Truly Madly Guilty

  The problem was that her mother now had too much time and too much money. When Erika was growing up her mother had had her full-time nursing job as well as the occasional cheques Erika's father sent from his new home in the UK, where he lived with his replacement, upgraded family. So they'd had money, but there was still a ceiling to how much new stuff she could accumulate, although Sylvia had given it a red-hot go. However, when Erika's grandmother had died, leaving a considerable sum of money to Sylvia, her mother's hoarding had been given a whole new financial boost. Thanks, Grandma.

  And of course, now there was online shopping too. Her mother had learned how to use a computer, and she managed to keep it plugged in and accessible, and because Erika had arranged for all her bills to be paid by direct debit, the electricity never got turned off like it had when Erika was growing up and the paper bills used to vanish into the abyss.

  If the front lawn looked like this, the inside of the house would be monstrous. Her heart galloped. It was as though she had the sole responsibility of rescuing someone by lifting something impossibly, incomprehensibly heavy: a train, a building. Of course it couldn't be done. Not on her own. Not in this rain. And not without Oliver by her side: methodical and unemotional, looking for solutions, speaking to her mother in his reasonable let's-work-our-way-through-this voice.

  Oliver didn't take every object personally, the way Erika did. To Erika, every piece of junk represented a choice her mother had made of an object over her. Her mother loved random, crappy objects more than she loved her daughter. She must, because she fought for them, she screamed for them, and she was fully prepared to bury her only daughter in them, and so each time Erika picked up an object it was with a wordless cry of despair: You choose this over me! She should have waited until he was better. Or she should have at least taken her anxiety medication - that's why she'd been prescribed the tablets, to help her get through exactly this sort of moment - but she hadn't taken one since the day of the barbeque. She hadn't even looked at the box. She couldn't risk more of those terrifying memory gaps.

  'Erika! I'm so happy to see you! Oh! Sorry to startle you like that!'

  It was the woman who had been living next door to her mother for the last five years. Erika's mother had adored this woman for quite a long time, long for her, anyway, maybe six months, before, predictably, she'd committed some sin, and gone from a 'really quite extraordinary person' to 'that woman'.

  'Hi,' said Erika. She couldn't remember the woman's name. She didn't want to remember her name. It would only increase her sense of responsibility.

  'Isn't the weather terrible,' said the woman. 'It's just torrential!'

  Why did people feel the need to comment on the rain, when they had absolutely nothing of value to add to the conversation?

  'Torrential,' agreed Erika. 'A veritable downpour of cats and dogs!'

  'Um, yes. So I was pleased to see you here actually,' said the woman. She held a child's tiny transparent umbrella tightly over her head. The rest of her was getting wet. She shot a pained look at Erika's mother's front yard. 'I, ah, just wanted to let you know that we're putting our house on the market.'

  'Ah,' said Erika. Her jaw clicked as her back teeth began to grind. It would be so much easier if this were one of the horrible neighbours, like the couple with the Jesus Loves You sign in their window, who made regular complaints about the state of Sylvia's house to the Department of Community Services, or the snooty ones across the road, who made aggressive legal threats. But this woman was so nice and non-confrontational. Michelle. Dammit. She'd accidentally remembered her name.

  Michelle clasped her hands together as if to beg. 'So, I know your mother has ... um, difficulties, please know I do understand, I have a close family member with mental health issues, oh gosh, I hope this isn't offending you, it's just that -'

  Erika took a breath. 'It's fine,' she said. 'I understand. You're saying the state of my mother's house will affect the value of your property.'

  'By maybe a hundred thousand dollars,' said Michelle pleadingly. 'According to the agent.'

  The agent was being conservative. By Erika's calculations the loss could be much higher. No one wants to buy a house in a nice middle-class suburb next door to a junkyard.

  'I'll get it fixed,' said Erika.

  You are not responsible for your parents' living conditions. That's what the children of hoarders were told, but how could she not feel responsible when she was this poor woman's only hope? Someone's financial outcome depended on Erika stepping up, and she took financial outcomes seriously. Of course she was responsible. She saw one of the blinds at her mother's window twitch. She'd be inside, peering out, muttering to herself.

