chapter twenty-nine
Vid sat at the wrought-iron table on his front veranda with sheets of newspaper laid out, polishing Dakota’s school shoes so she would look smart for the Information Morning at Saint Anastasias. He remembered how he used to polish his older daughters’ shoes when they were all at school. Three little pairs of black shoes going down in size. Now his daughters all wobbled about on stilettos with pointy heels.
Something was making him feel especially mournful today; he wasn’t exactly sure what it was and it made him feel angry. Perhaps it was related to the weather. He had heard an interview on the radio about how the lack of sunshine was having a detrimental psychological effect on the people of Sydney. Serotonin levels were dipping, causing depression rates to rise. An Englishman had rung up and said, ‘What a load of rubbish! This is nothing, you Aussies are so soft! Come to England and we’ll show you rain.’
Vid didn’t think he was so soft that he’d let a little bad weather worry him.
There was the sound of a car in the cul-de-sac and Vid looked up to see Erika from next door driving off down the street in her blue Statesman.
He wondered if Erika had seen Clementine lately.
He dipped the brush in the black polish and swirled it around.
He had told not one single person that he’d seen Clementine perform the other night, as if it were a secret when there was no reason for it to be a secret. Yes, possibly it was a little strange that he’d gone to see her perform, but come on now, why was it so strange? It was a free country. Anyone could go see her perform.
‘Isn’t that right, Barney?’ he said to the dog, which sat at his feet, very upright and alert, as if guarding him from something. ‘It’s a free country?’
Barney shot him a concerned look and then suddenly trotted off, as if a decision had been reached that nothing could be done with Vid and he might as well go and check in with some other members of the family.
Vid carefully polished the side of the shoe. Women could not polish shoes. They were too impatient and quick. They never did a good job of it.
Could Clementine polish a shoe? He wished he could ask her. He would like to hear her answer. Clementine was still their friend, surely? Why would she not return his calls? He only wanted to say hello, to check in with her. He had even left messages and he didn’t like leaving messages. He preferred people to see there was a missed call from him and call straight back. She must have his number programmed into her phone by now, surely? It was hurtful to him. He’d never had anyone not return his calls before. Even his ex-wife returned his calls.
He held the shoe up and examined it, remembering the music. It had been extraordinary. Breathtaking.
It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. He was at the Quay. He’d been going to meet a good friend at the Opera Bar, but his friend’s elderly mother had got sick and he’d had to cancel at the last minute, so Vid had wandered up into the Opera House where he’d had a very nice, long discussion with a girl at the ticket counter. He’d said he wanted to go to the symphony and it turned out that was no problem, there were plenty of seats available to Thus Spake Zarathustra. Vid had no idea what that meant, but the girl said he would recognise some of the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and she was right, of course he did.
He had not had his hopes up that Clementine would be playing. He knew she wasn’t a full-time employee of the orchestra. She filled in for them when they needed her. She was a subbie. He also knew she had an audition coming up for a full-time position that she very much wanted, and he’d confirmed with Erika that the audition hadn’t happened yet.
So he knew there was only a very small chance she would be playing, but then again, he’d always been lucky. He was a very lucky person. Some people had the luck, some people did not, but he had the luck, he’d always had the luck (except of course for what happened at the barbeque, but that was just a deviation in the path of his lucky life). But the other night he’d been lucky, because there she was, right there on the stage, wearing a long black dress, chatting with the musician sitting next to her, as calm as if they were waiting for a bus, with that beautiful, gleaming instrument leaning back against her shoulder the same way a small tired child does.
When he found his seat, he got into a conversation with the man sitting next to him, who was Croatian, his name was Ezra, and he was there with his wife and they were both ‘subscribers’. (Vid was now a subscriber too.) Vid told him he’d never been to the symphony before but he loved classical music, and he knew that cellist, sitting right there, and so he was going to be clapping very loudly for her, and Ezra told him that the audience didn’t normally clap in between movements, so maybe to wait until other people clapped first, and Ezra’s wife, Ursula, leaned forward and said, ‘You clap when you want to clap.’ (Vid was going to have Ezra and Ursula over for dinner as soon as he could arrange it. He had Ezra’s number in his phone. Good people. Very good people.)
He’d assumed the symphony would be like a show or a movie, where all the lights went out, but the lights stayed on; so he could see Clementine the whole time. At one point he even thought she’d looked right at him, but he couldn’t be sure.
