to put the rest of the world on pause and just sit there for a year or two, watching.”
Curled up like that, dreamy in the dimness, hair mussed against the faded red of the sofa, she should have looked like her old childhood self, tired from a day of playing; Leon, propped against the armchair with his legs sprawled anyhow, should have looked like that sparky little boy, smudge-faced and scrape-kneed. They almost did. We had been so close, back then, a closeness too fundamental even to think about. I couldn’t work out how they had got so far away.
“Finally my phone went off with a text,” Susanna said. “And then I heard yours through the floor, and then Leon’s—he had to leave it here; I didn’t like that, because what if anything went wrong and we couldn’t get in touch, but if the cops went sniffing around we couldn’t have Leon’s phone pinging in Howth. I gave it a minute before I looked—in case the police went checking times on phones and they could somehow tell what time I’d read the text; I didn’t want it to look like I’d been waiting for it. And there it was.”
And I had slept happily through it all. I had barely turned over to stretch out an arm when the phone beeped, check the text, What the hell? and back to sleep.
“After a while Leon got home and told me it had all gone fine,” Susanna said. “It was getting bright outside. We were both starving, so I made sandwiches and tea—”
“Whispering at the kitchen table,” Leon said, “giggling like a pair of little kids sneaking down for a midnight feast. I was light-headed. The food tasted amazing; I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anything that delicious.”
“And then we went to bed,” Susanna said. “Probably we should have been tossing and turning and having nightmares, but actually I don’t think I’ve ever slept that hard.”
“Oh, my God. Like I’d been hit with a baseball bat. I think I would’ve slept twenty-four hours straight, only Su came in and dragged me out of bed for work.”
“Well, we couldn’t be late,” Susanna said. “We needed to act completely normal. It wasn’t hard. All we had to do was go along with everyone else: did you get a text from Dominic Ganly, OMG what was that all about, has anyone talked to him? Oh no what if he’s done something stupid!!” She raised herself on her elbow and reached for another cigarette. “From there on, it kind of did itself.”
I tried to think back to that autumn. It seemed impossible that I hadn’t noticed anything; I had been happily wrapped up in college and making new friends and various sports clubs and going out but surely something would have registered, they had killed someone, surely I couldn’t have missed that? Surely they should have been different, branded or haunted or something? “Weren’t you scared?” I asked. “That you’d get caught?”
“Probably we should have been,” Susanna said, shaking Leon’s lighter. “But no, not really. You’ve got to remember, we were used to being scared. It was basically our default mode, by that stage. And ‘Oh noes, the cops might possibly figure out that Dominic didn’t kill himself and they might possibly tie it to us and they might possibly get enough evidence to arrest us and we might possibly be found guilty’ was a lot less scary than ‘Dominic Ganly is going to rape me or kill me any day now.’”
“I was scared, off and on,” Leon said. “When I thought about it too much. It wasn’t like they would have had to look very hard for him—obviously—and once they found him, that would’ve been it for us. The only thing that saved us was that they weren’t looking this way at all.”
“We were lucky,” Susanna said. “Dominic thought he was so smart, never texting me anything dodgy, so I’d have no proof. But if his phone had been full of vile texts to me, the cops would have taken one look and dived on me.”
“But,” I said, “the cops did come here. Didn’t they?” At this point nothing my memory came up with felt reliable, but all the same I was positive there’d been an afternoon, I’d been hungover and heading out to meet up with the guys for a cure, two culchie-types in suits on the doorstep holding out ID and asking pointless questions, I’d forgotten all about it till now—