  'I know it's hard,' said Michelle. 'I know it's an illness. I've seen the TV shows.'

  Oh, for God's sake. The TV shows. Always with the TV shows. Everyone was an expert after half an hour of neatly packaged television: the drama of the disgusting rubbish, the clever counsellor, the clean-up, the happy hoarder seeing her floor for the first time in years ... and fixed! They all lived happily ever after, when in fact cleaning away the rubbish was only alleviating the symptoms, not curing the illness.

  Years ago, Erika had still had hopes of a cure. If she could get her mother to see a professional. There was medication. There was cognitive behavioural therapy. Talk therapy. If only Sylvia could talk to someone about the day Erika's dad had left and how it had triggered some latent madness. Sylvia had always been a compulsive shopper, a bright, beautiful, nutty personality, a real character, a party girl, but she'd stayed on the right side of crazy until she'd read that little two-word note he left on the fridge: Sorry Sylvia. No mention of Erika. He'd never found her particularly relevant. And that's when it had begun. That very day Sylvia had gone out shopping and come home laden with bags. By Christmas the purple flowered carpet in the living room had vanished beneath the first layer of stuff, and Erika had never seen it again. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of the outline of a petal and it was like coming across an ancient relic. To think that she had once lived in a normal house.

  She accepted now that there would be no cure. There would be no end until the day Sylvia died. In the meantime Erika would keep battling the symptoms.

  'So I'd better -' Erika gestured with her mops towards the house.

  'I got on well with your mum when we first moved in,' said Michelle. 'But then it was like I offended her. I was never sure exactly what I did.'

  'You did nothing,' said Erika. 'That's just what my mother does. It's part of the illness.'

  'Right,' said Michelle. 'Well ... thank you.' She smiled apologetically and fluttered her fingers in a 'bye-bye' way at Erika. Far too nice for her own good.

  As soon as Erika reached her mother's front porch, the front door opened.

  'Quick! Get inside!' Her mother was wild-eyed, as if they were under attack. 'What were you talking to her for?'

  Erika turned sideways to come in. Sometimes when she went to other people's places, she automatically turned sideways to enter the front door, forgetting that most people had doors that opened the full way.

  She inched her way past the towers of magazines and books and newspapers, the open cardboard boxes containing random junk, the bookshelf filled with kitchen crockery, the unplugged washing machine with the lid up, the ubiquitous bulging plastic rubbish bags, the knick-knacks, the vases, the shoes, the brooms. It was always ironic to see the brooms, because there was never any floor free to sweep.

  'What are you doing here?' said her mother. 'I thought this was against the "rules".' She made quotation marks with her fingers around the word 'rules'. It made Erika think of Holly.

  'Mum, what are you wearing?' sighed Erika. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

  Her mother wore what appeared to be a brand new blue sequinned flapper-style dress that was too big for her thin frame and a feathered headband that sat low on her forehead, so that she had to peer up to keep it from slipping into her eyes. She posed like a star
on the red carpet, one hand on her thrust-forward hip. 'Isn't it beautiful? I got it online, you'd be proud of me, it was on special! I've been invited to a party. A Great Gatsby party!'

  'What party?' Erika walked down the hallway towards the living room, studying the house. No worse than usual. The normal fire hazards everywhere, but she couldn't smell anything rotten or decaying. Perhaps if she concentrated on the front yard today? If the rain slowed to a drizzle?

  'It's a sixtieth birthday party,' said her mother. 'I'm so looking forward to it! How are you, darling? You look a bit washed out. I wish you wouldn't turn up with equipment as if I were a job you had to do.'

  'You are a job I have to do,' said Erika.

  'Well, that's just silly. I'd rather just have a chat with you and hear what you've been up to. If only I'd known you were coming I would have baked something from that new recipe book, the one I was telling you about when you got so grumpy the other day -'

  'Yes, but who is turning sixty?' asked Erika. It seemed unlikely that her mother would be invited to a party. Since she'd retired from her job at the nursing home, she'd lost touch with her friends, even the most determined, patient ones, or else she'd discarded them. Her mother didn't hoard friends.

