The Boy That Never Was (4 page)

‘Mind you,’ my mother was saying, ‘if anyone should be marching, it’s you.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes! Haven’t architects been hit badly by this crisis?’

‘Well, yes, but –’

‘How many days a week are you working now? Four? Three?’

‘Three and a half.’

‘Three and a half. And a mortgage to pay on a house that’s falling down about your ears.’

I felt my heart hardening, and knew the conversation was reaching that tipping point beyond which it would descend into irritated sniping on her part and sullen bullishness on mine.

‘Look, Mum, I really should get back to my –’

‘Of course! Sorry, love. But look, before you go, can I just check with you about Christmas?’

‘Christmas?’ I said, my heart giving a little lurch at what I knew was coming next.

‘I thought I would make sure that you and Harry are still coming here for Christmas.’

‘Well –’

‘Because Mark rang last night and broke the news to us that he is going to be spending Christmas in Vancouver with this new squeeze of his, Suzie.’

‘Her name is Suki, Mum.’

‘God, yes it is. Although I can’t say it with a straight face. It’s like something you’d call the cat.’

I laughed despite myself and then I decided it was best just to tell her, rather than avoiding the issue for weeks and forcing myself to blurt out on Christmas Eve that Harry and I had decided to spend this Christmas at home, in our house.

There followed one shocked moment of silence.

Then she said, ‘But you always come to us.’

‘I know, Mum, but this year, we thought it would be nice to spend it in the house, especially after all the work we’ve been doing …’

My voice trailed off. It sounded pathetic and threadbare, even to me.

Into the silence, my mother breathed her discontent. She said, ‘I suppose this is Harry’s idea?’

A flare of annoyance sparked inside me. Not this again, I thought.

‘Actually, it was mine,’ I said archly. ‘I was the one who wanted to spend it here.’

‘I see.’

She let a minute pass, then spoke with weary resignation: ‘Well, you always were headstrong. Never one to seek advice, or take it when it was offered. Insistent on doing your own thing, regardless of the consequences.’

The words hung in the air between us. We both knew she was thinking about Tangier. I felt a tightening around my heart. For five years there had been an unspoken ‘I told you so’ hovering around her – words that, if spoken, would poison the love between us.

I almost hung up the phone. But instead I did something even more foolish.

‘Why don’t you and Dad come to us?’

‘Come to you?’ she asked. ‘But you have no heating!’

‘I promise, Mum,’ I told her, ‘if you come to us for Christmas, we will have heating. There will be roast goose and wine and champagne and a Christmas tree and presents and heating.’

‘Well, I don’t know, love,’ she said, her voice thin and doubtful. ‘I’ll have to see what your father says.’

‘Okay. Just think about it, Mum.’

‘I will. Thank you. Take care now, love. And stay warm!’

She hung up, and I sat on the step, looking at the phone and thinking:
Fuck
.

Now I had two things to worry about telling Harry.

I spent the morning hacking away at wallpaper, and in the afternoon I took a long, hot bath. It is one of my favourite things – a hot bath while listening to the radio and drinking a glass of red wine. I avoided the wine, and after ten
minutes of radio commentary that covered the freezing weather conditions along the east coast and the advance of the march towards Government Buildings, I switched it off and wallowed in silence. In the stillness of the water, I peered down at my body, looking for symptoms of pregnancy. My tummy was flat and smooth – no stretch marks, no telltale signs of a previous birth. I tested my breasts for a new fullness or sensitivity, but there was nothing different.

The water was cooling, but I didn’t want to get out yet, not ready to bare my naked flesh to the cold air of the room. And as I looked about – at the mould spots on the ceiling, the walls weeping with damp, the ancient avocado bathroom suite, the lino on the floor curling at the edges – I was overcome with a sense of panic. Every room in this house was still a work in progress. But now there was a clock ticking. How on earth were we going to get it ready in time?

Calm down, Robin, I told myself. The baby will be born in the summer. At least we won’t have to worry about the heating until the autumn. But the worry had started, and now I was like someone picking at a scab. I couldn’t leave it alone.

I thought about the house falling down around us. Mum was right: we should have sold it when we had the chance. We would have got a decent price for it – enough to buy a small but comfortable house in a nice area, with no mortgage to worry about. Instead, we were stuck with a crumbling old pile whose value had plummeted in the four years we had owned it. And while at the time of purchase we had thought it the bargain of a lifetime, now that my working week had been cut back and there was talk of further reductions, or even redundancies, it all seemed like a terrible risk. I had not factored in a
pregnancy – how would work respond to that? Plus, the art market was suffering with the recession, so Harry’s future seemed uncertain. He was excited about the new stuff he was doing, yet it felt like a long time since he had sold anything major.

