close as I could get.
It came back to me bit by bit, falling into my mind with a slow, irrevocable, wintry calm. It had seemed like a heroic thing, at the time; it had seemed to light the whole sky with its own savage blaze of redemption. In the bleak morning all that was gone. Rafferty was dead and I had killed him. Not to save Leon or Susanna, like I had believed I had killed Dominic, or even to save myself, but simply because my brain was fucked enough that I had thought it was a good idea. And now he was dead. Somewhere not too far away, someone was starting to wonder where he was, why he hadn’t called, hadn’t come home.
Moving flame-shadows making the walls ripple and buckle. Ragged heaps of books and dirty plates on the coffee table, spider bustling purposefully along the floorboards by my knee.
My face had thawed enough that I could feel it was coated with something; when I fumbled at it, pain went everywhere. I made my way to the bathroom, stopping a few times along the way to lean against a wall until the surge of dizziness subsided and I could see again. In the mirror my nose looked weird, lumpy and off center, and my face was crusted with dried blood and dirt like a mask. I rubbed at it with a wet towel for a while, but it didn’t seem to make much difference and it hurt too much to keep going. My legs folded under me and I sat down on the bathroom floor. I sat there for a very long time, cheek throbbing against cold tile.
I was waiting for the thing Susanna and Leon had talked about, the grand transformation. Well yeah there was that too. The steely power that had come to Susanna, no one will ever fuck with me again, I’m a superhero now; I’ll haul in the burglars by the scruffs of their necks and throw them at Martin’s feet, I’ll spin some Machiavellian web that will have the shitbird neurologist sobbing at my feet and begging my forgiveness. The airy weightlessness that had risen in Leon, none of it matters, none of it can hurt me; I’ll let this damaged life drop from my shoulders like a stained jacket, and off I’ll go to find something new and perfect. In the firelight they had shone as if they were made of some strange element, unknowable and indestructible. I waited to feel my own flesh transmute, to rise from the floor with my wounds healing themselves and my scars vanishing and everything at last making sense.
Nothing happened. All that came to me was the thought of Rafferty’s wife or girlfriend or whatever he had had, starting to be frightened, wondering whether to ring Kerr; his kids, maybe, dark rumple-haired boys thrumming with energy, dashing in from playing to ask where Dad was.
Small stirrings in the house as the wind nosed in. Cracks and damp-stains patterning the wall like the shadow of a great moss-draped tree. Dim light shifting across the grimed window, shower curtain drooping from a broken ring.
I remembered the emails to Dominic. Or I thought I did, for whatever that was worth; but it was clear as day. Sprawled on my bed at home supposedly studying, restless and itchy with unseasonable spring heat, one of those weekends when everyone was a pain in the hole: Susanna had gone off on me because I made an unflattering comment about some hambeast friend of hers, Leon kept going into long bitter rants about how we were all slaughterhouse sheep plodding obediently from school towards college and then straight into the corporate maw, and my ribs were killing me where Dominic had given me a just-messing punch the day before. Sean or Dec could have pulled me out of my foul mood, but Dec was working some shitty part-time gig to save up for college and was never around, and Sean was off somewhere with his hand up Audrey’s top or whatever, not answering his phone. I wanted to piss someone off.
The email address Dec and I had used on Lorcan was ifancyyou something, Hotmail or Yahoo. The password was sucker.
Susanna had been in a flap the week before about Dominic trying to hook up with her. At the time it had seemed kind of endearing—for someone so smart, Su could be such a total kid, losing her mind because a guy came on to