Truly Madly Guilty (43 page)

chapter eighty-seven

At half past three they finally called for her.

She walked down the strip of carpet with her cello and bow to the lonely chair. She blinked in the bright, hot, white light. A woman coughed behind the black screen and it sounded a little like Ainsley.

Clementine sat. She embraced her cello. She nodded at her pianist. He smiled. She’d hired her own pianist to accompany her. Grant Morton was a grandfatherly man who lived alone with an adult daughter with Down syndrome. His wife had died the day after her fiftieth birthday, only last year, but he still had the sweetest smile of anyone she knew, and she’d been so glad he was available, because she wanted to start her audition with that sweet smile.

She was conscious of her heart beating rapidly as she tuned, but it wasn’t racing out of control. She breathed and put her hand to the tiny metallic stickers stuck on the collar of her shirt.

‘This is for good luck for your audition,’ Holly had said when they were leaving today and she’d carefully put a purple butterfly sticker on her mother’s shirt and then, with great, grown-up ceremony, she had kissed Clementine on the cheek.

‘I want good luck too!’ Ruby had yelled, as if good luck was a treat being handed out by Clementine, and she’d copied everything her sister had done, except her sticker was a yellow smiley face, and her kiss was very wet and peanut-buttery. Clementine could still feel its sticky imprint on her cheek.

She took one deep breath and looked at the music on her stand.

It was all there within her. The hours and hours of early morning practice, the listening to recordings, the dozens of tiny technical decisions she’d settled upon.

She saw her little girls running about under the fairy lights, Vid throwing back his head and laughing, the chair lying on its side, Oliver’s locked hands over Ruby’s chest, the black shadow of the helicopter, her mother’s enraged face close to hers. She saw her sixteen-year-old self standing up and walking off the stage. She saw a boy in a badly fitting tuxedo watch her pack away her cello and say, ‘I bet you wish you chose the flute.’ She saw the look of disbelief on Erika’s face when Clementine first sat down opposite her in the playground.

She remembered Marianne saying, ‘Don’t just play for them,
perform
.’

She remembered Hu saying, ‘You have to find the balance. It’s like you’re walking a tightrope between technique and music.’

She remembered Ainsley saying, ‘Yes, but at some point you just have to let go.’

She lifted her bow. She let go.

chapter eighty-eight

The night of the barbeque

Pam and Martin pulled up in front of Erika and Oliver’s neat-looking little bungalow.

‘Holly might be asleep by now,’ said Pam to her husband. It was nearly nine o’clock.

‘Might be,’ said Martin. ‘Might not be.’

‘That must be where it happened,’ said Pam. She pointed at the big house next door with dislike. All those turrets and curlicues and spires. She’d always thought it was a fussy, show-offy sort of house.

‘Where what happened?’ said Martin blankly.

Sometimes she could swear he had early onset dementia.

‘Where the
accident
happened,’ said Pam. ‘They were at the neighbours’ house. They don’t even know them that well, apparently.’

‘Oh,’ said Martin. He looked away from the house and undid his seatbelt. ‘Right.’

They got out of the car and walked up the paved pathway with its neatly trimmed edges.

‘How do you feel?’ she said to Martin.

‘What? Me? I feel fine.’

‘I’m just making sure you don’t have chest pains or anything, because it’s times like this that people our age unexpectedly drop dead.’

‘
I
don’t have chest pains,’ said Martin. ‘Do
you
have chest pains? You’re a person of our age too.’

‘I play tennis three times a week,’ said Pam primly.

‘I’m more worried about our son-in-law dropping dead of a heart attack,’ said Martin, shoving his hands in his pockets. ‘He looked terrible.’

He was right, Sam had looked absolutely terrible at the hospital. It didn’t seem possible that one event could have such a profound physical effect on a person. They’d seen Sam just yesterday, when he’d dropped by to help Martin move out their old washing machine, and he’d been in great form, chatting about Clementine’s audition, some plan he had to help her get over her nerves, excited about his new job, but tonight he’d looked like he’d been rescued from somewhere, like those people you saw on the news wrapped in silver blankets, with red-rimmed eyes and a ghost-white pallor. He was in terrible shock, of course.

