chapter seventy-two
‘I’m sorry about dinner at Mum and Dad’s the other night,’ said Clementine as she handed Erika her cup of coffee. They were in Clementine’s living room with its original (but non-working) fireplace, stained-glass porthole windows and wide floorboards. When she and Sam had first seen this room they’d exchanged glinting looks of satisfaction behind the real estate agent’s back. This room had character, and it was just so ‘them’. (In other words, the opposite of the ‘modern, sterile and soulless’ sort of place that Erika and Oliver went for; Clementine was beginning to wonder if her entire personality was a fabrication, nothing more than a response to Erika’s personality. You are like this, so therefore I am like that.)
Right now the living room seemed dowdy and dark and very damp. She sniffed. ‘Can you smell the damp? We’ve got mould popping up everywhere. Revolting. If it doesn’t stop raining soon I don’t know what we’ll do.’
Erika took the cup of coffee and held it in both hands as though to warm herself.
‘Are you cold?’ Clementine half-rose. ‘I could –’
‘I’m fine,’ said Erika shortly.
Clementine sank back in her seat. ‘Remember when we bought this place and the building report said there was a problem with rising damp and you said we should really think twice about it, and I was all: Who cares about rising damp? Well, you were right. It’s really bad. We’ve got to get it fixed. I got a quote from …’
She stopped. She was boring herself so much she couldn’t even be bothered to finish the sentence. Anyway, it was all a transparent attempt at exoneration. You saved my child’s life, while all I’ve ever done is complain about you, you are all that is good, I am all that is bad, but surely I get extra credit points for all this self-flagellation, a reduced sentence for pleading guilty?
‘The dinner at your parents’ was nice,’ said Erika. ‘I enjoyed it.’
‘Oh, good,’ said Clementine. Now she felt bad. She didn’t want Erika to think she meant she didn’t deserve her hero’s dinner. ‘I just meant with the broken glass and Sam storming off and …’
She drifted again, and drank her coffee, and waited for Erika to get to the point of why she was here. She’d called earlier and asked if she could come around. It was bad timing: Sam had taken the girls to a movie so Clementine could practise – the audition was only ten days away now, it was the final countdown – but of course, Clementine had said yes. She presumed it was something to do with the next step in the egg donation process.
Erika nodded at Clementine’s cello in the corner. ‘Is your cello affected by all the rainy weather?’
She had that faintly defensive look she always got when she looked at Clementine’s cello, as if it were a glamorous friend who made her feel inferior.
‘I’ve been having a lot more trouble than usual with my wolf,’ said Clementine.
‘Your wolf?’ said Erika distractedly.
Clementine was surprised. She was sure she would have talked about her cello’s wolf tone with Erika before, and Erika tended to retain that sort of stuff, especially because it was something negative. She loved bad news.
‘A lot of cellos have it, it’s like a problem note, I guess is the simplest way to put it. It makes a horrible kind of sound, like a pneumatic drill or a toy gun,’ said Clementine. ‘I tried a wolf tone eliminator for a while but then I felt like I lost resonance and tone, so I took it off. I can deal with it, I just have to gently squeeze the cello with my knees, and sometimes I can rearrange the bowing to meet the wolf on the down-bow so –’
‘Oh, right, yes, I remember, I think you might have mentioned it before,’ said Erika. She changed the subject abruptly. ‘By the way, while I think of it, I found one of Ruby’s shoes at my place the other day.’
Erika pulled out Ruby’s missing flashing-soled sneaker from her handbag and placed it on the coffee table, making the lights flash. They seemed especially lurid in the dark room.
‘I can’t believe it!’ Clementine snatched up the shoe and examined it. ‘We looked everywhere for that damned shoe. It was at your place? I can’t even remember her wearing it to –’
‘Good. So anyway, what I wanted to discuss today,’ said Erika. ‘The egg donation.’
‘Right,’ said Clementine dutifully. She put the shoe back in her lap. ‘Well, as you know, I’ve got the appointment with –’
‘We’ve changed our mind,’ said Erika.
‘Oh!’ Clementine’s mind whirled. It was the last thing she’d expected. ‘How come? Because I’m really happy to –’
‘Personal reasons,’ said Erika.
‘Personal reasons?’ It was the sort of phrase that you used with an employer.
‘Yes, so I’m sorry we took up your time doing the blood tests and all that,’ said Erika. ‘Especially when you’ve got your audition coming up.’
‘Erika,’ said Clementine. ‘What’s going on?’
Erika’s face was impenetrable.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘We just don’t want to go ahead.’
‘Is it because …’ Clementine felt sick. ‘That day at the barbeque. I was talking to Sam and at first I wasn’t sure how I felt about your, ah, your request, and I’m just a bit worried that you might have overheard and you might have misinterpreted …’
‘I didn’t hear a thing,’ said Erika.
‘You did,’ said Clementine.
