Truly Madly Guilty (10 page)

chapter sixteen

The day of the barbeque

Erika checked the time. Clementine and Sam were expected ten minutes ago, but that was normal for them, they seemed to think that anything within half an hour of the agreed-upon arrival time was acceptable.

Over the years Oliver had come to accept their lateness, and no longer suggested Erika call to check if there had been an accident. Right now, he was pacing the hallway and at intervals making an unendurable squeaking sound by sucking his lower lip beneath his top teeth.

Erika went to the bathroom, locked the door behind her, double-checked and triple-checked it was locked and then pulled out a packet of pills from the back of the bathroom cabinet. It’s not that she was
hiding
them from Oliver. They were right there in the bathroom cupboard for him to see if he wanted, and Oliver would be sympathetic with her need for some sort of anti-anxiety medication. It was just that he was so paranoid about anything that went into his body: alcohol, pills, food that had passed its use-by date. (Erika shared the obsession with use-by dates. According to Clementine, Sam treated use-by dates as
suggestions.
)

Her psychologist had prescribed her this medication for those days when she knew her anxiety symptoms (racing heart, trembling hands, overwhelming sense of panic and imminent danger etcetera, etcetera) would be hard to control.

‘Experiment a bit. Start out really low,’ her psychologist had said. ‘You might find even a quarter of a tablet is enough to get you through.’

She took one tablet out of the blister pack and attempted to break it in half with her thumbnail. There was a deep groove down the middle of the tablet as if that was where you were meant to break it, but the design was faulty. It was impossible to break it in two. Her anti-anxiety medication was making her anxious. There was a not-especially-funny joke there somewhere.

Erika had planned to use the medication only when she visited her mother. She did feel nervous about today’s discussion with Clementine, of course she did, but it was just normal-person anxiety that anyone would experience in a situation like this.

However, that was until she’d walked in the door after her conversation with Vid in the driveway to find her husband looking at her with incredulous disbelief, a feather duster hanging absurdly by his side. (Clementine couldn’t believe they owned a feather duster. ‘Where’s your feather duster?’ Erika had said to her once when she visited, and Clementine had fallen about laughing and Erika had felt that familiar feeling of sick humiliation. Feather dusters were funny. Who knew?
How
did you know? Weren’t they quite useful?)

‘Why would you do that?’ Oliver had said. ‘Why would you say yes to a
barbeque
with the neighbours, today of all days? We’ve had it all planned! We’ve been planning it for
weeks
!’ He didn’t yell when he was angry. He didn’t even raise his voice. He just spoke in the same tone of polite disbelief he would use to make a call to his internet provider to complain about something ‘unacceptable’. His eyes were shiny and slightly bloodshot behind his glasses. She didn’t especially like him when he was angry but maybe everyone disliked their partners when they were angry and it was therefore normal.

‘Erika, you’ve got to get this idea out of your head about there being some objective measure of normality,’ her psychologist kept telling her. ‘This “normal” person of whom you speak doesn’t exist!’

‘Are you deliberately
sabotaging
this?’ Oliver had said, suddenly intense, as if he were on to something like a mistake on a bill, as if he’d just worked out that his internet provider was double-charging him.

‘Of course not!’ she’d said, outraged at the suggestion.

Oliver had tried to convince her to go straight next door and tell Vid that they couldn’t make it to the barbeque after all. He’d said he’d do it himself. He’d started walking out the door, and she’d grabbed him by his arm to stop him, and for just a few seconds they’d struggled and he’d actually dragged her along the kitchen floor behind him as he tried to walk ahead. It was ungainly and undignified and it was not them. Clementine and Sam sometimes did this mock-wrestling thing in public which always made Erika and Oliver go rigid with embarrassment. They took pride in
not
behaving like that. That’s why Oliver stopped. He held his hands up high in surrender.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Let’s just forget all about it. We’ll talk to Clementine and Sam another day. We’ll just go to the barbeque and have fun.’

‘No way. We’re going ahead. It’s going to be better this way,’ Erika told him. ‘We ask the question. It’s out there. We say, you don’t need to give us an answer right now. Then we say, okay, off we go to the barbeque. It gives us an end point. Otherwise we’d just be making awkward conversation.’