‘You were very rough on Clementine,’ said Martin mildly as Pam pressed the doorbell and they heard its distant chime.

‘She should have been watching Ruby,’ said Pam.

‘For Christ’s sake, it could have happened to anyone,’ said Martin.

Not me
, thought Pam.

‘And they
both
should have been watching,’ said Martin. ‘They made a mistake and they very nearly paid a terrible price. People make mistakes.’

‘Well, I know that.’ But in Pam’s eyes it was Clementine’s mistake. That’s why she was battling this terrible, unmotherly sense of rage towards her beloved daughter. She knew it would eventually recede, she sure hoped it would, and that she’d probably feel just awful about the way she’d spoken to her at the hospital, but for now she still felt very, very angry. It was the
mother’s
job to watch her child. Forget feminism. Forget all that. Pam would scream about equal pay from the rooftops, but every woman knew you couldn’t rely on a man to watch the children in a social situation. It was scientifically proven they couldn’t do two things at the same time!

Clementine had always been too prepared to rely on Sam, but just because she was a musician, a creative person, an ‘artist’, didn’t give her the right to relinquish her responsibilities as a
mother
. Her job as a mother came first.

Sometimes Clementine got the identical distracted, dreamy expression on her face as Pam’s dad used to get at the dinner table while Pam was trying to tell him something, and she wouldn’t even have finished the sentence before he’d wandered off. He might have been Ernest bloody Hemingway for all Pam cared. All that time he’d spent writing that novel no one would ever read, ignoring his children, locking himself away in his study, when he could have been living. ‘It could have been a masterpiece,’ Clementine always said, as if it was a tragedy, as if
that
was the point, when it wasn’t the point: the point was that Pam never got a father and Pam would have quite liked a father. Just every now and then.

What good did it do Ruby if her mother was the best cellist in the world? Clementine should have been watching. She should have been listening. She should have been
concentrating on her child.

Of course, Clementine’s music had nothing to do with what happened today. She did know that.

If Ruby didn’t make it through the night, if she suffered some sort of long-term damage to her health, Pam didn’t know what she’d do with all this anger. She’d have to find the strength to put it aside to be there for Clementine. Pam put her hand to her chest. Ruby was stable, she reminded herself. That rosy little plump-cheeked face. Those wicked slanting cat-like eyes.

‘Pam?’ said Martin.

‘What?’ she snapped. He was studying her closely.

‘You look like you’re having a heart attack.’

‘Well, I’m not, thank you very much, I’m perfectly –’ The door swung open and Oliver stood there, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt.

‘Hello, Oliver.’ Pam hadn’t seen him in casual clothes before. Normally he wore a nice checked shirt tucked into trousers. Pam had met him on so many occasions over the years, but she’d never really got to know him that well. He was always so complimentary about Pam’s signature dish, her carrot and walnut cake. (He seemed to have got it into his head that the cake was sugar-free, which was not the case, but she didn’t bother to correct him; he was so skinny, a bit of sugar wouldn’t hurt him.)

‘Holly is just through here watching a movie,’ said Oliver. ‘She would have been very welcome to stay the night with us, of course.’ He said this sadly.

‘Oh, she would have loved that, Oliver,’ said Pam. ‘But we were all fighting over her, you see, it’s a distraction from our worry over Ruby.’

‘I understand you were the hero of the day,’ said Martin, and he held out his hand to Oliver.

Oliver went to take Martin’s hand. ‘I don’t know about –’ But to Pam’s surprise her husband changed his mind about shaking hands at the last moment and instead threw his arms around Oliver in an awkward hug, thumping him on the back, probably much too hard.

Pam rubbed Oliver’s arm gently to make up for Martin’s thumping. ‘You are a hero,’ she said, her voice full of emotion. ‘You and Erika are heroes. Once Ruby is home and feeling better we’ll have you over for a special dinner. A dinner fit for heroes! I’ll make that carrot cake I know you like.’

‘Oh, delicious, wow, that’s very kind of you,’ said Oliver, stepping back and ducking his head like he was fourteen.

‘Where is Erika?’ said Pam.

‘She’s asleep actually,’ said Oliver. ‘She wasn’t feeling … quite right.’

