Truly Madly Guilty

  'Not those ones, Martin.' Pam bustled into the kitchen. 'We want the nice ones.' She took the mugs off him and swiftly put them away. 'Who isn't right in the head?'

  'Sam,' said Clementine.

  'I've been saying that for weeks,' said Pam.

  chapter seventy

  'Hello again.'

  Tiffany lifted her umbrella to see who had spoken. She was walking through the quadrangle towards the Saint Anastasias shop to buy Dakota's uniform for next year.

  It was Andrew's wife again. Of course it was. Murphy's Law would ensure that Tiffany ran into this woman and/or her husband every time she entered the school and at every school event until Dakota finished high school. It wasn't going to be at all uncomfortable. No! It was going to be freaking great. Cara and Dakota would become best friends. They'd invite them over for a barbeque. 'Where did you guys meet?' the nice wife would innocently ask, and her husband would clutch his chest and drop dead of a heart attack (handy!). Except then Oliver would rush over from next door and revive him.

  'Tiffany, right? I'm Lisa,' said Andrew's wife. She tilted back her own battered umbrella to reveal her face. There were soft pink pouches under her eyes. One of the metal spokes of her umbrella had broken free of the fabric and was directed at her face like a weapon. 'You probably don't remember me. I sat next to you at the Information Morning.'

  'I remember. How are you?' said Tiffany.

  'Not great. This constant rain is doing my head in,' said Lisa. She surveyed Tiffany. 'You look well. Do you take some sort of secret supplement?'

  'Caffeine?' said Tiffany.

  'Seriously, it's a pleasure to look at you.'

  Tiffany laughed uneasily. Was she about to say, 'I understand my husband used to pay good money just to look at you'?

  'Are you buying Cara's school uniform too?' said Tiffany. She knew that the uniform shop, run by 'our lovely volunteers', opened for just forty-five minutes at this time and 'strictly no longer' and it was 'first in, best dressed (literally!)'.

  Would it seem odd that she remembered Lisa's daughter's name? Suspicious?

  'Actually, I'd already bought her uniform but I'm bringing it back,' said Lisa. 'We're moving to Dubai for the next five years, so Cara won't be attending Saint Anastasias after all.'

  'Oh, well that's ...' Tiffany tried to think of a more appropriate way to end the sentence rather than 'wonderful news', although paradoxically, irrationally, she found herself feeling almost disappointed. She liked Lisa. It's a pleasure to look at you. Who actually said that? It was nice.

  'How do you feel about that?' she said.

  'I'm trying to feel okay about it,' said Lisa. 'We did the expat thing when the kids were little and it was all fine, but I just don't think I have the energy to do it again. We're very settled in Sydney and this just came out of the blue. It happened on Wednesday, the same day as the Information Morning, actually ... My husband hears about some marvellous, incredible opportunity that he can't pass up or ... or some bullshit.' She put her hand to her mouth. 'Probably shouldn't swear on Catholic school grounds.' She looked up. 'God won't like it.'

  'Don't you have a say in the matter?' said Tiffany.

  Lisa raised a hand in defeat. 'Some battles can't be won and this is one of them. I don't think it rains much in Dubai. So that's something.' She suddenly thrust out the bag she held in her hand. 'Here. Take it. Got the lot there. Our kids looked about the same size. I can't be bothered going through the rigmarole of getting my money back. Roxanne Silverman runs the uniform shop. She always asks me if I've lost weight, which is her passive aggressive way of saying I need to lose weight.'

  Tiffany took the bag unwillingly. 'I'll pay you.'

  'Nope!' said Lisa. 'Take it. I insist. Apparently we can afford to lose all those non-refundable deposits on school fees.'

  'Please,' said Tiffany. 'Please let me give you ...' She put the bag at her feet and began trying to get her wallet out of her handbag while still holding her umbrella.

  'I'm off. You take care,' said Lisa. She turned on her heel and walked away, her umbrella blowing sideways.

  'Well, thank you!' called out Tiffany.

  Lisa raised her umbrella in acknowledgement and kept walking.

  Tiffany watched her go. A bell rang and a babble of girlish voices rose from the nearest building like a flock of seagulls. Seagulls with nice private schoolgirl accents.

  She thought about Lisa's husband.

