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, 'Now!…'"
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…"
I was starting to dislike the tone of this. "If I understand you correctly," I said coldly, "you were under the influence both of alcohol and of illegal drugs at the time, you may quite possibly have been suffering from heat-stroke, and you were presumably in a state of considerable excitement. Don't you think these factors might have had something to do with this experience?"
Jonathan's eyes went to me for a moment; then he shrugged, a defeated little twitch. "Yeah, sure," he said quietly. "Probably. Again, I'm not saying any of this is an excuse. I'm only telling you. You asked."
It was an absurd story, of course, melodramatic and self-serving and utterly predictable: every criminal I have ever interrogated had a long convoluted story proving conclusively that it wasn't actually his fault or at least that it wasn't as bad as it looked, and most of them were a whole lot better than this one. What bothered me was that some tiny part of me believed it. I wasn't at all convinced about Cathal's idealistic motives, but Jonathan: he had been lost somewhere in the wild borderlands of nineteen, half in love with his friends with a love passing the love of women, desperate for some mystical rite that would reverse time and put their disintegrating private world back together. It would not have been difficult for him to see this as an act of love, however dark and twisted and untranslatable to the harsh outside world. Not that this made any difference: I wondered what else he would have done for his cause.
"And you're no longer in any contact with Cathal Mills and Shane Waters?" I asked, a little cruelly, I know.
"No," he said quietly. He looked away, out the window, and laughed, a mirthless little breath. "After all that, eh? Cathal and I send Christmas cards; the wife signs his name to theirs. I haven't heard from Shane in years. I wrote him the odd letter, but he never wrote back. I stopped trying."
"You started drifting apart not long after the rape."
"It was a slow thing, took years. But yeah, when you come down to it, I suppose it started with that day in the woods. It was awkward, after-Cathal wanted to talk about it over and over, it made Shane nervous as a cat on hot bricks; I felt guilty as hell, didn't even want to think about it… Ironic, isn't it? Here we thought it was going to be the thing that brought us together forever." He shook his head quickly, like a horse twitching off a fly. "But I'd say we might have gone our separate ways anyway, sure. It happens. Cathal moved away, I got married…"
"And Shane?"
"I'm betting you know Shane's in jail," he said dryly. "Shane…Listen, if that poor thick bastard had been born ten years later, he'd have been grand. I'm not saying he'd be some great success story, but he'd have a decent job and maybe a family. He was a casualty of the eighties. There's a whole generation out there that fell through the cracks. By the time the economy picked up it was too late for most of us, we were too old to start over. Cathal and I were just lucky. I was shite at everything else but good at maths, A's all through school, so I finally managed to get a job in the bank. And Cathal went out with some rich young one who had a computer and taught him how to use it, for the laugh; a few years later, when everyone was crying out for people who knew computers, he was one of the few in the country who could do more than turn the bloody things on. He always did land on his feet, Cathal. But Shane…He'd no job, no education, no prospects, no family. What did he have to lose by robbing?"
I was finding it hard to feel any particular sympathy towards Shane Waters. "In the minutes immediately after the rape," I said, almost against my will, "did you hear anything out of the ordinary-possibly a sound like a large bird flapping its wings?" I left out the part about it being a voiced sound. Even at moments like this, there is a limit to how weird I am prepared to appear.
Jonathan gave me a funny look. "The wood was full of birds, foxes, what have you. I wouldn't have noticed one more or less-especially not just then. I don't know if I've given you any idea of the state we were all in. It wasn't just me, you know. It was like we were coming down off acid. I was shaking all over, couldn't see straight, everything kept sliding sideways. Sandra was-Sandra was gasping, like she couldn't breathe. Shane was lying on the grass just staring up at the trees and twitching. Cathal started laughing, he was staggering around the clearing howling, I told him I'd punch the face off him if he didn't-" He stopped.