Truly Madly Guilty(87)

‘It was bad luck,’ she said. ‘It was very bad luck.’

‘It was not!’ exploded Sam. ‘It was negligence! Our negligence. I should have been watching the girls. I should have known that I couldn’t depend on you.’

‘What?’ Clementine felt a crazy, almost exhilarated feeling of rage and injustice blow straight through her body like a white-hot flame, making her feel as if she could lift off the ground. Finally, after all these weeks, they were going to fight.

‘It was the one time,’ he said coldly. ‘The one time I let my attention slip.’

‘Yes, maybe I thought I could sit back and relax,’ said Clementine. Her voice shook with fury. ‘Because the better parent was there, because Mr Fucking Perfect was on duty!’

Sam gave a bitter half-laugh. ‘Fine then, it was all my fault.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t be such a martyr,’ said Clementine. ‘We were both there, we were both equally responsible. This is silly.’

They looked at each other with flat dislike. Their different parenting styles had always been a teasing point of contention, a hairline fracture in an otherwise solid marriage, but now that tiny fracture had become a chasm.

‘I think I’m done,’ said Sam.

‘It’s a pointless conversation,’ agreed Clementine.

‘No,’ said Sam. ‘I think maybe I’m done with us.’

‘Done with us,’ repeated Clementine slowly. Was this what gunshot victims meant when they said they initially felt no pain? ‘You’re done with us.’

‘I think we should consider separating,’ said Sam. ‘Possibly. I don’t know. Don’t you think?’





chapter fifty-three



The day of the barbeque

Tiffany stood in her backyard being interviewed by a young police officer. She looked over her shoulder at the paramedics next to the tiny form of Ruby. Sam and Clementine were talking to the paramedics, and they looked like entirely different people from the ones who had been sitting around the table only minutes earlier. Their faces had collapsed, like popped balloons.

‘What happened here?’ the policewoman said to Tiffany. She pointed with her foot at the broken crockery on the pathway leading from the back door. There were dangerous-looking shards and chunks of broken blue china everywhere. Tiffany had loved those blue plates.

‘Oh,’ said Tiffany. She tried to imagine this scene through the policewoman’s eyes. Did it look like a crime scene? Did she think there had been a fight? Or that they had all been drunk? The policewoman had already spoken to Vid, so presumably she already knew exactly what had happened. She was double-checking their stories, making sure everything matched up. It made Tiffany nervous.

‘Our guest, Erika – our next-door neighbour – she was carrying plates from inside, and I think that’s when she realised that Ruby was in the fountain …’ Tiffany’s voice broke. She thought of Ruby’s squat little toddler body, her blonde curls. ‘And then I think she dropped them, because she ran to pull her out.’

What had Tiffany been doing? She’d been distracting Ruby’s parents. She’d made them forget they were parents.

‘It happened so fast,’ she told the policewoman.

‘Unfortunately it’s not an unusual scenario,’ said the policewoman. ‘Children drown in plain sight surrounded by people. It’s silent. It’s fast. Lack of parental supervision is the most common cause of drownings.’

‘Yes,’ said Tiffany. She wanted to say, No, you don’t understand. We’re not those kind of people. We were supervising them. Just not then. Just not at that moment. It was silent. It was fast. For one moment they all looked away.

Tiffany thought of her older sisters. She could never tell them about this. ‘For f*ck’s sake, Tiffany,’ they would say, because the Collins girls took pride in their down-to-earth practicality. Their common sense. They were from the western suburbs and proud of it. They didn’t make mistakes like that. They’d be distressed that something like this could happen at their own little sister’s house. They’d relate it to money. To her bloated bank account. They wouldn’t pull their punches.

If they ever learned that she’d been pretending to give the child’s mother a lap dance at the time it happened they would be united in their horror. Tiffany’s dancing career still mystified and shamed them. ‘Just thinking about you in that trashy club makes me sick to my stomach,’ her sister Emma, the dramatic one of the family, liked to say, all these years later, and she wasn’t actually being dramatic, she meant it, it really did make her sick to her stomach. ‘She was a disgrace to the sisterhood,’ agreed Louise, who had recently discovered feminism, and she meant it too. But their words had slid straight off Tiffany as if she were made of Teflon. Their words would stick now, even if her intentions had never been more innocent, because the safety of a child trumped everything, as it should.

Tiffany looked up as the frantic, dramatic sound of chopping helicopter blades suddenly filled the air. ‘Is that helicopter … for us?’

‘Yep, that’s for us.’ The policewoman looked up too, and took a radio out of her trouser pocket. ‘Excuse me.’

She hurried off.

‘Where’s it going to land?’ said Tiffany to herself. The helicopter hovered over them like a giant bird and the sound intensified. Out of the corner of her eye she saw poor Barney streak across the yard to escape the loud noise.