bit of boyish high spirits. He was a good guy—you said it yourself.” A sidelong glance at me. “Everyone loved him, or at least everyone who mattered. The papers were drooling over how wonderful he was, how full of potential, they made it sound like he was Cúchulainn come back to save the nation from itself . . . The whole country would have been out for our blood. They would probably have brought back the death penalty just for us. Of course I was terrified.”
“I wasn’t,” Susanna said. “Not for a second. Beforehand, yeah, I was absolutely petrified, but not once he was gone. I was . . .”
I waited, but after a moment she shook her head and laughed and put out her cigarette.
“Well, yeah,” Leon said, and I caught a hint of a smile in his voice as well. “There was that, too.”
“There was what?” I demanded.
They looked at each other. The fire was burning low again, dull red patches pulsing amid blackened wood. The pall of smoke stirred idly, small eddies and swirls.
“We both went a bit off the rails, I guess,” Leon said, “in different ways. Everything felt very weird; disorientating. The best way I can put it is that it felt like there was too much oxygen in the air, all of a sudden, and our bodies took a while to get used to it.”
“I wasn’t off the rails, thanks very much,” Susanna said. “I was just having fun. It had been way too long since I’d been able to do that. Not just because of Dominic, to be fair. Even before him, everyone had me pegged as the good girl, all smart and serious and well-behaved; I didn’t feel like there was any way to break out of that, or even figure out whether I wanted to. And once Dominic started in on me . . . Jesus. It felt like if I did anything fun—like wore nice clothes, or went out, or got drunk, or had a laugh—that would be Dominic’s justification: You were off your face with your tits hanging out, obviously you wanted it. Or if not Dominic, someone else like him. Afterwards . . .” She shrugged. “That didn’t feel like so much of an issue. I mean, obviously Dominic’s opinion wasn’t an issue any more, but other people weren’t as scary either, because I knew I didn’t have to take their shit. Not that I was going to whip out the nuclear option any time someone cut in front of me in the bus queue, but just knowing I could actually do something made the world feel a lot less dangerous. And I definitely didn’t give a shit that I was supposed to be the good girl.”
“I think you were well beyond calling yourself a good girl,” Leon said, grinning.
“Past redemption,” Susanna said cheerfully, raising her glass. “So I just had a good time. Remember those hippies with the camper van? They took me to Cornwall and this guy called Athelstan was teaching me to play the dulcimer?”
“Your parents were freaking out,” I said. Everything about this was bothering me. “They thought you were in a cult or something. Or abducted. Or losing your mind.”
“Every kid has a right to some rebellion. I’d been angelic all through school. It evens out.” Rolling over to stretch out on her back on the sofa: “I’m still Facebook friends with Athelstan. He’s living in Portugal, in a yurt.”
Leon got the giggles. “Don’t know what you’re laughing at,” Susanna told him. “Who was your mate who used to go around wearing the big purple wings?”
“Oh God, Eric! He was lovely. I wonder what happened to him. This one time, right, we were really stoned and we went into the Arts Block in Trinity late at night, just before they closed up? We were trying to get locked in for the night? Only the security guard spotted us and we were like playing hide-and-seek with him, all these masses of empty rooms and we kept hiding behind chairs, except Eric’s wings stuck out—”
“Well, that sounds like a blast,” I said. My coffee buzz was long gone; I felt sick and headachy and miserably tired. “I’m glad you guys had so much fun.”
“We’re not taking it lightly,” Susanna explained. “It’s just that we’ve had a while to get used to it.”
“So how come you’re not living in a yurt and playing the dulcimer?” I asked. “If it was so liberating. How come you’re Mrs.