The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  “We loved you anyway,” Leon told her, moving more stuff off the coffee table to make room for the ashtray.

  “Thanks a bunch. Anyway, I thought fine, whatever, I’ll try and get a few irregular verbs into Dominic’s thick head. Which went OK for a day or two, until one evening—right in here, actually, I think you two and your other mates were taking up the kitchen table—he started rubbing my thigh and told me how sexy I was.” She reached out a hand; Leon threw her the lighter. “Which, yeah, right. I assumed he was just taking the piss—I still think he was, actually. Like, he and his buddies had a dogfight going or something. Did you?”

  “No! Jesus Christ, Su. What do you take me for?” I was pretty sure I was right to be outraged, I wouldn’t have got involved in something like that, would I? “And”—definitely true, this part—“no way would I have let him drag you into it. No fucking way.”

  “Well,” Susanna said, “I knew he was setting me up, one way or another. Maybe it wasn’t a dogfight or a bet, maybe he just thought I’d be an easy shag because I’d be so flattered by having someone so totally awesome wanting little old me. Or maybe he thought he was doing me a favor in exchange for the study help. Anyway, I took his hand off me and said I wasn’t interested. Which he clearly wasn’t expecting.”

  Leon snorted. “Why did he have to be setting you up?” I said. “Or looking for a quick shag? Maybe he was genuinely into you.”

  Susanna threw me a look, over the click of the lighter. “Oh, come on. You know what Dominic was into. Cara Hannigan. Lauren Malone. Gorgeous popular super-groomed blondes.”

  “You shouldn’t underrate yourself,” I said, idiotically. “You’re beautiful. Not everyone likes the same—”

  “Toby,” Susanna said, half amused, half exasperated. “It’s OK that I’m not gorgeous, you know. It’s not some kind of deformity that you need to tiptoe around and pretend you don’t notice.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Anyway, I wasn’t into Dominic, so it doesn’t actually matter whether he was genuinely into me or not. Although of course that’s not how he saw it. He told me to relax, and put his hand back on my leg. I was done with the whole thing. So I told him to get off me because I’d rather eat my own puke.”

  “Oo,” I said, wincing reflexively. Even after all those years I could feel, with a quick zip of adrenaline, exactly how little Dom would have liked that.

  “Yeah, in hindsight, that may not have been a great call. Live and learn.” She stretched out a foot, hooked a toe under the edge of the coffee table to pull it closer so she could reach the ashtray. “He actually acted like he was taking it OK. He made a big deal of jumping back and holding his hands up, laughed a lot, some stuff about how I needed to chill out and what was I, a lezzer, cliché cliché. I got up to go and he was like, ‘What, you’re not going to help me out any more?’ I said no, we’re done. Well.” She raised an eyebrow. “He was genuinely outraged about that. ‘What the fuck is your problem, I was just having a laugh, you’re crazy . . .’ I left. I was a bit shaken up, but I thought that was the end of it.”

  Leon started to laugh. “I know,” Susanna said. “Bless my innocent little heart.”

  I was—deplorably, maybe, I didn’t care—thrilled by the way this story was going. I hadn’t been sure about Leon, but Susanna: there was no doubt in my mind that I would have protected her if she needed it, no matter what that took. My heart was going like I was on a roller coaster, rising towards that dizzying peak, ready for the unstoppable plunge.

  “After that,” Susanna said, “whenever I ran into him, like when everyone was hanging out in the park after school, he’d get in some comment about me being frigid or uptight. Someone would crack a dirty joke and Dominic would be like, ‘Whoa, better keep it clean, Mother Superior’s here!’ And plenty of people would laugh. I tried telling him to shut up, but that just made him worse: Ooo, someone needs to grow a sense of humor, she must be on her period, she needs a good shag to loosen her up . . . And everyone would laugh harder. So after a while I just kept my mouth shut.”

  I was trying to remember this. Everyone had flirted with everyone, mostly very badly, everyone had slagged everyone, a lot of people hadn’t known where to stop—we had been 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 d
idn’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 Mullan? And then you got a text from someone and forgot the whole thing.”

