“No.”
“I’ll give it one,” Spencer said. He pointed to his snare drum. “And I’ll pick that up later.”
“Mind yourself,” I said, and he was gone.
The door slammed shut, and I waited a moment or two before returning to Dillon’s box. It was a large wooden container, aluminum hammered around the corners. I dipped my hands in and took out a handful of loose sheaves and looked at them. For a brief moment, I considered throwing them away, destroying them. I had a vision of a burning barrel. All those images turning to dust.
Put it behind you. Get on.
These are the things people have said to me. Reasonable people. People who cared about me and my well-being. People who cared about Robin, cared about us.
All that time I had kept my grief hidden, but still those sketches continued; something I didn’t fully understand had drawn them out of me, guiding my hand across the page, time and again. Somehow, I couldn’t seem to stop myself. And I don’t know how long it was, that day, I sat there looking at them. I didn’t weep. Instead there was a wholly other feeling. I’m not sure I can describe it. A feeling of recognition. The sketches were the truest thing I had drawn in years. I don’t believe in the soul, but if I did, I would say there was a soul within those penciled lines.
My sketches of Dillon were all dated. And I sat there sifting through the years, sifting through the hundreds of pencil drawings and charcoal impressions I had of the boy as he might have aged.
The boy
. Do you hear me? Call him what he was: my son.
These sketches were not something I had painted. They were not something I had shown anyone, not even Robin. Especially not Robin. The drawings were a secret. That is why I could not bear to hear Spencer’s voice saying anything about them. I don’t know why, but on some level they had kept me going.
So I didn’t bundle them up and burn them. I laid them out carefully in their dated order, spread them out across the concrete floor. I had tried to capture my son as he might have been, getting older with each month, with each year. And as I stood there, looking from one to the next, there he was again, growing before my eyes.
Enough, I told myself, and hunkering down, I picked them up and slowly returned them to their calendar of despair. The lid closed over the box, and I carried it out and locked the studio behind me.
* * *
I
decided to leave the van where it was. The thought of driving home and having to empty the damn thing just made me feel tired. Instead I walked along while following the hum of a low-flying helicopter as it circled above O’Connell Street. My plan was to get something to eat, to fill the gaping hole in my stomach, but I was entranced by the whir of blades overhead and found myself instead walking down O’Connell Street and meeting the demonstration against the government head-on. Caught up in my own private drama, I had forgotten that the protest was taking place at all. On another day, I might have made a point of being there, adding my voice to the collective exasperation at the government. Fury, even. I was as angry as the next man. All over the country, people were united in their feelings of frustrated anger at the bailout. The terms were stringent, so in a way I was glad to be walking down O’Connell Street, an accidental protestor of sorts.
There were no cars, no traffic, but thousands of people marching and chanting and bellowing in protest. News crews from around the world placed their cameras along the protesters’ route. Tourists stopped to take photographs and video footage. Wherever they were from, what they saw can’t have been that surprising. Ireland’s financial woes were international news, after all.
The Guards were out in force, too. They wore luminous yellow jackets over their uniforms and huddled in twos and threes at intervals along the route, chatting and stamping the ground to keep warm. They didn’t have much to do. The demonstration was good-natured and benign. For all the rage, there was a dignified restraint to it. As a protest, it was more mannerly than riotous. One protester held a homemade placard that read,
REPUBLICAN IRA: EUROPE OUT, BRITS OUT.
The letters had been scrawled in a black marker. On a piece of paper slipped under your front door, it might have looked threatening. But on the end of a stick in the middle of a peaceful demo, it just seemed pathetic and out of place.
I walked along with the protesters and thought about joining in with the chanting and the singing. The crowd moved and flowed along the thoroughfare, pooling by the General Post Office, where a stage had been set up and from behind the outstretched arms of Jim Larkin’s statue, a large screen flickered with the black-and-white footage of demonstrations from the past. Ghostly images. The past resurrected, played out once again in a strange and unearthly light, sending shivers up my spine.
Then up onstage, where everyone’s attention was now directed, a man took the microphone, rallied the crowd to cheers and boos, and introduced a woman, who sang a long and ranting song of remonstrance. The guitar shook in her hands. A helicopter flew over the crowd, and for a few moments the noise of its turning blades drowned out the singing.
