Erika hurried out to her car parked in the quiet street outside Not Pat’s home office and sat for a few minutes with the ignition on, listening to the thunderous rain on her roof and watching her windscreen wipers work feverishly.
‘Calm down,’ she said to the windscreen wipers. Their manic rhythm reminded her of her mother when she got herself into a state over something inconsequential. She didn’t want to go back to her mother’s house. She’d taken the whole day off work to help her mother, but she didn’t think she had the fortitude to manage going there twice in one day. That was too much. Like asking someone to get back into a freezing cold swimming pool and swim one hundred laps after they’d already done one hundred laps that morning, and now they’d had a shower and were all warm and dry again.
She closed her eyes and tried some of the breathing exercises that Not Pat had taught her in a previous session. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. She let the memories spin through her head: The fairy lights in the trees. The smell of cooked, marinated meat. The sour taste of too much wine.
She saw that face again. That ghastly, featureless face she’d seen in her office yesterday. Like a ghoul.
She thought suddenly: Harry. It’s Harry’s face. Grumpy old Harry. Was there something important she needed to do for Harry? No. Because of Harry. Something to do with Harry. Don’t chase the memory, or it will disappear. She’d learned this. Relax, breathe. Harry’s neatly combed white hair. No, that wasn’t a memory. That was an image Oliver had put in her mind: Harry’s hair, still neatly combed in death.
Harry at the letterbox, muttering to himself as he studied an envelope. Barney streaking across the yard. Vid coming out of his front door.
An obligation. A request. A responsibility. Something that Harry needed from her. Shards of broken blue crockery on terracotta tiles.
Look up. Look up.
She opened her eyes in the fogged-up car and looked up. Nothing to see except rain.
For heaven’s sake, she was only thinking about Harry because he’d died. It was a casebook example of false memory syndrome. If Erika had a weaker personality, a more malleable mind, then an over-eager therapist could help her fabricate an entire memory about the barbeque and Harry. Next thing she’d be convinced that Harry had been there at the barbeque molesting Ruby or some such nonsense.
She turned the keys in the ignition, indicated and looked over her shoulder at the traffic. She would try Not Pat’s idea of ‘returning to the scene of the crime’. When she got home she would ask Vid and Tiffany if she could stand alone in their backyard in the rain for a while. That wouldn’t sound odd at all. Ha ha. No, the best thing would be if she went over when she knew they were out.
It probably wouldn’t help, but it couldn’t hurt.
chapter fifty-one
The day of the barbeque
The two blue-uniformed paramedics came into the backyard with the absolute authority of conductors walking onto a stage. They didn’t run, but they moved fast, with a rigid calmness.
It was as though the rest of them weren’t grown-ups anymore. It was as though they’d all been playing a game, a game where they’d pretended to be in control of their lives, a game where they’d pretended they had interesting professions and healthy bank accounts and families and backyard barbeques, but now a curtain had been pulled briskly aside and the grown-ups had marched in because rules had been broken.
Rules had been very badly broken. The circle of people surrounding Ruby parted automatically so the paramedics could get to her. Ruby mumbled incoherently, terrifyingly. She seemed drowsy and drugged, as if she were coming out of anaesthesia.
The paramedics moved as if in a choreographed dance they’d done many times before. As they examined Ruby with plastic-gloved hands the older man asked rapid questions without looking up, confident that the answers would be provided. He spoke in a voice that was fractionally louder and slower than a normal speaking voice, as if he were speaking to children.
‘What happened here?’
‘What’s her name?’
‘And how old is Ruby?’
‘When was Ruby last seen?’
‘So no one saw her fall? You don’t know if she hit her head?’
‘Did she have a pulse when she was pulled from the fountain?’
‘Are you the parents?’
He looked briefly up at Erika and Oliver as he asked the last question. A reasonable assumption. They were the ones in wet clothes.
‘No,’ said Sam. ‘We are.’ He indicated Clementine.
‘They rescued her,’ said Clementine. It seemed important to get this on the record. ‘Our friends. They did CPR. They got her breathing.’
‘How long did you perform CPR for?’ said the paramedic.
‘It would have been about five minutes,’ said Oliver. He looked at Erika to confirm.
‘At the most,’ said Erika.
‘We did two rescue breaths for every fifteen compressions,’ said Oliver anxiously.