  “I didn’t—” This didn’t sound right. “I must not have got that it was serious. I wouldn’t have—”

  “Nope,” Susanna said. “You definitely didn’t think it was serious. Which, in fairness, was partly my fault. I was too embarrassed to tell you all the gory details. I just gave you the general gist.”

  “Well there you go,” I said. A quick arse-grab and a few douchey comments wouldn’t have sounded like a huge deal, Susanna always had liked getting herself worked up, probably a week earlier she had been throwing a wobbler because she had got an A− on some test . . . “If you’d told me—”

  “Well, I kind of expected you to take my word for it. But no. I asked you would you at least tell him to leave me alone, but you said that would make things awkward with the guys. You were a little miffed at me for asking. I think you felt like I shouldn’t have put you in that position.”

  Then when, how, how had I— Maybe this was what had done it? anger at myself, as well as at Dominic, when I found out what I had let him get away with—could I have needed to make up for that, taken it too far? “Shit,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

  She shrugged. “Water under the bridge.”

  “What did you do? Did you tell someone else?”

  “My mates, sort of. They knew he was giving me hassle, but I didn’t give them all the details either. I felt weird about it. Dirty. I wouldn’t now, but hey: eighteen.” A philosophical shrug. “And it’s not like they had any idea what I should do, any more than I did. ‘God what an arsehole, maybe if you ignore him he’ll stop, maybe you should tell him you’ve got a boyfriend down the country—’”

  “I meant like your parents,” I said. “Or that English teacher you liked.”

  With an arch of her eyebrow, over her glass: “You mean did I Tell A Trusted Adult? Nope. Probably I should have, but I was embarrassed. No one wants to tell her parents how some guy felt her up. And I wasn’t sure whether I was making a big deal out of nothing—he was so casual about it, you know? Like it was all just a laugh. Plus, if I talked to a teacher and Dominic got in shite with the school, then everyone would find out and it would be total hell.”

  “It would’ve been,” Leon said, turning his socks on the hearth rail. “Remember when Lorcan Mullan ratted out Seamus Dooley for hiding his glasses? He was a leper. For months.”

  “And anyway,” Susanna said, “Dominic was smart about it. The worse he got, the more careful he was. He’d grab my wrist and pull my hand onto his dick and tell me I was going to suck it, but he’d only do it when there was no one watching. He’d come up to me in the park with a video clip on his phone—because of course he always had the fanciest phone, remember?—a video of some woman getting shagged in some creative way, and he’d be like ‘This is what I’m going to do to you,’ but he wouldn’t send me dick pics or anything. I couldn’t prove anything had happened at all. If I’d told anyone, all he would’ve had to do was say he didn’t know what I was talking about and I was a crazy bitch. Overall, it didn’t seem like there would be much upside to talking.”

  “I felt exactly the same,” Leon said. “That’s what he relied on. God, he really was ghastly, wasn’t he?”

  “And at that stage,” Susanna said, “I still felt like I could handle it. I mean, not like I was handling it well. I was jumpy as fuck. I was rearranging my life trying not to go anywhere Dominic Ganly might be, and whenever I went out of the house I was whipping around every two seconds to check for someone coming up behind me; every part of me felt like it was about to be grabbed, the whole time. But it still wasn’t the center of my universe. I was studying like crazy; most of my mind was on the Leaving, and that was where I wanted it. The last thing I wanted to do was make the Dominic mess blow up even bigger.” She reached for another cigarette. “Looking back, I don’t think I was handling it as well as I thought. Somewhere around there was when I started thinking about killing him.”

  The breath went out of me. Of course I should have known—no, I had known, except I hadn’t been able to believe it. I had known I didn’t have it in me to come up with the idea for that kind of planned, meticulous killing. And I would have known, if only I had been able to think about it clearly for thirty seconds, exactly who did.

  “Well, not in a serious way,” Susanna said, misreading the look on my face. “It was just a thing to make myself feel better, like sticking pins in a doll. I was daydreaming about blowing him away with a machine gun and coming up with some smart-aleck line that would be the last thing he heard on earth, that kind of crap.”

