The Witch Elm: A Novel Read online

  The garden had the same look of low-level unkemptness as the front of the house, but that wasn’t new. For a city garden it’s enormous, well over a hundred feet long. It’s lined along the side walls with oak trees and silver birches and wych elms, behind the rear laneway by the back of an old school or factory or something—adapted into a hip apartment block during the Celtic Tiger—five or six stories high; all that towering height gives the place a secret, sunken feel. Gran was the gardener; in her time the garden was artfully, delicately crafted till it felt like somewhere out of a fairy tale, slyly revealing its delights one by one as you earned them, look, behind this tree, crocuses! and over here, hidden under the rosemary bush, wild strawberries, all for you! She died when I was thirteen, less than a year after my grandfather, and since then Hugo had loosened the reins a lot (“Not just laziness,” he told me once, smiling out the kitchen window at the summer confusion of growth; “I prefer it running a bit wild. I don’t mean dandelions, they’re just thugs, but I like getting a glimpse of its true colors”). Gradually plants had strayed and tangled, long tendrils of ivy and jasmine trailing from the wall of the house, tumult of green leaves on the unpruned trees and seed-heads poking up among the long grass; the garden had lost its enchanted air and taken on a different quality, remote and self-possessed, archaeological. Mostly I felt that I had liked it better before, but that day I was grateful for the new version; I was in no mood for whimsical charm.

  The smaller kid had caught sight of me. She stood for a while examining me from amid the Queen Anne’s lace, swaying a handful of stems back and forth with absentminded persistence. Then she drifted over.

  “Hi,” I said.

  The kid—it took me a second to find her name: Sallie—regarded me with opaque, feline blue eyes. I couldn’t remember how old she was; four, maybe? “I have dolls in my shoes,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. I had no idea what she meant. “That’s nice.”

  “Look.” She balanced herself with a hand on a big geranium pot and turned up the sole of one trainer, then the other. An inch-high doll, encased in a thick bubble of clear plastic, gave me a stupefied leer from each one.

  “Huh,” I said. “That’s cool.”

  “I don’t know how to get them out,” Sallie said. For a moment I was afraid she was expecting me to do something about that, but just then her brother—Zach, that was it—followed her over and stood beside her. He was a head taller, but apart from that they were a lot alike, the same pale tangled curls and fine egg-brown skin and unblinking pale-blue eyes. Together they looked like something out of a horror movie.

  “Are you going to be living here?” he asked me.

  “For a couple of weeks. Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  I had no idea what Susanna had told them about Hugo. I had a vision of me saying the wrong thing and both of them exploding into piercing howls of trauma. “Because,” I said. And when they kept staring: “I’m visiting Hugo.”

  Zach was holding a stick; he swished it through the air, making a fine, nasty hissing sound. “Grownups aren’t supposed to live with their uncle. They live by themselves.”

  “I don’t live with him. I’m visiting him.” Zach had struck me as a little shit before. One Christmas Susanna had had to take him away from the dinner table for spitting in his sister’s turkey because it looked better than his.

  “My mum said you got hit in the head. Are you special needs now?”

  “No,” I said. “Are you?”

  He gave me a long stare that could have meant anything, although probably not anything good. “Come on,” he said to Sallie, flicking her on the leg with his stick, and he headed off down the grass with her trailing after him.

