Truly Madly Guilty (8 page)

chapter ten

Erika was back in the dry comfort of her office. The return cab fare from the library where Clementine had given her talk had been even more than the one out there. She’d just wasted one hundred and thirty-four non-claimable dollars. She couldn’t understand her own decision-making process. Listening to Clementine had certainly not filled in any gaps in her memory. All it had done was to stir up all sorts of uncomfortable feelings, and then she’d had to deal with the phone calls from both her husband and her mother on the way back in the taxi. She couldn’t wait to throw herself into some complex work. It would clear her mind almost as well as going for a good hard run with multiple hill sprints. Thank goodness she didn’t have a job like Clementine’s, where you needed to constantly draw upon the well of your own emotions. Work should be devoid of emotion. That was the joy of work.

She listened to her voicemail messages while she watched the rain falling outside the thick glass of her window. The weather had no relevance when you were safely ensconced in a high-rise office block. It was like it was happening in another dimension.

As she scrolled through her email inbox, her phone rang and she saw it was Oliver again. She’d spoken to him less than half an hour ago. Surely he wasn’t ringing to ask her again about talking to Clementine? He must have a good reason to call.

‘Sorry to disturb you again,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll be fast. I just wondered if you’d seen Harry around lately?’

‘Harry?’ said Erika as she opened an email. ‘Who is Harry?’

‘
Harry
!’ said Oliver impatiently. ‘Our next-door neighbour!’

For heaven’s sake. Harry was hardly a good friend. They barely knew the old man, and in point of fact, he wasn’t their next-door neighbour, he lived on the other side of Vid and Tiffany.

‘I don’t know,’ said Erika. ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

‘I was talking to Tiffany when I took out the bins,’ said Oliver. He stopped to blow his nose, and Erika stiffened at the mention of Tiffany, her hand on her computer mouse. She hadn’t wanted anything to do with Tiffany and Vid since the barbeque. They’d never had a real friendship anyway. It was proximity. Tiffany and Vid liked Clementine and Sam much more than them. If Erika hadn’t mentioned Clementine that day, if she’d said they had the day free, would Vid still have asked them over for a barbeque? Unlikely.

‘Anyway, I mentioned to her that I hadn’t seen Harry in a while,’ said Oliver. ‘We decided to go over together and looked at his letterbox, and it was pretty full. So, we took his mail up and knocked on his door but there was no answer. I tried to look in a window, but I don’t know, I just have this feeling that something isn’t right. Tiffany’s calling Vid now to ask if he knows anything.’

‘Okay,’ said Erika. She had no interest in any of this. ‘Maybe he’s gone away.’

‘I don’t think Harry goes on
holiday
,’ said Oliver. ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Erika. She was wasting time on this. ‘Not for a while.’

‘I’m wondering if I should call the police,’ fretted Oliver. ‘I mean, I don’t want to embarrass him if he’s fine, or waste police resources, but –’

‘He’ll have a spare key,’ said Erika. ‘There’ll be one under a garden pot or something near the front door.’

‘How do you know?’ said Oliver.

‘I just know,’ said Erika. ‘He’s of that generation.’ Erika’s grandmother had always left a key under a pot of geraniums by the front door whereas Erika’s mother would never have risked the horror of someone coming into her home without her permission. Her front door was double-deadlocked at all times. To protect the oh-so-precious contents of her home.

‘Right,’ said Oliver. ‘Good idea. I’ll try that.’

He hung up abruptly and Erika put down the phone and found herself unwillingly and annoyingly distracted by the thought of her elderly neighbour. When
was
the last time she’d seen him? He would have been complaining to her about something. He didn’t like anyone parking on the street outside his house, and he was always
full
of complaints about Vid and Tiffany: the noise (they liked to entertain; he’d called the police more than once), the dog (Harry said it dug up his garden; he’d put in an official complaint to the council), the general look of the place (looks like the bloody Taj Mahal). He seemed to genuinely hate Tiffany and Vid, and even Dakota, but he tolerated Erika, and seemed to quite like Oliver.