‘Okay, I did, but it doesn’t matter, it’s not about that.’ She looked at Clementine and her eyes seemed somehow naked and raw within her folded-up face, but Clementine was at a loss to interpret what she was feeling.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Clementine. ‘I’m really sorry.’
Erika lifted one shoulder: the tiniest possible shrug.
‘I want to do it now,’ said Clementine. ‘Not just because of Ruby. I’d got my head around it. I feel good about it.’
Was it a lie? She wondered.
Maybe it was true. She was exhilarated by the possibility that deep down she was her mother’s daughter, a kind, generous person after all.
‘I really want to do it,’ said Clementine.
‘It wasn’t my decision,’ said Erika. ‘Oliver is the one who wants to look at other options now.’
‘Oh,’ said Clementine. ‘Why?’
‘Personal reasons,’ said Erika again.
Had Erika told Oliver what she’d overheard Clementine say? The thought of kind, honourable Oliver, who had always been so unfailingly polite to Clementine, whose face lit up when he saw her children, hearing Clementine’s remarks made her want to cry. She thought of the sound Oliver had made when he revived Ruby: that animal-like whimper of relief.
She put down her cup on the coffee table and slid off the couch, falling to her knees in front of Erika. The sneaker fell onto the floor. ‘Erika, please let me do it. Please.’
‘Stop that,’ said Erika. She looked appalled. ‘Get up. You’re reminding me of my mother. That’s exactly the sort of thing she does. That sneaker is under the couch now, by the way. You’ll lose it again.’
She sounded crotchety but somehow revived. The colour was back in her cheeks.
Clementine found the sneaker and sat back up. She picked up her coffee, sipped it and met Erika’s eyes over the rim.
‘Idiot,’ said Erika.
‘Dummkopf,’ muttered Clementine into her mug.
‘Arschlich,’ spat out Erika. ‘No. That’s not it. Arschloch.’
‘Good one,’ said Clementine. ‘You big Vollidiot.’
Erika smiled. ‘I forgot that one,’ she said. ‘And verpiss dich, by the way.’
‘Piss off yourself,’ said Clementine.
‘I thought it meant “fuck off”,’ said Erika.
‘You’d know better than me,’ said Clementine. ‘You’re the one who got the higher mark.’
‘Too right I did,’ agreed Erika.
Clementine blinked back tears of laughter or grief, she wasn’t sure which. It was strange, because she always felt that she hid herself from Erika, that she was more ‘herself’ with her ‘true’ friends, where the friendship flowed in an ordinary, uncomplicated, grown-up fashion (emails, phone calls, drinks, dinners, banter and jokes that everyone got), but right now it felt like none of those friends knew her the raw, ugly, childish, basic way that Erika did.
‘Anyway, the truth is I’m ambivalent,’ said Erika. She tipped back her head and drank her coffee in virtually one gulp. It was one of her quirks. She drank coffee like she was doing a shot.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I never especially wanted to have children, as you know, as people keep reminding me. That’s why Oliver is the one driving this. I feel ambivalent.’ It was like she’d only recently settled on the word ‘ambivalent’ and wanted to use it as much as possible. She was staying on message like a politician. She pointed a warning finger at Clementine. ‘My ambivalence, by the way, is confidential.’
‘Yes, of course. But if you don’t really want a baby, you should tell him! You shouldn’t have a child just for him. It’s your choice!’
‘Yes, and I choose my marriage,’ said Erika. ‘That’s my choice: my marriage.’ She stood up. ‘Oliver’s dream is to have a baby and I’m not going to make him give that up.’ She picked up her bag. ‘Oh, by the way!’ Her tone changed, and became brittle. ‘I was going through an old box of memorabilia the other day, and I found this necklace. I think it was yours.’
She pulled out an extremely ugly shell necklace and held it up.
‘It’s not mine,’ said Clementine. ‘I always hated those necklaces.’
‘I’m pretty sure – well, maybe I’m wrong.’ Erika went to put the necklace back in the bag. ‘But maybe the girls would like it?’
She was giving Clementine a strange, piercing look, as if this really mattered. She was the oddest woman. ‘Sure. Thanks.’ Clementine took the necklace. She wouldn’t let the girls play with it. It didn’t look that clean and it would be like wearing barbed wire around your neck.
Erika looked relieved, as if she’d wiped her hands of something. ‘I hope your practice goes well. Only ten days until the audition, right?’
‘Right,’ said Clementine.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Not that great. I’ve found it hard to focus. Everything that happened – Sam and I – just … well, you know.’
‘Time to knuckle down then,’ said Erika briskly. ‘This is your dream, Dummkopf.’
And then she was gone, out into the rain in her sensible shoes. No kissing or hugging goodbye because they didn’t do that. The German insults had been their version of a hug.
You’re off the hook, thought Clementine as she cleared the coffee mugs away. No daily injections. She thought of the ‘So you’re thinking of becoming an egg donor!’ video she’d watched yesterday, and how her own stomach had clenched in horror as she’d watched the nice, generous woman briskly inject her stomach with the drug that would cause her body to produce multiple eggs.
