The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  I lay still, fighting for breath. He felt like a sack of wet cement holding me down. High above me misshapen gray birds flickered against the black sky and I thought they were the last thing I would ever see, but at last I managed to gasp in a great whoosh of air. I flailed at him, scrabbling and shoving, till I heaved him off me and dragged myself onto my knees.

  Slowly, inch by inch, he pulled himself up onto his hands and knees and turned his head to look at me. His eyes were huge and solid black, alien, and there was blood running down his face from a big gash in his forehead, spreading rivers of it, dark and glossy in the dim blue-white light. He made a deep snarling noise, lip lifting, and clamped one hand around my wrist.

  I punched him in the face. His hand fell away from my wrist and I went at him with both fists, swinging with all my weight behind it, hammering at his head, grabbing his hair to slam his face into the ground. I didn’t even feel my knuckles splitting; I could smash through living rock, I was strong as a god and inexhaustible. He was still making the snarling noise and I was going to make it stop, he was never going to grab me again, he was never going to do anything to me again, never, never— Through the ferocious drumming of my heartbeat and the huge roaring silence of the garden I heard Susanna’s voice: Now imagine you did it. The holy rapture of it, the painless lightning running in my bones. Rising on the far side of that river into a world that was finally mine again.

  In the end, little by little, the lightning drained out of me and I stopped. My arms were weak as cloth, they fell to my sides like they belonged to someone else, and I was breathing in great snuffling gulps. I knelt there in the dirt, swaying a little back and forth.

  He was huddled facedown, forearms wrapped over his head. I couldn’t remember why we had been fighting. I had lost hold of any idea who he was, or who I was. All I knew was the vast cold cobwebbed darkness and us, two tiny sparks of warmth, side by side.

  Birch seeds drifting down, hanging pale in the air, landing silently on his dark back. He was making a strange snoring noise. After a while he toppled, very slowly, onto his side.

  I lifted one hand, heavy as granite, and put it on his shoulder. One of his legs twitched rhythmically. I thought I should lie down across him, so that the birch seeds wouldn’t cover him like snow, but I didn’t have the strength to do it. My nose was throbbing, dripping big dark spots of blood onto my jeans.

  Snarled black branches, scrabble of something on the roof. I had only the foggiest idea where I was; the place seemed familiar but only barely, something from a dream or a story. It was terribly cold.

  After a while the twitching stopped. Then so did the snoring noise, and I was alone in the garden.

  I knelt there with my hand on his shoulder until I couldn’t stay kneeling any longer. Then I eased myself painfully down to the earth and curled up with my back against his. I was shivering in hard spasms, teeth clacking together painfully, but his back was warm and solid and somehow in the end I fell asleep.

  * * *

  Thin gray light woke me. I was curled on my side, knees pulled up to my belly and fists tucked into my chest, like some Iron Age burial. My mouth tasted of earth and one of my eyes was stuck shut somehow. I was stiff and sore from head to toe, damp all over, and so cold I couldn’t feel my face.

  I managed to inch one hand up towards my eye, but the sight of it startled me: it was covered in dried blood, blood grained into every crease, knuckles ragged and swollen. When I spat on my fingers and rubbed at my eye, they came back smeared with brighter red. Something bad had happened.

  The earth under me was soft, but my back was up against something hard and very cold and I wanted to get away from it. It took forever, every movement feeling like it ripped muscles or snapped joints, before I made it to sitting. The effort and the pain left me shaky, with an ugly red pounding behind my eyeballs. I spat dirt and blood, wiped my mouth on my sleeve.

  The garden was monochrome and dormant under a veil of dew. Nothing moved, not a leaf twitching, not a bird hopping or an insect scuttling. The sky was a null gray that made it invisible. Drifts of birch seeds had settled in the little valleys in the earth.

  They brought something back to me. Someone, another person, here with me— I turned around and there he was.

  Birch seeds dotting the outflung wing of his dark coat, dew silvering his hair. His head was twisted sideways, face buried in the crook of his elbow, other arm stretched above his head. His hand looked the same way as mine, the blood and the knuckles. I tried to lift his elbow away from his face so I could check if he was breathing, but it wouldn’t move; every muscle and joint was rigid, as if he was turning to stone from the inside out. His hand was even colder than mine.