She was clearly the best player in the whole orchestra. Any fool could see that. He was transfixed by the way her hand quivered rapidly on the neck of the cello, by the way her bow moved in tandem with the other musicians’ bows, by the way she tilted back her head, exposing her neck.
He was transfixed by the whole experience really.
(Ezra was right, nobody clapped when Vid thought they should clap. They coughed. Every time the orchestra stopped playing there was a little symphony of coughing and throat-clearing. It reminded Vid of church.)
He had to leave at the interval because Tiffany was expecting him but Ezra and Ursula said that the first half was always the best half anyway.
As he drove home from the city he could still feel the music, as if he’d taken some hallucinogenic drug. He had so much feeling trapped within his chest he had to take shallow breaths while he waited for it to subside.
He wanted to call her, to tell her that she was the best player on that stage, by a long shot, but then he kept remembering her face the last time he’d seen her in his backyard, and he understood that she didn’t want to be reminded of that day. He didn’t want to be reminded of it either, but still he longed, not for her exactly, he didn’t want Clementine, not really, not in a sexual way, but he longed for something and it felt like she was the only one who could give it to him.
*
A police car was pulling into Harry’s driveway as Vid, Tiffany and Dakota left for the Information Morning.
‘Maybe we should stop,’ said Tiffany. Face the music. I let my young daughter read The Hunger Games, Officer. I didn’t notice my neighbour was dead. I may have behaved in despicable ways.
Vid put his foot on the accelerator. ‘What? No.’ The Lexus purred forward obediently onto the street. ‘You’ve already spoken to the police. You’ve told them everything you know. There’s nothing more to say. They’re just finishing their report, you know, wasting taxpayers’ money.’
‘I should have taken Harry meals,’ fretted Tiffany. ‘That’s what a good neighbour would have done. Why didn’t I ever take him a meal?’
‘Is that what you think the police want to ask you? “Why didn’t you take him meals, you lousy neighbour?” You could say, “Well, Officer, I’ll tell you why! Because he would have thrown those meals in my face, you know! Like a cream pie!” ’
‘You shouldn’t only be nice to nice people,’ said Tiffany, observing the large homes they were passing, nice comfy double-brick homes with well-maintained lawns beneath towering canopies of trees. Had she become one of those entitled types? A little pleased with herself? Too busy to care?
‘Of course you should only be nice to nice people!’ Vid looked at Dakota in the rear-vision mirror. ‘You hear that, Dakota? Don’t waste your time on people who are not nice!’
Tiffany looked over her shoulder at Dakota, who sat upright and pale in her current school uniform (they’d be dropping her off at school afterwards), her body pressed right up against the side of the car, as if she were making room for other passengers. Why did you rip up that book, Dakota?
‘Once Mum took Harry over a quiche,’ said Dakota without looking at her mother. ‘I remember. It was a mushroom quiche.’
‘Did I? Wait, I did, didn’t I?’ said Tiffany, thrilled by the memory. It had been after a Christmas party they’d had catered. ‘He said he hated mushrooms.’
Vid chuckled. ‘There you go.’
‘It wasn’t his fault he didn’t like mushrooms!’ she said. ‘I should have tried again.’
‘He was rude about it, though, right?’ said Vid.
Harry had been rude about the quiche. He had slammed the door so fast she’d had to jump back to make sure her fingers weren’t jammed. Still, she knew that his wife and child had died years ago. He was a sad and lonely old man. She should have tried harder.
‘Don’t you feel bad?’ she said to Vid. ‘At all?’
Vid shrugged his big shoulders. He steered with his fingers barely touching the bottom of the wheel. ‘I feel sad that he died alone, but you know, what’s done is done, and the man spat at our beautiful Dakota!’
‘He didn’t spit at me,’ said Dakota. ‘He just spat on the ground when he saw me. I made him feel like spitting.’
‘That makes me feel like killing the man,’ said Vid. His fingers flexed on the wheel.
‘He’s already very, very dead,’ said Tiffany. She thought of the stench that had hit her when Oliver opened the door. She’d known straight away. ‘I just feel …’
‘You feel regret,’ said Dakota in a flat voice, from the back seat.
Tiffany turned again quickly. It was the sort of remark that Dakota used to make all the time, testing her vocabulary, testing out ideas, trying to work out exactly how the world worked.
