The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  Leon let out an angry laugh. “I’m not surprised. It’s not like you gave much of a fuck at the time.”

  “Jesus,” I said, putting up my hands. “Su, give him some more hash, quick.”

  “Leon,” Susanna said.

  “No. I don’t care if he’s messed up or whatever, he’s being a total—”

  “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 d
on’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.”

  “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, th
e 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.”

  “I hate this,” Leon said—it was almost a wail. “Can we stop this? Please?”

  “You started it. All that shite about I didn’t take good enough care of you, like the whole thing was my problem, like you had no responsibility to look after your fucking self—” This wasn’t what I had planned at all, I had meant to coax and charm it out of him, browbeating had never crossed my mind but it felt good and I wasn’t sure I could stop even if I wanted to— “At least I’ve finally found the one person who’s got a grudge against me—”

  “Toby,” Susanna said sharply. “Stop it.”

  “The only person who—look at me you little shit—the only person who hates me enough to send in a pair of scumbags to beat me half to death. Was that supposed to be, to, to be karma? Because I didn’t stop Dominic beating you up?”

  “I didn’t! Toby, what are you talking about, I don’t hate you, stop—”

  “And now you’re telling Rafferty this bullshit—” I got him by a clumsy fistful of jumper, jerking at him, trying to make him look at me but my hand was weak as a kid’s and he wouldn’t, he just curled tighter. “You didn’t fuck up my life enough the first time, now you’re trying to get me arrested? What are you, what have you, what the hell have you done to me—”

  I was about to hit him. I was pulling back my fist, I could already feel the ecstatic smack of it into his face, when Susanna caught my arm. She said, close to my ear, “Where were you?”

  I spun round ready to shout her off, but the sight of her stopped me. Her hair was straggling in her face, clips hanging loose; her eyes were dark and dilated, unfocused.

  “What?” I said.

  “That night. Toby. Where did you go?”