The Boy That Never Was by Karen Perry

make you happy, would it? That would get you off my back? All right then – I fucked her. There now. Happy?’
    He spat the words at me and held his hands up in a gesture of mock surrender.
    ‘Make a joke of it then,’ I said, shaking my head and looking at him anew. ‘But you weren’t always like this. I never would have suspected you of sleeping with someone else – never. Not until Dillon –’
    ‘Don’t you mention him,’ he growled, raising a finger in warning. ‘Don’t you bring him into this.’
    ‘Is that why you do it?’ I went on regardless. ‘Does fucking around take your mind off the guilt? Does it numb the pain? Does it help to blot out the details of that night even for just a brief instant?’
    He stared at me from the doorway. He looked tired, bleary and wild with pent-up rage. I wondered if there was a bottle somewhere in the garage, in among his things, that he would go to now and draw strength from.
    ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid,’ he said in a thick voice, then closed the door softly behind him.
    It took me a long time to calm down after that. I felt my anger stalking around inside me like a big cat, clawed and dangerous. It snarled and paced, and I felt restless and distracted.
    We don’t often argue, Harry and I. Neither one of us likes confrontation. But that day, in the kitchen, I was taken by a sudden rage, and, if I am honest, it had nothing to do with Diane. God knows, we have had that argument often enough. Nor did it have anything to do with the studio or what I saw as Harry’s adolescent sulk at having to give it up. Him and his bloody ground rules. The real root of my anger that day concerned my pregnancy and Harry’s apparent ambivalence towards it. No – more than that: his studied refusal to engage with it, whatever he said otherwise.
    With Dillon he had wanted to know everything. Back then, he had pored over the pregnancy book I had found at Cozimo’s. He was relentless in his questioning, eager for details of the changes I was feeling. He had encouraged me to keep a diary, documenting my pregnancy so that we would always have some way of remembering it, long after the details had faded from memory. At that early stage, he was already planning for posterity. He had wanted so badly toconnect with the life growing inside me that it almost broke my heart. It almost suffocated me.
    Now he seemed unable to connect with me or the pregnancy. He was caught up within his own thoughts, distracted by something he wouldn’t share with me. And what bothered me most, the thing that niggled away at me constantly, was worrying just what – or who – was causing his distraction.
    Later that week, when there was a lull in activity at the office, I slipped out and walked briskly down Parliament Street, out on to Dame Street. I had spent the morning digitizing up drawings for one of the senior architects, and my eyes were watering from staring too long at the screen. Lately, I seemed to be doing little more than data-entry work, and it was getting to the point where even working on door schedules sounded exciting. But as the most junior member of the staff in a small practice, I had little choice in what work I did, and I knew, deep down, that I was lucky to have a job at all.
    A heavy snow had fallen during the night, and the city felt blanketed – muffled. There was an air of desertion about it. What traffic there was moved slowly, and people picked their way carefully through the snow and the slush. It took me half an hour to reach Trinity College, and fifteen minutes more to make my way across the slippery cobblestones and the cricket pitches, out to the Lincoln Gate. I hadn’t thought of it until then, but my journey led me on to Fenian Street and past Harry’s recently vacated studio. It was just around the corner from Holles Street and the hospital. I looked up as I passed, up at the closed, opaque windows. I half-expected to see Spencer’s leathered features staring out. But