Oliver lifted up a heavy sandstone pot. No key underneath. There was a set of crappy old green plastic pots with very dead plants and dry crumbling soil. Surely Harry wouldn’t keep a key under one of them? But he lifted the first pot and there it was. A small gold key. Harry, old mate, thought Oliver. That’s not great security.
‘Tiffany.’ Oliver held up the key to show her.
‘Ah,’ said Tiffany. She stood back as Oliver went to the front door and put the key in the lock.
‘He might have gone away,’ she said tremulously. ‘To see family.’ But they both knew he hadn’t gone away.
‘Harry!’ called out Oliver as he opened the door.
‘Oh God, no, no, no,’ said Tiffany immediately. The smell took a fraction longer to get past Oliver’s blocked nostrils and then it was like he’d walked smack-bang into a wall of it. A wall of smell. Sweet, rotten smell. It was like someone had sprinkled cheap perfume over meat that had gone off. His stomach heaved. He looked back at Tiffany and he was reminded of the day of the barbeque, how in times of crisis a person’s face is somehow stripped back to something essential and universally human: all those labels like ‘beautiful’, ‘sexy’, ‘plain’ became irrelevant.
‘Fuck,’ she said sadly.
Oliver pushed the door all the way open and took a step forward into the dim light. He’d never been inside before. All his interactions with Harry had taken place in front yards. Harry’s front yard. His front yard.
A single light burned overhead. He could see a long hallway with a surprisingly beautiful red runner leading off into darkness. A staircase with a curved wooden banister.
At the bottom of the staircase lay a large unfamiliar object, and of course he knew already it had to be Harry’s body, that exactly what he’d feared had happened, but still for a few seconds he stared, trying to puzzle it out, as if it were one of those tricky optical illusion pictures. It just didn’t seem possible that cranky, stomping, spitting Harry was now that bloated, blackened, silent thing of horror.
Oliver registered certain things: Harry’s socks weren’t matching. One black. One grey. His glasses had sunk into his face as if they’d been pressed firmly by an unseen hand into soft, yielding flesh. His white hair was still as neatly combed as ever. A tiny swarm of busily buzzing flies.
Oliver’s stomach recoiled. He stepped back on trembling legs and pulled the door shut while Tiffany vomited into the sandstone pot and the rain continued to fall and fall.
chapter twelve The day of the barbeque
Dakota sensed a flash of movement in her peripheral vision. She looked out the window and saw Barney streak across the lawn. The front door flew open with a bang and she heard her dad shout, ‘I’ve had just about enough of that man! Tiffany! Where are you? He’s crossed a line! There is a line, Tiffany, a line! And this time that man has crossed it!’
She heard her mother from somewhere else in the house call out, ‘What?’
Pardon, thought Dakota.
‘Dakota! Where is your mother? Where are you?’
Dakota was exactly where she had been all morning, reading her book on the window seat, but of course her dad didn’t notice details like that.
The house was so big they could never find each other. ‘You need a map to get around this place,’ Dakota’s auntie said every single time she came over, even though she’d been here a million times and did not need a map at all. She even knew exactly where everything went in the kitchen cupboards better than Dakota did.
Dakota didn’t answer her dad. Her mum had said she could finish the chapter before she had to help tidy up the house for the visitors. (As if the visitors were her choice.) She looked up, considering, because she’d actually sneaked just a little way into a new chapter, but she looked back down at the page and just seeing the words was enough to pull her back in. She felt it like a pleasurable physical sensation, as if she were literally falling, straight back into the world of The Hunger Games, where Dakota was Katniss and she was strong and powerful and skilled, but also very pretty. Dakota was one hundred per cent certain that she’d be like Katniss and sacrifice herself in the Games for her cute little sister, if she had one. She didn’t particularly want one (her friend Ashling’s little sister was always there, hanging about, and poor Ashling could never get rid of her) but if Dakota did have a little sister, she’d totally die for her.
‘Where are you, Dakota?’ called out her mother this time.
‘Here,’ whispered Dakota. She turned the page. ‘I’m right here.’
chapter thirteen
‘Harry is dead,’ said Oliver, almost the moment Erika arrived home from work and put down her briefcase and umbrella. She touched her neck. Ice-cold raindrops were running down her back. Oliver was sitting on the couch surrounded by a little lake of squashed, used-up tissues.