chapter seventy-seven
‘Doesn’t that look pretty,’ said Oliver.
‘What?’ said Erika. They were standing in her mother’s disgusting, squelchy front yard; it seemed unlikely there would be anything pretty to look at. She followed his gaze to her mother’s liquidambar where tiny glistening raindrops quivered on each leaf in the sunlight.
‘Look at them sparkle. Like tiny diamonds!’ said Oliver.
‘You’re in a poetic mood,’ said Erika. It must be because they’d had sex last night for the first time in a week.
Her eyes returned to her mother’s stuff. Now that the sun was out, everything looked even more depressing than it had the day she’d been here in the rain. She kicked at an unopened, soft, sagging cardboard box with an Amazon label, and the puddle of dirty water on top sloshed onto her foot. A leaf clung to her shoe and she tried to kick it off.
‘What are you doing, darling? Line dancing?’
Erika’s mother appeared in the front yard wearing a red and white polka-dot scarf tied over her head and blue denim overalls, like a 1950s housewife ready to start spring-cleaning. She stuck her thumbs into the pockets of her (brand new-looking) overalls and kicked one leg behind the other and then out to the side while humming some twangy song.
‘You’re quite good at that, Sylvia,’ said Oliver.
‘Thank you,’ said Sylvia. ‘I have a line dancing DVD somewhere if you’d like to borrow it.’
‘I’m sure you could put your hands on it easily,’ said Erika.
Sylvia gave a pretty little shrug. ‘It’s no trouble.’ She looked around the front yard and sighed. ‘Goodness. What a mess. That rain was extraordinary, wasn’t it? We’ve got quite a task ahead of us.’
Today’s choice of delusion was that Sylvia’s front yard looked like this because of the rain.
‘Well, we’re not alone,’ said Sylvia with a brave tilt of her chin. ‘People across the state are out there today, mucking in, cleaning up.’
‘Mum,’ said Erika. ‘Those people had their houses flooded. This isn’t because of a flood of rain. It’s a flood of crap.’
‘I was watching TV this morning,’ continued Sylvia obliviously, ‘and it was so inspiring! Neighbours helping neighbours. I had tears in my eyes.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Erika.
Oliver put his hand on Erika’s shoulder. ‘The things we cannot change,’ he murmured.
He was quoting the serenity prayer to her. Oliver went to Al-Anon meetings, for families of alcoholics. Erika didn’t want to learn serenity.
‘What’s that, Oliver?’ said Sylvia. ‘How are your lovely parents, by the way? Were they affected by the rain?’ She was as sharp as a tack, that woman. ‘I haven’t seen them in a while. We must all get together and have a drink.’
‘Mum,’ said Erika.
‘We should,’ said Oliver. ‘Although, as you know very well, with my parents it’s more likely to be ten or twenty drinks.’
‘Ah, they’re good fun,’ said Sylvia fondly.
‘Yup,’ said Oliver. ‘They are that. Oh look, here comes our skip bin.’
‘Great. What can I do?’ said Sylvia as the truck pulled into the driveway and slowly lowered the massive bin.
‘Stay out of our way,’ said Erika.
‘Yes, although you’ll need me to make sure you don’t accidentally throw out anything important,’ said Sylvia. ‘Do you know what I found the other day, caught up in a box of old papers? The funniest little photo of you, me and Clementine!’
‘That seems unlikely,’ said Erika.
‘What do you mean it seems unlikely? Wait till you see it! I guarantee you will laugh. Now just imagine if we’d thrown away that precious memory! You and Clementine must have been about twelve, I think. Clementine looks so young and pretty in it. She seemed kind of worn-out the other night to be frank, not aging well. You should take a look at it, Oliver. See what your future daughter might look like!’
Oliver’s face closed down. ‘That’s not happening now.’
‘What? Did she pull out on you? After you saved her child’s life?’
‘We pulled out,’ said Erika. ‘Not her. Us. We changed our mind.’
‘Oh,’ said Sylvia. ‘But why? That’s terrible news. I’m crushed!’ Erika watched in amazement as her mother conveniently forgot everything she’d said on Thursday night and made herself the victim. ‘You let me get my hopes up! I thought I was going to be a grandma. I was looking at those pretty little girls at Pam’s place and thinking how nice it would be to have a grandchild of my own. I was thinking I could teach her how to sew, like my grandmother taught me.’
‘Teach her how to sew?!’ spluttered Erika. ‘You never taught me how to sew!’
‘You probably never asked,’ said Sylvia.
‘I’ve never seen you with a needle and thread in my life.’
‘I’ll just go and pay the driver for the skip,’ said Oliver.
‘I’ll go inside and see if I can find that funny little photo,’ said Sylvia quickly, just in case, God forbid, anyone would expect her to pay for anything.
Erika took the opportunity to snap on some plastic gloves, bend at the knees and pick up a broken laundry basket filled with miscellaneous junk: a headless doll, a sodden beach towel, a pizza box. She carried it to the skip bin and chucked it in, hard, like a grenade. It landed with a bang against the metal. Throwing stuff out always gave her a wild, terrified feeling, as if she were running into battle screaming a war cry.
