The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  I rolled my eyes. I had no idea, actually; I remembered leaning over banisters to hook the toupee, McManus’s panicky bleat fading below us as we hurtled away laughing, toupee swinging from my dad’s fishing rod, but I couldn’t remember what had happened after that.

  “You don’t even remember.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I got suspended. Three days. You got detention. One day.”

  “Are you serious?” I gave him an incredulous stare. I was getting sick of this; the air was leaking out of my shiny happy balloon of relief, and I felt like I deserved to hang on to it for at least one evening, after the week I’d had. “That was like fourteen years ago. You’re still pissed off about it?”

  Dec was waving a finger at me, shaking his head. “Not the point. The point is, you got a slap on the wrist and the scholarship kid got a kicking. No, hear me out, I’m talking here”—when I flopped back in my seat, eyes to the ceiling. “I’m not saying Armitage did that out of badness. I’m saying I went in there petrified that I was going to get kicked out, wind up down the shithole community school. You went in there knowing that even if you were expelled, your ma and da would just find you another lovely school. That’s the difference.”

  He was getting loud. The brunette was losing interest in me—too much electricity in the air around me, too much hassle, on which I totally agreed with her. “So,” Dec said. “What are you?”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about any more.”

  “Get it over with,” Sean said, not glancing up from his phone. “For fuck’s sake.”

  Dec said, “You’re a lucky little prick, is what you are. That’s all. Just a lucky little prick.”

  I was looking for a smart retort when all of a sudden it caught me, warm and buoying and irresistible as a thermal current: he was right, he was speaking the absolute truth, and it was nothing to get annoyed about, it was pure joy. I took what felt like my deepest breath in days; it came out in a rush of laughter. “I am,” I said. “That’s exactly what I am. I am one lucky bastard.”

  Dec was eyeing me, not done yet, deciding where to take this next. “Amen,” said Sean, putting his phone down and raising his glass. “Here’s to lucky little pricks, and to just plain little pricks,” and he tilted his glass at Dec.

  I started laughing all over again and clinked my glass against his, and after a moment Dec laughed loudest of all and clashed his glass against both of ours, and we went back to arguing over where to go for our holiday.

  I’d gone right off the idea of bringing them home with me, though. When Dec was in this mode he got unpredictable as well as aggressive—he wasn’t brave enough to do anything really disastrous, but still, I wasn’t in the mood. Things still felt a bit precarious, wobbly at the joints, as if they shouldn’t be prodded too hard. I wanted to lie back on my sofa and smoke my hash and melt nicely into a giggly puddle, not keep an eye on Dec while he buzzed around my living room collecting things to use in a makeshift game of bowling and I tried not to glance at anything fragile in case it gave him ideas. Deep down I still hold this against him: twenty-eight is old enough to have outgrown that particular brand of stupid crap, and if Dec had managed to do that, he and Sean would have come home with me and and and.

  After that things go fuzzy again. The next thing I remember with any clarity is saying good-bye to the guys outside the pub, closing time, loose noisy clumps of people arguing over where to go next, heads bending to cigarette lighters, girls teetering on their heels, yellow-lit taxi signs cruising past—“Listen,” Dec was telling me, with hyperfocused drunken sincerity, “no, listen. Joking aside. I’m delighted that it all worked out for you. I am. You’re a good person. Toby, I’m serious, I’m over the moon that it—” He would have gone on like that indefinitely, only Sean flagged down a taxi and steered Dec into it with a hand between his shoulder blades, and then gave me a nod and a wave and strolled off towards Portobello and Audrey.

  I could have taken a taxi, but it was a nice night, still and cool, with a soft easy edge that promised more spring in the morning. I was drunk but not to the point of unsteadiness; home was less than a half-hour walk away. And I was starving; I wanted a takeaway, something spicy and pungent and enormous. I buttoned my overcoat and started walking.

