Truly Madly Guilty

Now it was only eleven thirty and she felt like she'd been up for hours.

Because she had in fact been up for hours, she reminded herself as she put up her umbrella to walk through the crowded car park.

'Where's your violin, dear?' asked the head of the Hills District Retirees Association when Clementine introduced herself.

'My violin?' said Clementine. 'I'm actually a cellist but, um -'

'Your cello then,' said the woman with a little roll of her eyes to indicate Clementine's unnecessary attention to petty detail: a cello was just a big violin, after all! 'Where's your cello, dear?'

'But I'm not playing the cello,' said Clementine uneasily. 'I'm a guest speaker. I'm doing a talk.'

She had a moment of sudden terror. She was doing a talk, wasn't she? This wasn't a gig? Of course it wasn't. She was doing a talk.

'Oh, are you?' said the woman disappointedly. She studied the piece of paper in her hand. 'It says here you're a cellist. We thought you'd be playing for us.'

She looked at Clementine expectantly, as if a solution might present itself. Clementine lifted her hands. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I'm doing a talk. It's called "One Ordinary Day".'

For God's sake.

She felt exhausted. Was there really any point to all this? Was she actually helping or was she just doing it to make herself feel better, to pay her penance, her dues, to even things up on the universal scale of right and wrong?

The community talks had all come about because she'd been trying to redeem herself in her mother's eyes. A few days after they'd brought Ruby home from hospital, Clementine had been having a cup of tea with her mother and she'd said (she could still hear the reedy, self-conscious tone with which she'd spoken) that she felt she should do something to raise awareness of how easily an accident like this could happen and make sure no one else made the same mistake she had made. She felt she should 'tell her story'.

She'd meant she should write one of those touching 'please share' Facebook posts that would go viral. (She probably would never have got around to doing even that.)

But her mother had been thrilled. 'What a wonderful idea!' Clementine could do talks to community groups, mothers' groups, associations - they were always looking for guest speakers. She could 'partner' with a first aid course provider like St John Ambulance, hand out leaflets at the end, maybe offering a discount on a course. Pam would set it all up. She had all the contacts. She had a wide circle of friends who belonged to caring community groups across Sydney. They were always desperate for guest speakers. She'd be like Clementine's 'agent'. 'This could save lives, Clementine,' Pam had said, with that familiar evangelical look in her eyes. Oh God, Clementine had thought. But it was too late. As her father would say, 'The Pam train has left the station. Nothing can stop it now.'

She did feel it was the right thing to do. It was just that it was hard to fit the talks into an already crammed life, especially when she was driving all over Sydney to do them in between gigs and teaching and school pick-ups and audition practice.

And then there was the fact that she had to relive the worst, most shameful day of her life.

'This is a story that begins with a barbeque,' she said today to the members of the Hills District Retirees Association, who were eating lamb with gravy and roast potatoes and peas for lunch as she spoke. 'An ordinary neighbourhood barbeque in an ordinary backyard.'

You need to make it a story, her mother had told her. A story has power.

'We can't hear you!' called out someone from the back of the room. 'Can you hear her? I can't hear a word she's saying.'

Clementine leaned in closer to the microphone.

She heard someone at the table nearest the lectern say, 'I thought we had a violinist coming today.'

Beads of sweat ran all the way down her back.

She kept talking. She told her story as cutlery scraped against plates. She gave them facts and figures. A child can be submerged in ten seconds, lose consciousness in two minutes and sustain permanent brain damage in four to six minutes. Nine out of ten children who have died in the water were being watched by adults. A child can drown in as little as five centimetres of water. She talked about the importance of first aid training and how thirty thousand Australians died of cardiac arrest every year because there was no one around with the basic CPR knowledge to save their lives. She talked about the wonderful work that CareFlight did and how they were always grateful for donations.

When she'd finished, the president of the association gave her a box of chocolates and asked her fellow members to join her in a round of applause for their very interesting guest speaker today. Very informative, and thank goodness her daughter was all recovered and maybe next time Clementine could come and play her cello for them!

Afterwards, as she was heading for the door, her dress damp against her back, a man approached her, wiping his mouth with his napkin. She steeled herself. Sometimes people couldn't resist coming up afterwards to tell her off, to inform her that she should never have taken her eyes off her toddler.

But as soon as she saw the man's face she knew he wasn't one of those. He was the other sort. He had the relaxed authority of someone who had once been the boss, but the bruised eyes of someone who had suffered a devastating loss. It was a look around the eyes like fruit that has gone soft and is close to rotting.

He had a story he needed to share. It was her job to listen. This was her real penance.

He would probably cry. The women didn't cry. Elderly women were as tough as nails but it seemed that men got softer as they aged; their emotions caught them off guard, as if some protective barrier had been worn away by time.

She braced herself.

'My grandson would have been thirty-two this weekend,' he said.