Truly Madly Guilty (22 page)

Brides were rarely early. They’d played at one wedding where the bride was an hour late and they’d had to pack up and go because they had another booking.

Erika had been early to her own wedding. ‘We can’t be early,’ said Clementine, her only bridesmaid. ‘Your guests will still be arriving.’

‘Oliver will be there,’ said Erika. She had her hair pushed back off her forehead, and a lot of smoky eyeshadow. She looked like an entirely different person. ‘He’s the only one I care about.’ It was one of the few times when Erika had been the one prepared to break a rule of etiquette.

Clementine had felt not quite envy but maybe something like it, because she saw that Erika was truly only thinking about her marriage, not her wedding. She didn’t especially care about her dress or her hair or the music or even her guests; all she cared about was Oliver. Whereas when Clementine got married she
had
cared about all that peripheral stuff. (The hairdresser mucked up her hair, for example, and Clementine had looked like Morticia on her wedding day.) She and Sam had barely seen each other at their wedding because they were too busy catching up with friends and relatives who had come from overseas and interstate, whereas Erika and Oliver saw
only
each other. It was kind of sickening. Kind of lovely.

She wondered now if the signs had always been there. Sure, she and Sam made each other laugh, they had passion (or they did before kids), they had fun, but their relationship wasn’t strong enough to withstand their first true test. It was a feeble marriage. A shoddy marriage. A marriage from the two-dollar shop.

The marquee swayed. Clementine felt something wet on her face. Was she crying? Or was it rain?

‘It’s leaking,’ said Nancy, looking up. ‘It’s totally leaking.’

The rain suddenly intensified.

‘This is bad,’ said Indira, who had the most expensive instrument at the moment. It was on loan from a retired violinist.

‘We’re out of here.’ Kim lowered her violin. ‘Pack it up.’

*

Clementine was back in her car, her hand on the keys in the ignition, when her phone rang. She grabbed for it when she saw the single word on the screen: SCHOOL.

‘Helen?’ she said, to save time on the niceties, because it was generally Helen, the school secretary, who made phone calls from the school.

Her heart thumped. Disasters loomed now at every corner.

‘Everything is fine, Clementine,’ said Helen quickly. ‘It’s just Holly is insisting her tummy is hurting again. We tried everything to distract her but to no avail, I’m afraid. We’re at a loss and she’s disrupting the class and well … she seems so genuine. We don’t want it to be a case of the boy who cried wolf.’

Clementine sighed. This had happened last week too, and by the time she’d got Holly home her stomach had been magically fixed.

‘Do you know how her behaviour has been today?’ Clementine asked Helen.

According to Holly’s adorable, kind of dippy kindergarten teacher, Miss Trent, Holly had been having ‘occasional difficulties with her self-regulation’ at school, and as a result wasn’t always making ‘the right choices’. Certainly her behaviour at home hadn’t been wonderful. She was going through a naughty, whiny stage, and had recently perfected a brand new seagull-like squawk that she used instead of saying ‘no’. It set Clementine’s teeth on edge.

‘Not
too
bad apparently,’ said Helen cautiously. ‘The rain isn’t helping. All the children have turned feral. So have we, actually. They say we’ve got at least another week of this weather, can you believe it?’

Clementine looked at the wedding ceremony taking place in the park. The bride and the groom were facing each other, holding hands, while other people held umbrellas over their heads. The bride was laughing so hard she could barely stand, and the groom was supporting her, laughing too. They didn’t seem to care that their string quartet had vanished.

She and Sam had laughed a lot during their wedding ceremony. ‘I’ve never seen a bride and groom laugh so much,’ their celebrant had said acerbically, as though they weren’t taking their wedding seriously enough. Sam couldn’t stop laughing at Clementine’s Morticia hair, which had made her laugh too, and made it not matter.

But you couldn’t laugh your way out of everything. They’d had eight years of laughter; a good run. They’d vowed to be true to each other in good times and bad, but they’d laughed as they said it, because everything was just so, so funny to them. They thought a bad hairstyle was as bad as life got. The celebrant was right to be annoyed. She should have grabbed them by their shirtfronts and cried, ‘This is serious! Life gets serious and you two aren’t concentrating!’

