chapter twenty-four
The day of the barbeque
‘That sounds like Holly,’ said Sam. He put down his beer bottle. ‘I’ll go.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Tiffany. ‘I’ll show you where they are.’
‘Mummy!’ Holly shrieked from upstairs. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’
‘Looks like I’m needed too,’ said Clementine with obvious relief.
Erika wanted to go too, to check if Holly was okay, but with both parents there it was clearly not appropriate, and would be the sort of overstepping behaviour that would earn Erika an exasperated sigh from Clementine. Now it was just Erika, Oliver and Vid in the room, and it was immediately obvious that this particular social combination didn’t work, even though Vid, of course, would give it his ebullient best shot.
Oliver stared glumly into his champagne glass while Vid opened the oven door to check on his baking and closed it again.
Erika looked around for inspiration. There was a large glass bowl in the middle of the island bench, filled with different-sized, different-coloured pieces of glass.
‘This is pretty,’ she said, pulling it towards her to examine the contents.
‘It’s Tiffany’s,’ said Vid. ‘She calls it sea glass. I call it rubbish.’ He picked up a long oval-shaped piece of dark green glass. ‘Look at this! I said to her, babe, this is from a broken Heineken bottle! Some drunk leaves it at the beach and then you bring home his rubbish! She goes on about it being polished by the sea or whatever.’
‘I guess it makes a nice decoration,’ said Erika, although she agreed with him. It was a bowl of rubbish.
‘She’s a hoarder, my wife,’ continued Vid. ‘If it wasn’t for me, she’d be like one of those people you see on TV, you know, those ones who have so much crap they can’t get out their front door.’
‘Tiffany isn’t a hoarder,’ said Erika.
Oliver cleared his throat. A little warning bell.
‘She is, she really is!’ said Vid. ‘You should see her wardrobe. Her shoes. That woman is Imelda Marcos.’
‘She’s not a hoarder, though,’ said Erika. She avoided looking in Oliver’s direction. ‘My mother is a real hoarder.’
Oliver held out his hand, palm down in front of Erika, as if to stop a waiter refilling his glass, except instead of no more wine, he meant, no more sharing. In Oliver’s world you told no one anything. Family was private. Family was shameful. They had that in common, except that Erika no longer wanted to be ashamed.
‘Like for real?’ said Vid, interested. ‘Like on the TV shows?’
The TV shows. Erika remembered the first time she’d turned on the TV and seen her mother’s hallway, there for the world to see in all its disgusting glory, and how she’d leaped back, both hands pressed to her chest as if she’d been shot. It was like something from a nightmare; an enemy had filmed her dirty secret and broadcast it. Her rational mind had worked it out in the next instant. Of course it wasn’t her mother’s hallway, it belonged to an elderly Welshman on the other side of the world, but even then Erika still couldn’t shake that feeling of exposure, of public humiliation, and she’d turned it off, with an angry swipe of the remote, as if she were slapping someone’s face. She’d never watched one of those shows the whole way through; she couldn’t bear that glib, pseudo-sympathetic tone.
‘Yes, for real,’ said Erika. ‘Like on the TV shows.’
‘Wow,’ said Vid.
‘She has a pathological attachment to inanimate objects,’ Erika heard herself say. Oliver sighed.
‘She accumulates stuff to insulate herself from the world,’ continued Erika. She couldn’t stop.
For most of her life she had avoided analysing her mother’s ‘habit’ or even thinking about it much, except when absolutely necessary. It was as though her mother had a socially unacceptable fetish. When she had left home she was able to detach herself further still, but then, one night about a year ago, Erika had typed the word ‘hoarder’ into Google, and just like that she had developed a voracious appetite for information. She read textbooks, journal articles and case studies, initially with a racing heart, as if she were doing something illegal, but as she accumulated facts and statistics and terms like ‘pathological attachment to inanimate objects’, her heart slowed. She wasn’t alone. She wasn’t that special. There was even a ‘Children of Hoarders’ website where people like Erika shared story after story of identical frustrations. Erika’s entire childhood, which had once seemed so unique in its secret dirty shame, was nothing more than a category, a type, a box to be ticked.
It was all that research that had led to her decision to get counselling. ‘My mother is a hoarder,’ she’d said to the psychologist at her very first session, the moment she sat down, as dispassionately as if she were saying, ‘I have a bad cough’ to her GP. It had been exhilarating, as if she’d once had a fear of heights and now she was skydiving. She was talking about it. She was going to learn tips and techniques. She was going to repair herself like a broken appliance. She’d be as good as new. No more anxiety over visiting her mother. No more waves of panic when some smell or word or passing thought reminded her of her childhood. She’d get this sorted.
The exhilaration had diminished a little when it had turned out the repair process wasn’t quite as speedy or systematic as she’d hoped, but she was still optimistic and she still felt it was a sign of her good mental health that she could discuss her mother’s problem so freely now. ‘It’s not a sign of mental health,’ Oliver had said once, with unusual irritability, after Erika had begun telling an old lady in a supermarket check-out queue exactly why she needed to buy so many heavy-duty garbage bags. ‘It makes you look unstable.’ Oliver didn’t understand that Erika experienced a strange, wondrous pleasure in telling on her mother. I’m not keeping your secrets any longer, Mum. I’m reporting you to this nice little old lady in the shopping centre; I’m reporting you to whoever cares to listen.
Vid seemed fascinated, intrigued.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘So she just can’t throw anything out, eh? I remember on one of those shows I watched, this old fella, he kept newspapers, right? Piles of them, and I just thought, mate, what are you doing, you’ll never read them, chuck them in the bin!’
‘Well,’ said Erika.