‘I do feel regret,’ said Tiffany, eager to chat, to have one of those conversations she used to have all the time with Dakota, where she was always left amazed and delighted by her daughter’s quirky, clever observations, but Dakota just kept staring out the window, her jaw set, almost as if she were angry, and after a moment Tiffany gave up and faced the other way.
Vid talked for the rest of the drive about a new Japanese restaurant some clients of his had been talking about which served the best tempura in Sydney, possibly the world, possibly the universe.
‘Here we are!’ said Vid as they approached a giant set of iron gates. ‘Look at your new school, Dakota!’
Tiffany turned to smile at Dakota, but Dakota had her eyes closed, and she was letting her forehead bump quite hard against the window, as if she’d passed out.
‘Dakota!’ said Tiffany sharply.
‘What?’ Dakota opened her eyes.
‘Look!’ said Tiffany. She made a gesture at the surroundings. ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s nice,’ said Dakota.
‘Nice?!’ said Tiffany. ‘Nice?’ She looked at the lush, green fields. The imposing buildings. There was a massive sports arena in the distance that looked like the freaking Colosseum. ‘It’s like Downton friggin’ Abbey.’
Vid wound down his window a fraction. ‘Smell that?’
‘What?’ Tiffany sniffed. Some sort of fertiliser? Damp earth?
‘The smell of money.’ He rubbed his fingertips together. He had the same look of satisfaction as when he walked into an opulent hotel foyer. It was all just fun to him. He had the money. He could afford the best. So he’d buy the best and take pleasure in it. His relationship with money was completely uncomplicated.
Tiffany thought of her own high school: a cheerful, graffitied concrete jungle out in the western suburbs. Did the girls here smoke ciggies in the toilets? Maybe they did lines of excellent-grade coke in marble bathrooms.
Vid parked in a car park rapidly filling with shimmering luxury cars. Tiffany automatically curled her lip at the sight of all those cars. It was a habit left over from her childhood, when her family had sniffed at wealthy people as if there were something unsavoury and immoral about them. She still did it, even though her car was just as luxurious, even though she’d been the one to buy this car, with money she’d freaking well earned.
The feeling didn’t abate as the parents and their daughters were led into a magnificent hall. The smell of good perfume and cologne filled the air as dads in their suits and ties, and mums in effortlessly casually chic spring outfits, who obviously had older daughters at the school because they all knew each other, traded cosy, chummy, entitled rich-people remarks. ‘How was Japan?’ ‘Great! How was Aspen?’ ‘Well, you know the children had never been to Athens before, so …’
‘Snap!’ A middle-aged woman with dark curly hair sat down next to Tiffany and pointed at their matching Stella McCartney silk skirts. She was wearing a white cardigan exactly like the one Tiffany had been looking for in Dakota’s drawer.
‘Got mine on sale.’ The woman leaned forward and put her hand over her mouth. ‘Forty per cent off.’
‘Fifty per cent off,’ whispered back Tiffany. An outright lie. She’d paid full price, but life was a competition and she knew non-working wives of wealthy men loved to talk about how they’d saved by bargain-shopping for designer clothes. It was their contribution to the household finances.
‘Dammit!’ The woman laughed nicely which made Tiffany wish she’d told the truth. ‘I’m Lisa,’ she said. ‘Are you new to the school?’
‘My stepdaughters went here,’ said Tiffany, thinking that her stepdaughters would rather die than be described as her stepdaughters. They, as was their right, had many years ago decided the best way to show loyalty to their mother was by doing their level best to pretend that Tiffany didn’t really exist. They tended to give a little start when she spoke, as if the pot plant had tried to join in the conversation. They loved Dakota, though, so that was all that mattered.
‘My two older daughters are here at the school,’ said Lisa. ‘Cara is our baby.’ Lisa gestured to a little girl sitting next to her, swinging her legs and chewing gum. ‘Oh God, Cara, I told you to throw that out before we came in! How embarrassing. And my husband, Andrew.’
The husband leaned forward to give a little wave. He was in his late fifties with lots of grey hair (he’d be proud of his hair, like Vid was of his) and that distinguished, statesman-like confidence that comes with professional success in a career like medicine or law.
He had distinctive pale hazel eyes, with dark rings around the irises. Tiffany’s heart lurched as if she’d tripped in a dream.
‘Hi, Andrew,’ said Tiffany.