower and get dressed. Then I’m ringing the Shelbourne and booking a table.’

‘Last of the big spenders,’ Spencer said.

His blithe tone was betrayed by the concerned expression on his face. Was he talking to Angela under his breath? I couldn’t be sure. I was so far gone.

‘Can I get you a sweater or a towel, something to make you warmer?’

‘I’m fine, Angela,’ I said.

She shrugged and left the room.

‘I’ve come for the address.’

‘Harry, it’s Christmas fucking Day.’

‘I can’t wait any longer. I know you have it – now, cough up.’

‘Listen, pal –’

‘Don’t tell me to listen, Spencer.’

‘All right, all right!’ He put his hands up in a gesture of surrender and crossed to the other side of the room, where he lifted his jeans off the back of the couch and fished in the pockets until he found a scrap of paper. I kept my eyes fixed on the note as he returned to me, passing it from one hand to the other, his reluctance apparent. It felt like he was taunting me with it.

‘I’m not giving it to you without going with you,’ he said.

‘Let’s go, then.’

He sighed and shook his head. ‘You know, Harry, I think this might be a red herring.’

‘What?’

‘The address, the boy.’

‘You’ve seen him. The picture you sent me –’

‘I saw
a
boy, Harry –’

‘You went there. You saw him with your own two eyes. The picture –’

‘It’s not him, Harry.’

I stopped. I held my breath, waiting for him to say more, wanting him to speak, even as part of me shrank from what he might say.

‘Look. When I got the address, I decided to take a drive down there and check it out myself before passing the information on to you. So I went. I checked it out. The house is a cottage in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing sinister about it. There was a couple there with their kid.’

‘With Dillon.’

‘There’s a vague likeness. But I’m telling you honestly, I don’t think it’s him.’

I didn’t speak, just stood there withstanding his concerned gaze.

‘You’ve got to let it go,’ he said gently. ‘This obsession you’ve developed … it’s not healthy. I’m worried about you, Harry.’

He went to put his hand on my shoulder, but I raised my palm, warning him to back off.

‘Listen, I’m sure Robin is worried about you. Why not head home? We can talk about this tomorrow.’

I hung my head; something within me was starting to give way.

‘I need a drink,’ he said then. ‘How about it?’

‘Yeah. Sure.’

He went to the fridge and set about fixing gin and tonics, and I stood there listening to him talk about a total lunar eclipse, how the moon turns red, how we were about to have one, and something else about the moon passing through a shadow created by the earth that I did not understand.

At the same time, my eyes were fixed on the kitchen counter and the scrap of paper he had left tucked behind a coffee cup. Rattling ice cubes into each glass, Spencer kept talking,
and for once I was grateful for his verbosity, as it meant he didn’t notice me leaning forwards to pluck that note from its hiding place. He was slicing limes and cucumbers and rattling on about God knows what while I passed my gaze over the scrawl of his handwriting, absorbing that address into my memory. Not an easy thing to do when you’re full of goose and booze and still shivering from plunging into the frigid waters of the Irish Sea, but I managed it.

And then with the address in my head, I slipped out the front door, Spencer’s voice trailing behind me as I left.

Downstairs, I found the van where I had left it, parked alongside Spencer’s old Jag. Before I got the key into the lock, a sudden impulse overtook me. I walked over to the passenger side of the Jag and tried the door. Locked. I looked about, found a fist-sized rock by the car’s front tyre and, with barely a moment’s thought, I smashed that rock through the passenger side’s glass window with one heavy swipe. Reaching in, I opened the door while the car alarm screamed around me. I lunged towards the glove compartment and found what I was looking for. I didn’t stop to check if it was loaded, just jammed the gun into my pocket, jumped into the van and took off without once looking back.

On the road again. Darkness was falling, and the streets were silent and empty. My phone lit up. Someone had rung through to my voicemail and left a message. In fact, there were two messages. I was sure one would be from Spencer. He had tried to play it cool at his place, ease me into trusting him again. But it wasn’t him. The first message was from Cozimo. His voice sounded frail and far away. I could barely make out what he said: ‘Harry, I’m sorry. I should have liked to have talked more. I should have liked to have told you …’ The
sentence ended in an excruciating incompleteness, much like our last meeting. The next message was from Robin.

She sounded hoarse, as if she had been crying. ‘Harry, I’ve left with my parents. I’ll be staying with them tonight. I don’t know what else to say.’ That was it. The phone went dead. I pulled over and rang her back. There was no answer. But I kept dialling. Ten, twenty, who knows how many times. Finally, she answered in a whisper, ‘Harry?’

‘Robin.’

‘Harry, I don’t want to hear it.’

‘What?’

‘Whatever you’re going to say.’

A long sigh came out of her. I don’t know why, but I was smiling. It was time to come clean, and I felt strangely exhilarated. I knew she wasn’t going to hang up. Wait till she hears what Javier said, wait till she hears about the green amulet, the tarot card, the Sun card, for Christ’s sake, wait till she hears all that, I thought. And the child mummy in London and
The Book of the Dead
, all of it leading me to Dillon. She would be convinced, won over – not swayed but swept away by the guidance I was receiving. Surely with her own intuitive sense she would realize all this. But before I could tell her anything she said, ‘I’m worried about you.’