Truly Madly Guilty (20 page)

It didn’t even hurt. Did her mother think it was an earth-shattering revelation?

‘Yep,’ said Erika. ‘Pam knew my home situation was not ideal.’

‘Your home situation wasn’t “ideal”. How melodramatic. I tried my best! I put food on the table! Clothes on your back!’

‘We didn’t have hot water for a year,’ said Erika. ‘Not because we couldn’t afford it but because you were too ashamed to let anyone in to repair the water heater.’

‘I was not ashamed!’ her mother yelled with such force the tendons on her neck stood out and her face turned blood-red.

‘You should have been,’ said Erika evenly. At times like this she felt herself become eerily calm; it would be hours or even days later, when she was alone, in the car or the shower, that she’d find herself screaming back something in response.

‘I will admit that I sometimes got a teeny bit paranoid that they might take you away,’ said her mother. She blinked pitifully at Erika. ‘I always thought that Pam might get it into that do-gooder, lefty head of hers to complain to the Department of Community Services that I wasn’t polishing my skirting boards or whatever.’

‘Skirting boards! When have you even seen the skirting boards in this house?’ said Erika.

Her mother laughed merrily as if it was all in good fun. Erika’s mother had such a pretty laugh, like a girl at a ball.

(‘Could she be bipolar?’ Oliver asked, when he first witnessed his mother-in-law’s extraordinary ability to flip her temper on and off like a switch, but Erika told him that she suspected people with bipolar disorder didn’t
decide
on their behaviour; her mother was mad, of course she was mad, but she chose exactly when and how to be mad.)

‘We had rats,’ said Erika. ‘No one was concerned about the skirting boards being clean.’

‘Rats?’ said her mother. ‘Come on. We never had rats. Maybe a mouse. A dear little mouse.’

They did have rats. Or rodents of some sort, anyway. They’d die, and the stink would be terrible, unbearable, but they wouldn’t be able to find them in the cities of
stuff
that filled each room. They just had to wait it out. The stink would reach its peak and then finally fade. Except it never really faded. The stink leached into Erika.

‘Also, Clementine’s father wasn’t rich,’ she told her mother. ‘He was just an ordinary father with an ordinary job.’

‘Something to do with construction, wasn’t it?’ said her mother with the chatty charm of a guest at a cocktail party.

‘He worked for an engineering firm,’ said Erika. She didn’t really know what Clementine’s father’s job had involved. He was retired now, and had apparently taken up French cooking, and was very good at it.

Once, when Erika was fourteen and her mother was at work, Clementine’s father drove over and installed a lock on her bedroom door for her so that she could keep her room free of her mother’s junk. It was his idea. He hadn’t said a single word about the state of Erika’s home. When he’d finished the job, he’d picked up his toolbox, handed her the precious key, and put one hand briefly on her shoulder. His silence had been a revelation to Erika, who had grown up surrounded not just by physical items, but by words: a swirling deluge of cruel, kind, soft, shrill words.

That was Erika’s experience of fatherhood: the solid, silent weight of someone else’s dad’s hand on her shoulder. That was the sort of father Oliver would be. He’d give his love with simple, practical actions, not words.

‘Well, he might not have been rich, but Pam wasn’t a single mother, was she? She had support! I had no support. I was on my own. You have no idea. You wait until you have children of your own!’

Erika continued to mechanically fill her bag of rubbish, but she felt an alert stillness come over her, as though she were an animal sensing a predator. Years ago, when Erika had told her mother that she never wanted to have children, her mother had said with flippant cruelty: ‘Yes, I really can’t see you as a mother.’

Of course, she hadn’t told her about her attempts to become pregnant. The thought had never crossed her mind.

‘Oh, but wait, you’re not going to have children of your own, are you?’ Her mother shot her a triumphant look. ‘You don’t want children because you’re too busy with your important career! So bad luck to me.
I don’t
get to be a grandmother
.’ It was like the thought had just occurred to her, and now that it had, she needed to wallow in the terrible injustice of it. ‘I just have to put up with that, don’t I? Everyone else gets grandchildren, but not me, my daughter is such an important career woman with her important job in the city and her – hey!’ Her mother grabbed her arm. ‘What are you doing? Don’t throw that out!’

‘What?’ Erika looked at the rubbish in her gloved hand: a banana skin, a half-eaten tuna sandwich, a soggy paper towel.

