saying any of them killed him—I actually don’t think anyone killed him, I think the Leaving Cert was the first time in his life that Dom couldn’t buy his way or bully his way into getting what he wanted, and he couldn’t handle it. I’m only saying: the idea of someone wanting to kill him isn’t actually that incredible.”
“The way I remember it,” I said, “I always got on totally fine with him. The only thing is”—I wasn’t faking the suck of breath before I could keep going, this wasn’t easy—“I might not remember. And I feel like, I kind of think with everything that’s going on, I need to know.”
“I don’t remember you ever having any problems with him,” Sean said, stretching to top up glasses. “I didn’t either. Not saying I liked him, but he never did anything to me personally.”
“I thought,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m imagining it, or— Did he give Leon a bit of hassle?”
“Oh yeah,” Dec said. “Dominic was a prick to Leon; way worse than he was to me. I think he beat the shite out of him a couple of times.”
Hugo moved, a sharp wince, covered it by raising his glass to his mouth. “Do you remember anything like that?” he asked me.
“No,” I said, a little louder than I should have—not that there had been any accusation in his voice, he had sounded perfectly neutral, but still, the idea that I would have stood by while Leon got beaten up— “All I ever saw was a bit of slagging, the usual stuff, nothing like—”
“I could have it all wrong,” Dec said. “I didn’t actually see anything. I’m just talking rumors, yeah?”
“What about Susanna?” I asked. “Dom never picked on her, did he?”
Dec shrugged. “I don’t remember him ever picking on girls. And it’s not like he even saw her that much.”
“I think he might’ve actually tried chatting her up, at one stage,” Sean said, “but she put the kibosh on that fairly quick. Susanna’s sharp.”
“I think,” Hugo said, “it’s time I was going to bed. No”—gently but very firmly, a hand coming down hard on my shoulder as I went to follow him, my mouth opening on some excuse about the jacks—“not tonight.” And when Sean and Dec stood up: “No, no, I’m not throwing you out. Stay and talk to Melissa and Toby; they could do with the company, cooped up here with a rickety old man like me.” He gave each of them a brief one-armed hug, smiling into their faces. “Thank you so much for coming. It’s been a wonderful evening, and it’s meant the world to me. Good night. Safe home.”
We listened in silence to the slow thud and drag of him going up the stairs—“Hang on,” I said, lifting a hand, when Dec started to speak—and to the flickers of movement as he got ready for bed: crack of floorboards as he crossed the landing to the toilet, muffled thumps of footsteps back and forth in his room, finally the creak of bedsprings, all so faint that I would barely have heard them if I hadn’t known exactly what I was listening for. “OK,” I said, at last. “I think he’s fine.”
“Did we tire him out?” Dec asked—he had been sitting up straight, alert, eyes going back and forth between me and Melissa, trying to figure out whether to worry. “Is that why he headed up early?”
“He mostly goes to bed around this time,” Melissa said. “We keep an ear out, just in case.”
“You didn’t do him any damage,” I said. “He was delighted you were here.”
“We’ll come back again,” Sean said. “Soon.”
I hadn’t realized, not really, not till I saw Hugo through their eyes: the painful shuffle, the stoop over his walking stick, the hollows under his cheekbones and the new sharpness of his nose. “Yeah,” I said. “That’d be good.”
“Did the doctors say anything?” Dec asked. “Like, how long they think he’s got?”
“A few months, probably. This summer they were saying four to six, so by the end of the year; but he responded really well to the radiotherapy, so maybe a little extra. No guarantees, though. Apparently they made a big deal of that. He could last till spring, or he could have a stroke tomorrow.”
“Jesus,” Dec said softly.
“Yeah.”
“We’ll come back,” Sean said again.
“Come here,” Dec said to me, lower, leaning in and glancing at the ceiling as if Hugo might somehow hear him. “I didn’t want to say it before