  After a long time I managed to get to my feet and drag myself inside, stumbling, hunched over like an old man. I lit the fire—old ash whirling up, sending me into a painful coughing fit—and huddled in front of it, as close as I could get.

  It came back to me bit by bit, falling into my mind with a slow, irrevocable, wintry calm. It had seemed like a heroic thing, at the time; it had seemed to light the whole sky with its own savage blaze of redemption. In the bleak morning all that was gone. Rafferty was dead and I had killed him. Not to save Leon or Susanna, like I had believed I had killed Dominic, or even to save myself, but simply because my brain was fucked enough that I had thought it was a good idea. And now he was dead. Somewhere not too far away, someone was starting to wonder where he was, why he hadn’t called, hadn’t come home.

  Moving flame-shadows making the walls ripple and buckle. Ragged heaps of books and dirty plates on the coffee table, spider bustling purposefully along the floorboards by my knee.

  My face had thawed enough that I could feel it was coated with something; when I fumbled at it, pain went everywhere. I made my way to the bathroom, stopping a few times along the way to lean against a wall until the surge of dizziness subsided and I could see again. In the mirror my nose looked weird, lumpy and off center, and my face was crusted with dried blood and dirt like a mask. I rubbed at it with a wet towel for a while, but it didn’t seem to make much difference and it hurt too much to keep going. My legs folded under me and I sat down on the bathroom floor. I sat there for a very long time, cheek throbbing against cold tile.

  I was waiting for the thing Susanna and Leon had talked about, the grand transformation. Well yeah there was that too. The steely power that had come to Susanna, no one will ever fuck with me again, I’m a superhero now; I’ll haul in the burglars by the scruffs of their necks and throw them at Martin’s feet, I’ll spin some Machiavellian web that will have the shitbird neurologist sobbing at my feet and begging my forgiveness. The airy weightlessness that had risen in Leon, none of it matters, none of it can hurt me; I’ll let this damaged life drop from my shoulders like a stained jacket, and off I’ll go to find something new and perfect. In the firelight they had shone as if they were made of some strange element, unknowable and indestructible. I waited to feel my own flesh transmute, to rise from the floor with my wounds healing themselves and my scars vanishing and everything at last making sense.

  Nothing happened. All that came to me was the thought of Rafferty’s wife or girlfriend or whatever he had had, starting to be frightened, wondering whether to ring Kerr; his kids, maybe, dark rumple-haired boys thrumming with energy, dashing in from playing to ask where Dad was.

  Small stirrings in the house as the wind nosed in. Cracks and damp-stains patterning the wall like the shadow of a great moss-draped tree. Dim light shifting across the grimed window, shower curtain drooping from a broken ring.

  I remembered the emails to Dominic. Or I thought I did, for whatever that was worth; but it was clear as day. Sprawled on my bed at home supposedly studying, restless and itchy with unseasonable spring heat, one of those weekends when everyone was a pain in the hole: Susanna had gone off on me because I made an unflattering comment about some hambeast friend of
hers, Leon kept going into long bitter rants about how we were all slaughterhouse sheep plodding obediently from school towards college and then straight into the corporate maw, and my ribs were killing me where Dominic had given me a just-messing punch the day before. Sean or Dec could have pulled me out of my foul mood, but Dec was working some shitty part-time gig to save up for college and was never around, and Sean was off somewhere with his hand up Audrey’s top or whatever, not answering his phone. I wanted to piss someone off.

  The email address Dec and I had used on Lorcan was ifancyyou@ something, Hotmail or Yahoo. The password was sucker.

  Susanna had been in a flap the week before about Dominic trying to hook up with her. At the time it had seemed kind of endearing—for someone so smart, Su could be such a total kid, losing her mind because a guy came on to her—but that day it just seemed like annoying drama, an excuse for self-righteous outrage. If she wanted one of those, she could have it.