Her mother extracted a tiny grease-stained piece of notepaper from her hand. ‘There! That! I’d written down something important on that! It was the name of a book, I think, or a DVD maybe, I was listening to the radio and I thought, I must write that down!’ She held it up to the light and peered at it. ‘Now look what you’ve gone and done, I can’t even read it!’

Erika said nothing.

She had a policy of passive resistance now. She never argued back. Not since the day she’d found herself engaged in a ludicrous ten-minute tug-of-war over a broken-stringed tennis racquet, while her mother screamed, ‘But I’m selling it on the eBay!’ She lost in the end, of course. The tennis racquet stayed and it never got sold on eBay. Her mother didn’t know how to sell something on eBay.

Her mother brandished the slip of paper at her. ‘You march on in here, Miss Know-it-all, and start messing around with my things, thinking you’re doing me some great favour, and all you do is make things worse! It’s lucky you don’t want children! You’d just throw away their toys, wouldn’t you? Take their precious little things and toss them in the bin! What a wonderful mother you’d be!’

Erika turned away. She lifted the swollen rubbish bag up by the ends and banged it against the floor. She double-knotted the ends and carried it to the back door.

She thought of Clementine’s phone call: ‘I want to help you have a baby.’ The strange pitch of her voice. The thing was, Clementine really
did
want to help her have a baby now. That’s what accounted for the strange pitch of her voice. She wanted to do this badly. This was her opportunity for instant redemption. She thought of how Oliver’s face would be transformed by hope when she told him. Should she take Clementine’s charity even if it was given for the wrong reason? End justifies the means and all that?

Did she even want a baby anymore?

She shifted the rubbish bag into her left hand so she could open the back door and at that moment the rubbish bag split and oozed its contents: a thick, endless, inexorable discharge.

Her mother slapped her knee and laughed her pretty laugh.

chapter thirty-two

The day of the barbeque

Dakota looked over at where the grown-ups were sitting around the table and saw her mother slide her eyes towards her before leaning forward as if she was about to share a secret.

Holly and Ruby were squashed into the swinging egg chair on either side of her and she was showing them the Duck Song Game app. They both loved it. The girls were pretty cute and she liked them a lot but she’d kind of had enough of them now. She felt like going back inside to her bedroom and reading her book.

The grown-ups were all giggling excitedly now and lowering their voices as though they were teenagers telling rude jokes, and Dakota felt irritated.

They did this sometimes. She’d overheard enough bits and pieces to know that the rude, silly thing was something to do with how her mum and dad had met, but when she asked them they always said they’d met when they were both bidding for the same house, and then they shot each other glinting looks that they thought she was too stupid to catch.

Her older half-sisters said they knew the secret and the secret was that her dad had had a love affair with her mum when he was still married to Angelina. Angelina was her dad’s first wife, and it was very hard, almost impossible for Dakota to imagine this, even though she had an excellent imagination.

But her mother said there was absolutely no love affair while her dad was still married to someone else and Dakota believed her.

It was frustrating that she didn’t just come out and say the secret, because Dakota was old enough to handle whatever it was. Okay, so it was true, she’d never seen an R-rated movie, but she watched the news and she knew about sex and murder and ISIS and paedophiles. What else could there possibly
be
to know?

Also, as a matter of fact, she was more mature than her parents when it came to sex. There had been a sex education talk at her school where the parents had had to come too, and the lady giving the talk had said, ‘Now, some of this is going to make you feel like giggling and that’s natural, you can have a little giggle, but then we’ll just move along.’

She’d said this to the
kids
, but it was the
grown-ups
who couldn’t keep it together. Her dad, who wasn’t used to keeping quiet for such a long period of time (the only times he stopped talking were when he went to sleep and sometimes when he listened to his classical music; you couldn’t see a movie with him), had kept saying things under his breath to her friend Ashok’s dad, and in the end they were both snorting so hard they’d had to leave the room, and even then you could still hear them laughing outside.

This secret they were keeping from her was probably nothing. ‘Is that all?’ Dakota would say, and she’d roll her eyes and feel embarrassed for them.

Holly and Ruby squabbled over Dakota’s iPad.

‘My turn!’

‘No, my turn!’

