Truly Madly Guilty

'What?' said Sam with mock outrage. 'What about my signature dish?'

  'Your shepherd's pie. It's amazing. Exquisite. You follow the instructions on that packet mix to the letter.' Clementine put her arm around his waist.

  And also this. She didn't get this. How could they be teasing each other so fondly after all the tension at Erika's place? Tension caused by Erika, but really, Clementine and Sam should have been on the same page about something as significant as whether or not they were going to have a third child. It should have been clarified, discussed. Clementine should not have been going around telling people she'd rather poke her eyes out so that people thought they could rely on that information, thank you very much.

  Was all this lovable banter for the benefit of Vid and Tiffany? She and Oliver didn't do married couple banter. Oliver spoke fondly but politely to Erika in public, as if she were a beloved aunt, perhaps, not his wife. People probably thought they had a terrible marriage.

  'Let me top you up there,' said Tiffany to Erika, holding up the champagne bottle.

  'Oh, gosh, that went down fast.' Erika looked at her empty glass, mystified.

  'I wonder if I should go and check on the kids,' said Sam. He looked up at the ceiling. 'It sounds suspiciously quiet up there.'

  'Ah, relax, don't worry, they're fine with Dakota,' said Vid.

  'Sam is the worrier,' said Clementine.

  'Yes, Clementine prefers the free-range parenting approach,' said Sam. 'No need to watch them at the shopping centre, a security guard will take care of them.'

  'Sam, that happened once,' protested Clementine. 'I turned my back on Holly for one second in JB Hi-Fi,' she said to Vid and Tiffany, although Erika didn't remember hearing this story before. 'And she'd run off to find a Barbie DVD or something, and got disoriented and wandered out of the shop. It was terrifying.'

  'Yes, see, so that's why you can't turn your back,' said Sam.

  'Yes, Mr Never-Made-a-Mistake-in-Your-Life.' Clementine rolled her eyes.

  'Never made that sort of mistake,' said Sam.

  'That's nothing. I lost Dakota at the beach once,' said Vid.

  Erika and Oliver exchanged looks. Were these parents trying to outdo each other with just how incompetent and irresponsible they were? When Oliver and Erika had a child it would never be out of their sight. Never. They would risk-assess every situation. They would give their child all the attention they hadn't got from their own parents. They would do everything right that their parents had got wrong.

  'I have never been so scared in my life as that day at the beach,' said Tiffany. 'I wanted to kill him. I thought to myself, if something has happened to Dakota, I will kill him, I will literally kill him, I will never forgive him.'

  'But look, I'm still alive! We found her. It all worked out fine,' said Vid. 'Kids get lost. It's part of life.'

  No it's not, thought Erika.

  'Ah, no it's not,' said Tiffany, echoing Erika's thoughts. 'It's not inevitable.'

  'Agreed.' Sam clinked his beer bottle against Tiffany's. 'Jeez. These feckless partners of ours.'

  'You and me, we are the feckless ones,' said Vid to Clementine, and he made 'feckless' sound like a delicious way to be.

  'We're relaxed,' said Clementine. 'Anyway, it happened once and now I watch them like a hawk.'

  'What about you two, eh?' said Vid to Erika and Oliver, perhaps noticing that his neighbours were being left out of the conversation.

  'I watch Erika like a hawk,' said Oliver unexpectedly. 'I haven't lost her once.'

  Everyone laughed and Oliver looked triumphant. He couldn't normally pull off a clever comeback. Don't ruin it, my love, thought Erika as she saw Oliver's mouth move in preparation to speak again. Stop there. Don't try to say the same thing again in a different way to get a bigger laugh.

  'But what about kids, eh?' said Vid. 'Are you two planning to have children?'

  There was a brief pause. A tightening, a constriction of the atmosphere as if people had stopped breathing.

  'Vid,' said Tiffany. 'You can't ask people that. It's personal.'

  'What? Why not? What's personal about children?' Vid looked nonplussed.

  'We're hoping to have children,' said Oliver. His face collapsed inward, like a popped balloon. Poor Oliver. So soon after his tiny social triumph.

  'One day,' said Erika. Everyone seemed to be deliberately not looking at her, the way people did when you had food in your teeth and they didn't want to tell you so they kept trying not to see. She used her fingernail to check her teeth for sesame seeds from the crackers. She'd meant to sound up-beat and positive. 'One day soon.'

