Read Online The Innocent Sleep by Karen Perry - Free Book Online Page B

body. He didn’t holler or seem inconvenienced in any way. Staring blankly upward as if considering his predicament, he was humming something to himself. When I bent down to see if he was all right, he looked up at me and said, “It’s not like I’ve been drinking.”
    I reached my arm down and he grabbed it and I lifted him up. Robin handed him his hat.
    “Your health,” he said, reaching into his waistcoat. He took a swift slug from a small silver flask before blurting out that he was “much obliged.” But as he turned to walk away, he fell to the ground like a deck of cards. “Perhaps,” he said, never losing his decorum, “you could call me a taxi or an ambulance, even.” He was very polite, always polite.
    We went with him to the hospital, much to his surprise. It was Robin’s idea. The hospital was small and unclean. Robin spoke good French and told a nurse how we had found the man. By this stage, Cozimo was somewhat delirious and speaking—or, rather, slurring—in a number of different languages and at one stage humming and what can only be described as chirruping in a language resembling Arabic.
    That night we left him sedated and cheerful. When we returned to see him the next day, he was garrulous and appreciative. Robin asked if there was anything we could do for him.
    “There is one thing,” he said.
    “Anything,” she said, taking a shine to him or feeling sorry for him or some mixture of the two.
    “Can you check on the shop?”
    The shop was his bookstore. Robin, of course, said yes. She is always talking to strangers and saying yes. She doesn’t know how to say no. Generous to a fault.
    He handed us the keys and a scrap of paper with the address. “It’s in a state, but it’ll be good to know it is still standing.”
    We took off in a taxi and found ourselves traveling through a network of narrow streets until the car stopped and the driver pointed. “You walk now,” he said, and we did and found the old building tilting at the end of a small laneway. We let ourselves in—into the ramshackle old bookstore, into Cozimo’s life, and into, without knowing it at the time, what would become our home for the next four years. You see, one upshot of Robin’s generous spirit was that Cozimo offered us, by the time he was leaving hospital, a place to stay. “It’s my pleasure. You’d be doing me a favor.”
    “We can’t,” Robin said.
    “You visited me every day.”
    And that was the start of our time in Tangier, something that began as a dream and ended a nightmare. I can’t tell you everything that happened there. I can give you an idea, a sense of what the place was like—that’s all. I’d go mad if I had to delve into all the details again. It’s strange, because I remember it now as if it were someone else’s life. To put it simply: we had wanted to come to Tangier because of the light.
    Back then, both of us were artists. After Art College, we had traveled a bit through Europe—Spain mostly—ending up in Tarifa on the Costa de la Luz. We liked its hippie feel, it was cheap, and it gave us a chance to paint with the luminous coastal light of Andalusia. The century was drawing to a close, and after a weekender in Tangier, where we celebrated the start of the new millennium, we knew it was for us. The cultural mix was more interesting, and more importantly, there was something magical about the light there. It wasn’t until we returned to Ireland that Robin gave up on her art. After Dillon, she somehow lost the heart for painting. Maybe she associated the painting with him. She kind of co-opted his contribution to her paintings, you know, included them as part of the process. Ours was a free household. We weren’t fussy about the paintings. If Dillon wanted to dip his hands in and spread them about the canvas, well, so be it. At least, that’s how it became. Sure, when I started, I liked to have a closed-off space, but as I realized that Dillon was less of a distraction