Erika walked into the kitchen and her heart sank. The front yard would have to wait. It had to be the kitchen today. There were paper plates sitting on top of the hotplates. Half-empty food containers with green mould. She wasn’t meant to be here for another two weeks, and if it wasn’t for the problem with the front yard, she wouldn’t be seeing this, but now that she had seen it, it was impossible to walk away. It was a health hazard. It was an affront to human decency. She put down her buckets and pulled out the packet of disposable gloves.
‘Felicity Hogan is turning sixty,’ sighed her mother, with a little flare of the nostrils on the word ‘Felicity’ as though Erika was spoiling her pleasure in the party by reminding her who was hosting it. ‘Oh, look at you, now you’re putting on gloves as if you’re about to do an operation.’
‘Mum,’ said Erika. ‘Felicity turned sixty last year. No, actually, it was the year before. You didn’t go to the party. I remember you said it was tacky having a Great Gatsby party.’
‘What?’ Her mother’s face fell, and she pushed the headband further up her forehead so that her hair stuck up around it, making her look like an unhinged tennis player. ‘You think you’re always so clever and right but you’re wrong, Erika!’ The disappointment turned her voice strident. Those jagged edges were always there beneath the fluffy blanket of her maternal love. ‘Let me get the invitation for you! Why would I have an invitation for a party that happened two years ago, answer me that, Miss Smarty-pants?’
Erika laughed bitterly. ‘Are you joking? Are you serious? Because, Mum, you don’t throw anything out!’
Her mother tore off her headband and dropped it. Her tone changed. ‘I am aware that I have a problem, Erika, do you think I’m not aware of it? I’m not stupid. Do you think I wouldn’t like a bigger, nicer house with enough storage and linen cupboards and things so I could get on top of things? If your father hadn’t left us, I could have stayed at home all day and kept house, like your precious Clementine’s mother, like Pam, oh-I’m-such-a-perfect-mother Pam, with my rich husband and my perfect house.’
‘Pam worked,’ said Erika shortly. She tore a rubbish bag off the roll and began to dump plastic food containers inside it. ‘She was a social worker, remember?’
‘A part-time social worker. And of course I remember. How could I forget? You were her little social work project on the side. She made Clementine be your friend. She probably gave her a little gold star sticker each time you came to play.’
It didn’t even hurt. Did her mother think it was an earth-shattering revelation?
‘Yep,’ said Erika. ‘Pam knew my home situation was not ideal.’
‘Your home situation wasn’t “ideal”. How melodramatic. I tried my best! I put food on the table! Clothes on your back!’
‘We didn’t have hot water for a year,’ said Erika. ‘Not because we couldn’t afford it but because you were too ashamed to let anyone in to repair the water heater.’
‘I was not ashamed!’ her mother yelled with such force the tendons on her neck stood out and her face turned blood-red.
‘You should have been,’ said Erika evenly. At times like this she felt herself become eerily calm; it would be hours or even days later, when she was alone, in the car or the shower, that she’d find herself screaming back something in response.
‘I will admit that I sometimes got a teeny bit paranoid that they might take you away,’ said her mother. She blinked pitifully at Erika. ‘I always thought that Pam might get it into that do-gooder, lefty head of hers to complain to the Department of Community Services that I wasn’t polishing my skirting boards or whatever.’
‘Skirting boards! When have you even seen the skirting boards in this house?’ said Erika.
Her mother laughed merrily as if it was all in good fun. Erika’s mother had such a pretty laugh, like a girl at a ball.
(‘Could she be bipolar?’ Oliver asked, when he first witnessed his mother-in-law’s extraordinary ability to flip her temper on and off like a switch, but Erika told him that she suspected people with bipolar disorder didn’t decide on their behaviour; her mother was mad, of course she was mad, but she chose exactly when and how to be mad.)
‘We had rats,’ said Erika. ‘No one was concerned about the skirting boards being clean.’
‘Rats?’ said her mother. ‘Come on. We never had rats. Maybe a mouse. A dear little mouse.’
They did have rats. Or rodents of some sort, anyway. They’d die, and the stink would be terrible, unbearable, but they wouldn’t be able to find them in the cities of stuff that filled each room. They just had to wait it out. The stink would reach its peak and then finally fade. Except it never really faded. The stink leached into Erika.
‘Also, Clementine’s father wasn’t rich,’ she told her mother. ‘He was just an ordinary father with an ordinary job.’
‘Something to do with construction, wasn’t it?’ said her mother with the chatty charm of a guest at a cocktail party.