  'Yes, but you can't wait too long,' said Vid.

  'For God's sake, Vid!' said Tiffany.

  There was a piercing yell from upstairs.

  chapter twenty-three

  'It's Clementine.'

  The rain was so loud right now Erika could only just distinguish Clementine's voice on the phone.

  'Speak up,' she said.

  'Sorry. It's Clementine. Good morning! How are you?'

  'Yeah, hi, how are you?' Erika moved her mobile phone to the other ear and tucked it against her shoulder so she could continue taking things from the house through to the garage to pack in the car.

  'I wondered if you wanted to meet up for a drink after work,' said Clementine. 'Today. Or another day.'

  'I'm not going to work,' said Erika. 'I'm taking the day off. I have to go to my mother's house.'

  When she'd called the office she had told her secretary to tell anyone who asked that she'd taken the day off because her mother was ill, which was technically true.

  There was a pause. 'Oh,' said Clementine, and her tone changed as it always did when they talked about Erika's mother. She became tentative and gentle, as if she were talking to someone with a terminal disease. 'Mum did mention that she called you last night.'

  'Yes,' said Erika. She felt a tiny eruption of fury at the thought of Clementine and her mother talking cosily about her, poor, poor Erika, as they must have done since she was a child.

  She said to Clementine, 'How was dinner?'

  'Great,' said Clementine, which meant that it wasn't, because otherwise she would have rhapsodised about the amazing flavours of the such-and-such.

  Don't tell me about it then, Clementine. I don't care if your marriage is falling apart, if your perfect life is not so perfect these days. See how the rest of us live.

  'So you're going to your mother's place,' said Clementine. 'To, uh, help her clean.'

  'As much as I can.' Erika picked up the three-litre container of disinfectant and put it down again. It was too hard to carry while she tried to talk on the phone. She picked up the two mops instead and walked through the connecting door to the garage, switching on the light as she did. Their garage was spotless. Like a showroom for their spotless blue Statesman.

  'Has Oliver taken the day off work too?' Clementine knew that Oliver always went with her. Erika remembered when she'd told Clementine about the first time Oliver had helped with her mother's house and how wonderful he'd been, just getting the job done, never a word of complaint, and how Clementine had got such a soft, teary look on her face when she heard this, and for some reason that soft, teary look made Erika feel angry, because she already knew how lucky she was to have Oliver's help, she already felt grateful and cherished, but Clementine's reaction made her feel ashamed, as if Erika didn't deserve it, as if he were doing more than anyone could expect of a husband.

  'Oliver is home from work but he's sick,' said Erika. She opened the boot of her car and slid in the mops.

  'Oh. Well, do you want me to come with you today?' said Clementine. 'I could come. I'm playing at a wedding this morning, but then I'm free until school pick-up time.'

  Erika closed her eyes. She could hear notes of both hope and fear in Clementine's voice. She remembered Clementine as a child, the day she'd discovered the way Erika lived: sweet little Clementine, with her porcelain skin, her clear blue eyes and her clean, lov
ely life, standing at Erika's front door, her round eyes even rounder still.

  'You'd get bitten,' Erika told her bluntly. 'There are fleas.' Clementine's porcelain skin always got the first mosquito bite. She looked so juicy.

  'I'd wear repellent!' said Clementine enthusiastically. It was almost like she wanted to come.

  'No,' said Erika. 'No. I'm fine. Thank you. You should be practising for your audition.'

  'Yes,' said Clementine with a sound like a sigh. 'You're right, I guess.'

  'Who has a wedding on a Wednesday morning?' said Erika, mostly to change the subject but also because part of her didn't want to hear what she could sense was coming. 'Don't all the guests have to take time off work?'

  'People who want to save money,' said Clementine vaguely. 'And it's outdoors, and they didn't have a wet-weather plan, of course. Anyway, listen, I didn't want to do this over the phone, but ...'

  Here it came. The offer. It had only been a matter of time. Erika walked back inside and studied the huge bottle of disinfectant.

  'I know you probably haven't wanted to bring it up again since the barbeque,' said Clementine. 'I'm sorry it's taken me so long to come back to you.'

  She sounded incongruously formal.