  Hey I know I went off on you when you grabbed my arse the other day but actually it turned me on soooo much ;-)

  I didn’t sign it—plausible deniability if it all came out and Susanna came gunning for me, my best injured face, What? I never said it was from you! Dom would put two and two together, and if he didn’t, I didn’t really care. Either way, his head was all over the place enough that he would totally fall for it. One more move on Susanna and she would rip his arm off and hit him with the wet end, or lecture him into a coma about consent and bodily autonomy. They deserved each other. I just hoped I was there when he did it.

  Then something more interesting came up, I snapped out of my bad mood and forgot all about the whole thing for a few days. When I remembered and checked the email account, though, sure enough, Dominic had swallowed it whole. So why did u act like such a bitch?

  I snorted and forgot about it for another while, till the next time I was bored. I don’t know I was embarrassed!! Like in case you were just messing with me. Anyway this way is fun too right? ;)

  A big grinning smiley back from Dominic. :D That’s so hot

  And then? What had I said to him? How many emails had there been? Those were all I could remember, but a handful Rafferty had said. Enough; more than enough.

  Great big satisfied grin, like he’d done something clever and he was expecting a medal, Susanna had said. He went, “Happy to see me?”

  Probably the memory should have hit me with a rush of shame, guilt, horror, but all I could feel was an immense, bottomless sadness. It had been such a small thing to do. Kids pulled worse pranks on each other every day, thousands of them. I had thought it meant nothing at all; it should have meant nothing at all. And yet, somehow, here we all were, and everything was ruined.

  My bedroom looked like it had been abandoned for years, crumpled clothes in corners, dusty cobwebs swaying from the lampshade, weak slant of light through the crack between the curtains. I found my Xanax and my painkillers, tucked away at the back of a drawer, and spread them on the bed. There was a surprising amount of them left.

  I had thought about it before, of course I had—in those terrible weeks pacing my apartment I had thought about practically nothing else. But when it came down to it I had never gone through with it, never even tried. I had believed it was because of Melissa, because of my mother, my father—I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing them again, couldn’t bear the thought of any of them finding me. But it had never been that. It had been because of that tiny ludicrous spark, somewhere deep in the core of my mind, that had still believed things could turn around. Somewhere on the other side of that sheet of trick glass, my own life was waiting for me, warm and bright as summer, beckoning.

  Always one more miracle, always one more chance. Pull me from the earthquake rubble, weeks in, dust-coated to a white statue and just one hand lifting feebly, parade me high in triumph. Pull me from the river streaming like a merman, work on me past hope, till the cough and splutter finally come. I’m lucky, my luck will hold.

  Only now there was a dead detective in my garden and his blood all over my hands, and I couldn’t see a single thing that luck could do for me. Even if I managed to scrape a hole in the earth and bury him, they would come looking. He would have told someone where he was going, he would have left his car somewhere nearby, they would track his phone. I wasn’t Susanna who could spin cunning cover-up plans; there was no room here to play misdirection games, claim it could have been this or that someone else. I was going to prison.

  And even if I somehow didn’t: I had killed someone, and I always would have. It was always going to be like this. There was no undoing this, no talking my way out, no fixing it or apologizing it away, no smoothing off the sharp edges or planing it down so it could be tucked away into some smaller, manageable box. Instead it would grind me away till I fit around its own immutable shape.

  What I had failed to recognize after that night in my apartment—even though it had been right there, and crucial, the whole time—was that no one had been dead. That was why that spark had refused to go out: ruined, half-witted, staggering, I had still been alive. While there’s life there’s hope: banal enough to make you retch, and yet it had turned out to be true. Now Rafferty was dead and there was no place left for luck or miracles or last chances. This was the blank wall of rock, the final word against which there was no appeal. I was done.

  I swallowed the pills with palmfuls of water from the bathroom tap—I thought about vodka or wine, just to make sure, a parting glass, but the idea made my stomach churn and I couldn’t risk throwing up the whole mess. Then I stripped off my clothes—bloody, muddy, shedding trickles of dirt and birch seeds as I dropped them on the bedroom floor—pulled on a clean T-shirt and pajama bottoms and got into bed. The sheets were freezing and clammy. I curled up tight, wincing as I hit bruised spots, and wrapped the duvet over my head.

