Truly Madly Guilty(123)
‘Why do you look so happy?’ said Dakota. ‘And goofy?’
Vid regarded his daughter, who was now in the kitchen returning an empty tray. She dimpled up at him and she looked, at that moment, extremely pretty. Hail Mary, Mother of God, please don’t let her grow up as sexy as her mother.
‘Because I’m happy, you know,’ said Vid. He lifted Dakota up under her armpits and spun her around. He couldn’t spin his older daughters anymore. (Eva looked like she weighed as much as a small truck.) ‘Are you happy?’
‘Pretty much,’ said Dakota. She put her mouth to his ear. ‘How many more minutes before I can go and read my book in my room for just a little while?’
‘Thirty,’ said Vid.
‘Ten,’ said Dakota.
‘Twenty,’ said Vid. ‘Final offer.’
‘Deal.’ Dakota held out her hand.
They shook on it. He put her back on the floor. The volume of the music at the front of the house shot up to nightclub level. Someone called out ‘Whoa!’ in a scandalised tone that could only mean that Tiffany was dancing, while someone else shouted, ‘Where’s Vid?’
‘Here I come!’ bellowed Vid.
It was lucky that Harry from next door was resting in peace.
chapter seventy-six
Clementine woke to a glorious absence of sound.
All she could hear was silence, and then the familiar bubbling melody of a kookaburra’s laugh. It pierced her heart, as if she’d been away from Australia for a long time and was finally home. She opened her eyes and the light felt clean and bright and imbued with significance.
‘It’s stopped,’ she said out loud to Sam. ‘It’s finally stopped.’ She hadn’t let herself believe the weather forecaster’s promise of sunshine by Sunday. She went to wake Sam, to shake his arm, but then she saw his empty side of the bed and remembered that he wasn’t there. He was asleep, as usual these days, in the study, and she felt humiliated that she’d spoken out loud. His absence this hopeful, happy morning felt freshly painful, as if it were new.
She sighed and turned over on her stomach, lifting the corner of the curtain to look at the newly minted blue sky.
They would take the kids out in the sun … but wait, no, they couldn’t, because today she and Sam were booked in to do a first aid course at the local high school. They’d rescheduled it a few times already and she was determined they do it today. She couldn’t keep on traipsing across Sydney doing those talks, solemnly telling people about the importance of first aid training, like she was some sort of school prefect for the world, handing out her little leaflets, when she’d never done one herself.
Sam’s parents were going to look after the girls for the day. ‘It might actually be quite fun and stimulating to learn something new together!’ Sam’s mother had said hopefully. There was a suspicious Pam-like flavour to Joy’s tone. The mothers were circling. Clementine suspected her mother had been on the phone to Sam’s mother, worrying over the state of their marriage.
It was interesting how a marriage instantly became public property as soon as it looked shaky.
She looked at the clock and saw that she’d slept later than normal. It was past six but that was fine. She could fit in a solid two hours of practice before the girls woke. The audition was only a week away now. This was the home stretch. You had to time it right, like an athlete, so that you peaked on audition day. She put on her old shapeless blue cardigan over her pyjamas (for some reason the cardigan had become her practice cardigan) and went quietly downstairs. The absence of the sound of rain opened up a soaring sense of space around her, as if she’d gone from a tiny warm-up room into a concert hall. She hadn’t realised how oppressive that background noise had been.
As she rosined up her bow and the dust-flecked early morning sun created tiny glints of jewel-like light around the room, on the glass of their grandfather clock, on a picture frame, a vase, she felt a deep sense of peace about her progress. The strange thought occurred to her that she wasn’t resisting this audition, like she had so often in the past. She wasn’t wasting precious energy bemoaning the injustice of the system: the oversupply of qualified musicians on the audition circuit, the fact that auditioning was a skill entirely separate from someone’s playing ability. Ruby’s accident had somehow stripped her clean of what now seemed like a sort of petulant pride, of fear masquerading as outrage.
‘Good morning.’ Sam stood at the doorway.
‘Good morning.’ She lowered her bow. ‘You’re up early.’
‘The rain has stopped,’ he said glumly. He yawned hugely. He looked so pale and haggard in the sunlight. She wanted to hug him and at the same time she kind of wanted to slap him. ‘I might take the girls to the park, so you can practise.’
‘We’re doing that first aid course today,’ said Clementine. ‘Remember?’
‘I might give that a miss,’ he said. Each word was a sigh, as if it were an effort just to speak. ‘I’ll stay home with the girls. I’ll do it another time. I’m not … feeling great.’
‘You’re fine. You’re doing it,’ said Clementine, as if he were one of the children. ‘The girls are excited about spending the day with your parents. They have plans.’