Truly Madly Guilty

Clementine placed her book face down on her lap in the circle of lamplight reflected on the duvet. She listened to the rain and looked at the dark empty side of their double bed.

When Sam had come back from his 'drive', after her mother had gone home ('Another time,' she'd said robustly. 'We'll try again another time.') they hadn't said a word about their disastrous night out. They'd been polite and cool to each other like not especially friendly flatmates. 'There is some leftover pasta in the fridge.' 'Good, I might have some.' 'I'm off to bed.' 'Good night.' 'Good night.'

Sam had gone off to the study to sleep on the sofa bed that gave whoever slept on it a sore lower back. ('It was fine, fine!' guests would always assure them the next morning, discreetly massaging their lower backs.)

It appeared the study was Sam's bedroom now. They didn't even go to the pretence of starting out in the same bed, and then one of them creeping off in the middle of the night, pillow under the arm. We sleep in separate rooms now. It gave her a shocked, sick feeling when she actually let the thought crystallise like that.

The last time she and Sam had slept a proper full ordinary night together in this bed, a night without twisted-sheet dreams or teeth grinding or tossing and turning, had been the night before the barbeque.

It seemed extraordinary now to imagine them going to bed, sleeping through the night and waking up together in the morning. What had that last night of extraordinary ordinariness been like? She couldn't remember a single thing about it; except that she knew they'd been so different from the people they were now, just eight weeks later.

Did they have sex? Probably not. They so rarely got around to it. That's why they were so susceptible that night. To the sex.

Her mother would have been hoping that tonight's dinner at the fancy restaurant would have resulted in them coming home and 'making love'. If they hadn't come home early, if they'd walked in the door holding hands, Pam would have slipped off quickly with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge smile, and then she would have called the next day and said something horrifically inappropriate like, 'I do hope you weren't too tired to make love, darling, a healthy sex life is crucial for a healthy marriage.'

It would have made Clementine want to put her fingers in her ears and chant 'la la la' as she used to do when her mother delivered sex education lectures while she drove Clementine and Erika to parties. Erika, who practically took notes every time Clementine's mother opened her mouth, used to listen attentively to the lectures and ask very specific procedural questions. 'When exactly does the condom go on?' 'When the boy's penis ...' 'LA LA LA!' Clementine would yell.

Her mother had always been far too open and jolly about sex, as if it was something good for you, like water aerobics. She used to have The Joy of Sex sitting unabashedly on her bedside table as if it were a nice novel. Clementine chiefly remembered the hairiness of that book.

Clementine wanted sex to be something subtle and secret. Lights off. Mysterious. Hairless. An image came to her of Tiffany in that crazy backyard, before all the fairy lights came on: Tiffany's T-shirt bright white in the hazy light. A sweet taste filled Clementine's mouth. It was the taste of Vid's dessert. Now it was the taste of shame.

Two or three nights after the barbeque Clementine had dreamed she was having sex onstage at the Opera House concert hall with someone who was not Sam. Holly and Ruby were in the audience watching their mother have sex with some other man. Right there in the front row, legs swinging, while Clementine moaned and groaned in the most depraved way, and

at first they just watched with blank concentration, like they were watching Dora the Explorer, but then they started to cry, and Clementine called out 'Just a minute!' as if she were finishing the washing up, not her orgasm, and then her parents and Sam's parents, all four of them, came running down the aisle of the concert hall with disgusted faces, and Clementine's mother screamed, 'How could you, Clementine, how could you?'

It wasn't a hard dream to interpret. In Clementine's mind what happened would forever be tied up with sex. Skanky, sleazy sex.

Fragments of that revolting dream had lingered for days, as if it had been an actual memory. She had to keep reassuring herself: It's okay, Clementine. You never actually performed a sex show at the Opera House with your kids in the audience.

It still felt more like a memory than a dream.

They'd both had bad dreams that first week after the barbeque. Their sheets got tangled, their pillows stank of sweat. Sam's shouts would violently wrench her awake, as though someone had grabbed her by her shirtfront and yanked her upward to a sitting position, her heart hammering. Sam would be sitting up next to her, confused and gibbering, and her first instinctive reaction would always be pure rage, never sympathy.

Sam had begun grinding his teeth while he slept. An unbearable melody in perfect three-quarter time. Click-two-three, click-two-three. She would lie there, eyes open in the darkness, counting along for what seemed like hours at a time.

Apparently Clementine had started talking in her sleep. Once she'd woken up to find Sam leaning over her, shouting (he said he wasn't shouting but he was), 'Shut up, shut up, shut up!'

Whoever got the most frustrated would leave to sleep or read in the study. That's when the sofa bed got made up and stayed made up. Eventually they'd have to talk about it. It couldn't go on forever, could it?

Don't think about it now. It would sort itself out. She had other more important things to worry about. For example, tomorrow she needed to call Erika and arrange to see her for a drink after work. Then she would tell her that of course she would donate her eggs. It would be her pleasure, her honour.

For some reason a memory came to her of the first and only time she'd seen inside Erika's childhood home.

They'd been friends for about six months and Clementine was always (mostly at her mother's insistence) inviting Erika over to play, but the invitation was never returned, and Clementine, with a child's well-developed sense of fairness, was getting sick of it. It was fun going to other people's places. You often got treats you weren't allowed at your own place. So why was Erika being so strange and secretive and frankly, selfish?

Then one day Clementine's mother was driving them both to some school picnic, and they'd stopped at Erika's place to quickly pick up something she'd forgotten. A hat? Clementine couldn't remember. What she did remember was jumping out of the car and running after her, to tell Erika Mum said to bring a warm top as well because it was getting chilly, and how she'd stopped in the hallway of the house, bewildered. The front door wouldn't swing all the way open. Erika must have turned sideways to get through. The door was blocked by a ceiling-high tower of overflowing cardboard boxes.

'Get out of here! What are you doing here?' Erika had screamed, suddenly appearing in the hallway, her face a frightening grotesque mask of fury, and Clementine had leaped back, but she'd never forgotten that glimpse of Erika's hallway.

It was like coming upon a slum in a suburban home. The stuff: skyscrapers of old newspapers, tangles of coathangers and winter coats and shoes, a frypan filled with bead necklaces, and piles of bulging, knotted plastic bags. It was like someone's life had exploded.

And the smell. The smell of rot and mould and decay.

Erika's mother, Sylvia, was a nurse, supposedly a perfectly capable one. She held down a job at a nursing home for years before she retired. It seemed so extraordinary to Clementine that someone who lived like that could work in healthcare, where things like cleanliness and hygiene and order mattered so much. According to Erika, who was now able to freely discuss her mother's hoarding, it wasn't that unusual; in fact, it was quite common for hoarders to work in the healthcare industry. 'They say it has something to do with them focusing on taking care of others so they don't take care of themselves,' Erika said. Then she added, 'Or their children.'

For years, Erika's mother's problems had been something they all referred to obliquely and delicately, even when those shows started appearing on TV and they suddenly had a word for the horror: hoarding. Erika's mum was a 'hoarder'. It was a thing. A condition. But it wasn't until Erika had started with her 'lovely psychologist' about a year ago that Erika herself had begun saying the word 'hoarding' out loud, and discussing the psychology behind it, in this strange, new, clipped way, as if it had never been a deep, dark secret at all.

How could Clementine begrudge sharing her home and her life with Erika after she'd seen her home? She couldn't and yet she did.