Truly Madly Guilty

'I pushed Ruby,' said Holly again, louder.

Pam's hand lay flat and still on Holly's back, and for a moment she didn't recognise it; it looked too old and wrinkled to belong to her.

'She took my bag of rocks,' said Holly. 'She was standing on the side of the fountain with my bag and she wouldn't let me have it, and it's mine, and I was trying to get it off her, and then I got it, and I pushed her because I felt really, really angry.'

'Oh, Holly.'

'I didn't mean for her to be drowned. I thought she would chase after me. Will she go to heaven? I don't want her to go to heaven.'

'Did you tell anyone?' asked Pam.

'Oliver,' mumbled Holly into the pillow, as if she were worried that was also a transgression. 'I told Oliver.'

'What did Oliver say?' said Pam.

'He said when I see Ruby at the hospital I should whisper "sorry" very quietly in her ear and that I should never, ever push her again.'

'Ah,' said Pam.

'He said it was our secret and he would never tell anyone in the whole world ever,' said Holly.

He was a lovely man, Oliver. A good man. Trying to do the right thing.

But what if Holly never got that chance to whisper 'sorry' in Ruby's ear? Ruby was stable. Ruby would not die in the night.

But if she did die, Pam refused to have her beautiful innocent granddaughter pay the price for Clementine's inattention.

'You know what, I don't think she fell in when you pushed her,' she said firmly. 'That probably happened later. After you ran away. She probably slipped. I think she slipped. I know she slipped. She fell, darling. You did not push her. I know you didn't. You were having a little argument over the bag by the fountain and poor Ruby fell in. It was just an accident. You go to sleep now.'

Holly's breathing slowed.

'You just put it right out of your mind,' she said. 'It was an accident. A terrible accident. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't really anyone's fault.'

She kept rubbing Holly's back, in ever-increasing circles, like the endless ripples created by a tiny pebble thrown in still water, and as she did she talked, she talked and talked, making the memory disappear, just like the ripples, and the funny thing was that she could feel her anger towards Clementine ebbing away as if she'd never felt it in the first place.

chapter eighty-nine

Four months after the barbeque

Clementine walked back from the letterbox shuffling their mail and got to a plain white envelope, addressed to her. It was Erika's handwriting.

She stopped in the middle of her footpath, studying that familiar cramped scrawl. Erika wrote as if she needed to conserve space. Had she put it in the mail yesterday just before she'd left for the airport?

Erika and Oliver had flown out yesterday morning for a six-month trip. They'd both taken leave without pay from their jobs and bought around-the-world tickets. They were 'flexible' with their plans, or flexible for them, as in there were some nights where they hadn't yet booked accommodation. Crazy stuff.

When they got back they were hoping to become long-term foster carers. They'd already begun the approval process, when all of a sudden Erika had announced (by email, not a phone call) that they were going to travel first. According to Clementine's mother, they hadn't made any particular arrangements about Sylvia. If the neighbours called the police when the house got too bad, so be it. 'That's exactly what she said to me,' Pam told Clementine. 'So be it. I nearly fell off my chair.'

Of course, Clementine's parents were going to keep an eye on Sylvia.

'She could have asked me to look in on Sylvia,' Clementine had said, and her mother said, after a pause, as if she were considering her words, 'She knows how busy you are.'

Her friendship with Erika had been changing, shifting somehow. Weeks could go by without contact, and when Clementine called, Erika would inevitably take a few days to call back. It was like she was distancing herself; in fact, it was almost as though, and this seemed incredible, ironic, impossible, but it was almost as though Erika was letting Clementine down gently. She was behaving the way a kind boy behaves when he wants to let a girl know that he likes her as a friend but nothing more. Clementine was being demoted to a lower-tier level of friendship and she was accepting this with the strangest mix of feelings: amusement, relief, maybe a touch of humiliation and a definite sense of melancholy.

She opened the envelope. There was a short note:

Dear Clementine, I got you a copy of this old photo Mum found. Mum says it's 'proof'. I think she means of her great parenting. Thought it might give you a laugh. See you in six months!

Love, Erika