Everyone is in the same boat, I told myself. The trick is not to panic.

But it was hard to stay calm in a climate of fear. You couldn’t turn on the TV or the radio without hearing about spending cuts, the budget from hell, tightening our belts, sharing the pain. People were screaming blue murder about our loss of sovereignty, about how our forefathers who had given their lives for our independence would be spinning in their graves. The French and the Germans were hounding us over our low corporate tax rate, and if they succeeded in ridding us of it, then the country would become an economic wasteland. And into this panicked, embittered, frightened world, I wanted to bring a child? What on earth had I been thinking?

‘Hello?’

‘Robin, it’s me.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in town. At the protest.’

‘Harry, I can hardly hear you. Can you call me back from someplace quiet?’

‘I just saw –’

‘What’s that?’

‘I saw –’

A crackle on the line, a roaring crowd in the background.

‘What did you say?’

‘Come and meet me.’

‘In town?’

‘No. I need to get out. I’ve got to see you. Meet me in Slattery’s.’

‘Are you all right – Harry?’

He’d hung up, and I stood there with the phone in my hand, looking out at the tree caught in the early-evening sunlight, casting a cold shadow on the snow.

I broke free of the crowd and ran blindly down an alleyway. At the corner I stopped, my chest heaving, looking left, then right, wildly searching. Nothing. Instinct told me to go right. I ran up that street, panicking now with each passing minute. Where was he? Where had they gone? I recognized the acrid taste of fear in my mouth, like smoke, and suddenly I was back in Tangier again, running up the hill, my heart on fire, a kind of prayer ripping through me, a plea, as I raced back to him.

A couple was strolling hand in hand, coming towards me, and I shouted out to them, ‘Have you seen a boy in a red jacket? He was with a woman.’

The blank expressions on their faces were answer enough. I didn’t stop to hear their reply, running on up the street, rounding another corner now and finding myself in the wide-open expanse of a square. There was a church on one side, a shopping centre on the other, and groups of people idling in the snow-covered space. I scanned the faces of those gathered there, desperately hoping to catch a glimpse of him again, but I could feel him slipping away from me.

‘Fuck!’ I shouted. There was no time to panic. No time to think. No time for anything except action. Every second, he was getting further away from me, slipping from my grasp.

I was running again, back towards O’Connell Street. By the time I reached Henry Street, there was a searing pain in
my side. Sweat had soaked through my clothes, and my coat and boots felt too heavy. Still, I kept on. I needed help. There was a police station at the top of O’Connell Street, and when I got there, my limbs were shaking, my mouth and throat scratched dry.

The station was busy. Not one of those quiet nests of indolence. Not this central in the city. A man who had had too much to drink was being asked to sit down. His legs looked like they were about to buckle beneath him. A child in a buggy was roaring while her parents exchanged insults. There was a queue, but I was too agitated, too desperate to wait my turn. Instead I marched straight up to the counter and told the Guard behind the desk, ‘You’ve got to help me.’

‘Do you mind?’ the woman I had elbowed past demanded in an aggrieved tone, and behind her there were shouts of indignation: ‘What the fuck?’, ‘Listen, pal, there’s a queue.’ I didn’t care. I didn’t give a flying fuck.

‘My son,’ I said urgently. ‘My missing son. I’ve just seen him.’

And it hit me then, the magnitude of it, like a fist in the guts. The Guard behind the counter gave me a weary look.

‘Your son,’ he said slowly.

‘Yes, my missing son – I’ve just seen him,’ I said stupidly. And then I gestured with my thumb to the street outside, where the roar of the crowd could still be heard, and said, ‘Out there. At the march. I saw him. He was with a woman. I don’t know who she was. Please, you’ve got to help me –’

The Guard held up his hand to halt my flow, and I became aware of how fast I was speaking, how panicked and breathless I sounded.

‘Just back up there one moment. Your son – how long has he been missing?’

‘Five and a half years. He’d be nine now.’

‘And what were the circumstances surrounding his disappearance?’

‘It was in Tangier. Look, I don’t have time for this now – we need to do something before it’s too late to find him.’

‘Please lower your voice, Mr –?’

‘Lower my …? Lonergan. Harry Lonergan.’

‘Lonergan,’ he repeated slowly, writing it down carefully. I watched him with a rising impatience. His calmness was maddening. ‘Address?’

Patiently, I stated my address, trying to keep my cool, aware all the while that my son was getting further and further away from me.