‘Probably the shock,’ said Pam. ‘Everyone is feeling – well, look who’s here! Hello, darling. Look at those fairy wings!’

Holly headed straight to her and buried her face in Pam’s stomach.

‘Hello, Grandma,’ she said. ‘I am “
exhausted
”.’ She lifted her fingers in quotation marks. Her funny little habit.

‘Right,’ said Oliver. ‘I’ll grab your rock collection, Holly.’

‘No. I don’t want it,’ said Holly almost belligerently. ‘I
told
you I don’t want it. You keep it.’

‘Well, I’ll take care of it for you,’ said Oliver. ‘If you change your mind you can have it back.’

‘Come to Grandpa, Holly.’ Martin held out his arms to Holly and she leaped up, her legs wrapped around his waist, her head on his shoulder. No point telling Martin not to carry her after his knee operation. He needed to carry her.

Holly fell asleep in the car and didn’t wake when Martin carried her in, or even when Pam changed her into a spare pair of pyjamas she kept in the house. Martin didn’t see the need to change her but Pam knew you were always so much comfier in pyjamas.

But as Pam leaned in to kiss her good night, Holly’s eyes sprang open.

‘Is Ruby dead?’ she said. She was lying on her front, her head turned sideways on the pillow, a tangle of hair obscuring her face.

‘No, darling,’ said Pam. She lifted the hair off Holly’s face and smoothed it back from her forehead. ‘She’s at the hospital. The doctors are looking after her. She’s going to be fine. You go back to sleep.’

Holly closed her eyes, and Pam rubbed her back.

‘Grandma,’ whispered Holly.

‘Yes, darling?’ Pam was feeling tired herself now.

Holly whispered something Pam couldn’t hear.

‘What’s that?’ Pam leaned forward to listen.

‘Are Mummy and Daddy very, very angry with me?’ whispered Holly.

‘Of course not!’ said Pam. ‘Why would they be angry with you?’

‘Because I pushed her.’

Pam froze.

‘I pushed Ruby,’ said Holly again, louder.

Pam’s hand lay flat and still on Holly’s back, and for a moment she didn’t recognise it; it looked too old and wrinkled to belong to her.

‘She took my bag of rocks,’ said Holly. ‘She was standing on the side of the fountain with my bag and she wouldn’t let me have it, and it’s
mine
, and I was trying to get it off her, and then I got it, and I pushed her because I felt really, really angry.’

‘Oh, Holly.’

‘I didn’t mean for her to be drowned. I thought she would chase after me. Will she go to heaven? I don’t want her to go to heaven.’

‘Did you tell anyone?’ asked Pam.

‘Oliver,’ mumbled Holly into the pillow, as if she were worried that was also a transgression. ‘I told Oliver.’

‘What did Oliver say?’ said Pam.

‘He said when I see Ruby at the hospital I should whisper “sorry” very quietly in her ear and that I should never, ever push her again.’

‘Ah,’ said Pam.

‘He said it was our secret and he would never tell anyone in the whole world ever,’ said Holly.

He was a lovely man, Oliver. A good man. Trying to do the right thing.

But what if Holly never got that chance to whisper ‘sorry’ in Ruby’s ear? Ruby was stable. Ruby would not die in the night.

But if she did die, Pam refused to have her beautiful innocent granddaughter pay the price for Clementine’s inattention.

‘You know what, I don’t think she fell in when you pushed her,’ she said firmly. ‘That probably happened later. After you ran away. She probably slipped. I think she slipped. I know she slipped. She fell, darling. You did not push her. I
know
you didn’t. You were having a little argument over the bag by the fountain and poor Ruby fell in. It was just an accident. You go to sleep now.’

Holly’s breathing slowed.

‘You just put it right out of your mind,’ she said. ‘It was an accident. A terrible accident. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault.’

She kept rubbing Holly’s back, in ever-increasing circles, like the endless ripples created by a tiny pebble thrown in still water, and as she did she talked, she talked and talked, making the memory disappear, just like the ripples, and the funny thing was that she could feel her anger towards Clementine ebbing away as if she’d never felt it in the first place.

chapter eighty-nine

Four months after the barbeque

Clementine walked back from the letterbox shuffling their mail and got to a plain white envelope, addressed to her. It was Erika’s handwriting.