And now they were due any minute. Everything was ready. The craft table for the kids. The plate of crackers and dips.

But Erika’s heart zoomed like a race car around her chest and her hands trembled uncontrollably.

She swore at the stupid, tiny tablet. It wouldn’t break.

The doorbell rang. The sound was like a swift, violent kick to the stomach. The air rushed from her lungs. The tablet fell from her clumsy fingers.

‘Doorbell dread,’ her psychologist called it, almost with satisfaction, because Erika was ticking all the right boxes. ‘It’s very common. Of course you dread the doorbell, because all through your childhood you dreaded discovery.’

Erika squatted down, the tiles of the bathroom cold and hard against her knees. The floor was clean. The yellow tablet lay in the centre of a tile. She pressed her fingertip to it and looked at it. The doorbell rang again. She put the whole tablet on her tongue and swallowed.

Everything
depended on the conversation she was about to have. For God’s sake, of course she was anxious. She could feel herself breathing shallowly, taking tiny, rapid sips of air, so she put her hand on her stomach and took a deep breath the way her psychologist had taught her (inflate your belly, not your chest) then she walked out of the bathroom and down the hallway as Clementine, Sam, Holly and Ruby spilled in through the front door, a tumble of noise and movement and different fragrances, as if there were ten of them, not just four.

‘I brought a bottle of champagne to take when we go next door.’ Clementine held up a bottle as Erika kissed her hello. ‘And I’ve brought nothing for you. Is that rude? Oh, wait, I’ve got that book I promised you, Oliver.’ She rummaged through her big striped bag for the book. ‘I did spill some hot chocolate on it, I’m sorry, but you can still read through the chocolatey blotches. Are you okay, Erika? You look a bit pale.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Erika stiffly. ‘Hello, girls.’

The girls were dressed in ballet tutus, leggings and hoodies. They had glittery fairy wings attached to their backs by complicated elastic holster-type arrangements. Both girls needed their hair brushed and their faces washed. (Time to put on fairy wings but not to have a quick scrub in the bathroom!) Just looking at them gave Erika that same ache she experienced when she watched Clementine perform.

‘Holly, say hello to Erika. Don’t mumble,’ said Clementine. You would think Erika was an elderly aunt who demanded good manners. ‘Look her in the eye and say hello. Will you give Erika a cuddle, Ruby? Oh, you too, Holly. That’s nice.’

Erika bent down as the little girls both wound their arms around her neck. They smelled of peanut butter and chocolate.

Ruby, her thumb in her mouth, held up her kitchen whisk expectantly.

‘Hello, Whisk,’ said Erika. ‘How are you today?’

Ruby smiled around her thumb. Although Erika was always polite to Whisk, she didn’t really think Clementine and Sam should encourage the personification of an object, or Ruby’s intense attachment to it. Erika would have nipped it in the bud a long time ago. She thought her psychologist agreed with her, although she was annoyingly equivocal about it.

Erika saw that Holly had the little electric-blue sequinned handbag that she’d given her two Christmases ago slung over her shoulder. The ecstasy on Holly’s face when she’d opened her present and seen that bag had made Erika’s own face contort with such intense feeling she’d had to look away fast.

Holly now used her bag to lug around her growing rock collection. Erika was a little worried about Holly’s rock collection, because it was heading towards obsessive and could obviously lead to all sorts of issues, but her psychologist was quite adamant that Holly’s rock collection was nothing to be concerned about, it was perfectly normal, and that it was probably not a good idea to tell Clementine to keep an eye on it, but Erika had still told Clementine to keep an eye on it, and Clementine had promised she would, with that patronising kindly look she sometimes got, as if Erika had dementia.

Oliver squatted down next to Holly. ‘I found this the other day,’ he said, holding up a flat oval-shaped blue stone. ‘It’s got these little glittery bits.’ He pointed with his fingertip. ‘I thought you might like it.’

Erika held her breath. First of all, why was Oliver
encouraging
Holly’s rock collecting when she’d shared her concerns with him, and secondly, more importantly, was Holly about to snub him in the hurtful, honest way of children? Clementine had told Erika that Holly liked to find the stones herself (most of them seemed to be just plain old dirty garden stones) and was apparently completely disinterested when Clementine’s lovely father had tried to turn Holly’s interest into a learning opportunity and had given her a little gemstone attached to a card with information about its geological properties.

