Truly Madly Guilty(118)
Clementine dropped her bow and tried to imagine her life without Erika in it: without the aggravation, followed always by the guilt. A melody with only two notes: aggravation, guilt, aggravation, guilt. She picked up her bow and deliberately played the wolf note, over and over, letting the sound aggravate her and worm its way down her ear canal, vibrating against her eardrum, creeping into her brain, throbbing at the centre of her forehead.
She stopped.
‘You shouldn’t put up with a wolf tone,’ Ainsley had told her. ‘Get it looked at.’
When she’d tried the wolf tone eliminator, it was initially a relief. It had taken her a little while to realise that something else was gone along with her wolf. Her sound wasn’t as rich. The notes surrounding the wolf tone were somehow dampened, less focused. She wondered if it was similar to how people felt when they first took antidepressants and they lost their pain, but everything else felt muted too: flatter, duller.
In the end she decided that her wolf tone was the price she had to pay for the sound of all those centuries of time held within the red-gold curves of her cello.
Maybe Erika was her wolf tone. Maybe Clementine’s life would have lacked something subtle but essential without her in it: a certain richness, a certain depth.
Or maybe not. Maybe her life would have been great without Erika in it.
Clementine realised she was hungry. She set aside her cello and on the way to the kitchen she picked up the horrible knobbly shell necklace and chucked it straight in the bin. She went to the fridge, got herself a tub of yoghurt, went to the drawer for a spoon and the first thing she saw was the polar bear ice-cream scoop Sam had been looking for the other night. Men. It had probably been right there in front of him the whole time.
She opened the yoghurt, had a mouthful. It was really very good. Creamy, like they said in the ad. She was susceptible to advertising, but really, this was very good yoghurt. It reminded her of her first taste of food after fasting.
She hadn’t been fasting.
There was a feeling growing within her. A twitchy feeling. She was jabbing the spoon into the yoghurt and eating it too fast. She thought of the opening melody of Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’. The high-pitched bassoon. The strange, jerky moments building to an ecstatic unfurling. She wanted to hear that piece. She wanted to play that piece, because that was exactly how she felt right now. There was an upward spiralling feeling in her chest. Was the yoghurt drugged? Was it simply exquisite relief because she’d demonstrated her absolute willingness to donate her eggs but she didn’t actually have to do it: altruism without action, it didn’t get better than that!
Was it just that she’d had enough of feeling bad over what happened? She could never forget that afternoon but she could forgive herself. She could forgive Sam. If he wanted to end their marriage over this, then she would grieve him as if he’d died, but goddamn it, she’d get over it, she’d live. She’d always suspected this about herself, that right at the centre of her soul was a small unbreakable stone, a cold, hard instinct for self-preservation. She’d die for her children, but no one else. She wouldn’t allow one mistake, one slip of judgement, to define her life, not when Ruby was fine, not when life was there for the taking.
She thought of Erika saying, ‘This is your dream, Dummkopf.’
That job was hers. That job belonged to her. She threw down the empty yoghurt container, licked her fingers and headed back to her cello, not to work on her technique this time, but to play music. Somewhere along the way she’d forgotten it was about the music, the pure, uncomplicated bliss of the music.
chapter seventy-three
‘He’s going to steal it!’ announced Holly, loud and clear.
‘Shh!’ said Sam. They could never get Holly to shut up during movies.
‘But he is, look!’
‘You’re right, but …’ Sam put a finger to his lips, although who the hell cared, the movie theatre was packed with wriggly, chatty, rain-crazed kids and their frazzled parents.
Holly shovelled a handful of popcorn into her mouth and sat back, her eyes on the flickering colours of the Pixar movie. Ruby was on Sam’s other side, sucking her thumb, caressing Whisk’s spokes. Her eyelids drooped. She would fall asleep soon and wake up five minutes before the movie ended, demanding it be restarted.
Sam normally loved a good animation but he had no idea what this one was about. He was thinking about his job, and how much longer he could get away with coasting. He was the new guy, still ‘learning the ropes’, but he should have had those ropes learned by now. People must be starting to notice. The head of his division had said, ‘Might be time to invest in an umbrella,’ with a quizzical look at Sam’s drenched clothes yesterday. It was all going to come crashing down. Someone would say, ‘The weird new guy isn’t doing anything.’
It’s past crunch time, Sam. You need to get over it, to get on with it, leave a goddamned umbrella at the front door. Why did tiny things like that seem so impossible these days? Ruby’s head tipped gently against his arm. He pulled up the armrest and she snuggled up to him.
Clementine was getting on with it. He’d seen something change in her after the visit from Vid and Tiffany and Dakota. ‘I feel better after seeing them,’ she’d said, ‘don’t you?’ He’d wanted to shout, ‘No! I feel worse! I feel much worse!’