Truly Madly Guilty (13 page)

‘I see what you mean,’ she said uneasily.

‘I’m going to do it,’ said Clementine fast, before her mother could speak. ‘I’m going to say yes. I have to say yes.’

chapter nineteen

‘Are you okay? You’re not still upset about our friend Harry?’ said Vid, lying next to Tiffany in their dark bedroom while the rain continued its incessant soundtrack.

Thanks to their red velvet ‘absolute blackout’ curtains Tiffany could see absolutely nothing but black. Normally the darkness felt luxurious, like a hotel room, but tonight it felt suffocating. Like death. There was too much death on her mind these days.

Although she couldn’t see Vid in their king-sized bed, she knew he would be lying flat on his back, his hands crossed behind his head like a sunbaker. He slept the entire night like that without changing position. It still made Tiffany laugh after all these years. It was such a casual, confident, aristocratic approach to sleep.
You may approach, sleep
. So very Vid.

‘He wasn’t our friend, was he?’ said Tiffany. ‘That’s the point. He was our neighbour but he wasn’t our friend.’

‘He didn’t
want
to be our friend, you know,’ Vid reminded her.

It was true that if Harry had been at all interested in friendship with them he would have got it. Vid was open to friendship with anyone he encountered in his daily life: baristas and barristers, service station attendants and cellists.

Definitely cellists.

If Harry had been a different sort of old man they would have had him over all the time and they would have noticed his absence so much sooner.

Soon enough to have saved his life? Today, the police had told Oliver and Tiffany that it seemed most likely that Harry had either fallen down the stairs, or had a stroke or heart attack and perhaps had fallen as a result. There would be a coroner’s inquest. It seemed like a formality. The police were going through a process; ticking off the boxes.

‘He probably died instantly,’ the policeman told Tiffany, but how would he know? He had no medical expertise. He was just saying it to make her feel better.

Anyway, let’s be practical, even if they had been Harry’s friends, they wouldn’t have been over there every five minutes. He’d probably still be dead; he just wouldn’t be quite
as
dead as he was today. He’d got deader and deader over the weeks it took before they noticed. She gagged at the sickly sweet sensory memory. A smell had never made her vomit before. Well, she’d never smelled death before.

Oliver was an accountant. He probably hadn’t smelled death either, but while she’d been sick in Harry’s sandstone pot (Harry would have been
furious
), white-faced Oliver had calmly made the necessary phone calls, rubbed her back and offered her a clean, precisely folded white tissue from his pocket. ‘Unused,’ he promised. Oliver was the man to have around in a crisis. A man with a tissue and a conscience. The guy was a freaking hero.

‘Oliver is a freaking hero,’ she said out loud, even though she knew Vid probably didn’t need to hear any more about Oliver’s freaking heroism.

‘He is a good man,’ said Vid patiently. He yawned. ‘We should have them over.’ He said it automatically and now he must surely be lying there thinking of the last time they’d had them over.

‘Hey, I know! Let’s have them over for a barbeque!’ said Tiffany. ‘Great idea! Wait, haven’t they got some really nice friends? Isn’t one of them a cellist?’

‘That’s not funny,’ said Vid, and he sounded profoundly sad. ‘That’s not even a little bit funny.’

‘Sorry,’ said Tiffany. ‘Sick joke.’

‘For coffee?’ said Vid sadly. ‘We can have Erika and Oliver over for coffee, can’t we?’

‘Go to sleep,’ said Tiffany.

‘Yes, boss,’ said Vid, and within seconds she heard his breathing slow. He could go to sleep in an instant, even on those nights when she knew he was upset or angry or worried about something. Nothing ever affected that man’s sleep or his appetite.

‘Wake up,’ she whispered, but if she woke him he would keep talking and he’d been up since five that morning with the aquatic centre project. One of his boys had got sick and he was worried he’d underquoted. The man needed his sleep.

She turned on her side and tried to calmly sort her way through all the things that were churning through her mind.

Number one. Finding Harry’s body today. Not a nice experience, but get over it. Harry was probably happy to be dead. He seemed like a man who was done with living. So move right along.

Number two. Dakota. Everyone – Vid, Dakota’s teacher, Tiffany’s sisters – all said that Dakota was fine. It was all in Tiffany’s head. Maybe it was. She would continue to monitor.