  A flame-juggler at the top of Grafton Street whipping up his straggly crowd to a rhythmic clap, drunk guys roaring unintelligible encouragement or distraction. A homeless guy curled in a doorway, wrapped in a blue sleeping bag, out cold through the whole thing. While I walked I rang Melissa; she wouldn’t go to bed until we’d had our good-night phone call and I didn’t want to keep her up any later, and anyway I couldn’t wait till I got home. “I miss you,” I said, when she answered. “You’re lovely.”

  She laughed. “So are you. Where are you?”

  The sound of her voice made me press the phone closer to my ear. “Stephen’s Green. I was in Hogan’s with the lads. Now I’m walking home and thinking about how lovely you are.”

  “So come over.”

  “I can’t. I’m drunk.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “No. I’ll stink of booze and I’ll snore in your ear, and you’ll dump me and go off with some smooth-talking billionaire who has a pod machine to purify his blood when he comes home from the pub.”

  “I don’t know any smooth-talking billionaires. I promise.”

  “Oh, you do. They’re always there. They just don’t swoop until they see their chance. Like mosquitoes.”

  She laughed again. The sound of it warmed me all over. I had hardly expected her to sulk or pout or hang up on me for neglecting her, but the ready sweetness of her was another reminder that Dec was right, I was a lucky bastard. I remembered listening with slightly self-congratulatory awe to his stories of elaborate drama with exes, people locking themselves or each other into or out of various unlikely places while everyone sobbed and/or yelled and/or pleaded—none of that stuff would even occur to Melissa. “Can I come over tomorrow? As soon as I’m human again?”

  “Course! If it’s nice again, we can have lunch out in the garden and fall asleep in the sun and snore together.”

  “You don’t snore. You make happy little purry noises.”

  “Ew. Attractive.”

  “It is. It’s lovely. You’re lovely. Did I mention you’re lovely?”

  “You are drunk, silly.”

  “I told you.” The real reason I didn’t want to go over to Melissa’s—actually I did want to, very badly, but the reason I wasn’t going to—was, of course, that I was drunk enough that I might find myself telling her about the Gouger episode. I wasn’t worried that she would dump me, or anything extreme like that, but it would have bothered her, and I cared a lot about not bothering Melissa.

  I wanted as much of her as I could get before I hung up, though. “Who bought the steampunk armchair?”

  “Oh, Toby, I wish you could have seen them! This couple in their forties, all in yacht-club gear, she had one of those stripy Breton tops, you’d never expect—I thought maybe a blanket, if the colors weren’t too wild for them, but they went straight for the armchair. I think it must have reminded them of something; they kept looking at each other and laughing, and after about five minutes they decided they didn’t care whether it went with anything else in their house, they had to have it. I love when people are unexpected.”

  “We’ll have to celebrate tomorrow. I’ll bring prosecco.”

  “Yes! Bring the one we had last time, the—” A yawn caught her off guard. “Sorry, it’s not the company! I’m just—”

  “It’s late. You shouldn’t have waited up for me.”

  “I don’t mind. I like saying good night.”

  “Me too. Now go to sleep. I love you.”

  “I love you too. Night-night.” She blew me a kiss.

  “Night-night.”

 
; For some reason this is the mistake—hardly a mistake, really, what’s wrong with having a few pints on a Friday night after a stressful week, what’s wrong with wanting the girl you love to think the best of you?—this is the choice to which I return over and over, picking at it compulsively as if I could somehow peel it off and throw it away: one less shot of whiskey with the lads, one less pint, a sandwich at my desk as I rejigged the exhibition program, and I would have been sober enough that I would have trusted myself to go over to Melissa’s. I’ve thought about that might-have-been night so much that I know every moment of it: spinning her off her feet in a hug when she opened her door, Congratulations! I knew you’d do it!; the soft breathing curl of her in bed, her hair tickling my chin; lazy Saturday brunch in our favorite café, walk by the canal to see the swans, Melissa swinging our clasped hands. I miss it as ferociously as if it were something real and solid and irreplaceable that I somehow managed to mislay and could somehow, if only I knew the trick, salvage and keep safe.