I was caught in a throng of people, swaying this way and that. I suppose I allowed myself to be carried away with it all. Joining in with the applause and chanting. Adding my voice to the chorus of others. The woman finished her long lament to cheering and whistles. “We’ve been sold down the river!” the man with the microphone boomed. “It’s time we stood up for ourselves!” He introduced another woman; she told her story, about hospital cuts and waiting lists. And then a man took the microphone and told his story, about small communities and closing post offices. And another man told his story, and so on, a line of people on the stage, each with their own tale, and every tale greeted with roars from the crowd, applause and cheering, heads nodding and arms raised in solidarity.
Time passed; how much time, I don’t know. But after a while, I began to grow weary and hoarse. Somebody somewhere was beating a drum, and I felt the reverberations of it in my head and started to think about leaving. The strangeness of that morning—the surprise of snow, the clearing of my studio, whiskey poured into an empty stomach, Spencer’s hands on those drawings, and now the push and roar of the crowd.
Bang, bang, bang
went the drum. It was too much. I was hungry and tired. I needed to get home, or to the warmth of Slattery’s. I needed to see Robin.
As I turned to go, I noticed a flash of color. A scarf wound around a woman’s neck, the ends of it loose and billowing in the breeze. A diaphanous material, silk perhaps, the color blue like smoke on the air. The woman, tall and attractive, was holding a boy by the hand, the two of them walking purposefully up O’Connell Street. The boy turned and looked at me, and everything slowed right down. The drumbeat stopped. The roaring hushed. The crowd fell away. In that moment, there was nothing but me and the boy, our eyes holding each other’s.
Dillon.
My heart gave a frightened beat. I sucked in my breath, and the blood roared into my ears.
My son. My lost boy.
Someone passed in front of me, and for an instant I lost sight of my son, and into that sudden vacuum, it all came rushing back: the clamor and screech of the crowd, the thundering pulse of the drum, the push of bodies, and the oppressive hovering of the helicopter above us.
I strained to see him again, sweating profusely as I began to push through the crowd. The blue scarf rose like a puff of smoke, and I felt a kind of panic. I pushed people out of the way, jostled and shoved to get past, driven by a new and unfamiliar urge. I was heckled: “Hey, watch it, buddy.” “Calm the fuck down.” “What’s your hurry, chief?” But I didn’t care. I heaved and shimmied, dodged and darted my way through the slew of people. It was hard going. But it didn’t stop me. Nothing, I felt, could stop me.
After all these years when I had hoped and wondered, searched and questioned, after all these years when I had followed the smallest of clues, walked through the solemn streets of Tangier, kept sleepless vigils in unholy places and been disappointed time after time by a trail gone cold, he’d presented himself to me. He’d walked past me. Now, of all times, when I’d least expected it—he was there, before me, in Dublin, a place he had never been.
The crowd seemed to thicken and clot about me. The atmosphere changed. It grew hostile and forbidding. I was working hard to keep them in my sights—the boy and the woman—to hold on to them as I battled my way through. Their pace had quickened. They walked at a clip; distance began to open up between them and me.
“Dillon!” I screamed. “Dillon!”
I can’t be sure whether he heard me or not, but there was a moment when it felt like he turned in response to my shout and our eyes met. There, among the heaving crowds, his blue eyes somehow found mine, at least for a split second. Was there a hesitation, a moment of resistance on his part, an instance of recognition? I can’t say, though I have asked myself since a million times or more. And as quickly as he turned to look at me, he was gone. Swept away from me all over again, my son, my disappeared boy, leaving me trapped in the crowd, caught like a piece of meat in a snake’s body, stunned and struggling to get out.
CHAPTER TWO
ROBIN
I
woke to find Harry sitting on the edge of the bed, pushing his feet into his shoes and reaching for his jacket. Pretending to sleep, I secretly watched from my nest of blankets, taking pleasure in the sight of him slipping his cigarettes into his shirt pocket, his wallet into the back pocket of his jeans—his morning ritual—before pushing himself up and rising to meet his reflection in the mirror. His height meant he had to bend down to examine his appearance, passing a hand roughly through his hair. His hands were large and powerful, paint and pigments permanently caught around the nails, and his body appeared lean and angular in the cold light of the morning. I watched as he ran his fingers over his unshaven jaw, dark with three days of stubble, held by the same fascination that had bound me to him when first we met, sixteen years ago.
