There was a silence. I took a big swig of my wine—I only realized when I lifted the glass that my hand was shaking. Susanna and Leon were having some complicated exchange of eye signals.
“If you remember anything,” I said, “anything that could, could make sense of why I might have— That’s all you owe me. To help me straighten this out. Melissa only ever got into this because you wanted me to come here. If I hadn’t—”
“OK,” Susanna said. “We’re going to tell you a story.”
“Su,” Leon said. “I still think this isn’t a good idea.”
“Relax. It’ll be fine.”
“Su. Seriously.”
Susanna regarded him across the coffee table. She had her jumper sleeves pulled down to her fingertips and her wineglass cupped in both hands, like it was a cup of tea. In the firelight the whole scene looked almost impossibly cozy and idyllic, the worn red damask of the armchairs glowing, warm flickers catching in the dinged copper kindling bucket and making the old etchings stir and ripple. She said, “It’s only fair.”
“No it’s not.”
“It’s as close as we’re going to get.” To me: “If you ever tell this to anyone—and that includes Melissa—we’ll say it’s complete bollocks, you must’ve hallucinated the whole conversation, we just came over tonight and had a nice sentimental chat about Hugo and went home. And they’ll believe us. Are you OK with that?”
“Do I have a choice?” And when Susanna shrugged: “OK. I get it.”
“I’m having a smoke,” Leon said, pulling himself up off the rug. “I don’t care. Where’s that ashtray?”
“He’s still kind of wired, isn’t he?” Susanna said, when he had gone out to the kitchen. “It’s because he’s trying to decide what to do about Carsten. I hope he sticks with him. They’re good together.”
“Su,” I said. My heart was going hard. I hadn’t expected it to be this easy. I couldn’t tell whether I should worry about the fact that she had come here already planning to tell me this story.
“I know.” She leaned over the arm of the sofa to dig in her bag for her cigarettes. “Want one of these?”
“No thanks.”
“Have you got a light?”
“Su.”
“OK, OK. I’m figuring out where to start.” She stretched out her legs on the sofa and rearranged the throw, getting comfortable. “So. Sixth year, I guess was the beginning. Sometime in March; the Easter holidays. Our parents had gone somewhere, we were staying here, we were studying for the Leaving Cert orals. Remember that?”
“Yeah.”
“Our mates used to call round and study with us? Including Dominic?”
“Yeah.”
“It was horrible,” Leon said, coming back in with the cracked bowl Susanna had dug out after the funeral. “Here, for God’s sake, where it was supposed to be safe, and all of a sudden there’s that arsehole, swaggering in and swiping all my books onto the floor and laughing like a hyena.”
“At first I wondered what he was doing here,” Susanna said. “It’s not like you two were that close. But then he started sliming up to me, all smiley, asking me for a hand with French. I wasn’t impressed—he’d always acted like I didn’t exist, and suddenly when he needs help he’s all over me? But I was big into giving people a hand, back then. Community responsibility and all that shite. Jesus, I was a self-righteous little snot, wasn’t I?”
“We loved you anyway,” Leon told her, moving more stuff off the coffee table to make room for the ashtray.
“Thanks a bunch. Anyway, I thought fine, whatever, I’ll try and get a few irregular verbs into Dominic’s thick head. Which went OK for a day or two, until one evening—right in here, actually, I think you two and your other mates were taking up the kitchen table—he started rubbing my thigh and told me how sexy I was.” She reached out a hand; Leon threw her the lighter. “Which, yeah, right. I assumed he was just taking the piss—I still think he was, actually. Like, he and his buddies had a dogfight going or something. Did you?”
“No! Jesus Christ, Su. What do you take me for?” I was pretty sure I was right to be outraged, I wouldn’t have got involved in something like that, would I? “And”—definitely true, this part—“no way would I have let him drag you into it. No fucking way.”
“Well,” Susanna said, “I knew he was setting me up, one way or another. Maybe it wasn’t a dogfight or a bet, maybe he just thought I’d be an easy shag because I’d be so flattered by having someone so totally awesome wanting little old me. Or maybe he thought he was doing me a favor in exchange for the study help. Anyway, I took his hand off me and said I wasn’t interested. Which he clearly wasn’t expecting.”
Leon snorted. “Why did he have to be setting you up?” I said. “Or looking for a quick shag? Maybe he was genuinely into you.”
Susanna threw me a look, over the click of the lighter. “Oh, come on. You know what Dominic was into. Cara Hannigan. Lauren Malone. Gorgeous popular super-groomed blondes.”
“You shouldn’t underrate yourself,” I said, idiotically. “You’re beautiful. Not everyone likes the same—”
“Toby,” Susanna said, half amused, half exasperated. “It’s OK that I’m not gorgeous, you know. It’s not some kind of deformity that you need to tiptoe around and pretend you don’t notice.”
“I’m not—”
“Anyway, I wasn’t into Dominic, so it doesn’t actually matter whether he was genuinely into me or not. Although of course that’s not how he saw it. He told me to relax, and put his hand back on my leg. I was done with the whole thing. So I told him to get off me because I’d rather eat my own puke.”
“Oo,” I said, wincing reflexively. Even after all those years I could feel, with a quick zip of adrenaline, exactly how little Dom would have liked that.
“Yeah, in hindsight, that may not have been a great call. Live and learn.” She stretched out a foot, hooked a toe under the edge of the coffee table to pull it closer so she could reach the ashtray. “He actually acted like he was taking it OK. He made a big deal of jumping back and holding his hands up, laughed a lot, some stuff about how I needed to chill out and what was I, a lezzer, cliché cliché. I got up to go and he was like, ‘What, you’re not going to help me out any more?’ I said no, we’re done. Well.” She raised an eyebrow. “He was genuinely outraged about that. ‘What the fuck is your problem, I was just having a laugh, you’re crazy . . .’ I left. I was a bit shaken up, but I thought that was the end of it.”
Leon started to laugh. “I know,” Susanna said. “Bless my innocent little heart.”
I was—deplorably, maybe, I didn’t care—thrilled by the way this story was going. I hadn’t been sure about Leon, but Susanna: there was no doubt in my mind that I would have protected her if she needed it, no matter what that took. My heart was going like I was on a roller coaster, rising towards that dizzying peak, ready for the unstoppable plunge.
“After that,” Susanna said, “whenever I ran into him, like when everyone was hanging out in the park after school, he’d get in some comment about me being frigid or uptight. Someone would crack a dirty joke and Dominic would be like, ‘Whoa, better keep it clean, Mother Superior’s here!’ And plenty of people would laugh. I tried telling him to shut up, but that just made him worse: Ooo, someone needs to grow a sense of humor, she must be on her period, she needs a good shag to loosen her up . . . And everyone would laugh harder. So after a while I just kept my mouth shut.”