"This didn't strike you as-well, slightly odd, to say the least?"
"Not as odd as you'd think. It sounds mad now, yeah; but we'd always shared everything. It was a rule with us. This just felt like more of the same. I was going out with a girl for a while around the same time, sure, and she went with Cathal, not a bother on her-I think she only went out with me in the first place because he was taken. He was a lot better looking than I was."
"Shane," I said, "appears to have fallen out of the loop."
"Yeah. That was where it all went wrong. Shane found out, and he went mental. He was always mad about Sandra, too, I think; but more than that, he felt like we'd betrayed him. He was devastated. We had huge rows about it practically every day, for weeks and weeks. Half the time he wouldn't even talk to us. I was miserable, felt like everything was falling apart-you know how it is when you're that age, any little thing is the end of the world…"
He stopped. "What happened then?" I said.
"Then Cathal got it into his head that, since it was Sandra had come between us, it would have to be Sandra brought us together again. He was obsessed, wouldn't stop talking about it. If we were all with the same girl, he said, it'd be the final seal on our friendship-like the blood-brothers thing, only stronger. I don't know, any more, if he really believed that, or if he just…I don't know. He had an odd streak in him, Cathal, especially when it came to things like…Well. I had my doubts, but he kept on and on about it, and of course Shane was behind him all the way…"
"It didn't occur to any of you to ask Sandra's opinion about this?"
Jonathan let his head fall back against the glass, with a soft bump. "We should have," he said quietly, after a moment. "God knows we should have. But we lived in a world of our own, the three of us. Nobody else seemed real-I was wild about Sandra, but it was the same way I was wild about Princess Leia or whoever else we fancied that week, not the way you love a real woman. Not an excuse-there's no excuse for what we did, none. But a reason."
"What happened?"
He rubbed a hand over his face. "We were in the wood," he said. "The four of us-I wasn't with Claire any more. In this clearing where we used to go sometimes. I don't know would you remember, but we had a beauty of a summer that year-hot as Greece or somewhere, never a cloud in the sky, bright till after ten at night. We spent every day outside, in the wood or hanging around at the edge of it. We were all burned black-I looked like an Italian student only for these mad white patches round my eyes from my sunglasses…
"It was late one afternoon. We'd all been in the clearing all day, drinking and having a few joints. I think we were pretty much off our faces; not just the cider and the gear, but the sun, and the giddy way you get when you're that age… I'd been arm-wrestling with Shane-he was in a half-decent mood for once-and I'd let him win, and we were messing, pushing each other and fighting on the grass, you know the way young fellas do. Cathal and Sandra were yelling, cheering us on, and then Cathal started tickling Sandra-she was laughing and screaming. They rolled under our feet then; we went over in a heap on top of them. And all of a sudden Cathal yelled,
I waited for a long time. "Did all three of you rape her?" I asked quietly, in the end.
"Shane, only. Not that that makes it any better. I helped hold her…" He took a fast breath between his teeth. "I've never known anything like it. I think maybe we went a little out of our minds. It didn't feel real, you know? It was like a nightmare, or a bad trip. It went on forever. It was blazing hot, I was sweating like a pig, light-headed. I looked round at the trees and they were closing in on us, shooting out brand-new branches, I thought they were about to wrap round us and swallow us up; and all the colors looked wrong, off, like in one of those colorized old films. The sky had gone almost white, and there were things shooting across it, little black things. I looked back-I felt like I should warn the others that something was happening, something was wrong-and I was holding…holding her, but I couldn't feel my hands, they didn't look like mine. I couldn't work out whose hands those were. I was terrified. Cathal was there across from me and his breathing sounded like the loudest thing in the world, but I didn't recognize him; I couldn't remember who the hell he was or what we were doing. Sandra was fighting and there were these noises and-Jesus. For a second I swear I thought we were hunters and this was a, an animal we'd brought down, and Shane was killing it…"
