Truly Madly Guilty (2 page)

chapter two

‘Been at a meeting then?’ said the cab driver taking Erika back into the city. He grinned paternally at her in the rear-vision mirror as if it was kind of cute the way women worked these days, all dressed up in suits, almost like they were proper businesspeople.

‘Yes,’ said Erika. She gave her umbrella a vigorous shake on the floor of the cab. ‘Keep your eyes on the road.’

‘Yes, ma’am!’ The cab driver tapped two fingertips to his forehead in a mock salute.

‘The rain,’ said Erika defensively. She indicated the raindrops pelleting furiously against the windscreen. ‘Slippery roads.’

‘Just drove this goose to the airport,’ said the cab driver. He stopped talking as he changed lanes, one meaty hand on the wheel, the other arm slung casually along the back of the seat, leaving Erika with the image of an actual large white goose sitting in the back seat of the taxi.

‘He reckons all this rain is related to climate change. I said, mate, mate, I said, it’s nothing to do with climate change. It’s La Niña! You know about La Niña? El Niño and La Niña? Natural events! Been happening for thousands of years.’

‘Right,’ said Erika. She wished Oliver were with her. He’d take on this conversation for her. Why were cab drivers so insistent on educating their passengers?

‘Yep. La
Niña
,’ said the cabbie, with a sort of Mexican inflection. He obviously enjoyed saying La Niña. ‘So, we broke the record hey? Longest consecutive run of rainy days in Sydney since 1932. Hooray for us!’

‘Yes,’ said Erika. ‘Hooray for us.’

It was 1931, she never forgot a number, but there was no need to correct him.

‘I think you’ll find it was 1931,’ she said. She couldn’t help herself. It was a character flaw. She knew it.

‘Yup, that’s it, 1931,’ said the cabbie, as if that’s what he’d said in the first place. ‘Before that it was twenty-four days in 1893. Twenty-four rainy days in a row! Let’s hope we don’t break that record too, hey? Think we will?’

‘Let’s hope not,’ said Erika. She ran a finger along her forehead. Was that sweat or rain?

She’d calmed down as she waited in the rain outside the library for the cab. Her breathing was steady again, but her stomach still rocked and roiled, and she felt exhausted, depleted, as if she’d run a marathon.

She took out her phone and texted Clementine:
Sorry, had to rush off, problem at work, you were fantastic, talk later
.
Ex

She changed ‘fantastic’ to ‘great’. Fantastic was over the top. Also inaccurate. She pressed ‘send’.

It had been an error of judgement to take precious time out of her working day to come and listen to Clementine’s talk. She’d only gone to be supportive, and because she wanted to get her own feelings about what had happened filed away in an orderly fashion. It was as though her memory of that afternoon was a strip of old-fashioned film and someone had taken a pair of scissors and removed certain frames. They weren’t even whole frames. They were slivers. Thin slivers of time. She just wanted to fill in those slivers, without admitting to anyone, ‘I don’t quite remember it all.’

An image came to her of her own face reflected in her bathroom mirror, her hands shaking violently as she tried to break that little yellow pill in half with her thumbnail. She suspected the gaps in her memory were related to the tablet she’d taken that afternoon. But it was a
prescription
pill. It wasn’t like she’d popped an Ecstasy tablet before going to a barbeque.

She remembered feeling odd, a little detached, before they went next door to the barbeque, but that still didn’t account for the gaps. Too much to drink? Yes. Too much to drink. Face the facts, Erika. You were affected by alcohol. You were ‘drunk’. Erika couldn’t quite believe that word could apply to her but it seemed to be the case. She had been unequivocally drunk for the first time in her life. So, maybe the gaps were alcoholic
blackouts
? Like Oliver’s mum and dad. ‘They can’t remember whole decades of their life,’ Oliver said once in front of his parents, and they’d both laughed delightedly and raised their glasses even though Oliver wasn’t smiling.

‘So what do you do for a quid, if you don’t mind me asking?’ said the cabbie.

‘I’m an accountant,’ said Erika.

