The Boy That Never Was (27 page)

There was a hand on mine then, and I looked down at my mother’s fingers, diamonds sparkling above her wedding ring.

‘He’ll be all right,’ she said softly, and I felt the emotion break within me, and the tears fell freely, and my voice, when I spoke, came out liquid and choked.

‘He’s so broken,’ I said.

‘He’s safe now. That’s all that matters.’

‘He won’t talk to me. He can hardly even bring himself to look at me.’

‘It will take time, Robin, but he will come back to you. He’s your son.’

I shook my head and drew my hand away, pressing my fingertips against my eyelids.

‘I feel like he blames me – for everything. For letting him be taken from me in the first place. And then, once he had forgotten me, once he had formed new bonds, I came along and broke those bonds, and he blames me for that, too.’

My mother drew in her breath, and I opened my eyes and saw the worry lines creasing her forehead, her lower lip sucked in in that anxious way of hers.

‘Remember what the counsellor said: it will take time – who knows how much time. Months, even years. But children are resilient. And he is tougher than he looks. Just like his mother.’

‘I’m not tough. I’m barely hanging on, Mum.’

‘Oh, Robin. My poor pet.’

She squeezed my hand again, and there was love and fear in that reassuring gesture, and I felt like a child again, a thirty-five-year-old child returned home and needing to be cared for and nourished, protected and guided all over again, and with this thought came a rising impatience with myself. I needed to do something. I needed to regain my life.

After Harry died, I’d been unable to go back to the house. I couldn’t face returning to the home we had shared and all the memories it contained, both good and bad. I’d had Dillon with me by then, and I couldn’t cope with him alone, his rejection of me, his unassailable anger and resentment towards me. I’d needed help. It was my father who’d suggested that we move back in with them.

‘Just until the baby arrives,’ he had said, ‘and you get back on your feet again.’

At the time, it had felt like a defeat of sorts, but then I’d felt defeated at so many levels that one more hardly made a difference. I’d told myself it would be best for Dillon, and that truth had been borne out as I’d watched him drawing close to my mother and father, accepting hugs from them, slowly opening up to them, a little voice emerging unsteadily from his mouth as they eased him into a routine. But with me he’d remained silent. Cold and distant. Resentment emanated from him in waves, and it amazed me, the patience with which he kept it going. Months had passed, and still there was no sign of any softening towards me. I’d thought that once the baby arrived, things might change, but while he showed an interest in his little sister, it never extended beyond her to me.

The feeling had been growing within me for some time that we needed to get away. There were too many memories here. I was dogged by nostalgia – and by gossip. The press had got hold of the story and had a field day with it. And while things had died down, I knew it would all start up again once the trial began. I felt too old to be living in my parents’ house. Were I to have any chance of rebuilding my relationship with my son, it would have to be done somewhere far away, without any help from my parents or anyone else. This was something I needed to do alone. I had the sense that were we to be thrown together in isolation, he would have no choice but to learn to trust me again.

Sitting there with my mother, staring out at the garden in the last flush of summer, I had a thought. It was unbidden and surprising, and yet, in that moment, it felt completely right. It felt like a gift. Tangier. The place of Dillon’s birth. But more than that, it was the one place where Harry had felt truly alive. The one place he had called home. I’d realized, in
the weeks after I’d lost him, that he had never really settled in Dublin. The house had not been home to him, a place of refuge, a harbour. Instead, it had been a shell, lacking a centre. A hollow space within which we had rattled around, circling each other, a cold cavern within which our suspicions of each other had been nurtured and allowed to grow.

Tangier was where he had left his heart. It was as if he had exacted an unspoken promise from me in the longing of his gaze that last time I’d looked upon him. To go back there. To bring the boy home.

Resolve formed within me, and I felt it strengthen and harden, and for the first time in all those long months, a feeling of excitement caught tightly in my chest. It glowed inside, and I looked up to tell my mother, but then decided against it. She was not ready for that. She would not understand my need to go, and I hadn’t the strength yet to persuade her of it. Instead I looked at her gently cradling her granddaughter in her arms.

‘Martha,’ I said softly. ‘That’s her name.’

My mother’s eyes clouded, and she offered me a watery smile before looking down at the sleeping child.

‘Martha,’ she said gently, trying it out.

Then she brought her face down to the baby and pressed her lips against Martha’s head.

She had not understood, but she had let us go. And since I’ve arrived back in this old familiar town, with my two small children and my broken heart, I have spoken to my mother often. I know she thinks that this is just a passing phase, that I will return home once the seasons change. I haven’t the heart to tell her otherwise. Tomorrow, my brother and his girlfriend will leave, and there is an attendant fear about striking out on my own. I acknowledge the fear and then try to
put it aside, sipping my coffee and watching the leaves of the giant palms flutter and sway in the warm evening breeze.

A trial date has been set. Eight months from now, I will sit in a courtroom and listen as the drama of my life and Harry’s death is played out for the gallery. Garrick, I am told, has hired a specialist legal team. He has dipped into his family’s wealth, which, as it turns out, is considerable – the Garricks are brewing multimillionaires, and their sphere of influence is broad – and he is employing the very best lawyers to explore and exploit all legal loopholes to ensure that he and his wife escape justice. So far, he has been successful. In Ireland, he was awarded bail. I neither know nor care where he is living. Here in Morocco, there seems to be no appetite to dredge up the horrors of that night, to open the old wounds of many who lived through that earthquake, not to mention the legal and political hoops that would have to be gone through in order to extradite Garrick and Eva. I am not sure I have the energy for that fight. Everything I have is taken up with survival, with reconnecting with the boy I lost and getting to know this new little girl I have been blessed with.

