The Witch Elm

by Tana French

That night. I know there are an infinite number of places to begin any story, and I’m well aware that everyone else involved in this one would take issue with my choice—I can just see the wry lift at the corner of Susanna’s mouth, hear Leon’s snort of pure derision. But I can’t help it: for me it all goes back to that night,

The only possible way to get through this, on what minimal resources I had, seemed to be to pull my head deeper into my cave, slam everything shut as tightly as possible, take plenty of painkillers and refuse to even think about the whole thing until it was over.

Hugo’s road has that effect; it gives the impression of being there only on alternate Thursdays or to people with the mysterious talisman in their pockets, invisible the rest of the time and instantly forgotten once you leave it.

how quickly it came to feel as though we’d been there for years and would be there, all of us, for years more.

“That time when Declan was singing ‘Wonderwall’ and someone threw a can at him. Weren’t we all up there?”

On the landing outside our bedrooms we stood for a moment looking at one another, in the dim glow of the stained-glass pendant lamp, as if there was some crucial thing that needed to be said and we were all hoping someone else knew what it was.

always seemed to me like someone who, if just one or two rolls of the dice had gone differently . . .”

That and the candlelight wrapped the two of them in a deep golden glow, like heroes out of legend, timeless and steadfast. I wanted to reach out across the table and grip their arms, feel the warmth and solidity of them. “Cheers, guys,” I said instead, raising my glass. “Thanks. For everything.”

all my childhood rose up in me like a howl of longing to throw it at his feet:

So this was it: this sudden, one moment pushing up your glasses and considering the king of spades, the next moment gone.

My head was whirling mercilessly; I flopped back onto the terrace and gazed up at the skidding stars, hoping they would settle down. I considered the possibility that we were all still sixteen and getting stoned for the first time and everything since then had been an elaborate hallucination, but this felt way too heavy to deal with and I decided I should probably ignore it. “Your

“But I was really in love with Jo. And I know how incredibly teenage this sounds, but I genuinely couldn’t handle that. It was stressing the fuck out of me. We’d be cuddled up together in bed, or we’d be out dancing and having a laugh, or we’d just be eating breakfast and watching the pigeons on our balcony, and suddenly all I could think about was how one day we wouldn’t be doing this together any more.

I couldn’t find how to talk to her; she seemed like someone from another world, someone long lost.

I wanted to put the rest of the world on pause and just sit there for a year or two, watching.”

The world I had been blithely bouncing through had been so utterly unrelated to this one running along its dark subterranean track,

I had thought it meant nothing at all; it should have meant nothing at all. And yet, somehow, here we all were, and everything was ruined.

I would have liked to lie there for longer; I would have liked time to go back through every good memory, all the pints and messing with Sean and Dec, all the wild college nights, the girls and the holidays and the bedtime stories, even the Ivy House summers with Hugo and Susanna and Leon.

If I could have had a very specific lobotomy to slice every memory of his existence out of my brain, I would have done it.

The Ivy House, when I think about it, seems heartbreakingly improbable, a murmuring haven from a battered childhood book, suffused in all my memories with a golden haze that has something frighteningly numinous about it; could that place really have existed, in this drab grinding vapid world of Twitterstorms and carb-counting, gridlock and Big Brother?

And while sometimes I can’t stop my mind from reaching for the alternate realities (pacing the wooden floorboards of that white Georgian house, drowsy baby snuffling on my shoulder, Melissa asleep in the next room) I’m very aware that, of all the possibilities, this is at least far from the worst.