“None taken,” Leon said cheerfully. “He’d have eaten me for breakfast.”
“Instead Leon convinced me to go talk to the cops. I took some convincing, but seeing how furious he was . . . that made me twig that yeah, actually, I wasn’t overreacting, this genuinely was a big deal, and it was about time someone stuck a spoke in that fucker’s wheel. And like he pointed out, we weren’t in school any more; I didn’t have to worry about everyone finding out and me being a leper.” She was smiling over at Leon. “He went with me and held my hand while we waited, and everything.”
“I’m so ashamed about that,” Leon said, covering his face with his hands. “God. Every time I think of it, I want to ring you up and apologize. I don’t even know what I thought they’d do. Go give him a stern talking-to. Scare him into backing off.”
“It’s OK,” Susanna said. “Seriously. I actually expected them to do something, too. Pair of middle-class spoiled brats that we were.”
“What, they didn’t?” I said. “Like, nothing at all?” This sounded completely bizarre. Martin and Flashy Suit had been pretty useless, but at least they had made some kind of effort.
“Laughed in my face,” Susanna said. “They wouldn’t even take a statement, or a report, or whatever they call it.”
“Why not? What was their problem?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t have any evidence. The lump on my head was gone by that time. No texts, no emails, no notes, no witnesses. Just she-said-he-said, and apparently what she said didn’t count for much. In fairness, I don’t think it was just because I was a girl. Dominic was a rich kid from a fancy school, his parents would’ve gone ballistic and hired big-shot lawyers and filed a million complaints . . . The cops didn’t want to get into that mess, not with zero evidence. So they patted me on the head and told me he was probably just having a laugh, and I should go home and concentrate on having a nice relaxing summer, instead of getting myself all worked up about fellas.”
“Which seemed a teeny bit insensitive at the time,” Leon said, shaking another cigarette out of the packet, “but actually it was the best thing that could have happened. If there had been a report on file . . .”
“So that was that,” Susanna said. She put out her smoke and pushed the ashtray across the coffee table to Leon. “If the cops wouldn’t touch it, then there wasn’t much point in going to my parents, either, even if I had wanted to—what were they going to do, grab a cop and march him out to arrest Dominic? go talk to his parents, so Mummy and Daddy could be outraged at the thought that their precious prince had done anything bad? And the school wasn’t even involved any more. I was pretty much out of options.”
“You were about to go to college,” I said. I knew it might come out wrong and piss her off, but I needed to hear that I had had no choice. “You could have got in anywhere. Hadn’t you applied to Edinburgh, or somewhere?”
“I had, yeah,” Susanna said, unruffled. “And I was pretty sure I’d get in. I was thinking about going—I didn’t want to, I wanted to stay here, but anything to be safe, right? Except then Dominic came up to me in the kitchen, one day, and he went, ‘So I hear you’re thinking about Edinburgh’—who knows where he heard that.” A wry eyebrow-lift at me. “I babbled something, and he said, ‘Cool. I’ve always wanted an excuse to spend some time in Edinburgh.’ And he shot me the finger guns and wandered off.”
Shrugging: “I mean, maybe he wouldn’t actually have followed me. Maybe he’d have forgotten I existed. But by that stage he was crazy enough that I believed him. God knows money wasn’t a problem for him, and it wasn’t like he had anything to stay here for. Even you guys were pulling away from him—not that I blamed you, believe me. He didn’t have any real friends, did he? Plenty of dudebro types all ready to hoot and cheer when he did something moronic, but no actual friends. Not like you had Sean and Dec.”
“I guess not,” I said. I had never thought much about it, but I couldn’t remember Dominic ever hanging around with one or two people; he had been either at the center of a whooping crowd, or else—towards the end, mainly—sloping around on his own, with a fractured, roving glitter in his eye that made you want to stay far away.
“So he wasn’t going to stick around Dublin just to hang with the lads. And I was so fucking terrified all the time, and so exhausted from being terrified, I couldn’t think straight. I was positive he’d track me down, and it would be even worse because I’d be away from home and my family. By that stage he didn’t feel like just some douche; he felt huge. Like a demon. Something that could find me anywhere.” With a glance at me: “You figure I should’ve gone anyway, and kept my fingers crossed. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I should’ve headed off to Outer Mongolia because some arsehole couldn’t handle not getting his way. Would you have?”
“I don’t know,” I said. The calm of her—of both of them, really, Leon lounging on the hearthrug and poking experimentally at one wet shoe—was unsettling me more and more. It wasn’t that I wanted them trembling and sobbing, but given where all this had led, it felt like they should at least be tense or jittery or something. “I don’t know what I would have done.”
“I was pretty crazy myself, at that point,” Susanna said. “It was like being in a nightmare, that feeling where you have to get out but you can’t move fast enough and you can’t scream. I was cutting myself a lot. The only thing that made me feel any better was daydreaming about killing Dominic. I still wasn’t even considering actually doing it, but I had got a lot more realistic. Riddling him with machine-gun bullets felt stupid; like dropping a cartoon anvil on his head. I needed something that could be real.”
“I didn’t know,” Leon said, to one of us or both, I couldn’t tell. “I mean, I knew, but I had no idea it had got that bad.”
“It took me a while to find a way that would work,” Susanna said. “Dominic was twice my size, and I didn’t want anything where he would bleed because the cleanup would be too complicated, so that ruled out most stuff. I thought about poison, but it’s too dicey. Even if I managed to get something into him, most poisons take ages; he would’ve had time to go to the hospital, get treated, tell someone about me . . . I don’t even know how much time I spent reading true-crime websites, checking out methods. I know how to poison someone so it won’t come up on a tox screen—if I could have got my hands on succinylcholine—I know the best ways to drown someone, which would have been great if we’d had a lake in the garden . . . Finally I found out about garrotes. At first I couldn’t believe it was that easy, but I kept reading about it, and bit by bit it dawned on me: Holy shit. This could actually work.”
And again, I should have known; I had known. It would never have occurred to me to go researching garrotes. It was, on the other hand, exactly Susanna’s style. My mind felt like it was turning inside out. I could have trusted myself, all along.
“It was a good feeling,” Susanna said. “Not that it made any actual difference, but I’d been so totally fucking powerless . . . After that, when he’d grab my boob or whatever, and give me that big shitbird grin like What are you going to do about it, I’d be thinking Motherfucker I could garrote you any time I want.”
“Oh my God, your face,” Leon said, to me. “Don’t look so shocked. I’d been daydreaming about feeding him into a wood chipper for years. And so would you have been.”
My apartment, step and drag, unstoppable fantasy loop where I tracked down the burglars and karate-kicked them off tall buildings a thousand times a night. “I’m not looking shocked,” I said.
“You’ve got nothing to be self-righteous about.”