Truly Madly Guilty

  '... with a beef and goats' cheese parfait!' The waiter finished his recital in the jubilant rush of a carol singer chorusing, and a partridge in a pear tree!

  'All sounds delicious,' said Sam.

  'Do you want me to go back over anything?' said the waiter.

  'Absolutely not,' said Sam, and Clementine nearly laughed out loud. He'd always been good at delivering a dry, straight-faced line.

  'Right. So, you have a think, and in the meantime I'll just check on your -' The waiter looked at Clementine.

  'Shiraz,' supplied Clementine. 'Pepper Tree shiraz.'

  'Too easy.' The waiter snapped his fingers, jaunty with relief now that he'd got through the specials.

  'So,' said Sam, after the waiter had gone.

  'So,' said Clementine.

  'What are you having?' Sam lifted the menu in front of him like a newspaper.

  'Not sure,' said Clementine, picking up her own menu. 'It all looks good.'

  She needed to make a joke. A joke about the waiter. The specials. The non-arrival of the drinks. The girl behind the bar still obliviously polishing glasses. There was so much potential material. For a moment, it felt as though everything rested on this. If she could just make the right joke right now she would save the night, save their marriage. Something about the girl taking a Buddhist approach to her job? Mindfully polishing her wineglasses? If only she'd mindfully pour their drinks? Dear God, when did she become the sort of person who mentally rehearsed flippant remarks?

  Someone laughed in the restaurant. A man's laugh. A deep, distinctive baritone laugh.

  Clementine's heart lurched. Sam's head jerked up from the menu.

  Not Vid. Not here. Not tonight.

  chapter fifteen There it was again. Inappropriately loud for this soft-carpeted place.

  Clementine swung her head to watch three men making their way through the restaurant. They all bore a superficial resemblance to Vid: the big, bullet heads, giant shoulders, proud stomachs and that European way of walking, not quite a swagger.

  But none of them was Vid.

  Clementine exhaled. The man laughed again, but it didn't have the particular tone or depth of Vid's laugh at all.

  She turned back to Sam. He had closed his menu and let it fall back against his chest.

  'I thought it was Vid,' he said. 'It sounded exactly like him.'

  'I know,' said Clementine. 'I thought it was him too.'

  'Jesus. I just didn't want to see him.' He took the menu and placed it back on the table. He pressed his hand to his collarbone. 'I thought I was going to have a heart attack.'

  'I know,' said Clementine again. 'Me too.'

  Sam leaned forward, his elbows on the table. 'It just brought it all back.' He sounded close to tears. 'Just seeing his face would -'

  'The Margaret River shiraz!'

  Their young waiter triumphantly presented the bottle like a prize.

  It was the wrong wine but Clementine couldn't bear to see his face crumple. 'That's it!' she said in a 'well done you!' tone.

  The waiter poured them overly generous glasses of wine, one hand behind his back. Red droplets stained the crisp white tablecloth. It might have been safer for him to use two hands.

  'Are you ready to order?' the waiter beamed at them, flushed with success.

  'Just a few more minutes,' said Clementine.

  'Of course! Too easy!' The waiter backed away.

  Sam lifted his glass. His hand shook.

  'I thought I saw Vid in the audience at the symphony the other night,' said Clementine. 'It gave me such a shock, I forgot to come in. It's lucky Ainsley was my stand partner.'

  Sam gulped a large mouthful of wine. He wiped the back of his hand across his lips. 'So you didn't want to see him?' he said roughly.

  'Well of course I didn't want to see him. It would have been ...' Clementine couldn't come up with the right word. She lifted her own glass. There was no tremor in her hand. She'd learned to control a shaking bow arm without beta-blockers, even while her heart thumped with excruciating stage fright.

  Sam grunted. He re-opened his menu but she could tell he wasn't reading it. He was busy reassembling himself, smoothing out his face, becoming bland again.

  She couldn't bear it. She wanted him to crack again.

  'Although, actually, Erika mentioned the other day that Vid is keen to see us,' said Clementine. She didn't want yet another generic conversation about the view and the menu and the weather. A conversation like elevator music.