‘I’m minutes away,’ she said to Helen.

chapter thirty-five

The day of the barbeque

‘Vid already knew me because he’d seen me perform,’ said Tiffany to Clementine.

‘Mummy!’ called out Holly from the egg chair. ‘Come and see this!’

‘Just a minute!’ called back Clementine, without taking her eyes off Tiffany. ‘So you were a performer …?’

‘A performer like you, Clementine!’ said Vid delightedly.

‘Not quite like Clementine,’ corrected Tiffany with a snort.

‘Mummy!’ shouted Ruby.

‘Just a
minute
,’ called back Clementine. She looked at Tiffany. ‘Are you a musician?’

‘No, no, no.’ Tiffany began stacking plates. ‘I was a dancer.’

‘She was a
famous
dancer,’ said Vid.

‘I wasn’t
famous
,’ said Tiffany, although she had been kind of famous in certain circles.

‘Were you a famous limbo dancer?’ asked Sam, with a glint in his eye.

‘No, but there was sometimes a pole involved.’ Tiffany glinted right back at him.

There was silence around the table. Vid beamed.

‘Do you mean you were a pole dancer?’ Clementine lowered her voice. ‘Like a … like a stripper?’

‘Clementine, of course she wasn’t a
stripper
,’ said Erika.

‘Well,’ said Tiffany.

There was a pause.

‘Oh,’ said Erika. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean –’

‘You’ve certainly got the body for it,’ said Clementine.

‘Well,’ said Tiffany again. This was where it got tricky. She couldn’t say, Yeah, too right I do, girlfriend. You weren’t allowed to be proud of your body. Women expected humility on this topic. ‘When I was nineteen I did.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’ Sam asked Tiffany.

Clementine gave him a look. ‘What?’ Sam lifted his hands. ‘I’m just asking if she enjoyed a previous occupation. That’s a valid question.’

‘I loved it,’ said Tiffany. ‘For the most part. It was like any job. Good parts and bad parts, but I mostly enjoyed it.’

‘Good money?’ continued Sam.

‘Great money,’ said Tiffany. ‘That’s why I did it. I was doing my degree, and I could earn so much more money doing that than being a check-out chick.’

‘
I
was a check-out chick,’ said Clementine. ‘I didn’t especially love it, by the way, if anyone is interested.’

‘Such a pity. You would have made a wonderful stripper, darling,’ said Sam.

‘Thank you, sweetheart,’ said Clementine evenly.

‘You could have made your cello faces as you spun around the pole. That would have got you some good tips.’ Sam threw back his head, closed his eyes and made his eyebrows go up and down, presumably in imitation of Clementine’s face as she played the cello.

Clementine looked down at the table and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. Her whole body shook. Tiffany stared. Was she crying?

‘She’s laughing,’ said Erika dismissively. ‘You won’t be able to get any sense out of her for the next few minutes.’

Oliver cleared this throat. ‘I read an article recently about a move to make pole dancing an Olympic sport,’ he said. ‘Apparently it’s very athletic. You need good core strength.’

Tiffany had to smile at the poor fellow doing his level best to manoeuvre the conversation back into safe middle-class dinner party conversation territory.

‘Oh yes, Oliver, it’s
very
athletic,’ said Vid meaningfully, one eyebrow lifted, and Clementine dissolved again.

Tiffany thought how much simpler the world would be if everyone shared Vid’s almost child-like approach to all things sexual. Vid liked sex in the same way he like classical music and blue cheese and fast cars. To him, it was all the same. The good stuff of life. It was just naked pretty dancing girls in a club. What was the big deal?

Erika turned pointedly in her seat to look over her shoulder towards the kids. ‘So does your daughter –?’ she said to Tiffany.

‘Dakota knows I was a dancer.’ Tiffany lifted her chin.
Don’t you freaking well question my parenting choices
. ‘I’ll wait till she’s older to give her more details than that.’

