by Karen Perry
‘Robin, how did you sleep?’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘Bed all right?’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘Lucky I changed the sheets on Christmas Eve.’
‘As if you were expecting me,’ I said drily.
She looked at me warily, then gave me a tight smile of reassurance.
‘Sit down, love, and I’ll make us both a cup of coffee.’
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘Still in bed. Enjoying his lie-in.’
I didn’t ask when he finally went to bed. I didn’t want to know how long he had paced the floor. Instead, I watched as she flicked on the coffee machine, then slid the tray of muffins into the oven. Her easy domesticity had never given me much pause for thought, but now, in the light of everything that had passed, I looked upon it as a sort of triumph. She had come through almost forty years of marriage intact, with her home and her family still around her. For the first time, I saw the value of such an achievement.
‘I’ve made such a mess of things, Mum,’ I said then. Hearing the break in my voice, she came and sat next to me, wrapping her arms about me, and drew my face down to the crook of her neck.
‘Robin …’
‘Yesterday, I had wanted so badly for the day to be perfect. It couldn’t have gone any worse.’
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, Robin. You cooked a lovely meal. Let’s not forget that.’
I drew back from her, momentarily dazzled by her ability to gloss over the negative when she needed to.
‘Mum, my husband walked out on me. Tell me how this is not a disaster.’
‘Well, when you put it like that …’
She stood up and busied herself pouring the coffee, returning with two steaming hot mugs, and we sat there together on that cold winter morning, warming ourselves around them.
‘What am I going to do, Mum?’
‘I don’t know, love. But you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like. This will always be your home.’
I shook my head. ‘No. I don’t think that’ll solve anything.’
‘Well, you can’t go back to that house.’
‘Why not?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Robin. With Harry acting the way he is? Don’t be ridiculous. You must think of the new baby.’
‘I am thinking of my child. I owe it to him or her to try and sort things out with Harry. Jesus,’ I said then, my head sinking into my hands. ‘A baby. What a fucking mess.’
Neither of us spoke. And then I looked up and told her about Harry.
‘He thinks Dillon is alive.’
Anxiety clouded her face, and she put down her cup.
‘He says he saw him.’
‘When? Where?’
‘Does it matter? The whole thing is a fantasy.’ I relented and then told her: ‘In Dublin, he says. In the city. He saw a boy he swears was Dillon with some woman he didn’t recognize.’
‘My God.’
‘The frightening thing is how far he has taken it this time. Before he just talked about the possibility of Dillon having survived – talked and talked about it until it became an obsession, until it made him sick. But this is different.’
‘How?’
‘For a start, he didn’t tell me anything about it, not until yesterday. For weeks he has been acting weirdly, but he never mentioned a word about it. And then yesterday I found out that he has spent the last month playing detective and doing things that don’t sound legal. He somehow got access to some CCTV footage and is convinced it shows Dillon. But the worst thing was the picture.’
‘Picture?’
‘On his phone. He showed me this picture on his phone of a young boy. It was blurry and distant. He claimed it was Dillon, but it wasn’t. It was just a boy the same age Dillon would have been had he lived. I keep thinking about Harry going out there in the world, looking at young boys, taking pictures of them with his phone, just because they bear a vague resemblance to his dead son. It’s so sordid. So sinister. It’s not like Harry. I just can’t understand what has driven him to this. Is it the baby? Is that what caused him to crack?’
My mother shook her head.
‘You think he’s having another breakdown?’ she asked softly.
‘Oh, Mum,’ I said, surprised by my sudden tears. ‘I hope to God he’s not.’
All the signs were there. It was starting all over again – another breakdown. I gazed beyond my mother, through the glass doors closed against the frozen garden. I could see the swing hanging from the sycamore. I looked at it and remembered those weeks Harry had spent in St James’s, all those counselling sessions. I remembered how he had held himself, hugging one arm protectively about his ribs, staring hard at the ground, one finger compulsively rubbing at his lower lip, how intensely caught up he was in his own fevered imaginings, how locked in he was by the illusions he had created. I remembered the anxiety of friends and relatives as they asked tentatively about his progress, their naked concern for him. And I remembered how angry it made me – how furious I was. Our son had just died. He had died a horrible and tragic death. My heart was shattered. I would wake in the night and remember all over again, and the shock of the realization was like a hammer blow, so intense I could hardly breathe. And through all of that, I was alone. Harry retreated behind his wall of illusions, his refusals to believe that Dillon was dead, his crazy theories of abduction and mistaken identity. I tended to him patiently, I was present at all the counselling sessions, I held his hand and listened to the doctors, I answered everyone’s questions, gave regular updates as to his progress, I waited and waited, but inside I was engulfed by rage. That white-hot anger burned and burned, and I kept it hidden from everyone, while secretly it consumed me. Now I watched the dawn creep coldly over the silent garden and I thought of how his behaviour over the past few weeks had been erratic and strange, how moody and uncommunicative he had become. Clearly, he was unhappy, depressed even. A jolt of panic thundered in my chest. I turned to my mother and said, ‘Jesus. You don’t think he’s planning to kill himself, do you?’
