Truly Madly Guilty

'Throw it away?' said Oliver. 'Are you kidding? You have to give it all back! You have to tell her that you've been ... what? Pilfering her stuff? Is that what it is? Are you a kleptomaniac? Do you ... dear God, Erika, do you shoplift?'

'Of course I don't shoplift!' She would never do anything illegal.

'Clementine must think she's going mad.'

'Well, she really needs to be tidier, more organised,' began Erika, but for some reason that really tipped Oliver over a precipice she hadn't realised he was balancing upon.

'What in God's name are you talking about? She needs a friend who doesn't steal her stuff!' shouted Oliver. He actually shouted. He'd never shouted at her before. He'd always been on her side.

She understood, of course, that what she did wasn't perhaps ordinary. It was a strange, unsavoury habit, like gnawing her cuticles or picking her nose, and she knew she needed to keep it at a manageable level, but part of her had always assumed that Oliver would somehow understand, or at least accept it, the way he'd accepted everything else about her. He'd seen her mother's house and he still loved her. He never criticised her the way she knew some husbands criticised tiny things about their wives. 'The woman is incapable of closing a cupboard door,' Sam would say about Clementine. Oliver was too loyal to ever say anything like that about Erika in public, but right now he didn't just look mildly aggravated, he looked truly appalled.

The room went blurry as Erika's eyes filled with tears. He was going to leave her. She'd tried to keep her craziness confined to just one small suitcase, but deep down she'd always suspected that his leaving one day was a foregone conclusion, and now the sight of those items laid out in all their useless, shabby glory confirmed it: She was her mother.

She felt a burst of fury and for some reason it was directed at Clementine.

'Yeah, well, she's not that great. Clementine isn't that great,' she said shakily, idiotically, childishly, but she couldn't seem to quell the flood of words. 'You should have heard the things I heard her say to Sam at the barbeque. When I went upstairs! She was talking about how she felt "repulsed" at the idea of donating her eggs to us. That's the word she used. Repulsed.'

Oliver didn't look at her. He picked up an ice-cream scoop from the table and fiddled with the mechanism. It had a picture of a polar bear on the handle. Erika had put it in her handbag one hot day last summer, after they'd had ice-creams in the backyard at Clementine's house, after she'd performed at Symphony Under the Stars. Erika had just got the call about another unsuccessful IVF round, but it was nothing to do with the IVF. She'd taken the first item for her collection, a shell necklace Clementine had brought back from a holiday to Fiji, when she was only thirteen years old. Where was it? There it was. Erika had to pull back her own right arm because she so badly wanted to reach over and feel its chunky, rough-edged texture in the palm of her hand.

'Why didn't you tell me?' he said.

'About this? Because I know it's weird and wrong and -'

'No. Why didn't you tell me what you overheard Clementine say?'

'I don't know.' She paused. 'I guess I felt embarrassed ... I didn't want you to know that my best friend feels that way about me.'

Oliver put down the ice-cream scoop. There was an infinitesimal softening around his mouth, but it was enough to make Erika's legs go weak and wobbly with relief. She pulled out a chair and sat down and looked up at him, st

udying the faint stubble along his jawline. She remembered when they'd first sat down together to do the draw for the squash comp all those years ago. He was the clean-shaven nerd with the glasses and the pin-striped shirt frowning over the spreadsheet, taking it far too seriously, just like her, wanting it done right and done fairly. She'd looked at the stubble along his jawline, and the thought had crossed her mind, He looks like Clark Kent, but maybe he's really Superman.

Oliver sat down at the table in front of her, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

'I'm your best friend, Erika,' he said sadly. 'Don't you know that?'

chapter seventy-two

'I'm sorry about dinner at Mum and Dad's the other night,' said Clementine as she handed Erika her cup of coffee. They were in Clementine's living room with its original (but non-working) fireplace, stained-glass porthole windows and wide floorboards. When she and Sam had first seen this room they'd exchanged glinting looks of satisfaction behind the real estate agent's back. This room had character, and it was just so 'them'. (In other words, the opposite of the 'modern, sterile and soulless' sort of place that Erika and Oliver went for; Clementine was beginning to wonder if her entire personality was a fabrication, nothing more than a response to Erika's personality. You are like this, so therefore I am like that.)

Right now the living room seemed dowdy and dark and very damp. She sniffed. 'Can you smell the damp? We've got mould popping up everywhere. Revolting. If it doesn't stop raining soon I don't know what we'll do.'

Erika took the cup of coffee and held it in both hands as though to warm herself.

'Are you cold?' Clementine half-rose. 'I could -'

'I'm fine,' said Erika shortly.

Clementine sank back in her seat. 'Remember when we bought this place and the building report said there was a problem with rising damp and you said we should really think twice about it, and I was all: Who cares about rising damp? Well, you were right. It's really bad. We've got to get it fixed. I got a quote from ...'

She stopped. She was boring herself so much she couldn't even be bothered to finish the sentence. Anyway, it was all a transparent attempt at exoneration. You saved my child's life, while all I've ever done is complain about you, you are all that is good, I am all that is bad, but surely I get extra credit points for all this self-flagellation, a reduced sentence for pleading guilty?

'The dinner at your parents' was nice,' said Erika. 'I enjoyed it.'

'Oh, good,' said Clementine. Now she felt bad. She didn't want Erika to think she meant she didn't deserve her hero's dinner. 'I just meant with the broken glass and Sam storming off and ...'

She drifted again, and drank her coffee, and waited for Erika to get to the point of why she was here. She'd called earlier and asked if she could come around. It was bad timing: Sam had taken the girls to a movie so Clementine could practise - the audition was only ten days away now, it was the final countdown - but of course, Clementine had said yes. She presumed it was something to do with the next step in the egg donation process.

Erika nodded at Clementine's cello in the corner. 'Is your cello affected by all the rainy weather?'