Truly Madly Guilty(91)

‘What? You can’t go over while they’re not home,’ said Oliver. ‘That’s trespassing.’

‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Vid and Tiffany wouldn’t care,’ said Erika. ‘I’d just explain … well, I’d just explain what I was doing.’ It would be awkward but it would be worth it. She wanted to get some return on the money she’d invested in Not Pat’s session.

‘And it’s raining,’ pointed out Oliver. Now he was crunching the cough lolly between his teeth. ‘There’s no point going over in the rain. It wasn’t raining that day.’ He suddenly swallowed the lolly in one gulp and gave her a hard look. ‘You’re not going to remember anything by standing in their backyard. You were drunk, that’s all. I’ve told you before. Drunk people forget stuff. It’s perfectly normal.’

‘And I’ve told you before, I got drunk because of the medication,’ said Erika. Don’t take your childhood issues out on me.

‘It’s not relevant how or why you got drunk, I’m just saying,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s not going to help. Come on. It’s a crazy idea. Stay here. Tell me about your mother’s place. How bad was it?’

‘This won’t take a minute,’ said Erika as she walked to the front door. ‘I’ll be back in a moment. I’ll tell you about Mum then.’

‘I’ve made a chicken curry for dinner.’ Oliver kept talking as he walked behind her. He held the door as she opened it. ‘I started to feel a bit better this afternoon, and I wasn’t sure if we had any coconut milk but we did. Oh, and I nearly forgot, the police came today! About Harry. They’re having trouble finding -’

‘Hold all those thoughts!’ Erika picked up her umbrella. Oliver wasn’t normally so loquacious but a sick day at home alone always left him banked up with conversation. Also, she had a feeling those cold and flu tablets he took made him a little hyper, not that she would ever tell him that due to his horror of ever being affected by drugs and alcohol. It was cute how chatty he got.

She hurried out in the rain across the front yard and up Vid and Tiffany’s driveway. She rang the doorbell first, for form’s sake, just in case someone was home, or someone, somewhere, was secretly observing her, although the only neighbour who could possibly have done that was Harry and he was dead. She waited a good minute, and then she headed around into the backyard. As she went down the path at the side of the house, security lights switched on automatically, turning the rain to gold. She hoped she wouldn’t trip some alarm.

All the fairy lights in the backyard were on, and she remembered how Tiffany had said they were on some sort of automatic timer. Just the sight of the fairy lights created a deluge of sensory memory from that afternoon. She could smell Vid’s caramelised onions that Clementine had fussed over. She could feel the way the ground had gently rocked beneath her feet. The woolly sensation in her head. This was working. Not Pat was a genius, worth every cent.

Don’t get distracted, she reminded herself. Focus, except don’t focus too much. Relax and remember.

She had walked down this footpath from the back door. She was carrying the blue and white plates. She was looking at the plates. She liked the plates. She coveted the plates. My God, she hadn’t taken the plates, had she? No. She’d dropped the plates. She remembered that.

The music. There was music, and beneath the music, or above the music, there was a sound, an urgent sound, and the sound was related in some way to … Harry. Oh, why did she keep coming back to Harry? What did that mean? Just because of his phone call earlier about turning down the music?

She walked a little further down the footpath. She couldn’t see the fountain from here. She needed to see the fountain. Her heart thudded in rhythm with the rain pelleting her umbrella.

She stopped, confused. Where was the fountain? She turned to the left. She turned to the right. She let the umbrella fall back behind her head and squinted through the rain.

The fountain was gone. There was nothing but an ugly slab of empty concrete where it had once stood, and Erika’s memories were dissolving, disappearing, being washed away like a chalk drawing on pavement in the rain, and all she felt right now was cold and wet and foolish.





chapter fifty-seven



Clementine followed Sam into their bedroom, where he pulled a T-shirt from a drawer and shrugged it on. He took off his work pants and pulled on a pair of jeans. His movements were jerky, like a twitchy junkie in need of a fix. He avoided meeting her eye.

She said, ‘Do you mean it? Are you serious? About separating?’

‘Probably not,’ he said with a lift of his shoulders, as if the state of their marriage was neither here nor there to him.

She was so agitated she couldn’t sort out her breathing. It was like she couldn’t remember the process. She kept holding her breath and then taking sudden gasps of air.

She said, ‘For God’s sake, you can’t just say things like that! You’ve never, we’ve never …’

She meant that they’d never used words like ‘separation’ and ‘divorce’ even in their worst screaming matches. They yelled things like, ‘You’re infuriating!’ ‘You don’t think!’ ‘You are the most annoying woman in the history of annoying women!’ ‘I hate you!’ ‘I hate you more!’ and they always, always used the word ‘always’, even though Clementine’s mother had said you should never use that word in an argument with your spouse, as in, for example, ‘You always forget to refill the water jug!’ (But Sam did always forget. It was accurate.)