“I felt exactly the same,” Leon said. “That’s what he relied on. God, he really was ghastly, wasn’t he?”
“And at that stage,” Susanna said, “I still felt like I could handle it. I mean, not like I was handling it well. I was jumpy as fuck. I was rearranging my life trying not to go anywhere Dominic Ganly might be, and whenever I went out of the house I was whipping around every two seconds to check for someone coming up behind me; every part of me felt like it was about to be grabbed, the whole time. But it still wasn’t the center of my universe. I was studying like crazy; most of my mind was on the Leaving, and that was where I wanted it. The last thing I wanted to do was make the Dominic mess blow up even bigger.” She reached for another cigarette. “Looking back, I don’t think I was handling it as well as I thought. Somewhere around there was when I started thinking about killing him.”
The breath went out of me. Of course I should have known—no, I had known, except I hadn’t been able to believe it. I had known I didn’t have it in me to come up with the idea for that kind of planned, meticulous killing. And I would have known, if only I had been able to think about it clearly for thirty seconds, exactly who did.
“Well, not in a serious way,” Susanna said, misreading the look on my face. “It was just a thing to make myself feel better, like sticking pins in a doll. I was daydreaming about blowing him away with a machine gun and coming up with some smart-aleck line that would be the last thing he heard on earth, that kind of crap.”
“‘Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker,’” Leon said, grinning.
Susanna blew smoke at him. “The point is, I still thought I could cope. I figured all I had to do was grit my teeth for a few more weeks: we were about to leave school, right? Once we’d done our exams, why would I ever have to see that arsehole again?”
“If only,” Leon said.
“Right. After the Leaving, it actually got worse. While I was living at home, Dominic couldn’t exactly call round and demand to be let in; but once we were all here for the summer, he was over like every other day. He waited for me outside work, a few times—I don’t even know how he found out where I was working. I definitely didn’t tell him.”
Side-eye at me. I had no idea; I might have said something, how would I have known that was some terrible crime? A lot of this felt hugely unfair: I was being blamed for stuff that I hadn’t done and had had no way of knowing about. “Anyone could have told him,” I said. “It’s not like it was a state secret.”
“Well, someone did,” Susanna said. “He’d walk me to the bus stop, pinching various bits of me and describing all the details of what he was going to do to me. I kept telling him to leave me alone, but he’d just laugh and tell me I could quit bullshitting, he knew I loved it. I don’t know if he was just saying that to wind me up, or if he genuinely had himself convinced.”
“Who knows what the fuck went on in Dominic’s head,” Leon said. “Frankly, who cares. The whole reason for this was so that Dominic Ganly’s horrible little mind wouldn’t be our problem any more.”
“I think, deep down,” Susanna said, “he thought I was a jinx. He’d always got everything he wanted, without even having to try for it, right? And then there was me. And then straight after that there was the Leaving. He knew he’d crashed and burned, and the only course he was going to get offered was like basket-weaving in Sligo Tech. Whatever life plans he’d had were pretty much fucked—which was my fault, for stopping helping him—and I doubt he had a Plan B; it had never occurred to him that he might need one. And I think he felt like it had all started with me.” She considered that, head cocked to one side against the arm of the sofa. “Maybe not a jinx; more like an albatross. And if he could shoot me down, put me in my place, then everything would go back to the way it should be.”
“Or else it was nothing deep,” Leon said. “He just liked making people scared and miserable, and he liked shagging girls, and you looked like a perfect chance to do both.”
“I don’t know,” Susanna said. “I think he was really seriously crazy, by then. I don’t mean mentally ill, not in any way that would have got him a diagnosis. I just mean wrong; gone off the rails. Basically everything he’d ever been—the big success, the king of the castle, the stud—it was all gone. And it broke him. He must’ve been pretty fragile to start with, if that was all it took.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Leon said. “He wasn’t broken. He’d always been a total shit. Any of us, if we’d crashed and burned in the Leaving, would we have started making rape threats to random people? No, thanks very much, we wouldn’t have.”
Susanna thought about that, tapping ash. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it was more like he didn’t break; he just broke open, and you could see what was inside. Which was basically the same, only more so.”
It had occurred to me, a little late, to wonder how exactly Leon fit into this. Su I still think this isn’t a good idea— Clearly he knew the whole story, had for a while; what the hell did that mean? Had we all been in on it together? I wouldn’t have put it past Susanna to come up with some byzantine Orient Express thing— I took another Mars bar.
“Anyway,” Susanna said, “he kept getting worse. This one day he showed up outside my work and walked with me to the bus stop again, only there was no one else there, which I knew right away wasn’t good. He shoved me up against the bus shelter and started groping me. I smacked him across the face, and he smacked me right back, good and hard, without even stopping what he was doing. My head bashed off the bus shelter; I had a big lump for days. When I stopped seeing stars I tried to push him off me, but he was strong. He got both my wrists in one hand and held them above my head, and stuck the other hand up my skirt. I tried kicking him, but he just laughed and slammed his whole weight against me so I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even get enough breath to scream. If a bunch of old women hadn’t come along, I don’t know what would’ve happened.”
“But that’s assault,” I said. Her tone—cool, detached, she might have been describing a trip to the shops—was bothering me; this was Susanna, for God’s sake, who could work herself into a passion about an injustice to someone in a whole different hemisphere, what was going on? “Why didn’t you go to the cops?”
“Way ahead of you there, champ,” Susanna said, raising an eyebrow. “I did. After that happened, I told Leon the whole thing. Not that I expected him to jump in and put a stop to it, but I needed someone to walk me to work in the mornings and meet me outside when I finished—which was pretty humiliating: like I was a little kid who couldn’t handle the big bad world. And I knew Leon wouldn’t think I was being a wimp, because he knew what Dominic was like.”
“Oh, I did,” Leon said. “I knew exactly what he was like. He was still giving me some of the same old shite, by the way; he was well able to handle more than one victim at a time. Multitasking; he’d have done well in management. But at least I was getting a lot less of it. He’d only really ever picked on me when he had his buddies around—it was some kind of chimpanzee thing, displaying dominance for the other males—and now that no one wanted to be around him, he didn’t bother as much. Just casual stuff, in passing. Knocking my coffee down my chest, that kind of thing.”
“But,” Susanna said, with a glance of real affection, “Leon was horrified. Outraged. ‘That bastard, we’re not going to let him get away with this . . .’ I think if I’d let him he would’ve rushed right out to teach Dominic a lesson, and that wouldn’t have ended well—no offense, Leon—”