“Oh, he doesn’t. And even if he does, there’s nothing he can do about it.” When I didn’t answer: “Seriously, Toby, chill out. It’s all under control.”
“But,” I said, looking from one of them to the other. There were things I needed to ask, vital things, but I couldn’t figure out what they were. “Don’t you feel bad about it?”
As soon as I’d said it, it sounded like a stupid question, sanctimonious and faux-na?ve. I expected some barbed putdown, but they were silent for a moment, glancing at each other, considering.
“No,” Leon said. “I’m sure that sounds terrible. But no.”
“Not for Dominic,” Susanna said. “For his parents, yes. I didn’t at first, because it had to be partly their fault he was such an entitled arsehole; but once I had the kids, yeah. But I’ve never felt bad for him. I’ve actually tried to. But I don’t. Fuck him.”
“I mean, I wish it had never happened,” Leon said, “any of it. I wish we’d never met him. But we did, so . . .”
“Do you?” Susanna asked, interested. “Really?”
“Well, I wish I hadn’t had to kill anyone. You don’t?”
Susanna thought that over. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I don’t know if I would’ve had the guts to have kids, if none of that had happened. It’s not like Dominic was this once-off supervillain; the world’s full of people like him. If there’s absolutely fuck-all you can do about them except lie back and take it, and then listen to people explaining how it’s not a big deal? Bring kids into that? Now”—reaching to flip the blanket over her toes; the room was getting cold—“at least I know, if anyone tries to fuck with my kids, I’ve got a decent shot at taking them down.”
Her story about the doctor, me wondering through my hash-and-booze haze why she was telling it. A warning to me, I had thought, but of course I had got it all wrong. That had been for Leon, nothing to do with me, and it had been a reassurance: Don’t worry. Look what we can do.
“It’s not like ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’” Leon said to me, through another cigarette and the click of the lighter. “We haven’t spent the last ten years hearing skeleton fingers scrabbling inside the wych elm whenever we walked past it.”
“Every now and then there’d be a storm and I’d be like, I hope that tree doesn’t come down,” Susanna said, “but that’s pretty much it. I saw the wych elm every time we came here, and nine times out of ten Dominic didn’t even cross my mind. I’ve sat against it.”
“Although,” Leon said, with an exasperated glance at her, “it would have been really great if you’d kept him in mind enough to teach your kids not to mess about in that bloody tree.”
“I did. I told them a million times. Zach was just looking for attention, he was all wound up because of Hugo—”
“Yeah, but you knew he was like that. You could’ve left him with your parents, or—”
“I didn’t know Hugo was going to call some big meeting. And anyway, how would that have been better? Dominic would still be out there. We’d have to deal with it sooner or later. At least now—”
Bickering like kids, like someone had dropped someone’s phone or spilled Coke on someone’s homework. “I don’t get it,” I said, loudly enough that they both stopped and looked at me.
“What?” Susanna asked.
“You fucking killed someone. You’re”—the pair of them looking at me inquiringly, interested, it was hard to stay focused—“you’re murderers. How—” How are you not fucked up is what I meant, you should be fucked up, it’s not fair— “how is that not a big deal? How do you not feel guilty?”
Silence again, and those glances. I could feel them considering, not how much was safe to tell me, but how much I would understand.
“Has there ever been someone,” Susanna said, “who treated you like you weren’t a person? Not because of anything you’d done; just because of what you were. Someone who did whatever they wanted to you. Anything they felt like.” Her eyes on me were unblinking and so bright that for a wild moment I was afraid of her. “And you were totally powerless to do anything about it. If you tried to say anything, everyone thought you were ridiculous and whiny and you should quit making such a fuss because this is normal, this is the way it’s supposed to be for someone like you. If you don’t like it, you should have been something else.”
“Of course there hasn’t,” Leon said. Something in his voice brought back the kid he had been, scuttling along school corridors, eyes down, huddled under the weight of his bookbag. “Who would ever?”
“Has there?”
“Yes,” I said. For some reason it wasn’t just the two men in my apartment I thought of—them of course, sweat-and-milky smell horribly close and the blows crunching in, but in a confused whirl it was also the neurologist in the hospital, the clammy pallor of him and the fold of his neck over his shirt collar as he stared blandly back at me: It depends on multiple factors.
What fac, factors? Thick-tongued and idiot-sounding. The near-concealed pity and distaste sliding across his eyes, the moment when he demoted me to something not worthy of explanations, branded and filed away, no appeal possible.
It’s very complicated.
Yeah but but but, can you, can—
Why don’t you concentrate on your physio. Leave the medical issues to us.
Kick in the ribs and something snapping, stupid cunt think you’re fucking great
“OK,” Susanna said. “What did you want to do to them?”
It stopped my throat. Not for anything in the world could I have put it into words, what I had wanted to do and how badly. I shook my head.
“And how did it feel when you didn’t?”
The memory flared all through my body: fist throbbing where I had smashed it into the wall over and over, leg one great bruise where I had punished it with every heavy object I could find, head pounding blindingly from slap after slap. I couldn’t breathe.
“Now imagine,” Susanna said. She was looking at me very steadily, through the smoky air. “Imagine you did it.”
Air rushed into my chest and for an enormous light-headed moment I felt it: the impossible ecstasy of it, almost too huge to be survived, the vast lightning rush of power and my fists and feet thundering down again and again, bones crunching, hoarse screams, on and on until finally: stillness; nothing left but obliterated gobbets of pulp at my feet and me standing tall, streaming blood and gasping air like a man rising from some purifying river, into a world that was mine again. My heart felt like it would burst free of my ribs and soar like a Chinese lantern up and away, through the window glass and out over the dark trees. For an insane second I thought I was going to cry.
Susanna said, “That’s what it was like.”
For a long time no one said anything. Things wavered in a sly draft, flames and high cobwebs, pages of a book lying open on the coffee table, the soft edges of Susanna’s hair.
Leon said, “Aren’t you happy?”
I laughed, a harsh astonished crack that came out too loud. “Happy?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. Or anyway not anything that could get you in trouble. That’s not good news?” When I didn’t answer: “Should we not have told you?”
I said, “I have no idea.”
“I didn’t want to. I thought we were all better off just leaving it. But Su thought you should know.”
“I felt bad about making you think you might have done it,” Susanna said. “But that seemed like the best way to handle things at the time. And I was right, wasn’t I? It all worked out in the end.”
I let out a hard, breathless laugh. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“It’s over. The cops are gone. We can forget the whole thing.”
“Yeah. Melissa’s gone, too.”
“That’s just because all the fuckery and drama got to be too much for her. I don’t blame her. Now you can go tell her it’s over, you had nothing to do with it, the end. You’ll be fine.”
“She’ll be over the moon,” Leon said, peering earnestly at me through the dimness. “She’s mad about you.”