‘No,’ she said, moving quickly to reassure me.
‘Christ, I don’t know. He rang me last night, and there was something about his voice … something so final in it.’ My heart was beating crazily in my chest, and I felt nauseous. My mother didn’t answer, and she seemed suddenly pale, as if all the blood had drained from her face.
‘Mum? What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
She swallowed. ‘He was here last night.’
‘Who was?’
‘Harry.’
Something sank within me.
‘Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘I didn’t see him. I didn’t even know he was here until afterwards. He spoke to Jim.’
‘What happened?’
She bit her lip and looked down at the place mat she had begun fiddling with.
‘Mum?’
Cold plunged through to the pit of my stomach.
‘He told your father … he said to tell you that he was sorry. That whatever else happens, he wanted you to know that.’
I turned from her then and ran out into the hall. Her car keys were hanging by the door, and I snatched them as I walked past.
‘Robin, don’t do this …’
‘I’m not going to do anything,’ I said, trying to sound calm, trying to sound like a woman who was in control of things, although we were well past that now. ‘Please, don’t worry.’
That was the last thing I said to her as I headed out the door.
I drove in a daze, feeling light-headed and dizzy. The snow hurt my eyes. There was a hole in my stomach, and my head was blurry from lack of sleep. I drew the car up in front of our house. There was no sign of the van. I stared at the front door from behind the steering wheel. What waited for me inside?
The first thing I noticed was the cold. The fire had gone out, and the heating had been off since the previous evening, and the last of the warmth seeped a
way as I closed the door behind myself. I kept my coat on as I pushed the kitchen door open and saw saucepans piled up by the sink, upturned glasses on the draining board. The light had been left on all night, and its sibilant hum echoed and bounced off the cold, hard surfaces.
In the dining room, things were exactly as we had left them. There were bowls of half-eaten trifle, glasses of wine waiting to be drunk, cold coffee in espresso cups, cream turning sour in the jug, napkins bunched and left lying on the table. A fork rested on the side of a plate as if whoever had been sitting there had just popped out of the room for a minute.
I took each room in turn, and with every door I opened, I felt myself holding my breath, not knowing what I would find, fearing the worst. When the last room had been checked, I came back to the dining room, feeling myself grow calm again. For a moment, I stood there, taking it all in, trying to feel relief, or at least some resolve – the push of determination to clear up this mess, to get on with things, to sort myself out.
Instead, I sat down on one of the dining-room chairs and listened to the house around me. The tickings and creakings. Dust drifted through the air. This house was old, and full of memories. I listened hard and tried to be still, straining to feel some trace of the past, of the people who had once occupied these rooms, of my grandmother and grandfather, some whispery echo of their voices. The air smelled empty. Harry had not been home. I wondered where he was. He seemed entirely remote from me now, cut off, falling through his own crazy universe.
His laptop was on the table, right where he had left it. Looking at it now, I recalled the vigour and spark of his actions the day before, how excited he had seemed as he’d scanned through those grainy images, how triumphant his response on finding the right one, and how hurt and off ended and indignant he had become when I’d refused to see what he saw, when I’d denied what seemed so blatantly obvious to him. Casually, half-heartedly, I reached for the laptop and drew it towards me. I turned it on and waited for it to hum to life. The DVD popped out of the drive and I pushed it back in and waited for it to reload. Absently, more out of a half-formed curiosity than anything else, I began to flick through it, trying to summon from memory where he had paused, what part of this recording held his fascination. I fiddled with it for a few minutes, telling myself that I was crazy, that I was as bad as Harry, and yet I felt myself getting sucked in.
I don’t know how long I sat there. Long enough to grow cold. Long enough for the battery to run out. I got up and turned on the heat. I made myself a mug of tea. I looked at the dishes stacked by the sink and told myself to get cracking on them. But instead, I found the cord for the laptop, plugged it in and kept looking.
I don’t know why I did that. Some need to understand, I suppose. Some need to connect with Harry, to find a reason to explain his behaviour. Maybe I was grasping at straws in some pathetic bid to prove to myself that he was not crazy, that there could be a simple explanation to all this. But in my heart, I knew I was fooling myself.
The DVD was long and mind-numbingly boring. I skipped through it, fast-forwarding and pausing. I wondered how much of this Harry had sat through – all of it? A picture formed of him in my head, huddled in the cold concrete space of his studio, his eyes growing red and squinty with fatigue as he scanned through these images, watchful of the door in case I made an appearance, furtively seeking the boy, whoever he was, who had so captured his imagination. The thought depressed me enough to want to stop looking.
But just before I gave up, I found the image. A boy of about eight or nine, walking hand in hand with a woman, presumably his mother, both of them stopping and getting into a car. The image was grainy, and when I paused it to examine the boy closely, I found it impossible to see any real likeness, so poor was the quality. It was a blanked-out face. It could have been anyone.
I sat back and folded my arms. I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers into the sockets. The house was warmer now, and I thought I would go upstairs and sleep.