  Lisa's husband was a polite, softly spoken man. He had been interested in Tiffany's degree. He'd liked her schoolgirl outfit best: a green and white checked uniform not dissimilar to the one still in its cellophane wrapper in the bag she now held; the one his daughter would have worn if she'd attended this school. Lisa's husband drank Baileys and milk. A girly drink, she used to tease him about it. Lisa's husband used to slip a huge wodge of tipping dollars into her garter in one go, instead of making her work for them, or worse, teasing her, as if the tipping dollars were dog biscuits. Fuck that.

  Lisa's husband had taken her out a few times after work. Once he'd come to see her perform in the day and after she finished work they couldn't find anywhere open for lunch so he'd booked a hotel room just so they could order room service. It had been a revelation to Tiffany: how you could use money to manipulate your world. When things went wrong you just waved your credit card like a magic wand. After lunch he'd gone back to work and she'd had a free hotel in the city for the night. She'd invited some of her uni friends over to stay. None of them believed she hadn't slept with him, but she hadn't. They'd just eaten club sandwiches and watched a movie. He had been a friend. She'd been like his hairdresser, except she hadn't cut his hair, she'd danced for him. Their relationship had felt wholesome.

  It was maybe a whole year after that, after she'd given him a private show, that Lisa's husband had asked Tiffany, in his polite, reticent way, if she'd ever seen that movie, Indecent Proposal? The one with Robert Redford and Demi Moore? The one where Robert Redford paid some obscene amount to sleep with Demi Moore?

  Tiffany had seen the movie. She understood the question.

  'One hundred thousand dollars,' she'd told him, before he'd even asked.

  She had pitched it low enough to be a possibility, but high enough so it was still a joke, a dare, a fantasy, and it didn't make her a hooker.

  He hadn't hesitated. He'd said, 'Will you take a cheque?' It was a company cheque, from 'Something-or-other Holdings', and it was enough for the deposit on the apartment she'd bought at the auction where she'd met Vid. It had laid the foundation of her financial fortress.

  She'd always told Vid that she'd never slept with any of her clients - she was a dancer, not a hooker - and it still felt true. What happened with Andrew was a one-off with a wealthy, older friend. A joke. A dare. A fun idea. She might have done it for the cost of two drinks if she'd met him in a bar and he'd made her laugh. Even after she had slept with him she'd still felt like their relationship had a kind of wholesomeness to it. They had straightforward, missionary-position sex with a condom. She had a dirtier relationship with Vid.

  She remembered that afterwards, while they were in bed together, Andrew had begun to talk about a one-bedroom apartment he owned in the city, something about a trust, something about tax advantages. It took her a while to catch on that he was offering her an 'opportunity'; a mutually beneficial, long-term arrangement. She had politely declined. He'd said to let him know if she ever wanted to reconsider.

  About six months later, he came into the club and booked her for a private show. He told her he was moving the family overseas for a year. It wasn't long after that Tiffany finished her degree, stopped dancing and got her first full-time job.

  In all her dealings with Andrew, she'd never thought of his wife. 'What about the wives?' Clementine had said in the car that night. 'The wives stuck at home with the kids.'

  Tiffany had answered with a shrug. The faceless middle-aged wives had never been her responsibility. She wished them no ill. She owed them
no duty of care. They probably didn't have great bodies, but they had great credit cards.

  Her deal with Andrew was the only secret she'd ever kept from Vid. She wasn't ashamed, and in all honesty she wasn't even sure it was necessary, but every time over the years when she'd gone to open her mouth and share her story her instincts had screamed: Shut the hell up. Even her free-spirited Vid had his boundaries, and she didn't want to find out what they were by crossing them.

  So, no, she'd never felt shame about what had happened with Andrew, except for right now, as she stood in the rain holding an environmentally friendly bag heavy with free expensive school uniforms, watching his tired, disappointed, chunky-around-the-middle wife head back through the rain to her black four-wheel drive Porsche, because maybe the timing of this unexpected move to Dubai was a wonderful coincidence, but then again, maybe it wasn't.

  chapter seventy-one

  It was because of the rain.

  If only the rain had stopped, then Erika wouldn't be standing here right now on a Saturday morning in her living room with the sound of her heart thumping in her ears, feeling like she'd been arrested, except the policeman was her own husband.