  “You didn’t hang up.”

  “Neither did you.”

  “Night-night. Sleep tight.”

  “Safe home. Night-night.” Kisses, more kisses.

  Baggot Street was silent and near-deserted, long rows of massive Georgian houses, the fabulous wrought-iron whorls of old streetlamps. Smooth tickticktick of bicycle wheels coming up behind me and a tall guy in a trilby skimmed past, sitting very erect with his arms folded neatly across his chest. Two people kissing in a doorway, fall of smooth green hair, ruffle of lilac. I must have picked up Indian food somewhere although I can’t imagine where, because the air around me was rich with coriander and fennel, making my mouth water. The street felt warm and strange and very wide, full of some odd coded enchantment. An old man in beard and flat cap doing a shuffling half-dance to himself, fingers spread, among the great trees in the center divider. A girl across the street walking fast, black coat swirling around her ankles, head down over the phone that shone blue-white in her hand like a fairy-tale jewel. Delicate dusty fanlights, golden glow in a tiny high window. Dark water under the canal bridge, glitter and rush.

  I must have made it home without incident—although how do I know, how do I know what was going on just beyond the corner of my eye, who might have been watching from the doorways, what might have detached itself from a shadow to pad soft-footed behind me? But at any rate I must have made it home without anything happening that set off warning bells. I must have eaten my Indian food and maybe watched something on Netflix (although wouldn’t I have been too drunk to bother following a plotline?), or maybe played some Xbox (although that seems unlikely; after the last few days I was sick to death of my Xbox). I must have forgotten to turn on the alarm—in spite of being on the ground floor, I only bothered with it about half the time; the kitchen window was a little loose and if the wind was in the wrong direction it rattled and set the alarm shrieking hysterically, and it wasn’t like I lived in some crime-ridden urban jungle. And at some point I must have changed into my pajamas and gone to bed, and fallen drunkenly and contentedly asleep.

  * * *

  Something woke me. At first I wasn’t sure what; I had a clear memory of a sound, a neat crack, but I couldn’t tell whether it had been inside my dream (tall black guy with dreadlocks and a surfboard, laughing, refusing to tell me something I needed to know) or outside. The room was dark, only the faintest streetlamp glow outlining the curtains. I lay still, the last of the dream still cobwebbing my mind, and listened.

  Nothing. And then: a drawer sliding open or closed, just on the other side of the wall, in my living room. A soft thud.

  The first thing I thought was the guys, Dec sneaking in to mess with me as revenge for the hair-plug thing, one time in college Sean and I had woken him to our bare arses pressed up against his bedroom window, but Dec didn’t have a key—my parents had a spare, maybe some surprise but surely they would have waited till morning—Melissa? couldn’t wait to see me? but she hated being out alone at night— But some animal part of me knew; I had sat bolt upright, and all the time my heart was laying down a grim relentless beat.

  A brief murmur from the living room. Pale swish of a torch-beam past the crack under the bedroom door.

  On my bedside table was a candlestick that Melissa had brought over from the shop a few months back, a beautiful thing made to look like the black wrought-iron railings outside old Dublin homes: barley-sugar-twist stem and graceful fleur-de-lys swoops at the top, the center prong sharpened to hold the candle (stub of melted wax, a night with wine in bed and Nina Simone). I don’t remember getting up but I was on my feet with both hands wrapped tight around the candlestick, testing the heft of it and feeling my way softly towards the bedroom door. I felt like an idiot, when obviously nothing bad was happening, I would terrify poor Melissa, Dec would never let me live this down—

  The door to the living room was half open, a beam of light wavering through the darkness inside. I smashed the door back with the candlestick and slapped the light switch, and the room flared into brightness so that it was a blinking half-second before I could see.