‘Have you filed a missing persons report, Mr Lonergan?’

‘Can’t you get on the radio, issue a description of him? The city is crawling with your lot today – one of them is bound to spot him.’

‘One moment.’ He gave me a cool glance before turning from me and disappearing through a doorway into an office. The door shut slowly behind him, and I was left there, brimming with anxiety and crazed with a spiralling panic.

Beneath my fingertips, I felt the rough, grainy surface of the plastic countertop. In the queue behind me, I heard the irritated scuffling of feet and heavy sighs of indignation. Not that I cared. It was all I could do to remain still and to wait for what seemed like the longest time before that door opened again and the Guard emerged with a folder in his hand.

‘Now then,’ he said slowly, fixing me with a look I couldn’t quite get a handle on. ‘You say your son went missing in Tangier.’

‘Yes.’

‘And I see you have been in to see us before. It says in your file that your son’s disappearance coincided with an earthquake.’

He looked up at me with a cool, implacable stare.

‘Look, I know what you’re thinking. I know that there is an assumption that he was killed that night, but a body was never found, and just now, not half an hour ago, I saw him. With my own two eyes. He was there, alive, breathing. He looked at me and I knew –’

My voice broke off. Judgement had crept into his eyes and pity, too. That Guard was regarding me like I was some poor demented fool, and I knew exactly what he had read in that file. What they had written there about me. I had been in so many times over the years. I could tell he thought I was a crank.

‘Mr Lonergan, you would have been told on those other occasions that this matter was handed over to Interpol. I suggest you contact the National Central Bureau in the Phoenix Park.’

‘Listen to me,’ I said slowly, keeping my voice low, trying to sound reasonable, knowing that this was my only real chance of finding Dillon. ‘If you could just get on the radio, please. Please, I’m asking you. Just issue a description. Have your guys check it out.’

I held my breath.

‘Mr Lonergan, you must have seen the demonstration outside. Every Guard in the city is on duty today. All leave has been cancelled. There are no available resources, and even if there were, this would not come under our remit, because as I stated, Interpol …’

I was clenching my fists as he spoke.

‘If you wish, you may fill out this form, and I will add it to your file. When Sergeant Sayer gets in on Monday –’

‘Monday’ll be too fucking late.’

‘Watch your language there, Mr Lonergan.’

I pushed myself angrily away from the counter and, ignoring the gawping bodies in the queue, flung wide the doors.

Outside, cold air rushed back into my lungs. I felt a sudden crushing despair. I should have known better. The pain of the dismissal was nothing compared to the thought that it was too late. I had blown it. After all this time, the one chance I had – the only opportunity to present itself in five and a half long years – had been wasted. In that moment, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether to ring Robin or get in the van and start driving through the city to look for my son. I did know that I needed to steady my nerves, so I went into a pub and ordered a drink.

Some football fans were screaming at a huge TV screen. There was a demonstration outside, where the buzzwords were ‘loss of economic sovereignty’, but inside nobody gave a crap about economic sovereignty. They cared about whether Arsenal were going to score the next goal and who was going to buy the next round of drinks. That was all. The atmosphere was oppressive. I drained my lager, felt it swirling around inside me, but with no effect. A trickle of doubt had started to work at me. Before the day was out, it would build to a full-flowing river.

I went back outside. It was still bright, and the light reflecting off the snow made me squint. I walked around Parnell Square, then for some reason went into the Rotunda Hospital. I walked up and down the wards, stuck my head into room after room. Nobody asked me anything. I left feeling dejected and tripped back down O’Connell Street, looking out all the way. At one point, I called Robin. The need to see her was building inside me – the need to share this burden with her. A hurried arrangement to meet in
Slattery’s, and then I hung up, still casting my eyes around me. But there was nothing, no sign of Dillon – his dark hair, the red jacket he was wearing – or the woman he was with. I could have searched up and down that street until nightfall, for all the difference it made. They had simply vanished.

When I got back to Fenian Street, I was shaking. Had Spencer left any booze? My hands were cold, and I rubbed them together vigorously. They looked red and old. The hands of another person, not mine. They were always shaking these days. Too much drink, too much stress, too much worry and fear. It had become an aesthetic of sorts. The hazy brushstrokes of my paintings, thick with egg yolk, vinegar and sand, were not an act of the mind. They came not out of an intellectual context, a framework of notional and conceptual investigation. No. The paintings, the work, the vision, if anyone really wanted to know, came out of the delirium tremens of my life, the hangover, the morning after, the shake in my hands causing the brush to waver and tremble over the canvas, giving everything a shadowy, uncertain and unreal aura. All tremor and nerve.

