kids, after all, seventeen, eighteen. Even if I’d been there for this stuff, it sounded close enough to normal that I might not have registered it at all.
“At that stage it wasn’t a big deal,” Susanna said, as if she had read my mind. “I mean, it pissed me off, but it was just your bog-standard bullshit; it wasn’t scary. After the orals, though, it got worse. Dominic knew he’d made a total bollocks of them, and he figured it was my fault, because I’d quit helping him. He wasn’t slagging me off to get a laugh any more. Instead he’d get right in close to me, lean over and say stuff in my ear—‘You think you’re smart, you stupid bitch, you think you’re smarter than me? Someone should put you in your place,’ crap like that. And the inevitable stuff about how he wanted to see just how good I was at oral.” She mimed a rimshot.
“He was like that with me too,” Leon said, turning to toast the other side of himself at the fire. “All the clichés. Arse jokes. AIDS jokes. If you’re going to put all that time and effort into being a douchebag bully, then at least go the extra mile and be original about it.”
“I don’t know,” Susanna said, considering that. “Things might have been a lot worse if he’d had any imagination. But he didn’t. You know what, I think that may have been his real problem all along. As well as being an arsehole, obviously.”
“And a psycho,” Leon said. “By then he was starting to get that look—I mean, he’d always been a psycho, but it was starting to be obvious that there was something really wrong with him. He’d walk up to you out of nowhere and punch you right in the stomach, and then just stand there staring and laughing. It was creepy.” To me: “How you and your pals never even noticed—”
“In fairness,” Susanna said, leaning forwards to stub out her cigarette, “none of us were at our most observant right then, what with the Leaving. By that time it was like May, the written exams were coming up—which meant Dominic was getting more stressed, which meant he was getting nastier. The stuff he said was sounding more and more like actual threats. ‘You’re too ugly to fuck face-to-face, I’m going to do you from behind . . .’”
“Jesus, Su,” I said, wincing.
“Yeah, sorry if that bothers you. It wasn’t fun for me, either.” She settled back into the sofa, tucking a cushion behind her. “And he wasn’t just talking any more. At first it wasn’t sexual, exactly; just weird. Like one time I started to say something to him, and he shoved his finger in my mouth—I should’ve bitten it off him, but by the time I figured out what was happening, he was gone. Another time he pulled out the back of my top and spat down it.”
“He was an animal,” Leon said. “One time he pissed on my shoes.”
“It turned sexual fairly fast, though,” Susanna said. “One day he walked up to me—I was just standing there, outside that little shop beside the schools, waiting for my friends—and he looked me in the eye, grabbed my arse with both hands and gave it a good squeeze. Shoved his crotch up against me while he was at it. And then walked off.”
“You should have said it to me,” I said, as naturally as I could, and waited for it. I wasn’t breathing.
Susanna’s eyebrows went up. “I did,” she said: coolly matter-of-fact, almost amused. “Of course I did. That’s exactly when I went to you. My lovely cool cousin who would sort it all out.”
“Aah,” Leon said, to the fire. “Bless.”
“I was eighteen. I was stupid. So sue me.”
There was something wrong here, something I wasn’t getting. “What?” I said. “What was stupid?”
“He doesn’t even remember,” Leon said.
“Do you?” Susanna asked me. When it was obvious I didn’t: “Don’t worry, you didn’t laugh in my face or anything. You were very nice about it. You explained to me that it was actually a good thing that guys were starting to fancy me, it wasn’t something to freak out about, I’d have a lot more fun and be a lot more fun if I got a boyfriend instead of spending my whole life saving Tibet. And it was probably a good call not to go for Dominic because he was kind of a dick, but maybe someone like Lorcan