The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  After work Melissa came over, hauling a huge fragrant bag of Thai takeaway. She was so irrepressibly and touchingly delighted about me being home—spinning around the living room laying out cutlery like she could barely keep her feet on the ground, flicking on the sound system to some radio station full of peppy sixties girl groups, flinging a kiss my way every time she passed me—that I couldn’t help feeling a little more cheerful. I hadn’t been hungry since that night, but my fiery beef stir-fry actually tasted good, and Melissa gave me the whole saga of how she had spent the last week persuading my mother not to get me a dog (my parents loved Melissa; fortunately they weren’t the type to drop heavy hints about weddings and grandchildren, but I could see them thinking it): “She was totally set on it, Toby, she said you could never have a dog when you were little because of your dad’s allergies but this was perfect, it would be extra security and it would cheer you up—your dad kept going, ‘Lily, it’s not going to work, the management company—’ but she just went, ‘Oh, Edmund, who cares about them, I’ll talk them round!’ And Toby”—giggles starting to break through—“the one problem she could see, the only one, she thought you wouldn’t hoover and the whole place would be covered in dog hair. So she”—Melissa was giggling harder and I found myself laughing too, even though it hurt my ribs—“she decided to get you one of those great big poodles. Because they don’t shed. She was going to have it here waiting for you, she said it would be the perfect welcome-home surprise—” The image of me and the detectives walking into the apartment and coming face-to-face with a poodle in full pompom resplendence had us laughing so hard that I was startled to find myself trembling. It had been a long day.

  As the evening wore on, though, I got edgy. Melissa—shoes kicked off, snuggled drowsily against me on the sofa—obviously assumed she was staying the night. As far as I was concerned, this was unthinkable, absolutely out of the question. I couldn’t even let my mind touch on what would have happened if she had been there that night, when clearly I would have been utterly unable to protect her. I started stretching and yawning and dropping hints about how it was going to be weird being back in my own bed and I might be kind of restless, so maybe since she had to get up in the morning . . . Melissa picked up on this quickly, ungrudgingly—yes, getting sleepy too, better go now before I doze off right here. “Soon,” I said, tracing a finger down the back of her neck as she bent to pull on a shoe.

  “Yes,” she said, and turned fast to kiss me fiercely, “soon.”

  I got her a taxi on my phone, so I could watch the little car icon tick towards her place, holding my breath every time it paused or took an odd turning. And there I was: on my own at last, in this apartment that felt so much like mine and yet in some insidious way not like mine at all, with my holdall dumped by the door like a long-distance traveler and with absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with that night, or the next day, or the next.

  * * *

  The next couple of months were bad. It’s hard to say whether it was the worst time of my life, given everything that came after, but it was definitely the worst I’d had at that point, by a long shot. I was restless as a tweaker, but I didn’t want to go out during the day—I still had an underfed, off-kilter look, I still limped, and although my hair was growing back and I’d shaved the rest to match it, the Frankenstein scar still showed. I had some idea of going for long walks late at night, roaming the shadows of Ballsbridge in a Phantom of the Opera kind of way, but as it turned out I couldn’t do that either. I had been walking home at all hours of the night since I was a teenager, and it had never once occurred to me to be afraid; wary, sure, when I spotted a junkie on the scrounge or a pack of drunk guys looking for hassle, but never this thick miasma of nonspecific fear polluting the air, corrupting everything into a threat—every shadow could be hiding an attacker, every walker could be waiting for his moment to lunge, every driver could be an instant from flooring it straight over my body, how would I know and what would I do? I got about thirty meters from my gate before adrenaline was juddering me like an electric current, I was panting for breath, and I turned tail and gimped as fast as I could back to my apartment, which although it hardly counted as safety did at least have manageable boundaries that I could keep an eye on. I didn’t try again. Instead I walked up and down my living room, for hours on end, shoulders tight, hands dug deep into the pockets of my dressing gown. I can still feel the terrible rhythm of it, step and drag, step and drag, every pace driving it home all over again, but I couldn’t stop; somehow I believed that as long as I was up and moving, no one would break in, I wouldn’t have a seizure, at least nothing would get worse. Sometimes I kept walking until gray light filtered around the edges of the curtains and outside the birds started chirping.

