chapter eighty-nine
Four months after the barbeque
Clementine walked back from the letterbox shuffling their mail and got to a plain white envelope, addressed to her. It was Erika’s handwriting.
She stopped in the middle of her footpath, studying that familiar cramped scrawl. Erika wrote as if she needed to conserve space. Had she put it in the mail yesterday just before she’d left for the airport?
Erika and Oliver had flown out yesterday morning for a six-month trip. They’d both taken leave without pay from their jobs and bought around-the-world tickets. They were ‘flexible’ with their plans, or flexible for them, as in there were some nights where they hadn’t yet booked accommodation. Crazy stuff.
When they got back they were hoping to become long-term foster carers. They’d already begun the approval process, when all of a sudden Erika had announced (by email, not a phone call) that they were going to travel first. According to Clementine’s mother, they hadn’t made any particular arrangements about Sylvia. If the neighbours called the police when the house got too bad, so be it. ‘That’s exactly what she said to me,’ Pam told Clementine. ‘So be it. I nearly fell off my chair.’
Of course, Clementine’s parents were going to keep an eye on Sylvia.
‘She could have asked me to look in on Sylvia,’ Clementine had said, and her mother said, after a pause, as if she were considering her words, ‘She knows how busy you are.’
Her friendship with Erika had been changing, shifting somehow. Weeks could go by without contact, and when Clementine called, Erika would inevitably take a few days to call back. It was like she was distancing herself; in fact, it was almost as though, and this seemed incredible, ironic, impossible, but it was almost as though Erika was letting Clementine down gently. She was behaving the way a kind boy behaves when he wants to let a girl know that he likes her as a friend but nothing more. Clementine was being demoted to a lower-tier level of friendship and she was accepting this with the strangest mix of feelings: amusement, relief, maybe a touch of humiliation and a definite sense of melancholy.
She opened the envelope. There was a short note:
Dear Clementine, I got you a copy of this old photo Mum found. Mum says it’s ‘proof’. I think she means of her great parenting. Thought it might give you a laugh. See you in six months!
Love, Erika
What photo? She’d forgotten to include the photo. But then as Clementine shook the envelope a tiny square floated towards the ground and she caught it.
It was a black and white photo of herself and Erika and Sylvia on a rollercoaster at Luna Park, caught at the moment they plunged over its highest precipice. Clementine remembered how staggered she’d been when Erika’s mother had pulled them out of school that day. (How did she do it? Some story she invented. Sylvia could get away with anything.) Clementine had been drunk with happiness. It was outrageous! It was living!
She remembered how Erika had been as excited as her, what fun they’d all had, until towards the end of the day when Erika’s mood inexplicably changed. On the way home she got herself all worked up about a missing library book. ‘I know exactly where it is,’ Sylvia kept saying, and Erika said, ‘You do not, you do not.’ Clementine, in her innocence, wondered why it was such a big deal. The library book would turn up, surely. After all, Sylvia never threw anything out. Stop spoiling it, Erika, she’d thought resentfully.
Clementine could relish the anarchy of that day because she was going home to order and cleanliness, to spaghetti bolognese and school bags packed the night before.
She looked closely at the photo, studying Erika’s face: the pure, almost sensual abandonment with which she’d thrown back her head, laughing, screaming, her eyes closed. There was a secret wildness to Erika. It came out so rarely. She kept it under wraps. Maybe Oliver got to see it. It was like that dry, subversive sense of humour that occasionally slipped out almost by mistake. As Clementine walked back inside studying the photo, she wondered what sort of person Erika could have been, would have been, should have been, if she’d been given the privilege of an ordinary home. You could jump so much higher when you had somewhere safe to fall.
‘What’s that? What are you looking at?’ asked Holly as Clementine walked in the door.
Clementine held the photo up high, away from snatching tiny fingers.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
She looked again at the letter and saw that Erika had scrawled something in the bottom corner: PS. Just heard the news. Well done, Dummkopf. Knew you would.
‘Is it something “precious”?’ Holly used her fingers to give emphasis. ‘Precious’ was the word of the moment.
‘Yes,’ said Clementine. She looked at the tiny photo again. She’d have to keep it somewhere safe. It would be so easy to lose. ‘It’s something precious.’