“Go. Go. Go.” I started chanting too, “Go go go,” our voices spilling out across the ravaged garden, Melissa laughing— “Go go go,” I leaned across and started jabbing Leon in the arm until he couldn’t help giggling too, half angrily, slapping my hand away, “Stop—” I got him in a headlock and we tumbled over onto Susanna, her elbow jammed into my ribs and Leon’s hair in my mouth and it took me straight back to when we were kids scrapping, they even smelled the same— “OK!” Leon yelled. “OK! Get off me!”
We disentangled ourselves, breathless and laughing, Leon making a big thing of brushing himself down, “God, you people are savages—” My head was whirling mercilessly; I flopped back onto the terrace and gazed up at the skidding stars, hoping they would settle down. I considered the possibility that we were all still sixteen and getting stoned for the first time and everything since then had been an elaborate hallucination, but this felt way too heavy to deal with and I decided I should probably ignore it. “Your hair,” Melissa said, laughing, holding out her hands, “you’re all leaves, come here—” and I rolled over to her and put my head in her lap so she could pick the leaves out.
“Fine,” Leon said, fumbling for his cigarette packet. It took me a moment to remember what we were supposed to be talking about. “The time when we were five and I bit you on the face.”
“Jesus, I actually remember that,” I said. “You drew blood. What the fuck was your major malfunction there?”
“I can’t remember. I bet you deserved it, though.”
“I had to start school looking like I’d escaped from Hannibal Lecter,” I told Melissa.
“Poor little Toby.” She stroked my cheek. “Did you tell the other kids you’d been fighting supervillains?”
“I wish. I probably just said it was the neighbors’ cat.”
“So there’s mine,” Leon said, noticing just in time that he was about to light the wrong end of his cigarette. “Toby, you’re up.”
“What? No I’m not. That doesn’t count.”
“It’s what you’re getting. Take it and like it.”
“After Su’s thing, that’s what you come up with? That was crap. Do a proper one.”
He blew smoke at me. “You do a proper one.”
“I’m not going till you do.”
“I’ll go,” Melissa said.
I sat up to look at her face: calm, steady, unreadable. I couldn’t tell how stoned she was. “You don’t have to,” I said.
“Why not?” Susanna asked.
“Because she barely even knows you guys. It’s not the same thing.”
“Why don’t you let her decide for herself?”
“My mum’s an alcoholic,” Melissa said. Her voice was clear, almost dreamy. “One time, when I was twelve, she fell downstairs and broke her leg. I was supposed to be asleep, but she’d been making a lot of noise. She couldn’t get up. My dad was working nights, so he was out. She was screaming to me to help her, but I pretended I was asleep. I thought if she had to lie there like that for a while, in an awful lot of pain, it would scare her off drinking. I knew she might choke to death—she was getting sick—but I left her there anyway. I listened to her all night, till my dad came home and found her.”
“Jesus,” I said. I had heard snippets of stories, along the way, but not this one. “Baby—” I put an arm around her waist and drew her to me.
“It was a long time ago. She was fine; her leg healed up. And she doesn’t remember it.” To the others: “It didn’t work. She still drinks.”
“Oh, you poor little kid,” Leon said, big-eyed, leaning over to squeeze her hand. “Of course that doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“Amen,” Susanna said. “If it had worked, you would’ve been a hero.”
“I don’t think it does,” Melissa said. “I hope it doesn’t. It was a terrible thing to do, but I was only twelve. I don’t think one thing, specially one when you’re a kid, can make you a bad person.”
“It doesn’t,” I said, pulling her closer and kissing the top of her head. “You’re one of the best people I know.”
That got a touch of a smile. “Well, probably not that. But . . .” A small sigh, as she leaned her head on my chest. “Trying my best to make things better. Whatever difference that makes.” And to Leon: “Your turn.”
He could hardly refuse, after that. I was blown away, yet again, by Melissa. She had to be wondering what the hell I was trying to do, she hadn’t wanted me to do it to begin with, and yet here she was throwing herself into the breach, heart and soul, to help me do it.
After a moment Leon said, “OK.” He gave her hand one more squeeze and moved away to settle his back against the wall, his face in shadow. “So. Back when I was in Amsterdam, I was going out with this guy Johan—remember him?”
“Yeah,” I said, which wasn’t true. Leon always had a boyfriend, none of them ever lasted longer than a year or two, I had given up keeping track.
“I do,” Susanna said. “What happened there? I thought you guys were serious.”
“We were, yeah. We were talking about getting married. And then one day, while Johan was out at work minding his own business, I dumped all his stuff in the hall outside our apartment with a note telling him we were over, and changed the lock on our door.”
“Why?” Susanna asked. She was lying back on the terrace, dead leaves caught in her hair and a cool shine of moonlight in her eyes. “What had he done?”
“Nothing. He didn’t cheat on me, didn’t hit me, practically never even got narky with me. He’s an amazing guy, he was mad about me, I was mad about him.”
“Then why?”
“Because,” Leon said, “it wasn’t going to last forever anyway. Shut up, Toby, I’m not being dramatic here, I’m just stating the bleeding obvious: for whichever reason, growing apart or fighting or cheating or just getting old and dying, relationships don’t last forever. Not to depress you guys or anything.” A wry, bleak glance at the rest of us, as he mashed out his cigarette. “And actually, that had never bothered me before. I kind of liked it. It was like, if I do something stupid and make a great big mess of this, no big deal: it wasn’t going to last forever anyway. I haven’t bulldozed the pyramids here. I can just go start over somewhere else.”
He reached for the gin and topped up his glass, not bothering with the rest of us. “But I was really in love with Jo. And I know how incredibly teenage this sounds, but I genuinely couldn’t handle that. It was stressing the fuck out of me. We’d be cuddled up together in bed, or we’d be out dancing and having a laugh, or we’d just be eating breakfast and watching the pigeons on our balcony, and suddenly all I could think about was how one day we wouldn’t be doing this together any more. No maybe, nothing I could do to stop it; it was guaranteed. And I’d just want to scream, or run away, or break everything. So in the end I did. It was the ballsack-in-church thing again, only that time I actually did it.”
“What happened when Johan got home?” I asked. For some reason I was picturing Johan as an eternal-postgrad type, thin benevolent face and little wire-rimmed glasses, completely unable to cope with anything coming out of left field like this.
Leon stared at his glass like he wasn’t sure what it was. “Basically what you’d expect. It was horrible. Lots of shouting. Him hammering on the door. Both of us crying. The people in the other apartments sticking their heads out to gawp—the old lady at the end of the hall was screaming at us to shut up, and then her awful yappy dog got out and bit Jo on the ankle . . . In the end he called the cops—not to get me in trouble; because he thought I’d lost my mind. The cops were totally shitty about the whole thing, but since I wasn’t actually crazy and it was my flat, in the end there wasn’t a lot they could do. I moved anyway. I’d had enough of Amsterdam.”
For some reason I couldn’t put my finger on, I didn’t like this story at all. I unwrapped myself from Melissa and found my glass, which miraculously hadn’t got knocked over along the way.
“So,” Leon said, “that was the worst thing I’ve ever done. Breaking Johan’s heart.”
I let a snigger escape. “Is that funny?” Leon snapped, head whipping up.
“No no no”—holding up a hand, half-masking a burp—“you’re fine, dude. Not laughing at you. I’m laughing at myself. All this time I’ve been related to Mother Teresa, and I never even noticed.”