  Sam glanced up at her, but his face was blank, his eyes were closed windows. She waited. There was that strange little pause before he answered. It was like a mechanical glitch. Nobody but her seemed to have noticed that Sam's timing was off when he spoke these days.

  'Well, I'm sure we probably will run into him some time,' he said. His eyes returned to the menu. 'I think I'll have the chicken risotto.'

  She couldn't bear it.

  'Actually, "desperate" was the word Erika used,' she said.

  His mouth twisted. 'Yeah, well, he's probably desperate to see you.'

  'I mean it's inevitable that we'll run into them again, isn't it?'

  'I don't see why,' said Sam.

  'When we're visiting Erika and Oliver? We can't avoid driving down their street again.'

  Although perhaps that's exactly what Sam intended. Maybe it was what she intended too. They could still see Erika and Oliver without going anywhere near their house. It would just be a matter of making the right excuse, deftly side-stepping Erika's invitations. They were never that keen on them in the first place.

  She remembered the first time she'd seen Erika and Oliver's new house. 'We're kind of dwarfed by our neighbours,' Erika had said with a doubtful grimace at the castle-like mansion with its tizzy curls and curlicues. It looked especially over the top compared to Erika and Oliver's benign, beige bungalow: a safe, personality-less house that was so very them. Oh, but they couldn't laugh at Erika and Oliver like that anymore, could they? Their relationship had changed forever that day. The power balance had shifted. Clementine and Sam could never again make their superior 'we're so easygoing, they're so uptight' digs.

  Sam placed his menu carefully on the edge of the table. He readjusted the placement of his mobile phone.

  'Let's talk about something more pleasant,' he said with the social smile of a stranger.

  'I mean, it wasn't their fault,' she said. Her voice was thick with inappropriate emotion. She saw him flinch. His colour rose.

  'Let's talk about something else,' repeated Sam. 'What are you having?'

  'I'm not actually that hungry,' said Clementine.

  'Good,' said Sam. 'Neither am I.' He looked businesslike. 'Shall we just go?'

  Clementine put her menu on top of his and squared up the corners. 'Fine.'

  She lifted her glass. 'So much for date night.'

  'So much for date night,' agreed Sam contemptuously.

  Clementine watched him swirl his wine in his glass. Did he hate her? Did he actually hate her?

  She looked away from him to their expensive rainy view. She let her eye follow the choppy water to the horizon. You couldn't hear the rain from in here. Lights sparkled and winked on the skyscrapers. Romantic. If she'd just made the right joke. If that damned man hadn't laughed like Vid.

  'Do you ever think,' she said carefully, without looking at Sam, her eyes on a keeling solitary yacht, the wind tugging angrily at its sail. Who would choose to sail in this weather? 'What if we just hadn't gone? What if one of the girls had got sick, or I'd had to work, or you'd had to work, or whatever, what if we just hadn't gone to the barbeque? Do you ever think about that?'

  She kept her eyes on the maniac in the yacht.

  The too-long pause.

  She wanted him to say: Of course I think about it. I think about it every day.

  'But we did go,' said Sam. His voice was heavy and cold. He wasn't going to consider any other possibilities for their life than the one they were leading.
'We went, didn't we?'

  chapter sixteen

  The day of the barbeque

  Erika checked the time. Clementine and Sam were expected ten minutes ago, but that was normal for them, they seemed to think that anything within half an hour of the agreed-upon arrival time was acceptable.

  Over the years Oliver had come to accept their lateness, and no longer suggested Erika call to check if there had been an accident. Right now, he was pacing the hallway and at intervals making an unendurable squeaking sound by sucking his lower lip beneath his top teeth.

  Erika went to the bathroom, locked the door behind her, double-checked and triple-checked it was locked and then pulled out a packet of pills from the back of the bathroom cabinet. It's not that she was hiding them from Oliver. They were right there in the bathroom cupboard for him to see if he wanted, and Oliver would be sympathetic with her need for some sort of anti-anxiety medication. It was just that he was so paranoid about anything that went into his body: alcohol, pills, food that had passed its use-by date. (Erika shared the obsession with use-by dates. According to Clementine, Sam treated use-by dates as suggestions.)