‘Play nicely,’ said Dakota, and she heard the way she sounded and you would have thought she was, like, forty years old. Seriously.

chapter thirty-three

The lines around Andrew’s eyes had deepened but, apart from that, he looked exactly the same. Tiffany saw the unmistakeable glimmer of recognition in his pale eyes even as he gave her the appropriate, courteous smile for a fellow parent at a school event.

Did she see fear too? Or laughter? Confusion? He was probably trying to place her. She was out of context. She was way, way out of context.

Tiffany didn’t have a chance to introduce herself because at that moment a silver-haired, elegantly suited woman glided onto the stage and instantly quietened the room with her presence. The school principal. Robyn Byrne. She wrote a weekly column in the local paper about educating girls.

‘Good
morning
, ladies and gentlemen, girls,’ the principal said, in a way that made it clear she expected to be answered, and so everyone did, automatically, with that pre-programmed sing-song rhythm: Good morn-ing, Ms Byrne, followed by a faint ripple of chuckles as CEOs, barristers and ear, nose and throat specialists realised they’d been tricked into schoolyard subservience.

Tiffany looked to her left, at Vid, who was smiling goofily down at Dakota, as if she were a toddler at a Wiggles concert. Dakota sat motionless, that awful catatonic look on her face.

‘A very warm welcome to Saint Anastasias,’ said the school principal.

A very warm welcome to crippling school fees.

‘Thank you for venturing out today in this truly dreadful weather!’ Ms Byrne lifted both arms ballerina-style to indicate the heavens above and everyone glanced up at the soaring ceilings protecting them from the rain.

Tiffany chanced another quick look sideways at Andrew. He wasn’t looking up but was instead staring straight ahead at the school principal, his legs crossed, a Rolex-watched wrist draped languidly over one knee in an almost feminine pose.

A nice man. The creepy eyes were misleading. She could remember them filled with laughter.

‘Your daughters will leave this school as confident, resilient young women.’ Ms Byrne was off, delivering the private school party line. Resilience. What crap. No kid was going to go to school in a place that looked like freaking Buckingham Palace and come out of it
resilient
. She should be honest: ‘Your daughter will leave this school with a grand sense of entitlement that will serve her well in life; she’ll find it especially useful on Sydney roads.’

Tiffany looked again at Dakota, who continued to stare unseeingly at the stage, while next to her, Vid pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and nonchalantly checked text messages, his chunky thumb swiping the screen back and forth. Manners! What would people think? Yes, Tiffany, what would people think? What would people think if Andrew told his wife about his connection to her? But why would he? Oh, darling, the funniest thing, but that woman sitting next to you this morning was actually an old friend!

She
was
an old friend.

What if he did tell his wife, and what if his wife told all the other mothers, or just one mother, who couldn’t resist telling one other mother? Until finally word got out to the daughters? What would that mean for Dakota’s social standing at this school? Would that help her become a ‘resilient young woman’? Yeah, well, it probably would. Nothing like a bit of social ostracism to toughen you up.

Tiffany closed her eyes briefly.

She had to keep her footing. She thought of her sisters, all those years ago, saying, ‘How
could
you, Tiffany?’ But she’d felt no shame, she’d never felt shame, so why was she sitting here drenched in it now?

She knew why. She knew exactly why. It was because everything felt out of balance since the barbeque. They had been the hosts. It was their home. It had happened in their home, and it was more than that – their behaviour had contributed. Contributory negligence. She could not claim innocence. Neither could Vid.

So what if she took responsibility for all of it?

For Harry lying on the floor of his home, calling weakly for help that never came.

For Clementine’s eyes gleaming in the twilight, and it had all been in good fun, no harm intended. Just because they were parents didn’t mean they weren’t people.

For the lines she’d once crossed. Only once.

The school principal’s voice rose as she tapped closed fingertips together in her refined version of applause, to welcome three girls in school uniform onto the stage, each carrying a musical instrument.

Tiffany looked at the lustrous gold wood of the instruments, the red school ribbons in perfect ponytails, the elegant cut and quality of their school blazers, and she saw with absolute clarity what would happen if Andrew told his wife how he knew Tiffany. Nothing nasty or cruel would ever be said out loud, but green-coated, red-ribboned girls would destroy Dakota with stifled giggles and low whispers, with fake smiles and cryptic, cutting comments on social media. Dakota would pay.