  'But I didn't want you to think it was just because ...' Her voice wavered. 'And obviously, Sam and I, we haven't been thinking straight ...'

  'Clementine,' said Erika. 'You don't have -'

  'So I want to do it,' said Clementine. 'Donate my eggs, that is. I want to help you have a baby. I'd love to help. I'm ready to, you know, get the ball rolling.' She cleared her throat self-consciously, as if the words 'get the ball rolling' were in a foreign language she was only just learning. 'I feel good about it.'

  Erika didn't say anything. She managed to heft the bottle of disinfectant up onto her hip, like an obese toddler. She staggered back out to the garage.

  'I want you to know that my decision has got nothing to do with what happened,' said Clementine. 'I would have said yes anyway.'

  Erika grunted as she opened the passenger door of her car and dropped the disinfectant onto the seat.

  'Oh, Clementine,' she said, and she was conscious of the sudden candidness of her tone, as if she'd been speaking falsely up until now. This was her true voice. It echoed around the garage. This was the voice she used with Oliver in the middle of the night when they shared the most shameful secrets of their shameful childhoods. 'We both know that's a lie.'

  chapter twenty-four

  The day of the barbeque

  'That sounds like Holly,' said Sam. He put down his beer bottle. 'I'll go.'

  'Oh dear,' said Tiffany. 'I'll show you where they are.'

  'Mummy!' Holly shrieked from upstairs. 'Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!'

  'Looks like I'm needed too,' said Clementine with obvious relief.

  Erika wanted to go too, to check if Holly was okay, but with both parents there it was clearly not appropriate, and would be the sort of overstepping behaviour that would earn Erika an exasperated sigh from Clementine. Now it was just Erika, Oliver and Vid in the room, and it was immediately obvious that this particular social combination didn't work, even though Vid, of course, would give it his ebullient best shot.

  Oliver stared glumly into his champagne glass while Vid opened the oven door to check on his baking and closed it again.

  Erika looked around for inspiration. There was a large glass bowl in the middle of the island bench, filled with different-sized, different-coloured pieces of glass.

  'This is pretty,' she said, pulling it towards her to examine the contents.

  'It's Tiffany's,' said Vid. 'She calls it sea glass. I call it rubbish.' He picked up a long oval-shaped piece of dark green glass. 'Look at this! I said to her, babe, this is from a broken Heineken bottle! Some drunk leaves it at the beach and then you bring home his rubbish! She goes on about it being polished by the sea or whatever.'

  'I guess it makes a nice decoration,' said Erika, although she agreed with him. It was a bowl of rubbish.

  'She's a hoarder, my wife,' continued Vid. 'If it wasn't for me, she'd be like one of those people you see on TV, you know, those ones who have so much crap they can't get out their front door.'

  'Tiffany isn't a hoarder,' said Erika.

  Oliver cleared his throat. A little warning bell.

  'She is, she really is!' said Vid. 'You should see her wardrobe. Her shoes. That woman is Imelda Marcos.'

  'She's not a hoarder, though,' said Erika. She avoided looking in Oliver's direction. 'My mother is a real hoarder.'

  Oliver held out his hand, palm down in front of Erika, as if to stop a waiter refilling his glass, except instead of no more wine, he meant, no more sharing. In Oliver's world you told no one anything. Family was private. Family was shameful. They had that in common, except that Erika no longer wanted to be ashamed.

  'Like for real?' said Vid, interested. 'Like on the TV shows?'

  The TV shows. Erika remembered the first time she'd turned on the TV and seen her mother's hallway, there for the world to see in all its disgusting glory, and how she'd leaped back, both hands pressed to her chest as if she'd been shot. It was like something from a nightmare; an enemy had filmed her dirty secret and broadcast it. Her rational mind had worked it out in the next instant. Of course it wasn't her mother's hallway, it belonged to an elderly Welshman on the other side of the world, but even then Erika still couldn't shake that feeling of exposure, of public humiliation, and she'd turned it off, with an angry swipe of the remote, as if she were slapping someone's face. She'd never watched one of those shows the whole way through; she couldn't bear that glib, pseudo-sympathetic tone.

  'Yes, for real,' said Erika. 'Like on the TV shows.'

  'Wow,' said Vid.

  'She has a pathological attachment to inanimate objects,' Erika heard herself say. Oliver sighed.