  Erika walked into the kitchen and her heart sank. The front yard would have to wait. It had to be the kitchen today. There were paper plates sitting on top of the hotplates. Half-empty food containers with green mould. She wasn't meant to be here for another two weeks, and if it wasn't for the problem with the front yard, she wouldn't be seeing this, but now that she had seen it, it was impossible to walk away. It was a health hazard. It was an affront to human decency. She put down her buckets and pulled out the packet of disposable gloves.

  'Felicity Hogan is turning sixty,' sighed her mother, with a little flare of the nostrils on the word 'Felicity' as though Erika was spoiling her pleasure in the party by reminding her who was hosting it. 'Oh, look at you, now you're putting on gloves as if you're about to do an operation.'

  'Mum,' said Erika. 'Felicity turned sixty last year. No, actually, it was the year before. You didn't go to the party. I remember you said it was tacky having a Great Gatsby party.'

  'What?' Her mother's face fell, and she pushed the headband further up her forehead so that her hair stuck up around it, making her look like an unhinged tennis player. 'You think you're always so clever and right but you're wrong, Erika!' The disappointment turned her voice strident. Those jagged edges were always there beneath the fluffy blanket of her maternal love. 'Let me get the invitation for you! Why would I have an invitation for a party that happened two years ago, answer me that, Miss Smarty-pants?'

  Erika laughed bitterly. 'Are you joking? Are you serious? Because, Mum, you don't throw anything out!'

  Her mother tore off her headband and dropped it. Her tone changed. 'I am aware that I have a problem, Erika, do you think I'm not aware of it? I'm not stupid. Do you think I wouldn't like a bigger, nicer house with enough storage and linen cupboards and things so I could get on top of things? If your father hadn't left us, I could have stayed at home all day and kept house, like your precious Clementine's mother, like Pam, oh-I'm-such-a-perfect-mother Pam, with my rich husband and my perfect house.'

  'Pam worked,' said Erika shortly. She tore a rubbish bag off the roll and began to dump plastic food containers inside it. 'She was a social worker, remember?'

  'A part-time social worker. And of course I remember. How could I forget? You were her little social work project on the side. She made Clementine be your friend. She probably gave her a little gold star sticker each time you came to play.'

  It didn't even hurt. Did her mother think it was an earth-shattering revelation?

  'Yep,' said Erika. 'Pam knew my home situation was not ideal.'

  'Your home situation wasn't "ideal". How melodramatic. I tried my best! I put food on the table! Clothes on your back!'

  'We didn't have hot water for a year,' said Erika. 'Not because we couldn't afford it but because you were too ashamed to let anyone in to repair the water heater.'

  'I was not ashamed!' her mother yelled with such force the tendons on her neck stood out and her face turned blood-red.

  'You should have been,' said Erika evenly. At times like this she felt herself become eerily calm; it would be hours or even days later, when she was alone, in the car or the shower, that she'd find herself screaming back something in response.

  'I will admit that I sometimes got a teeny bit paranoid that they might take you away,' said her mother. She blinked pitifully at Erika. 'I always thought that Pam might get it into that do-gooder, lefty head of hers to complain to the Department of Community Services that I wasn't polishing my skirting boards or whatever.'

  'Skirting boards! When have you even seen the skirting boards in this house?' said Erika.

  Her mother laughed merrily as if it was all in good fun. Erika's mother had such a pretty laugh, like a girl at a ball.

  ('Could she be bipolar?' Oliver asked, when he first witnessed his mother-in-law's extraordinary ability to flip her temper on and off like a switch, but Erika told him that she suspected people with bipolar disorder didn't decide on their behaviour; her mother was mad, of course she was mad, but she chose exactly when and how to be mad.)

  'We had rats,' said Erika. 'No one was concerned about the skirting boards being clean.'

  'Rats?' said her mother. 'Come on. We never had rats. Maybe a mouse. A dear little mouse.'

  They did have rats. Or rodents of some sort, anyway. They'd die, and the stink would be terrible, unbearable, but they wouldn't be able to find them in the cities of stuff that filled each room. They just had to wait it out. The stink would reach its peak and then finally fade. Except it never really faded. The stink leached into Erika.

