Truly Madly Guilty (19 page)

‘My two older daughters are here at the school,’ said Lisa. ‘Cara is our baby.’ Lisa gestured to a little girl sitting next to her, swinging her legs and chewing gum. ‘Oh God, Cara, I told you to throw that out before we came in! How embarrassing. And my husband, Andrew.’

The husband leaned forward to give a little wave. He was in his late fifties with lots of grey hair (he’d be proud of his hair, like Vid was of his) and that distinguished, statesman-like confidence that comes with professional success in a career like medicine or law.

He had distinctive pale hazel eyes, with dark rings around the irises. Tiffany’s heart lurched as if she’d tripped in a dream.

‘Hi, Andrew,’ said Tiffany.

chapter thirty

The day of the barbeque

‘So. Our stomachs are full,’ said Vid, patting his.

Tiffany knew he meant: My stomach is full, so I need a cigarette, like people once did in the civilised world.

‘Anyone for seconds?’ asked Tiffany. ‘Or thirds?’ She scanned the long table as people pushed away their plates with satisfied sighs and complimentary murmurs.

Vid, at the head of the table, leaned back in his chair and tapped his fingers on his armrests like a king benevolently regarding his loyal subjects, except that in this case the king had cooked dinner and his subjects had praised him big-time: the
tenderness
of the meat, and so on and so forth. Clementine in particular had laid it on thick.

Vid and Clementine were getting on like a house on fire. Earlier, they’d spoken for ten minutes straight about caramelised onions. Tiffany had got her own back by talking to Clementine’s husband about the footy.

‘You’re really into your sport, aren’t you, Tiffany?’ said Sam now. ‘You’re not just faking it to be polite.’

‘Oh, I never fake it,’ said Tiffany.

‘Why would she?’ said Vid. He lifted his hands as if to indicate his marvellous physique.

Everyone laughed, except for Oliver and Erika, who gave pained smiles. Tiffany decided she’d better try to curb the risqué jokes as she saw her neighbours give pointed looks at the children, who were out of earshot anyway. Dakota had the two little girls on either side of her in the hanging egg chair in the back corner of the cabana, and she was showing them something on her iPad. The girls were happily snuggled up to Dakota’s sides like the dream little sisters she’d never have (a deal was a deal, but how could you not have a pang of regret watching that?) and were enthralled by whatever Dakota was showing them. Hopefully it didn’t involve people’s heads exploding. Barney was over in a far corner of the backyard contentedly involved with some sort of illicit hole-digging operation which Tiffany was pretending not to notice. Every now and then he’d look over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t about to be caught.

‘Poor Oliver pretends to be interested in sport whenever we’re around,’ said Clementine. ‘Sam says, “Did you catch the game last night?” and you can see Oliver thinking, “What game?”’

‘I don’t mind watching a bit of the tennis,’ said Oliver.

‘Oliver
plays
sport,’ said Sam. ‘That’s the difference between him and me. I get my heart rate up yelling at the screen.’

‘Oliver and Erika actually met on the squash court,’ said Clementine. ‘They’re very athletic people.’

There was something a bit over-eager about the way Clementine spoke, as if she felt the need to champion the couple, like she was their newly appointed publicist.

‘Were you playing against each other?’ asked Tiffany as she refilled Erika’s wineglass yet again. Tiffany wouldn’t have picked her to be a heavy drinker, not that it was her business. Anyway, it wasn’t like Erika had to drive home; she only had to walk next door.

‘We worked for the same accounting firm,’ said Erika. ‘Some of the staff started a squash comp on Thursday nights. Oliver and I volunteered to do the draw.’

‘We have a shared love of spreadsheets,’ said Oliver, and he smiled at Erika, as if over some secret memory involving spreadsheets.

‘I love a good spreadsheet myself,’ said Tiffany.

‘Do you?’ Clementine spun her head. ‘What do you use spreadsheets for?’ There was just the faintest emphasis on the word ‘you’.

‘For my work,’ said Tiffany, with just the faintest emphasis on the word ‘work’.

‘Oh!’ said Clementine. ‘I didn’t … what do you do?’

‘I buy unrenovated properties, fix them up, sell them,’ said Tiffany.

‘You flip them,’ said Sam.

‘Yep,’ said Tiffany. ‘I flip them. Like pancakes.’

‘She doesn’t just flip!’ said Vid. ‘She’s a big-time property developer!’

‘I’m not,’ said Tiffany. ‘I’ve only just gone a bit bigger. I’m doing a small apartment block. Six two-bedroom apartments.’

‘Yep, she’s like Donald Trump! My wife earns the big bucks. You think this big motherfucking house, excuse my French, comes from my money?! You think all that artwork inside, all those masterpieces, comes from my money?’

Oh God, Vid. Next he was going to say, ‘I’m just a simple electrician.’

