Truly Madly Guilty (29 page)

chapter fifty-five

The day of the barbeque

Tiffany registered the sudden, eerie, whisper-quietness of her neighbourhood. The police and the paramedics and the helicopter had all left. Sunday night in the suburbs. Time for homework and ironing and
60 Minutes.

It was dark now. The streetlights were on. They stood in the front yard. Tiffany was about to drive Clementine to the hospital. She had her car keys ready in the palm of her hand. Only one parent had been allowed to go in the helicopter with Ruby and Sam had gone, which meant Clementine had to get to the hospital on her own.

‘I’ll drive myself,’ said Clementine now. She must have been running fingers through her hair, because it stood out in a mad halo around her head, like she’d had an electric shock.

‘No, you won’t. You’re probably over the limit anyway,’ said Tiffany.

‘Haven’t you been drinking?’ said Clementine.

‘I only had one light beer,’ said Tiffany.

‘Oh,’ said Clementine. She chewed her lip and Tiffany saw that she’d drawn blood. ‘Right.’

The plan was for Oliver and Erika to take care of Holly, just Oliver really, because Erika was clearly not quite right, although she’d finally stopped shaking.

‘I’ll get these two ladies onto the couch with a DVD and some popcorn,’ said Oliver. The poor man was still in wet clothes himself.

Clementine suddenly threw her arms so violently around Oliver she nearly knocked him off balance. ‘I haven’t even said thank you,’ she said into his chest. ‘I haven’t even thanked you both.’ Her voice was so full of raw emotion it was almost painful to hear.

She reached an arm out to Erika, to hug her too, but Erika stepped away. ‘Fix your hair, Clementine,’ she said. She smoothed down the strands of hair around Clementine’s face with both hands. ‘You’ll scare Ruby. You look like a witch.’

‘Thanks,’ said Clementine with a shaky breath. ‘Right.’

She bent down to Holly’s height. ‘You be a good girl for Erika and Oliver, okay? And, um, you might get to stay with Grandma tonight!’

‘Hooray!’ said Holly. She stopped. ‘And Ruby too?’

‘I think it will be just you tonight, Holly,’ said Clementine. She looked up at the sky where the helicopter had just disappeared and pulled her cardigan tighter around her. Holly stared up at her mother and her lower lip trembled.

‘Let’s go, Holly,’ said Oliver, taking her hand. He looked at Tiffany. ‘Er. Thank you for your hospitality, Tiffany. Vid.’

Vid slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Mate.’

Oliver hurried Holly off down the driveway, telling her about the movie they were about to see.

‘You’ll call us?’ Erika put her hand on Clementine’s arm, and Tiffany could see that this was her version of a hug. Her sister Karen was exactly the same.

‘I can’t believe she’s in that helicopter right now.’ Clementine stared at the sky. ‘
I
should have been the one to go with her, not Sam. I don’t know why I let him go – what if, what if …’

‘Snap out of it,’ said Erika. ‘Who cares who went in the helicopter? She’s sedated. She won’t even remember it. Off you go. Do I need to slap you across the face?’

‘What?’ Clementine blinked. ‘No!’

‘So call us, okay?’ said Erika.

‘Of course I’ll call you,’ said Clementine snippily.

They really were like sisters.

As Erika followed Oliver and Holly down the driveway, in bare feet, her wet shoes in her hand, Vid came from inside with Tiffany’s wallet, followed by Dakota.

‘Well. So. We hope little Ruby is all good, back to her little monkey self in no time. I’m sure she will be,’ said Vid to Clementine. ‘You have private health cover, right? Tell them you want the best doctors. No trainees.’

Poor Vid. He didn’t shine at times like these. Tiffany could see the tension in his shoulders, as if he were squaring up for a fight. It was like his entire body resisted negative emotion.

Clementine studied Vid. Her face twisted with some unreadable emotion.

‘Yes,’ she said formally. ‘Thank you.’ She looked at Tiffany. ‘Can we –’

‘Of course,’ said Tiffany. She pointed the remote on her key ring at the garage door to open it, and as she did she saw Dakota bravely open her mouth and start to say something to Clementine, but Clementine walked straight past Dakota, her eyes on the car, clearly desperate to get to the hospital as fast as she could.

chapter fifty-six

‘I’m just going to pop over next door for a moment,’ said Erika to Oliver when she got home. ‘My psychologist thinks the best way to get my memory back is to “return to the scene of the crime”, so to speak.’

‘There was no crime,’ said Oliver thickly. He was up and dressed and sucking on a cough lolly.

‘It’s a figure of speech,’ said Erika. ‘That’s why I said,
so to speak
.’

‘I don’t think Vid and Tiffany are home at the moment,’ said Oliver. ‘I saw their car leave as you were coming in.’

‘I know. I saw it too. I’d actually rather go over when they’re not there,’ said Erika. ‘Less distracting.’

‘What? You can’t go over while they’re not home,’ said Oliver. ‘That’s trespassing.’

‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Vid and Tiffany wouldn’t care,’ said Erika. ‘I’d just explain … well, I’d just explain what I was doing.’ It would be awkward but it would be worth it. She wanted to get some return on the money she’d invested in Not Pat’s session.

‘And it’s raining,’ pointed out Oliver. Now he was crunching the cough lolly between his teeth. ‘There’s no point going over in the rain. It wasn’t raining that day.’ He suddenly swallowed the lolly in one gulp and gave her a hard look. ‘You’re not going to remember anything by standing in their backyard. You were drunk, that’s all. I’ve told you before. Drunk people forget stuff. It’s perfectly normal.’

‘And I’ve told you before, I got drunk because of the
medication
,’ said Erika. Don’t take your childhood issues out on me.

‘It’s not relevant how or why you got drunk, I’m just saying,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s not going to help. Come on. It’s a crazy idea. Stay here. Tell me about your mother’s place. How bad was it?’

‘This won’t take a minute,’ said Erika as she walked to the front door. ‘I’ll be back in a moment. I’ll tell you about Mum then.’

‘I’ve made a chicken curry for dinner.’ Oliver kept talking as he walked behind her. He held the door as she opened it. ‘I started to feel a bit better this afternoon, and I wasn’t sure if we had any coconut milk but we did. Oh, and I nearly forgot, the police came today! About Harry. They’re having trouble finding
-
’

‘Hold all those thoughts!’ Erika picked up her umbrella. Oliver wasn’t normally so loquacious but a sick day at home alone always left him banked up with conversation. Also, she had a feeling those cold and flu tablets he took made him a little hyper, not that she would ever tell him that due to his horror of ever being affected by drugs and alcohol. It was cute how chatty he got.

She hurried out in the rain across the front yard and up Vid and Tiffany’s driveway. She rang the doorbell first, for form’s sake, just in case someone was home, or someone, somewhere, was secretly observing her, although the only neighbour who could possibly have done that was Harry and he was dead. She waited a good minute, and then she headed around into the backyard. As she went down the path at the side of the house, security lights switched on automatically, turning the rain to gold. She hoped she wouldn’t trip some alarm.

All the fairy lights in the backyard were on, and she remembered how Tiffany had said they were on some sort of automatic timer. Just the sight of the fairy lights created a deluge of sensory memory from that afternoon. She could smell Vid’s caramelised onions that Clementine had fussed over. She could feel the way the ground had gently rocked beneath her feet. The woolly sensation in her head. This was
working.
Not Pat was a genius, worth every cent.

Don’t get distracted, she reminded herself. Focus, except don’t focus too much. Relax and remember.

She had walked down this footpath from the back door. She was carrying the blue and white plates. She was looking at the plates. She liked the plates. She
coveted
the plates. My God, she hadn’t taken the plates, had she? No. She’d dropped the plates. She remembered that.

The music. There was music, and beneath the music, or above the music, there was a sound, an urgent sound, and the sound was related in some way to … Harry. Oh, why did she keep coming back to Harry? What did that mean? Just because of his phone call earlier about turning down the music?

She walked a little further down the footpath. She couldn’t see the fountain from here. She needed to see the fountain. Her heart thudded in rhythm with the rain pelleting her umbrella.

She stopped, confused. Where was the fountain? She turned to the left. She turned to the right. She let the umbrella fall back behind her head and squinted through the rain.

The fountain was gone. There was nothing but an ugly slab of empty concrete where it had once stood, and Erika’s memories were dissolving, disappearing, being washed away like a chalk drawing on pavement in the rain, and all she felt right now was cold and wet and foolish.

chapter fifty-seven

Clementine followed Sam into their bedroom, where he pulled a T-shirt from a drawer and shrugged it on. He took off his work pants and pulled on a pair of jeans. His movements were jerky, like a twitchy junkie in need of a fix. He avoided meeting her eye.

She said, ‘Do you mean it? Are you serious? About separating?’

‘Probably not,’ he said with a lift of his shoulders, as if the state of their marriage was neither here nor there to him.

She was so agitated she couldn’t sort out her breathing. It was like she couldn’t remember the process. She kept holding her breath and then taking sudden gasps of air.

She said, ‘For God’s sake, you can’t just say things like that! You’ve never, we’ve never …’

She meant that they’d never used words like ‘separation’ and ‘divorce’ even in their worst screaming matches. They yelled things like, ‘You’re infuriating!’ ‘You don’t think!’ ‘You are the most annoying woman in the history of annoying women!’ ‘I hate you!’ ‘I hate you more!’ and they always, always used the word ‘always’, even though Clementine’s mother had said you should never use that word in an argument with your spouse, as in, for example, ‘You always forget to refill the water jug!’ (But Sam did always forget. It was accurate.)

But they’d never allowed for the possibility of their marriage ending. They could stomp and yell and sulk safe in the knowledge that the scaffolding of their lives was rock solid. Paradoxically, it gave them permission to yell louder, to scream stupider, sillier, more irrational things, to just let their feelings swirl freely through them, because it was going to be fine in the morning.