  Oliver didn't really look like a policeman. He looked sad and confused. She wondered if that was the same expression he'd got on his face as a child when he found the bottles of vodka and gin his parents had hidden around the house, before he stopped believing their excited promises about giving up. (They still made extravagant promises. 'We're doing Dry July!' 'We're doing Sober November!')

  It had happened when she was out renewing her licence. She'd been in a good mood when she came home. She liked starting her weekend by ticking off those kind of day-to-day administrative tasks her mother had so often left undone: bills left unpaid, disconnection notices ignored, unsigned permission slips immediately lost in the maelstrom.

  But then Oliver met her at the door. 'We've got a leak,' he said. 'A roof leak. In the storeroom.'

  They had a small storeroom where they kept their suitcases and camping gear and skis.

  'Well, that's not the end of the world, is it?' she asked, but her heart started to beat double-time. She had an inkling.

  Oliver being Oliver, he'd got right onto it and had begun moving things into the hallway, and he'd come upon this old locked suitcase under a blanket. The suitcase was full, and he couldn't think what would be in there. It only took him a second to find the only unmarked key in the drawer where they kept the keys.

  See. If she really was her mother's daughter, he would never have found the key.

  'So I opened it,' he said, and then he took her gently by the hand and led her into the dining room where he'd laid out the entire contents of the suitcase in orderly rows, as if he were an investigator laying out evidence from a crime scene. Exhibit one. Exhibit two.

  'It's just a silly habit,' she said defensively, and to her horror she felt an expression like her mother's creep across her face: a furtive, sneaky look. 'It's not hoarding if that's what you're thinking.'

  'At first it just seemed like random stuff,' said Oliver. 'But then I recognised Ruby's sneaker.' He lifted up the runner and banged it against the palm of his hand so that the coloured lights flashed. 'And I remembered how Clementine and Sam said they'd lost one of her flashing shoes. It's Ruby's shoe, isn't it?'

  Erika nodded, unable to speak.

  'And this bracelet.' He held up the chain. 'It's Clementine's, right? It's the one you bought for her in Greece.'

  'Yes,' said Erika. She felt a hot, itchy flush creep up her neck as if she were having an allergic reaction. 'She didn't like it. I could tell she didn't like it.'

  'Everything here belongs to Clementine, doesn't it?' He picked up a pair of scissors. They were Clementine's grandmother's pearl-handled scissors. Erika couldn't even remember the day she'd taken them.

  She pressed her finger to Holly's long-sleeved T-shirt with the strawberry on the front. Next to it was a tote bag with a picture of a treble clef: Clementine's first boyfriend, the French horn player, had given it to her for her twentieth birthday.

  'Why?' said Oliver. 'Can you tell me why?'

  'It's just a habit,' said Erika. She had no words to explain why. 'A sort of ... um, compulsion. There's nothing of actual value there.'

  Compulsion: one of those solid, respectable, psychological-sounding words to nicely wrap the truth: she was as mad as a hatter, as crazy as a bedbug.

  Oh, she'd slept with enough crazy bedbugs in her time!

  She scratched the side of her neck.

  'Don't make me throw it away,' she said suddenly.

  'Throw it away?' said Oliver. 'Are you kidding? You have to give it all back! You have to tell her that you've been ... what? Pilfering her stuff? Is that what it is? Are you a kleptomaniac? Do you ... dear God, Erika, do you shoplift?'

  'Of course I don't shoplift!' She would never do anything illegal.

  'Clementine must think she's going mad.'

  'Well, she really needs to be tidier, more organised,' began Erika, but for some reason that really tipped Oliver over a precipice she hadn't realised he was balancing upon.

  'What in God's name are you talking about? She needs a friend who doesn't steal her stuff!' shouted Oliver. He actually shouted. He'd never shouted at her before. He'd always been on her side.

  She understood, of course, that what she did wasn't perhaps ordinary. It was a strange, unsavoury habit, like gnawing her cuticles or picking her nose, and she knew she needed to keep it at a manageable level, but part of her had always assumed that Oliver would somehow understand, or at least accept it, the way he'd accepted everything else about her. He'd seen her mother's house and he still loved her. He never criticised her the way she knew some husbands criticised tiny things about their wives. 'The woman is incapable of closing a cupboard door,' Sam would say about Clementine. Oliver was too loyal to ever say anything like that about Erika in public, but right now he didn't just look mildly aggravated, he looked truly appalled.

