“I know that. OK?”
“And then,” Susanna said, ignoring this, “it got to August, and the Leaving Cert results came out. I only skimmed mine, you know that? I should’ve been over the moon with myself, but the only results I cared about were Dominic fucking Ganly’s, because if he’d done OK then he might pull himself together, but if he’d bombed then I was in deep shit. And of course he’d bombed.”
“I got to tell her,” Leon said, on a stream of smoke. “When we went down to the school and got our results, I headed straight off, remember— What am I saying, of course you don’t, you were too busy jumping around making orangutan noises with Sean and Dec. But Dominic was just off in a corner, staring. He looked like he was about to pull out an AK-47. I barely even looked at my own results. All I could think was that now I had to tell Susanna.”
“I figured my only option was to lock myself in my room for the rest of my life,” Susanna said. “Except even that wouldn’t work, because Leon’s birthday party was coming up like a week later, and of course Dominic was going to be there. I was petrified. I thought about saying I was too sick to go, but what was I going to do instead? Stay up in my room, where he could get me on my own any time he wanted? Hugo always put in earplugs for the parties, he wouldn’t have heard anything, and I could hardly stay in his room all night—I mean, I guess I could have, if I’d told him the whole story, but it felt like things had gone way past that. I could have gone back to my house, but the thought of being all on my own there scared the shit out of me.”
She rearranged herself more comfortably, curled on her side, elbow propped on the arm of the sofa and her cheek leaning pensively on her hand. “But in the end,” she said, “it was totally fine. I dodged Dominic the whole way through the party, and he didn’t even come after me. I was so happy. The college place offers had just come out like two days before; I thought maybe there’d been a miracle and he’d actually got in somewhere decent, and that had sorted his head out . . . Only then I asked around and found out: nope, he’d got nothing. No offer at all. He’d only applied for the big-shot courses, no safety backup stuff for him. So that wasn’t reassuring.”
I remembered that, awed hushed voices, Shit he got nothing at all? and the odd snarky joke about McDonald’s. Except at the party Dominic had seemed totally fine, louder than ever, bellowing with laughter, leaping off the kitchen table. I had meant to keep my mouth firmly shut so I didn’t get a punch in the face, but down at the bottom of the garden, the coke making me jabber: Dude that sucks about college, no I mean that really sucks, what are you going to do? And Dominic staring at me, eyes white-ringed in the moonlight: Like you give a shit. Like anyone gives a shit. I know you’re all laughing your arses off about this. You bunch of fuckers. And then he had laughed at the flash of fear on my face, punch in the arm that sent me staggering, Relax dude I’ll be fine, have some more of this!
“And then,” Susanna said, “I found out he’d spent the party nicking the garden key.”
She sighed. “That was what did it,” she said, “in the end. It meant he could get to me here, any time he wanted. Here.” An iron spike of outrage through her voice, a jerk of her head to the house, and for a moment I saw it the way it had been: warm, shabby, happy, us noisy and tangled in our fort and our contraptions, Hugo calling Dinner! up the stairs through a fog of savory smells.
“And he did, too. A couple of days later Hugo sent me out to the garden to get rosemary, for something he was cooking. Remember where the rosemary bushes were? Right down the back? The second I leaned in to pick a bit, something came barreling out from behind that oak tree and rugby-tackled me. I went flat on my face in the strawberries. I got the wind knocked out of me and there was this huge weight squashing me flat, I couldn’t turn my head to look, but I knew who it was, obviously. I knew the smell of him, by that time; that shitty body spray, eau de jockstrap. He started fumbling under me, trying to undo my jeans. I was flailing around trying to dig my nails into him, but he got his other hand on my throat and started squeezing. And everything started to go all gray and fuzzy and faraway.”
She examined her glass, picked something real or imaginary off the rim. Her face hadn’t changed, but it was a moment before she went on. “Luckily for me,” she said evenly, “right then Hugo stuck his head out the back door and called me. So Dominic rolled off me and grinned and whispered, ‘Rain check,’ and pulled my hair and oozed back off behind the oak tree.”
“You know,” Leon said tightly, “sometimes I wish you’d picked a different method. Something slower and more painful.”
“Hugo spotted that I was covered in dirt and bits of grass,” Susanna said, “but I said I’d tripped and he didn’t guess, because in fairness, who would. I did think about telling him—I was pretty seriously shaken up. To put it mildly. But . . .” A small shrug. “Hugo, you know? What was he going to do? He was hardly going to rush out and beat the shit out of Dominic. He couldn’t have if he’d tried.”
You should have told me, I wanted to say. “Jesus,” I said, instead.
“She didn’t tell me,” Leon said. “About that. Not then.”
“You’d have gone for him,” Susanna said, “and got beaten up, and that wouldn’t have done anyone any good. I needed to end this thing. Dominic was well capable of killing me next time, and he had been waiting for me out there. I couldn’t tell myself he was just grabbing opportunities when he saw them, and I’d be OK if I managed to keep out of his way. He was coming after me. Even if I’d managed to get Hugo to change the lock, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Dominic had plans; concrete ones. So I needed concrete ones too.”
She said it so simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “I spent a lot of time thinking it through. I knew actually killing him was going to be the easy part; the hard part was how to make sure I didn’t get caught. I think I did OK, for a kid.” Glancing up at us: “It startled me, you know that? how well I did. I’d always thought of myself as kind of a spacer, book-smart but not practical-smart, but once my back was up against the wall . . .”
“You did great,” Leon said, a little sadly. “You were amazing.”
Susanna took a sip of her wine. “The first thing I did—apart from staying out of the garden, obviously, and double-checking that the house was locked up at night—was start playing down Dominic’s bullshit to my friends. They didn’t know the whole story anyway—like I said, I was ashamed and embarrassed and all that good stuff—but they knew some of it, and I didn’t want anyone telling the cops, afterwards, that I’d been having problems with him. So I started making jokes about it, rolling my eyes, Oh God that idiot, it’s like having someone’s stupid puppy jumping all over you, you can’t really get mad about it but you totally want to smack him on the nose with a newspaper . . . And I started dropping sympathetic little comments about how the poor guy was really messed up about his results, he seemed like he might be having an actual breakdown, I hoped his parents would get him to see a therapist, you hear all these news stories about people killing themselves because they don’t get the course they wanted . . . And of course when you’re that age everyone loves drama, so within a few days there were rumors all over the place about Dominic being in counseling because he’d tried to hang himself.”