‘
Are
you now?’ said the cabbie with far too much interest. ‘What a coincidence, because I was just thinking –’

Erika’s phone rang and she startled, as she did without fail whenever her phone rang. (‘It’s a phone, Erika,’ Oliver kept telling her. ‘That’s what it’s meant to do.’) She could see it was her mother, the very last person in the world she wanted to talk to right now, but the cab driver was shifting in his seat, his eyes on her instead of the road, virtually licking his lips in anticipation of all the free tax advice he was about to get. Cab drivers knew a little bit about everything. He’d want to tell her about an amazing loophole he’d heard about from one of his regular customers. Erika wasn’t that kind of accountant. ‘Loophole’ wasn’t a word she appreciated. Maybe her mother was the lesser of two evils.

‘Hello, Mum.’

‘Well,
hello
! I didn’t expect you to answer!’ Her mother sounded both nervous and defiant, which didn’t bode well at all.

‘I was all prepared to leave a voicemail message!’ said Sylvia accusingly.

‘Sorry I answered,’ said Erika. She
was
sorry.

‘Obviously you don’t need to be sorry, I just need to recalibrate. Tell you what, why don’t you just listen while I pretend to leave you the message I had all prepared?’

‘Go ahead,’ said Erika. She looked out at the rainy street where a woman battled with an umbrella that wanted to turn itself inside out. Erika watched as the woman suddenly, marvellously, lost her temper and jammed the umbrella into a rubbish bin without losing stride and continued walking in the rain. Good on you, thought Erika, exhilarated by this little tableau. Just throw it out. Throw the damned thing
out
.

Her mother’s voice got louder in her ear as if she’d repositioned her phone. ‘I was going to start like this: Erika, darling, I was going to say, Erika darling, I know you can’t talk right now because you’re at work, which is such a pity, being stuck in an office on this beautiful day, not that it
is
a beautiful day, I must admit, it’s actually a terrible day, a horrendous day, but
normally
at this time of year we have such glorious days, and whenever I wake up and have a peek outside at the blue sky, I think, oh
dear
,
oh what a
pity
, poor, poor old Erika, stuck in her office on this beautiful day!, that’s what I think, but that’s the price you pay for corporate success! If only you’d been a park ranger or some other outdoorsy job. I wasn’t actually going to say the park ranger part, that just came to me then, and actually I know why it came to me, because Sally’s son has just left school and he’s going to be a park ranger, and when she was telling me, I just thought to myself, you know, what a marvellous job, what a clever idea, instead of being trapped in a little cubicle like you are.’

‘I’m not trapped in a cubicle,’ sighed Erika. Her office had harbour views and fresh flowers bought each Monday morning by her secretary. She loved her office. She loved her job.

‘It was Sally’s idea, you know. For her son to be a park ranger. So clever of her. She’s not conventional, Sally, she thinks outside the box.’

‘Sally?’ said Erika.

‘Sally! My new hairdresser!’ said her mother impatiently, as if Sally had been in her life for years, not a couple of months. As if Sally were going to be a lifelong friend. Ha. Sally would go the way of all the other wonderful strangers in her mother’s life.

‘So what else was your message going to say?’ said Erika.

‘Let’s see now … then I was going to say, sort of casually, as if I’d only just thought of it: Oh, listen darling, by the
way
!’

Erika laughed. Her mother could always charm her, even at the worst times. Just when Erika thought she was done, that was it, she could take no more, her mother charmed her back into loving her.

Her mother laughed too, but it sounded hectic and high-pitched. ‘I was going to say: Listen, darling, I was wondering if you and Oliver would like to come to lunch at my place on Sunday?’

‘No,’ said Erika. ‘No.’

She breathed in like she was breathing in through a straw. Her lips felt wonky. ‘No, thank you. We’ll be at your place on the fifteenth. That’s when we’ll come, Mum. No other time. That’s the deal.’

‘But darling, I think you’d be so proud of me because –’

‘No,’ said Erika. ‘I’ll meet you anywhere else. We can go out to lunch this Sunday. To a nice restaurant. Or you can come to our place. Oliver and I don’t have anything on. We can go anywhere else but we are not coming to your house.’ She paused and said it again, louder and more clearly, as if she were speaking to someone without a good grasp of English. ‘We are not coming to your house.’

There was silence.

‘Until the fifteenth,’ said Erika. ‘It’s in the diary. It’s in both our diaries. And don’t forget we’ve got that dinner with Clementine’s parents on Thursday night! So we’ve got that to look forward to as well.’ Yes, indeed, that was going to be a barrel of laughs.

‘I had a new recipe I wanted to try. I bought a gluten-free recipe book, did I tell you?’

