Truly Madly Guilty

'Barbie. Kind of embarrassing. I used to love my Barbie dolls.'

'Please keep talking,' she said.

And so Tiffany talked.

She talked about the deep bass beat of the music and the haze of cigarette smoke and the drugs and the girls and the rules and how she got pretty good on the pole, she could do lots of spinning tricks, and hold herself out perpendicular to the pole, although it hurt her shoulders afterwards, but she'd done gymnastics at a competitive level as a kid, so ...

Clementine thought of Holly's gymnastic classes. Maybe it was time for her to learn the violin instead.

The car inched forward.

'Go on,' she said.

Tiffany went on.

She talked about the one time she had to push the panic button doing a private show, but that was honestly the only time she didn't feel safe, and the barrister who wanted to just sit there and tenderly hold her feet, and how she saw him a few weeks later, being interviewed about a case on TV, and the scruffy-looking guy in a faded polo shirt who turned out to be mega-rich and handed over stacks of tipping dollars, not like the bankers in expensive suits who teased you with a single token, it was worth two dollars for God's sake, and the young country boys who kept on going back to the ATM for more cash and booking her again until finally she said, 'Fellas, this is it. I've got nothing more to show you,' and the B-grade celebrity who used to book her and Erin for shower shows and say 'Bravo! Bravo!' as if he were at the opera.

'Or the symphony.' Tiffany looked sideways at Clementine.

'Shower shows?' said Clementine.

'Yes, so you'd have a shower while your customer sat on a couch and watched you loofah up - or soap each other up, if there were two of you. I liked the shower shows. The club got really hot and sticky. It was a relief to cool off.'

'Right,' said Clementine. God Almighty. Shower shows. She wondered if she was going to be sick. There was a very good chance she was going to be sick.

'Should I stop talking now?' said Tiffany.

'No,' said Clementine. She closed her eyes, saw Ruby and opened them again. 'Keep talking!' she said in a louder voice.

And so for the next twenty surreal minutes, while Clementine fixed her eyes on the brakelights of the car in front and willed them to vanish, Tiffany talked and talked, and the words flowed over Clementine and she kept losing track, hearing only fragments: the podiums in the private rooms were really hard so you carried this small fluffy rug ... some girls needed to drink to work but I ... competitive, this one night I thought to hell with it ...

Until finally they came to the traffic cones, and the bright white flashing lights, and a tow truck slowly lifting a small mangled red car up by its bumper bar at an unnatural angle and a policeman waving them on and Tiffany said, in a suddenly very different tone of voice, 'Right then,' and put her foot down hard on the accelerator, and neither of them said another word until they drove into the hospital car park.

chapter fifty-nine

'So did it work? Did you remember anything more?' said Oliver. They were sitting at the dining room table eating the chicken curry he'd made. Outside, the rain eased to a drizzle as if it were thinking about stopping, but Erika wasn't falling for that. There was nothing else on the polished expanse of mahogany except what they needed: shining cutlery, placemats, un-smudged glasses of iced water on coasters. Sitting down to eat at a table like this was something neither of them ever took for granted. Before they ate, their eyes always met in brief acknowledgement, an unspoken moment of gratitude for space and order.

'No,' said Erika. 'The fountain is gone. It's all concreted over. The backyard looks scarred. It was kind of sad.'

'I guess they didn't want the memory,' said Oliver.

'Whereas I did want the memory,' said Erika. She carefully put down her knife and fork. ('Stop waving your cutlery about!' Pam used to tell Clementine and her brothers; Erika was the only one who listened. Clementine still liked to emphasise a point with her fork.)

'Yes,' said Oliver. 'I know.'

'I've written it down, you know, everything I do and don't remember.' In fact, she'd typed it up in a Word document (saved as 'Memory.doc') in the hope that treating it like a professional problem would bring about a professional solution.

'Good idea,' said Oliver. He was listening to her, but she could tell he was also listening to the gurgling sound of rainwater cascading from their overflowing gutters onto their back deck. He was worried about the timber starting to rot.

'I remember coming out of the house holding the plates,' said Erika. Her memories were like the rapid flashes of a strobe light: on, off, on, off. 'And then next thing I'm in the fountain, and you're there, and together we're lifting up Ruby between us, but I can't remember anything in between. It's completely blank. I don't remember seeing Ruby, or getting to the fountain. Suddenly I'm just in there.'

'You dropped the plates and you ran,' said Oliver. 'You screamed for Clementine and then you ran. I saw you running.'

'Yes, but why can't I remember that?' said Erika. 'Why can't I remember thinking: "Oh my God, Ruby is in the fountain?" How could I forget that?'

'The shock, the alcohol, the medication - all those things,' said Oliver. 'Honestly, I think you have to let it go.'

'Yes,' sighed Erika. She picked up her cutlery again. 'I know. You're right.'