She stood up and walked over to her office window. Some people, like her managing partner, couldn’t stand too close to the windows in this building – the way the windows were set gave you the sensation of standing at the edge of a cliff – but Erika enjoyed the drop in her stomach as she looked out at the streets snarled with rainy-day traffic below.

Harry. The last time she remembered seeing him was the morning of the barbeque. It was when she rushed out to buy more crackers. She’d been worried about those sesame seeds. As she’d driven off down the street she’d looked in her rear-vision mirror and caught sight of Harry yelling at Vid and Tiffany’s dog. He’d kicked out his foot, aggressively, but Erika was sure he hadn’t actually made contact with the little dog. He’d just done it for effect. Vid had come out onto his front veranda, presumably to call for the dog. That’s all she’d seen.

Erika didn’t have a problem with Harry’s grumpiness. Grumpiness was less time-consuming and tiring than cheeriness. Harry never wanted to stand around chatting for long. She wondered if something had happened to him, if he was sick perhaps, or if he was fine and poor, responsible Oliver was going to get his head snapped off for interfering.

A flash of lightning lit up the city skyline like a firework and Erika imagined how she would look to someone on the street below, if they happened to glance up at the rainy sky right at that moment and see her dark, solitary figure illuminated against the window.

The image carried a memory … perhaps it did, maybe it did … of hands pressed against glass, a face without features except for the idea of a mouth, a gaping mouth, but then the memory split and fractured into a thousand tiny pieces. Was it possible she’d done something irreparable and catastrophic to her
brain chemistry
that day?

She turned away from the window and hurried back to her desk to open a spreadsheet, any spreadsheet, as long as it made sense, it added up, and as the soothing figures filled her computer screen, she picked up her phone and rang her psychologist’s number and said to the secretary, lightly, as if it didn’t really matter, ‘I don’t suppose you have any cancellations for tomorrow?’ But then she changed her mind and begged, ‘Please?’

chapter eleven

Oliver put down the phone from Erika and blew his nose hard. He picked up his umbrella. It was not the best for his health to be traipsing about in the pouring rain checking on elderly neighbours but there was no way he could delay it a moment longer.

He had a terrible feeling about this. The last time he could remember seeing Harry was the day before the barbeque, before there was any plan of a barbeque, before Erika’s curve ball, when it was still just afternoon tea with Clementine and Sam and the girls,
as per the plan
.

That Saturday afternoon Harry had ambled over for a chat and given Oliver some tips about the correct way to hold the whipper-snipper. Some people didn’t like being given unsolicited advice but Oliver was always happy to learn from other people’s experiences. Harry had complained about Vid and Tiffany’s dog. Its barking kept him up at night, apparently. Oliver had found that hard to believe. Barney was such a little dog. Harry had said he was calling the police, or it might have been the local council, but frankly Oliver hadn’t taken that much notice. Harry was always making official complaints through whatever official channels he could find. Making complaints was like a hobby for him. Everyone needed an interest when they retired.

That was two months ago now and Oliver couldn’t remember seeing Harry since then.

He opened his front door and jumped back when he saw Tiffany there, her umbrella tipped back on her shoulders as she stood on the shelter of their front veranda, her hand up as if she’d been just about to knock.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I know you’re sick, but it’s just that I’ve been thinking about Harry. I really think we should try to break in. Or call the police. Vid can’t remember seeing him for weeks either.’

‘Neither can Erika,’ said Oliver. ‘I was just about to go over.’ He was suddenly frantic. It was as if every minute counted now. ‘Let’s go.’ The wind picked up. ‘My God, this
rain
.’

They held their umbrellas up like riot shields and ducked behind them as they hurried over the lawns and back onto the front veranda of Harry’s house.

Tiffany dropped her umbrella in a soggy heap and began banging on the door with a closed fist. ‘Harry!’ she called over the noise of the rain. There was a panicky note in her voice. ‘Harry! It’s just us! Just the neighbours!’

Oliver lifted up a heavy sandstone pot. No key underneath. There was a set of crappy old green plastic pots with very dead plants and dry crumbling soil. Surely Harry wouldn’t keep a key under one of them? But he lifted the first pot and there it was. A small gold key. Harry, old mate, thought Oliver. That’s not great security.

