She hurried out in the rain across the front yard and up Vid and Tiffany’s driveway. She rang the doorbell first, for form’s sake, just in case someone was home, or someone, somewhere, was secretly observing her, although the only neighbour who could possibly have done that was Harry and he was dead. She waited a good minute, and then she headed around into the backyard. As she went down the path at the side of the house, security lights switched on automatically, turning the rain to gold. She hoped she wouldn’t trip some alarm.
All the fairy lights in the backyard were on, and she remembered how Tiffany had said they were on some sort of automatic timer. Just the sight of the fairy lights created a deluge of sensory memory from that afternoon. She could smell Vid’s caramelised onions that Clementine had fussed over. She could feel the way the ground had gently rocked beneath her feet. The woolly sensation in her head. This was working. Not Pat was a genius, worth every cent.
Don’t get distracted, she reminded herself. Focus, except don’t focus too much. Relax and remember.
She had walked down this footpath from the back door. She was carrying the blue and white plates. She was looking at the plates. She liked the plates. She coveted the plates. My God, she hadn’t taken the plates, had she? No. She’d dropped the plates. She remembered that.
The music. There was music, and beneath the music, or above the music, there was a sound, an urgent sound, and the sound was related in some way to … Harry. Oh, why did she keep coming back to Harry? What did that mean? Just because of his phone call earlier about turning down the music?
She walked a little further down the footpath. She couldn’t see the fountain from here. She needed to see the fountain. Her heart thudded in rhythm with the rain pelleting her umbrella.
She stopped, confused. Where was the fountain? She turned to the left. She turned to the right. She let the umbrella fall back behind her head and squinted through the rain.
The fountain was gone. There was nothing but an ugly slab of empty concrete where it had once stood, and Erika’s memories were dissolving, disappearing, being washed away like a chalk drawing on pavement in the rain, and all she felt right now was cold and wet and foolish.
chapter fifty-seven
Clementine followed Sam into their bedroom, where he pulled a T-shirt from a drawer and shrugged it on. He took off his work pants and pulled on a pair of jeans. His movements were jerky, like a twitchy junkie in need of a fix. He avoided meeting her eye.
She said, ‘Do you mean it? Are you serious? About separating?’
‘Probably not,’ he said with a lift of his shoulders, as if the state of their marriage was neither here nor there to him.
She was so agitated she couldn’t sort out her breathing. It was like she couldn’t remember the process. She kept holding her breath and then taking sudden gasps of air.
She said, ‘For God’s sake, you can’t just say things like that! You’ve never, we’ve never …’
She meant that they’d never used words like ‘separation’ and ‘divorce’ even in their worst screaming matches. They yelled things like, ‘You’re infuriating!’ ‘You don’t think!’ ‘You are the most annoying woman in the history of annoying women!’ ‘I hate you!’ ‘I hate you more!’ and they always, always used the word ‘always’, even though Clementine’s mother had said you should never use that word in an argument with your spouse, as in, for example, ‘You always forget to refill the water jug!’ (But Sam did always forget. It was accurate.)
But they’d never allowed for the possibility of their marriage ending. They could stomp and yell and sulk safe in the knowledge that the scaffolding of their lives was rock solid. Paradoxically, it gave them permission to yell louder, to scream stupider, sillier, more irrational things, to just let their feelings swirl freely through them, because it was going to be fine in the morning.
‘Sorry,’ said Sam. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’ He looked at her, and an expression of pure exhaustion crossed his face, and for a moment, it was him again, not that cold, peculiar stranger. ‘I was just upset about the idea of Dakota coming to Holly’s party. I don’t want Holly having anything to do with that family.’
‘They’re not bad people,’ said Clementine, momentarily distracted from the point at hand by the loathing in Sam’s tone. Clementine didn’t want to see Vid and Tiffany because they were a reminder of the worst day of her life. Just thinking about them made her shudder, the way you shuddered at the thought of some food or drink in which you had overindulged until it made you sick. But she didn’t loathe them.
‘Look, they’re just not our type of people,’ said Sam. ‘To be frank, I don’t want my child associating with people like them.’
‘What? Because she used to be a dancer?’ said Clementine.