The Boy That Never Was by Karen Perry Read Free Book Online

going to buy the next round of drinks. That was all. The atmosphere was oppressive. I drained my lager, felt it swirling around inside me, but with no effect. A trickle of doubt had started to work at me. Before the day was out, it would build to a full-flowing river.
    I went back outside. It was still bright, and the light reflecting off the snow made me squint. I walked around Parnell Square, then for some reason went into the Rotunda Hospital. I walked up and down the wards, stuck my head into room after room. Nobody asked me anything. I left feeling dejected and tripped back down O’Connell Street, looking out all the way. At one point, I called Robin. The need to see her was building inside me – the need to share this burden with her. A hurried arrangement to meet inSlattery’s, and then I hung up, still casting my eyes around me. But there was nothing, no sign of Dillon – his dark hair, the red jacket he was wearing – or the woman he was with. I could have searched up and down that street until nightfall, for all the difference it made. They had simply vanished.
    When I got back to Fenian Street, I was shaking. Had Spencer left any booze? My hands were cold, and I rubbed them together vigorously. They looked red and old. The hands of another person, not mine. They were always shaking these days. Too much drink, too much stress, too much worry and fear. It had become an aesthetic of sorts. The hazy brushstrokes of my paintings, thick with egg yolk, vinegar and sand, were not an act of the mind. They came not out of an intellectual context, a framework of notional and conceptual investigation. No. The paintings, the work, the vision, if anyone really wanted to know, came out of the delirium tremens of my life, the hangover, the morning after, the shake in my hands causing the brush to waver and tremble over the canvas, giving everything a shadowy, uncertain and unreal aura. All tremor and nerve.
    I lit a cigarette as I walked up to the building. I had an idea. Spencer, as a businessman, as a man of means, well, he had connections. He knew people. Detectives. Someone who might have access to the CCTV cameras on O’Connell Street, someone who might, without causing too many waves, without letting too many people know, inspect them closely, follow it up, help me track Dillon and that woman down or give me an idea of where they were going, which direction, which bus, who they might have met. A terror rushed through my body, but it was a terror mixed with a thread of hope. I felt manic as I pushed open the door to thestudio. When I saw a figure standing at the other end of the room, the mania changed to dread.
    Diane was trailing her finger over the worktop in the kitchenette.
    ‘I wouldn’t say you’ve done a great job cleaning this place up.’
    ‘Diane, what the fuck?’
    ‘I have a key. You know that, Harry. All your stuff may be gone, but there’s still something of you about the place.’
    Even on a Saturday she wore a suit, a stiff black jacket and skirt. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and smiled. I picked up some folders I had left and turned to go.
    ‘I wanted to say goodbye,’ she said.
    ‘What?’ I asked, turning back to her.
    ‘To your place, the place where you worked. To the memories.’ She was walking towards me, holding up a bottle. ‘I brought this, as a kind of bon voyage.’
    I said nothing.
    ‘Har … Harry,’ she said coyly.
    ‘Look, I have to go,’ I said, but she was already coaxing me back into the room, pouring two short glasses of whiskey. I don’t know if it was the lure of another drink, or the shock I’d had, or the immediacy of my need right then for any human company, but it made me think, I don’t know, that I could linger at least for a moment, that I needed to, in order to calm down.
    ‘You made some of your best work here,’ she said, passing a glass to me. ‘Do you remember your first solo show?
The Tangier Manifesto.
I made it happen, Harry.’
    I drank