  My leg was starting to judder—too much standing. I sat down on the terrace steps. Stretch of grass by the camomile patch where Leon and Susanna and I had pitched a tent and camped for a week one summer, giggly and eating biscuits and scaring each other with spooky stories all night, heavy-eyed and ratty all day, redolent of camomile where we had rolled over onto the plants. Over there the tree where in the dizzying darkness of Leon’s fourteenth birthday party I had had my first real kiss, a slight sweet blonde called Charlotte, illicit cider taste of her tongue and the softness of her breasts against me, cheers and whoops from the lads somewhere Go on Toby you legend and the unending soft whoosh of the breeze in the leaves overhead. This terrace where we had sprawled the first time we smoked hash, stars overhead bouncing into tantalizing coded patterns and the smell of jasmine strong as music in the air, and I had with total solemnity convinced Leon that Susanna had turned into a tiny fairy and I had her cupped in my hands, him trying to peer between my fingers Hey babes talk to me are you OK in there? while Susanna was right beside us and there had been someone else there too, Dec, Sean? someone at my shoulder and shivering with laughter in the darkness, who? Holes in my mind, blind spots shimmering nastily like migraine aura. All these landmarks, close enough to touch and miles out of reach. Now, great big grown-ass man me, I could no more have mustered the courage to sleep in that tent than I could have flown.

  “Oh my God,” Leon said, behind me, slamming the terrace door with a flick of his wrist. “What a nightmare.”

  “What?” I asked. The slam had made me leap like a startled cat, but Leon didn’t seem to have noticed; he was fishing a pack of Marlboro Reds out of the pocket of his jeans, which were black and shredded in weird places and so tight that he had trouble getting the smokes out. He was also wearing a Patti Smith T-shirt and Docs the size of his head.

  “The whole thing. Like some lovely family reunion and we’ll all be sent off on a scavenger hunt any minute. It’s grotesque. But I guess that’s Hugo, isn’t it, keep calm and carry on—” He bent his head to the lighter. “Which, yeah, respect, he’s got guts and whatever, but still. Jesus.” Tossing back his forelock as he straightened: “Is that vodka?”

  “Just water.”

  “Shit. I left my drink on the windowsill and now my mother’s there, and if I go back for it she’ll start asking me about some amazing cultural event she read was on in Berlin and have I been to it and what do I think? And I honest-to-God can’t.” He inhaled deeply and thirstily.

  Leon and Susanna were the ones who had been on my mind the most, over the last few days. When I was a kid, the aunts and uncles—not Hugo, he was different, but Oliver and Miriam, Phil and Louisa—had been basically an amorphous cloud of adulthood that occasionally fed us and mostly needed avoiding in case they made us stop doing something, and even when I grew up I had never really put in the attention to bring them into sharp focus. But Leon and Susanna: they had been, to all intents and purposes, my brother and sister; we had known each other with the same complete, matter-of-fact intimacy with which we knew our own hands. Some tiny inchoate part of me had been hoping, against all reason, that just being around them would magically bring together all my pulverized fragments, that with them I couldn’t be anything but myself. The rest of me had been dreading meeting them, with an awful churning terror that they would take one look and see straight through all my pathetic concealments, to every fine detail of the damage.

  “Here,” I said, holding out my hand. I was still thrumming with adrenaline. “Give me one of those.”

  Leon glanced over, one eyebrow arched. “Since when?”

  I shrugged. “Off and on.” In fact I’d barely smoked a cigarette in my life until a month or two back, but I wasn’t about to say that in case he interpreted it as some dramatic lunge towards self-destruction, which it wasn’t. The head-injury thing had done something weird to my sense of smell; I kept picking up improbable scents (reek of disinfectant off my microwave pasta, sudden rush of my father’s cologne as I pulled the curtains closed for nighttime), and since the awful warnings about smoking always waxed ominous about how it destroyed your sense of smell, I figured it was worth a try. So far I had managed to hide it from M
elissa, but I felt safe enough; she was hardly likely to ditch Hugo and come looking for me.

  Leon passed me a cigarette and his lighter. Of us three, he was the one who had changed most. When we were little kids he had been sparky and mischievous, in constant motion, but somewhere around the time we hit secondary school that had changed. We were in different classes, but I knew he had taken a certain amount of hassle—small, slight, suspiciously delicate-featured and gentle, it had been inevitable; I’d done what I could, but when I caught a glimpse of him in the corridors he had always been hurrying along, head tucked down, shrunken and self-contained. He was still a couple of inches shorter than me, and he still had the elfin look and the ragged dark hair falling in one eye—although now the raggedness had clearly taken about an hour and a metric ton of hairwax—but I had trouble overlaying either of those memories on this slim guy slouching against the wall, jiggling one foot and looking cool enough to imply that your whole life was an exercise in missing out.

