Truly Madly Guilty(95)

‘Or the symphony.’ Tiffany looked sideways at Clementine.

‘Shower shows?’ said Clementine.

‘Yes, so you’d have a shower while your customer sat on a couch and watched you loofah up – or soap each other up, if there were two of you. I liked the shower shows. The club got really hot and sticky. It was a relief to cool off.’

‘Right,’ said Clementine. God Almighty. Shower shows. She wondered if she was going to be sick. There was a very good chance she was going to be sick.

‘Should I stop talking now?’ said Tiffany.

‘No,’ said Clementine. She closed her eyes, saw Ruby and opened them again. ‘Keep talking!’ she said in a louder voice.

And so for the next twenty surreal minutes, while Clementine fixed her eyes on the brakelights of the car in front and willed them to vanish, Tiffany talked and talked, and the words flowed over Clementine and she kept losing track, hearing only fragments: the podiums in the private rooms were really hard so you carried this small fluffy rug … some girls needed to drink to work but I … competitive, this one night I thought to hell with it …

Until finally they came to the traffic cones, and the bright white flashing lights, and a tow truck slowly lifting a small mangled red car up by its bumper bar at an unnatural angle and a policeman waving them on and Tiffany said, in a suddenly very different tone of voice, ‘Right then,’ and put her foot down hard on the accelerator, and neither of them said another word until they drove into the hospital car park.





chapter fifty-nine



‘So did it work? Did you remember anything more?’ said Oliver. They were sitting at the dining room table eating the chicken curry he’d made. Outside, the rain eased to a drizzle as if it were thinking about stopping, but Erika wasn’t falling for that. There was nothing else on the polished expanse of mahogany except what they needed: shining cutlery, placemats, un-smudged glasses of iced water on coasters. Sitting down to eat at a table like this was something neither of them ever took for granted. Before they ate, their eyes always met in brief acknowledgement, an unspoken moment of gratitude for space and order.

‘No,’ said Erika. ‘The fountain is gone. It’s all concreted over. The backyard looks scarred. It was kind of sad.’

‘I guess they didn’t want the memory,’ said Oliver.

‘Whereas I did want the memory,’ said Erika. She carefully put down her knife and fork. (‘Stop waving your cutlery about!’ Pam used to tell Clementine and her brothers; Erika was the only one who listened. Clementine still liked to emphasise a point with her fork.)

‘Yes,’ said Oliver. ‘I know.’

‘I’ve written it down, you know, everything I do and don’t remember.’ In fact, she’d typed it up in a Word document (saved as ‘Memory.doc’) in the hope that treating it like a professional problem would bring about a professional solution.

‘Good idea,’ said Oliver. He was listening to her, but she could tell he was also listening to the gurgling sound of rainwater cascading from their overflowing gutters onto their back deck. He was worried about the timber starting to rot.

‘I remember coming out of the house holding the plates,’ said Erika. Her memories were like the rapid flashes of a strobe light: on, off, on, off. ‘And then next thing I’m in the fountain, and you’re there, and together we’re lifting up Ruby between us, but I can’t remember anything in between. It’s completely blank. I don’t remember seeing Ruby, or getting to the fountain. Suddenly I’m just in there.’

‘You dropped the plates and you ran,’ said Oliver. ‘You screamed for Clementine and then you ran. I saw you running.’

‘Yes, but why can’t I remember that?’ said Erika. ‘Why can’t I remember thinking: “Oh my God, Ruby is in the fountain?” How could I forget that?’

‘The shock, the alcohol, the medication – all those things,’ said Oliver. ‘Honestly, I think you have to let it go.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Erika. She picked up her cutlery again. ‘I know. You’re right.’

She should tell him now that Clementine had agreed to be their egg donor. It was cruel to withhold information that would make him so happy.

‘How bad was your mother’s place today?’ asked Oliver.

‘The worst it’s been in a while.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Oliver. ‘And I’m sorry you had to go on your own.’

‘It’s fine. I didn’t do much. I kind of gave up. The bad news is that the woman next door is selling.’

‘Okay,’ said Oliver, carefully chewing. ‘So that’s a problem.’ She watched him weighing it all up.

‘She was nice about it,’ said Erika.

‘We’ll just have to work with her,’ said Oliver. ‘Find out exactly when she’s listing, the open-for-inspection times.’

‘I feel like Mum might deliberately sabotage her,’ said Erika. ‘Just to be malicious.’

‘Possibly,’ said Oliver. He’d grown up with purposeless malice too, but he accepted it like the weather, whereas Erika still resisted it, resented it, tried to find meaning behind it. She thought of her mother’s laugh when the rubbish bag had split. Why would she laugh? How was that funny?