Back then, both of us were artists. After Art College, we had traveled a bit through Europe—Spain mostly—ending up in Tarifa on the Costa de la Luz. We liked its hippie feel, it was cheap, and it gave us a chance to paint with the luminous coastal light of Andalusia. The century was drawing to a close, and after a weekender in Tangier, where we celebrated the start of the new millennium, we knew it was for us. The cultural mix was more interesting, and more importantly, there was something magical about the light there. It wasn’t until we returned to Ireland that Robin gave up on her art. After Dillon, she somehow lost the heart for painting. Maybe she associated the painting with him. She kind of co-opted his contribution to her paintings, you know, included them as part of the process. Ours was a free household. We weren’t fussy about the paintings. If Dillon wanted to dip his hands in and spread them about the canvas, well, so be it. At least, that’s how it became. Sure, when I started, I liked to have a closed-off space, but as I realized that Dillon was less of a distraction and more of an asset, I loosened up and let him throw whatever dollop of paint my way whenever he wanted.
I think Cozimo liked the idea that there were two artists living in his apartment. “Talk about landing on your feet,” I said to Robin, but she thought it a poor choice of words after Cozimo’s accident.
“Some broken ribs, maybe an internal thing or two, they don’t know. How could they? Tangier is a wonderful place to live, but not if you are a medical patient. Or a medical specimen, as they would have it.”
Cozimo talked with an affected English accent. The sinking couch in the apartment was where a prince of Morocco had been conceived, he whispered confidentially to us, lounging and downing his pills with a heady mixture of cocktails. He liked martinis most of the time, and he could often be heard calling out for vermouth.
“Where is the vermouth? Olives, where are the olives?”
We were intrigued by this eccentric yet austere-looking man. His hair was receding at the front, but he wore it long at the back. He wore slippers and silk pants. We visited him in the hospital every day for a week before he came to convalesce with us. “Look here,” he said, “stay—we’ll come to some sort of arrangement.”
“Arrangement?” I said a little dubiously.
“A rent agreeable to both parties.”
I remember Robin asking him, in those early days, how long he had been in Tangier. He answered her while mixing another martini. “Since God was a child my dear,” he said. “Since God was a child.”
That’s the way he spoke. He was theatrical. He owned the bookstore, but it seemed to do very little trade. Was it a front, a hobby, something to keep the lord himself occupied? “One can’t be sure,” he said, answering my indirect question obliquely on one of those smoldering afternoons. “The truth is, I can hardly remember when or why I opened the place myself.”
The apartment was large, with three rooms. In the back room, where we painted, there was a stack of old typewriters. “I used them once, I think,” Cozimo told us. “Now I collect them. I must have used them once. Maybe I wrote a book on one of them.” He balanced his gold cigarette holder between his fingers like Garbo and blithely flicked the ash onto the ground.
Tangier. It was another world away. Another lifetime. We had freedom. We had Dillon. We had everything we wanted. Yes, we arrived without Dillon. And we plunged into life in Tangier without him, but in a way, I remember that time as if he had been there all along. Laughing, mischievous, unfettered.
We worked hard there, but we enjoyed ourselves, too. And even though one painting followed another, it seemed as if the days were longer, languorous, hazy and golden, that we had time for everything we wanted to do.
We wrote the Tangier Manifesto there. It was a coauthored missive of free living. A poster stuck to one wall of the kitchen. We scratched mottoes, dictums, words of encouragement, reminders, jokes, and phrases we heard:
Paint or die.
Wake early.
Meditate.
God give me the strength to lead a double life.
Milk, please, we need milk!
Sometimes the phrases were crossed out, and over time “paint at first light” was replaced by “bottle at 3 and 6
A.M.
! Harry’s turn!”
Or: “nappies, we are out of nappies and the water has been cut off.”
But more often than not, they were madcap phrases of the moment:
“What is Buddha?”
The next day the answer might be scribbled by the same person or someone else:
“Three pounds of flax!”
Thinking back now, it seemed as if Robin never fully believed in Tangier. Maybe she thought it was too good to be true. Maybe it was. Maybe she thought, Life can’t be like this. Of course, her mother didn’t help. Ringing her all the time. Asking her to come home. Guilt-tripping her. “Your father’s sick.” “I miss you.” Or “How can you deal with the heat of that country while you’re pregnant? That’s no place to bring up a child!” And so on, ad nauseam.
