Truly Madly Guilty (38 page)

chapter seventy-five

Vid’s house was full of people and music and the smell of good food, which was what he liked, what he loved. What was the point in having a big house like this unless you filled it with people?

The occasion was no occasion. What did you need an occasion for? You didn’t! It was spur of the moment. He’d made some phone calls and now the house was full. It was still raining, of course, but that didn’t mean all the fun had to stop, they were warm and dry in here, the rain would not stop them from living their lives! They should do this more often! They should do it every weekend!

All four of his daughters were here tonight, and at this point they were all talking to him, a rare and wonderful event. Of course his older girls all wanted something from him but so be it. That was parenting.

Adrianna wanted him to agree to do a choreographed father and daughter dance at her wedding. It would be filmed and then she’d post it on YouTube. It was her dream to go viral. He would do this, of course, although he was pretending he hated the idea. (He already had a few moves in mind.)

Eva and Elena wanted money, he assumed, and of course they would get it. He’d transfer it into their accounts tonight, after they left. All that was in question was how much. He would see how their negotiating skills were developing. Eva would get hysterical within seconds. He’d been trying to explain to her that hysteria was not an effective negotiating tactic ever since she was two years old.

His baby, Dakota, didn’t want anything. She was happy again, although he hadn’t realised just how sad the poor little angel had got. Tiffany’s idea of turning up at the cellist’s house had been excellent, even though they had never even offered them a
drink
. It had been wonderful to see little Ruby so happy and healthy after the terribleness of that night. It had been a giant weight off his back. He had walked out of that tiny cramped house feeling straighter and lighter (also thirsty).

Clementine and Sam had been silent and strange but they had invited Dakota to Holly’s birthday party! Hopefully they’d remember to feed their guests. He’d take some food along, just in case. He was hopeful they might all still be friends. Tiffany was not as hopeful as him. She said only Dakota was invited to the birthday party, not them. She said it was probably a ‘drop-off party’. He didn’t know what she was talking about. He would take meatballs, maybe. A case of champagne.

‘You having fun?’ said Tiffany, meeting him in the kitchen as they both collected more plates of food to pass around.

‘No! Why do we do this? I just wanted a quiet night at home and look! The house is filled with all these people wanting to be fed! How did this happen?’

‘I have no idea. It’s a mystery.’ Tiffany closed the fridge door with her hip and smiled up at him, both her hands filled with trays. ‘Apparently the sun is coming out tomorrow. We should invite everyone to stay the night and have a barbeque lunch tomorrow. Continue the party all weekend!’

‘Excellent idea,’ said Vid. He knew she was joking but he was wondering if this was a possibility.

He kissed her and stuck in his tongue just to make her say, ‘
Vid
!’ except she gave back as good as she got. She liked to surprise him. ‘Jesus, get a room,’ said his cousin, walking into the kitchen and straight out again.

Tiffany raised an eyebrow and sashayed off with an exaggerated swing of the hips just for him.

There was something else making Vid happy. To do with Tiffany. What was it? Was his mind losing its edge? No! His mind was a steel trap. Of course. That little matter of the dickhead. It was all under control. Yesterday she’d come home from Dakota’s new school and said that she’d run into the wife of that old client of hers and they weren’t coming to Saint Anastasias after all.

This was good because he knew she’d slept with that dickhead.

He knew it because of her left nostril.

Vid played poker once a month with a group of friends. His friend Raymond had told him years ago how poker players tried to work out each other’s ‘tells’: the little giveaways that showed when they were bluffing. Raymond said, ‘You, my friend, have about a dozen tells. You blink, you wink, you twitch, you virtually have a seizure, you are the worst bluffer in the world.’

Vid did okay at poker though, because he might have been the worst bluffer in the world but he had the best luck. He drew great hands. He’d always been lucky. He had great luck in business, he had many, many good friends, he’d married two gorgeous women, even if the first one had turned out to be a crazy-in-the-head bitch who’d tried to turn his daughters against him, but that was okay, because he’d got even luckier with his second wife. Walking Viagra and he loved her like crazy.

Tiffany was a great poker player. Not as lucky as him, but she could do a beautiful ‘poker face’. It worked on him for years but then one day he broke her code.

Tiffany had a show. Her left nostril. Whenever she lied or bluffed, her left nostril quivered. Just once. A teeny-tiny movement. Like a butterfly wing.

