The Boy That Never Was Read Online Free PDF Page A

watched the skeletal tree filling up with snow. I had known all along.
    It was the anniversary. Our annual celebration had reached its sixth year. It was something we’d decided one night not long after he was gone. The two of us sitting together in a café, nothing stronger than coffee between us, and Harry hammering the table with his fist, tears in his eyes, hissing angrily that he did not want us to be defined by the tragedy we had suffered. He refused to live his life governed by grief, to become one of those people paralysed by the past, caught in the amber of loss. He said it, and I watched him shaking with grief, barely able to control it, and I put out my hand to steady him. I held on to his arm, whispering to him, as he sobbed, that we didn’t need any anniversary Masses or weekly visits to a grave to get us through this. No reliving of all the fond memories; it would not bring Dillon back. Instead, I suggested that we would have one day every year – Dillon’s birthday – and it would be a day of celebration, just the two of us. He looked up at me then, caught by the idea, and listened as I went on: Each year, on that day, for the rest of our lives, no matter what happened between us in the future, on that one day we would go somewhere together for a meal, for a night, for a drink and a long walk; we would talk about him, about how much we had loved him, about how happyhe had made us; we would get drunk, we would make love, we would cry, we would do whatever was needed to get through that day. It was a chance to distil and contain all the love and longing left after him.
    Dillon was three years old when he died. And every year since we have observed this anniversary. Strange, as we no longer celebrated or even acknowledged our own birthdays. After what happened in Tangier, I couldn’t.
    A month ago. Driving to Kilkenny, where we were booked to spend the night in a stately home – log fires and tartan rugs and stags’ heads mounted over the billiards table, that kind of thing – we were talking about how some people would think us morbid, the way we still celebrated our son’s birthday five years after he had died.
    ‘Take your brother, for instance,’ Harry said.
    ‘Mark? You’ve spoken to Mark about this?’
    ‘No, but he did ask me once in that awkward way of his whether he should, “you know, send birthday cards for Dillon and stuff”.’
    Harry had drifted into a mock imitation of Mark, with his halting speech and the nervous way he chewed his lip whenever dealing with something serious. I feigned shocked indignation, then broke into laughter, telling him to stop taking the piss out of my brother.
    ‘No, seriously, Robin! And as for your mother – Christ! When I told her we were going to Kilronan House for the night, she began waxing lyrical about how she had seen an article about it in
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and how some friend from her bridge club raved about it, and when I said that we were going there to celebrate Dillon’s birthday, her face kind of froze in horror. Seriously! I’m not making this shit up. It waslike a death mask. That waxwork of Robespierre’s head after the guillotine. That’s what she reminded me of.’
    ‘Stop. You love her really. Admit it.’
    He smiled, and I turned my attention back to the countryside viewed through the windscreen.
    Something was nipping at the edges of my happiness. All the way from Dublin, I had harboured the feeling that I had forgotten something, and we were halfway to Kilkenny when I realized what it was: my birth control. I didn’t say anything to Harry, just sat there biting my lip and jigging my crossed legs, watching fields and hedgerows strip past and trying to calculate how great a risk would it be if I took my pill tomorrow at lunchtime, when we got back home, rather than at nine o’clock that night, when I would normally take it. Was fifteen hours a big risk? Surely not. Not after nine careful years?
    I told myself that as soon as we