The girls lifted their bows in unison. Music filled the hall. The music of another world. Clementine’s world. Not the bass beat of Tiffany’s world.

Tiffany looked sideways at Dakota’s beautiful, young profile in time to catch an expression of immense sadness cross her face. It was as though Tiffany’s little girl was being struck down by some terrible grief. It was as though everything Tiffany had just foreseen had already come to be.

‘Mum.’ Dakota suddenly turned to face Tiffany and whispered, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

Tiffany felt a surge of gratitude and maternal love. It was not grief, it was nausea. She could fix this. Easy. ‘Let’s go,’ she whispered back, and she stood, urgently gesturing at Vid. She walked out past her new friend in the Stella McCartney skirt, her daughter and Andrew, who nodded politely, with maybe a little tightness around his mouth, but she could have been imagining it. Once they were outside, Dakota said she didn’t want to find a bathroom, she just needed to go home, please, right away. Her face was white.

Vid, in his inimitable way, found a woman wearing a name badge, explained the situation and was given an information folder and sent on his way with an understanding smile. He was comfortable in any social situation: garden party or cage fighting contest, it was all the same to Vid, it was all
interesting
.

Would he find her connection to Andrew interesting?

Dakota climbed into the back of the car.

‘Do you want the front seat?’ babbled Tiffany.

Dakota shook her head dumbly.

‘Sit in the middle at least,’ said Tiffany. ‘So you can see the road ahead. Better for your tummy.’

Dakota slid over to the middle, and Vid and Tiffany got in the front and they drove out of the school grounds towards home. After a while, when it seemed clear that Dakota wasn’t going to be sick, Vid lit up a cigarette and began to speak.

‘So, pretty good school, right? What do you think? The girls playing their instruments were good, eh? Maybe you could play the cello, Dakota! Like Clementine. We could get Clementine to give you lessons.’

‘Vid,’ said Tiffany. For God’s sake. Was he completely deluded? Did he really believe Clementine would want to have anything to do with them ever again after what had happened? She would find every excuse in the world not to teach Dakota. And her location wasn’t exactly convenient. If Dakota really did want to learn a musical instrument they’d find someone local. ‘Clementine won’t want to give Dakota lessons.’

There was a strange sound in the back seat.

‘Are you going to be sick, honey?’ Tiffany whipped her head around.

Dakota’s eyes locked onto Tiffany’s. It was as though she were trapped within her own body, pleading desperately with Tiffany to help.

‘Can you breathe?’ said Tiffany. ‘Dakota, can you breathe? Are you choking?’

‘Dakota?’ Vid chucked his cigarette out the window and wrenched the steering wheel to the left, coming to a stop on the side of the road with a squeal of brakes and the outraged shriek of a horn from behind him.

Tiffany and Vid opened their car doors and flung themselves out into the pouring rain. They opened the back doors and climbed in on either side of Dakota.

‘What is it? What is it?’ said Tiffany.

‘It … it …’ Dakota’s chest heaved. Tears spilled from her eyes and rolled down her face.

Tiffany’s heart thudded. What could have happened to her? What could be so awful? It had to be sexual abuse. Someone had touched her. Someone had hurt her.

‘Dakota,’ said Vid. ‘Dakota, my angel, take a very deep breath, okay?’ There was a quiver of terror in his voice as if his mind was following a similar path. ‘And then you need to tell us what the matter is.’

Dakota took a deep, shaky breath.

At last she whispered, ‘Clementine.’

‘Clementine?’ repeated Tiffany.

‘She hates me,’ sobbed Dakota.

‘She does not!’ responded Tiffany immediately, instinctively to the banned word ‘hate’. ‘I only meant she wouldn’t want to give lessons because I got the impression she doesn’t especially like teaching, she’s going for a full-time job with –’

‘Yes, she does so hate me!’ snapped Dakota, and it was a relief to hear ordinary, ten-year-old petulance.

‘Why would you think Clementine hates you?’ said Vid.

Dakota threw herself at her father. He wrapped her in his arms, and his mystified eyes met Tiffany’s over her head.

‘Oh, Dakota,’ said Tiffany. ‘Sweetheart. No.
No
.’ She leaned forward and rested her cheek against Dakota’s narrow, hunched back and put her hand on her knobbly spine, her heart breaking for her, because she knew exactly what Dakota was going to say.