Vid had confirmed it by studying his wife on those occasions when he knew for a fact she wasn’t telling the truth. For example, when she answered Dakota’s questions about Santa Claus, or when she told her sisters that she was flying economy, when really she’d booked business class tickets. Her sisters had some strange problem with flying business class, as if it were somehow sinful.

It was conclusive. The nostril never lied. He never told Tiffany, of course, because it was very handy, his secret superpower to see straight through her poker face. (Sadly, she did not at all like the red lingerie he’d bought her for Christmas.)

So when he asked his wife, ‘Did you sleep with him?’ all he had to do was watch her nostril and there was the answer.

She said no but the answer was yes. Yes, she’d slept with him.

It was fine! It was no problem!

It was maybe a slight problem. Say Vid had been at a school concert and he’d seen this dickhead looking at his wife in a disrespectful way, he might have been tempted to hit him. Assault and battery that would be.

Or say he and this dickhead had ended up cooking at a sausage sizzle together (there were always sausage sizzles, even when you paid a million bucks in school fees) and the dickhead made some remark about Tiffany. It might even be an
innocent
remark, but say Vid
took it the wrong way
, because of what he knew, and say he went home and the thought got trapped in Vid’s head, like thoughts sometimes did, and say, in a moment of madness, he got on the phone to his friend Ivan and arranged to have the dickhead’s knees broken.

Ivan was always going on about how if Vid ever needed someone’s knees broken, then Ivan was his man. Tiffany said Ivan was joking. Ivan was not joking.

But! All was good because the dickhead was safely on his way to Dubai, with his knees intact. Vid would therefore not end up in jail. He’d never knowingly broken the law, but he
could
. The potential was there: maybe not to kill, but certainly to maim, and he did not want to go to jail. The food. The
clothes
. Vid shuddered at the thought.

And for now Vid was not in danger of breaking the law. It was lucky he was so lucky. That’s why he felt happy. And Dakota’s reputation at the school was safe. She could be school captain if she wanted. He was sure those people would love Dubai. Interesting place! He’d read an article just the other day about the Dubai Food Festival. They had something called ‘The Big Grill’. It sounded amazing.

‘Why do you look so happy?’ said Dakota. ‘And goofy?’

Vid regarded his daughter, who was now in the kitchen returning an empty tray. She dimpled up at him and she looked, at that moment, extremely pretty. Hail Mary, Mother of God, please don’t let her grow up as sexy as her mother.

‘Because I’m happy, you know,’ said Vid. He lifted Dakota up under her armpits and spun her around. He couldn’t spin his older daughters anymore. (Eva looked like she weighed as much as a small truck.) ‘Are you happy?’

‘Pretty much,’ said Dakota. She put her mouth to his ear. ‘How many more minutes before I can go and read my book in my room for just a little while?’

‘Thirty,’ said Vid.

‘Ten,’ said Dakota.

‘Twenty,’ said Vid. ‘Final offer.’

‘Deal.’ Dakota held out her hand.

They shook on it. He put her back on the floor. The volume of the music at the front of the house shot up to nightclub level. Someone called out ‘
Whoa
!’ in a scandalised tone that could only mean that Tiffany was dancing, while someone else shouted, ‘Where’s Vid?’

‘Here I come!’ bellowed Vid.

It was lucky that Harry from next door was resting in peace.

chapter seventy-six

Clementine woke to a glorious absence of sound.

All she could hear was silence, and then the familiar bubbling melody of a kookaburra’s laugh. It pierced her heart, as if she’d been away from Australia for a long time and was finally home. She opened her eyes and the light felt clean and bright and imbued with significance.

‘It’s stopped,’ she said out loud to Sam. ‘It’s finally stopped.’ She hadn’t let herself believe the weather forecaster’s promise of sunshine by Sunday. She went to wake Sam, to shake his arm, but then she saw his empty side of the bed and remembered that he wasn’t there. He was asleep, as usual these days, in the study, and she felt humiliated that she’d spoken out loud. His absence this hopeful, happy morning felt freshly painful, as if it were new.

She sighed and turned over on her stomach, lifting the corner of the curtain to look at the newly minted blue sky.

They would take the kids out in the sun … but wait, no, they couldn’t, because today she and Sam were booked in to do a first aid course at the local high school. They’d rescheduled it a few times already and she was determined they do it today. She couldn’t keep on traipsing across Sydney doing those talks, solemnly telling people about the importance of first aid training, like she was some sort of school prefect for the world, handing out her little leaflets, when she’d never done one herself.