Her one and only visit was a complete train wreck from start to finish. Jesus, what can I tell you now? The essentials are: Her flight was delayed. I was to meet her. Robin had picked up a few hours working in Caid’s Bar, so she’d sent me. I waited for the plane dutifully. It was delayed further. I went for coffee. I went for a drink. The plane landed. We missed each other. Robin’s mother did not speak to me when I saw her later that night. Neither did she like our digs, so she wasted money on a four-star hotel an expensive taxi ride away. She spent the weekend weeping, beseeching Robin to come home. “Beseeching,” I say, because she is the kind of woman to use the word “beseeching.” I thought she might develop a rapport with Cozimo, but she found him small and vile. Her words. The weekend passed dismally, and Robin accompanied her mother back to the airport and I never said good-bye.
Robin hardly ever mentioned the visit, and we settled back into our life. But I knew, or I sensed at least, that the wobbles were there in Robin. Her mother had only exasperated her anxiety. It was not the middle-class life our parents may have expected of us, but we were doing what we had dreamed about in college. Tangier was not an expensive place to live, and we had, from what I had made from my first show out of college, enough to get by on, I reckoned, for at least three years. That had been the plan, but within eighteen months’ of our arrival there, Robin told me she was pregnant.
Not that that changed things for me. I was elated. But when she suggested moving back to Ireland, I resisted, to put it mildly. “Why would we go back?” I said. “What have we got to go back to?”
“Family.”
“Your family?”
It wasn’t hard to figure out why I did not get on with Robin’s parents. They resented me for taking their daughter away from them, away from Ireland, away from everything cozy and comfortable. An artist has to go away, I told Robin. She didn’t disagree, and I remember talking at length on the subject. She wasn’t objecting, but it didn’t stop me from making my point, even after we had absconded.
But I’d always suspected that Robin had her eye on our return. Whereas I wasn’t sure I would ever go back. What for?
To say it was not an ideal place to bring up a child just suggested you were from somewhere else. Dillon’s first years passed in a blur of night feedings, sleeplessness, and walking, always walking, in a buggy, in my arms, on my shoulder, whatever it took to get him to sleep.
Cozimo was bewildered but charmed by the presence of a child. He lived within walking distance of the bookstore in a detached and gated house he was curiously private about, and though we saw him nearly every day since first meeting him, he rarely asked us to his home. That was something Robin and I talked about, but never with Cozimo. He was generous enough as it was and brought gifts for Dillon on a regular basis, but he looked at the boy strangely, as if he had never encountered a child before. “Amusing little things, aren’t they,” he said to me once after I found him blowing smoke into Dillon’s face. “Doesn’t like that,” he said wryly.
“No, I wouldn’t imagine he does,” I said, assuming Cozimo’s arch tone. There were plenty of oddities about Coz. Where was he from? Where had his money come from? What was his own house like? Why did he spend so much time with us at the apartment? We had our own theories about him, but Cozimo for the most part remained elusive, and though I can say that he was probably my best friend from that time, I also feel like I hardly knew him. Take for example, his bizarre interest in the occult.
I’m not sure how he persuaded me, but one night he wanted to have a séance. “I have some questions for the dead,” he said. The truth was that he was off his head most of the time, and I suppose I was overindulging myself. Tangier was a transit point for all sorts of drugs; the place was drenched in them. There were parties where you could hardly avoid cocaine, pills, hash—anything you wanted or had ever heard of was there.
“I don’t think Robin will be into it,” I said to Coz.
“Okay, so we’ll do it when she is out.”
After work, Robin often liked to walk at night. I’m not saying it was safe or that I approved, but she took in the sights, cleared her head, and very often went to an Internet café or somewhere she could make or receive a phone call. She liked to stay in regular contact with her parents, and when I say “regular,” I mean every second day. I did not have that problem. Even if my parents had been alive, I don’t think I would have been in touch that often. But it was Robin’s business. In any case, that and her work at the bar allowed me to join in with the séances. I remembered something about Yeats getting involved in séances, way back when, and I thought Cozimo’s flighty idea might generate some ideas for my own work, my painting, and that it might be some fun. Yes, I was curious. And I was high.