‘Chuck what in the bin?’ Tiffany reappeared with Dakota (who appeared so colourless and ordinary, standing next to her vibrant mother) and Holly, who seemed to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after all that yelling. She could be a drama queen.
‘Everything okay?’ said Erika.
‘Oh, yes, all good,’ said Tiffany. ‘Holly just had a bump playing tennis on the Wii.’
‘Did a tennis ball hit your nose?’ Oliver asked Holly. It was like the whole shape and texture of his face changed when he spoke to children, as if he stopped clenching his teeth or something.
‘Uh, Oliver, the tennis balls are not technically “real”,’ said Holly. She held up two fingers on each hand to place inverted commas around the word ‘real’.
Oliver slapped the side of his head. ‘Silly me.’
‘Ruby’s head went wham! against my nose.’ Holly rubbed her nose resentfully, remembering. ‘She has a super-hard head.’
‘Ouch,’ said Oliver.
‘Dakota is going to take Holly to show her the little house where Barney sleeps,’ said Tiffany.
‘I want a puppy for my birthday,’ said Holly. ‘Exactly like Barney.’
‘We’ll give you Barney!’ said Vid. ‘He is very naughty.’
‘Really?’ said Holly. ‘Can I have him?’
‘No,’ said Dakota. ‘That’s just my dad being silly.’
‘Oh,’ said Holly, and she threw Vid a baleful look.
Maybe I’ll get her a puppy for her birthday, thought Erika. She’d tie a red ribbon around its collar and Holly would throw her arms around her, and Clementine would smile indulgently and fondly. (Was she drunk? Her thoughts seemed to keep skidding off in all kinds of hysterical directions.)
‘Oh dear, oh well, I’ll let your mum and dad deal with that!’ said Tiffany. She lifted her T-shirt and scratched her flat, tan stomach. ‘And then we should all move out to the cabana, don’t you think, Vid? It’s too nice to be inside. Is that strudel finally ready?’
‘What are Clementine and Sam doing?’ asked Erika.
‘Ruby wanted them to try to play tennis with her on the Wii,’ said Tiffany. ‘She’s too little for it really, and then I think they forgot Ruby and started to get competitive with each other.’
‘Ruby needs her nappy changed,’ confided Holly to Erika. She waved a hand in front of her nose.
‘They’ll need the bag then,’ said Erika, picking up Clementine’s nappy bag. It was so typical of Clementine and Sam to start playing some computer game while their child needed changing, and they were visiting people they barely knew. They were like teenagers sometimes. ‘I’ll take it up.’
‘It’s the room at the end of the hallway.’ Tiffany’s tone became abruptly sharp. ‘Not on the marble!’ She spun Vid back towards the stove just before he dumped a hot baking dish on the island bench.
Erika put the bag over her shoulder and walked up the softly carpeted curved staircase. At the top of the stairs there was a huge landing without any furniture, like an empty carpeted field. Erika stopped to allow her five-year-old self to relish the feeling of space. She let her arms float from her sides. There was an enormous painting of an eye on one wall, with a four-poster bed reflected in the pupil of the eye (nonsensical!), illuminated by a single low-hanging light fitting, like an upside-down milk bottle. It was like a room in a gallery of modern art. How long would it take her mother to ruin a ‘space’ like this with her crap?
Erika walked down the hallway towards the murmur of voices in the end room. The carpet was so plush she bounced along like an astronaut. Whoops. She swayed a little and her shoulder brushed the wall.
‘She should have asked me in private.’ It was Clementine, speaking quietly but perfectly clearly. ‘Not with all four of us there. With cheese and crackers, for God’s sake. That stingy little piece of cheese. It was so weird. Wasn’t it weird?’
Erika froze. She was close enough to the room to see their shadows. She stood back against the hallway wall, away from the door.
‘She probably thought it involved all four of us,’ said Sam.
‘I guess,’ said Clementine.
‘Do you want to do it?’ said Sam.
‘No. I don’t want to do it. I mean, that’s my first instinctive response. Just, no. I don’t want to do it. This sounds so awful but I just … hate the thought of it. It’s almost … repulsive to me. Oh God, I don’t mean that, I just really don’t want to do it.’
Repulsive.
Erika closed her eyes. No amount of therapy or long hot showers would ever get her clean enough. She was still that dirty, flea-bitten kid.
‘Well you don’t have to do it,’ said Sam. ‘It’s just something they’re asking you to consider, you don’t need to get all worked up about it.’
‘But there’s no one else in her life! There’s only me. It’s always only me. She hasn’t got any other friends. It’s like she always wants another piece of me.’ Clementine’s voice rose.
‘Shh,’ said Sam.
‘They can’t hear us.’ But Clementine lowered her voice again and Erika had to strain to hear. ‘I think I’d feel like it was my baby. I’d feel like they had my baby. What if it looked like Holly and Ruby?’
‘That shouldn’t worry you too much, seeing as you’d rather poke your eyes –’
‘That was a joke. Erika shouldn’t have passed that on, I didn’t actually mean –’ Clementine’s voice rose again.
‘Yes, I know, sure. Look, let’s just get through this thing and we’ll talk about it when we get home.’
‘Daddy!’ Ruby’s little voice piped up. ‘Play again! Right now. Now, now, now.’
‘That’s enough, Ruby, we need to go back downstairs,’ said Clementine.
‘We need to change her, that’s what we need to do,’ said Sam. ‘Where’s the nappy bag?’
‘It’s downstairs, of course, it’s not attached to my wrist.’
‘Jeez, don’t get snippy on me, I’ll get it.’ Sam came out of the room and stopped short.
‘Erika!’ he said, and it was almost funny the way he took a step back, his eyes wide with fear, as if she were an intruder.