But when I opened my eyes and again saw that image, something came to me. Something I had not considered before. I sat forward suddenly. I looked at the boy. I looked at the woman. There was a question in my head, the possibility of something so remote. My stomach gave an answering lurch, and immediately I got to my feet.
I half-ran to the kitchen. My heart was pounding now, blood thundering in my ears. The number was in my phone, and once I had pulled it from my handbag, I scrolled hurriedly through the address book until I found it. My hands shook as I dialled and waited for a response.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me. It’s Robin.’
A pause. A hesitation.
‘Robin. Are you okay?’
‘I’m sorry for calling you like this – out of the blue. But …’
‘What is it?’
‘I’m … Listen, I want to ask you something.’
‘Okay?’
‘When we met, the other day, you said you’d been in Ireland for a while. How long?’
Again the hesitation.
‘A few weeks,’ he said slowly. ‘We came just before Halloween –’
‘Do you remember the march? The protest against the austerity measures in the budget? It was back at the end of November.’
‘Sure. I remember it.’
‘You weren’t, by any chance, at that march, were you?’
Sweat had formed on my upper lip, and I tasted the saltiness of it now as I waited for his answer.
‘No.’
I closed my eyes. Breathed out a sigh.
‘That is, I wasn’t at the march,’ he said, as if to clarify. ‘But I was in town that day. Eva was visiting her mom at the hospital. I went to pick her up.’
Tightness clenched around my heart.
‘Oh, no.’
‘Why? What is it?’
‘Harry,’ I said. ‘Harry was there. He saw her. He saw her with a boy.’
I heard his breath draw in quickly.
‘Fuck.’
‘The boy’s age, the likeness … He’s jumped to a conclusion. I need to see you,’ I said then. ‘Tell me where you are.’
‘Robin, just hang on …’
‘This can’t wait. I need to get to you before Harry does. Now please, tell me where you are.’
15. Harry
A porch light threw the man’s shadow on to the gravel before me. I could hear a lighter unlatch and fire. Then I heard the crackling hush of a cigarette as it burned and was inhaled.
Crouching to one side of the car, I stayed as still as I could, a stinging pain starting in my thigh muscle. With one hand, I reached down and felt the rip in my jeans and the smarting pain of a flesh wound. My hand came away wet with blood. It must have happened when I jumped the fence. Wincing, I tried to keep the wound clear of the ground. The effort of staying still was exhausting; every inch of me strained toward this man, this stranger, exhaling a solitary plume of smoke into the night sky. Someone must have called out to him from within the house, for he turned and answered, ‘Just getting the fireworks from the car.’
Fuck, I thought, panicking as I heard the car door creak open. Without thinking, I threw myself on to the snow and rolled underneath the car. I held my breath. Staring up at the shadowy undercarriage, I strained to hear the voice again. It had a familiar ring – a self-assured tone, the accent a curious mixture of places. I knew the voice, or it was recognizable to me at least, but I couldn’t place it. I thought of Cozimo and what he had said. Very unlikely. But not impossible. In a way, his words had carried me here.
A woman came to the porch. I could make out her outline only. It resembled that of the woman I had seen on O’Connell Street. ‘Find them, Dave?’ she asked.
‘Got them. It’s freezing out here. Go back inside.’ The man’s voice again; I knew it. But from where?
The creak of springs above me, and then his feet on the gravel beside me. Brown hiking boots. I let out a silent breath and held it again, as if I were underwater. I tried not to move a mu
scle.
The light from the porch went as far as the car, but beneath it I remained in shadow. I let out another silent breath and inhaled the dank smell of rust and oil.
‘Are you ready to go?’ he asked.
‘Gimme one sec,’ she said, disappearing into the house, and panic rose up inside me while the man leaned against the car, his feet crossed at the ankles, waiting.
A wave of nausea came over me. What was I going to do when he started the car? I opened my eyes to see if there was anything on the undercarriage that I could hang on to if the car did move. There wasn’t. The exhaust was old and rusty. Maybe I could just lie still and pray the fucker wouldn’t drive over me.
I didn’t know what I was going to do. Maybe I should just step out and confront them right now? But I hadn’t formulated a plan. Before I did anything, I wanted to see Dillon. I didn’t know whether I was going to take him or talk to him or what. I needed to think, but there was no time. The man, Dave, who was he? I’d known Daves, and at some time, I knew that voice, but no, I couldn’t be sure. He had sat down into the driver’s seat and was turning the key in the ignition. I closed my eyes and braced myself.
But then, as the engine hummed above me, I felt the undercarriage lift again, and saw the man’s feet emerge. I watched those feet walk away through the snow, back to the house. I didn’t watch for long. No sooner were his feet out of the range of my vision than I shuffled out from beneath the car and hid among the fir trees that lined the driveway.
Crouching beneath the dense boughs, I let out a sigh of relief. Still no sign of Dillon, but at least I had not been seen. I waited for my breathing to slow, trying to collect myself. My mind was all over the place. I reached into my pocket. Thank fuck I had remembered to stash the flask of whiskey. Left pocket: whiskey. Right pocket: gun.