Free The Boy That Never Was by Karen Perry Page A

can I tell you now? The essentialsare: 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 goodbye.
    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 exacerbated her anxiety. It was not the middle-class life our parents might 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 cosy 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 bookshop in a detached and gated house he was curiously private about, and though we saw him nearly every day since our first meeting, 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