  My living room, espresso cup from that morning still on the coffee table, papers strewn on the floor beneath open drawers, and two men: both with tracksuit tops pulled up high over their mouths and baseball caps pulled down low over their eyes, both frozen in mid-motion to stare at me. One was turned towards my open patio door, hunched clumsily around my laptop; the other was stretching up behind my TV, reaching for the wall mount, his torch still poised in the other hand. They so clearly and utterly didn’t belong there that they looked ludicrous, superimposed, a bad Photoshop job.

  After the first stunned instant I yelled, “Get out!” The outrage slammed through my whole body like rocket fuel, I’d never felt anything like it, the sheer nonchalant audacity of these scumbags coming into my home— “Out! Get the fuck out! Out!”

  Then I realized they weren’t running for the door and after that things get a bit confused, I don’t know who moved first but all of a sudden the guy with the torch was halfway across the floor to me and I was launching myself at him. I think I got in a pretty good crack to his head with the candlestick, that at least, but our momentum threw us both off balance and we grappled at each other to stay standing. He stank, body odor and something strange and milky—I sometimes still catch a whiff of it in a shop and find myself gagging before I understand why. He was stronger than I had expected, wiry and twisting, he had me by the candlestick arm and I couldn’t get another swing— I was jamming short furious punches into his stomach but I didn’t have room to get any force behind them, we were pressed too close, stumbling. His thumb stabbed into my eye and I yelled and then something hit me in the jaw, blue-white light splintered everywhere and I was falling.

  I landed on my back on the floor. My eyes and nose were streaming, my mouth was filling with blood and I spat a mouthful, my tongue was on fire. Someone shouting, stupid cunt you— I was up on my elbows and pushing myself backwards away from them with my feet think you’re fucking great and trying to pull myself up by the arm of the sofa and

  Someone was kicking me in the stomach. I’ll fucking burst you— I managed to roll away, retching in great raw heaves, but the kicks kept coming, into my side now, solid and systematic. There was no pain, not exactly, but there was something else, worse, a hideous jarring sense of wrongness. I couldn’t breathe. I realized with a terrible detached clarity that I might die, that they needed to stop right now or it would be too late, but I couldn’t find the breath to tell them this one unbearably important thing

  I tried to scrabble away, flat on my stomach, fingers clawing uselessly. A kick to my arse driving my face further into the carpet, and another and another. A man’s laugh, high and amped up and triumphal.

  From somewhere:

  —anyone else—?

  Nah or they’d

  Have a look. —girlfriend—

 
; The laugh again, that laugh, with a new avidity driving it. Ah yeah man.

  I couldn’t remember whether Melissa was there or not. On a fresh wave of terror I tried to push myself up off the ground but I couldn’t, my arms were weak as ribbons, every breath was a thick ragged snuffle through blood and snot and carpet fibers. The kicking had stopped; the hugeness of the relief washed away the last of my strength.

  Scraping sounds, grunts of effort. The candlestick, rolled away under an overturned chair. I couldn’t even think about reaching for it but somehow it clicked a piece into place in my jumbled brain, night-night sleep tight, Melissa safe at her place, thank God— The light jabbing my eyeballs. Crash of tumbling objects, again, again. The green geometric pattern of my curtains, stretching upwards at an unfamiliar angle, fading and clearing and fading

  That’s it

  —has any—

  —fuck it. Go

  Hang on is he?

  A blur of dark moving closer. A sharp jab to my ribs and I balled up, coughing, pawing feebly against the next kick, but it didn’t come. Instead a gloved hand came down into view and curled around the candlestick, and I had just time to wonder dizzily why they would want that before a vast soundless explosion blotted out the air and everything was gone, everything.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long I was out. None of the next part holds together; all I have is isolated moments, framed like slides and with the same lucent, untethered quality, nothing in between them but blackness and the harsh click of one rotating away as the next drops into place.

  Rough carpet against my face and pain everywhere; the pain was astounding, breathtaking, but that didn’t seem particularly important or even particularly connected to me, what mattered the terrifying part was that I was blind, utterly, I couldn’t