Truly Madly Guilty

by Liane Moriarty

  'They've got two little girls,' said Vid.

  'I remember they said they had little kids,' said Tiffany. 'Cutesy little names.'

  'I don't remember their names,' said Vid. 'Anyway, Dakota can play with them, you know, can't you, Dakota?' He looked hopefully at Dakota.

  'Uh, guys, there's someone at the front door,' said Dakota, without looking up from her book, as Barney, eyes alert, lifted his head from her arm and leaped to the floor, where he ran around in circles, yapping delightedly. Barney liked guests nearly as much as Vid.

  Someone was thumping over and over again on the front door, ignoring the doorbell.

  'You didn't invite them right this very minute, did you?' said Tiffany. 'Shh, Barney. Vid, did you?'

  Vid was standing at the pantry, pulling out ingredients. 'Of course I did not,' he said distractedly, although he was perfectly capable of doing that.

  Tiffany went to answer the door, Barney zigzagging excitedly in front of her and almost tripping her up. She found Harry, the old man who lived next door, standing on the front porch, glowering at her, as usual, in his normal outfit of old grey suit trousers (from his old job maybe?) and a white business shirt going yellow around the collar. White tufts of hair spurted from the top button of his shirt. He had white bushy eyebrows just like Barney.

  'Hello, Harry,' said Tiffany, smiling as nice a smile as she could muster, while thinking, And how have we freaking well offended you today, my elderly friend? 'How are you?'

  'This keeps happening!' shouted Harry. 'It's unacceptable!' He handed her a letter addressed to Vid. 'I've spoken to you about it before. I don't want your mail. I shouldn't have to deliver your mail. It's nothing to do with me.'

  'It's the postman, Harry,' said Tiffany. 'He accidentally put it in the wrong letterbox. It happens.'

  'It's happened before!' said Harry belligerently.

  'Yes, I think it did happen one other time,' said Tiffany.

  'Well, you need to put a stop to it! Are you stupid? It's not my responsibility!'

  'Okay, Harry,' said Tiffany.

  'Harry, mate!' Vid strolled out into the hallway, stuffing a handful of purple grapes into his mouth. 'You want to come to a barbeque later? We're having Erika and Oliver over! You know, from number seven.'

  Harry blinked at Vid. He put his hand inside his shirtfront and scratched. 'What? No, I don't want to come to a barbeque.'

  'Ah, that's a pity,' said Vid. He put his arm around Tiffany. 'Maybe another time, but Harry, you know, I don't want to hear you calling my wife "stupid". Okay, Harry? That's not nice. That's not neighbourly.'

  Harry looked at them with his rheumy brown eyes.

  'I don't want any more of your letters,' he muttered. 'Not my responsibility. You've got to take responsibility.'

  'We take responsibility,' said Vid. 'Don't you worry about that.'

  'Get that dog away from me!' said Harry as Barney sniffed his shoe with fascination. Barney lifted his bearded little face, as if his feelings were hurt.

  'Come on, Barney.' Vid clicked his fingers at the dog.

  'You know we're always here if you need us, Harry,' said Tiffany. He suddenly seemed so heartbreaking, like a confused child.

  'What?' Harry looked appalled. 'Why would I need you? Just keep your damned letters out of my letterbox.'

  He shuffled off, shoulders bowed, shaking his head and muttering.

  Vid shut the door. Harry was already forgotten. 'Right,' he said. 'Do I feel like baking? Yes, I feel like baking! Will I make strudel? What do you think? Strudel? Yes. I think most definitely strudel.'

  chapter ten

  Erika was back in the dry comfort of her office. The return cab fare from the library where Clementine had given her talk had been even more than the one out there. She'd just wasted one hundred and thirty-four non-claimable dollars. She couldn't understand her own decision-making process. Listening to Clementine had certainly not filled in any gaps in her memory. All it had done was to stir up all sorts of uncomfortable feelings, and then she'd had to deal with the phone calls from both her husband and her mother on the way back in the taxi. She couldn't wait to throw herself into some complex work. It would clear her mind almost as well as going for a good hard run with multiple hill sprints. Thank goodness she didn't have a job like Clementine's, where you needed to constantly draw upon the well of your own emotions. Work should be devoid of emotion. That was the joy of work.