‘Sorry,’ said Sam. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’ He looked at her, and an expression of pure exhaustion crossed his face, and for a moment, it was him again, not that cold, peculiar stranger. ‘I was just upset about the idea of Dakota coming to Holly’s party. I don’t want Holly having anything to do with that family.’

‘They’re not bad people,’ said Clementine, momentarily distracted from the point at hand by the loathing in Sam’s tone. Clementine didn’t want to see Vid and Tiffany because they were a reminder of the worst day of her life. Just thinking about them made her shudder, the way you shuddered at the thought of some food or drink in which you had overindulged until it made you sick. But she didn’t loathe them.

‘Look, they’re just not our type of people,’ said Sam. ‘To be frank, I don’t want my child associating with people like them.’

‘What? Because she used to be a dancer?’ said Clementine.

‘She used to be a
stripper
,’ said Sam, with such disgust it made Clementine feel instantly defensive on Tiffany’s behalf.

It would be too easy to put Tiffany into a particular box for a ‘certain kind of person’ and to decide that the powerful shot of desire Clementine had felt when Tiffany offered her a lap dance was merely a cheap trick of her body, an involuntary response, like using a vibrator. It would be easy to decide that Clementine’s behaviour was disgusting and Tiffany was disgusting and what had happened was all just so disgusting. But that was a cop-out. That was like saying that what had happened to Ruby could never have happened if they’d been at a barbeque with ‘the right sort of people’. Of course it could still have happened if they’d been distracted by a conversation about philosophy or politics or prize-winning literature.

‘Tiffany is nice. Really nice! They’re nice people!’ she said. She thought about Vid and Tiffany and the warmth and friendliness they’d showed them that night. They were both so unabashedly themselves. There was no subterfuge, no obfuscation. ‘They’re kind of sweet people really.’

‘Sweet!’ exploded Sam. ‘Are you out of your mind? You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve
been
to those strip clubs. Have you ever been to one?’

‘No, but so what?’

‘They’re revolting, depressing places. They’re not glamorous. They’re not sexy. You’ve got no grip on reality. Seriously.’ It was just another version of the ongoing argument of their marriage. Sam had reality gripped. Apparently Clementine did not. Sam wanted to get to the airport early. Clementine wanted to be the last one to board. Sam wanted to book ahead. Clementine wanted to wing it. It used to balance out. It used to be a joke.

‘
Seriously
.’ She imitated his tone mockingly under her breath.

‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘No one wants to be there at those places. Not the girls. Not the punters.’

‘Oh, right,
no one
wants to be there,’ repeated Clementine. The word ‘punters’ irked her (conservative old-man word), or was it just that everything about him irked her now? ‘So I guess you and the other
punters
were just forced to go along.’

‘In most cases it’s a drunk group of blokes and someone says, let’s do this for a lark, and you go along and it’s funny, but then you see all those hard-faced women gyrating about and you realise it’s seedy, it’s disgusting –’

‘Yeah, that’s right, Sam, because you seemed really
disgusted
by Tiffany that night,’ said Clementine. This was insane. This was historical revisionism at its best, and hadn’t Sam
always
specialised in that, hadn’t she always said she wished she had a permanent film rolling of their life so she could go back and prove that yes he did so say that thing he now denied? ‘You were laughing. You were encouraging her. You liked her, don’t pretend you didn’t like her, I know you did.’

She regretted it as soon as she said it because she knew him so well she could see how her words flayed him.

‘You’re right. And that’s what I have to live with,’ he said. ‘I have to live with that forever, but it doesn’t mean I want to socialise with her. You know she was probably a hooker, right?’

‘She wasn’t! Dancing was just a job. It was just a fun job.’

‘How would you know?’ said Sam.

‘We talked about it. When she drove me to the hospital.’

Sam stopped. ‘So you had a fun chat about Tiffany’s stripping days on the way to the hospital, while Ruby … while Ruby …’ His voice cracked. He took a breath and when he spoke again he had regained control of his voice. ‘How nice. How very
innocent
.’

The rage felt as powerful and unconsenting and extraordinary as a contraction. It took her a moment to catch her breath. He was questioning her love for Ruby. He was implying she’d somehow betrayed Ruby, that she didn’t care, that her love was inferior to his, and in fact, now she thought about it, hadn’t that always been his implication, that he loved the children more than she did because he worried more, he hovered more?

‘You have no idea what that drive to the hospital was like,’ she said carefully. She could hear the anger she was trying to contain rippling through her speech, so that each word sounded offbeat. ‘It was the worst –’

Sam held up his hand like a stop sign. ‘I have no interest in hearing about this.’

Clementine lifted both her hands in frustration and then let them drop. Their relationship was becoming so twisted and tangled, it was like they were lost in the overgrown forest of a fairy tale and she couldn’t see how to hack their way back through to the place she knew was still there, the place where surely they still loved each other.