“Jesus, Toby. For God’s sake.”
It seemed a bit rich for her to get miffed over being accused of burglary, given the rest of the conversation, but I wasn’t getting into that. I felt sick; too many Mars bars, the sugary residue of them flooding my mouth with saliva like I was about to throw up. “OK,” I said. “I get it. Leave it. What did you do next?”
Susanna stared me out of it for another moment, but then she gave me an exasperated head-shake and let it drop. “So,” she said—resettling herself under her blanket, getting back into the swing of the story—“that was everything basically planned out. All I had to do was get Dominic in the right place at the right time. A few weeks earlier it would have been easy enough to set up a meeting, he was practically squatting here, but since Leon’s birthday party he hadn’t been around as much—at least not during the day. And I knew I didn’t have a lot of time. He wasn’t going to be happy with wandering around the garden forever.”
I wanted to get up and walk out, away from the two of them and this godawful wreck of a conversation. I couldn’t remember why I had ever imagined this would be a good idea.
“So,” Susanna said, “I had to get creative. I hadn’t been going out in the garden by myself, but I started doing it every chance I got. Pruning rosebushes, stuff like that—I know fuck-all about rosebushes; I probably killed them. But it did the job. After a few days of that, I was out there one afternoon when something shoved right up against my arse, hard, and Dominic asked if I liked it like that.”
“That guy,” Leon said, taking another sausage roll, “watched way too much bad internet porn.”
“I nearly went face-first into the rosebushes,” Susanna said, “which could have ended badly. I got lucky: I grabbed hold of a bush and got my balance back. Ripped up my hand on the thorns, but I didn’t even notice till later. When I turned around to Dominic, he went, ‘Surprise!’” With a wry twitch of her mouth: “I swear he was grinning at me. Great big satisfied grin, like he’d done something clever and he was expecting a medal. He went, ‘Happy to see me?’
“I said, ‘I don’t like surprises.’ He thought that was very funny. He backed me up against the rosebushes and stuck his hand up my top. I said, ‘Hugo’s in the kitchen.’ Dominic didn’t like that. He took his hand back and said, ‘I’m gonna surprise you big-time, some night. Soon.’”
“Complete fucking psycho,” Leon said, through a mouthful. “Do you still think Su should have just headed off to Edinburgh? Without her around to lead him into temptation, abracadabra, Dominic would have transformed into a nice normal guy?”
“Up until then,” Susanna said, “I hadn’t been positive I’d actually be able to go through with it. But that made it easy. I said, ‘OK, I can’t stand this any more. You win. If I give you a blow job, will you leave me alone?’
“His jaw hit the floor. He looked like he genuinely couldn’t figure out what was going on, but after a second he went, ‘Are you serious?’ I said, ‘Yeah, as long as you swear on your life that afterwards you’ll never bother me again.’ You should’ve seen the grin on his face. He was all, ‘Yeah, totally, I swear!’—which was bullshit, of course he was planning to keep hassling me—‘Like, now?’ I said no, we’d get caught, Hugo would be out any minute. He’d have to come back late some night, like maybe Monday? And he said yeah, no problem, Monday night, deal. I said half-one in the morning—I thought he might kick up a fuss about that, but he would’ve said yes to anything.”
She checked the level in her glass against the light. “So I made the most of it. I made him promise to walk, in case anyone saw his car. I made him promise not to tell anyone; I said if I heard even the tiniest rumor, then the deal was off. And if he texted me or rang me or anything, the deal was off. He was all, ‘Sure, babe, no problem, swear on my life’—he was obviously planning to tell the world afterwards, but I was OK with that. He went, ‘I don’t need to text you, because you know you don’t get to change your mind. And you don’t need to worry about letting me in, I’ll be here.’ And he waved the key at me and winked, and headed off.”
In the window behind her the sky was dimming, rusty leaves hanging heavy with rain on the chestnut trees. “He was never even the smallest bit suspicious,” Susanna said, “you know that? I made sure I looked totally terrified and disgusted—not that that was difficult—and he was getting such a kick out of that, he didn’t have room for anything else. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he had.”
The room was getting chilly; the fire had burned low. Leon reached over to the pile of firewood and tossed in a log, sending up a soft crunching sound and a shower of orange sparks.
“So then,” Susanna said, “all we had to do was wait till Monday.”
“You were our big worry,” Leon said, to me. “Hugo was always in bed with the lights out by half-eleven, like clockwork. The factory was still being turned into apartments, there was no one living there yet, and the neighbors were all about a hundred and ten; they went to bed after the nine o’clock news, and even if they got up and looked out the window, they were mostly blind as bats. But if you’d decided to stay up late, surfing porn or whatever you used to do on Hugo’s computer, we’d have been in big trouble.”
“Well,” Susanna said, tiny smile over the rim of her glass. “Not that big a worry.”
“What?” I demanded. I had sat bolt upright. “What did you do to me?”
“Oh my God, relax on the jacks,” Leon said, eyebrows arched. “We didn’t do anything.”
“We just got in a bottle of vodka, Sunday night,” Susanna said. “And a bit of hash. And the two of us didn’t have very much of either one.”
“You didn’t even notice,” Leon told me. “You got ossified. At one stage you were swinging from a tree branch, giggling and telling us you were Monkey Man.”
“And we made sure you were up bright and early for work on Monday morning. It wasn’t easy, but we did it.”
“You were in bits. Green. I think you were actually puking. You wanted to pull a sickie, but we wouldn’t let you.”
“So by eleven on Monday night,” Susanna said, “you were just about falling over. We were in here, watching TV, Newsnight or something there was no way you would hang around for. You were bitching at us to switch over, but we wouldn’t, so eventually you gave up and headed off to bed. We were pretty sure you’d stay there.”
“Well that’s good,” I said. Not even the bumbler on the sidelines; just an object to be got out of the way so they wouldn’t trip over it in the middle of important business, an irritating toy that needed its battery run down to keep it inert while the action went on. And I had trundled off, with barely a nudge to start me going, down the path they had mapped out for me. They had known me so well. “I wouldn’t have wanted to, to, to cramp your style.”
“You didn’t,” Susanna assured me. “You behaved yourself perfectly. Everything behaved itself, actually. My other main worry had been rain—the last thing I wanted was Dominic trying to bring things indoors—”
“He wouldn’t have,” Leon said, licking flakes of sausage roll off his fingers. “You think he was planning to stop at a blow job? No way would he have wanted to be anywhere you could scream for help.”
“True enough,” Susanna said. “But he might not have shown up if it was raining; he might have wanted to reschedule. That would’ve been a pain in the arse.”
“Having to get me out of the way all over again,” I said. “Bummer.”