It was the flip tone that did it. The calculated, cruel brightness, as if she thought there was a chance Erika might join her in playing the game they’d played all those years, where they both pretended to be an ordinary mother and daughter having an ordinary conversation, when she
knew
that Erika no longer played, when they’d both agreed the game was over, when her mother had wept and apologised and made promises they both knew she’d never keep, but now she wanted to pretend she’d never even made the promises in the first place.

‘Mum. Dear God.’

‘What?’ Faux innocence. That infuriating babyish voice.

‘You
promised
on Grandma’s grave that you wouldn’t buy another recipe book! You don’t cook! You don’t have a gluten allergy!’ Why did her voice tremble with rage when she never expected those melodramatic promises to be kept?

‘I made no such promise!’ said her mother, and she dropped the baby voice and had the audacity to respond to Erika’s rage with her own. ‘And as a matter of fact, I have been suffering quite dreadful bloating lately. I have gluten intolerance, thank you very much. Excuse me for worrying about my health.’

Do not engage. Remove yourself from the emotional minefield. This was why she was investing thousands of dollars in therapy, for exactly this situation.

‘All right then, well, Mum, it was nice talking to you,’ said Erika rapidly, without giving her mother a chance to speak, as if she were a telemarketer, ‘but I’m at work, so I have to go now. I’ll talk to you later.’ She hung up before her mother could speak and dropped the phone in her lap.

The cab driver’s shoulders were conspicuously still against his beaded seat cover, only his hands moving on the bottom of the steering wheel, pretending that he hadn’t been listening in. What sort of daughter refuses to go to her mother’s house? What sort of daughter speaks with such ferocity to her mother about buying a new recipe book?

She blinked hard.

Her phone rang again, and she jumped so violently it nearly slid off her lap. It would be her mother again, ringing to shout abuse.

But it wasn’t her mother. It was Oliver.

‘Hi,’ she said, and nearly cried with relief at the sound of his voice. ‘Just had a fun phone call with Mum. She wanted us to go over for lunch on Sunday.’

‘We’re not due there until next month, are we?’ said Oliver.

‘No,’ said Erika. ‘She was pushing her boundaries.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yep.’ She ran a fingertip under her eyes. ‘Fine.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘Just put her straight out of your mind,’ said Oliver. ‘Hey, did you go to Clementine’s talk at that library out in wherever it was?’

Erika tipped back her head against the seat and closed her eyes. Dammit. Of course. That’s why he was calling. Clementine. The plan had been that she would chat to Clementine after her talk, while they had coffee. Oliver hadn’t been overly interested in Erika’s motivation for attending Clementine’s talk. He didn’t understand her obsessive desire to fill in the blank spots of her memory. He found it irrelevant, almost silly. ‘Believe me, you’ve remembered everything you’re ever going to remember,’ he’d said. (His lips went thin, his eyes hard on the words ‘Believe me’. Just a little flash of pain he could never quite repress, and that he would probably deny feeling.) ‘Blank spots are par for the course when you drink too much.’ They weren’t par for
her
course. But Oliver had seen this as the perfect opportunity to talk to Clementine, to finally pin her down.

She should have let him go to voicemail too.

‘I did,’ she said. ‘But I left halfway through. I didn’t feel well.’

‘So you didn’t get to talk to Clementine?’ said Oliver. She could hear him doing his best to conceal his frustration.

‘Not today,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m just finding the right time. The food court wouldn’t have been the best spot anyway.’

‘I’m just looking at my diary. It has been two months now since the barbeque. I don’t think it’s offensive or insensitive, or whatever, to just ask the question. Just ring her up. It doesn’t need to be face to face.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t need to be sorry,’ said Oliver. ‘This is difficult. It’s not your fault.’

‘It was my fault we went to the barbeque in the first place,’ she said. Oliver wouldn’t absolve her of that. He was too accurate. They’d always had that in common: a passion for accuracy.

The cabbie slammed on the brake. ‘Ya bloody idiot driver! Ya bloody goose!’ Erika put her hand flat against the front seat to brace herself as Oliver said, ‘That’s not relevant.’

‘It’s relevant to me,’ she said. Her phone beeped to let her know another call was coming through. It would be her mother. The fact that it had taken her a couple of minutes to call back meant that she’d chosen tears over abuse. Tears took longer.