The thing was, before that first séance, Dillon had fallen asleep on the dinner table at the apartment. I know it sounds strange, but things were free and easy and often out of kilter. The large oak table we ate at also had a dip at the end of it, where Dillon sometimes climbed. I often put a cushion up there, and late at night he would climb up and fall asleep. I think he was about two when we had this first séance. Two Spanish sisters I had never met before and a local couple Cozimo had befriended the previous week were there, too. “What about Dillon?” Cozimo asked. “Can you put him to bed?”
“I’d hate to wake him,” I said.
Dillon was a bad sleeper. Straight and simple. In the past it had had nothing to do with teething or growth spurts or the noise from outside, the hawkers or touts, the music from across the street, the heaving mass of the city, none of it; he was like his father, pure and simple, a bad sleeper. No, wait a minute; he was worse. Probably, if we had gone to check it out, we would have been told it was some kind of condition. But we didn’t. We struggled on. It was like this; he could stay awake for hours. I’m talking all night. Now, Robin and I had been night owls, back in our college days, but in Tangier we were super conscious of the light, the daylight. We had to have as much of it as possible. That’s what we had come for. That’s what made the paintings possible. The strange and beautiful light of Tangier, its radiant and dusty history.
But we became exhausted. Missing the morning light because of lack of sleep made me sick. I started taking pills to either keep me going when I woke or to get me to sleep at night so I could be up to catch that fiery dawn light I wanted in my paintings. Cozimo had a cabinet full of pills. In one pencil case, he kept the pills he needed for a week; a generous soul, he offered me pretty much what I wanted or what he thought I needed. Of course, I didn’t tell Robin about taking these pills. But to paint, to be ready for the canvas, I needed to be there; I couldn’t afford to be exhausted from lack of sleep.
The first pill I tried was a sleeping pill. I took it at half eleven at night and slept till seven
A.M.
Robin wasn’t suspicious. She was happy I had gotten some rest. “If only I could sleep like that,” she said. “Dillon was awake half the night.”
When the lack of sleep started to take something of a toll and Robin lost weight and dark rings formed about her eyes, I thought that, rather than offering her a pill, I would get the little man to sleep with a quarter of a pill. Then maybe she could rest. I crushed the pill up in the kitchen and poured it into a glass of warm milk. It dissolved, and Dillon never noticed. I know I should never have done that. But it felt almost as if someone else was doing it. Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice was saying,
Bad idea, very bad idea, stop,
but the other Harry, the one who moved and spoke and did things, he carried on regardless, and after that first night when our Dillon slept properly, heavily even, and woke up with a satisfying yelp and smile, I thought, Well, lucky, good, no harm done.
Then our séances became a monthly thing. Cozimo managed to contact his great-uncle and a childhood friend named Albert who he had not saved when he could have. It sounds perplexing now, but at the time it all made sense—either that or I didn’t think so much about it and went along with it. I mean, why weren’t we doing these dodgy séances in his more private, more spacious and comfortable house? But then, that first night there was an element of spontaneity about it. Anyway, one of the beings Cozimo wanted most to contact—and I am not joking when I say this—was his childhood pet beagle. That’s how our monthly meetings became known as the Order of the Golden Beagle. It sounds ludicrous now, and even then the ridiculous title and name—well, it was all a bit of fun, another excuse for a late-night party. Robin never participated, and I did not discuss the details of those supernatural evenings with her, even if she suspected something.
I didn’t administer the crushed pills to Dillon every night; I wasn’t that far gone. But I did start to give them to him more than I might have, more than I should have—I know that now. I take the responsibility, even if it is not something I found the nerve or courage to tell Robin about. I suppose I gave them to him once a month. Cozimo became convinced that the sleeping child on the table—Dillon, in other words—was instrumental to the success of the séances. So as we got bedtime together and after I had read him his storybooks—he liked the tales from Narnia; Aslan was his favorite—I gave him his milk, with the crushed quarter pill, and deposited him on the oak table before the Order of the Golden Beagle met. Cozimo even made him an honorary member of the order and procured a special pillow, embroidered with the order’s name, and that is where Dillon’s head rested on those particular nights.