  “Thanks,” I said, passing back the lighter.

  Leon had relaxed enough to look at me properly—I had to stop myself turning away. “Sorry I didn’t ring you more,” he said abruptly. “When you got hurt.”

  “You’re fine. You texted me.”

  “Just, your mum said all you needed was peace and quiet and not to be hassled, so . . .” A one-shouldered shrug. “Still, though. I should have rung. Or come over.”

  “Jesus, no. No need for that.” I couldn’t tell whether my voice sounded casual enough, too casual— “I just, all I wanted to do was chill out and, and take it easy. Like, shitty daytime telly in my pajamas, you know? I wouldn’t have been great company.”

  “Still,” Leon said. “Sorry.”

  “You’re here now, anyway,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about this any more. “Are you staying here?”

  “Oh hell no. I’m at my parents’. God help me.” He wiggled the lighter into his pocket. “I’d actually way rather be here, except once I moved in, boom, I’d be the designated carer and I’d never be able to leave because then it would be all my fault if Hugo collapsed and died alone, and no thank you very much. I love Hugo, I want to spend time with him while I can and I’m happy to help out for a few weeks, but I can’t make any big long-term commitments. I’ve got a job”—Leon worked for some achingly hip indie record label, I couldn’t remember the name—“I’ve got a relationship, I’ve got a life. And I’d like to keep them.”

  I didn’t much like the sound of this—I had no intention of being the designated carer, either—but then Leon had always been kind of a drama queen, and it sounded like someone had been leaning on him pretty hard. “Pressure?” I asked.

  He rolled his eyes to heaven. “Don’t even get me started. My mother and my father. They’ve been tag-teaming me, like a pair of interrogators, every single day. First she’d call to go on about poor Hugo spending his last days alone and bring on the violins, then he’d call with a big pompous speech about how good Hugo’s always been to me and wouldn’t it make sense to give a little of that back, then she’d call to tell me how they have total faith in me to be able to handle things just for a little while, and after that I don’t know who would say what because that’s when I’d stop answering my phone. I’m hoping they’ll back off now that I’m at least in town, but I don’t know, they might step it up and hope that if they drive me mental enough I’ll move in here just to get away from them. Which I won’t.”

  He was a little drunk, but not enough that most people would have noticed. “I’m staying here,” I said.

  His face whipped around to me, eyebrows sky-high. “You?”

  The incredulity—like I was a chimpanzee put in charge of a rocket launch—set my teeth on edge. “Yeah. Me. Is there a problem?”

  After a moment Leon let his head fall back against the wall and started to laugh, up at the sky. “Oh. My. God,” he said. “This is beautiful. I can’t wait to see this.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “Our Toby, the angel of mercy, sacrificing himself to care for those in need—”

  “For a couple of weeks. I’m not planning on being the designated carer either.” And when that turned the laugh into a dry, knowing snort: “What?”

  “Surprise surprise.”

  “What are you bitching at me for? You just said there’s no way you’ll move in even for—”

  “Because once I was in I’d never get out. While you’ll just prance off, won’t you, the minute you’ve had enough—”

  The cigarette and the booze and the whole fever-tinted afternoon were making me feel sick; I really wasn’t in the mood for this. “It’s not my fault if you don’t have the, the”—I was looking for cojones—“the balls to stand up to your parents—”

  “—and we all know that won’t take long. I give you a week. Ten days, max.”

  The snide flick in his voice, like I was some pampered prince who had never dealt with anything tougher than a hangover— If only he knew, Mr. Cool with his faux-meaningful leather bracelets and his carefree all-night-clubbing life, if he had the faintest clue— “What the fuck are you babbling about? You don’t think I’m able for it?”