  When I did force myself to go to bed, I was, predictably, having a hard time sleeping. While I was in hospital my parents had thoughtfully had a monitored alarm installed, with a panic button and all (I could picture my mother looking around at the damage, knuckles pressed to her mouth, groping for some way to go back in time and stop it happening), and while I saw their point and knew it was probably a good idea, part of me wished they hadn’t. The panic button was a rectangular thing about the size of a matchbox, in a brisk medical shade of red, and it was set near my bed but low down, just out of reach. I spent hours frozen in bed, holding my breath and straining to catch the follow-up to some minute click or scrape, heard? imagined? about to explode into hoarse shouts and crashes? should I dive for the button now and risk crying wolf and not being taken seriously when the danger was real, or should I hold off for ten more excruciating seconds, ten more, ten more, and risk being too late, scrabbling frantically to cross those unbridgeable few inches as the blows crunched into me? The button developed a life of its own, swollen with symbolism, a single chance at salvation pulsing redly in the corner and if I blew it too soon or left it too late then I was lost. I developed a habit of sleeping balanced precariously on the edge of the bed, with my arm hanging over so my fingers would be as close as possible to the button. Once or twice I fell out and woke up on the floor, yelling and flailing.

  Texts from friends, from my cousins, from work connections. Hey dude how you doing, barbecue at my place Saturday week are you on for it? . . . Hi, not to hassle you but you might want to pick up when my mum rings, otherwise she tells your parents that she thinks you’re unconscious on your floor—Susanna, with a little eye-roll emoji thrown in. Memes and gifs and bits of internet chaff from Leon, presumably meant to give me a laugh. Hi Toby, this is Irina, I heard what happened and just hoping you are feeling OK now and we will see you soon . . . I mostly didn’t answer, and gradually the texts got sparser, which left me unreasonably miffed and self-pitying. Richard rang; when I didn’t pick up, he left a message telling me—awkwardly, delicately, with real warmth—that everything at work was absolutely fine, the show was going beautifully, a major collector had bought Chantelle’s sofa assemblage, and that I shouldn’t worry about anything, just concentrate on getting better and come back to work whenever I felt ready. Texts from Sean, from Dec, will we call round? how about tomorrow? at the weekend? I didn’t want to see them. I didn’t feel like I had anything at all to contribute to a conversation, and I couldn’t stand the thought of them leaving in a cloud of inarticulate pity, waiting till they were well away from my door before they spoke: Jesus. He’s . . . Yeah, he is. The poor bastard.

  Physically, I was getting better, at least to some extent. My face went back to normal—except for the chipped tooth, which I knew I should get fixed at some stage—and my ribs and my tailbone healed up OK, although I still got the odd twinge. I didn’t have any seizures, as far as I could tell, which was nice, although the neurologist had informed me smugly that they could start months or even a year or two after the injury. Sometimes I went four or five hours painkiller-free before the headache kicked in again; I liked life a lot better on the pills, which blurred the edges till things were
just about bearable, but I was going easy on them in case—I didn’t even want to think too hard about this possibility—the doctors refused to renew the prescription once I ran out.

  The mental stuff was a different story. I had a good all-round selection of the symptoms from the social worker’s helpful brochures: my Memory Filing Cabinet appeared to be well and truly fucked (standing blank-headed in the shower trying to remember whether I had already washed my hair or not, in mid-conversation with Melissa groping for the word instant), I was constantly exhausted just like James from Cork, and my organizational skills were shot to the point where making breakfast was a major and incredibly frustrating challenge. In practical terms all this was less of a problem than it might have been, I suppose, given that I wasn’t even trying to do anything complex like work or socialize, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it.