Sam’s parents were going to look after the girls for the day. ‘It might actually be quite fun and stimulating to learn something new together!’ Sam’s mother had said hopefully. There was a suspicious Pam-like flavour to Joy’s tone. The mothers were circling. Clementine suspected her mother had been on the phone to Sam’s mother, worrying over the state of their marriage.

It was interesting how a marriage instantly became public property as soon as it looked shaky.

She looked at the clock and saw that she’d slept later than normal. It was past six but that was fine. She could fit in a solid two hours of practice before the girls woke. The audition was only a week away now. This was the home stretch. You had to time it right, like an athlete, so that you peaked on audition day. She put on her old shapeless blue cardigan over her pyjamas (for some reason the cardigan had become her practice cardigan) and went quietly downstairs. The absence of the sound of rain opened up a soaring sense of space around her, as if she’d gone from a tiny warm-up room into a concert hall. She hadn’t realised how oppressive that background noise had been.

As she rosined up her bow and the dust-flecked early morning sun created tiny glints of jewel-like light around the room, on the glass of their grandfather clock, on a picture frame, a vase, she felt a deep sense of peace about her progress. The strange thought occurred to her that she wasn’t
resisting
this audition, like she had so often in the past. She wasn’t wasting precious energy bemoaning the injustice of the system: the oversupply of qualified musicians on the audition circuit, the fact that auditioning was a skill entirely separate from someone’s playing ability. Ruby’s accident had somehow stripped her clean of what now seemed like a sort of petulant pride, of fear masquerading as outrage.

‘Good morning.’ Sam stood at the doorway.

‘Good morning.’ She lowered her bow. ‘You’re up early.’

‘The rain has stopped,’ he said glumly. He yawned hugely. He looked so pale and haggard in the sunlight. She wanted to hug him and at the same time she kind of wanted to slap him. ‘I might take the girls to the park, so you can practise.’

‘We’re doing that first aid course today,’ said Clementine. ‘Remember?’

‘I might give that a miss,’ he said. Each word was a sigh, as if it were an effort just to speak. ‘I’ll stay home with the girls. I’ll do it another time. I’m not … feeling great.’

‘You’re fine. You’re doing it,’ said Clementine, as if he were one of the children. ‘The girls are excited about spending the day with your parents. They have plans.’

He made a sound, an exhausted exhalation, like an elderly person seeing yet another flight of stairs to climb. ‘Fine. Whatever.’ He turned around and slouched off. It was like being married to an octogenarian who spoke like a teenager.

‘It starts at ten!’ she called out after him briskly. She felt so brisk today, she was the very
essence
of brisk, and if he didn’t pull himself together soon she was going to briskly tell him that he wasn’t the only one capable of throwing around dramatic, hurtful words like: separate.

chapter seventy-seven

‘Doesn’t that look pretty,’ said Oliver.

‘What?’ said Erika. They were standing in her mother’s disgusting, squelchy front yard; it seemed unlikely there would be anything pretty to look at. She followed his gaze to her mother’s liquidambar where tiny glistening raindrops quivered on each leaf in the sunlight.

‘Look at them sparkle. Like tiny diamonds!’ said Oliver.

‘You’re in a poetic mood,’ said Erika. It must be because they’d had sex last night for the first time in a week.

Her eyes returned to her mother’s
stuff.
Now that the sun was out, everything looked even more depressing than it had the day she’d been here in the rain. She kicked at an unopened, soft, sagging cardboard box with an Amazon label, and the puddle of dirty water on top sloshed onto her foot. A leaf clung to her shoe and she tried to kick it off.

‘What are you doing, darling? Line dancing?’

Erika’s mother appeared in the front yard wearing a red and white polka-dot scarf tied over her head and blue denim overalls, like a 1950s housewife ready to start spring-cleaning. She stuck her thumbs into the pockets of her (brand new-looking) overalls and kicked one leg behind the other and then out to the side while humming some twangy song.

‘You’re quite good at that, Sylvia,’ said Oliver.

‘Thank you,’ said Sylvia. ‘I have a line dancing DVD somewhere if you’d like to borrow it.’

‘I’m sure you could put your hands on it easily,’ said Erika.

