Truly Madly Guilty

'We met at a property auction,' said Tiffany, before Vid got a chance to answer. 'It was a studio apartment in the city. My first ever investment.'

'Ah. But that wasn't the first time I met her,' said Vid, with the anticipatory tone of someone sharing his favourite dirty joke.

'Vid,' warned Tiffany. She met his eyes across the table. Jesus. He was hopeless. It was because he liked Clementine and Sam, and whenever he really liked people he felt compelled to share the story. He was like a big kid desperate to show off to his new friends by saying the naughtiest word he knew. If it were just the neighbours there he would never have said it.

Vid looked back at Tiffany, disappointed. He gave a little shrug and lifted his hands in defeat. 'But maybe that's a story for another day.'

'This is all very mysterious,' said Clementine.

'So were you bidding against each other at the auction?' asked Sam.

'I stopped bidding,' said Vid, 'when I saw how badly she wanted it.'

'A lie,' said Tiffany. 'I outbid him fair and square.'

She'd made two hundred thousand dollars on that place, in just under six months. It was her first

hit. Her first money-making high.

Or maybe not quite. Her second.

'But you can't tell us how you already knew each other?' said Clementine.

'My wife has an enquiring mind,' said Sam, 'which is a nice way of saying she's nosy.'

'Oh, don't pretend you don't want to know,' said Clementine. 'He's a bigger gossip than me.' She looked over at Tiffany. 'But I'll stop asking. Sorry. I was just intrigued.'

To hell with it. Tiffany lowered her voice. 'It was like this,' she said. Everyone leaned forward.

chapter thirty-one

Erika stood in the pouring rain on the pavement outside her childhood home, an umbrella in one hand, a bucketful of cleaning supplies in the other. She didn't move, only her eyes moved, expertly tracking the amount of time and work and arguing and begging and pleading and tug-of-warring required.

Clementine's mother hadn't been exaggerating when she'd said on the phone that it was 'pretty bad'. When Erika was a child, her mother's belongings had never spread beyond the front door. The house always had a sullen, furtive look to it with its closed blinds and its thirsty wilted garden. But it wasn't a house that would make a passer-by turn their head and stare. All their secrets were kept inside, behind the front door that could never open the whole way. Their worst fear was a knock on the door. Erika's mother would react instantly, as if to a sniper attack. You had to drop down low so you couldn't be seen by spying eyes through a window. You had to be still and silent and wait, your heart thudding in your ears, until that nosy, rude person who dared to knock finally saw sense and slunk away, never seeing, never knowing the disgusting truth about the way Erika and her mother lived.

It was only over recent years that her mother's belongings had finally burst through the front door, proliferating like the mushroom cells of a killer virus.

Today she could see a pallet of bricks, a pedestal fan standing companionably next to a mangy artificial Christmas tree of the same height, a mountain of bulging rubbish bags, a city of unopened delivery boxes that had got wet in the recent rain so the cardboard had turned to soft pulp, a stack of framed prints that looked like they'd come from a teenager's room (they weren't Erika's) and dozens of pieces of women's clothing with the arms and legs flung out at panicky angles, as if there had been a recent massacre.

The problem was that her mother now had too much time and too much money. When Erika was growing up her mother had had her full-time nursing job as well as the occasional cheques Erika's father sent from his new home in the UK, where he lived with his replacement, upgraded family. So they'd had money, but there was still a ceiling to how much new stuff she could accumulate, although Sylvia had given it a red-hot go. However, when Erika's grandmother had died, leaving a considerable sum of money to Sylvia, her mother's hoarding had been given a whole new financial boost. Thanks, Grandma.

And of course, now there was online shopping too. Her mother had learned how to use a computer, and she managed to keep it plugged in and accessible, and because Erika had arranged for all her bills to be paid by direct debit, the electricity never got turned off like it had when Erika was growing up and the paper bills used to vanish into the abyss.

If the front lawn looked like this, the inside of the house would be monstrous. Her heart galloped. It was as though she had the sole responsibility of rescuing someone by lifting something impossibly, incomprehensibly heavy: a train, a building. Of course it couldn't be done. Not on her own. Not in this rain. And not without Oliver by her side: methodical and unemotional, looking for solutions, speaking to her mother in his reasonable let's-work-our-way-through-this voice.

Oliver didn't take every object personally, the way Erika did. To Erika, every piece of junk represented a choice her mother had made of an object over her. Her mother loved random, crappy objects more than she loved her daughter. She must, because she fought for them, she screamed for them, and she was fully prepared to bury her only daughter in them, and so each time Erika picked up an object it was with a wordless cry of despair: You choose this over me! She should have waited until he was better. Or she should have at least taken her anxiety medication - that's why she'd been prescribed the tablets, to help her get through exactly this sort of moment - but she hadn't taken one since the day of the barbeque. She hadn't even looked at the box. She couldn't risk more of those terrifying memory gaps.

'Erika! I'm so happy to see you! Oh! Sorry to startle you like that!'

It was the woman who had been living next door to her mother for the last five years. Erika's mother had adored this woman for quite a long time, long for her, anyway, maybe six months, before, predictably, she'd committed some sin, and gone from a 'really quite extraordinary person' to 'that woman'.

'Hi,' said Erika. She couldn't remember the woman's name. She didn't want to remember her name. It would only increase her sense of responsibility.

'Isn't the weather terrible,' said the woman. 'It's just torrential!'

Why did people feel the need to comment on the rain, when they had absolutely nothing of value to add to the conversation?

'Torrential,' agreed Erika. 'A veritable downpour of cats and dogs!'