Truly Madly Guilty

Clementine followed Sam into their bedroom, where he pulled a T-shirt from a drawer and shrugged it on. He took off his work pants and pulled on a pair of jeans. His movements were jerky, like a twitchy junkie in need of a fix. He avoided meeting her eye.

She said, 'Do you mean it? Are you serious? About separating?'

'Probably not,' he said with a lift of his shoulders, as if the state of their marriage was neither here nor there to him.

She was so agitated she couldn't sort out her breathing. It was like she couldn't remember the process. She kept holding her breath and then taking sudden gasps of air.

She said, 'For God's sake, you can't just say things like that! You've never, we've never ...'

She meant that they'd never used words like 'separation' and 'divorce' even in their worst screaming matches. They yelled things like, 'You're infuriating!' 'You don't think!' 'You are the most annoying woman in the history of annoying women!' 'I hate you!' 'I hate you more!' and they always, always used the word 'always', even though Clementine's mother had said you should never use that word in an argument with your spouse, as in, for example, 'You always forget to refill the water jug!' (But Sam did always forget. It was accurate.)

But they'd never allowed for the possibility of their marriage ending. They could stomp and yell and sulk safe in the knowledge that the scaffolding of their lives was rock solid. Paradoxically, it gave them permission to yell louder, to scream stupider, sillier, more irrational things, to just let their feelings swirl freely through them, because it was going to be fine in the morning.

'Sorry,' said Sam. 'I shouldn't have said that.' He looked at her, and an expression of pure exhaustion crossed his face, and for a moment, it was him again, not that cold, peculiar stranger. 'I was just upset about the idea of Dakota coming to Holly's party. I don't want Holly having anything to do with that family.'

'They're not bad people,' said Clementine, momentarily distracted from the point at hand by the loathing in Sam's tone. Clementine didn't want to see Vid and Tiffany because they were a reminder of the worst day of her life. Just thinking about them made her shudder, the way you shuddered at the thought of some food or drink in which you had overindulged until it made you sick. But she didn't loathe them.

'Look, they're just not our type of people,' said Sam. 'To be frank, I don't want my child associating with people like them.'

'What? Because she used to be a dancer?' said Clementine.

'She used to be a stripper,' said Sam, with such disgust it made Clementine feel instantly defensive on Tiffany's behalf.

It would be too easy to put Tiffany into a particular box for a 'certain kind of person' and to decide that the powerful shot of desire Clementine had felt when Tiffany offered her a lap dance was merely a cheap trick of her body, an involuntary response, like using a vibrator. It would be easy to decide that Clementine's behaviour was disgusting and Tiffany was disgusting and what had happened was all just so disgusting. But that was a cop-out. That was like saying that what had happened to Ruby could never have happened if they'd been at a barbeque with 'the right sort of people'. Of course it could still have happened if they'd been distracted by a conversation about philosophy or politics or prize-winning literature.

'Tiffany is nice. Really nice! They're nice people!' she said. She thought about Vid and Tiffany and the warmth and friendliness they'd showed them that night. They were both so unabashedly themselves. There was no subterfuge, no obfuscation. 'They're kind of sweet people really.'

'Sweet!' exploded Sam. 'Are you out of your mind? You've got no idea what you're talking about. I've been to those strip clubs. Have you ever been to one?'

'No, but so what?'

'They're revolting, depressing places. They're not glamorous. They're not sexy. You've got no grip on reality. Seriously.' It was just another version of the ongoing argument of their marriage. Sam had reality gripped. Apparently Clementine did not. Sam wanted to get to the airport ea

rly. Clementine wanted to be the last one to board. Sam wanted to book ahead. Clementine wanted to wing it. It used to balance out. It used to be a joke.

'Seriously.' She imitated his tone mockingly under her breath.

'Seriously,' he said. 'No one wants to be there at those places. Not the girls. Not the punters.'

'Oh, right, no one wants to be there,' repeated Clementine. The word 'punters' irked her (conservative old-man word), or was it just that everything about him irked her now? 'So I guess you and the other punters were just forced to go along.'

'In most cases it's a drunk group of blokes and someone says, let's do this for a lark, and you go along and it's funny, but then you see all those hard-faced women gyrating about and you realise it's seedy, it's disgusting -'

'Yeah, that's right, Sam, because you seemed really disgusted by Tiffany that night,' said Clementine. This was insane. This was historical revisionism at its best, and hadn't Sam always specialised in that, hadn't she always said she wished she had a permanent film rolling of their life so she could go back and prove that yes he did so say that thing he now denied? 'You were laughing. You were encouraging her. You liked her, don't pretend you didn't like her, I know you did.'

She regretted it as soon as she said it because she knew him so well she could see how her words flayed him.

'You're right. And that's what I have to live with,' he said. 'I have to live with that forever, but it doesn't mean I want to socialise with her. You know she was probably a hooker, right?'

'She wasn't! Dancing was just a job. It was just a fun job.'

'How would you know?' said Sam.

'We talked about it. When she drove me to the hospital.'

Sam stopped. 'So you had a fun chat about Tiffany's stripping days on the way to the hospital, while Ruby ... while Ruby ...' His voice cracked. He took a breath and when he spoke again he had regained control of his voice. 'How nice. How very innocent.'

The rage felt as powerful and unconsenting and extraordinary as a contraction. It took her a moment to catch her breath. He was questioning her love for Ruby. He was implying she'd somehow betrayed Ruby, that she didn't care, that her love was inferior to his, and in fact, now she thought about it, hadn't that always been his implication, that he loved the children more than she did because he worried more, he hovered more?