  The room went blurry as Erika's eyes filled with tears. He was going to leave her. She'd tried to keep her craziness confined to just one small suitcase, but deep down she'd always suspected that his leaving one day was a foregone conclusion, and now the sight of those items laid out in all their useless, shabby glory confirmed it: She was her mother.

  She felt a burst of fury and for some reason it was directed at Clementine.

  'Yeah, well, she's not that great. Clementine isn't that great,' she said shakily, idiotically, childishly, but she couldn't seem to quell the flood of words. 'You should have heard the things I heard her say to Sam at the barbeque. When I went upstairs! She was talking about how she felt "repulsed" at the idea of donating her eggs to us. That's the word she used. Repulsed.'

  Oliver didn't look at her. He picked up an ice-cream scoop from the table and fiddled with the mechanism. It had a picture of a polar bear on the handle. Erika had put it in her handbag one hot day last summer, after they'd had ice-creams in the backyard at Clementine's house, after she'd performed at Symphony Under the Stars. Erika had just got the call about another unsuccessful IVF round, but it was nothing to do with the IVF. She'd taken the first item for her collection, a shell necklace Clementine had brought back from a holiday to Fiji, when she was only thirteen years old. Where was it? There it was. Erika had to pull back her own right arm because she so badly wanted to reach over and feel its chunky, rough-edged texture in the palm of her hand.

  'Why didn't you tell me?' he said.

  'About this? Because I know it's weird and wrong and -'

  'No. Why didn't you tell me what you overheard Clementine say?'

  'I don't know.' She paused. 'I guess I felt embarrassed ... I didn't want you to know that my best friend feels that way about me.'

  Oliver put down the ice-cream scoop. There was an infinitesimal softening around his mouth, but it was enough to make Erika's legs go weak and wobbly with relief. She pulled out a chair and sat down and looked up at him, st
udying the faint stubble along his jawline. She remembered when they'd first sat down together to do the draw for the squash comp all those years ago. He was the clean-shaven nerd with the glasses and the pin-striped shirt frowning over the spreadsheet, taking it far too seriously, just like her, wanting it done right and done fairly. She'd looked at the stubble along his jawline, and the thought had crossed her mind, He looks like Clark Kent, but maybe he's really Superman.

  Oliver sat down at the table in front of her, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  'I'm your best friend, Erika,' he said sadly. 'Don't you know that?'

  chapter seventy-two

  'I'm sorry about dinner at Mum and Dad's the other night,' said Clementine as she handed Erika her cup of coffee. They were in Clementine's living room with its original (but non-working) fireplace, stained-glass porthole windows and wide floorboards. When she and Sam had first seen this room they'd exchanged glinting looks of satisfaction behind the real estate agent's back. This room had character, and it was just so 'them'. (In other words, the opposite of the 'modern, sterile and soulless' sort of place that Erika and Oliver went for; Clementine was beginning to wonder if her entire personality was a fabrication, nothing more than a response to Erika's personality. You are like this, so therefore I am like that.)

  Right now the living room seemed dowdy and dark and very damp. She sniffed. 'Can you smell the damp? We've got mould popping up everywhere. Revolting. If it doesn't stop raining soon I don't know what we'll do.'

  Erika took the cup of coffee and held it in both hands as though to warm herself.

  'Are you cold?' Clementine half-rose. 'I could -'

  'I'm fine,' said Erika shortly.

  Clementine sank back in her seat. 'Remember when we bought this place and the building report said there was a problem with rising damp and you said we should really think twice about it, and I was all: Who cares about rising damp? Well, you were right. It's really bad. We've got to get it fixed. I got a quote from ...'

  She stopped. She was boring herself so much she couldn't even be bothered to finish the sentence. Anyway, it was all a transparent attempt at exoneration. You saved my child's life, while all I've ever done is complain about you, you are all that is good, I am all that is bad, but surely I get extra credit points for all this self-flagellation, a reduced sentence for pleading guilty?