Truly Madly Guilty

They'd taken far too long that afternoon to turn on the outdoor lights in that preposterous backyard.

'I remember at one point we were listening to music,' said Clementine. She looked down at the lectern in front of her, and then up again, as if she were seeing something on the horizon far in the distance. Her eyes were blank. She didn't look like a suburban mum now. ' "After a Dream" by the French composer Gabriel Faure.' Naturally she pronounced it the proper French way. 'It's a beautiful piece of music. It has this exquisite mournfulness to it.'

She stopped. Did she sense the slight shifting in seats, the discomfort in her audience? 'Exquisite mournfulness' was not the right phrase for this audience: too excessive, too arty. Clementine, my love, we're too ordinary for your high-brow references to French composers. Anyway, they also played 'November Rain' by Guns N' Roses that night. Not quite so arty.

Wasn't the playing of 'November Rain' somehow related to Tiffany's revelation? Or was that before? When exactly did Tiffany share her secret? Was that when the afternoon had turned to liquid and began to slip and slide away?

'We had been drinking,' said Clementine. 'But no one was drunk. Maybe a little tipsy.'

Her eyes met Erika's, as though she'd been aware of exactly where she was sitting the whole time and had been avoiding looking at her, but had now made a deliberate decision to seek her out. Erika stared back and tried to smile, like a friend, Clementine's closest friend, the godmother of her children, but her face felt paralysed, as if she'd had a stroke.

'Anyway, it was very late in the afternoon and we were all about to have dessert, we were all laughing,' said Clementine. She dropped Erika's gaze to look at someone else in the audience in the front row, and it felt dismissive, even cruel. 'Over something. I don't remember what.'

Erika felt light-headed, claustrophobic. The room had become unbearably stuffy.

The need to get out was suddenly overpowering. Here we go, she thought. Here we go again. Fight-or-flight response. Activation of her sympathetic nervous system. A shift in her brain chemicals. That's what it was. Perfectly natural. Childhood trauma. She'd read all the literature. She knew exactly what was happening to her but the knowledge made no difference. Her body went right ahead and betrayed her. Her heart raced. Her hands trembled. She could smell her childhood, so thick and real in her nostrils: damp and mould and shame.

'Don't fight the panic. Face it. Float through it,' her psychologist had told her.

Her psychologist was exceptional, worth every cent, but for God's sake, as if you could float when there was no room, no space anywhere, above, below, when you couldn't take a step without feeling the spongy give of rotting stuff beneath your feet.

She stood, pulling at her skirt which had got stuck to the back of her legs. The guy with the barcode glanced over his shoulder at her. The sympathetic concern in his eyes gave her a tiny shock; it was like seeing the disconcertingly intelligent eyes of an ape.

'Sorry,' whispered Erika. 'I have to -' She pointed at her watch and shuffled sideways past him, trying not to brush the back of his head with her jacket.

As she reached the back of the room, Clementine said, 'I remember there was a moment when my friend screamed my name. Really loud. I'll never forget the sound.'

Erika stopped with her hand on the door, her back to the room. Clementine must have leaned towards the microphone because her voice suddenly filled the room: 'She shouted, Clementine!'

Clementine had always been an excellent mimic; as a musician she had an ear for the precise intonations in people's voices. Erika could hear raw terror and shrill urgency in just that one word, 'Clementine!'

She knew she was the friend who had shouted Clementine's name that night but she had no memory of it. There was nothing but a pure white space where that memory should have been and if she couldn't remember a moment like that, well, that indicated a problem, an anomaly, a discrepancy; an extremely significant and concerning discrepancy. The wave of panic peaked and nearly swept her off her feet. She pushed down the handle of the door and staggered out into the relentless rain.

chapter two

'Been at a meeting then?' said the cab driver taking Erika back into the city. He grinned paternally at her in the rear-vision mirror as if it was kind of cute the way women worked these days, all dressed up in suits, almost like they were proper businesspeople.

'Yes,' said Erika. She gave her umbrella a vigorous shake on the floor of the cab. 'Keep your eyes on the road.'

'Yes, ma'am!' The cab driver tapped two fingertips to his forehead in a mock salute.

'The rain,' said Erika defensively. She indicated the raindrops pelleting furiously against the windscreen. 'Slippery roads.'

'Just drove this goose to the airport,' said the cab driver. He stopped talking as he changed lanes, one meaty hand on the wheel, the other arm slung casually along the back of the seat, leaving Erika with the image of an actual large white goose sitting in the back seat of the taxi.

'He reckons all this rain is related to climate change. I said, mate, mate, I said, it's nothing to do with climate change. It's La Nina! You know about La Nina? El Nino and La Nina? Natural events! Been happening for thousands of years.'

'Right,' said Erika. She wished Oliver were with her. He'd take on this conversation for her. Why were cab drivers so insistent on educating their passengers?

'Yep. La Nina,' said the cabbie, with a sort of Mexican inflection. He obviously enjoyed saying La Nina. 'So, we broke the record hey? Longest consecutive run of rainy days in Sydney since 1932. Hooray for us!'

'Yes,' said Erika. 'Hooray for us.'

It was 1931, she never forgot a number, but there was no need to correct him.

'I think you'll find it was 1931,' she said. She couldn't help herself. It was a character flaw. She knew it.

'Yup, that's it, 1931,' said the cabbie, as if that's what he'd said in the first place. 'Before that it was twenty-four days in 1893. Twenty-four rainy days in a row! Let's hope we don't break that record too, hey? Think we will?'