Number three. The Information Morning at Dakota’s new school tomorrow. Feelings of resentment (don’t you send me emails reminding me that ATTENDANCE IS COMPULSORY, how dare you talk to me in capital letters) probably related to subconscious feelings of inferiority over the snooty school and other parents. Get over yourself. It’s not about you. It’s about Dakota.

Number four, but perhaps overriding everything else, were her feelings of guilt and horror over what had happened at the barbeque. Like the memory of a nightmare you can’t quite get out of your head. Well, yes, Tiffany, we get it, all very distressing, over and over it we go, not achieving anything, just stop thinking about it, you can’t change what you did or didn’t do, what you should and shouldn’t have done.

The problem was that every item on her list was so nebulous. Impossible to pin down. She remembered the days when her worries were always related to money and solutions could be calculated.

To comfort and distract herself, she worked her way through a conservative estimate of her current net present value: Property. Shares. Self-managed superannuation fund. Family trust. Term deposits. Cheque account. Doing this always calmed her. It was like imagining the protective walls of an impenetrable fortress. She was safe. No matter what happened. If her marriage fell apart (her marriage wouldn’t fall apart), if the stock market or property market crashed, if Vid died or she died or if one of them got a rare disease requiring endless medical bills, the family was safe. She’d constructed this fortress herself, with Vid’s help, of course, but it was mainly her fortress, and she was proud of it.

Go to sleep then, safe in the financial fortress you built on a transgression and yet still it stands.

She closed her eyes and opened them again instantly. She was tired but wide awake. She felt all pop-eyed like she was on coke. So this was insomnia. She’d always thought she wasn’t the type for it.

She felt a sudden need to go and check on Dakota. She wasn’t the type for that either. She hadn’t been one of those mothers who go in to check her sleeping baby is still breathing. (She’d caught Vid doing it a few times. He’d been a little shamefaced. Mr I’m-So-Cool-and-Casual and This-Is-My-Fourth-Kid.)

She got out of bed, her arms outstretched, and expertly shuffled her way to the doorjamb, which always turned up sooner than she expected. It was much easier to see once she got out on the landing because they always left a light on, turned down low, in case Dakota got up in the night. She pushed Dakota’s bedroom door open and stood there for a moment letting her eyes adjust.

Tiffany couldn’t hear anything over the rain. She wanted to hear the even sound of Dakota breathing. She tiptoed forward, past the crammed bookshelf, and stood next to the bed looking down at Dakota, trying to make out the form of her body. Dakota appeared to be lying flat on her back just like her father, although usually she slept curled up on her side.

At the same moment she registered the twin shimmers of Dakota’s eyes staring up at her, she heard Dakota say in a perfectly clear, wide-awake voice, ‘What’s the matter, Mum?’

Tiffany jumped and yelped. ‘I thought you were asleep,’ she said, pressing her hand to her chest. ‘You gave me the fright of my life.’

‘I’m not asleep,’ said Dakota.

‘Can’t you sleep? Why are you lying there awake like that? What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing,’ said Dakota. ‘I’m just awake.’

‘Is something worrying you? Move over.’

Dakota moved over and Tiffany got into bed with her, feeling an immediate comfort she hadn’t known she craved.

‘Are you upset about Harry?’ said Tiffany. Dakota had responded to the news of Harry’s death in the same impassive way she now responded to everything.

‘Not really,’ said Dakota flatly. ‘Not that much.’

‘No. Well. We didn’t know him very well and he wasn’t …’

‘Very nice,’ finished Dakota.

‘No. He wasn’t. But is there something else?’ said Tiffany. ‘Something on your mind?’

‘There’s nothing on my mind,’ said Dakota. ‘Nothing at all.’ She sounded absolutely certain of this and Dakota had never been able to lie.

‘You’re not worried about going to Saint Anastasias tomorrow?’ said Tiffany.

‘No,’ said Dakota.

‘It should be interesting,’ said Tiffany vaguely. She could feel sleep tugging at her consciousness like a drug. Maybe it was nothing. Prepubescent stuff. Hormones. Growing up.

‘Shall I just lie here until you fall asleep?’ said Tiffany.

‘If you want,’ said Dakota frostily.

*

Dakota’s mother lay sound asleep next to her, not snoring exactly but making a long, thin whistling sound each time she breathed out.