  'She accumulates stuff to insulate herself from the world,' continued Erika. She couldn't stop.

  For most of her life she had avoided analysing her mother's 'habit' or even thinking about it much, except when absolutely necessary. It was as though her mother had a socially unacceptable fetish. When she had left home she was able to detach herself further still, but then, one night about a year ago, Erika had typed the word 'hoarder' into Google, and just like that she had developed a voracious appetite for information. She read textbooks, journal articles and case studies, initially with a racing heart, as if she were doing something illegal, but as she accumulated facts and statistics and terms like 'pathological attachment to inanimate objects', her heart slowed. She wasn't alone. She wasn't that special. There was even a 'Children of Hoarders' website where people like Erika shared story after story of identical frustrations. Erika's entire childhood, which had once seemed so unique in its secret dirty shame, was nothing more than a category, a type, a box to be ticked.

  It was all that research that had led to her decision to get counselling. 'My mother is a hoarder,' she'd said to the psychologist at her very first session, the moment she sat down, as dispassionately as if she were saying, 'I have a bad cough' to her GP. It had been exhilarating, as if she'd once had a fear of heights and now she was skydiving. She was talking about it. She was going to learn tips and techniques. She was going to repair herself like a broken appliance. She'd be as good as new. No more anxiety over visiting her mother. No more waves of panic when some smell or word or passing thought reminded her of her childhood. She'd get this sorted.

  The exhilaration had diminished a little when it had turned out the repair process wasn't quite as speedy or systematic as she'd hoped, but she was still optimistic and she still felt it was a sign of her good mental health that she could discuss her mother's problem so freely now. 'It's not a sign of mental health,' Oliver had said once, with unusual irritability, after Erika had begun telling an old lady in a supermarket check-out queue exactly why she needed to buy so many heavy-duty garbage bags. 'It makes you look unstable.' Oliver didn't understand that Erika exp
erienced a strange, wondrous pleasure in telling on her mother. I'm not keeping your secrets any longer, Mum. I'm reporting you to this nice little old lady in the shopping centre; I'm reporting you to whoever cares to listen.

  Vid seemed fascinated, intrigued.

  'Wow,' he said. 'So she just can't throw anything out, eh? I remember on one of those shows I watched, this old fella, he kept newspapers, right? Piles of them, and I just thought, mate, what are you doing, you'll never read them, chuck them in the bin!'

  'Well,' said Erika.

  'Chuck what in the bin?' Tiffany reappeared with Dakota (who appeared so colourless and ordinary, standing next to her vibrant mother) and Holly, who seemed to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after all that yelling. She could be a drama queen.

  'Everything okay?' said Erika.

  'Oh, yes, all good,' said Tiffany. 'Holly just had a bump playing tennis on the Wii.'

  'Did a tennis ball hit your nose?' Oliver asked Holly. It was like the whole shape and texture of his face changed when he spoke to children, as if he stopped clenching his teeth or something.

  'Uh, Oliver, the tennis balls are not technically "real",' said Holly. She held up two fingers on each hand to place inverted commas around the word 'real'.

  Oliver slapped the side of his head. 'Silly me.'

  'Ruby's head went wham! against my nose.' Holly rubbed her nose resentfully, remembering. 'She has a super-hard head.'

  'Ouch,' said Oliver.

  'Dakota is going to take Holly to show her the little house where Barney sleeps,' said Tiffany.

  'I want a puppy for my birthday,' said Holly. 'Exactly like Barney.'

  'We'll give you Barney!' said Vid. 'He is very naughty.'

  'Really?' said Holly. 'Can I have him?'

  'No,' said Dakota. 'That's just my dad being silly.'

  'Oh,' said Holly, and she threw Vid a baleful look.

  Maybe I'll get her a puppy for her birthday, thought Erika. She'd tie a red ribbon around its collar and Holly would throw her arms around her, and Clementine would smile indulgently and fondly. (Was she drunk? Her thoughts seemed to keep skidding off in all kinds of hysterical directions.)

  'Oh dear, oh well, I'll let your mum and dad deal with that!' said Tiffany. She lifted her T-shirt and scratched her flat, tan stomach. 'And then we should all move out to the cabana, don't you think, Vid? It's too nice to be inside. Is that strudel finally ready?'