Free The Boy That Never Was by Karen Perry

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 trousers. 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 bookshop, 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 smouldering 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 on to 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 co-authored 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