I actually was mildly unsettled by this. It was looking like Melissa was right, but I wasn’t clear on how she would know that stuff: even if I had been a self-absorbed teenage brat, that had been years before I met her.
“Well,” Susanna said. “He was kind of oblivious sometimes. But there was no malice in it. Just being a teenager. Like you said.”
But I had caught her straight warning stare at Leon. He had been about to say something, but instead he shut his mouth tight and concentrated on putting out the joint on the terrace. It was very strange, seeing the two of them as the enemy; unsettling to the core, like suddenly seeing the world through a dark distorting overlay, no way to know which version was the true one.
Melissa had caught that look, too, or anyway she had caught something that told her to move on. “What about Dominic Ganly? What was he like?”
“We didn’t know him very well,” Susanna said. “Toby saw a lot more of him.”
“Toby says he never thought about him.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “He was just sort of there. Like what you said about not really noticing the people you see all the time. Or maybe you’re right and I was a bit oblivious.” I caught the snide arch of Leon’s eyebrow—You think?—but he kept his mouth shut.
“I keep wondering about him,” Melissa said. “At first all I could think was Poor thing, poor boy—because he was practically a child, wasn’t he?”
Leon moved sharply, but he turned it into reaching for the Rizla packet. Melissa was good at this. I hadn’t really expected her to be, and it gave me a sweet sharp thrill of triumph: the two of us, in this as a team, invincible.
“Except then,” she said, “Sean and Declan were over for dinner the other night. And they really didn’t like Dominic.” To me: “Did they?”
“Apparently not,” I said.
“What did they say?” Susanna asked.
“They didn’t really go into details,” Melissa said. “I think they didn’t want to speak ill of the dead. But they obviously thought he wasn’t a very good person.”
Leon had started working on another joint; he didn’t look up from the lighter flame. “Were they right?” Melissa asked.
“Sean and Dec are no idiots,” Susanna said, fishing a cucumber slice out of her glass to nibble on. “Or they weren’t back then, anyway; I haven’t seen them in a while. If they thought he was bad news—”
“Well but,” I said, “in fairness, teenagers. Everything’s black and white. All it takes is one stupid fight, like I don’t know over a rugby match, and—”
“Dominic,” Leon said, a little too sharply, “was a straight-up arsehole.”
“Pretty much, yeah,” Susanna said. “From what I saw.”
“What kind of arsehole?” Melissa asked.
Susanna shrugged. “Your basic model. He was big and good-looking and popular and good at rugby—”
“Which at our school,” Leon said, “meant you could get away with literally anything.”
“Right. So he did. Bullied people, basically. Which didn’t make him unique; there was a lot of it about. Even in context, though, I remember him being fairly nasty.”
I waited for Melissa to keep pushing—Why, what did he do, did he ever bully you—but she didn’t. Instead she sat up, brushing her hair out of her face, and reached for her glass. “Some people are just bad news,” she said. “I don’t like thinking that, but they are. The best thing you can do is stay far away from them. If you can.” I tried to catch her eye, but she wasn’t looking at me.
Susanna laughed a little, up at the sky: dark blue now, a heavy moon hanging above the trees. “Amen,” she said.
“OK,” I said, lifting a hand to get their attention. “Question. I’ve got a question. What’s the worst thing you ever did?”
“Oh my God, it’s like being ten,” Leon said. He was rolling with enormous care, bent over, nose almost touching his hands. “Truth or Dare. If I pick Dare, do I have to climb a tree and moon the neighbors again?”
“Jesus, I’d forgotten that,” Susanna said. To Melissa: “Old Mrs. Whatsherface next door was out in her garden, but she didn’t have her glasses, so she couldn’t work out what she was seeing. She was there peering up at this shiny white arse—”
Leon started to laugh. “‘Princess? Can you not get down? Here, kittykittykitty—’”
“Leon was laughing so hard I thought he was going to fall out of the tree—”
“Knock it off,” I said. “I’m serious.”
“Jesus,” Susanna said, eyebrows arched. “What have you done? Have you been arms-dealing out of that gallery?”
“Nothing goes out of this garden. I swear. I just want to know.”
“What brought this on?”
“Well, because. I’ve been thinking, a lot. What with . . .” I waved a loose arm at the garden and the house and the universe in general. I wasn’t as wasted as I was pretending to be, but my arms and legs had an interesting will of their own and the lighted windows of the apartment block seemed to have detached themselves from the walls and were merrily jigging about. “Because, look, take Dominic. OK? He probably thought he was a good guy. And most people thought so too—I mean, I did, or at least I took it for granted that probably he was, because people mostly are, right? But what you’re saying there, and the stuff Sean and Dec were saying—it’s like, whoa . . . maybe not so good.” I pretended not to notice the sardonic up-glance from Leon. “And on the other hand, right, there’s Hugo. He’s a good person. I don’t know if he knows he’s a good person, but we do. I mean, there’s no guarantee that, once he’s gone, there won’t be people saying different. But at least we’ll be able to tell the world, if we need to obviously, that he was a good man. Because he is. So”—I had sort of forgotten where I was going with this—“so. You see what I mean.”
“Not really,” Susanna said, topping up glasses and watching me with interest.
“Well”—I found my place again—“right. So I have to wonder, right? I’ve always thought of myself as a decent guy. Yeah? But the shit I’ve done in my life, haven’t we all, but the shit I’ve done, is it bad enough that I don’t count as a good person? Or what?” I blinked back and forth between the two of them. “You haven’t been thinking about this stuff? Seriously?”
“Nope,” Leon said, licking the edge of the Rizla in one deft sweep. “And I’m not planning to, thanks all the same.”
“Well,” I said, after a moment. “I guess I’m seeing this differently. From a, an angle. Because I don’t know if anyone told you guys this, right, but I could have died, back in spring. With that thing, the break-in. I nearly died.”
A small sound from Melissa, a quick breath. I didn’t look at her. “And that really fucks with your head. You know? Because I don’t know, if I had died, I don’t know whether I would have counted as a good person or not. I’m not talking about heaven and hell, I don’t . . . Just, it matters. To me. So I’d really like it if you’d think about it. Just for a few minutes. I’d like it a lot.”
Susanna had turned her head to look at me; the turn shifted half her face into shadow, I couldn’t read her expression at all. “OK,” she said. “I’ll play. If you will.”
“Thanks, Su,” I said, raising my glass to her and managing not to spill any. “I mean it. You’re a, a, a rock star. A trouper. Something.”
“So let’s hear it. What’d you do?”
I said, “You go first.”
“Why?”
“Because. I need to hear other people’s first.”
Susanna lay back with her arms behind her head and looked up at the sky. Curve of her throat, drape of the throw around her body, long lines of her outstretched legs, all whitened and chilled by the moonlight: she looked like a statue washed up on some lonely beach, never to be found. “OK,” she said. “I might have sort of killed someone.”
Leon, in the middle of lighting the joint, choked and doubled over, hacking. “What,” I said.
“Su—” Leon managed to wheeze, urgently.
“Not Dominic,” Susanna said to both of us, amused. “Jesus. Pair of drama queens.”
“What the fuck,” Leon croaked, watery-eyed and fanning himself.
“Breathe.”
“I almost had a heart attack.”
“Have a sip of that.”