Truly Madly Guilty

ad many, many good friends, he'd married two gorgeous women, even if the first one had turned out to be a crazy-in-the-head bitch who'd tried to turn his daughters against him, but that was okay, because he'd got even luckier with his second wife. Walking Viagra and he loved her like crazy.

Tiffany was a great poker player. Not as lucky as him, but she could do a beautiful 'poker face'. It worked on him for years but then one day he broke her code.

Tiffany had a show. Her left nostril. Whenever she lied or bluffed, her left nostril quivered. Just once. A teeny-tiny movement. Like a butterfly wing.

Vid had confirmed it by studying his wife on those occasions when he knew for a fact she wasn't telling the truth. For example, when she answered Dakota's questions about Santa Claus, or when she told her sisters that she was flying economy, when really she'd booked business class tickets. Her sisters had some strange problem with flying business class, as if it were somehow sinful.

It was conclusive. The nostril never lied. He never told Tiffany, of course, because it was very handy, his secret superpower to see straight through her poker face. (Sadly, she did not at all like the red lingerie he'd bought her for Christmas.)

So when he asked his wife, 'Did you sleep with him?' all he had to do was watch her nostril and there was the answer.

She said no but the answer was yes. Yes, she'd slept with him.

It was fine! It was no problem!

It was maybe a slight problem. Say Vid had been at a school concert and he'd seen this dickhead looking at his wife in a disrespectful way, he might have been tempted to hit him. Assault and battery that would be.

Or say he and this dickhead had ended up cooking at a sausage sizzle together (there were always sausage sizzles, even when you paid a million bucks in school fees) and the dickhead made some remark about Tiffany. It might even be an innocent remark, but say Vid took it the wrong way, because of what he knew, and say he went home and the thought got trapped in Vid's head, like thoughts sometimes did, and say, in a moment of madness, he got on the phone to his friend Ivan and arranged to have the dickhead's knees broken.

Ivan was always going on about how if Vid ever needed someone's knees broken, then Ivan was his man. Tiffany said Ivan was joking. Ivan was not joking.

But! All was good because the dickhead was safely on his way to Dubai, with his knees intact. Vid would therefore not end up in jail. He'd never knowingly broken the law, but he could. The potential was there: maybe not to kill, but certainly to maim, and he did not want to go to jail. The food. The clothes. Vid shuddered at the thought.

And for now Vid was not in danger of breaking the law. It was lucky he was so lucky. That's why he felt happy. And Dakota's reputation at the school was safe. She could be school captain if she wanted. He was sure those people would love Dubai. Interesting place! He'd read an article just the other day about the Dubai Food Festival. They had something called 'The Big Grill'. It sounded amazing.

'Why do you look so happy?' said Dakota. 'And goofy?'

Vid regarded his daughter, who was now in the kitchen returning an empty tray. She dimpled up at him and she looked, at that moment, extremely pretty. Hail Mary, Mother of God, please don't let her grow up as sexy as her mother.

'Because I'm happy, you know,' said Vid. He lifted Dakota up under her armpits and spun her around. He couldn't spin his older daughters anymore. (Eva looked like she weighed as much as a small truck.) 'Are you happy?'

'Pretty much,' said Dakota. She put her mouth to his ear. 'How many more minutes before I can go and read my book in my room for just a little while?'

'Thirty,' said Vid.

'Ten,' said Dakota.

'Twenty,' said Vid. 'Final offer.'

'Deal.' Dakota held out her hand.

They shook on it. He put her back on the floor. The volume of the music at the front of the house shot up to nightclub level. Someone called out 'Whoa!' in a scandalised tone that could only mean that Tiffany was dancing, while someone else shouted, 'Where's Vid?'

'Here I come!' bellowed Vid.

It was lucky that Harry from next door was resting in peace.

chapter seventy-six

Clementine woke to a glorious absence of sound.

All she could hear was silence, and then the familiar bubbling melody of a kookaburra's laugh. It pierced her heart, as if she'd been away from Australia for a long time and was finally home. She opened her eyes and the light felt clean and bright and imbued with significance.

'It's stopped,' she said out loud to Sam. 'It's finally stopped.' She hadn't let herself believe the weather forecaster's promise of sunshine by Sunday. She went to wake Sam, to shake his arm, but then she saw his empty side of the bed and remembered that he wasn't there. He was asleep, as usual these days, in the study, and she felt humiliated that she'd spoken out loud. His absence this hopeful, happy morning felt freshly painful, as if it were new.

She sighed and turned over on her stomach, lifting the corner of the curtain to look at the newly minted blue sky.

They would take the kids out in the sun ... but wait, no, they couldn't, because today she and Sam were booked in to do a first aid course at the local high school. They'd rescheduled it a few times already and she was determined they do it today. She couldn't keep on traipsing across Sydney doing those talks, solemnly telling people about the importance of first aid training, like she was some sort of school prefect for the world, handing out her little leaflets, when she'd never done one herself.