Truly Madly Guilty

'So I want to do it,' said Clementine. 'Donate my eggs, that is. I want to help you have a baby. I'd love to help. I'm ready to, you know, get the ball rolling.' She cleared her throat self-consciously, as if the words 'get the ball rolling' were in a foreign language she was only just learning. 'I feel good about it.'

Erika didn't say anything. She managed to heft the bottle of disinfectant up onto her hip, like an obese toddler. She staggered back out to the garage.

'I want you to know that my decision has got nothing to do with what happened,' said Clementine. 'I would have said yes anyway.'

Erika grunted as she opened the passenger door of her car and dropped the disinfectant onto the seat.

'Oh, Clementine,' she said, and she was conscious of the sudden candidness of her tone, as if she'd been speaking falsely up until now. This was her true voice. It echoed around the garage. This was the voice she used with Oliver in the middle of the night when they shared the most shameful secrets of their shameful childhoods. 'We both know that's a lie.'

chapter twenty-four

The day of the barbeque

'That sounds like Holly,' said Sam. He put down his beer bottle. 'I'll go.'

'Oh dear,' said Tiffany. 'I'll show you where they are.'

'Mummy!' Holly shrieked from upstairs. 'Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!'

'Looks like I'm needed too,' said Clementine with obvious relief.

Erika wanted to go too, to check if Holly was okay, but with both parents there it was clearly not appropriate, and would be the sort of overstepping behaviour that would earn Erika an exasperated sigh from Clementine. Now it was just Erika, Oliver and Vid in the room, and it was immediately obvious that this particular social combination didn't work, even though Vid, of course, would give it his ebullient best shot.

Oliver stared glumly into his champagne glass while Vid opened the oven door to check on his baking and closed it again.

Erika looked around for inspiration. There was a large glass bowl in the middle of the island bench, filled with different-sized, different-coloured pieces of glass.

'This is pretty,' she said, pulling it towards her to examine the contents.

'It's Tiffany's,' said Vid. 'She calls it sea glass. I call it rubbish.' He picked up a long oval-shaped piece of dark green glass. 'Look at this! I said to her, babe, this is from a broken Heineken bottle! Some drunk leaves it at the beach and then you bring home his rubbish! She goes on about it being polished by the sea or whatever.'

'I guess it makes a nice decoration,' said Erika, although she agreed with him. It was a bowl of rubbish.

'She's a hoarder, my wife,' continued Vid. 'If it wasn't for me, she'd be like one of those people you see on TV, you know, those ones who have so much crap they can't get out their front door.'

'Tiffany isn't a hoarder,' said Erika.

Oliver cleared his throat. A little warning bell.

'She is, she really is!' said Vid. 'You should see her wardrobe. Her shoes. That woman is Imelda Marcos.'

'She's not a hoarder, though,' said Erika. She avoided looking in Oliver's direction. 'My mother is a real hoarder.'

Oliver held out his hand, palm down in front of Erika, as if to stop a waiter refilling his glass, except instead of no more wine, he meant, no more sharing. In Oliver's world you told no one anything. Family was private. Family was shameful. They had that in common, except that Erika no longer wanted to be ashamed.

'Like for real?' said Vid, interested. 'Like on the TV shows?'

The TV shows. Erika remembered the first time she'd turned on the TV and seen her mother's hallway, there for the world to see in all its disgusting glory, and how she'd leaped back, both hands pressed to her chest as if she'd been shot. It was like something from a nightmare; an enemy had filmed her dirty secret and broadcast it. Her rational mind had worked it out in the next instant. Of course it wasn't her mother's hallway, it belonged to an elderly Welshman on the other side of the world, but even then Erika still couldn't shake that feeling of exposure, of public humiliation, and she'd turned it off, with an angry swipe of the remote, as if she were slapping someone's face. She'd never watched one of those shows the whole way through; she couldn't bear that glib, pseudo-sympathetic tone.

'Yes, for real,' said Erika. 'Like on the TV shows.'

'Wow,' said Vid.

'She has a pathological attachment to inanimate objects,' Erika heard herself say. Oliver sighed.

'She accumulates stuff to insulate herself from the world,' continued Erika. She couldn't stop.

For most of her life she had avoided analysing her mother's 'habit' or even thinking about it much, except when absolutely necessary. It was as though her mother had a socially unacceptable fetish. When she had left home she was able to detach herself further still, but then, one night about a year ago, Erika had typed the word 'hoarder' into Google, and just like that she had developed a voracious appetite for information. She read textbooks, journal articles and case studies, initially with a racing heart, as if she were doing something illegal, but as she accumulated facts and statistics and terms like 'pathological attachment to inanimate objects', her heart slowed. She wasn't alone. She wasn't that special. There was even a 'Children of Hoarders' website where people like Erika shared story after story of identical frustrations. Erika's entire childhood, which had once seemed so unique in its secret dirty shame, was nothing more than a category, a type, a box to be ticked.