“Whoa whoa whoa,” I said. “Back up the truck here. Dominic was giving you hassle?”
“Everyone gave me hassle. You were right there, you saw plenty of it, occasionally you’d actually bother to go, ‘Hey, guys, lay off my cousin,’ and they’d back off for a while. But Dominic was the only one who actually scared me. The rest were just being Neanderthal idiots, but he was a total sadist. Vicious. He kept it down around you, but when you weren’t there, God— So finally I told you. And you”—twist to Leon’s lip, almost a snarl—“you went, ‘Oh, chill, he’s just messing, I’ll have a word with him.’”
“What’s wrong with that?” I demanded. “I was straight in there, ready to help you out. What did you want from me?”
“I didn’t want you to have a word. I wanted you to get Sean and the two of you knock Dominic’s teeth in and tell him you’d rip his head off and shove it up his hole if he ever went near me again. But you said, God you were so reasonable about it, you said oh no, that wasn’t the way to go about it. You said you couldn’t be there minding me all the time, and if you beat Dominic up, he’d find a chance to take it out on me. You said I needed to learn to deal with my problems myself.”
And, at last, there it was. The grudge, spiking through his voice as sharp and bright as if it had been yesterday. “Well,” I said. My heart was going wild, I couldn’t tell how much was the revelation and how much was the hash—stupid, I should have stayed straight for this— “I had a point, didn’t I? What part of that is wrong?”
“All of it. It doesn’t work that way, it sounds great but— You had your word with Dominic, and of course that just made him worse, exactly like I’d told you it would. Because after that it wasn’t just casual stuff in passing, slamming my locker door on my head like he would have to anyone weaker than him; it was targeted. He went looking for me. And he knew he could do anything he wanted to me, and all that would happen was a little chat where you suggested that maybe he should be nice to me if that was OK please and thank you.”
He was breathing in quick hard puffs, nostrils flaring. “Jesus,” I said. “I mean, I’m sorry, man. But this was like, what, fifteen years ago? Maybe it might be time to let go a little, yeah?”
Of course Leon bit on that. Throwing himself back against the wall: “You are fucking unbelievable. My God. Dominic tortured me. For years. I thought about killing myself all the time. You think getting beaten up fucked with your head— That was one night. Imagine what years of it would do to you. I don’t know”—raising his voice as I tried to say something—“I’m never going to know what I would have been like if you had had my back, that time. So, so”—furiously scraping his forelock back from his face—“so don’t get all self-righteous about how you would never hurt anyone close to you.”
Melissa was tugging harder at her hair, wrapping it tight around her finger. I knew this was making her unhappy and I wished there had been a way to do it when she wasn’t around, but I had to take what I could get; she would understand when I brought her my shining answers— “But,” I said. “Jesus. I didn’t know it was that bad. Fuck’s sake, Leon, I don’t read minds. You should’ve told me. If I’d known he was getting worse, I would’ve—”
“You would’ve been raging,” Susanna said. “You would’ve done something.”
“Exactly. But I didn’t know.”
I had turned to her triumphantly, but there was a look on her face I couldn’t read, muddled shadows, darkness tangling with the yellow light through the French doors. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“What? Of course I am.”
“Because I thought—I mean, Faye said—”
She broke off. “Faye?” I said. “Faye what?”
“Nothing specific. Just that you’d been kind of pissed off with Dominic, that summer.”
“I wasn’t—” When the hell had Susanna been talking to Faye, why the hell? “I wasn’t pissed off with him.” And when she didn’t answer: “Did you tell Rafferty that? What the fuck, Su?”
“No, I didn’t tell him. He already knew.”
“Well,” I said, after a moment. “Then I guess we all know who did.”
Leon’s head snapped up. “What? You mean me? I never—”
“Of course you did. This is exactly what I’m talking about.” In fact, I was having a hard time keeping track of what I was talking about; the whole thing had the nasty, nightmarish, swimming-through-seaweed quality of all stoned arguments, impossible either to navigate or to escape. “Me, right? now that you finally bother to tell me you had real problems with Dominic, I’m not going to run to Rafferty. Because I don’t deliberately dump my own cousins in the shit. But you, you blame me for your whole life or whatever it was, and you just told us, Leon, you just said you don’t have a problem fucking over your, your nearest and dearest when it’s convenient—”
“That’s not the same thing at all. I knew you wouldn’t get it, that’s why I didn’t want to tell you, I just knew you’d make it into—”
“I don’t feel well,” Melissa said abruptly.
She did look awfully white, soft hair rumpled and falling in her face, shoulders slumping. “Baby,” I said, reaching for her. “What is it? Are you going to get sick?”
“No. Just a bit dizzy.”
“Oh, shit,” Leon said, round-eyed. “Did I roll it too strong? You’re so tiny—”
“Come on,” I said, slipping an arm round her waist. Her hand clamped hard on my wrist. “Let’s get you to bed.”
She leaned on me through the kitchen, head drooping on my chest, but in the hall she pulled away so abruptly I lost my balance. “Whoops,” I said, catching the banister rail. “Are you OK?”
Melissa said, “I don’t want to do this any more.”
“OK,” I said, carefully, after a moment. “Like, they’ll tell me more if you’re not around?”
“No. Enough.” She was facing me across the hall like I was dangerous, arms wrapped tight around her chest. “Let’s go home.”
“What?” I said, after a bewildered pause. “We are home.”
“No. My place, or your place.”
Confusing pale slants falling through the fanlight to stripe her set face, the geometric flowers of the floor tiles; too many patterns everywhere, my eyes wouldn’t focus. “Like, now? Tonight?”
“Yes, now. Or come to bed with me, and we’ll go first thing in the morning. Leon can stay with Hugo—I don’t want to leave him, you know I don’t, but we can come visit—”
I was in much worse shape than I had realized before I stood up. None of this made sense. “Wait,” I said. “You’re not feeling sick?”
“I want to go home.”
“But,” I said. “Why? Are you mad about the, the thing at the gallery? Because—”
“No. That wasn’t good, you know it wasn’t, but right now it’s not the— This is terrible, Toby. The three of you. Look what you’re doing to each other.”
“Hang on,” I said. “This is, what, this is because I didn’t get Dominic off Leon’s back? You’re upset about that? I mean I should have, I get it, but I was just a stupid kid, I didn’t realize—I’ll go back and apologize—”
Melissa shook her head in frustration. “No. Not that, you can do that some other time, but right now— I can see what you’re doing. I’m not stupid. But they’re doing something too, Toby”—a fierce flick of her head towards the terrace—“they’re trying to do something to you, and I can’t tell what it is but it’s not good. And we need to go home.”
“No we don’t.” I felt I had every right to be indignant about this; she was the one who had insisted we should come here in the first place, I had only gone along with it to make her happy, what was her problem? “Everything’s fine. I know what I’m doing.”
“What? What do you think you’re going to get out of this?”
“You heard them out there.” I was still hanging on to the banister, gesturing at the terrace with my other arm, I knew I looked like some wild flailing drunk but I didn’t care— “They know something. I’m going to find out what it is.”