Holly took the stone and examined it through narrowed eyes.

‘This is a good stone,’ she pronounced, opening her bag to add it to her collection.

Erika exhaled.

Oliver straightened, pulling on his trouser legs, exultant.

‘What do you say?’ said Clementine at the same time as Holly said, ‘Thank you, Oliver,’ and then looked up at her mother balefully. ‘I was
saying
thank you.’

Clementine really should have given Holly a chance to speak before she jumped in.

Erika clapped her hands. ‘I’ve got a craft table set up for you two,’ she said.

‘That sounds exciting, doesn’t it, girls?!’ said Clementine in a fake, jolly tone as if Erika had actually suggested something inappropriate and boring for children, like crochet.

‘Watch the game last night?’ said Sam to Oliver.

‘Sure did,’ said Oliver with the air of a man about to finally sit a test for which he’d been studying hard. He had in fact watched ‘the game’ last night specifically so he could answer this question from Sam, as if faking an interest in sport would affect today’s outcome.

Sam looked delighted. Normally sport was a conversational dead-end with Oliver. ‘What about that tackle in the first half, eh?’

‘Come on, now! We don’t want to talk about football!’ interrupted Clementine. ‘Put us out of our misery. What’s this mysterious thing we need to talk about?’

Erika saw Oliver look panicked. They were still milling about in the hallway. This was not the way it was meant to happen.

‘We’re not saying a word until everyone is sitting quietly in their designated positions,’ said Erika. Maybe the pill was working. Her heart rate felt steady.

‘Oh, she’s a
herrschsüchtige Frau
,’ said Clementine.

‘What’s that?’ said Holly.

‘It means bossy woman in German,’ said Erika. ‘I’m surprised your mum remembers such a long word. Shall we ask her to spell it?’

When they were thirteen Erika and Clementine had studied German at school and developed a love of German insults. They enjoyed the brutal snap of those Germanic syllables. Sometimes they’d shove each other at the same time: just enough to make the other one nearly but not quite lose her balance.

It was one of their few shared passions.

‘Just because she got a higher mark than me.’ Clementine rolled her eyes.

‘Oh, only twenty marks or so higher,’ said Erika. ‘
Dummkopf
.’

(She got exactly twenty-two marks more than Clementine.)

Clementine laughed, fondly it seemed, and Erika felt herself relax. She had to remember to always be like
this
: sort of flippant and cool, not so intense, or she could be intense but in an amusing, endearing way, not annoyingly so.

In a few minutes they had everyone sorted: the girls were happily using their pink glitter glue sticks on cardboard. Erika saw with vindicated pride that the craft table was a hit. Of course it was. Little girls loved crafts. Clementine’s own mother used to have a craft table like this for her when she was little. Erika had adored that craft table: the tidy little jars of gold star stickers, the pots of glue. Surely Clementine had loved that table as much as Erika, so why hadn’t she set one up for her own children? Erika had known better than to ever suggest it; too often she saw her interest in the girls misinterpreted as criticism.

‘I love these sesame seed crackers,’ said Clementine as they sat opposite each other in the living room. She shuffled forward in a sitting position to take a cracker, and Erika saw a glimpse of cleavage. White bra. The emerald pendant necklace that Erika had got her for her thirtieth birthday dangled from her neck. The coffee table was too far away from the couch, so Clementine just sank gracefully to her knees, like a geisha girl.

She wore a turquoise cardigan over a white T-shirt, a full skirt in a fabric featuring giant white daisies against a yellow background, the skirt spread around her on the floor. She was a splash of colour in the middle of Erika’s beige living room.

‘I remembered you either loved them or hated them,’ said Erika.

Clementine laughed again. ‘I’m just so passionate about my crackers.’

‘She’s crackers about crackers,’ said Sam as Clementine, without asking, cut him a piece of cheese, put it on a cracker and handed it to him.

‘Dad joke,’ said Clementine, rolling her eyes as she sank back on the couch.