Truly Madly Guilty(62)

‘Skirting boards! When have you even seen the skirting boards in this house?’ said Erika.

Her mother laughed merrily as if it was all in good fun. Erika’s mother had such a pretty laugh, like a girl at a ball.

(‘Could she be bipolar?’ Oliver asked, when he first witnessed his mother-in-law’s extraordinary ability to flip her temper on and off like a switch, but Erika told him that she suspected people with bipolar disorder didn’t decide on their behaviour; her mother was mad, of course she was mad, but she chose exactly when and how to be mad.)

‘We had rats,’ said Erika. ‘No one was concerned about the skirting boards being clean.’

‘Rats?’ said her mother. ‘Come on. We never had rats. Maybe a mouse. A dear little mouse.’

They did have rats. Or rodents of some sort, anyway. They’d die, and the stink would be terrible, unbearable, but they wouldn’t be able to find them in the cities of stuff that filled each room. They just had to wait it out. The stink would reach its peak and then finally fade. Except it never really faded. The stink leached into Erika.

‘Also, Clementine’s father wasn’t rich,’ she told her mother. ‘He was just an ordinary father with an ordinary job.’

‘Something to do with construction, wasn’t it?’ said her mother with the chatty charm of a guest at a cocktail party.

‘He worked for an engineering firm,’ said Erika. She didn’t really know what Clementine’s father’s job had involved. He was retired now, and had apparently taken up French cooking, and was very good at it.

Once, when Erika was fourteen and her mother was at work, Clementine’s father drove over and installed a lock on her bedroom door for her so that she could keep her room free of her mother’s junk. It was his idea. He hadn’t said a single word about the state of Erika’s home. When he’d finished the job, he’d picked up his toolbox, handed her the precious key, and put one hand briefly on her shoulder. His silence had been a revelation to Erika, who had grown up surrounded not just by physical items, but by words: a swirling deluge of cruel, kind, soft, shrill words.

That was Erika’s experience of fatherhood: the solid, silent weight of someone else’s dad’s hand on her shoulder. That was the sort of father Oliver would be. He’d give his love with simple, practical actions, not words.

‘Well, he might not have been rich, but Pam wasn’t a single mother, was she? She had support! I had no support. I was on my own. You have no idea. You wait until you have children of your own!’

Erika continued to mechanically fill her bag of rubbish, but she felt an alert stillness come over her, as though she were an animal sensing a predator. Years ago, when Erika had told her mother that she never wanted to have children, her mother had said with flippant cruelty: ‘Yes, I really can’t see you as a mother.’

Of course, she hadn’t told her about her attempts to become pregnant. The thought had never crossed her mind.

‘Oh, but wait, you’re not going to have children of your own, are you?’ Her mother shot her a triumphant look. ‘You don’t want children because you’re too busy with your important career! So bad luck to me. I don’t get to be a grandmother.’ It was like the thought had just occurred to her, and now that it had, she needed to wallow in the terrible injustice of it. ‘I just have to put up with that, don’t I? Everyone else gets grandchildren, but not me, my daughter is such an important career woman with her important job in the city and her – hey!’ Her mother grabbed her arm. ‘What are you doing? Don’t throw that out!’

‘What?’ Erika looked at the rubbish in her gloved hand: a banana skin, a half-eaten tuna sandwich, a soggy paper towel.

Her mother extracted a tiny grease-stained piece of notepaper from her hand. ‘There! That! I’d written down something important on that! It was the name of a book, I think, or a DVD maybe, I was listening to the radio and I thought, I must write that down!’ She held it up to the light and peered at it. ‘Now look what you’ve gone and done, I can’t even read it!’

Erika said nothing.

She had a policy of passive resistance now. She never argued back. Not since the day she’d found herself engaged in a ludicrous ten-minute tug-of-war over a broken-stringed tennis racquet, while her mother screamed, ‘But I’m selling it on the eBay!’ She lost in the end, of course. The tennis racquet stayed and it never got sold on eBay. Her mother didn’t know how to sell something on eBay.

Her mother brandished the slip of paper at her. ‘You march on in here, Miss Know-it-all, and start messing around with my things, thinking you’re doing me some great favour, and all you do is make things worse! It’s lucky you don’t want children! You’d just throw away their toys, wouldn’t you? Take their precious little things and toss them in the bin! What a wonderful mother you’d be!’

Erika turned away. She lifted the swollen rubbish bag up by the ends and banged it against the floor. She double-knotted the ends and carried it to the back door.

She thought of Clementine’s phone call: ‘I want to help you have a baby.’ The strange pitch of her voice. The thing was, Clementine really did want to help her have a baby now. That’s what accounted for the strange pitch of her voice. She wanted to do this badly. This was her opportunity for instant redemption. She thought of how Oliver’s face would be transformed by hope when she told him. Should she take Clementine’s charity even if it was given for the wrong reason? End justifies the means and all that?