  Overall, being home was worse than being in the hospital. At least in that cockeyed, dislocated limbo my symptoms hadn’t seemed out of place, while here in the real world they were glaringly, repellently wrong, they were obscenities that should never have been allowed to exist: grown man standing slack-jawed in his kitchen trying to figure out duhhh how me make fried egg, on the phone with the credit-card company fumbling for his date of birth, drooling moron, defective, freakshow, disgusting— And down again into that all-consuming vortex, only it had deepened, it was spreading: not just fear any more, now it was roiling fury and loathing and it was a depth and breadth of loss that I had never imagined. Only a few weeks ago I had been a normal guy, just a guy, tossing his jacket on in the morning, humming the Coronas through a slice of toast caught between his teeth, deciding where he was going to take his girlfriend for dinner; now every second was part of an inexorable tide drawing me farther and farther from that guy whom I had every right to be and who was gone for good, left behind on the other side of that unbreakable sheet of glass. And whereas in the hospital I had been able to tell myself that things would be better once I was home, now that that had turned out not to be true, I couldn’t find any reason to think that anything would get better ever.

  It wasn’t only myself I raged at, of course. My mind churned out epic, elaborate fantasies in which I tracked down the two burglars (recognized a voice in the street, a pair of eyes across a pub, kept my cool with awe-inspiring self-control as I stalked them through their seedy haunts) and destroyed them in Tarantino-esque ways much too embarrassing to recount. I lived those scenarios over and over, amplifying and refining each time, till I knew each step and twist of them far better than I knew the details of the actual event. Even at the time, though, I knew exactly how feeble and pathetic they were (zit-ridden asthmatic loser locked in his bedroom furiously fantasizing, under his collection of scantily clad anime posters, about kung-fu-kicking the school bullies into next week) and in the end the rage always turned back on myself: mutilated, useless, physically and mentally incapable of a trip to Tesco never mind action-hero revenge, a fucking joke.

  Calls from my mother, who—since Melissa had managed to convince her that I didn’t need a poodle—had switched back to suggesting, with infuriating persistence, that what I really needed was a few weeks at home. “You’d be amazed what it can do for you, a different setting— We promise to stay out of your way, you’ll barely know we’re there—” And, when I made it clear that nothing on earth would induce me to move back home: “Or I know! What about the Ivy House? Uncle Hugo would love to have you, and it’s so peaceful—just try it for a weekend, if you don’t like it you can go back to your apartment—” I put that idea down a lot more viciously than I needed to. I couldn’t even think about being at the Ivy House, not like this. The Ivy House, twilight hide-and-seek among the moths and the silver birches, wild-strawberry picnics and gingerbread Christmases, endless teenage parties with everyone lying on the grass gazing up at the stars— All that was unreachable now; that night was a flaming sword barring the way. The Ivy House was the one place that, more than any other, I couldn’t bear to see from this far shore.

  Unidentifiable ready-meals congealing to lumpy glue on my coffee table. Dust thickening on the bookshelves, crumbs on the kitchen counters—I had texted my cleaner to tell her I wouldn’t be needing her any more, partly because I knew the clattering and hoovering would give me headaches, more because I very strongly didn’t want anyone (except Melissa) in my apartment. Bird-shadows skimming across my living-room floor, making me leap.

  Melissa was a problem, actually, a big one. I loved her coming over, she was the only person I genuinely wanted to see, but the thought of her staying the night still sent me into a firework fizzle of panic that I could barely hide. I could have gone to her place, in fact I did try that once, but there was Megan the awful flatmate, hanging around with her thin lips all primmed up and just waiting for Melissa to leave the room so she could make bitchy jabs about how that one time when she got mugged she had been totally traumatized and she was actually much more sensitive than most people but she had actually managed to get over it in like a couple of weeks? because she had really set her mind to it? and someone as special as Melissa actually deserved someone who would make that actual effort? I made my excuses (headache) and left when I realized I was on the actual verge of actually punching Megan’s face in. I’d never had a temper before, I’d always been the easygoing type, but now tiny ludicrous things would send me, out of nowhere, into an uncontrollable fury that took my breath away. One time I couldn’t get a frying pan to fit back into the tangled mess that was my kitchen cupboard; I smashed it down on the counter over and over, with utter methodical concentration, until the pan bent and the handle cracked apart and the whole thing went flying in various directions. Another day, when my toothbrush fell out of my hand for the third time, I slammed my stupid fucking useless left fist into the wall, over and over, I was trying to smash the vile thing to pulp so they would have to cut it off me but—the irony—my muscles didn’t have the strength to do any real damage; all I ended up with was a big purple bruise that made my hand even more useless for the next few days and that I had to remember to hide from Melissa.