‘Tiffany.’ Oliver held up the key to show her.

‘Ah,’ said Tiffany. She stood back as Oliver went to the front door and put the key in the lock.

‘He might have gone away,’ she said tremulously. ‘To see family.’ But they both knew he hadn’t gone away.

‘Harry!’ called out Oliver as he opened the door.

‘Oh God, no, no, no,’ said Tiffany immediately. The smell took a fraction longer to get past Oliver’s blocked nostrils and then it was like he’d walked smack-bang into a wall of it. A wall of smell. Sweet, rotten smell. It was like someone had sprinkled cheap perfume over meat that had gone off. His stomach heaved. He looked back at Tiffany and he was reminded of the day of the barbeque, how in times of crisis a person’s face is somehow stripped back to something essential and universally human: all those labels like ‘beautiful’, ‘sexy’, ‘plain’ became irrelevant.

‘Fuck,’ she said sadly.

Oliver pushed the door all the way open and took a step forward into the dim light. He’d never been inside before. All his interactions with Harry had taken place in front yards. Harry’s front yard. His front yard.

A single light burned overhead. He could see a long hallway with a surprisingly beautiful red runner leading off into darkness. A staircase with a curved wooden banister.

At the bottom of the staircase lay a large unfamiliar object, and of course he knew already it had to be Harry’s body, that exactly what he’d feared had happened, but still for a few seconds he stared, trying to puzzle it out, as if it were one of those tricky optical illusion pictures. It just didn’t seem possible that cranky, stomping, spitting Harry was now that bloated, blackened, silent thing of horror.

Oliver registered certain things: Harry’s socks weren’t matching. One black. One grey. His glasses had sunk into his face as if they’d been pressed firmly by an unseen hand into soft, yielding flesh. His white hair was still as neatly combed as ever. A tiny swarm of busily buzzing flies.

Oliver’s stomach recoiled. He stepped back on trembling legs and pulled the door shut while Tiffany vomited into the sandstone pot and the rain continued to fall and fall.

chapter twelve

The day of the barbeque

Dakota sensed a flash of movement in her peripheral vision. She looked out the window and saw Barney streak across the lawn. The front door flew open with a bang and she heard her dad shout, ‘I’ve had just about enough of that man! Tiffany! Where are you? He’s crossed a line! There is a line, Tiffany, a line! And this time that man has crossed it!’

She heard her mother from somewhere else in the house call out, ‘What?’

Pardon
, thought Dakota.

‘Dakota! Where is your mother? Where are you?’

Dakota was exactly where she had been all morning, reading her book on the window seat, but of course her dad didn’t notice details like that.

The house was so big they could never find each other. ‘You need a map to get around this place,’ Dakota’s auntie said every single time she came over, even though she’d been here a million times and did not need a map at all. She even knew exactly where everything went in the kitchen cupboards better than Dakota did.

Dakota didn’t answer her dad. Her mum had said she could finish the chapter before she had to help tidy up the house for the visitors. (As if the visitors were
her
choice.) She looked up, considering, because she’d actually sneaked just a little way into a new chapter, but she looked back down at the page and just seeing the words was enough to pull her back in. She felt it like a pleasurable physical sensation, as if she were literally falling, straight back into the world of
The Hunger Games
,
where Dakota was Katniss and she was strong and powerful and skilled, but also very pretty. Dakota was one hundred per cent certain that she’d be like Katniss and sacrifice herself in the Games for her cute little sister, if she had one. She didn’t particularly
want
one (her friend Ashling’s little sister was always there, hanging about, and poor Ashling could never get rid of her) but if Dakota did have a little sister, she’d totally die for her.

‘Where are you, Dakota?’ called out her mother this time.

‘Here,’ whispered Dakota. She turned the page. ‘I’m right here.’

chapter thirteen

‘Harry is dead,’ said Oliver, almost the moment Erika arrived home from work and put down her briefcase and umbrella. She touched her neck. Ice-cold raindrops were running down her back. Oliver was sitting on the couch surrounded by a little lake of squashed, used-up tissues.

