because I’m living with you and I’ve known you all your life. But that’s not what I mean.” It took him two tries to get the cigarette out the window to tap ash. “Fundamentally, under all that, you still seem like Toby. Battered and cracked, of course, but essentially the same person.”
When I didn’t say anything: “Do you really feel so very different?”
“Yes. Jesus, yeah, I fucking do. But it’s not even that.” I had never put this into words before, and even trying was making my hands shake; I could hardly breathe. “It’s not the actual ways I’ve changed. Probably I could handle those—I mean, they’re utterly shit, I fucking hate them, but I could . . . But it’s the fact of it. I never thought much about my, my personality before, but when I did, I took it for granted that it was mine, you know? That it was me? And now it’s like, I could wake up in the morning a, a, a Trekkie, or gay, or a mathematical genius, or one of those guys who shout at girls on the street to get their tits out? And I’d have no way to, to know it was coming. Or to do anything about it. Just . . . bam. There you go. Deal with it.”
I stopped talking. My adrenaline was through the roof; every muscle was trembling.
Hugo nodded. We sat there, not talking, for a while. When he moved, for a horrible second I wondered if he was going to put his arm around me or something, but instead he threw his cigarette out the window and bent to a cloth bag on the floor between his feet—I had vaguely registered him going into the kitchen (Rafferty trailing him unobtrusively) and coming back with it, on our way out, but I hadn’t paid much attention. “Here,” he said, coming up with a clingfilm-wrapped bundle. “You do need to eat, you know.”
It was the leftover cake from Sunday’s pickup lunch. He had even brought a knife. He spread out the clingfilm on his lap and sliced the cake into two neat halves. “There,” he said, handing me mine, on a paper napkin.
We ate in silence. The cake was jam sponge and it tasted startlingly, almost humiliatingly delicious, childhood rush of sugar and comfort. It was still raining, wind blowing small erratic spatters at the windscreen. A woman went by with a little kid in a bright yellow raincoat, the kid jumping in puddles, the woman shooting us a suspicious look from under the hood of her puffy jacket.
“Now,” Hugo said, brushing crumbs and powdered sugar off his jumper into his hand. “Do you want to ring your cousins and let them know?”
“Shit,” I said. Somehow this hadn’t even occurred to me, but of course, Rafferty would be zooming over to interrogate them as soon as he finished fucking up the Ivy House. “Yes. I should do that now.”
“Here,” Hugo said, balling up the clingfilm and the napkins and handing the whole thing to me. “You can find a bin for this, while you’re at it—don’t forget the cigarette butts. I might close my eyes for a moment. We’ve got a while, haven’t we, before we can go home?”
He turned the radio on to Lyric FM—something peaceful, string quartet—and leaned his head back against the headrest. I got out of the car, turned up my jacket collar against the rain and went looking for a bin while I rang Susanna.
She picked up fast. “What’s up?”
“There was a whole skeleton in there. In the tree. And the cops found out who it is. Remember Dominic Ganly?”
Silence.
“Su?” I didn’t remember Susanna being remotely matey with Dom, she hadn’t been his type, but given the effect he had had on girls— “Are you OK?”
“Fine. I just didn’t expect it to be someone we knew.” In the background, horrible cacophony of someone banging on a piano— “Zach! Knock it off! —Do they know what happened to him?”
“No. Not yet, anyway. They say maybe he could have been”—the word felt unreal, a bright migraine flare rippling out dangerously across everything—“he could have been murdered.”
Sharply: “Could have been? Or he was?”
“Could have been. They don’t know. What he died of, even.”
A second of silence. “So they think he could have got in there by himself.”
“That’s what Rafferty said. It sounds crazy to me, how the fuck—”
“Well, plenty of ways,” Susanna said. Zach was still smashing the piano, but faintly now, farther away; she had