Sylvia gave a pretty little shrug. ‘It’s no trouble.’ She looked around the front yard and sighed. ‘Goodness. What a mess. That rain was extraordinary, wasn’t it? We’ve got quite a task ahead of us.’

Today’s choice of delusion was that Sylvia’s front yard looked like this because of the
rain
.

‘Well, we’re not alone,’ said Sylvia with a brave tilt of her chin. ‘People across the state are out there today, mucking in, cleaning up.’

‘Mum,’ said Erika. ‘Those people had their houses flooded. This isn’t because of a flood of rain. It’s a flood of crap.’

‘I was watching TV this morning,’ continued Sylvia obliviously, ‘and it was so inspiring! Neighbours helping neighbours. I had tears in my eyes.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Erika.

Oliver put his hand on Erika’s shoulder. ‘The things we cannot change,’ he murmured.

He was quoting the serenity prayer to her. Oliver went to Al-Anon meetings, for families of alcoholics. Erika didn’t want to learn serenity.

‘What’s that, Oliver?’ said Sylvia. ‘How
are
your lovely parents, by the way? Were they affected by the rain?’ She was as sharp as a tack, that woman. ‘I haven’t seen them in a while. We must all get together and have a drink.’

‘Mum,’ said Erika.

‘We should,’ said Oliver. ‘Although, as you know very well, with my parents it’s more likely to be ten or twenty drinks.’

‘Ah, they’re good fun,’ said Sylvia fondly.

‘Yup,’ said Oliver. ‘They are that. Oh look, here comes our skip bin.’

‘Great. What can I do?’ said Sylvia as the truck pulled into the driveway and slowly lowered the massive bin.

‘Stay out of our way,’ said Erika.

‘Yes, although you’ll need me to make sure you don’t accidentally throw out anything important,’ said Sylvia. ‘Do you know what I found the other day, caught up in a box of old papers? The funniest little photo of you, me and Clementine!’

‘That seems unlikely,’ said Erika.

‘What do you mean it seems unlikely? Wait till you see it! I
guarantee
you will laugh. Now just imagine if we’d thrown away that precious memory! You and Clementine must have been about twelve, I think. Clementine looks so young and pretty in it. She seemed kind of worn-out the other night to be frank, not aging well. You should take a look at it, Oliver. See what your future daughter might look like!’

Oliver’s face closed down. ‘That’s not happening now.’

‘What? Did she pull out on you? After
you saved her child’s life
?’

‘We pulled out,’ said Erika. ‘Not her. Us. We changed our mind.’

‘Oh,’ said Sylvia. ‘But why? That’s terrible news. I’m crushed!’ Erika watched in amazement as her mother conveniently forgot everything she’d said on Thursday night and made herself the victim. ‘You let me get my hopes up! I thought I was going to be a grandma. I was looking at those pretty little girls at Pam’s place and thinking how nice it would be to have a grandchild of my own. I was thinking I could teach her how to sew, like my grandmother taught me.’

‘Teach her how to sew?!’ spluttered Erika. ‘You never taught
me
how to sew!’

‘You probably never asked,’ said Sylvia.

‘I’ve never seen you with a needle and thread in my life.’

‘I’ll just go and pay the driver for the skip,’ said Oliver.

‘I’ll go inside and see if I can find that funny little photo,’ said Sylvia quickly, just in case, God forbid, anyone would expect her to pay for anything.

Erika took the opportunity to snap on some plastic gloves, bend at the knees and pick up a broken laundry basket filled with miscellaneous junk: a headless doll, a sodden beach towel, a pizza box. She carried it to the skip bin and chucked it in, hard, like a grenade. It landed with a bang against the metal. Throwing stuff out always gave her a wild, terrified feeling, as if she were running into battle screaming a war cry.

‘Jeez, you’ve got a job ahead of you,’ said the skip bin guy as he folded up the yellow form Oliver had handed him and stuffed it in his back pocket. He crossed his arms across his barrel chest and studied the front yard with an expression of pure disgust.

‘Want to lend a hand?’ said Oliver.

‘Ha ha! Nah, you’re on your own there, mate. Better you than me!’ He kept standing there, shaking his head, as if he were there to supervise.

‘Well, on your bike then,’ said Erika irritably, and she heard Oliver stifle a laugh as she turned away to pick up the old Christmas tree. A Christmas tree, of all things. She couldn’t remember ever having a Christmas tree growing up, and yet here was an old, mangled one with a single sad strand of gold tinsel.