‘Seriously?’ said Erika. She was focused on the tissues. ‘What happened?’ The sight of the tissues made her heart rate pick up. Visceral response linked to childhood trauma. Perfectly natural. Three deep breaths. She just needed to get rid of those tissues.

‘Tiffany and I found his body,’ said Oliver as Erika hurried to the cupboard under the kitchen sink to find a plastic bag.

‘Where?’ said Erika, scooping up tissues. ‘At his house, do you mean?’

She tied the handles of the plastic bag into a firm, satisfying knot and took it over to the bin and dropped it in.

‘Yes,’ said Oliver. ‘You were right about the key. It was under a pot.’

‘So he was … dead?’ said Erika as she stood at the sink, scrubbing her hands. People always asked if she’d been in the medical profession because of the way she washed her hands. When she was in public she tried to be less obviously rigorous, but now that she was home with Oliver, she could scrub and scrub without worrying that someone would diagnose her with OCD. Oliver never judged.

‘Yes, Erika,’ said Oliver. He sounded aggravated. ‘He was very dead. He’d been dead for some time. Weeks and weeks, I’d say.’ His voice broke.

‘Oh. I see. Oh dear.’ Erika turned from the sink. Oliver looked very pale. His hands lay limply on his knees and he sat upright, his feet flat on the floor, like a kid in the throes of terrible remorse, sitting outside the school principal’s office.

She took a breath. Her husband was upset. Extremely upset by the look of it. So he probably wanted and needed to ‘share’. People with dysfunctional childhoods like hers didn’t have the best interpersonal skills when it came to relationships. Well, it was just a fact. No one had modelled a healthy relationship for her. No one had modelled a healthy relationship for Oliver either. They had their dysfunctional childhoods in common. That’s why Erika had invested close to six thousand dollars to date in high-quality therapy. The cycles of dysfunction and mental illness did not have to carry over from generation to generation. You just had to educate yourself.

Erika went and sat on the couch next to Oliver and indicated by her body language that she was ready to listen. She made eye contact. She touched his forearm. She would use hand sanitiser once they finished talking. She really didn’t want to catch that horrible cold.

‘Was he …’ She didn’t want to know the answers to any of the questions she knew she should ask. ‘Was he … what, in bed?’ She thought of a maniacally grinning corpse sitting upright in a bed, one rotting hand on the coverlet.

‘He was at the bottom of the stairs. As soon as I opened the door we could smell it.’ Oliver shuddered.

‘God,’ said Erika.

Smell was one of her issues. Oliver always laughed at the way she’d drop rubbish in the bin and then jump back so the smell couldn’t catch her.

‘I only looked for one second, and then I just, I just … well, I slammed the door shut, and we called the police.’

‘That’s awful,’ said Erika mechanically. ‘Horrible for you.’ She felt herself resist. She didn’t want to hear about it, she didn’t want him to
share
this experience with her. She wanted him to stop talking. She wanted to talk about dinner. She wanted to calm down after the day she’d had. She’d skipped lunch, and she’d stayed back at work to make up for the time she’d wasted going to Clementine’s talk, so she was starving, but obviously after your husband tells you about finding a corpse you can’t then immediately follow it with, ‘Fancy some pasta?’ No. She’d have to wait at least half an hour before she could mention dinner.

‘The police said they think maybe he fell down the stairs,’ said Oliver. ‘And I keep thinking, I keep thinking …’

He made strange little breathy noises. Erika tried to keep the irritation off her face. He was going to sneeze. Every sneeze was a performance. She waited. No. He wasn’t going to sneeze. He was trying not to cry.

Erika recoiled. She couldn’t join him in this. If she allowed herself to feel sad and guilty about Harry, who she hadn’t even
liked
, then who knew what could happen. It would be like uncorking a champagne bottle that had been vigorously shaken. Her emotions would fly all over the place. Messy. She needed order. ‘I need order,’ she’d told her psychologist. ‘Of course you need order,’ her psychologist had said. ‘You crave order. That’s perfectly understandable.’ Her psychologist was the nicest person she knew.