  “‘Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker,’” Leon said, grinning.

  Susanna blew smoke at him. “The point is, I still thought I could cope. I figured all I had to do was grit my teeth for a few more weeks: we were about to leave school, right? Once we’d done our exams, why would I ever have to see that arsehole again?”

  “If only,” Leon said.

  “Right. After the Leaving, it actually got worse. While I was living at home, Dominic couldn’t exactly call round and demand to be let in; but once we were all here for the summer, he was over like every other day. He waited for me outside work, a few times—I don’t even know how he found out where I was working. I definitely didn’t tell him.”

  Side-eye at me. I had no idea; I might have said something, how would I have known that was some terrible crime? A lot of this felt hugely unfair: I was being blamed for stuff that I hadn’t done and had had no way of knowing about. “Anyone could have told him,” I said. “It’s not like it was a state secret.”

  “Well, someone did,” Susanna said. “He’d walk me to the bus stop, pinching various bits of me and describing all the details of what he was going to do to me. I kept telling him to leave me alone, but he’d just laugh and tell me I could quit bullshitting, he knew I loved it. I don’t know if he was just saying that to wind me up, or if he genuinely had himself convinced.”

  “Who knows what the fuck went on in Dominic’s head,” Leon said. “Frankly, who cares. The whole reason for this was so that Dominic Ganly’s horrible little mind wouldn’t be our problem any more.”

  “I think, deep down,” Susanna said, “he thought I was a jinx. He’d always got everything he wanted, without even having to try for it, right? And then there was me. And then straight after that there was the Leaving. He knew he’d crashed and burned, and the only course he was going to get offered was like basket-weaving in Sligo Tech. Whatever life plans he’d had were pretty much fucked—which was my fault, for stopping helping him—and I doubt he had a Plan B; it had never occurred to him that he might need one. And I think he felt like it had all started with me.” She considered that, head cocked to one side against the arm of the sofa. “Maybe not a jinx; more like an albatross. And if he could shoot me down, put me in my place, then everything would go back to the way it should be.”

  “Or else it was nothing deep,” Leon said. “He just liked making people scared and miserable, and he liked shagging girls, and you looked like a perfect chance to do both.”

  “I don’t know,” Susanna said. “I think he was really seriously crazy, by then. I don’t mean mentally ill, not in any way that would have got him a diagnosis. I just mean wrong; gone off the rails. Basically everything he’d ever been—the big success, the king of the castle, the stud—it was all gone. And it broke him. He must’ve been pretty fragile to start with, if that was all it took.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Leon said. “He
wasn’t broken. He’d always been a total shit. Any of us, if we’d crashed and burned in the Leaving, would we have started making rape threats to random people? No, thanks very much, we wouldn’t have.”

  Susanna thought about that, tapping ash. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it was more like he didn’t break; he just broke open, and you could see what was inside. Which was basically the same, only more so.”

  It had occurred to me, a little late, to wonder how exactly Leon fit into this. Su I still think this isn’t a good idea— Clearly he knew the whole story, had for a while; what the hell did that mean? Had we all been in on it together? I wouldn’t have put it past Susanna to come up with some byzantine Orient Express thing— I took another Mars bar.

  “Anyway,” Susanna said, “he kept getting worse. This one day he showed up outside my work and walked with me to the bus stop again, only there was no one else there, which I knew right away wasn’t good. He shoved me up against the bus shelter and started groping me. I smacked him across the face, and he smacked me right back, good and hard, without even stopping what he was doing. My head bashed off the bus shelter; I had a big lump for days. When I stopped seeing stars I tried to push him off me, but he was strong. He got both my wrists in one hand and held them above my head, and stuck the other hand up my skirt. I tried kicking him, but he just laughed and slammed his whole weight against me so I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even get enough breath to scream. If a bunch of old women hadn’t come along, I don’t know what would’ve happened.”

  “But that’s assault,” I said. Her tone—cool, detached, she might have been describing a trip to the shops—was bothering me; this was Susanna, for God’s sake, who could work herself into a passion about an injustice to someone in a whole different hemisphere, what was going on? “Why didn’t you go to the cops?”