“That,” I said, “was not a fucking owl.”
Susanna stared at me for another moment. Her knuckle had left her face streaked with dirt like warpaint. Then she toppled slowly backwards to the ground, hair in the earth, gazing up at the blank sky. Leon sounded like he might be crying.
There was grainy dirt in my shoes and all over my hands; I was sweating and shaking and way, way too stoned. The ugly moonscape all around me looked nothing like the Ivy House that was woven through my life. It hit me, with a freeze of utter horror, that that was because it wasn’t the same place at all: this was a fake, a dark mist-formed parallel, some skewed but lethally plausible facsimile that Rafferty had created and tricked us all into, and now we were here there was absolutely no way to get back. It felt like something I’d known all along, deep down, if only I’d had the sense to recognize it. I almost screamed, but I knew Rafferty had to be listening and that tipping him off would lead to some unimaginable disaster.
High whistles of night birds, over the trees. Above us, in my bedroom window, the light had gone out.
“What the fuck,” I said. My voice sounded scraped and hollow. “Is wrong with you guys. What the fuck.”
Neither of them answered. Leon was sobbing, not bothering to hide it any more.
“You shits. You know that? Fuck you.”
“I want to go home,” Leon said, through tears, wiping his face with his palms. In the faint light he looked grotesque, hair swept into lunatic scribbles, face contorted and dirt smeared everywhere.
“Yeah,” Susanna said. She struggled up to sitting and then to standing, wobbly-legged. “That’s probably a good idea. Come on.”
She held out her hands to Leon. He caught hold, and after some fumbling and staggering they managed to get him vertical. They stumbled off together across the uneven earth, arms wrapped around each other, Susanna’s ankles bending at impossible angles. Neither of them looked back at me.
I stayed where I was. Inside the lit kitchen, Susanna slumped against a counter, poking at her phone with glassy, slow-motion concentration; Leon, at the sink, palmed water onto his face and neck, ran himself a mugful and gulped it down. Susanna said something, and he nodded without turning. The air around me was restless and moth-ridden, tiny things fluttering at the back of my neck and crawling on my arms, cold striking up from the earth through my clothes.
After a while Susanna glanced at her phone and said something else: taxi. They groped for coats and dropped them and slung them over their shoulders, and wove their way out towards the hall.
My high was starting to wear off, but the garden still had that terrible alien feel, itself and not itself. The thought of standing up and walking across it, exposed, made my back prickle—who knew what this place had waiting in its secret corners, mantraps, tangling vines, feral dogs and searchlights. But I was shivering, my arse was damp, and even if that thing had been just an owl I didn’t like being out here alone with it. In the end I hauled myself to my feet, fought down the head rush and scuttled up the garden like a mouse under a shadow.
It took me a very long time to grope my way up the stairs. Smell of dust, soft even snores from Hugo’s room, floorboard creaks making my heart ricochet. I couldn’t decide whether to wake Melissa; on the one hand she needed a good night’s sleep but on the other hand I needed her to hear this, this bullshit that had pushed us into our one and only fight ever, I couldn’t leave it till morning. “Baby,” I said quietly, or as quietly as I could, into our dark bedroom. “Are you awake?”
As I said it I knew. The air of the room was chilly and sterile, no breathing, no scent of her, no tinge of body warmth.
I found the light switch. The bed was still made; the wardrobe was open, bare hangers dangling.
I sat down heavily on the bed. My ears were roaring. I found my phone and rang Melissa: it rang out to voicemail. Tried again: same thing. Again: she had switched it off.
I never thought you did, she had said, looking me straight in the eye, and I had believed her because I wanted to. No wonder she had been preoccupied, the last while; no wonder she had been desperate to drag me out of there—middle of the night, drunk, stoned, leave everything behind and run with just the clothes on our backs. She had been trying to protect me. She had been afraid that, if I kept asking questions, I was going to find out what I had done.
Somehow what hurt wasn’t the fact that she believed I could be a killer—she hadn’t even met me back then, teenagers are scrambled and confused and half off the rails, I could have been anything for all she knew. What made me want to drop my head in my hands and weep was that I had really believed Melissa knew who I was now, knew it so closely and truly that she would be able to hold me together while I didn’t even know myself any more, and I had been wrong. I wasn’t some callous shithead, some psychopath who could push a murder into a corner of my mind and bounce blithely on with my life as if it didn’t exist— And there I was again, here we go round the mulberry bush and come full circle, what made me so sure what type of person I was, what I could and couldn’t have done?
Melissa, Leon, Susanna, Rafferty, Kerr. Hugo, for all I knew—in the car that day, I’d really like to know the story behind him ending up in that tree, I do feel as if I’ve got a bit of a right to know what happened . . . In hindsight it was obvious that he’d been carefully, delicately inviting me to come clean. Who else? Which of the guys on the alumni Facebook group? Dec, Sean? My own father? My own mother?
Whirls of crimson flowers spread out on a slate countertop, neat rhythmic flash of a knife through sunlight. Susanna’s voice, wry and amused: Oh, you. Anything you feel bad about just falls straight out of your head.
And with that, finally, it all fell into place. It had taken me a gobsmacking amount of time to notice the one dazzlingly obvious reason why all these people might think I’d killed Dominic: because I had.
The house was utterly quiet, not a creak or a tick of settling wood, not a snore from Hugo. It had the same terrible feel as the garden, a monstrous impostor burgeoning with incomprehensible, unstoppable transformations, wooden floors squelching like moss underfoot and brick walls billowing like curtains with the force of whatever was growing behind them.
That night. Where did you go?
I tried to tell myself that I would remember that. A whack to the head could knock out the word for colander or the last time I’d seen Phil, but not something like this. I had no idea whether that was true.
Faye said you’d been kind of pissed off with Dominic, that summer.
By the time Dominic died, we had all been finished with school, about to head off in our various directions to the rest of our lives. It wasn’t like Leon had been facing into another year of Dominic’s locker-room shenanigans; all that had been history. Why would he have needed to kill him?
I’d bet money that you only meant to give Dominic a scare. You were only planning on shaking him up a bit, nothing serious.
But surely, I thought (walls rippling queasily, dark pulses at the edges of my vision), surely if that had happened it would have colored every day of my life since, nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks whenever I saw a cop or went into Hugo’s garden, a head injury couldn’t rewrite all that—