Truly Madly Guilty(5)

‘But darling, I think you’d be so proud of me because –’

‘No,’ said Erika. ‘I’ll meet you anywhere else. We can go out to lunch this Sunday. To a nice restaurant. Or you can come to our place. Oliver and I don’t have anything on. We can go anywhere else but we are not coming to your house.’ She paused and said it again, louder and more clearly, as if she were speaking to someone without a good grasp of English. ‘We are not coming to your house.’

There was silence.

‘Until the fifteenth,’ said Erika. ‘It’s in the diary. It’s in both our diaries. And don’t forget we’ve got that dinner with Clementine’s parents on Thursday night! So we’ve got that to look forward to as well.’ Yes, indeed, that was going to be a barrel of laughs.

‘I had a new recipe I wanted to try. I bought a gluten-free recipe book, did I tell you?’

It was the flip tone that did it. The calculated, cruel brightness, as if she thought there was a chance Erika might join her in playing the game they’d played all those years, where they both pretended to be an ordinary mother and daughter having an ordinary conversation, when she knew that Erika no longer played, when they’d both agreed the game was over, when her mother had wept and apologised and made promises they both knew she’d never keep, but now she wanted to pretend she’d never even made the promises in the first place.

‘Mum. Dear God.’

‘What?’ Faux innocence. That infuriating babyish voice.

‘You promised on Grandma’s grave that you wouldn’t buy another recipe book! You don’t cook! You don’t have a gluten allergy!’ Why did her voice tremble with rage when she never expected those melodramatic promises to be kept?

‘I made no such promise!’ said her mother, and she dropped the baby voice and had the audacity to respond to Erika’s rage with her own. ‘And as a matter of fact, I have been suffering quite dreadful bloating lately. I have gluten intolerance, thank you very much. Excuse me for worrying about my health.’

Do not engage. Remove yourself from the emotional minefield. This was why she was investing thousands of dollars in therapy, for exactly this situation.

‘All right then, well, Mum, it was nice talking to you,’ said Erika rapidly, without giving her mother a chance to speak, as if she were a telemarketer, ‘but I’m at work, so I have to go now. I’ll talk to you later.’ She hung up before her mother could speak and dropped the phone in her lap.

The cab driver’s shoulders were conspicuously still against his beaded seat cover, only his hands moving on the bottom of the steering wheel, pretending that he hadn’t been listening in. What sort of daughter refuses to go to her mother’s house? What sort of daughter speaks with such ferocity to her mother about buying a new recipe book?

She blinked hard.

Her phone rang again, and she jumped so violently it nearly slid off her lap. It would be her mother again, ringing to shout abuse.

But it wasn’t her mother. It was Oliver.

‘Hi,’ she said, and nearly cried with relief at the sound of his voice. ‘Just had a fun phone call with Mum. She wanted us to go over for lunch on Sunday.’

‘We’re not due there until next month, are we?’ said Oliver.

‘No,’ said Erika. ‘She was pushing her boundaries.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yep.’ She ran a fingertip under her eyes. ‘Fine.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘Just put her straight out of your mind,’ said Oliver. ‘Hey, did you go to Clementine’s talk at that library out in wherever it was?’

Erika tipped back her head against the seat and closed her eyes. Dammit. Of course. That’s why he was calling. Clementine. The plan had been that she would chat to Clementine after her talk, while they had coffee. Oliver hadn’t been overly interested in Erika’s motivation for attending Clementine’s talk. He didn’t understand her obsessive desire to fill in the blank spots of her memory. He found it irrelevant, almost silly. ‘Believe me, you’ve remembered everything you’re ever going to remember,’ he’d said. (His lips went thin, his eyes hard on the words ‘Believe me’. Just a little flash of pain he could never quite repress, and that he would probably deny feeling.) ‘Blank spots are par for the course when you drink too much.’ They weren’t par for her course. But Oliver had seen this as the perfect opportunity to talk to Clementine, to finally pin her down.

She should have let him go to voicemail too.

‘I did,’ she said. ‘But I left halfway through. I didn’t feel well.’

‘So you didn’t get to talk to Clementine?’ said Oliver. She could hear him doing his best to conceal his frustration.

‘Not today,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m just finding the right time. The food court wouldn’t have been the best spot anyway.’

‘I’m just looking at my diary. It has been two months now since the barbeque. I don’t think it’s offensive or insensitive, or whatever, to just ask the question. Just ring her up. It doesn’t need to be face to face.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t need to be sorry,’ said Oliver. ‘This is difficult. It’s not your fault.’