Oliver took his glasses off and wiped his eyes. ‘I keep thinking, what if he fell down the stairs and he couldn’t move and he was calling and calling for help but nobody heard? We all just went about our daily lives, while Harry starved to death, what if that happened? We’re like those neighbours you see on TV, and you think, how could you not have noticed? How could you not have cared? So what if he was a bit grumpy?’

‘Well, you know, Vid and Tiffany are right next door to him,’ said Erika. She did not want to think about Harry lying on the floor. The sun rising and setting. Hearing the sounds of the neighbourhood: lawn mowers, garbage trucks, the leaf blower he hated so much.

‘I know. Tiffany is really upset too. But you know what?
I
was the one on the street he probably liked the most. He tolerated me, anyway. I mean, we had some civil conversations.’

‘I know,’ said Erika. ‘Like that time you were both so mad about that abandoned car outside the Richardsons’.’

‘I should have noticed he hadn’t been out and about,’ said Oliver. He took a tissue from the box and blew his nose noisily. ‘I
did
think I hadn’t seen him for a while, maybe a week or so ago, but then I just forgot about it.’

‘He wouldn’t have
starved
to death,’ reflected Erika. ‘It would have been the lack of water that killed him. Dehydration.’

‘Erika!’ Oliver winced. He dropped his scrunched-up tissue on the couch next to him and pulled another one from the box.

‘What? I’m just saying he didn’t lie there for
weeks
on end.’ She paused. ‘He should have had one of those emergency alarm things around his neck.’

‘Well, he didn’t,’ said Oliver shortly. He blew his nose again.

‘And I guess he had no family,’ said Erika. ‘No friends.’ Because he was such a nasty, vindictive old bastard. She wasn’t going to let Oliver drag her into the morass of guilt into which he was sinking. Let Tiffany sink with him. Erika already lived with the permanent thrum of guilt.

‘I guess he didn’t,’ said Oliver. ‘Or if he did, we never saw them visit. That’s why it was up to us to keep an eye out for him. These are the people who slip through the cracks of society. I mean, as a community, we have a moral obligation to –’

The landline rang and Erika leaped to her feet as though she’d won a prize. ‘I’ll get it.’

She picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’

‘Erika, darling. It’s Pam.’

That well-bred, well-projected voice. The voice of good sense and good manners.

‘Pam,’ said Erika. ‘Hi.’ She felt an instant softening and a ticklish feeling of imminent tears. She felt it whenever she spoke to Clementine’s mother. That old childhood adoration, the dizzy, glorious feeling of relief, as if she’d been rescued at sea.

‘I’m babysitting for Clementine and Sam,’ said Pam. ‘They’ve just left. They’re going out for dinner at that new restaurant in the Overseas Passenger Terminal people have been raving about. I booked it for them. It’s got three hats. Maybe even five hats? I don’t know. An impressive number of hats. Hopefully they’re having as nice a time as can be expected, although I wish it wasn’t raining, but fingers crossed. They need it, the poor kids. To be frank, I’m worried about their marriage. That’s talking out of school, I know, but, well, you’re her best friend, so you probably know more than me about it.’

‘Oh, well, I don’t know about that,’ said Erika. In actual fact, Erika knew nothing about Clementine’s marriage problems. Surely Pam knew that the ‘best friends’ label had been created by her, and for all those years Erika had clung to it while Clementine merely endured it.

‘Anyway, Erika, darling, I know we’re seeing you soon for our special dinner at my place, which I’m really looking forward to, but listen, the reason I thought I’d give you a call tonight …’ Erika heard the tentativeness in Pam’s voice and her jaw clenched.

‘Well, I had to go to Flower Power today, which meant I drove by your mum’s house,’ said Pam. ‘I didn’t stop.’ She paused. ‘Perhaps I should have, but your mum has really taken against me in recent years, hasn’t she?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Erika, I know you stick to a schedule now with your visits and I think that’s a really sensible idea for your own mental health, but I’m thinking perhaps you need to bring this month’s visit forward.’

Erika breathed out a long thin stream of air like she was blowing up a balloon. She looked at Oliver. He’d closed his eyes and let his head tip back against the couch, one hand pressed to his forehead.

‘How bad?’ she said to Pam.

‘Pretty bad, darling, I’m afraid. Pretty bad.’