‘I’m just a simple electrician!’ said Vid. ‘I married up.’

A simple electrician with thirty employees, thought Tiffany. But go for your life, Vid. I’ll take full credit for our money.

‘They’re not masterpieces by the way,’ said Tiffany.

‘So how did you two meet?’ asked Oliver in his courteous, proper way. He reminded Tiffany of a priest making conversation with his parishioners after Sunday mass.

‘We met at a property auction,’ said Tiffany, before Vid got a chance to answer. ‘It was a studio apartment in the city. My first ever investment.’

‘Ah. But that wasn’t the first time I met her,’ said Vid, with the anticipatory tone of someone sharing his favourite dirty joke.

‘Vid,’ warned Tiffany. She met his eyes across the table. Jesus. He was hopeless. It was because he liked Clementine and Sam, and whenever he really liked people he felt compelled to share the story. He was like a big kid desperate to show off to his new friends by saying the naughtiest word he knew. If it were just the neighbours there he would never have said it.

Vid looked back at Tiffany, disappointed. He gave a little shrug and lifted his hands in defeat. ‘But maybe that’s a story for another day.’

‘This is all very mysterious,’ said Clementine.

‘So were you bidding against each other at the auction?’ asked Sam.

‘I stopped bidding,’ said Vid, ‘when I saw how badly she wanted it.’

‘A lie,’ said Tiffany. ‘I outbid him fair and square.’

She’d made two hundred thousand dollars on that place, in just under six months. It was her first hit. Her first money-making high.

Or maybe not quite. Her second.

‘But you can’t tell us how you already knew each other?’ said Clementine.

‘My wife has an enquiring mind,’ said Sam, ‘which is a nice way of saying she’s nosy.’

‘Oh, don’t pretend you don’t want to know,’ said Clementine. ‘He’s a bigger gossip than me.’ She looked over at Tiffany. ‘But I’ll stop asking. Sorry. I was just intrigued.’

To hell with it. Tiffany lowered her voice. ‘It was like this,’ she said. Everyone leaned forward.

chapter thirty-one

Erika stood in the pouring rain on the pavement outside her childhood home, an umbrella in one hand, a bucketful of cleaning supplies in the other. She didn’t move, only her eyes moved, expertly tracking the amount of time and work and arguing and begging and pleading and tug-of-warring required.

Clementine’s mother hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said on the phone that it was ‘pretty bad’. When Erika was a child, her mother’s belongings had never spread beyond the front door. The house always had a sullen, furtive look to it with its closed blinds and its thirsty wilted garden. But it wasn’t a house that would make a passer-by turn their head and stare. All their secrets were kept inside, behind the front door that could never open the whole way. Their worst fear was a knock on the door. Erika’s mother would react instantly, as if to a sniper attack. You had to drop down low so you couldn’t be seen by spying eyes through a window. You had to be still and silent and wait, your heart thudding in your ears, until that nosy, rude person who
dared
to knock finally saw sense and slunk away, never seeing, never knowing the disgusting truth about the way Erika and her mother lived.

It was only over recent years that her mother’s belongings had finally burst through the front door, proliferating like the mushroom cells of a killer virus.

Today she could see a pallet of bricks, a pedestal fan standing companionably next to a mangy artificial Christmas tree of the same height, a mountain of bulging rubbish bags, a city of unopened delivery boxes that had got wet in the recent rain so the cardboard had turned to soft pulp, a stack of framed prints that looked like they’d come from a teenager’s room (they weren’t Erika’s) and dozens of pieces of women’s clothing with the arms and legs flung out at panicky angles, as if there had been a recent massacre.

The problem was that her mother now had too much time and too much money. When Erika was growing up her mother had had her full-time nursing job as well as the occasional cheques Erika’s father sent from his new home in the UK, where he lived with his replacement, upgraded family. So they’d had money, but there was still a ceiling to how much new stuff she could accumulate, although Sylvia had given it a red-hot go. However, when Erika’s grandmother had died, leaving a considerable sum of money to Sylvia, her mother’s hoarding had been given a whole new financial boost. Thanks, Grandma.

And of course, now there was online shopping too. Her mother had learned how to use a computer, and she managed to keep it plugged in and accessible, and because Erika had arranged for all her bills to be paid by direct debit, the electricity never got turned off like it had when Erika was growing up and the paper bills used to vanish into the abyss.

If the front lawn looked like this, the inside of the house would be monstrous. Her heart galloped. It was as though she had the sole responsibility of rescuing someone by lifting something impossibly, incomprehensibly heavy: a train, a building. Of
course
it couldn’t be done. Not on her own. Not in this rain. And not without Oliver by her side: methodical and unemotional, looking for solutions, speaking to her mother in his reasonable let’s-work-our-way-through-this voice.