Long strands of her mum’s hair floated across Dakota’s face and tickled her nose. She had hooked one leg over Dakota’s leg, locking her close, like she had her in a leg-cuff.

Holding her breath, Dakota inched her leg free. She pulled back the covers and got up on her knees and flattened herself against the bedroom wall like Spiderman. She slid her way down the wall to the end of the bed. It was a covert operation. She was escaping her captor. Yes! She’d done it! She tiptoed across her bedroom, avoiding the landmines in the carpet.

Stupid stuff. Don’t think stupid, little-kid thoughts like that, Dakota, when there are real wars happening right now and real refugees in tiny boats in the middle of the ocean and real people stepping on landmines. Would you like to step on a landmine? She sat on her cushioned window seat and hugged her knees to her chest. She tried to feel gratitude for her window seat but she felt nothing about her window seat. Instead, she actually thought the terribly rude, ungrateful thought:
I don’t give a shit about this window seat.

Dakota had not properly understood until recently how her brain was a private space with only her in it. Yesterday she’d looked at her teacher and screamed the F-word in her head. Nothing happened. Nobody knew she’d done that. Nobody would ever know.

Everybody else probably worked this out when they were like, three years old, but it was a revelation to Dakota. Thinking about it made her feel as if she were alone in a circle-shaped room: circle-shaped because her head was circle-shaped, with two little round windows, which were her eyes, and people tried to look in, to understand her, by looking through her eyes, but they couldn’t see in. Not really. She was there, in her circle-shaped room, all on her own.

She could say to her mum, ‘I love my window seat,’ and if she said it just the right way, not so enthusiastically that she made her suspicious, her mum would think she meant it and she’d never know the truth.

So if Dakota could do that, if Dakota could think shocking, kind of angry, hard thoughts like,
I don’t give a shit about window seats
, then probably grown-ups had shocking, angry, hard thoughts too, which were probably much worse because they could watch R-rated movies.

For example, her mum might say, ‘Good night, Dakota, I love you, Dakota,’ but inside the circle-shaped room of her brain her real self was thinking:
I can’t believe you are my daughter, Dakota, I can’t believe I have a daughter who would do what you did
.

Her mother probably thought the reason Dakota had turned out to be such a disappointment was because she was ‘growing up with money’, although funnily enough she didn’t actually
have
any money, except for some birthday money in a bank account she wasn’t allowed to touch.

Dakota’s mum did
not
‘grow up with money’ (neither did Dakota’s dad, but he didn’t go on about that; he just really loved spending it).

When Dakota’s mum was Dakota’s age she’d gone to a ‘rich kid’s’ party and fallen in love with her house. It was like a castle, she said. She could still describe everything about that house in pretty boring detail. She’d especially loved the window seats. She was obsessed with window seats. They were ‘the height of luxury’. For years and years her mum had dreamed of a two-storey house with marble bathrooms and bay windows and window seats. It was a really architecturally specific dream. She had even drawn pictures of it. So when she and Dakota’s dad had talked to the builders about this house they’d said: Window seats, please. The more the better.

The funny thing was that Dakota had once said something to her Auntie Louise, who was one of her mum’s big sisters, about how their family had grown up ‘poor’, and her auntie had burst out laughing. ‘We weren’t
poor
,’ she said, ‘we just weren’t rich. We had holidays, we had toys, we had a great life. Your mum just thought she didn’t belong out here in the lower-class suburbs.’ Then she’d gone and told the other aunties, who’d all teased her mum, but her mum didn’t give a shit, she just laughed and said, ‘
Whatevah
,’ like she was an American girl on a TV show.

Anyway, Dakota still tried her best to love and appreciate her window seats but she wasn’t very good at it. She got, like, one out of ten for appreciation.

The blind was down and she didn’t want to risk opening it and waking up her mum, so she pulled it over her head like a tent.

It was raining outside, so she couldn’t see much. Harry’s house was just a blurred, spooky shape. She wondered if Harry’s ghost was in there, muttering angrily, kicking stuff with the toe of his foot and occasionally turning his head to one side and spitting in disgust,
Why did it take you people so long to find my body? Are you stupid or what?

She wasn’t
glad
he was dead but she wasn’t sad either. She didn’t feel anything. There was just a big nothing feeling in her head about Harry.