She stopped in the middle of her footpath, studying that familiar cramped scrawl. Erika wrote as if she needed to conserve space. Had she put it in the mail yesterday just before she’d left for the airport?

Erika and Oliver had flown out yesterday morning for a six-month trip. They’d both taken leave without pay from their jobs and bought around-the-world tickets. They were ‘flexible’ with their plans, or flexible for them, as in
there were some nights where they hadn’t yet booked accommodation
. Crazy stuff.

When they got back they were hoping to become long-term foster carers. They’d already begun the approval process, when all of a sudden Erika had announced (by email, not a phone call) that they were going to travel first. According to Clementine’s mother, they hadn’t made any particular arrangements about Sylvia. If the neighbours called the police when the house got too bad, so be it. ‘That’s exactly what she said to me,’ Pam told Clementine. ‘
So be it
. I nearly fell off my chair.’

Of course, Clementine’s parents were going to keep an eye on Sylvia.

‘She could have asked
me
to look in on Sylvia,’ Clementine had said, and her mother said, after a pause, as if she were considering her words, ‘She knows how busy you are.’

Her friendship with Erika had been changing, shifting somehow. Weeks could go by without contact, and when Clementine called, Erika would inevitably take a few days to call back. It was like she was distancing herself; in fact, it was almost as though, and this seemed incredible, ironic, impossible, but it was almost as though Erika was
letting Clementine down gently
. She was behaving the way a kind boy behaves when he wants to let a girl know that he likes her as a friend but nothing more. Clementine was being demoted to a lower-tier level of friendship and she was accepting this with the strangest mix of feelings: amusement, relief, maybe a touch of humiliation and a definite sense of melancholy.

She opened the envelope. There was a short note:

Dear Clementine, I got you a copy of this old photo Mum found. Mum says it’s ‘proof’. I think she means of her great parenting. Thought it might give you a laugh. See you in six months!

Love, Erika

What photo? She’d forgotten to include the photo. But then as Clementine shook the envelope a tiny square floated towards the ground and she caught it.

It was a black and white photo of herself and Erika and Sylvia on a rollercoaster at Luna Park, caught at the moment they plunged over its highest precipice. Clementine remembered how staggered she’d been when Erika’s mother had pulled them out of school that day. (How did she do it? Some story she invented. Sylvia could get away with anything.) Clementine had been drunk with happiness. It was outrageous! It was
living
!

She remembered how Erika had been as excited as her, what fun they’d all had, until towards the end of the day when Erika’s mood inexplicably changed. On the way home she got herself all worked up about a missing library book. ‘I know exactly where it is,’ Sylvia kept saying, and Erika said, ‘You do not, you do not.’ Clementine, in her innocence, wondered why it was such a big deal. The library book would turn up, surely. After all, Sylvia never threw anything out. Stop spoiling it, Erika, she’d thought resentfully.

Clementine could relish the anarchy of that day because she was going home to order and cleanliness, to spaghetti bolognese and school bags packed the night before.

She looked closely at the photo, studying Erika’s face: the pure, almost sensual abandonment with which she’d thrown back her head, laughing, screaming, her eyes closed. There was a secret wildness to Erika. It came out so rarely. She kept it under wraps. Maybe Oliver got to see it. It was like that dry, subversive sense of humour that occasionally slipped out almost by mistake. As Clementine walked back inside studying the photo, she wondered what sort of person Erika could have been, would have been,
should
have been, if she’d been given the privilege of an ordinary home. You could jump so much higher when you had somewhere safe to fall.

‘What’s that? What are you looking at?’ asked Holly as Clementine walked in the door.

Clementine held the photo up high, away from snatching tiny fingers.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

She looked again at the letter and saw that Erika had scrawled something in the bottom corner:
PS. Just heard the news. Well done, Dummkopf. Knew you would
.

‘Is it something “
precious
”?’ Holly used her fingers to give emphasis. ‘Precious’ was the word of the moment.

‘Yes,’ said Clementine. She looked at the tiny photo again. She’d have to keep it somewhere safe. It would be so easy to lose. ‘It’s something precious.’