‘Seriously?’ said Erika. She was focused on the tissues. ‘What happened?’ The sight of the tissues made her heart rate pick up. Visceral response linked to childhood trauma. Perfectly natural. Three deep breaths. She just needed to get rid of those tissues.
‘Tiffany and I found his body,’ said Oliver as Erika hurried to the cupboard under the kitchen sink to find a plastic bag.
‘Where?’ said Erika, scooping up tissues. ‘At his house, do you mean?’
She tied the handles of the plastic bag into a firm, satisfying knot and took it over to the bin and dropped it in.
‘Yes,’ said Oliver. ‘You were right about the key. It was under a pot.’
‘So he was … dead?’ said Erika as she stood at the sink, scrubbing her hands. People always asked if she’d been in the medical profession because of the way she washed her hands. When she was in public she tried to be less obviously rigorous, but now that she was home with Oliver, she could scrub and scrub without worrying that someone would diagnose her with OCD. Oliver never judged.
‘Yes, Erika,’ said Oliver. He sounded aggravated. ‘He was very dead. He’d been dead for some time. Weeks and weeks, I’d say.’ His voice broke.
‘Oh. I see. Oh dear.’ Erika turned from the sink. Oliver looked very pale. His hands lay limply on his knees and he sat upright, his feet flat on the floor, like a kid in the throes of terrible remorse, sitting outside the school principal’s office.
She took a breath. Her husband was upset. Extremely upset by the look of it. So he probably wanted and needed to ‘share’. People with dysfunctional childhoods like hers didn’t have the best interpersonal skills when it came to relationships. Well, it was just a fact. No one had modelled a healthy relationship for her. No one had modelled a healthy relationship for Oliver either. They had their dysfunctional childhoods in common. That’s why Erika had invested close to six thousand dollars to date in high-quality therapy. The cycles of dysfunction and mental illness did not have to carry over from generation to generation. You just had to educate yourself.
Erika went and sat on the couch next to Oliver and indicated by her body language that she was ready to listen. She made eye contact. She touched his forearm. She would use hand sanitiser once they finished talking. She really didn’t want to catch that horrible cold.
‘Was he …’ She didn’t want to know the answers to any of the questions she knew she should ask. ‘Was he … what, in bed?’ She thought of a maniacally grinning corpse sitting upright in a bed, one rotting hand on the coverlet.
‘He was at the bottom of the stairs. As soon as I opened the door we could smell it.’ Oliver shuddered.
‘God,’ said Erika.
Smell was one of her issues. Oliver always laughed at the way she’d drop rubbish in the bin and then jump back so the smell couldn’t catch her.
‘I only looked for one second, and then I just, I just … well, I slammed the door shut, and we called the police.’
‘That’s awful,’ said Erika mechanically. ‘Horrible for you.’ She felt herself resist. She didn’t want to hear about it, she didn’t want him to share this experience with her. She wanted him to stop talking. She wanted to talk about dinner. She wanted to calm down after the day she’d had. She’d skipped lunch, and she’d stayed back at work to make up for the time she’d wasted going to Clementine’s talk, so she was starving, but obviously after your husband tells you about finding a corpse you can’t then immediately follow it with, ‘Fancy some pasta?’ No. She’d have to wait at least half an hour before she could mention dinner.
‘The police said they think maybe he fell down the stairs,’ said Oliver. ‘And I keep thinking, I keep thinking …’
He made strange little breathy noises. Erika tried to keep the irritation off her face. He was going to sneeze. Every sneeze was a performance. She waited. No. He wasn’t going to sneeze. He was trying not to cry.
Erika recoiled. She couldn’t join him in this. If she allowed herself to feel sad and guilty about Harry, who she hadn’t even liked, then who knew what could happen. It would be like uncorking a champagne bottle that had been vigorously shaken. Her emotions would fly all over the place. Messy. She needed order. ‘I need order,’ she’d told her psychologist. ‘Of course you need order,’ her psychologist had said. ‘You crave order. That’s perfectly understandable.’ Her psychologist was the nicest person she knew.
Oliver took his glasses off and wiped his eyes. ‘I keep thinking, what if he fell down the stairs and he couldn’t move and he was calling and calling for help but nobody heard? We all just went about our daily lives, while Harry starved to death, what if that happened? We’re like those neighbours you see on TV, and you think, how could you not have noticed? How could you not have cared? So what if he was a bit grumpy?’