Truly Madly Guilty

'Do you ever think,' she said carefully, without looking at Sam, her eyes on a keeling solitary yacht, the wind tugging angrily at its sail. Who would choose to sail in this weather? 'What if we just hadn't gone? What if one of the girls had got sick, or I'd had to work, or you'd had to work, or whatever, what if we just hadn't gone to the barbeque? Do you ever think about that?'

She kept her eyes on the maniac in the yacht.

The too-long pause.

She wanted him to say: Of course I think about it. I think about it every day.

'But we did go,' said Sam. His voice was heavy and cold. He wasn't going to consider any other possibilities for their life than the one they were leading.

'We went, didn't we?'

chapter sixteen

The day of the barbeque

Erika checked the time. Clementine and Sam were expected ten minutes ago, but that was normal for them, they seemed to think that anything within half an hour of the agreed-upon arrival time was acceptable.

Over the years Oliver had come to accept their lateness, and no longer suggested Erika call to check if there had been an accident. Right now, he was pacing the hallway and at intervals making an unendurable squeaking sound by sucking his lower lip beneath his top teeth.

Erika went to the bathroom, locked the door behind her, double-checked and triple-checked it was locked and then pulled out a packet of pills from the back of the bathroom cabinet. It's not that she was hiding them from Oliver. They were right there in the bathroom cupboard for him to see if he wanted, and Oliver would be sympathetic with her need for some sort of anti-anxiety medication. It was just that he was so paranoid about anything that went into his body: alcohol, pills, food that had passed its use-by date. (Erika shared the obsession with use-by dates. According to Clementine, Sam treated use-by dates as suggestions.)

Her psychologist had prescribed her this medication for those days when she knew her anxiety symptoms (racing heart, trembling hands, overwhelming sense of panic and imminent danger etcetera, etcetera) would be hard to control.

'Experiment a bit. Start out really low,' her psychologist had said. 'You might find even a quarter of a tablet is enough to get you through.'

She took one tablet out of the blister pack and attempted to break it in half with her thumbnail. There was a deep groove down the middle of the tablet as if that was where you were meant to break it, but the design was faulty. It was impossible to break it in two. Her anti-anxiety medication was making her anxious. There was a not-especially-funny joke there somewhere.

Erika had planned to use the medication only when she visited her mother. She did feel nervous about today's discussion with Clementine, of course she did, but it was just normal-person anxiety that anyone would experience in a situation like this.

However, that was until she'd walked in the door after her conversation with Vid in the driveway to find her husband looking at her with incredulous disbelief, a feather duster hanging absurdly by his side. (Clementine couldn't believe they owned a feather duster. 'Where's your feather duster?' Erika had said to her once when she visited, and Clementine had fallen about laughing and Erika had felt that familiar feeling of sick humiliation. Feather dusters were funny. Who knew? How did you know? Weren't they quite useful?)

'Why would you do that?' Oliver had said. 'Why would you say yes to a barbeque with the neighbours, today of all days? We've had it all planned! We've been planning it for weeks!' He didn't yell when he was angry. He didn't even raise his voice. He just spoke in the same tone of polite disbelief he would use to make a call to his internet provider to complain about something 'unacceptable'. His eyes were shiny and slightly bloodshot behind his glasses. She didn't especially like him when he was angry but maybe everyone disliked their partners when they were angry and it was therefore normal.

'Erika, you've got to get this idea out of your head about there being some objective measure of normality,' her psychologist kept telling her. 'This "normal" person of whom you speak doesn't exist!'

'Are you deliberately sabotaging this?' Oliver had said, suddenly intense, as if he were on to something like a mistake on a bill, as if he'd just worked out that his internet provider was double-charging him.

'Of course not!' she'd said, outraged at the suggestion.

Oliver had tried to convince her to go straight next door and tell Vid that they couldn't make it to the barbeque after all. He'd said he'd do it himself. He'd started walking out the door, and she'd grabbed him by his arm to stop him, and for just a few seconds they'd struggled and he'd actually dragged her along the kitchen floor behind him as he tried to walk ahead. It was ungainly and undignified and it was not them. Clementine and Sam sometimes did this mock-wrestling thing in public which always made Erika and Oliver go rigid with embarrassment. They took pride in not behaving like that. That's why Oliver stopped. He held his hands up high in surrender.

'Fine,' he said. 'Let's just forget all about it. We'll talk to Clementine and Sam another day. We'll just go to the barbeque and have fun.'

'No way. We're going ahead. It's going to be better this way,' Erika told him. 'We ask the question. It's out there. We say, you don't need to give us an answer right now. Then we say, okay, off we go to the barbeque. It gives us an end point. Otherwise we'd just be making awkward conversation.'

And now they were due any minute. Everything was ready. The craft table for the kids. The plate of crackers and dips.

But Erika's heart zoomed like a race car around her chest and her hands trembled uncontrollably.

She swore at the stupid, tiny tablet. It wouldn't break.

The doorbell rang. The sound was like a swift, violent kick to the stomach. The air rushed from her lungs. The tablet fell from her clumsy fingers.

'Doorbell dread,' her psychologist called it, almost with satisfaction, because Erika was ticking all the right boxes. 'It's very common. Of course you dread the doorbell, because all through your childhood you dreaded discovery.'

Erika squatted down, the tiles of the bathroom cold and hard against her knees. The floor was clean. The yellow tablet lay in the centre of a tile. She pressed her fingertip to it and looked at it. The doorbell rang again. She put the whole tablet on her tongue and swallowed.

Everything depended on the conversation she was about to have. For God's sake, of course she was anxious. She could feel herself breathing shallowly, taking tiny, rapid sips of air, so she put her hand on her stomach and took a deep breath the way her psychologist had taught her (inflate your belly, not your chest) then she walked out of the bathroom and down the hallway as Clementine, Sam, Holly and Ruby spilled in through the front door, a tumble of noise and movement and different fragrances, as if there were ten of them, not just four.