  Her psychologist had prescribed her this medication for those days when she knew her anxiety symptoms (racing heart, trembling hands, overwhelming sense of panic and imminent danger etcetera, etcetera) would be hard to control.

  'Experiment a bit. Start out really low,' her psychologist had said. 'You might find even a quarter of a tablet is enough to get you through.'

  She took one tablet out of the blister pack and attempted to break it in half with her thumbnail. There was a deep groove down the middle of the tablet as if that was where you were meant to break it, but the design was faulty. It was impossible to break it in two. Her anti-anxiety medication was making her anxious. There was a not-especially-funny joke there somewhere.

  Erika had planned to use the medication only when she visited her mother. She did feel nervous about today's discussion with Clementine, of course she did, but it was just normal-person anxiety that anyone would experience in a situation like this.

  However, that was until she'd walked in the door after her conversation with Vid in the driveway to find her husband looking at her with incredulous disbelief, a feather duster hanging absurdly by his side. (Clementine couldn't believe they owned a feather duster. 'Where's your feather duster?' Erika had said to her once when she visited, and Clementine had fallen about laughing and Erika had felt that familiar feeling of sick humiliation. Feather dusters were funny. Who knew? How did you know? Weren't they quite useful?)

  'Why would you do that?' Oliver had said. 'Why would you say yes to a barbeque with the neighbours, today of all days? We've had it all planned! We've been planning it for weeks!' He didn't yell when he was angry. He didn't even raise his voice. He just spoke in the same tone of polite disbelief he would use to make a call to his internet provider to complain about something 'unacceptable'. His eyes were shiny and slightly bloodshot behind his glasses. She didn't especially like him when he was angry but maybe everyone disliked their partners when they were angry and it was therefore normal.

  'Erika, you've got to get this idea out of your head about there being some objective measure of normality,' her psychologist kept telling her. 'This "normal" person of whom you speak doesn't exist!'

  'Are you deliberately sabotaging this?' Oliver had said, suddenly intense, as if he were on to something like a mistake on a bill, as if he'd just worked out that his internet provider was double-charging him.

  'Of course not!' she'd said, outraged at the suggestion.

  Oliver had tried to convince her to go straight next door and tell Vid that they couldn't make it to the barbeque after all. He'd said he'd do it himself. He'd started walking out the door, and she'd grabbed him by his arm to stop him, and for just a few seconds they'd struggled and he'd actually dragged her along the kitchen floor behind him as he tried to walk ahead. It was ungainly and undignified and it was not them. Clementine and Sam sometimes did this mock-wrestling thing in public which always made Erika and Oliver go rigid with embarrassment. They took pride in not behaving like that. That's why Oliver stopped. He held his hands up high in surrender.

  'Fine,' he said. 'Let's just forget all about it. We'll talk to Clementine and Sam another day. We'll just go to the barbeque and have fun.'

  'No way. We're going ahead. It's going to be better this way,' Erika told him. 'We ask the question. It's out there. We say, you don't need to give us an answer right now. Then we say, okay, off we go to the barbeque. It gives us an end point. Otherwise we'd just be making awkward conversation.'

  And now they were due any minute. Everything was ready. The craft table for the kids. The plate of crackers and dips.

  But Erika's heart zoomed like a race car around her chest and her hands trembled uncontrollably.

  She swore at the stupid, tiny tablet. It wouldn't break.

  The doorbell rang. The sound was like a swift, violent kick to the stomach. The air rushed from her lungs. The tablet fell from her clumsy fingers.

  'Doorbell dread,' her psychologist called it, almost with satisfaction, because Erika was ticking all the right boxes. 'It's very common. Of course you dread the doorbell, because all through your childhood you dreaded discovery.'

  Erika squatted down, the tiles of the bathroom cold and hard against her knees. The floor was clean. The yellow tablet lay in the centre of a tile. She pressed her fingertip to it and looked at it. The doorbell rang again. She put the whole tablet on her tongue and swallowed.

