“You were doing coke—oh, come on, Toby, I know I was na?ve but you weren’t exactly subtle about it. You snuck off down there together, and then you came back snickering and rubbing your noses and putting each other in headlocks and talking a mile a minute. Remember?”
The thing was, I did. C’mon, Henno, I need a word; hurrying down the garden, Dominic swearing as his foot went deep in mud, me laughing at him, lines chopped out on an old garden table by the light of my phone. “Why the hell would I want the key?”
Susanna shrugged, sitting up to take the joint off me. “How would I know? I figured maybe since you’d gone off Faye—duh, of course I knew you were hooking up with her—I thought maybe you didn’t want me to let her in any more.”
“I didn’t give a damn whether you had Faye in and out every night of the week. And I didn’t go off her. It’s not like we were going out. We just— You know what, never mind. Forget it.” I didn’t feel like having this conversation in front of Melissa.
“Or else I thought maybe Dominic had tried to rob the key, for a laugh, and you’d taken it off him and lost it— I don’t know, Toby, I didn’t exactly spend a lot of time analyzing the possibilities. I just sort of figured you had it.”
“Well, I didn’t. Jesus.”
Susanna shot me an oblique look. “You don’t even remember doing the coke. How do you know for sure you didn’t take the key?”
“Because there’s no bloody reason why I would.”
“Huh,” Susanna said, on a long thoughtful stream of smoke. “Then I guess it must have been Dominic.”
“Did you say that to the detectives? That you thought it was me? Tell me you didn’t.”
“Of course I didn’t. I said, ‘Dominic Ganly’s ballsack.’” Leon started to giggle again.
“Su, seriously. Did you—”
“No, I didn’t. I said I hadn’t got a clue. Relax.”
The thing I’d almost missed, in the middle of being annoyed with Susanna: she was right. If I hadn’t taken the key, and no one else had been down to the bottom of the garden, then Dominic had to have. “Why would Dominic want a key to our place?” I asked.
Susanna shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe he was just robbing random stuff because he thought it was funny.”
The joint was kicking in properly; my G and T tasted novel and starry, I could feel every individual bubble popping on my tongue. “One time Dec robbed Mr. Galvin’s shopping list for the laugh,” I said. “Right off his desk, when we were bringing up our homework. It was like, ‘Ketchup, Heineken, shaving foam, condoms.’ So Dec took a photo and made it the screensaver for the entire computer room.”
“That was Dec?” Leon said, impressed. “Everyone said it was Eoghan McArdle.”
“Shh. Nobody has to know.”
“I wish I’d known you all back then,” Melissa said; dreamily, gazing out over the darkening garden, but she had caught the opening I was throwing to her; I felt the shift in her, her body drawing itself together, ready steady go. I gave her a tiny encouraging squeeze.
“You don’t,” Susanna said. “Believe me.”
“Why not?”
“No one’s at their finest at eighteen. You probably wouldn’t have liked us.”
“Don’t listen to her,” I said, dropping my head to nuzzle Melissa’s hair. “You would’ve loved me.” Leon made a faint sound that was just far enough from a snort for plausible deniability. “And I would have loved you.”
“I imagine you being lovely,” Melissa said. Leon offered her the joint; she shook her head and passed it to me. “All happy and silly together, having picnics on the grass and staying up all night talking. Toby tells me stories about it, sometimes.”
This time Leon’s snort was harder to miss. “Don’t believe a word he says.”
It was clearly meant to sound jokey, but enough edge slipped through that Melissa turned her head to look at him, puzzled. “But I love those stories. Was it not like that? Was Toby not happy?”
“Oh, he was happy all right,” Leon said. “Not the angst-ridden type, our Toby.”
“What was he like? Was he nice?”
“I was a saint,” I said. “I studied twenty-four hours a day and spent my spare time reading bedtime stories to orphans and saving baby seals.”
“Shh, silly. You’re never serious about this. I’m asking them.”
“Toby was basically Toby,” Susanna said. “Eighteen, so he was a bit louder and more obnoxious, but he’s always been very much himself.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”
“Was he loud and obnoxious?” Melissa asked Leon.
“We’re probably the worst people to ask,” Susanna said, rolling over onto her stomach to find her glass. “We know each other too well; we don’t really look at each other properly.”
“I’d have loved to have cousins like that.” Melissa had her head snuggled into the hollow of my shoulder, listening with the same milky, wondering gaze she used to have when I told her those childhood stories. “Mine are nice, but we never saw each other much. It must have been lovely to be so close.”
“Well,” Leon said. “It’s not like we were close close. When we were little, yeah, but by the time we were eighteen . . . not so much.”
What? “Of course we were,” I said. “We were spending the whole holidays together here—”
“Right, and during term time we barely hung out at all. And it’s not like we spent the holidays snuggled up together pouring out our hearts to each other.”
I wasn’t sure what to think about this. As far as I was concerned, the old bond had hung on right through secondary school, until college hit and we all went our separate ways—I had felt exactly the same as always about the two of them, I’d assumed they felt the same about me, why wouldn’t they? I couldn’t tell whether Leon was rewriting history to make himself feel better about whatever he was trying to pull on me, or whether I had genuinely missed some subtle but crucial shift along the way.
“Well, we still loved each other and all that stuff,” Susanna said, seeing my face. “We just weren’t bestest buddies. That’s natural enough.”
“What about you two?” Melissa asked. “Were you basically the same back then?”
“I was a total nerd,” Susanna said cheerfully. “And a space cadet. Someone could be mocking me right to my face, or hitting on me, and the whole thing would go straight over my head. I like to think I’m a bit more copped on these days, but then I would, wouldn’t I?”
“And I was a loser,” Leon said crisply, flicking ash.
“You weren’t,” Susanna said, instantly and firmly. “You were great. Smart and kind and funny and brave and all the good stuff.”
She was smiling at him. Her face had a warmth, an unconcealed glow of something like admiration, that startled me: Leon? what had been so great about Leon? He smiled back, but wryly. “Course I was,” he said. “Unfortunately, no one noticed except you.” To Melissa: “I was the kid who got his head flushed down the jacks and found shites in his lunchbox.”
“Poor Leon.” Melissa reached out a hand to squeeze his. I couldn’t tell whether she was actually a bit tipsy or whether she was putting it on. If she was, she was surprisingly good at it. “That’s horrible.”
He squeezed her hand back. “I survived.”
“Did Toby take good care of you?”
“He wasn’t bad, actually,” Susanna said. “He brought us along to the good parties. Warned me when some guy chatting me up was a wanker. Basically, he kept me clued in enough that I didn’t make a complete tit of myself, at least not too often. He was even fairly tactful about it. Mostly.”
“That’s funny,” Melissa said dreamily. “I wouldn’t have expected him to be like that.”
I curled a strand of her hair round my finger. “What did you expect?”
“I imagined you a little bit thoughtless. So busy with your own things, you wouldn’t really notice anyone else’s problems.”
“Hey!” I said, mock-wounded.
“I don’t mean in a bad way. Just bouncing along, with your head full of so much that there wasn’t room to realize . . . Lots of teenagers are like that.” To the others: “Was he?”