to clear it. “Are you—I mean, do you think someone killed him?”
“Could’ve done,” Rafferty said matter-of-factly. “We don’t know the cause of death; all we can say is his head wasn’t bashed in—you probably noticed that yourself, sure. So he could’ve gone down that tree himself, one way or another. Or not. We’re keeping open minds for now; just finding out a bit more about him, seeing if that gives us a clearer picture. You hung out with him, yeah?”
“Yeah. Sometimes. Sort of.” There had been maybe a dozen of us who ran as a loose crowd, basically because we were in the same class and we were all popular or cool or whatever you want to call it. I had been at one end of the group, Dominic had been at the other; we had hung out by default rather than by active choice, but there was no way I could have come up with the words to explain that. My brain was stuttering, over and over, computer in a loop of crash and reboot and crash: skull on the grass, clot of dirt and roots in the eye socket, Dominic yawning at his desk with his head down over his phone, skull on the grass—
“What was he like?”
“I don’t know. Just a regular guy.”
“Was he smart? Thick?”
“Not really. I mean, not either one. Like he didn’t do great in school, but not because he was seriously thick? He just, he couldn’t be arsed.” Skull, dirt clot, yawn, I had been sitting under that tree just a few days before—
“Nice guy? Sound?”
“Yeah. Definitely. He, Dominic was a good guy.”
“Did he get on with people?”
Kerr was writing all this down and I had no idea why, what had I even said that was worth recording? “Yeah. He did.”
“He was popular? Or just harmless?”
“Popular. He was I guess really confident? Out, out—” Outgoing, I meant, couldn’t find it— “Always on for a laugh or, you know, action, like a party or whatever. And he was good at rugby, so that always helps, but I mean it wasn’t just that—” The rhythm of this was getting to me, no let-up, every answer seized and turned straight into a new question; like being back in the hospital, trapped in the bed, my head throbbing and Martin and Flashy Suit asking on and on—
“Anyone you can think of who didn’t get on with him?”
Actually I had a vague memory of Dominic taking the piss out of Leon, but a lot of guys had taken the piss out of Leon back then, and under the circumstances I didn’t think I should go into this. “Not really.”
“What about girls? He do well there?”
“Oh yeah. They threw themselves at him. It was kind of a, a thing? Like a joke? Whatever girl we were all into, Dom was the one who’d get with her first.”
“We all know that guy,” Rafferty said, grinning. “The bastard. He piss anyone off with that? Rob anyone’s girlfriend, maybe?”
“No way. Like I said, he was a good guy. He wouldn’t have hit on anyone’s girlfriend—bro code, you know? And the rest, the way girls were all into him . . . like I said, that was kind of a running joke. No one got upset about it.”
“Easy for you to say, man, if you weren’t on the wrong end of it. Dominic ever get a girl you were into?”
“Probably. I don’t remember.” This was true. I had been into just about every girl who was pretty or hot or both, back then; odds were Dominic had hooked up with at least some of them, but then I had done OK myself, so it hadn’t bothered me.
“Did he stick to the hit-and-run stuff? Or did he have a girlfriend of his own?”
“Not when he . . . Not that summer. I think he was maybe going out with someone for a while, like the year before? Maybe some girl from St. Therese’s, that’s our sister school? But it wasn’t, like, a big serious thing.”
“When did it end?”
I saw what he was getting at, but— “No. Ages before he— And I think he dumped her. Either way, he wasn’t torn up about it or anything. That wasn’t why . . .” I stopped. I was getting mixed up.
“About that,” Rafferty said. “When you heard he’d killed himself. Did that make sense to you? Or were you surprised?”
“I don’t—” My bedroom upstairs, rolling over with a grunt to grab my insistent phone, Dec’s voice: Did