She sat down with her cello, picked up her bow and focused on working her way through her chromatic scales.
Over the last few days she had been allowing an image to form in her head: an image of a little boy with Ruby’s almond-shaped eyes and Oliver’s jet-black hair.
The image trembled like a reflection on water and then vanished.
For heaven’s sake, Clementine, how dare you. Her hand tightened on her bow. The image didn’t even make sense because Ruby’s eyes came from Sam’s side of the family.
There it was again. Her friendly wolf tone. It was a truly ghastly sound. She could feel it in her teeth.
Sam always said she was overly sensitive to sounds because she was a musician, but she didn’t think that was true; he was just astonishingly insensitive to them. There were only a few sounds she could feel in her teeth: her wolf tone, a certain high-pitched shriek of Holly’s when Ruby had wronged her, the wailing shark alarm at Macmasters Beach.
She was suddenly transported to the last time she’d heard that shark alarm during that holiday when she was thirteen. Clementine and Erika had been in the surf together when the alarm went off. Erika was a strong swimmer, better than her. The alarm had made Clementine panicky (that sound) and she’d slipped as she waded towards the shore, and Erika had grabbed her arm. ‘I’m fine,’ Clementine had snapped, shrugging her off, full of that hideous rage she’d carried throughout that entire two weeks, but then, just a second later, she’d thought she felt something slippery and strange slide across one leg and she’d instinctively reached out for Erika. ‘You’re okay,’ said Erika, calmly, kindly, soothingly, steadying her. Clementine could still see Erika’s wet arm on hers, the salt water clinging like diamonds to her white skin, three angry red bite marks circling her thin, bony wrist like a bracelet. The fleas had come and gone in Erika’s house like seasons.
Clementine dropped her bow and tried to imagine her life without Erika in it: without the aggravation, followed always by the guilt. A melody with only two notes: aggravation, guilt, aggravation, guilt. She picked up her bow and deliberately played the wolf note, over and over, letting the sound aggravate her and worm its way down her ear canal, vibrating against her eardrum, creeping into her brain, throbbing at the centre of her forehead.
She stopped.
‘You shouldn’t put up with a wolf tone,’ Ainsley had told her. ‘Get it looked at.’
When she’d tried the wolf tone eliminator, it was initially a relief. It had taken her a little while to realise that something else was gone along with her wolf. Her sound wasn’t as rich. The notes surrounding the wolf tone were somehow dampened, less focused. She wondered if it was similar to how people felt when they first took antidepressants and they lost their pain, but everything else felt muted too: flatter, duller.
In the end she decided that her wolf tone was the price she had to pay for the sound of all those centuries of time held within the red-gold curves of her cello.
Maybe Erika was her wolf tone. Maybe Clementine’s life would have lacked something subtle but essential without her in it: a certain richness, a certain depth.
Or maybe not. Maybe her life would have been great without Erika in it.
Clementine realised she was hungry. She set aside her cello and on the way to the kitchen she picked up the horrible knobbly shell necklace and chucked it straight in the bin. She went to the fridge, got herself a tub of yoghurt, went to the drawer for a spoon and the first thing she saw was the polar bear ice-cream scoop Sam had been looking for the other night. Men. It had probably been right there in front of him the whole time.
She opened the yoghurt, had a mouthful. It was really very good. Creamy, like they said in the ad. She was susceptible to advertising, but really, this was very good yoghurt. It reminded her of her first taste of food after fasting.
She hadn’t been fasting.
There was a feeling growing within her. A twitchy feeling. She was jabbing the spoon into the yoghurt and eating it too fast. She thought of the opening melody of Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’. The high-pitched bassoon. The strange, jerky moments building to an ecstatic unfurling. She wanted to hear that piece. She wanted to play that piece, because that was exactly how she felt right now. There was an upward spiralling feeling in her chest. Was the yoghurt drugged? Was it simply exquisite relief because she’d demonstrated her absolute willingness to donate her eggs but she didn’t actually have to do it: altruism without action, it didn’t get better than that!
Was it just that she’d had enough of feeling bad over what happened? She could never forget that afternoon but she could forgive herself. She could forgive Sam. If he wanted to end their marriage over this, then she would grieve him as if he’d died, but goddamn it, she’d get over it, she’d live. She’d always suspected this about herself, that right at the centre of her soul was a small unbreakable stone, a cold, hard instinct for self-preservation. She’d die for her children, but no one else. She wouldn’t allow one mistake, one slip of judgement, to define her life, not when Ruby was fine, not when life was there for the taking.
She thought of Erika saying, ‘This is your dream, Dummkopf.’
That job was hers. That job belonged to her. She threw down the empty yoghurt container, licked her fingers and headed back to her cello, not to work on her technique this time, but to play music. Somewhere along the way she’d forgotten it was about the music, the pure, uncomplicated bliss of the music.