Truly Madly Guilty(47)

‘You’d get bitten,’ Erika told her bluntly. ‘There are fleas.’ Clementine’s porcelain skin always got the first mosquito bite. She looked so juicy.

‘I’d wear repellent!’ said Clementine enthusiastically. It was almost like she wanted to come.

‘No,’ said Erika. ‘No. I’m fine. Thank you. You should be practising for your audition.’

‘Yes,’ said Clementine with a sound like a sigh. ‘You’re right, I guess.’

‘Who has a wedding on a Wednesday morning?’ said Erika, mostly to change the subject but also because part of her didn’t want to hear what she could sense was coming. ‘Don’t all the guests have to take time off work?’

‘People who want to save money,’ said Clementine vaguely. ‘And it’s outdoors, and they didn’t have a wet-weather plan, of course. Anyway, listen, I didn’t want to do this over the phone, but …’

Here it came. The offer. It had only been a matter of time. Erika walked back inside and studied the huge bottle of disinfectant.

‘I know you probably haven’t wanted to bring it up again since the barbeque,’ said Clementine. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to come back to you.’

She sounded incongruously formal.

‘But I didn’t want you to think it was just because …’ Her voice wavered. ‘And obviously, Sam and I, we haven’t been thinking straight …’

‘Clementine,’ said Erika. ‘You don’t have –’

‘So I want to do it,’ said Clementine. ‘Donate my eggs, that is. I want to help you have a baby. I’d love to help. I’m ready to, you know, get the ball rolling.’ She cleared her throat self-consciously, as if the words ‘get the ball rolling’ were in a foreign language she was only just learning. ‘I feel good about it.’

Erika didn’t say anything. She managed to heft the bottle of disinfectant up onto her hip, like an obese toddler. She staggered back out to the garage.

‘I want you to know that my decision has got nothing to do with what happened,’ said Clementine. ‘I would have said yes anyway.’

Erika grunted as she opened the passenger door of her car and dropped the disinfectant onto the seat.

‘Oh, Clementine,’ she said, and she was conscious of the sudden candidness of her tone, as if she’d been speaking falsely up until now. This was her true voice. It echoed around the garage. This was the voice she used with Oliver in the middle of the night when they shared the most shameful secrets of their shameful childhoods. ‘We both know that’s a lie.’





chapter twenty-four



The day of the barbeque

‘That sounds like Holly,’ said Sam. He put down his beer bottle. ‘I’ll go.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Tiffany. ‘I’ll show you where they are.’

‘Mummy!’ Holly shrieked from upstairs. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’

‘Looks like I’m needed too,’ said Clementine with obvious relief.

Erika wanted to go too, to check if Holly was okay, but with both parents there it was clearly not appropriate, and would be the sort of overstepping behaviour that would earn Erika an exasperated sigh from Clementine. Now it was just Erika, Oliver and Vid in the room, and it was immediately obvious that this particular social combination didn’t work, even though Vid, of course, would give it his ebullient best shot.

Oliver stared glumly into his champagne glass while Vid opened the oven door to check on his baking and closed it again.

Erika looked around for inspiration. There was a large glass bowl in the middle of the island bench, filled with different-sized, different-coloured pieces of glass.

‘This is pretty,’ she said, pulling it towards her to examine the contents.

‘It’s Tiffany’s,’ said Vid. ‘She calls it sea glass. I call it rubbish.’ He picked up a long oval-shaped piece of dark green glass. ‘Look at this! I said to her, babe, this is from a broken Heineken bottle! Some drunk leaves it at the beach and then you bring home his rubbish! She goes on about it being polished by the sea or whatever.’

‘I guess it makes a nice decoration,’ said Erika, although she agreed with him. It was a bowl of rubbish.

‘She’s a hoarder, my wife,’ continued Vid. ‘If it wasn’t for me, she’d be like one of those people you see on TV, you know, those ones who have so much crap they can’t get out their front door.’

‘Tiffany isn’t a hoarder,’ said Erika.

Oliver cleared his throat. A little warning bell.

‘She is, she really is!’ said Vid. ‘You should see her wardrobe. Her shoes. That woman is Imelda Marcos.’

‘She’s not a hoarder, though,’ said Erika. She avoided looking in Oliver’s direction. ‘My mother is a real hoarder.’

Oliver held out his hand, palm down in front of Erika, as if to stop a waiter refilling his glass, except instead of no more wine, he meant, no more sharing. In Oliver’s world you told no one anything. Family was private. Family was shameful. They had that in common, except that Erika no longer wanted to be ashamed.

‘Like for real?’ said Vid, interested. ‘Like on the TV shows?’