‘Jeez, you’ve got a job ahead of you,’ said the skip bin guy as he folded up the yellow form Oliver had handed him and stuffed it in his back pocket. He crossed his arms across his barrel chest and studied the front yard with an expression of pure disgust.
‘Want to lend a hand?’ said Oliver.
‘Ha ha! Nah, you’re on your own there, mate. Better you than me!’ He kept standing there, shaking his head, as if he were there to supervise.
‘Well, on your bike then,’ said Erika irritably, and she heard Oliver stifle a laugh as she turned away to pick up the old Christmas tree. A Christmas tree, of all things. She couldn’t remember ever having a Christmas tree growing up, and yet here was an old, mangled one with a single sad strand of gold tinsel.
The driver roared off in his truck, and Erika threw the Christmas tree in the bin while Oliver picked up a broken pedestal fan in one hand and a bag of rubbish in the other.
Her mother came out the front door triumphantly holding a tiny photo between her thumb and finger. A miracle that she’d found something.
‘Look at this photo!’ she said to Erika. ‘I guarantee it will make you laugh.’
‘I guarantee it won’t,’ said Erika sourly.
Her mother leaned over and removed a tiny piece of gold tinsel from Erika’s shirt. ‘Yes, it will. Look.’
Erika took the picture. She burst out laughing. Her mother danced around, hugging herself with delight. ‘I told you, I told you!’
It was a grainy black and white picture of herself, her mother and Clementine sitting together on a rollercoaster. It had been taken by one of those automatic cameras timed to capture passengers’ reactions at the most terrifying moment of the rollercoaster ride. All three of them had oval-shaped mouths frozen forever mid-scream. Erika was leaning forward, both hands clutching the safety bar, as if she were pushing it to go faster even as she threw her head back. Clementine had her eyes squeezed shut and her ponytail flew in a vertical line above her head like the pope’s hat. Sylvia had her eyes wide open and both arms flung up in the air like a drunk girl dancing. Terrified, hilarious joy. That’s what you saw in that photo. It didn’t matter if it was accurate, you couldn’t look at it without laughing. She and Clementine were wearing their school uniforms.
‘See! Aren’t you glad I kept it!’ said Sylvia. ‘Show it to Clementine. See if she remembers that day! I must admit I don’t actually remember that day specifically, but you can see how happy we were! Don’t you pretend you had a terrible childhood, you had a wonderful childhood! All those rollercoasters, remember? My goodness, I loved rollercoasters. You did too.’
Her eye was caught by something. ‘Oliver, what have you got there? Let me just check that!’ Oliver, who had both arms wrapped around a disintegrating cardboard box, hurried off to the skip bin, with Sylvia running behind him calling out, ‘Oliver! Oh, Oliver!’
This was life with Sylvia: absurd, grotesque, infuriating and sometimes, every now and then, wonderful. They were meant to be at school that day. It was late November, summer in the air. It was Erika’s twelfth birthday – no, it was a week after Erika’s twelfth birthday; her mother had forgotten the actual birthday, Sylvia had difficulties with dates, but this time she’d decided to redeem herself with a spontaneous, crazy gesture. She’d turned up at school and taken both girls out of class for a trip to Luna Park, without, by the way, Clementine’s parents’ permission or knowledge; it would never happen today and Erika was horrified now on the school’s behalf. The legal ramifications were mind-boggling.
Clementine wasn’t allowed to go on a rollercoaster because her mother had a phobia about them. She had been deeply affected by the story of a fairground ride accident in which eight people had died at a country fair, years before Clementine and Erika were born. ‘They don’t maintain those machines,’ Pam always said. ‘They are death traps. They are accidents waiting to happen.’
But Erika and Sylvia loved rollercoasters, the scarier the better. No decisions, no control, no discussion: just the rush of air into your lungs and the piercing sound of your own screams before they’re snatched away by the wind. It was one of the very few, strange, random things they had in common: an enjoyment of scary rollercoaster rides. Not that they went on them all that often. Erika could remember only a handful of occasions, and this was one of them.
Erika knew Clementine had loved that day too. She had been in one of her hectically happy moods. It was a day where Erika didn’t second-guess herself or their friendship. There had been days like those, days where her mother was her mother and her friend was her friend.
She slid the photo into the back pocket of her jeans and watched as Sylvia leaned so far into the skip bin to rescue something that she nearly toppled in. She got herself back upright, adjusted her checked headscarf and faced Oliver, hands on her hips.
‘Oliver! There’s nothing wrong with that fan!’ she cried. ‘You retrieve that for me, please!’
‘No can do, Sylvia,’ said Oliver.
Erika turned away to hide her smile. She studied the sunlight shining on the rain-speckled tree. It actually did look pretty. Like a Christmas tree.
She tipped her head back, enjoying the sun on her face, and saw the lady who lived across the road, the one who loved Jesus, but sure didn’t love Sylvia. She was standing at her upstairs window, one hand on the glass as if she were cleaning it. The lady seemed to be looking straight back at Erika.
And just like that, it happened: Erika remembered everything.