  I thought of Melissa, a time when she had had the flu and had sat up in my bed flushed with fever and chattering with daffy, determined brightness, while I brought her soft-boiled eggs and toast soldiers and herbal tea and read her Winnie-the-Pooh off my phone with her head on my chest. I thought of my mother sitting cross-legged on the floor playing Snap with me, ponytail falling forwards over her shoulder, hand hovering and an unconscious half grin lighting her face; of my father leaning back in his armchair in lamplight to give some school essay of mine his serious, unhurried attention, This is very good, I like the way you’ve constructed your argument . . . I would have liked to lie there for longer; I would have liked time to go back through every good memory, all the pints and messing with Sean and Dec, all the wild college nights, the girls and the holidays and the bedtime stories, even the Ivy House summers with Hugo and Susanna and Leon. But I was exhausted to the marrow, body and mind, I was fading in and out, and as the bed warmed up and the pills kicked in I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. The last thing I remember thinking is how terribly sad it was that it should be so easy, in the end, to go to sleep.

  Thirteen

  I didn’t get the job done, obviously. Somewhere in there I apparently left Melissa a long meandering voicemail made up mainly of apologies and incomprehensible slurred gibberish. When Melissa heard it she rang my parents, who rushed over to the Ivy House, where they found Rafferty dead in the garden in a puddle of blood and me only mostly dead in my bed in a puddle of puke. I can’t even begin to imagine what the next few hours were like. I woke up back in the hospital, feeling like I had the mother of all hangovers and had been kicked repeatedly in the stomach, with that sickness-and-disinfectant reek soaked into me all over again and a uniformed cop glaring grimly from the chair beside my bed.

  At first I thought I was back in the aftermath of that night in my apartment, and I couldn’t work out why the cop was so pissed off with me about it. The realization that my head wound was healed to a scar sent me into such a panic—how long had I been here?!—that a nurse had to come and give me a shot. When a couple o
f detectives strolled in for a chat, I was so off my face that all I could do was stare dreamily at them and ask if they had found my car and if they would mind checking that my feet were still there.

  It took a while before I got things straight enough to be questioned—which in practice, under strict orders from the fancy solicitor my parents had hired for me, meant saying “No comment” an awful lot of times to a pair of detectives who, behind the careful blank expressions, clearly wanted to rip me to pieces and piss on the leftovers. But one of the few intelligible bits of that voicemail to Melissa had been something along the lines of snuck up on me, thought he was a burglar, scared the shit out of . . . and then more mumbling and sorry I’m so sorry (having to listen to that voicemail being played in a courtroom was, in the face of some stiff competition, definitely one of the worst moments of the whole thing). By the time I recovered enough to have any idea what had happened, the story had solidified itself, in basically the form that my defense eventually used at the trial: Rafferty calling by to see if I could back up Susanna’s story; the open door (my mother and Louisa and the postman all testified to having found the door unlocked or even swinging open, over the previous few weeks; apparently the postman had lectured me about it, but he didn’t think I’d taken it in); the startle on the dark terrace, the poor triggered PTSD sufferer flashing back to the attack that had devastated his life, lashing out in a frenzy of what he truly believed to be self-defense (expert testimony from the shitbird neurologist and from several psychologists, as well as some pretty crushing stuff from my family and Melissa), and then horror-stricken to the point of suicide when he snapped out of his trance of terror and saw Rafferty’s bloodied face.

  It had some kind of truth to it, I suppose, in its own tangled, oblique way. My solicitor took me through it methodically, relentlessly, like a strict old-fashioned tutor drilling a backward student in Latin declensions. At first I refused point-blank even to think about testifying. It wasn’t only, or even mostly, what Rafferty had said—if you got into a courtroom, you’d be fucked. It was simpler than that. There were very few things left in the world that seemed like they would make me feel worse, but expanding on the finer details of my fuckedupitude to an audience consisting of my family and my friends and Melissa and assorted media and the entire world was pretty much top of the list.