Truly Madly Guilty

'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.

'I don't know what you want me to say about that, Erika,' said Oliver worriedly. He thought there was an actual correct response. An answer at the back of the book. He thought there was a secret set of relationship rules that she must know, because she was the woman, and she was deliberately withholding them. 'Just ... will you talk to Clementine?' he said.

'I'll talk to Clementine,' said Erika. 'See you tonight.'

She turned her phone to silent and put it in her bag, at her feet. The taxi driver turned up the radio. He must have given up on asking her accounting advice now, probably thinking that judging from her personal life, her professional advice couldn't be trusted.

Erika thought of Clementine, who would be finishing up her little speech at the library by now, presumably to polite applause from her audience. There would be no 'bravos!', no standing ovations, no bouquets backstage.

Poor Clementine, feeling she had to virtually abase herself in this way.

Oliver was right: the decision to go to the barbeque was of no relevance. It was a sunk cost. She put her head back against the seat, closed her eyes and remembered a silver car driving towards her, surrounded by a swirling funnel of autumn leaves.

chapter three

The day of the barbeque

Erika drove into her cul-de-sac and was greeted by a strange, almost beautiful sight: someone was finally driving the silver BMW that had been parked outside the Richardsons' house for the last six months, and whoever was driving hadn't bothered to brush away the layer of red and gold autumn leaves that had accumulated on the car's bonnet and roof, so that as they drove (much too fast for a residential area) a whirling vortex of leaves was created, as if the car were being followed by a mini tornado.

As the leaves cleared, Erika saw her next-door neighbour, Vid, standing at the end of his driveway, watching the car drive away, while a single ray of sunlight bounced off his sunglasses, like the shimmer of a camera flash.

Erika braked next to him, opening her passenger-side window at the same time.

'Good morning,' she called out. 'Someone finally moved that car!'

'Yes, they must have finished their drug dealing, what do you reckon?' Vid leaned down towards the car, pushing his sunglasses up onto his head of luxuriant grey hair. 'Or maybe it was the Mafia, you know?'

'Ha ha!' Erika laughed unconvincingly because Vid looked kind of like a successful gangster himself.

'It's a cracker of a day, you know. Look! Am I right?!' Vid made a satisfied gesture at the sky, as if he'd personally purchased the day and paid a premium price for it, and got the quality product he deserved.

'It is a beautiful day,' said Erika. 'You off for a walk?'

Vid reacted with faint disgust to this suggestion.

'Walk? Me? No.' He indicated a lit cigarette between his fingers and the rolled-up, plastic-wrapped Sunday paper in the other hand. 'I just came down to collect my paper, you know.'

Erika reminded herself not to count the number of times Vid said 'you know'. Recording someone's conversational tic bordered on obsessive-compulsive. (Vid's current record: eleven times in a two-minute diatribe about the removal of the smoked pancetta pizza fro

m the local pizzeria's menu. Vid could not believe it, he just could not believe it, you know. The 'you knows' came thick and fast when he got excited.)

Erika was very aware that some of her behaviours could potentially be classified as obsessive-compulsive. 'I wouldn't get too caught up with labels, Erika,' her psychologist had said with the constipated smile she tended to give when Erika 'self-diagnosed'. (Erika had taken out a subscription to Psychology Today when she started therapy, just to educate herself a little about the process, and it was all so fascinating she'd recently begun working her way through the first-year reading list for a psychological and behavioural sciences undergraduate degree at Cambridge. Just for interest, she'd told her psychologist, who didn't look threatened by this, but didn't look exactly thrilled by it either.)

'Bloody revhead kid hoons up the street and throws it from his car like he's throwing a grenade in bloody Syria, you know.' Vid made a grenade-throwing gesture with the rolled-up paper. 'So what are you up to? Been grocery shopping?'

He looked at the little collection of plastic bags on Erika's passenger seat, and drew deeply on his cigarette, blowing a stream of smoke out the side of his mouth.

'Not exactly grocery shopping, just some, um, bits and bobs I needed.'

'Bits and bobs,' repeated Vid, trying out the phrase as if he'd never heard it before. Maybe he hadn't. He looked at Erika in that searching, almost disappointed way he had, as if he'd been hoping for something more from her.

'Yes. For afternoon tea. We've got Clementine and Sam coming over later for afternoon tea, with their little girls. My friends, Clementine and Sam? You met them at my place?' She knew perfectly well that Vid remembered them. She was giving him Clementine to make herself more interesting. That's all she had to offer Vid: Clementine.