I lit a cigarette as I walked up to the building. I had an idea. Spencer, as a businessman, as a man of means, well, he had connections. He knew people. Detectives. Someone who might have access to the CCTV cameras on O’Connell Street, someone who might, without causing too many waves, without letting too many people know, inspect them closely, follow it up, help me track Dillon and that woman down or give me an idea of where they were going, which direction, which bus, who they might have met. A terror rushed through my body, but it was a terror mixed with a thread of hope. I felt manic as I pushed open the door to the
studio. When I saw a figure standing at the other end of the room, the mania changed to dread.

Diane was trailing her finger over the worktop in the kitchenette.

‘I wouldn’t say you’ve done a great job cleaning this place up.’

‘Diane, what the fuck?’

‘I have a key. You know that, Harry. All your stuff may be gone, but there’s still something of you about the place.’

Even on a Saturday she wore a suit, a stiff black jacket and skirt. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and smiled. I picked up some folders I had left and turned to go.

‘I wanted to say goodbye,’ she said.

‘What?’ I asked, turning back to her.

‘To your place, the place where you worked. To the memories.’ She was walking towards me, holding up a bottle. ‘I brought this, as a kind of bon voyage.’

I said nothing.

‘Har … Harry,’ she said coyly.

‘Look, I have to go,’ I said, but she was already coaxing me back into the room, pouring two short glasses of whiskey. I don’t know if it was the lure of another drink, or the shock I’d had, or the immediacy of my need right then for any human company, but it made me think, I don’t know, that I could linger at least for a moment, that I needed to, in order to calm down.

‘You made some of your best work here,’ she said, passing a glass to me. ‘Do you remember your first solo show?
The Tangier Manifesto.
I made it happen, Harry.’

I drank the whiskey and felt suddenly exhausted. Her hand had come to rest on my thigh.

‘It was a great show, Harry.’

She was right. I had sold a lot and, yes, I owed Diane a great deal. But that was all in the past.

‘Diane, I thought we decided.’

‘I know, I know we did. But I thought –’

She was an aggressive lover. Coy at one moment and ferocious the next, and always candid in her sexual communication. She could be modest without being shy, seductive without being sluttish, and when she moved her hand along my leg, I felt the tug and urge to be with her again, though I knew it was wrong.

‘Have I ever let you down? Have I ever disappointed you, have I ever let your wife know? And I won’t, I still won’t, but, Harry, I want you to do this one last thing for me. I want you to give me this one final farewell.’

It had never been an affair. At least, I had never considered it as such. A fling. A series of bad decisions, misjudged ends of nights, lustful moments, stupid sex. She had been there when we got back from Tangier. I suppose she supported me when I was in a bad way, when I was in a dark place. She became a confidante, bolstered my spirits, gave me some hope, put on my first show. She was available. I can still remember her coming to the studio that first day. ‘It’s more of a bedsit than a studio, but it will serve you well,’ she’d said authoritatively. ‘I’ve brought you a little something.’ It wasn’t a bottle of wine, a contract, a business proposal, or any painting materials; it was a fax machine, wrapped in Christmas paper. It wasn’t Christmas. ‘It’s all I had,’ she said, meaning the wrapping paper, making herself comfortable and smiling at my bewilderment.

‘All the artists have them now.’

‘In their studios?’

‘In their studios. You can receive communiqués.’

‘Communiqués?’

‘Contracts and the like. It’ll be less intrusive than a computer.’

And that’s how it started with her. Week after week she would visit; we would talk. One thing would lead to another. ‘Tell me about Tangier,’ she would say, and we would fall on to the mattress at the back of the studio, and it had continued like that, haphazardly and foolishly, until now.

‘I can’t.’

‘Harry …’ I thought she was going to say I owed her. Her hand moved further up my thigh, slow and insistent. I felt the steady pressure of it tugging at me, drawing me to her, not taking no for an answer.

‘I saw Dillon.’

Her hand stopped.

‘I saw him. He was there, at the march. Some woman had him by the hand.’

She held my gaze for a moment; then her eyes flickered over my face. She sighed and looked away. ‘Not this again, Harry.’

‘
Not this again?
What are you talking about?’

Her hand, withdrawn from my thigh, was now raised in a calming gesture.

‘You know what I’m talking about, Harry.’

‘This is ridiculous. What am I even doing, sitting here with you? I have to get going. I have to find him.’

‘Harry, sit down and relax.’

‘Relax? Don’t tell me to relax, Diane.’