by Tana French
“OK,” I said. “So. If you did have something to do with him dying. Do you still figure you’re a good person?”
Susanna thought about that, chin on hands. “Maybe not,” she said, in the end. “But say I’d decided not to have kids, so I’d never needed to go to him. Or say I’d got lucky and ended up with a decent doctor. Then I wouldn’t have done it. But I’d still be the same person; the reason I hadn’t done it wouldn’t be because I was more virtuous, it would just be dumb luck. Would I be a good person then?”
This was way above my pay grade. Leon had made this joint even stronger than the first one; a weird fizzing sensation was traveling up my arms and I was suddenly very aware of my nose. I felt like there was something wrong with what she was saying, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “I have no idea,” I said, after a long pause. “What you’re talking about.”
That started Susanna giggling. Once she started, she couldn’t stop, and it set the rest of us off too. The windows of the apartment building swung to and fro, bright rectangular pendulums, tick tock tick tock, and that felt somehow irresistibly funny, a marvelous joke straight out of Alice in Wonderland. I wondered if Susanna had been joking too, if her whole story had been one great big wind-up, silly me falling for it!
“So,” she said to Leon. “Beat that.”
Leon held up a palm. “Oh hell no. I’m not playing this game. You three knock yourselves out.”
“You have to play. Or I’m not giving you any more hash and you’ll have to go back to wandering around dodgy nightclubs.” She stretched out one leg and poked him with a toe. “Go on.”
“Stop it.”
“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.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well—whoops”—as my glass nearly slipped out of my fingers; I saved it and took a long gulp. “Ahh. That’s beautiful gin. What was I . . . ?” With a finger-snap and a point at Leon, who was glaring: “Right. The thing is, dude, yeah? I know a lot of people. And I don’t know anyone, like not one person, who can honestly say that the worst thing they’ve ever done is dumping someone. Maybe my friends are just a shower of arseholes, I don’t know. But it’s either that or you’re a total saint.”
In the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Melissa, tugging at a strand of hair and looking worried: my tone was bothering her. I tried to shoot her a covert glance to reassure her that I knew what I was doing, I had a plan, but I was in no state to pull that off and it came out as a cross-eyed leer.
“Johan really loved me,” Leon said. “God help him. And now, wherever he is, he’s stuck for life doing the same thing I did: obsessing about how, sooner or later, whatever he’s doing is all going to go tits-up. Like I infected him.” With a defiant stare at me: “If what you want to hear is that that makes me a bad person, then yeah, I think it probably does. Does that make you feel better about whatever it is you’ve done?”
“Not really,” I said. “But then you didn’t want it to, did you?”
The thing was, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it, I believed him. I hadn’t believed Susanna, or not all the way, but every word of this rang true—this kind of self-indulgent emo shite was right up Leon’s alley. And I had finally, laboriously, figured out why that story had gone through me like ice. If the worst thing Leon had ever done was hurting specky Johan’s feelings, then clearly he hadn’t killed Dominic. Whatever was going on here, I had got it all wrong.
“What have you done?” Leon demanded. “This was your stupid idea to begin with, now you’re sitting there giving me shite because my ones aren’t dramatic enough for you— What’s yours?”
It hadn’t been Susanna, either. There was no way a skinny teenage girl could have hauled Dominic up that tree. Which meant the reason they were nudging the cops towards me—and they were, I knew they were, one of them? both? not just the hoodie but where else would that photo have come from, who else would have said I had problems with Dominic?—that wasn’t to save themselves. Malice, pure and simple? Could they really hate me that much, and I had never noticed? What could I possibly have done to either of them to make them think I deserved this?
I was on the verge of full stoner paranoia. The apartment windows were tick-tocking back and forth again, but it didn’t feel funny this time; it felt sinister, as if they were working up the momentum to rip free from the building altogether and come swooping down at us. I knew if I didn’t pull it together I was going to end up rocking and whimpering in some corner.
“Forget it,” Susanna said, on a yawn. She pulled herself up to sitting and knuckled one eye. “Let’s go home. Toby can make his confession next time.”
