“Come here,” Dec said to me, lower, leaning in and glancing at the ceiling as if Hugo might somehow hear him. “I didn’t want to say it before because Hugo was looking a bit iffy, but Dominic was a genuine mega-prick to Leon. It got bad, like. He used to tell people Leon had AIDS, so no one would go near him. And one time, yeah? Dom and a couple of others got Leon in the showers, they stuffed his jocks in his mouth to keep him quiet and tried to shove something up his arse—I heard it was a Coke bottle, and then they were going to make him drink it. I don’t know how far they actually got, but . . .” And at the look on my face: “Do you not remember any of that, no?”
“No,” I said, which was true. This had nothing in common, not only with the Dominic I remembered but with the entire world I remembered; it sounded like something out of a totally different school from mine, or maybe out of some horror-tinged English boarding-school movie with a hard-hitting message about the dark heart of humanity. “Are you positive you got the real story? I mean, dude, that’s some seriously crazy shit. I never saw anything like that in school. Like, nothing within a million miles of that. And I love Leon, but he exaggerates like hell.”
Dec was looking at me with a new expression on his face, or more like a lack of expression, so complete it was like a flat rejection. “School wasn’t paradise, man. It wasn’t just jolly japes and then everyone has a good laugh together. Sometimes it got hardcore.”
“Come on. Not like that. I was there. My memory might be fucked, but it’s not that fucked.” I glanced involuntarily at Melissa—I didn’t usually swear around her—but she was pinching a piece of candle wax into shapes, eyes down, and didn’t look up.
“I’m not saying it’s your memory. I’m not even saying you’re wrong. School was genuinely never like that, for you. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t like that for anyone else.”
“I’m not totally oblivious. I’m not thick. If this shit had been going on all around me—”
“Around you, not in your face. You’re not a shithead, you’re a good guy, so no one would’ve tried to get you in on it. And they wouldn’t’ve tried it on you, either; you’re not the type that gets picked on. But someone like Leon—”
“Leon is a fucking drama queen. He’ll take some tiny little nothing and blow it up into the apocalypse. I’ve seen him do it my whole life. I’ve been grounded because he—”
“I didn’t hear the Coke bottle thing from Leon,” Dec said. “I heard it from Eoghan McArdle. He was there, but he was scared to do anything in case they went after him as well, so he legged it. He said he went and got a teacher—maybe he did, I don’t know. Eoghan wasn’t a drama queen. At all. And he was really shaken up. That’s why he said it to me: he knew I was mates with you, so he thought I might’ve heard what had happened in the end.”
I couldn’t say a word. Partly it was outrage, at Dominic and, ludicrously, at Dec—I had liked school a lot, had remembered it with real fondness and an inner grin at all the stuff we had got away with, and now apparently the school I had liked so much had never existed. But overriding that was a much sharper sizzle of excitement, because it was all starting, just barely, to make sense.
“I did try feeling you out about it,” Dec said. “Delicately, you know what I mean? I thought Leon might’ve told you. But you didn’t seem like you had a clue. So I figured maybe Leon felt the same as me, didn’t want anyone knowing—let’s be honest, it’s not the kind of story you want to share, yeah? So I kept my mouth shut. I figured it should be Leon’s call.”
“He should have told me,” I said. My heart was going high and fast in my throat. “I would’ve done something.”
“Listen,” Dec said—leaning across the table to catch my eye, pointing his glass at me for emphasis. “I’m not accusing Leon of anything. OK? We all know he did nothing to Dominic. He’s a good guy, Leon. And let’s face it, even if he wanted to, it would’ve been like a Chihuahua trying to take out King Kong.”
“I know.”
“I’m just telling you because it’s probably a good idea for you to be aware of all that stuff. Yeah? If the detectives come back asking more questions.”
“God, yeah. Thanks, man.” I knew my voice sounded weird, tight and breathless, but that was OK, there were logical reasons for that— “You didn’t say it to them, right?”
“Fuck, no.”
“Good. Like you said, Leon wouldn’t . . . So there’s no reason to go sending the cops down the wrong track.”
Dec was nodding away. “Right.”
Leon. Leon desperate not to let the house be sold: a new owner might have decided to cut down the trees, and surprise! Leon wanting to throw the skull away and forget all about it, Leon like a cat on hot bricks about the detectives. Leon, after all that huffing and puffing about having to get back to his job and his boyfriend, still here weeks later: no way to leave while this was still up in the air. Leon with excellent reasons to want Dominic dead. And Leon who would have remembered me taking photos on that camera at his birthday party, who might have had reasons to worry about what was on there—
Sean and Dec and Melissa were all watching me, identical concerned expressions, and I realized what my face must look like. “I should’ve known,” I said.
“How?” Sean said. “Dominic wouldn’t have pulled any of that crap when you were around. It’s not like you’re psychic. I didn’t know either.”
Melissa slipped her hand into mine, on the table. “Or maybe Leon did talk to you,” she said softly, “and you did make Dominic leave him alone. You might not remember.”
“Yeah,” I said, with a small huff of a laugh. I seriously doubted it. Leon making snide little jabs about how easy I had it. Leon, who would have seen the Dominic thing as a totally valid reason to hold a grudge against me, to nudge the cops in my direction—I had been the one who people actually listened to, I should have done something, should have stood up for him; to someone like Leon, it would make no difference that I hadn’t had a clue what was going on. “True enough. That’s some best-case scenario.” She squeezed my hand.
“The memory’ll come back,” Sean said. “Give it time. You seem like you’re doing a lot better already.”
“I am.”
“He is,” Melissa said, when Sean glanced at her.
“That thick head came in handy for once,” Dec said.
“That night,” I said, and had to take a breath again. “The night it happened. That basically got knocked right out of my head, yeah? A lot of it’s come back, but there’s still big chunks missing. It’s been driving me mental.”
“Same as the time I got concussion,” Sean said easily. “The Gonzaga match, remember? That prop they had, size of a moose; I tackled him and knocked myself out? I played the whole rest of the match, and I don’t remember a single thing about it.”
“You,” Dec told me, pointing a finger at me, “you spent that evening giving me shite about my hair. Because you’re a bollix. Your fella, right?”—to Melissa—“your fella, he notices me admiring this very beautiful woman at the next table. Which should’ve been fair enough, right? seeing as I was single at the time? But he starts accusing me, at the top of his lungs, of having hair plugs—”