  I was at least semi-deliberately asking for trouble. Leon always did get defensive easily; the snap in my voice was the perfect way to turn him nasty, especially when he was already on edge. It wasn’t that I was aiming to get into a knock-down-drag-out fight on the terrace—although I could think of worse ways to spend the time; it sounded like someone inside had started singing—but I did, with a vicious, self-flagellating intensity, want Leon to lose his cool and tell me exactly what he thought about this new version of me.

  He brought up his cigarette and took a long pull. “You’re not exactly at your best right now,” he said, on a sideways stream of smoke. “Are you?”

  The rush of anger almost felt good. “What? I’m fine.”

  A glance under his eyelids. “If you say so.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  I couldn’t tell how close I was to punching him, but he didn’t seem worried. One corner of his mouth curled upwards. “Oh, please. How many words have you said today? A dozen? How many bites did you eat in there, like two?”

  I laughed, a startled yelp that echoed off the high walls. I had been expecting something about my walk, my inability to follow the thread of a conversation, the agonizing pauses as I fumbled for words: a deft, pitiless slice straight to the jugular that would leave me bloodied and reeling. In its place I had got a snippy little finger-wag about not being chatty enough and not eating my greens, and I was practically light-headed with relief.

  “Today sucks,” I said, still laughing. “Like you said. I can’t be arsed making the effort to pretend everything’s great. If you can, away you go. I’ll watch.”

  “Now that’s the Toby I know and love,” Leon said. There was an edge to his voice; he didn’t like being laughed at. “Leave the dirty work to everyone else.”

  “I’m not making you do anything, dude. I’m just doing my own thing. Nothing wrong with that.” It came out so naturally, so exactly the way the old me would have said it, and the fast upward jerk of Leon’s chin made it so clear that I was getting to him, I couldn’t stop laughing.

  “That’s bullshit,” he snapped. “Dude. Have you seen your eyes? Just because you can slip it past them”—toss of his head towards the house—“that doesn’t mean you’re actually doing an amazing job of hiding it. You’re off your tits on something.”

  This made me laugh so hard that smoke went down my nose. I doubled over, hacking. “And you’re hysterical,” Leon said sourly, moving away from me. “Whatever you’re on—”

  “Heroin, man. All the cool kids are taking it. You should really—”

  “You know what would be great? If you would just shut up. Just finish your cigarette—my cigarette—and go insid
e and leave me alone.”

  “Oh, here you are,” Susanna said, ducking surreptitiously out of the back door with a fast wary glance behind her. “Your dad’s singing ‘Raglan Road,’ Leon. I said I’d go find you guys, since obviously you wouldn’t want to miss that. I think it might take me a while, though. What’s so funny?”

  “Toby’s lost his mind,” Leon said, grinding out his cigarette viciously under his heel. “What there was of it.”

  “Jesus,” I said, catching my breath. My heart was skittering. “That was worth this entire shitty afternoon.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Susanna told me. “You’ve been great company too.”

  “The company’s been”—I was looking for scintillating, couldn’t find it—“gorgeous. Dazzling. But you’ve got to admit, given a choice of ways to spend the day, this comes right below a, a root canal.”

  “Tell me you brought booze,” Leon said to Susanna. “I can’t face going back in there till I’ve had more drink.”

  “I thought you had some. Hang on”—turning, eye to the crack of the door—“OK, it looks clear. I’m going in. If I get nabbed, you come get me, right? I’m serious.” She vanished back into the kitchen.

  “Sorry about that,” I said. I was feeling a lot warmer towards Leon, and not just because he thought the only thing wrong with me was a few too many party favors. We hadn’t been close in a long time, not since we left school—new friends, widening social lives, plus he had come out and had made sure everyone noticed by going through an over-the-top phase of the kind of stereotypical drugs and clubs that definitely weren’t my scene, and we had never really made our way back from that—but there was something very heartening about the discovery that I could still push his buttons with practically no effort. “Just, for a second there it sounded like you thought I was banging up or something. It was beautiful.”