chapter fifty-three
The day of the barbeque
Tiffany stood in her backyard being interviewed by a young police officer. She looked over her shoulder at the paramedics next to the tiny form of Ruby. Sam and Clementine were talking to the paramedics, and they looked like entirely different people from the ones who had been sitting around the table only minutes earlier. Their faces had collapsed, like popped balloons.
‘What happened here?’ the policewoman said to Tiffany. She pointed with her foot at the broken crockery on the pathway leading from the back door. There were dangerous-looking shards and chunks of broken blue china everywhere. Tiffany had loved those blue plates.
‘Oh,’ said Tiffany. She tried to imagine this scene through the policewoman’s eyes. Did it look like a crime scene? Did she think there had been a fight? Or that they had all been drunk? The policewoman had already spoken to Vid, so presumably she already knew exactly what had happened. She was double-checking their stories, making sure everything matched up. It made Tiffany nervous.
‘Our guest, Erika – our next-door neighbour – she was carrying plates from inside, and I think that’s when she realised that Ruby was in the fountain …’ Tiffany’s voice broke. She thought of Ruby’s squat little toddler body, her blonde curls. ‘And then I think she dropped them, because she ran to pull her out.’
What had Tiffany been doing? She’d been distracting Ruby’s parents. She’d made them forget they were parents.
‘It happened so fast,’ she told the policewoman.
‘Unfortunately it’s not an unusual scenario,’ said the policewoman. ‘Children drown in plain sight surrounded by people. It’s silent. It’s fast. Lack of parental supervision is the most common cause of drownings.’
‘Yes,’ said Tiffany. She wanted to say, No, you don’t understand. We’re not those kind of people. We were supervising them. Just not then. Just not at that moment. It was silent. It was fast. For one moment they all looked away.
Tiffany thought of her older sisters. She could never tell them about this. ‘For fuck’s sake, Tiffany,’ they would say, because the Collins girls took pride in their down-to-earth practicality. Their common sense. They were from the western suburbs and proud of it. They didn’t make mistakes like that. They’d be distressed that something like this could happen at their own little sister’s house. They’d relate it to money. To her bloated bank account. They wouldn’t pull their punches.
If they ever learned that she’d been pretending to give the child’s mother a lap dance at the time it happened they would be united in their horror. Tiffany’s dancing career still mystified and shamed them. ‘Just thinking about you in that trashy club makes me sick to my stomach,’ her sister Emma, the dramatic one of the family, liked to say, all these years later, and she wasn’t actually being dramatic, she meant it, it really did make her sick to her stomach. ‘She was a disgrace to the sisterhood,’ agreed Louise, who had recently discovered feminism, and she meant it too. But their words had slid straight off Tiffany as if she were made of Teflon. Their words would stick now, even if her intentions had never been more innocent, because the safety of a child trumped everything, as it should.
Tiffany looked up as the frantic, dramatic sound of chopping helicopter blades suddenly filled the air. ‘Is that helicopter … for us?’
‘Yep, that’s for us.’ The policewoman looked up too, and took a radio out of her trouser pocket. ‘Excuse me.’
She hurried off.
‘Where’s it going to land?’ said Tiffany to herself. The helicopter hovered over them like a giant bird and the sound intensified. Out of the corner of her eye she saw poor Barney streak across the yard to escape the loud noise.
‘Mum!’ Dakota appeared by her side in the backyard, her eyes big and wide. She held her book in her hand, her finger still marking the page. ‘What happened? Why is there a helicopter here? I heard the ambulance before but I didn’t think it was for us.’
Tiffany put her arm around her and pulled her close, wanting to feel her skinny little body for a moment. She had forgotten all about her up until now. ‘Ruby fell in the fountain. She nearly drowned.’
Dakota immediately pulled away from her hug and grabbed Tiffany’s arm. She said something, but Tiffany couldn’t hear her over the increasing volume of the helicopter.
She saw Vid at the end of the path that led down the side of the house, gesturing for her to come out the front. He had yet another policeman with him. He wouldn’t like that. Vid had a police phobia. One of his greatest, genuine but amusing fears was going to jail for a crime he didn’t commit. ‘Innocent people go to jail every day,’ he often told Tiffany, completely straight-faced, as if it were more likely than not that this could happen to him. It made him excessively law-abiding. He’d paid far too much tax until Tiffany had taken over his financial affairs. He still wanted to throw extra money at the tax man just in case.
‘Daddy needs me. Go and wait in the house!’ she yelled at Dakota. ‘Everything is fine.’
Dakota grabbed at Tiffany’s arm again, pinching the flesh too hard. Tiffany shook her off. ‘Later!’ she yelled. ‘Go!’
Dakota ran off, shoulders rounded, her face in her hands, and Tiffany thought impatiently, Jeez Louise, I don’t have time for this Dakota, it’s not about you.