The driver roared off in his truck, and Erika threw the Christmas tree in the bin while Oliver picked up a broken pedestal fan in one hand and a bag of rubbish in the other.

Her mother came out the front door triumphantly holding a tiny photo between her thumb and finger. A miracle that she’d found something.

‘Look at this photo!’ she said to Erika. ‘I guarantee it will make you laugh.’

‘I guarantee it won’t,’ said Erika sourly.

Her mother leaned over and removed a tiny piece of gold tinsel from Erika’s shirt. ‘Yes, it will. Look.’

Erika took the picture. She burst out laughing. Her mother danced around, hugging herself with delight. ‘I told you, I told you!’

It was a grainy black and white picture of herself, her mother and Clementine sitting together on a rollercoaster. It had been taken by one of those automatic cameras timed to capture passengers’ reactions at the most terrifying moment of the rollercoaster ride. All three of them had oval-shaped mouths frozen forever mid-scream. Erika was leaning forward, both hands clutching the safety bar, as if she were pushing it to go faster even as she threw her head back. Clementine had her eyes squeezed shut and her ponytail flew in a vertical line above her head like the pope’s hat. Sylvia had her eyes wide open and both arms flung up in the air like a drunk girl dancing. Terrified, hilarious joy. That’s what you saw in that photo. It didn’t matter if it was accurate, you couldn’t look at it without laughing. She and Clementine were wearing their school uniforms.

‘See! Aren’t you glad I kept it!’ said Sylvia. ‘Show it to Clementine. See if she remembers that day! I must admit I don’t actually remember that day
specifically
,
but you can see how happy we were! Don’t you pretend you had a terrible childhood, you had a wonderful childhood! All those rollercoasters, remember? My goodness, I loved rollercoasters. You did too.’

Her eye was caught by something. ‘Oliver, what have you got there? Let me just check that!’ Oliver, who had both arms wrapped around a disintegrating cardboard box, hurried off to the skip bin, with Sylvia running behind him calling out, ‘Oliver! Oh,
Oliver
!’

This was life with Sylvia: absurd, grotesque, infuriating and sometimes, every now and then, wonderful. They were meant to be at school that day. It was late November, summer in the air. It was Erika’s twelfth birthday – no, it was a week
after
Erika’s twelfth birthday; her mother had forgotten the actual birthday, Sylvia had difficulties with dates, but this time she’d decided to redeem herself with a spontaneous, crazy gesture. She’d turned up at school and taken both girls out of class for a trip to Luna Park,
without
, by the way, Clementine’s parents’ permission or knowledge; it would never happen today and Erika was horrified now on the school’s behalf. The legal ramifications were mind-boggling.

Clementine wasn’t allowed to go on a rollercoaster because her mother had a phobia about them. She had been deeply affected by the story of a fairground ride accident in which eight people had died at a country fair, years before Clementine and Erika were born. ‘They don’t maintain those machines,’ Pam always said. ‘They are
death traps
. They are accidents waiting to happen.’

But Erika and Sylvia loved rollercoasters, the scarier the better. No decisions, no control, no discussion: just the rush of air into your lungs and the piercing sound of your own screams before they’re snatched away by the wind. It was one of the very few, strange, random things they had in common: an enjoyment of scary rollercoaster rides. Not that they went on them all that often. Erika could remember only a handful of occasions, and this was one of them.

Erika knew Clementine had loved that day too. She had been in one of her hectically happy moods. It was a day where Erika didn’t second-guess herself or their friendship. There had been days like those, days where her mother was her mother and her friend was her friend.

She slid the photo into the back pocket of her jeans and watched as Sylvia leaned so far into the skip bin to rescue something that she nearly toppled in. She got herself back upright, adjusted her checked headscarf and faced Oliver, hands on her hips.

‘Oliver! There’s nothing wrong with that fan!’ she cried. ‘You retrieve that for me, please!’

‘No can do, Sylvia,’ said Oliver.

Erika turned away to hide her smile. She studied the sunlight shining on the rain-speckled tree. It actually did look pretty. Like a Christmas tree.

She tipped her head back, enjoying the sun on her face, and saw the lady who lived across the road, the one who loved Jesus, but sure didn’t love Sylvia. She was standing at her upstairs window, one hand on the glass as if she were cleaning it. The lady seemed to be looking straight back at Erika.

And just like that, it happened: Erika remembered everything.