Certain things will have to happen now. For one thing, I will have to put my house in Dublin on the market. My father will baulk at it not achieving its true value. Still, I need the money. And I have come to believe that it is the best thing for me and Dillon and Martha. I hope my parents will understand that.

The other thing I will have to tell them is that there is to be a posthumous exhibition of Harry’s work in Dublin in a couple of months. It was Diane’s idea, and I must admit that I was surprised when she contacted me about it. I was sceptical at first; it seemed too soon for such a gesture, and I worried whether it might also be too maudlin for Harry’s tastes. Would his spirit rile and protest at being remembered
by a roomful of stiffs in suits and stuffy art bores clutching glasses of cheap wine, and others present merely out of a prurient curiosity, drawn by the whiff of scandal that attached itself to his name after death? I don’t know. Still, the decision has been made.

My phone rings. It is Mark, telling me that the children are tired so he and Suki are taking them home. I tell him that I will join them, but he urges me to relax. There is no rush.

I finish my coffee and pay my bill and walk away from the square. The peasant women in their striped robes and wide-brimmed hats have gone, taking their wares with them, replaced now by merchants setting up their stalls for the night market. I wander past, ignoring any calls to peruse and purchase, keeping my eyes fixed on a point in the distance, feeling the night air sweeping in off the Strait of Gibraltar. I wear my solitude lightly here, sensing, with a degree of pleasure, the anonymity it brings.

Close by, in the warren of streets that huddle and spread over this part of the medina, is the place where Garrick had lived – the place we used to go to together. I have a fleeting recollection of lying next to him, staring up at the lazy revolutions of a ceiling fan. Immediately, I put that thought away.

Instead, I think of Harry, of his conviction in those last days of his life and how he discovered the truth purely by chance and through his own dogged determination and unshakeable belief that Dillon was still alive. I try to imagine how it was for him that day on a street in Dublin when he set eyes on a boy and felt the frightening jolt of recognition. It had seemed to me a fantasy, that he was merely imagining the boy to life by virtue of the fact that his mind could not bridge the gaping chasm of loss. And I remember how I had
doubted him, how my doubt had been the very worst kind of betrayal, and when I remember it, I feel the shame rise through me and I need to concentrate very hard on the ground in front of me to prevent my emotions from claiming me.

I am aware, too, that my grieving has not started yet – not properly. It lies in wait around a corner, lurking in the shadows, ready to jump out and catch me unawares. I cannot yet conceive of a world without Harry in it. For now, when I think of him, what I feel most is gratitude. All-encompassing and overwhelming gratitude. For his stubborn belief, his refusal to be swayed from the crazy notion that our boy had been stolen when everything pointed so clearly to his death. Had he not held on to that belief, had he not trusted his instincts and pursued them against all the odds, then … No. It does not bear thinking about.

Sometimes, in the nights I have spent here, I’ve dreamed that Harry is with me, and that we are lying alongside each other in a companionable silence. When I wake, it is a renewed shock to see the empty space on the pillow next to me, and in those moments, the longing I feel is achingly physical, and I want to draw the covers up over my head and surrender to it all. But then I hear Martha crying in her cot and I force myself to swing my legs out of bed and press my feet into my sandals.

On the Rue es Siaghin I get caught behind a group of tourists milling about outside the Spanish Cathedral. For a moment they stand looking around themselves, consulting maps and trying to find their bearings, and the cries from the street sellers rise in pitch. The place, all at once, is too crowded, too loud and oppressive. Time to go home.

The sky above the medina is streaked with bands of gold. Gulls wheel and swoop, their echoing cries carried aloft.

I turn to go, and it is in the motion of turning that I feel it – the sense that someone is watching me, a sensation like a feather passing over the skin at the nape of my neck, goose-bumps crawling over the space between my shoulders. I stop, my eyes scouring the crowd. And then I see him. Tall, rangy, his intense gaze fixed on me. That face so familiar and yet impossible. Disbelief plunges to the very depths of my stomach. Impossible. It cannot be.

He turns away quickly, pushing hurriedly through the crowd.

I need to go after him, but I am paralysed.

I need to shout out his name, but it catches in my throat.

Emotion bubbles and roils within me, filling my inner spaces, drowning out sense and reason.

‘Harry!’ I call out, my voice a hoarse shout of fear.

He turns a corner without looking back.

Quickly now, I begin to move, my legs weak, my breath shallow.

A frantic impatience grows within me.

And then I turn the corner on to a street I don’t know. My eyes scan it quickly: the dusty pavement, the intricate wrought-iron railings that enclose balconies overhead, awnings stretching and casting the street in shadow. At every corner there is an exit – a warren of alleys shooting off into the
ville nouvelle
. A woman’s laughter drifts down from above. At a drain, a dog sniffs at something, the only living being here.

I stand there, looking down the empty street, feeling the pulse in my head, that rhythmic thumping, my eyes casting about, uncertain, wavering. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. Grief
begins to clamour at the edges of my thoughts, threatening to break through, and with it comes the doubt that clouds my judgement, telling me it cannot be – it cannot. But I am not yet ready to let the grief in. It lasts only an instant before being overshadowed by a new, insistent urgency. I suck in my breath. Then I start to run.

We would like to thank the teams at Curtis Brown, ICM Partners, Penguin UK/Michael Joseph and Henry Holt. In particular, we wish to thank: Jonathan Lloyd, an inspiring agent; his assistant Lucia Rae; Melissa Pimentel and her superb work as translation agent; Kari Stuart for her wise guidance; Stefanie Bierwerth for championing this book from the start and for her unflagging enthusiasm; Mari Evans for her careful steering; Steve Rubin and Aaron Schlechter for their vision for the book and consummate professionalism.

Finally, we would like to thank Aoife Perry and Conor Sweeney for their love, patience and support.