  Everything depended on the conversation she was about to have. For God's sake, of course she was anxious. She could feel herself breathing shallowly, taking tiny, rapid sips of air, so she put her hand on her stomach and took a deep breath the way her psychologist had taught her (inflate your belly, not your chest) then she walked out of the bathroom and down the hallway as Clementine, Sam, Holly and Ruby spilled in through the front door, a tumble of noise and movement and different fragrances, as if there were ten of them, not just four.

  'I brought a bottle of champagne to take when we go next door.' Clementine held up a bottle as Erika kissed her hello. 'And I've brought nothing for you. Is that rude? Oh, wait, I've got that book I promised you, Oliver.' She rummaged through her big striped bag for the book. 'I did spill some hot chocolate on it, I'm sorry, but you can still read through the chocolatey blotches. Are you okay, Erika? You look a bit pale.'

  'I'm fine,' said Erika stiffly. 'Hello, girls.'

  The girls were dressed in ballet tutus, leggings and hoodies. They had glittery fairy wings attached to their backs by complicated elastic holster-type arrangements. Both girls needed their hair brushed and their faces washed. (Time to put on fairy wings but not to have a quick scrub in the bathroom!) Just looking at them gave Erika that same ache she experienced when she watched Clementine perform.

  'Holly, say hello to Erika. Don't mumble,' said Clementine. You would think Erika was an elderly aunt who demanded good manners. 'Look her in the eye and say hello. Will you give Erika a cuddle, Ruby? Oh, you too, Holly. That's nice.'

  Erika bent down as the little girls both wound their arms around her neck. They smelled of peanut butter and chocolate.

  Ruby, her thumb in her mouth, held up her kitchen whisk expectantly.

  'Hello, Whisk,' said Erika. 'How are you today?'

  Ruby smiled around her thumb. Although Erika was always polite to Whisk, she didn't really think Clementine and Sam should encourage the personification of an object, or Ruby's intense attachment to it. Erika would have nipped it in the bud a long time ago. She thought her psychologist agreed with her, although she was annoyingly equivocal about it.

  Erika saw that Holly had the little electric-blue sequinned handbag that she'd given her two Christmases ago slung over her shoulder. The ecstasy on Holly's face when she'd opened her present and seen that bag had made Erika's own face contort with such intense feeling she'd had to look away fast.

  Holly no
w used her bag to lug around her growing rock collection. Erika was a little worried about Holly's rock collection, because it was heading towards obsessive and could obviously lead to all sorts of issues, but her psychologist was quite adamant that Holly's rock collection was nothing to be concerned about, it was perfectly normal, and that it was probably not a good idea to tell Clementine to keep an eye on it, but Erika had still told Clementine to keep an eye on it, and Clementine had promised she would, with that patronising kindly look she sometimes got, as if Erika had dementia.

  Oliver squatted down next to Holly. 'I found this the other day,' he said, holding up a flat oval-shaped blue stone. 'It's got these little glittery bits.' He pointed with his fingertip. 'I thought you might like it.'

  Erika held her breath. First of all, why was Oliver encouraging Holly's rock collecting when she'd shared her concerns with him, and secondly, more importantly, was Holly about to snub him in the hurtful, honest way of children? Clementine had told Erika that Holly liked to find the stones herself (most of them seemed to be just plain old dirty garden stones) and was apparently completely disinterested when Clementine's lovely father had tried to turn Holly's interest into a learning opportunity and had given her a little gemstone attached to a card with information about its geological properties.

  Holly took the stone and examined it through narrowed eyes.

  'This is a good stone,' she pronounced, opening her bag to add it to her collection.

  Erika exhaled.

  Oliver straightened, pulling on his trouser legs, exultant.

  'What do you say?' said Clementine at the same time as Holly said, 'Thank you, Oliver,' and then looked up at her mother balefully. 'I was saying thank you.'

  Clementine really should have given Holly a chance to speak before she jumped in.

  Erika clapped her hands. 'I've got a craft table set up for you two,' she said.

  'That sounds exciting, doesn't it, girls?!' said Clementine in a fake, jolly tone as if Erika had actually suggested something inappropriate and boring for children, like crochet.