Truly Madly Guilty

'What?' Erika looked at the rubbish in her gloved hand: a banana skin, a half-eaten tuna sandwich, a soggy paper towel.

Her mother extracted a tiny grease-stained piece of notepaper from her hand. 'There! That! I'd written down something important on that! It was the name of a book, I think, or a DVD maybe, I was listening to the radio and I thought, I must write that down!' She held it up to the light and peered at it. 'Now look what you've gone and done, I can't even read it!'

Erika said nothing.

She had a policy of passive resistance now. She never argued back. Not since the day she'd found herself engaged in a ludicrous ten-minute tug-of-war over a broken-stringed tennis racquet, while her mother screamed, 'But I'm selling it on the eBay!' She lost in the end, of course. The tennis racquet stayed and it never got sold on eBay. Her mother didn't know how to sell something on eBay.

Her mother brandished the slip of paper at her. 'You march on in here, Miss Know-it-all, and start messing around with my things, thinking you're doing me some great favour, and all you do is make things worse! It's lucky you don't want children! You'd just throw away their toys, wouldn't you? Take their precious little things and toss them in the bin! What a wonderful mother you'd be!'

Erika turned away. She lifted the swollen rubbish bag up by the ends and banged it against the floor. She double-knotted the ends and carried it to the back door.

She thought of Clementine's phone call: 'I want to help you have a baby.' The strange pitch of her voice. The thing was, Clementine really did want to help her have a baby now. That's what accounted for the strange pitch of her voice. She wanted to do this badly. This was her opportunity for instant redemption. She thought of how Oliver's face would be transformed by hope when she told him. Should she take Clementine's charity even if it was given for the wrong reason? End justifies the means and all that?

Did she even want a baby anymore?

She shifted the rubbish bag into her left hand so she could open the back door and at that moment the rubbish bag split and oozed its contents: a thick, endless, inexorable discharge.

Her mother slapped her knee and laughed her pretty laugh.

chapter thirty-two

The day of the barbeque

Dakota looked over at where the grown-ups were sitting around the table and saw her mother slide her eyes towards her before leaning forward as if she was about to share a secret.

Holly and Ruby were squashed into the swinging egg chair on either side of her and she was showing them the Duck Song Game app. They both loved it. The girls were pretty cute and she liked them a lot but she'd kind of had enough of them now. She felt like going back inside to her bedroom and reading her book.

The grown-ups were all giggling excitedly now and lowering their voices as though they were teenagers telling rude jokes, and Dakota felt irritated.

They did this sometimes. She'd overheard enough bits and pieces to know that the rude, silly thing was something to do with how her mum and dad had met, but when she asked them they always said they'd met when they were both bidding for the same house, and then they shot each other glinting looks that they thought she was too stupid to catch.

Her older half-sisters said they knew the secret and the secret was that her dad had had a love affair with her mum when he was still married to Angelina. Angelina was her dad's first wife, and it was very hard, almost impossible for Dakota to imagine this, even though she had an excellent imagination.

But her mother said there was absolutely no love affair while her dad was still married to someone else and Dakota believed her.

It was frustrating that she didn't just come out and say the secret, because Dakota was old enough to handle whatever it was. Okay, so it was true, she'd never seen an R-rated movie, but she watched the news and she knew about sex and murder and ISIS and paedophiles. What else could there possibly be to know?

Also, as a matter of fact, she was more mature than her parents when it came to sex. There had been a sex education talk at her school where the parents had had to come too, and the lady giving the talk had said, 'Now, some of this is going to make you feel like giggling and that's natural, you can have a little giggle, but then we'll just move along.'

She'd said this to the kids, but it was the grown-ups who couldn't keep it together. Her dad, who wasn't used to keeping quiet for such a long period of time (the only times he stopped talking were when he went to sleep and sometimes when he listened to his classical music; you couldn't see a movie with him), had kept saying things under his breath to her friend Ashok's dad, and in the end they were both snorting so hard they'd had to leave the room, and even then you could still hear them laughing outside.

This secret they were keeping from her was probably nothing. 'Is that all?' Dakota would say, and she'd roll her eyes and feel embarrassed for them.

Holly and Ruby squabbled over Dakota's iPad.

'My turn!'

'No, my turn!'

'Play nicely,' said Dakota, and she heard the way she sounded and you would have thought she was, like, forty years old. Seriously.

chapter thirty-three

The lines around Andrew's eyes had deepened but, apart from that, he looked exactly the same. Tiffany saw the unmistakeable glimmer of recognition in his pale eyes even as he gave her the appropriate, courteous smile for a fellow parent at a school event.

Did she see fear too? Or laughter? Confusion? He was probably trying to place her. She was out of context. She was way, way out of context.

Tiffany didn't have a chance to introduce herself because at that moment a silver-haired, elegantly suited woman glided onto the stage and instantly quietened the room with her presence. The school principal. Robyn Byrne. She wrote a weekly column in the local paper about educating girls.