  I knew awful Megan was right, of course. I knew that Melissa, the unfailing, unforced sweetness and patience of her—never a word of complaint, always a joyful hug and a full-on kiss—was far more than anyone could have expected in the circumstances, far more than I deserved. I knew, too, that even Melissa’s optimism couldn’t be bottomless, that sooner or later she would realize I wasn’t going to magically wake up one morning as my old sunny self. And then what? I understood that the only decent thing to do was to break it off now, save her all the squandered time and energy and hope, save both of us the terrible shatter and slice of the moment when it finally hit home; let her go on her way free of the heavy belief that she had abandoned me when of course that wouldn’t be true, not at all: I was the one who had abandoned her. But I couldn’t do it. She was the one person who seemed to believe, to take for granted, that I was the same Toby she had always known; a bit bruised and battered, sure, in need of extra nuzzles and funny stories and of having my coffee brought to me on the sofa, but not changed in any essential way. Even though I knew that was rubbish, I couldn’t make myself give it up.

  I was aware that I was in big trouble here, but there didn’t seem to be any way out. At the dark heart of the horror was the knowledge that it was inescapable. The thing I couldn’t bear wasn’t burglars or blows to the head, wasn’t anything I could beat or evade or set up defenses against; it was myself, whatever that had become.

  * * *

  So when I say that I was lucky to have the Ivy House, I don’t mean that in some airy-fairy abstract way, ooh so lucky! to have such a lovely pretty place in my life! For better or for worse, the Ivy House saved me, in the most concrete of ways. If I hadn’t gone back there that summer, I’d still be pacing my apartment all night, getting skinnier and paler and twitchier by the month, having long muttered conversations with myself and ne
ver answering my phone; that or else—which seemed like a better and better idea as the weeks wore on—I would be dead.

  Susanna rang me on an evening in mid-August, daylight lasting and lasting, barbecue smell and gleeful kid-game shouts filtering in even through my closed windows. The voice message she left—“Ring me back. Now”—sparked enough curiosity in me that I actually did; considering the low level of hassle she had given me over the past few months, I was pretty sure she didn’t want to pressure me about moving home or make sure I was eating.

  “How’re you doing?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said. I had the phone a few inches from my mouth, hoping the slurring wouldn’t come across. “Still kind of sore in places, but I’ll live.”

  “That’s what your mum said. I wasn’t sure—you know how she always puts a positive spin on stuff. But I didn’t want to bug you.”

  The rush of gratitude to my mother caught me off guard—she had actually done it, covered for me like I had asked her to, she hadn’t spread out the full extent of my wreckage for them all to pick and cluck over. “Nah, she’s right. It sucked for a while there, but it could’ve been a lot worse. I got lucky.”

  “Well, good for you,” Susanna said. “I hope they catch the bastards.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Listen,” she said, tone shifting. “I’ve got bad news. Hugo’s dying.”

  “What?” I said, after a second of total blankness. “Like, now?”

  “No, not now now. But this year, probably. No one wanted to tell you yet, in case it upset you or something. Which . . .” A flick of unreadable laughter. “So I’m telling you.”

  “Wait,” I said, struggling up from the sofa. The galvanizing rush of anger at the rest of my family was distracting; I made myself shove it aside for later. “Hang on. Dying of what?”