“Jesus,” I said. The world I had been blithely bouncing through had been so utterly unrelated to this one running along its dark subterranean track, I couldn’t make the two of them click together in my mind. “What did you say?”
Susanna shrugged. “It wasn’t bad. They were nice to me. It’s not like I was a suspect; I was just number ninety-whatever on a list of friends and acquaintances they had to cross off. I basically told them what the uniform guys had told me: Dominic was just having a laugh, it was kind of a running joke. You could tell they believed it. I mean”—she held out her hands, matter-of-factly—“look at me, and look at Dominic. Then I got all upset because OMG what if he genuinely had been in love with me all along and I just didn’t realize it, and he couldn’t take the pain any more? So I cried a little bit. And they told me it wasn’t my fault either way and he’d been upset about his exam results, and not to be worrying about it. And then they went away.”
“And thank God you handled it that well,” Leon said, turning his head away from her to blow out a plume of smoke. “My God. They’d taken about five minutes with Toby and me—no one must have told them about the stuff Dominic did to me; not wanting to give the wrong impression of such a lovely guy, probably, or something idiotic like that. But they were in here with you for half an hour. The whole time I was up in my room, shaking so hard I couldn’t stand up. Pouring sweat. I was positive there would be a bang on the door any minute and we’d be hauled off to jail—I was wondering whether to slit my wrists while I still had the chance. If you’d let the smallest thing slip—if we had ever occurred to them as a possibility, even for a second—we would have been fucked. Megafucked.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” I said. For some reason Leon’s drama-queen shtick infuriated me more than ever; it felt like he was making a huge deal of this on purpose, to hammer home just how much I had missed. “It was self-defense, basically. Even if they had caught you, it’s not like they would have locked you up and thrown away the key. It’s not as simple now that you left him there for ten years, but if you’d just gone to the cops straightaway—”
Both of them started to laugh.
“What? What the fuck is funny?”
“Oh God,” Leon said, through a fresh gale of laughter. “This is why we didn’t bring you in on it.”
“Thank God,” Susanna said.
“What are you talking about?”
“‘Excuse me, Guard dude, I’ve like totally got something to tell you, right, but we’ll have to make it quick because I’m meeting the lads down the pub—’”
“Of course they would’ve locked us up,” Susanna said, like she was explaining something to Sallie. “We had zero evidence that it was self-defense; the police would only have had our word for it. You think they would’ve believed us?”
“Why not? Two of you, both telling the same story, and your mates would have backed you up—”
“Teenage girls,” Susanna said. “Probably hysterical or liars or both—the cops already thought I was hysterical. Why would anyone believe us?”
“And a queer,” Leon said. “I wasn’t out yet, but it would have taken them about two minutes to guess. Fags are hysterical too, you know, and vicious, not to mention morally bankrupt.”
“And on the other hand,” Susanna said, “you’ve got a fine handsome upstanding young rugby hero like Dominic Ganly.”
“OK, so he’d been a bit depressed,” Leon said, “but that was just because of his exam results and possibly because this ungrateful bitch”—Susanna waved—“refused to appreciate him the way he deserved. It wasn’t like he was mentally ill or anything. Nothing wrong with him but a bit of boyish high spirits. He was a good guy—you said it yourself.” A sidelong glance at me. “Everyone loved him, or at least everyone who mattered. The papers were drooling over how wonderful he was, how full of potential, they made it sound like he was Cúchulainn come back to save the nation from itself . . . The whole country would have been out for our blood. They would probably have brought back the death penalty just for us. Of course I was terrified.”
“I wasn’t,” Susanna said. “Not for a second. Beforehand, yeah, I was absolutely petrified, but not once he was gone. I was . . .”
I waited, but after a moment she shook her head and laughed and put out her cigarette.
“Well, yeah,” Leon said, and I caught a hint of a smile in his voice as well. “There was that, too.”
“There was what?” I demanded.
They looked at each other. The fire was burning low again, dull red patches pulsing amid blackened wood. The pall of smoke stirred idly, small eddies and swirls.
“We both went a bit off the rails, I guess,” Leon said, “in different ways. Everything felt very weird; disorientating. The best way I can put it is that it felt like there was too much oxygen in the air, all of a sudden, and our bodies took a while to get used to it.”
“I wasn’t off the rails, thanks very much,” Susanna said. “I was just having fun. It had been way too long since I’d been able to do that. Not just because of Dominic, to be fair. Even before him, everyone had me pegged as the good girl, all smart and serious and well-behaved; I didn’t feel like there was any way to break out of that, or even figure out whether I wanted to. And once Dominic started in on me . . . Jesus. It felt like if I did anything fun—like wore nice clothes, or went out, or got drunk, or had a laugh—that would be Dominic’s justification: You were off your face with your tits hanging out, obviously you wanted it. Or if not Dominic, someone else like him. Afterwards . . .” She shrugged. “That didn’t feel like so much of an issue. I mean, obviously Dominic’s opinion wasn’t an issue any more, but other people weren’t as scary either, because I knew I didn’t have to take their shit. Not that I was going to whip out the nuclear option any time someone cut in front of me in the bus queue, but just knowing I could actually do something made the world feel a lot less dangerous. And I definitely didn’t give a shit that I was supposed to be the good girl.”
“I think you were well beyond calling yourself a good girl,” Leon said, grinning.
“Past redemption,” Susanna said cheerfully, raising her glass. “So I just had a good time. Remember those hippies with the camper van? They took me to Cornwall and this guy called Athelstan was teaching me to play the dulcimer?”
“Your parents were freaking out,” I said. Everything about this was bothering me. “They thought you were in a cult or something. Or abducted. Or losing your mind.”
“Every kid has a right to some rebellion. I’d been angelic all through school. It evens out.” Rolling over to stretch out on her back on the sofa: “I’m still Facebook friends with Athelstan. He’s living in Portugal, in a yurt.”
Leon got the giggles. “Don’t know what you’re laughing at,” Susanna told him. “Who was your mate who used to go around wearing the big purple wings?”
“Oh God, Eric! He was lovely. I wonder what happened to him. This one time, right, we were really stoned and we went into the Arts Block in Trinity late at night, just before they closed up? We were trying to get locked in for the night? Only the security guard spotted us and we were like playing hide-and-seek with him, all these masses of empty rooms and we kept hiding behind chairs, except Eric’s wings stuck out—”
“Well, that sounds like a blast,” I said. My coffee buzz was long gone; I felt sick and headachy and miserably tired. “I’m glad you guys had so much fun.”
“We’re not taking it lightly,” Susanna explained. “It’s just that we’ve had a while to get used to it.”
“So how come you’re not living in a yurt and playing the dulcimer?” I asked. “If it was so liberating. How come you’re Mrs. Suburban Mummy?”