‘I’m not,’ said Tiffany. ‘I’ve only just gone a bit bigger. I’m doing a small apartment block. Six two-bedroom apartments.’
‘Yep, she’s like Donald Trump! My wife earns the big bucks. You think this big motherfucking house, excuse my French, comes from my money?! You think all that artwork inside, all those masterpieces, comes from my money?’
Oh God, Vid. Next he was going to say, ‘I’m just a simple electrician.’
‘I’m just a simple electrician!’ said Vid. ‘I married up.’
A simple electrician with thirty employees, thought Tiffany. But go for your life, Vid. I’ll take full credit for our money.
‘They’re not masterpieces by the way,’ said Tiffany.
‘So how did you two meet?’ asked Oliver in his courteous, proper way. He reminded Tiffany of a priest making conversation with his parishioners after Sunday mass.
‘We met at a property auction,’ said Tiffany, before Vid got a chance to answer. ‘It was a studio apartment in the city. My first ever investment.’
‘Ah. But that wasn’t the first time I met her,’ said Vid, with the anticipatory tone of someone sharing his favourite dirty joke.
‘Vid,’ warned Tiffany. She met his eyes across the table. Jesus. He was hopeless. It was because he liked Clementine and Sam, and whenever he really liked people he felt compelled to share the story. He was like a big kid desperate to show off to his new friends by saying the naughtiest word he knew. If it were just the neighbours there he would never have said it.
Vid looked back at Tiffany, disappointed. He gave a little shrug and lifted his hands in defeat. ‘But maybe that’s a story for another day.’
‘This is all very mysterious,’ said Clementine.
‘So were you bidding against each other at the auction?’ asked Sam.
‘I stopped bidding,’ said Vid, ‘when I saw how badly she wanted it.’
‘A lie,’ said Tiffany. ‘I outbid him fair and square.’
She’d made two hundred thousand dollars on that place, in just under six months. It was her first hit. Her first money-making high.
Or maybe not quite. Her second.
‘But you can’t tell us how you already knew each other?’ said Clementine.
‘My wife has an enquiring mind,’ said Sam, ‘which is a nice way of saying she’s nosy.’
‘Oh, don’t pretend you don’t want to know,’ said Clementine. ‘He’s a bigger gossip than me.’ She looked over at Tiffany. ‘But I’ll stop asking. Sorry. I was just intrigued.’
To hell with it. Tiffany lowered her voice. ‘It was like this,’ she said. Everyone leaned forward.
chapter thirty-one
Erika stood in the pouring rain on the pavement outside her childhood home, an umbrella in one hand, a bucketful of cleaning supplies in the other. She didn’t move, only her eyes moved, expertly tracking the amount of time and work and arguing and begging and pleading and tug-of-warring required.
Clementine’s mother hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said on the phone that it was ‘pretty bad’. When Erika was a child, her mother’s belongings had never spread beyond the front door. The house always had a sullen, furtive look to it with its closed blinds and its thirsty wilted garden. But it wasn’t a house that would make a passer-by turn their head and stare. All their secrets were kept inside, behind the front door that could never open the whole way. Their worst fear was a knock on the door. Erika’s mother would react instantly, as if to a sniper attack. You had to drop down low so you couldn’t be seen by spying eyes through a window. You had to be still and silent and wait, your heart thudding in your ears, until that nosy, rude person who dared to knock finally saw sense and slunk away, never seeing, never knowing the disgusting truth about the way Erika and her mother lived.
It was only over recent years that her mother’s belongings had finally burst through the front door, proliferating like the mushroom cells of a killer virus.
Today she could see a pallet of bricks, a pedestal fan standing companionably next to a mangy artificial Christmas tree of the same height, a mountain of bulging rubbish bags, a city of unopened delivery boxes that had got wet in the recent rain so the cardboard had turned to soft pulp, a stack of framed prints that looked like they’d come from a teenager’s room (they weren’t Erika’s) and dozens of pieces of women’s clothing with the arms and legs flung out at panicky angles, as if there had been a recent massacre.