I waited. “We were all hysterical,” he said harshly, after a moment. “We were wrecks. Not Daniel, obviously, he would never do anything as undignified as get upset, he just stuck his head in a book and occasionally came out with some fucking Old Norse quote about arms that remain strong in times of trial, or something. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t sleep all week; no matter what time I got up, his light was still on. And the rest of us… Just to start with, we weren’t sleeping either. We were all having nightmares-it was like some awful farce, every time you managed to get to sleep someone would wake up screaming, and of course that would wake everyone else up… Our sense of time completely disintegrated; half the time I didn’t know what day it was. I couldn’t eat, even the smell of food made me gag. And Abby kept baking-she said she needed to do something, but, God, piles of gooey chocolate things and bloody meat pies all over the house… We had a blazing row about it, Abby and I. She threw a fork at me. I was drinking all the time so the smell wouldn’t make me sick, and then of course Daniel started giving me flak about that… We ended up giving away the chocolate things in the tutorial groups. The meat pies are in the freezer, if you’re interested. None of the rest of us are going to touch them.”
Shaken up, Frank had said, but no one had mentioned this level of hysteria. Now that Rafe had started talking, he didn’t know how to stop. The words were tumbling out hard and involuntary as vomiting. “And Justin,” he said. “Jesus. He was the worst by a long shot. He couldn’t stop shaking, I mean really shaking-some little smart-arse first-year asked him if he had Parkinson’s. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was incredibly unnerving; every time you looked at him, even for a second, it set your teeth on edge. And he kept dropping things, and every time he did it the rest of us nearly had heart attacks. Abby and I would yell at him, and then he would start crying, like that was going to help anything. Abby wanted him to go to Student Health and get Valium or something, but Daniel said that was ridiculous, Justin had to learn to cope like the rest of us-which was obviously completely insane, because we weren’t coping. The biggest optimist in the world couldn’t have said we were coping. Abby was sleepwalking-one night she ran herself a bath at four in the morning and got into it in her pajamas, fast asleep. If Daniel hadn’t found her, she could have drowned.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice sounded strange, high and shaky. Every word he said had hit me straight in the stomach with a kick like a horse’s. I had argued this with Frank and talked it through with Sam, I’d thought I had my head around it, but it had never been real to me till that moment: what I was doing to these people. “Oh, God, Rafe, I’m so sorry.”
Rafe gave me a long, dark, unreadable look. “And the police,” he said. He took another swig of his drink, made a face as if it tasted bitter. “Have you ever had to deal with cops?”
“Not like that,” I said. I still sounded wrong, breathless, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“They’re bloody scary. These weren’t uniformed cops fresh out of the bog; these were detectives. They have the best poker faces I’ve ever seen, you don’t have a clue what they’re thinking or what they want from you, and they were all over us. They questioned us for hours, almost every single day. And they make even the most innocent question-what time do you normally go to bed?-sound like a trap, like they’re just waiting to whip out the handcuffs if you give the wrong answer. You feel like you have to be on your guard, every second, it’s fucking exhausting-and we were exhausted already. That guy who dropped you off, Mackey, he was the worst. All smiles and sympathy, but he obviously hated our guts right from the word go.”
“He was nice to me,” I said. “He brought me chocolate biscuits.”
“Well, isn’t that charming,” Rafe said. “I’m sure that won your heart. Meanwhile, he was showing up here at all hours of the day and night, giving us the third degree about every single detail of your entire life and making bitchy little comments about how the other half live, which is complete bollocks anyway. Just because we’ve got the house and we go to college… The man’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of Bolivia. He would have loved a reason to lock us all up. And of course that got Justin even more hysterical, he was positive we were all going to be arrested any minute. Daniel told him that was crap and to pull himself together, but actually Daniel wasn’t all that much help, seeing as he thought…”
He broke off and stared away down the garden, his eyes hooded. “If you hadn’t pulled through when you did,” he said, “I think we would have killed each other.”
I reached out one finger and touched the back of his hand, just for a second. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I am, Rafe. I don’t know how else to say it. I’m so sorry.”
