Clementine really should have given Holly a chance to speak before she jumped in.
Erika clapped her hands. ‘I’ve got a craft table set up for you two,’ she said.
‘That sounds exciting, doesn’t it, girls?!’ said Clementine in a fake, jolly tone as if Erika had actually suggested something inappropriate and boring for children, like crochet.
‘Watch the game last night?’ said Sam to Oliver.
‘Sure did,’ said Oliver with the air of a man about to finally sit a test for which he’d been studying hard. He had in fact watched ‘the game’ last night specifically so he could answer this question from Sam, as if faking an interest in sport would affect today’s outcome.
Sam looked delighted. Normally sport was a conversational dead-end with Oliver. ‘What about that tackle in the first half, eh?’
‘Come on, now! We don’t want to talk about football!’ interrupted Clementine. ‘Put us out of our misery. What’s this mysterious thing we need to talk about?’
Erika saw Oliver look panicked. They were still milling about in the hallway. This was not the way it was meant to happen.
‘We’re not saying a word until everyone is sitting quietly in their designated positions,’ said Erika. Maybe the pill was working. Her heart rate felt steady.
‘Oh, she’s a herrschsüchtige Frau,’ said Clementine.
‘What’s that?’ said Holly.
‘It means bossy woman in German,’ said Erika. ‘I’m surprised your mum remembers such a long word. Shall we ask her to spell it?’
When they were thirteen Erika and Clementine had studied German at school and developed a love of German insults. They enjoyed the brutal snap of those Germanic syllables. Sometimes they’d shove each other at the same time: just enough to make the other one nearly but not quite lose her balance.
It was one of their few shared passions.
‘Just because she got a higher mark than me.’ Clementine rolled her eyes.
‘Oh, only twenty marks or so higher,’ said Erika. ‘Dummkopf.’
(She got exactly twenty-two marks more than Clementine.)
Clementine laughed, fondly it seemed, and Erika felt herself relax. She had to remember to always be like this: sort of flippant and cool, not so intense, or she could be intense but in an amusing, endearing way, not annoyingly so.
In a few minutes they had everyone sorted: the girls were happily using their pink glitter glue sticks on cardboard. Erika saw with vindicated pride that the craft table was a hit. Of course it was. Little girls loved crafts. Clementine’s own mother used to have a craft table like this for her when she was little. Erika had adored that craft table: the tidy little jars of gold star stickers, the pots of glue. Surely Clementine had loved that table as much as Erika, so why hadn’t she set one up for her own children? Erika had known better than to ever suggest it; too often she saw her interest in the girls misinterpreted as criticism.
‘I love these sesame seed crackers,’ said Clementine as they sat opposite each other in the living room. She shuffled forward in a sitting position to take a cracker, and Erika saw a glimpse of cleavage. White bra. The emerald pendant necklace that Erika had got her for her thirtieth birthday dangled from her neck. The coffee table was too far away from the couch, so Clementine just sank gracefully to her knees, like a geisha girl.
She wore a turquoise cardigan over a white T-shirt, a full skirt in a fabric featuring giant white daisies against a yellow background, the skirt spread around her on the floor. She was a splash of colour in the middle of Erika’s beige living room.
‘I remembered you either loved them or hated them,’ said Erika.
Clementine laughed again. ‘I’m just so passionate about my crackers.’
‘She’s crackers about crackers,’ said Sam as Clementine, without asking, cut him a piece of cheese, put it on a cracker and handed it to him.
‘Dad joke,’ said Clementine, rolling her eyes as she sank back on the couch.
‘Had a manicure, have you, mate?’ said Oliver to Sam, and Erika thought, What’s he talking about? Is he trying to be all matey and ‘I’m a straightforward Aussie bloke just like you’ but he’s getting it all wrong?
But Sam held up his hand to show that his fingernails were painted coral pink.
‘Yep, Holly’s work,’ he said. ‘I had to pay for the privilege.’
‘She doesn’t do a bad job,’ said Clementine. ‘We just have to remember to take it off before he goes to work tomorrow so no one questions his manhood.’
‘No one would question my manhood!’ Sam thumped his chest, and Oliver laughed, maybe a bit too enthusiastically but really, it was all good. The tone felt just right.
‘Well,’ said Oliver. He cleared his throat. Erika could see his knee jiggling. He put a hand on it as if to still it.
‘So, to give you some background …’ began Erika.