“No,” Leon said. “If I’m going to spill my guts, I want to hear his one.”
Melissa was looking at me with her head tilted, questioning and anxious. It was the sight of her that steadied me. After her story, there was no way I could let her down by coming out of this empty-handed; it was unthinkable. There was something here, even if I had been wrong about what it was, and I needed it.
I closed my eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. When I opened them again the windows stayed still, more or less. I smiled at Melissa and gave her a little nod: Don’t worry, baby, everything’s going according to plan.
Susanna was poking Leon with her foot, trying to make him move. “I’m in tatters. If we don’t head, I’m going to crash out right here. How strong did you roll those?”
“Get a drink of water or something. I want to hear Toby’s.”
“You go home if you want,” I said to Susanna. Actually, I liked that idea; Leon would be easier to wrangle without her there. “Zach’s probably tied Tom up and set him on fire by now.”
“Leon. Come on. We can split a taxi.”
“No.”
Both of us knew the mulish set of his chin: he was going nowhere. Susanna rolled her eyes and flopped back onto the terrace, but she kept watching us.
“OK,” I said. “You need to swear you won’t tell anyone.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Susanna said. “Mutually assured destruction. You think I want people finding out about me and Dr. Mengele?”
“No, I mean it. I could get into serious trouble.”
She gave me an eye-roll and held up her little finger. “Pinky swear.”
“Whatever,” Leon said. “Spill.”
“OK,” I said, and took a breath. “So this spring, right? we had this show going on at the gallery?”
I fumbled and stammered my way through it—which didn’t take much acting; this wasn’t a story I had wanted to tell Melissa, ever. I kept one eye on her (not happy, clearly: upset, disappointed? angry? what?) and the other on Leon: slouched back against the wall giving me an increasingly disgusted stare, occasionally taking an ostentatiously large swig of G and T when some detail was just too much for him.
“So,” I said, finally, on another very deep breath. “There’s mine.”
I had deliberately picked something relatively innocuous, something that would give Leon every excuse to come after me, especially after the way I’d gone after him. And sure enough: “Oh. My. God,” he said, lip curling. “You’re trying to claim that’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? That?”
“Listen,” I said, rubbing at my nose, properly shamefaced. “That could have scuppered the whole show. These kids, that was their one chance to make a better life for themselves, and I could have wrecked it. And I was”—what was it Dec had sa
id—“I was dissing them, their lives. Making a joke out of them. I didn’t really get what a big deal it was at the time, but now—”
Susanna was giving me a look of profound skepticism. “I should have told you,” I said to Melissa. “I just didn’t want to upset you. I was working my way up to it, and then . . .” She shook her head, one brief quick move: Don’t worry about it or Don’t give me that or We’ll talk about it later, I couldn’t tell.
“Hold the phone,” Leon said, eyebrows up. “That’s your big moral crisis? You fooled a bunch of people about some paintings? And you gave me shite because mine wasn’t dramatic enough?”
“Everyone has breakups, man. Not everyone feeds a line of total bullshit to hundreds of people—”
“Total strangers. And no one got hurt.”
“Well, yeah,” I said, mildly miffed. “Total strangers. I wouldn’t do anything to anyone I love. I know you would, you just said that, but—”
“Or,” Susanna said coolly, “Leon figures the things he’s done to people he loves are more serious than the things he’s done to total strangers. And you don’t.”
Some part of me noticed that she seemed a lot less fucked up than the rest of us, which I didn’t like. “No. No no no.” I waved a finger at her. “That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t do stuff that would hurt people I love. People who love me.”
I made it good and self-righteous, and sure enough, Leon’s head went back. “Oh. My. God. You are unbelievable, do you know that? You’re in your own world, it’s like talking to an alien—”
“Dude, what are you on about? Give me one example of me doing something to anyone who—”
“OK. Fine. I, just for example, when Dominic bloody Ganly started making my life hell, I went and told you. Do you even remember that?”
He was sitting up straight, glaring at me through his hair like a bristling cat. “What are you talking about?” I said.
