?I wasn’t supposed to drive, but Hugo clearly couldn’t, and there was no way in hell I was going to make him walk the streets till Rafferty and his pals finished doing their thing. His car was a long white 1994 Peugeot, rust spots and duct tape everywhere, but actually a nice drive once I started getting the hang of its quirks. The hard part was the surroundings, out on the main road: speed and colored lights and moving things everywhere, like being yanked up from the depths of still green water into way too much of everything. I hoped to God I was driving OK; I really, really couldn’t handle any more cops right then.
I badly wanted a cigarette. I hadn’t been smoking long enough to build up a serious addiction, but what with the situation—cops to the left of me, journalists to the right, and there I was, stuck in the middle with my nonsmoker act—I hadn’t had one since the night before, and it had been a bastard of a day already. I pulled off the main road and turned corners till I found a cul-de-sac lined with spindly trees and little old-person cottages. “Can we just hang on here for a minute?” I said, switching off the ignition, already fumbling for my cigarettes. “I really need one of these.”
“I almost punched him,” Hugo said, startling me. He had taken the news and the plan quietly, just a nod and a careful note on his papers before he put them aside, barely a word on our way out the door or on the drive. “That Rafferty man. I know it’s not his fault, it has to be done, but still. The thought of him and his men prodding and peering through my house—not that I have anything I want to hide, but that’s beside the point, it’s our home— Just in that second, when he said it, I very nearly—” The sudden rise and roll of his shoulders: for a fleeting moment I saw the size of him, the breadth of his back, the reach of his arms. “A part of me wishes I had.”
“I did try to stop them,” I said, although I wasn’t sure this really counted as true. “From searching the house. Or at least from throwing us out.”
Hugo sighed. “I know. It’s all right. Probably it’s good for us to get out of the house for a bit.” He leaned his head back against the headrest and ran a hand over his face, roughly, eyes squeezed tight. “I couldn’t tell what the detective was thinking, not a glimmer. He’s very hard to read, isn’t he—which I suppose is his job. What did he ask you?”
“Just about Dominic. What he was like. How much time he spent at the house.”
“He asked me the same.” Rafferty had talked to Hugo in the study, while Kerr made pleasant chitchat with me in the living room (genealogy, leading into Kerr’s great-uncle who had had some involvement or other in the 1916 Rising) to gloss over the fact that he was supervising me. It had taken long enough that I had got violently, unreasonably twitchy, what the hell were they talking about up there while Kerr—apparently oblivious—droned on and on and on? “I barely remember him, though, this boy Dominic. God knows I’ve been trying. I don’t know whether he just didn’t leave much of an impression, or whether my memory . . . I think it was a bit frustrating for the detective.”
“That’s his problem,” I said. The cigarette was improving my mood, but I still wasn’t feeling very charitable towards Rafferty.
“The photo rang a bell, but not much more than that. I do remember one of your class committing suicide the summer you all left school, but I didn’t think it was someone who was particularly close to any of you.”
“He wasn’t. He hung around with the same crowd as me, was all.”
“What was he like?”
“He was a good bloke, basically. Kind of a party animal. He wasn’t over at the house a lot, I don’t think. Probably that’s why you don’t remember him.”
“Poor boy,” Hugo said. “I’d really like to know the story behind him ending up in that tree. I’m not being prurient, at least I don’t think I am; but there he was, and here I am, with his death getting right in the middle of mine. Maybe it’s childish, but I do feel as if I’ve got a bit of a right to know what happened.”
“Well,” I said. “If the cops do their job, we should all know the story soon enough.”
A wry twist of his mouth. “Not necessarily soon enough for me.”
“You’ve got time,” I said, ludicrously. “I mean, the doctors didn’t, it’s not like they gave you a deadline. You’re not getting worse, or . . .” I couldn’t keep it up.
Hugo didn’t look at me. His hair had grown: it was down to his shoulders, thick rumpled locks streaked dark and gray. His hands lay on his lap, huge square capable hands, loose as rubber gloves.
“I can feel it, you know,” he said. “Just this last week or so. My body turning away from all this. Focusing its energy on doing something else, some new process. Something that I don’t understand and have no idea how to go about, but my body knows and is busy at it. At first I told myself it was psychological—from hearing that Susanna’s Swiss expert couldn’t do anything—but it’s not.”
There was nothing I could say. I wanted to reach out and take his arm, physically hold him there, but I knew I wasn’t solid enough myself to make any difference.
After a moment he drew a long breath. “Well, there you are. Give me one of those, would you?”
I held the lighter for him. “On the other hand,” he said in a different tone, cocking an eyebrow at me as he bent to the flame, “it’s good to see you on the opposite trajectory. Even in these few weeks, there’s been a real change.”
“Yeah,” I said. I had finished my cigarette; I threw the butt out of the window. “Well.”
“No?”
“I guess. But”—I didn’t know I was going to say it till I heard the words, today was all out of whack, still that dazzled feel like being in a simulator, everything too brightly colored and hanging in mid-air—“even if stuff gets better, like my leg or whatever, so what? Because that’s not the point. The point is, even if I end up running a marathon, I’m not the same person any more. That’s the point.”
Hugo thought about that for a while. “I have to say”—he blew smoke carefully out his window—“you seem pretty much yourself to me.”
“Well,” I said. This was nice, inasmuch as it meant I was doing a decent job of faking it, but given Hugo’s condition it was hard to put too much weight on it. “That’s good.”
“No, I know you’re putting in the effort. I can see that—no, not that anyone else would notice, it’s only because I’m living with you and I’ve known you all your life. But that’s not what I mean.” It took him two tries to get the cigarette out the window to tap ash. “Fundamentally, under all that, you still seem like Toby. Battered and cracked, of course, but essentially the same person.”
When I didn’t say anything: “Do you really feel so very different?”
“Yes. Jesus, yeah, I fucking do. But it’s not even that.” I had never put this into words before, and even trying was making my hands shake; I could hardly breathe. “It’s not the actual ways I’ve changed. Probably I could handle those—I mean, they’re utterly shit, I fucking hate them, but I could . . . But it’s the fact of it. I never thought much about my, my personality before, but when I did, I took it for granted that it was mine, you know? That it was me? And now it’s like, I could wake up in the morning a, a, a Trekkie, or gay, or a mathematical genius, or one of those guys who shout at girls on the street to get their tits out? And I’d have no way to, to know it was coming. Or to do anything about it. Just . . . bam. There you go. Deal with it.”
I stopped talking. My adrenaline was through the roof; every muscle was trembling.
Hugo nodded. We sat there, not talking, for a while. When he moved, for a horrible second I wondered if he was going to put his arm around me or something, but instead he threw his cigarette out the window and bent to a cloth bag on the floor between his feet—I had vaguely registered him going into the kitchen (Rafferty trailing him unobtrusively) and coming back with it, on our way out, but I hadn’t paid much attention. “Here,” he said, coming up with a clingfilm-wrapped bundle. “You do need to eat, you know.”