Truly Madly Guilty

And then she was gone, out into the rain in her sensible shoes. No kissing or hugging goodbye because they didn't do that. The German insults had been their version of a hug.

You're off the hook, thought Clementine as she cleared the coffee mugs away. No daily injections. She thought of the 'So you're thinking of becoming an egg donor!' video she'd watched yesterday, and how her own stomach had clenched in horror as she'd watched the nice, generous woman briskly inject her stomach with the drug that would cause her body to produce multiple eggs.

She sat down with her cello, picked up her bow and focused on working her way through her chromatic scales.

Over the last few days she had been allowing an image to form in her head: an image of a little boy with Ruby's almond-shaped eyes and Oliver's jet-black hair.

The image trembled like a reflection on water and then vanished.

For heaven's sake, Clementine, how dare you. Her hand tightened on her bow. The image didn't even make sense because Ruby's eyes came from Sam's side of the family.

There it was again. Her friendly wolf tone. It was a truly ghastly sound. She could feel it in her teeth.

Sam always said she was overly sensitive to sounds because she was a musician, but she didn't think that was true; he was just astonishingly insensitive to them. There were only a few sounds she could feel in her teeth: her wolf tone, a certain high-pitched shriek of Holly's when Ruby had wronged her, the wailing shark alarm at Macmasters Beach.

She was suddenly transported to the last time she'd heard that shark alarm during that holiday when she was thirteen. Clementine and Erika had been in the surf together when the alarm went off. Erika was a strong swimmer, better than her. The alarm had made Clementine panicky (that sound) and she'd slipped as she waded towards the shore, and Erika had grabbed her arm. 'I'm fine,' Clementine had snapped, shrugging her off, full of that hideous rage she'd carried throughout that entire two weeks, but then, just a second later, she'd thought she felt something slippery and strange slide across one leg and she'd instinctively reached out for Erika. 'You're okay,' said Erika, calmly, kindly, soothingly, steadying her. Clementine could still see Erika's wet arm on hers, the salt water clinging like diamonds to her white skin, three angry red bite marks circling her thin, bony wrist like a bracelet. The fleas had come and gone in Erika's house like seasons.

Clementine dropped her bow and tried to imagine her life without Erika in it: without the aggravation, followed always by the guilt. A melody with only two notes: aggravation, guilt, aggravation, guilt. She picked up her bow and deliberately played the wolf note, over and over, letting the sound aggravate her and worm its way down her ear canal, vibrating against her eardrum, creeping into her brain, throbbing at the centre of her forehead.

She stopped.

'You shouldn't put up with a wolf tone,' Ainsley had told her. 'Get it looked at.'

When she'd tried the wolf tone eliminator, it was initially a relief. It had taken her a little while to realise that something else was gone along with her wolf. Her sound wasn't as rich. The notes surrounding the wolf tone were somehow dampened, less focused. She wondered if it was similar to how people felt when they first took antidepressants and they lost their pain, but everything else felt muted too: flatter, duller.

In the end she decided that her wolf tone was the price she had to pay for the sound of all those centuries of time held within the red-gold curves of her cello.

Maybe Erika was her wolf tone. Maybe Clementine's life would have lacked something subtle but essential without her in it: a certain richness, a certain depth.

Or maybe not. Maybe her life would have been great without Erika in it.

Clementine realised she was hungry. She set aside her cello and on the way to the kitchen she picked up the horrible knobbly shell necklace and chucked it straight in the bin. She went to the fridge, got herself a tub of yoghurt, went to the drawer for a spoon and the first thing she saw was the polar bear ice-cream scoop Sam had been looking for the other night. Men. It had probably been right there in front of him the whole time.

She opened the yoghurt, had a mouthful. It was really very good. Creamy, like they said in the ad. She was susceptible to advertising, but really, this was very good yoghurt. It reminded her of her first taste of food after fasting.

She hadn't been fasting.

There was a feeling growing within her. A twitchy feeling. She was jabbing the spoon into the yoghurt and eating it too fast. She thought of the opening melody of Stravinsky's 'The Rite of Spring'. The high-pitched bassoon. The strange, jerky moments building to an ecstatic unfurling. She wanted to hear that piece. She wanted to play that piece, because that was exactly how she felt right now. There was an upward spiralling feeling in her chest. Was the yoghurt drugged? Was it simply exquisite relief because she'd demonstrated her absolute willingness to donate her eggs but she didn't actually have to do it: altruism without action, it didn't get better than that!

Was it just that she'd had enough of feeling bad over what happened? She could never forget that afternoon but she could forgive herself. She could forgive Sam. If he wanted to end their marriage over this, then she would grieve him as if he'd died, but goddamn it, she'd get over it, she'd live. She'd always suspected this about herself, that right at the centre of her soul was a small unbreakable stone, a cold, hard instinct for self-preservation. She'd die for her children, but no one else. She wouldn't allow one mistake, one slip of judgement, to define her life, not when Ruby was fine, not when life was there for the taking.

She thought of Erika saying, 'This is your dream, Dummkopf.'

That job was hers. That job belonged to her. She threw down the empty yoghurt container, licked her fingers and headed back to her cello, not to work on her technique this time, but to play music. Somewhere along the way she'd forgotten it was about the music, the pure, uncomplicated bliss of the music.

chapter seventy-three

'He's going to steal it!' announced Holly, loud and clear.

'Shh!' said Sam. They could never get Holly to shut up during movies.

'But he is, look!'

'You're right, but ...' Sam put a finger to his lips, although who the hell cared, the movie theatre was packed with wriggly, chatty, rain-crazed kids and their frazzled parents.

Holly shovelled a handful of popcorn into her mouth and sat back, her eyes on the flickering colours of the Pixar movie. Ruby was on Sam's other side, sucking her thumb, caressing Whisk's spokes. Her eyelids drooped. She would fall asleep soon and wake up five minutes before the movie ended, demanding it be restarted.

Sam normally loved a good animation but he had no idea what this one was about. He was thinking about his job, and how much longer he could get away with coasting. He was the new guy, still 'learning the ropes', but he should have had those ropes learned by now. People must be starting to notice. The head of his division had said, 'Might be time to invest in an umbrella,' with a quizzical look at Sam's drenched clothes yesterday. It was all going to come crashing down. Someone would say, 'The weird new guy isn't doing anything.'