“Why? Who cares what they know? What could they know that’ll make anything better?”
Even if I’d been sober, I couldn’t have put it into words; it surged up inside me, so immense that it almost stopped my throat. “I’m trying to fix it,” I said. The words felt much too small for something so momentous. “I’m trying to fix it all.”
Melissa’s head went back in frustration. “You’re not fixing it. Toby. You’re going to make it a million times worse.”
That stung. “You don’t think I can do this? You think, what, I’m too fucked up, I’ll make a mess of it and they’ll see straight through me—”
“No. You’re doing it really well: pretending to be all drunk and stupid, and they’re falling straight into it—”
“Then what? You don’t think I can handle it? You think I’ll find out something I don’t like and I’ll, what, go to pieces, I’ll, I’ll be running in circles making chicken noises—”
“I don’t know! I’m not good at saying things, Toby, I’m doing my best but— All I know is, this whole thing is bad. It’s bad stuff. And”—she was drunk too, swaying forwards, small pale hands swooping and whirling like sparklers in the dimness—“and, and, when something’s bad all through, the only thing you can do—not you, anyone—the only thing is to get away. You can’t go, ‘Oh, it’s fine, I’ll just jump in and fix it—’ It doesn’t work like that.” Glint of tears on her face, but when I stepped towards her she put up her hands to keep me off—“No, don’t, I’m trying to— If you get yourself all tangled up in whatever’s going on here, if you deliberately dive right into the middle, it’s going to wreck you. And I’m not going to sit here and watch while you do that to yourself. Not after how hard you’ve worked to get better, how hard we’ve both— I’m not. I’m not.” She was crying openly now, and it ripped my heart open. “I’m going home. Please come with me, Toby. Please.”
“You can’t drive,” I said, firmly and ridiculously, as if that were the final word on this whole issue. “You’re too drunk.”
“We can get a taxi. Please. Let’s go.”
I would have done it if I could, done it in a heartbeat. I would have done anything else in the world, ripped my own arm off, to stop the tears falling down her face. But this was my one chance of ever clawing my way out of this strangling dark, back up to the warm bright world; this was it.
“Go to bed,” I said. “I’m way too messed up to even have this conversation. We’ll have it in the morning.”
“Come up with me.”
“I’ll be there in two minutes. I just have to tell Susanna and Leon we’re crashing out.” Soothingly, or as soothingly as I could manage: “You head on up, baby. Get the bed nice and warm. I’ll be right there. OK?”
This time Melissa let me go to her, stroke back her hair and kiss her wet face. “Shh,” I said, “shh. Everything’s fine,” and she clasped her hands behind my neck and kissed me back, hard. But when she moved away from me and headed up the stairs, her head was down and she had her hand pressed against her mouth, and I knew she was still crying.
I almost went after her. In the eerie gray light of the hall, what I thought of for some reason was that long-ago phone call as I walked home late and drunk, among the wrought-iron whorls of streetlamps and the tantalizing smell of spices. Come over. How I could have gone to her then; how it would have been, all unknown to me, salvation. For a dizzying and deeply stoned moment, I thought time had folded over and this was my second chance; that if I went up those stairs I would find myself in Melissa’s flat, with awful Megan pinching up her lips and making bitchy little jabs about my lack of consideration, while I laughed and headed for Melissa’s nest of duvets and a long lazy Saturday morning, pancakes for brunch and a walk by the canal.
Melissa switched on our bedroom light and brightness flooded down the stairs, making me flinch and blink. Then the bedroom door closed with a soft click and the hall was dark again. I stood there for one more minute, leaning against the newel post and staring at the tile patterns, trying to make them stop hopping and pulsating. Then I went back out to Leon and Susanna.
Susanna was lying on her back on the terrace, arms behind her head, looking up at the sky. The moonlight hit her full in the face. “Is Melissa OK?” she asked.
“Just a little bit the worse for wear,” I said. I made my way around her, very carefully, and settled myself on the steps. “She’s going to bed.”
Leon was huddled up with a fist pressed to his mouth; he was clearly much too wasted to cope with this. “Oh God. We upset her. Didn’t we? All that fighting, we upset her, we have to go in and say sorry—”
“I don’t think she really wants to see you right now, man. Not after that.”
“Oh nooo,” Leon moaned, face going down in his hands. “Oh, shit . . .”
“Shouldn’t you stay with her?” Susanna suggested. “Like, in case she gets sick or something?”
“She’s not that bad. She just needs to crash out.” I was impressed with my easy tone, no hint of crisis, nothing like a guy whose girlfriend was walking out on him. The truth was I didn’t believe she was, not at all. The things she’d stuck by me through, the roiling nightmare months when I was barely a human being: there was no way she would dump me because I was being a bit too nosy for comfort. By the time I went to bed she would be asleep, curled up still dressed on top of the covers, suitcase open on the floor and a random armful of clothes thrown in there to show me she was serious; I would pull her close and wrap the duvet around both of us, and in the morning when the hangovers wore off we would sort everything out. And oh God if I could come back to her with something solid, something to show her this wasn’t pointless and stupid and self-destructive— “And to be honest, that’s OK with me. Because I think we need to talk, Leon, don’t we, and I think it’s a better idea that Melissa isn’t around.”
“What?” Leon’s head popped up and he stared at me. “Talk about what? I didn’t say anything to Rafferty, I swear, Toby, I—”
“Not that. Fuck that.” I found my glass, or someone’s glass, and took a good swig. “I want to talk about the break-in at my apartment.”
Susanna rolled onto her side and propped herself up on her elbow to look at me. “Why?” she asked.
“Well,” I said. “Those two guys, right? the two guys who broke in? They had a plan. They waited, they specif, spefi—” I was never going to make it. “They waited on purpose till they knew I was home. And then they broke in and took a bunch of my stuff which, you know what, that didn’t seem like a huge deal at the time, compared to the rest, although now I’m starting to wonder, you know? But they also beat the living shite out of me. No”—at a movement from Leon—“shut up, Leon. You have no idea. Whatever you’re imagining, whatever, it was a shit-ton worse than that. So just shut up.”
Leon curled in on himself, chewing on a thumbnail and breathing too fast. It made me even more positive: guilty conscience, he couldn’t even look at me, at last I was on the right track— “The detective who’s looking into it,” I said, leaning closer, “you know what he told me? He said if it was a random thing, if it was just your basic skanger burglars who fancied my car, right? He would’ve had an idea who they were, straightaway. He knows all the regulars. But he didn’t have a clue. Because shut the fuck up Leon”—my voice exploding in a roar, going to wake Melissa, Hugo, the neighbors, I didn’t care—“because this was personal. Not random. This was some little shit who had a grudge against me and he wanted me fucked up, and Jesus Christ he got what he wanted, didn’t he? And what I’ve been trying to explain to you is that people don’t have grudges against me, because I don’t do shitty things to people who actually care about me. But you do.”