or just getting old and dying, relationships don’t last forever. Not to depress you guys or anything.” A wry, bleak glance at the rest of us, as he mashed out his cigarette. “And actually, that had never bothered me before. I kind of liked it. It was like, if I do something stupid and make a great big mess of this, no big deal: it wasn’t going to last forever anyway. I haven’t bulldozed the pyramids here. I can just go start over somewhere else.”
He reached for the gin and topped up his glass, not bothering with the rest of us. “But I was really in love with Jo. And I know how incredibly teenage this sounds, but I genuinely couldn’t handle that. It was stressing the fuck out of me. We’d be cuddled up together in bed, or we’d be out dancing and having a laugh, or we’d just be eating breakfast and watching the pigeons on our balcony, and suddenly all I could think about was how one day we wouldn’t be doing this together any more. No maybe, nothing I could do to stop it; it was guaranteed. And I’d just want to scream, or run away, or break everything. So in the end I did. It was the ballsack-in-church thing again, only that time I actually did it.”
“What happened when Johan got home?” I asked. For some reason I was picturing Johan as an eternal-postgrad type, thin benevolent face and little wire-rimmed glasses, completely unable to cope with anything coming out of left field like this.
Leon stared at his glass like he wasn’t sure what it was. “Basically what you’d expect. It was horrible. Lots of shouting. Him hammering on the door. Both of us crying. The people in the other apartments sticking their heads out to gawp—the old lady at the end of the hall was screaming at us to shut up, and then her awful yappy dog got out and bit Jo on the ankle . . . In the end he called the cops—not to get me in trouble; because he thought I’d lost my mind. The cops were totally shitty about the whole thing, but since I wasn’t actually crazy and it was my flat, in the end there wasn’t a lot they could do. I moved anyway. I’d had enough of Amsterdam.”
For some reason I couldn’t put my finger on, I didn’t like this story at all. I unwrapped myself from Melissa and found my glass, which miraculously hadn’t got knocked over along the way.
“So,” Leon said, “that was the worst thing I’ve ever done. Breaking Johan’s heart.”
I let a snigger escape. “Is that funny?” Leon snapped, head whipping up.
“No no no”—holding up a hand, half-masking a burp—“you’re fine, dude. Not laughing at you. I’m laughing at myself. All this time I’ve been related to Mother Teresa, and I never even noticed.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well—whoops”—as my glass nearly slipped out of my fingers; I saved it and took a long gulp. “Ahh. That’s beautiful gin. What was I . . . ?” With a finger-snap and a point at Leon, who was glaring: “Right. The thing is, dude, yeah? I know a lot of people. And I don’t know anyone, like not one person, who can honestly say that the worst thing they’ve ever done is dumping someone. Maybe my friends are just a shower of arseholes, I don’t know. But it’s either that or you’re a total saint.”
In the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Melissa, tugging at a strand of hair and looking worried: my tone was bothering her. I tried to shoot her a covert glance to reassure her that I knew what I was doing, I had a plan, but I was in no state to pull that off and it came out as a cross-eyed leer.
“Johan really loved me,” Leon said. “God help him. And now, wherever he is, he’s stuck for life doing the same thing I did: obsessing about how, sooner or later, whatever he’s doing is all going to go tits-up. Like I infected him.” With a defiant stare at me: “If what you want to hear is that that makes me a bad person, then yeah, I think it probably does. Does that make you feel better about whatever it is you’ve done?”
“Not really,” I said. “But then you didn’t want it to, did you?”
The thing was, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it,