kind of dangerousness—volcanic, unpredictable, horrifying; something that didn’t belong around, say, babies, or Melissa.
If Rafferty was right, on the other hand, and this had happened because I was somehow protecting Leon, then that seemed like an entirely different thing. That felt like someone who would deserve what Hugo had done for him; someone who had the right, or maybe even the responsibility, to reclaim whatever he could of life.
I don’t know how much hope I held out. I had never seen myself as some white knight, either, charging recklessly into battle to save the oppressed, but I did still want to believe that at some level, at least, I had been a decent guy. Leon talked like I was some tremendous douche who had never lifted a finger for anyone except myself, but I had got rid of other bullies for him, after all, I had chased off the wanker who was hassling Melissa, I had stayed here at the Ivy House with Hugo right to the end; surely it wasn’t too much of a stretch to think that, if I had somehow found out the full extent of what Dominic was doing to Leon, I might have been protective?
By this point I didn’t trust my own mind enough even to bother trying to remember. Anything I dredged up would more than likely be bollocks, thrown up by the same batch of scrambled synapses as my grandparents’ cremation. While Leon and Susanna clearly didn’t know for sure that I had killed Dominic, they seemed like the most likely people to know—even if they hadn’t made the connection—about whatever tangled set of circumstances might have brought me to that point. And so, one more time, I put on my Toby the Boy Detective disguise and I texted the two of them and asked them to come over some afternoon.
Probably it would have made more sense to leave Susanna out of it. With Leon I could cajole, guilt-trip, needle till I got something out of him. But even before my mind had been hit by a wrecking ball, Susanna could have run circles around me; if she wanted something kept from me, I would never get within a mile of it. I never even thought about leaving her out. The two of them were, after all, wound around the roots of my old, my own life. Somewhere deeper than thought, I believed that if anyone could open up a route back to that life, it had to be them. I suppose I could say, and in spite of everything it wouldn’t be a lie, that I needed them both there because I loved them.
I thought I was being cunningly casual about the invitation, but in hindsight it’s obvious that they knew. They showed up anyway. I’m still not sure, even after all this time, whether I should be grateful for that; whether they at least thought, one or both of them, that they were there to do me a favor.
* * *
After all that time on my own sinking into the silent house, the energy of them came as a shock. Susanna had brought a bunch of sausage rolls, which she threw into the oven with a slam and a clatter of baking sheets, Leon had a big bag of mini Mars bars—Halloween was coming up; I had forgotten, till I saw the cartoon ghosts and vampires leering from the packet—and I had all the wine left over from the funeral do. “Classy combo,” Leon said, kneeling on the living-room floor and shoving aside drifts of paper and jumpers and plates so he could shake out the Mars bars onto the coffee table—it was cold, I had lit a fire, the living room was the only room that was warm. “You can say what you want about us, but we’ve got style.”
“Next time we can be terribly civilized and do tea and cucumber sandwiches and scones, if you want,” Susanna said, nudging him over to put down the plate of sausage rolls. “But we’ve all been in emergency mode for so long, what we need right now is comfort food. Tom and the kids and I have been living on pizza and Chinese takeaway. I’ll go back to being Organic Superfoods Mummy at some stage, but for now, fuck it.”
“What’s the problem?” I said, pulling the cork out of a bottle of red. “I like sausage rolls, I like Mars bars, I like wine, it’s all good. Red goes with pork, right?”