chapter ten
Erika was back in the dry comfort of her office. The return cab fare from the library where Clementine had given her talk had been even more than the one out there. She’d just wasted one hundred and thirty-four non-claimable dollars. She couldn’t understand her own decision-making process. Listening to Clementine had certainly not filled in any gaps in her memory. All it had done was to stir up all sorts of uncomfortable feelings, and then she’d had to deal with the phone calls from both her husband and her mother on the way back in the taxi. She couldn’t wait to throw herself into some complex work. It would clear her mind almost as well as going for a good hard run with multiple hill sprints. Thank goodness she didn’t have a job like Clementine’s, where you needed to constantly draw upon the well of your own emotions. Work should be devoid of emotion. That was the joy of work.
She listened to her voicemail messages while she watched the rain falling outside the thick glass of her window. The weather had no relevance when you were safely ensconced in a high-rise office block. It was like it was happening in another dimension.
As she scrolled through her email inbox, her phone rang and she saw it was Oliver again. She’d spoken to him less than half an hour ago. Surely he wasn’t ringing to ask her again about talking to Clementine? He must have a good reason to call.
‘Sorry to disturb you again,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll be fast. I just wondered if you’d seen Harry around lately?’
‘Harry?’ said Erika as she opened an email. ‘Who is Harry?’
‘Harry!’ said Oliver impatiently. ‘Our next-door neighbour!’
For heaven’s sake. Harry was hardly a good friend. They barely knew the old man, and in point of fact, he wasn’t their next-door neighbour, he lived on the other side of Vid and Tiffany.
‘I don’t know,’ said Erika. ‘I don’t think so. Why?’
‘I was talking to Tiffany when I took out the bins,’ said Oliver. He stopped to blow his nose, and Erika stiffened at the mention of Tiffany, her hand on her computer mouse. She hadn’t wanted anything to do with Tiffany and Vid since the barbeque. They’d never had a real friendship anyway. It was proximity. Tiffany and Vid liked Clementine and Sam much more than them. If Erika hadn’t mentioned Clementine that day, if she’d said they had the day free, would Vid still have asked them over for a barbeque? Unlikely.
‘Anyway, I mentioned to her that I hadn’t seen Harry in a while,’ said Oliver. ‘We decided to go over together and looked at his letterbox, and it was pretty full. So, we took his mail up and knocked on his door but there was no answer. I tried to look in a window, but I don’t know, I just have this feeling that something isn’t right. Tiffany’s calling Vid now to ask if he knows anything.’
‘Okay,’ said Erika. She had no interest in any of this. ‘Maybe he’s gone away.’
‘I don’t think Harry goes on holiday,’ said Oliver. ‘When was the last time you saw him?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Erika. She was wasting time on this. ‘Not for a while.’
‘I’m wondering if I should call the police,’ fretted Oliver. ‘I mean, I don’t want to embarrass him if he’s fine, or waste police resources, but –’
‘He’ll have a spare key,’ said Erika. ‘There’ll be one under a garden pot or something near the front door.’
‘How do you know?’ said Oliver.
‘I just know,’ said Erika. ‘He’s of that generation.’ Erika’s grandmother had always left a key under a pot of geraniums by the front door whereas Erika’s mother would never have risked the horror of someone coming into her home without her permission. Her front door was double-deadlocked at all times. To protect the oh-so-precious contents of her home.
‘Right,’ said Oliver. ‘Good idea. I’ll try that.’
He hung up abruptly and Erika put down the phone and found herself unwillingly and annoyingly distracted by the thought of her elderly neighbour. When was the last time she’d seen him? He would have been complaining to her about something. He didn’t like anyone parking on the street outside his house, and he was always full of complaints about Vid and Tiffany: the noise (they liked to entertain; he’d called the police more than once), the dog (Harry said it dug up his garden; he’d put in an official complaint to the council), the general look of the place (looks like the bloody Taj Mahal). He seemed to genuinely hate Tiffany and Vid, and even Dakota, but he tolerated Erika, and seemed to quite like Oliver.
She stood up and walked over to her office window. Some people, like her managing partner, couldn’t stand too close to the windows in this building – the way the windows were set gave you the sensation of standing at the edge of a cliff – but Erika enjoyed the drop in her stomach as she looked out at the streets snarled with rainy-day traffic below.
Harry. The last time she remembered seeing him was the morning of the barbeque. It was when she rushed out to buy more crackers. She’d been worried about those sesame seeds. As she’d driven off down the street she’d looked in her rear-vision mirror and caught sight of Harry yelling at Vid and Tiffany’s dog. He’d kicked out his foot, aggressively, but Erika was sure he hadn’t actually made contact with the little dog. He’d just done it for effect. Vid had come out onto his front veranda, presumably to call for the dog. That’s all she’d seen.
Erika didn’t have a problem with Harry’s grumpiness. Grumpiness was less time-consuming and tiring than cheeriness. Harry never wanted to stand around chatting for long. She wondered if something had happened to him, if he was sick perhaps, or if he was fine and poor, responsible Oliver was going to get his head snapped off for interfering.
A flash of lightning lit up the city skyline like a firework and Erika imagined how she would look to someone on the street below, if they happened to glance up at the rainy sky right at that moment and see her dark, solitary figure illuminated against the window.
The image carried a memory … perhaps it did, maybe it did … of hands pressed against glass, a face without features except for the idea of a mouth, a gaping mouth, but then the memory split and fractured into a thousand tiny pieces. Was it possible she’d done something irreparable and catastrophic to her brain chemistry that day?
She turned away from the window and hurried back to her desk to open a spreadsheet, any spreadsheet, as long as it made sense, it added up, and as the soothing figures filled her computer screen, she picked up her phone and rang her psychologist’s number and said to the secretary, lightly, as if it didn’t really matter, ‘I don’t suppose you have any cancellations for tomorrow?’ But then she changed her mind and begged, ‘Please?’