Opening the curtains, he sucked in his breath with amazement. Beyond him, I could see the tree outside our window weighed down with snow. On the windowpane there was a bloom of frost, and he ran his hand over it and looked out.
It was the last Saturday of November, and the first snow had fallen. I watched him at the window, and the glare of sunlight reflected off the white surface of the garden below seemed to illuminate his face, briefly clearing it of all traces of the burden he had been carrying for some time. He was thirty-six years old, though he looked older, but that morning his delight at the sudden snow—the surprise of it, lying thick and unspoiled, making everything clean and new—was so open and unabashed and boyish that it brought a smile to my lips. I was about to drop my pretense and say his name, maybe join him at the window, wrap my arms about him, whisper against his ear, “Don’t go, my love,” then drag him back into the warm funk of our bed, when I remembered how Dillon used to sleep between us.
Something cold slipped down into my stomach, and instantly I knew I would not go to him. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t. Instead I had to lie very still with my eyes closed, concentrating hard on shutting out the image that had entered my head. The softness and warmth of our son’s little body lying between us. The sound of his breathing. The smell of him.
My mind came down on the image like a steel trap.
I stayed where I was. I kept my eyes closed.
The moment passed, and I lay listening to Harry padding quietly down the stairs and felt the twinge of regret at not keeping him here. Still, I had held it together. That was the important thing. I would make it up to Harry later. Besides, there was something I had to do first. From downstairs came the clink of bottles and the sound of the door closing after him. The van coughed and spluttered to life, and then he was gone.
* * *
With
Dillon, I knew it right away. It was as if I woke up one morning and all the molecules in my body had shifted slightly during the night—a small, almost imperceptible restructuring—so that I felt different, but in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I felt changed. Within days the nausea started—waves of it at any time of the day or night. And along with it came a sweeping tiredness so that I, who had always had difficulty finding sleep, suddenly found myself nodding off at bus stops, in bars, over dinner with friends. I felt it—I felt
him
—even before I realized I was late. With Dillon, I felt like my body had been pounced on by pregnancy. This time seemed different. I was over a week late and there were no symptoms—no nausea, no sudden assaults of fatigue. It was different from the first time, and I was grateful for that. Because I didn’t want this pregnancy, this baby, to remind me of Dillon. I had put all that behind me.
Ten minutes after I listened to Harry’s old Volkswagen groaning and screeching out of the driveway, I sat shivering in the bathroom, staring at the thin pink line that confirmed my suspicion.
“Steady,” I told myself, feeling my heart rocking in my chest. “Take it easy, Robin.”
I put the wand down, washed my hands at the sink, and looked at myself in the small, cracked shaving mirror. I’m normally quite pale but that morning the face that looked back at me was flushed, blood rushing up from my neck and suffusing my cheeks with color. I put my fingers to my face and smiled. A murmur of happiness started inside me. I began to laugh. In that cold, damp bathroom, with my breath clouding out on the air, I hugged my arms about myself. A brand-new life. A fresh start. I felt it like the blanket of clean, white snow outside making everything new.
* * *
There
is one room in this house that is devoid of any evidence of DIY. It is a sanctuary, a place to avoid the snaking cables of power tools that lie like nests of vipers across the bare floors, or the scarred walls where halfhearted attempts at stripping wallpaper have been started and then abandoned, or where tiles have been hammered away, leaving globs of old tile adhesive and flaking plaster. We use this one room as an office, and it was to this room that I went, still wrapped in my bathrobe, long socks pulled up over my knees. I sat there, shivering in front of my MacBook, scanning the Internet for an ovulation calendar, a menstrual cycle graph, some means of indicating when this child might have been conceived. Then I checked the calendar on my phone and flicked back through the weeks. I did all this as if someone were watching me—making a great show of my careful calculations—when really I knew. I put down my phone and closed my MacBook. At the window, I watched the skeletal tree filling up with snow. I had known all along.