Vid’s older daughters and ex-wife didn’t know either. Oh God, the
judgement
that would come her way from his daughters, who dressed like Kardashians but behaved around Tiffany as if they had the moral high ground normally reserved for nuns. If they ever found out they would leap on that secret like rabid dogs.

‘Right,’ said Erika. ‘Of course. Right.’

Clementine lifted her head and ran her fingertips beneath her eyes. Her voice still trembled with laughter. ‘So, forgive me, because I guess I’ve led a very, you know,
vanilla
life,’ she said.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Sam. ‘What are you implying? I read
Fifty Shades of Grey.
I studied it. I tried to set up the study as the Red Room of Pain.’

Clementine elbowed him. ‘I’m just fascinated. Did you find it … well, I don’t know, where to start! Weren’t the men watching you kind of … sleazy?’

‘Of course some of them were, but most of them were just ordinary blokes.’

‘
I
wasn’t sleazy,’ said Vid. ‘Ah, well, maybe I was a little bit sleazy. In a good way sleazy!’

‘So did you go to those places often?’ Clementine asked him, and Tiffany could hear the effort she was making to keep her tone clear of judgement.

This was what Vid never understood and Tiffany always forgot: people had such
complicated
feelings when they heard that she’d been a dancer. It was all mixed up with their feelings about sex, which sadly for most people were always inextricably linked with shame and class and morality (some people thought she was confessing to an illegal act), and for the women there were issues relating to body image and jealousy and insecurity, and the men didn’t want to look too interested, even though they were generally very interested, and some men got that angry, defensive look as if she were trying to trick them into revealing a weakness, and most people, men and women, wanted to giggle like teenagers but didn’t know if they should. It was a freaking minefield. Never again, Vid, never again.

‘Sure, I went lots!’ said Vid easily. ‘When my marriage broke up my friends wanted to take me out, and, you know, my friends didn’t go to symphonies or whatever, you know, they went to clubs. And when I saw this woman dance, well, she blew my mind. She just blew my mind.’ He put a pretend gun to his head, pulled a pretend trigger and made his fingertips explode. ‘That’s why I recognised her straight away at that auction. Even though she had her clothes on.’

Vid slapped his knee and roared with laughter. Clementine and Sam chuckled in a kind of horrified way, while Erika frowned and poor Oliver blushed.

‘Anyway,’ said Tiffany. ‘That’s probably enough of that.’

There was a sudden discordant shriek: ‘
Mummy
!’

chapter thirty-six

It was raining so hard Clementine didn’t hear the front door open. She jumped when she saw Sam materialise in the doorway to Holly’s room, his blue and white pinstriped shirt so wet it was transparent.

‘You scared the life out of me!’ she said, her hand to her chest. ‘Why are you home so early?’ She knew it sounded like an accusation. She should have said, maybe, ‘This is a nice surprise!’ and
then
said, conversationally, gently, ‘Why so early, honey?’

She’d never called him ‘honey’ in her life.

Sam plucked at the saturated fabric of his shirt.

‘What are you doing?’ he said.

‘Looking for something,’ she said. ‘As usual.’ She was sitting on Holly’s bed with a pile of clothes in front of her, searching for Holly’s ‘strawberry top’, a white long-sleeved top with a giant strawberry on the front that Holly needed right now if she was to ever feel happiness again, and which, of course, was nowhere to be found.

She felt strangely self-conscious. Would she normally have jumped to her feet at the sight of Sam, and kissed him hello? She couldn’t remember. It was so strange that she would even consider this: the correct etiquette for greeting her husband.

She didn’t particularly want to hug him when he was once again soaked. Nobody in Sydney could be surprised by rain anymore. You were an idiot if you found yourself caught in the rain. It was all anyone could talk about. Umbrella sales had gone up by forty per cent. But ever since the rain had started, Sam left every day for the ferry without an umbrella or raincoat. She watched him each morning from the kitchen window, bolting along the footpath through the rain, his briefcase held over his head, and the sight of his bobbing body disappearing into the distance made her want to laugh and cry. Maybe it was a form of masochism. He thought he didn’t deserve an umbrella. He probably thought she didn’t deserve one either.

