‘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 Ni?a! You know about La Ni?a? El Ni?o and La Ni?a? 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 Ni?a,’ said the cabbie, with a sort of Mexican inflection. He obviously enjoyed saying La Ni?a. ‘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?’
‘Let’s hope not,’ said Erika. She ran a finger along her forehead. Was that sweat or rain?
She’d calmed down as she waited in the rain outside the library for the cab. Her breathing was steady again, but her stomach still rocked and roiled, and she felt exhausted, depleted, as if she’d run a marathon.
She took out her phone and texted Clementine: Sorry, had to rush off, problem at work, you were fantastic, talk later. Ex
She changed ‘fantastic’ to ‘great’. Fantastic was over the top. Also inaccurate. She pressed ‘send’.
It had been an error of judgement to take precious time out of her working day to come and listen to Clementine’s talk. She’d only gone to be supportive, and because she wanted to get her own feelings about what had happened filed away in an orderly fashion. It was as though her memory of that afternoon was a strip of old-fashioned film and someone had taken a pair of scissors and removed certain frames. They weren’t even whole frames. They were slivers. Thin slivers of time. She just wanted to fill in those slivers, without admitting to anyone, ‘I don’t quite remember it all.’
An image came to her of her own face reflected in her bathroom mirror, her hands shaking violently as she tried to break that little yellow pill in half with her thumbnail. She suspected the gaps in her memory were related to the tablet she’d taken that afternoon. But it was a prescription pill. It wasn’t like she’d popped an Ecstasy tablet before going to a barbeque.
She remembered feeling odd, a little detached, before they went next door to the barbeque, but that still didn’t account for the gaps. Too much to drink? Yes. Too much to drink. Face the facts, Erika. You were affected by alcohol. You were ‘drunk’. Erika couldn’t quite believe that word could apply to her but it seemed to be the case. She had been unequivocally drunk for the first time in her life. So, maybe the gaps were alcoholic blackouts? Like Oliver’s mum and dad. ‘They can’t remember whole decades of their life,’ Oliver said once in front of his parents, and they’d both laughed delightedly and raised their glasses even though Oliver wasn’t smiling.
‘So what do you do for a quid, if you don’t mind me asking?’ said the cabbie.
‘I’m an accountant,’ said Erika.
‘Are you now?’ said the cabbie with far too much interest. ‘What a coincidence, because I was just thinking –’
Erika’s phone rang and she startled, as she did without fail whenever her phone rang. (‘It’s a phone, Erika,’ Oliver kept telling her. ‘That’s what it’s meant to do.’) She could see it was her mother, the very last person in the world she wanted to talk to right now, but the cab driver was shifting in his seat, his eyes on her instead of the road, virtually licking his lips in anticipation of all the free tax advice he was about to get. Cab drivers knew a little bit about everything. He’d want to tell her about an amazing loophole he’d heard about from one of his regular customers. Erika wasn’t that kind of accountant. ‘Loophole’ wasn’t a word she appreciated. Maybe her mother was the lesser of two evils.
‘Hello, Mum.’
‘Well, hello! I didn’t expect you to answer!’ Her mother sounded both nervous and defiant, which didn’t bode well at all.
‘I was all prepared to leave a voicemail message!’ said Sylvia accusingly.