Oliver didn’t take every object personally, the way Erika did. To Erika, every piece of junk represented a choice her mother had made of an object over her. Her mother loved random, crappy objects more than she loved her daughter. She must, because she fought for them, she screamed for them, and she was fully prepared to bury her only daughter in them, and so each time Erika picked up an object it was with a wordless cry of despair:
You choose this over me!
She should have waited until he was better. Or she should have at least taken her anxiety medication – that’s why she’d been prescribed the tablets, to help her get through exactly this sort of moment – but she hadn’t taken one since the day of the barbeque. She hadn’t even looked at the box. She couldn’t risk more of those terrifying memory gaps.

‘Erika! I’m so happy to see you! Oh! Sorry to startle you like that!’

It was the woman who had been living next door to her mother for the last five years. Erika’s mother had adored this woman for quite a long time, long for her, anyway, maybe six months, before, predictably, she’d committed some sin, and gone from a ‘really quite extraordinary person’ to ‘
that
woman’.

‘Hi,’ said Erika. She couldn’t remember the woman’s name. She didn’t want to remember her name. It would only increase her sense of responsibility.

‘Isn’t the weather terrible,’ said the woman. ‘It’s just torrential!’

Why did people feel the need to comment on the rain, when they had absolutely nothing of value to add to the conversation?

‘Torrential,’ agreed Erika. ‘A veritable downpour of cats and dogs!’

‘Um, yes. So I was pleased to see you here actually,’ said the woman. She held a child’s tiny transparent umbrella tightly over her head. The rest of her was getting wet. She shot a pained look at Erika’s mother’s front yard. ‘I, ah, just wanted to let you know that we’re putting our house on the market.’

‘Ah,’ said Erika. Her jaw clicked as her back teeth began to grind. It would be so much easier if this were one of the horrible neighbours, like the couple with the
Jesus Loves You
sign in their window, who made regular complaints about the state of Sylvia’s house to the Department of Community Services, or the snooty ones across the road, who made aggressive legal threats. But this woman was so nice and non-confrontational. Michelle. Dammit. She’d accidentally remembered her name.

Michelle clasped her hands together as if to beg. ‘So, I know your mother has … um, difficulties, please know I do understand, I have a close family member with mental health issues, oh gosh, I hope this isn’t offending you, it’s just that –’

Erika took a breath. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I understand. You’re saying the state of my mother’s house will affect the value of your property.’

‘By maybe a hundred thousand dollars,’ said Michelle pleadingly. ‘According to the agent.’

The agent was being conservative. By Erika’s calculations the loss could be much higher. No one wants to buy a house in a nice middle-class suburb next door to a junkyard.

‘I’ll get it fixed,’ said Erika.

You are not responsible for your parents’ living conditions
. That’s what the children of hoarders were told, but how could she not feel responsible when she was this poor woman’s only hope? Someone’s financial outcome depended on Erika stepping up, and she took financial outcomes seriously. Of course she was responsible. She saw one of the blinds at her mother’s window twitch. She’d be inside, peering out, muttering to herself.

‘I know it’s hard,’ said Michelle. ‘I know it’s an illness. I’ve seen the TV shows.’

Oh, for God’s sake. The TV shows. Always with the TV shows. Everyone was an expert after half an hour of neatly packaged television: the drama of the disgusting rubbish, the clever counsellor, the clean-up, the happy hoarder seeing her floor for the first time in years … and
fixed
! They all lived happily ever after, when in fact cleaning away the rubbish was only alleviating the symptoms, not curing the illness.

Years ago, Erika had still had hopes of a cure. If she could get her mother to see a professional. There was medication. There was cognitive behavioural therapy. Talk therapy. If only Sylvia could talk to someone about the day Erika’s dad had left and how it had triggered some latent madness. Sylvia had always been a compulsive shopper, a bright, beautiful, nutty personality, a real character, a party girl, but she’d stayed on the right side of crazy until she’d read that little two-word note he left on the fridge:
Sorry Sylvia
. No mention of Erika. He’d never found her particularly relevant. And that’s when it had begun. That very day Sylvia had gone out shopping and come home laden with bags. By Christmas the purple flowered carpet in the living room had vanished beneath the first layer of stuff, and Erika had never seen it again. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of the outline of a petal and it was like coming across an ancient relic. To think that she had once lived in a normal house.

She accepted now that there would be no cure. There would be no end until the day Sylvia died. In the meantime Erika would keep battling the symptoms.

‘So I’d better –’ Erika gestured with her mops towards the house.

‘I got on well with your mum when we first moved in,’ said Michelle. ‘But then it was like I offended her. I was never sure exactly what I did.’

‘You did nothing,’ said Erika. ‘That’s just what my mother does. It’s part of the illness.’