‘Why are you home so early?’ she said again.

‘Well, I got your message.’ Sam’s face was a mask of anxiety with a hint of aggressive defensiveness. ‘So I left work early.’

‘My message that said Holly was perfectly fine?’ said Clementine. ‘My message that said there was nothing to worry about?’

‘This is the second time she’s had this stomach thing,’ said Sam.

‘I assume you saw her in the living room,’ said Clementine. ‘Happily playing on the iPad without a care in the world.’

‘I think we need to get her checked out. It could be her appendix or something. It could come and go.’

‘Yeah, it comes when she’s at school and it goes when she’s playing on the iPad. She’s playing
us
,’ said Clementine. ‘As soon as I got her in the car she was fine. She talked the whole way home about her party. She wants to invite Dakota, by the way.’ She said the last part quickly, without looking at him.

‘Dakota,’ said Sam. He straightened as if sensing danger. ‘
That
Dakota?’

‘Yes,
that
Dakota.’

‘She can’t invite her,’ said Sam. ‘Obviously. Jesus.’

‘I told her that Dakota was probably too big for a sixth birthday party. And she had a meltdown. She said that we told her she could invite whoever she wanted, and we
did
say that. We made kind of a big deal of it.’

‘Yeah, well, we meant anyone except Dakota,’ said Sam.

‘She was inconsolable.’

‘She doesn’t even
know
Dakota,’ said Sam. He pulled his shirt out of the waistband of his trousers, went to wring it with his hands and then reconsidered. ‘She met her one time. Like you said, she’s too old. She wouldn’t want to come to Holly’s party!’

‘Well, anyway, I gave in,’ said Clementine. ‘She was becoming hysterical. It was kind of frightening.’

‘You just said yourself that she was putting it on about the stomach thing,’ said Sam. ‘So she’s putting it on about Dakota too. She
played
you, Clementine.’

He said this mockingly. Before, he’d always teased, but he’d never mocked.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Clementine. ‘Look. Holly wants to invite her, and it’s her party, and she’s obviously going through a bad stage at the moment, which is maybe not unexpected, so if she wants to have Dakota at her party, she’s having Dakota at her party. It’s not that big a deal!’

Sam clenched his jaw. ‘She’s not coming.’

Clementine threw her hands up. ‘She
is
coming.’

They stared at each other.

How did they get out of this? How did a couple resolve something like this, where there was no possibility of compromise, where one person had to give in? What happened if
no one
gave in?

‘I called Erika today,’ she said, to change the subject. ‘I told her that I’d donate my eggs.’

‘Right,’ said Sam.

He began to take his shirt off. Clementine found herself not quite but almost averting her eyes in the polite way you did when someone else’s husband took off their shirt.

‘She was funny about it,’ said Clementine. ‘I think she definitely overheard what I said that day, when we were upstairs. Those horrible things I said.’

‘I need to get changed,’ said Sam distractedly, as if she were boring him.

‘So you’re fine with me donating my eggs?’ asked Clementine, without making eye contact, as if it were an inconsequential question.

‘It’s your decision,’ said Sam. ‘She’s your friend. Nothing to do with me.’

His disinterest felt almost exquisitely painful, as if it was a pain she needed, a boil she needed lanced.

‘So you definitely don’t want another baby?’ she said. There it was again. Like at dinner the other night at the restaurant. That desire to push him, to
shove
him off this ledge where they were stranded.

‘Another baby?’ said Sam. He hung his wet shirt on the handle of Holly’s door. ‘
Us
? Have another baby? You’re not serious.’

‘Oh. Right,’ said Clementine. She piled clothes on top of each other. ‘You haven’t seen Holly’s strawberry top, have you? It’s vanished.’ She looked around her in frustration and tried not to cry. ‘Oh, I can’t stand it, why do things keep
vanishing
?’