  'Also, Clementine's father wasn't rich,' she told her mother. 'He was just an ordinary father with an ordinary job.'

  'Something to do with construction, wasn't it?' said her mother with the chatty charm of a guest at a cocktail party.

  'He worked for an engineering firm,' said Erika. She didn't really know what Clementine's father's job had involved. He was retired now, and had apparently taken up French cooking, and was very good at it.

  Once, when Erika was fourteen and her mother was at work, Clementine's father drove over and installed a lock on her bedroom door for her so that she could keep her room free of her mother's junk. It was his idea. He hadn't said a single word about the state of Erika's home. When he'd finished the job, he'd picked up his toolbox, handed her the precious key, and put one hand briefly on her shoulder. His silence had been a revelation to Erika, who had grown up surrounded not just by physical items, but by words: a swirling deluge of cruel, kind, soft, shrill words.

  That was Erika's experience of fatherhood: the solid, silent weight of someone else's dad's hand on her shoulder. That was the sort of father Oliver would be. He'd give his love with simple, practical actions, not words.

  'Well, he might not have been rich, but Pam wasn't a single mother, was she? She had support! I had no support. I was on my own. You have no idea. You wait until you have children of your own!'

  Erika continued to mechanically fill her bag of rubbish, but she felt an alert stillness come over her, as though she were an animal sensing a predator. Years ago, when Erika had told her mother that she never wanted to have children, her mother had said with flippant cruelty: 'Yes, I really can't see you as a mother.'

  Of course, she hadn't told her about her attempts to become pregnant. The thought had never crossed her mind.

  'Oh, but wait, you're not going to have children of your own, are you?' Her mother shot her a triumphant look. 'You don't want children because you're too busy with your important career! So bad luck to me. I don't get to be a grandmother.' It was like the thought had just occurred to her, and now that it had, she needed to wallow in the terrible injustice of it. 'I just have to put up with that, don't I? Everyone else gets grandchildren, but not me, my
daughter is such an important career woman with her important job in the city and her - hey!' Her mother grabbed her arm. 'What are you doing? Don't throw that out!'

  'What?' Erika looked at the rubbish in her gloved hand: a banana skin, a half-eaten tuna sandwich, a soggy paper towel.

  Her mother extracted a tiny grease-stained piece of notepaper from her hand. 'There! That! I'd written down something important on that! It was the name of a book, I think, or a DVD maybe, I was listening to the radio and I thought, I must write that down!' She held it up to the light and peered at it. 'Now look what you've gone and done, I can't even read it!'

  Erika said nothing.

  She had a policy of passive resistance now. She never argued back. Not since the day she'd found herself engaged in a ludicrous ten-minute tug-of-war over a broken-stringed tennis racquet, while her mother screamed, 'But I'm selling it on the eBay!' She lost in the end, of course. The tennis racquet stayed and it never got sold on eBay. Her mother didn't know how to sell something on eBay.

  Her mother brandished the slip of paper at her. 'You march on in here, Miss Know-it-all, and start messing around with my things, thinking you're doing me some great favour, and all you do is make things worse! It's lucky you don't want children! You'd just throw away their toys, wouldn't you? Take their precious little things and toss them in the bin! What a wonderful mother you'd be!'

  Erika turned away. She lifted the swollen rubbish bag up by the ends and banged it against the floor. She double-knotted the ends and carried it to the back door.

  She thought of Clementine's phone call: 'I want to help you have a baby.' The strange pitch of her voice. The thing was, Clementine really did want to help her have a baby now. That's what accounted for the strange pitch of her voice. She wanted to do this badly. This was her opportunity for instant redemption. She thought of how Oliver's face would be transformed by hope when she told him. Should she take Clementine's charity even if it was given for the wrong reason? End justifies the means and all that?

  Did she even want a baby anymore?

  She shifted the rubbish bag into her left hand so she could open the back door and at that moment the rubbish bag split and oozed its contents: a thick, endless, inexorable discharge.