‘Right,’ said Michelle. ‘Well … thank you.’ She smiled apologetically and fluttered her fingers in a ‘bye-bye’ way at Erika. Far too nice for her own good.

As soon as Erika reached her mother’s front porch, the front door opened.

‘Quick! Get inside!’ Her mother was wild-eyed, as if they were under attack. ‘What were you talking to
her
for?’

Erika turned sideways to come in. Sometimes when she went to other people’s places, she automatically turned sideways to enter the front door, forgetting that most people had doors that opened the full way.

She inched her way past the towers of magazines and books and newspapers, the open cardboard boxes containing random junk, the bookshelf filled with kitchen crockery, the unplugged washing machine with the lid up, the ubiquitous bulging plastic rubbish bags, the knick-knacks, the vases, the shoes, the brooms. It was always ironic to see the brooms, because there was never any floor free to sweep.

‘What are you doing here?’ said her mother. ‘I thought this was against the “rules”.’ She made quotation marks with her fingers around the word ‘rules’. It made Erika think of Holly.

‘Mum, what are you wearing?’ sighed Erika. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Her mother wore what appeared to be a brand new blue sequinned flapper-style dress that was too big for her thin frame and a feathered headband that sat low on her forehead, so that she had to peer up to keep it from slipping into her eyes. She posed like a star on the red carpet, one hand on her thrust-forward hip. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? I got it online, you’d be proud of me, it was on special! I’ve been invited to a party. A
Great Gatsby
party!’

‘What party?’ Erika walked down the hallway towards the living room, studying the house. No worse than usual. The normal fire hazards everywhere, but she couldn’t smell anything rotten or decaying. Perhaps if she concentrated on the front yard today? If the rain slowed to a drizzle?

‘It’s a sixtieth birthday party,’ said her mother. ‘I’m so looking forward to it! How are you, darling? You look a bit washed out. I wish you wouldn’t turn up with
equipment
as if I were a job you had to do.’

‘You are a job I have to do,’ said Erika.

‘Well, that’s just silly. I’d rather just have a chat with you and hear what you’ve been up to. If only I’d known you were coming I would have baked something from that new recipe book, the one I was telling you about when you got so grumpy the other day –’

‘Yes, but
who
is turning sixty?’ asked Erika. It seemed unlikely that her mother would be invited to a party. Since she’d retired from her job at the nursing home, she’d lost touch with her friends, even the most determined, patient ones, or else she’d discarded them. Her mother didn’t hoard friends.

Erika walked into the kitchen and her heart sank. The front yard would have to wait. It had to be the kitchen today. There were paper plates sitting on top of the hotplates. Half-empty food containers with green mould. She wasn’t meant to be here for another two weeks, and if it wasn’t for the problem with the front yard, she wouldn’t be seeing this, but now that she had seen it, it was impossible to walk away. It was a health hazard. It was an affront to human decency. She put down her buckets and pulled out the packet of disposable gloves.

‘Felicity Hogan is turning sixty,’ sighed her mother, with a little flare of the nostrils on the word ‘Felicity’ as though Erika was spoiling her pleasure in the party by reminding her who was hosting it. ‘Oh, look at you, now you’re putting on
gloves
as if you’re about to do an operation.’

‘Mum,’ said Erika. ‘Felicity turned sixty last year. No, actually, it was the year before. You didn’t go to the party. I remember you said it was tacky having a
Great Gatsby
party.’

‘What?’ Her mother’s face fell, and she pushed the headband further up her forehead so that her hair stuck up around it, making her look like an unhinged tennis player. ‘You think you’re always so clever and right but you’re wrong, Erika!’ The disappointment turned her voice strident. Those jagged edges were always there beneath the fluffy blanket of her maternal love. ‘Let me get the invitation for you! Why would I have an invitation for a party that happened two years ago, answer me that, Miss Smarty-pants?’

Erika laughed bitterly. ‘Are you joking? Are you serious? Because, Mum,
you don’t throw anything out
!’

Her mother tore off her headband and dropped it. Her tone changed. ‘I am aware that I have a problem, Erika, do you think I’m not aware of it? I’m not stupid. Do you think I wouldn’t like a bigger, nicer house with enough storage and linen cupboards and things so I could get on top of things? If your father hadn’t left us, I could have stayed at home all day and kept house, like your precious Clementine’s mother, like Pam, oh-I’m-such-a-perfect-mother Pam, with my rich husband and my perfect house.’

‘Pam worked,’ said Erika shortly. She tore a rubbish bag off the roll and began to dump plastic food containers inside it. ‘She was a social worker, remember?’

‘A
part-time
social worker. And of course I remember. How could I forget? You were her little social work project on the side. She
made
Clementine be your friend. She probably gave her a little gold star sticker each time you came to play.’