  She listened to her voicemail messages while she watched the rain falling outside the thick glass of her window. The weather had no relevance when you were safely ensconced in a high-rise office block. It was like it was happening in another dimension.

  As she scrolled through her email inbox, her phone rang and she saw it was Oliver again. She'd spoken to him less than half an hour ago. Surely he wasn't ringing to ask her again about talking to Clementine? He must have a good reason to call.

  'Sorry to disturb you again,' he said quickly. 'I'll be fast. I just wondered if you'd seen Harry around lately?'

  'Harry?' said Erika as she opened an email. 'Who is Harry?'

  'Harry!' said Oliver impatiently. 'Our next-door neighbour!'

  For heaven's sake. Harry was hardly a good friend. They barely knew the old man, and in point of fact, he wasn't their next-door neighbour, he lived on the other side of Vid and Tiffany.

  'I don't know,' said Erika. 'I don't think so. Why?'

  'I was talking to Tiffany when I took out the bins,' said Oliver. He stopped to blow his nose, and Erika stiffened at the mention of Tiffany, her hand on her computer mouse. She hadn't wanted anything to do with Tiffany and Vid since the barbeque. They'd never had a real friendship anyway. It was proximity. Tiffany and Vid liked Clementine and Sam much more than them. If Erika hadn't mentioned Clementine that day, if she'd said they had the day free, would Vid still have asked them over for a barbeque? Unlikely.

  'Anyway, I mentioned to her that I hadn't seen Harry in a while,' said Oliver. 'We decided to go over together and looked at his letterbox, and it was pretty full. So, we took his mail up and knocked on his door but there was no answer. I tried to look in a window, but I don't know, I just have this feeling that something isn't right. Tiffany's calling Vid now to ask if he knows anything.'

  'Okay,' said Erika. She had no interest in any of this. 'Maybe he's gone away.'

  'I don't think Harry goes on holiday,' said Oliver. 'When was the last time you saw him?'

  'I have no idea,' said Erika. She was wasting time on this. 'Not for a while.'

  'I'm wondering if I should call the police,' fretted Oliver. 'I mean, I don't want to embarrass him if he's fine, or waste police resources, but -'

  'He'll have a spare key,' said Erika. 'There'll be one under a garden pot or something near the front door.'

  'How do you know?' said Oliver.

  'I just know,' said Erika. 'He's of that generation.' Erika's grandmother had always left a key under a pot of geraniums by the front door whereas Erika's mother would never have risked the horror of someone coming into her home without her permission. Her front door was double-deadlocked at all times. To protect the oh-so-precious contents of her home.

  'Right,' said Oliver. 'Good idea. I'll try that.'

  He hung up abruptly and Erika put down the phone and found herself unwillingly and annoyingly distracted by the thought of her elderly neighbour. When was the last time she'd seen him? He would have been complaining to her about something. He didn't like anyone parking on the street outside his house, and he was always full of complaints about Vid and Tiffany: the noise (they liked to entertain; he'd called the police more than once), the dog (Harry said it dug up his garden; he'd put in an official complaint to the council), the general look of the place (looks like the bloody Taj Mahal). He seemed to genuinely hate Tiffany and Vid, and even Dakota, but he tolerated Erika, and seemed to quite like Oliver.

  She stood up and walked over to her office window. Some people, like her managing partner, couldn't stand too close t
o the windows in this building - the way the windows were set gave you the sensation of standing at the edge of a cliff - but Erika enjoyed the drop in her stomach as she looked out at the streets snarled with rainy-day traffic below.

  Harry. The last time she remembered seeing him was the morning of the barbeque. It was when she rushed out to buy more crackers. She'd been worried about those sesame seeds. As she'd driven off down the street she'd looked in her rear-vision mirror and caught sight of Harry yelling at Vid and Tiffany's dog. He'd kicked out his foot, aggressively, but Erika was sure he hadn't actually made contact with the little dog. He'd just done it for effect. Vid had come out onto his front veranda, presumably to call for the dog. That's all she'd seen.

  Erika didn't have a problem with Harry's grumpiness. Grumpiness was less time-consuming and tiring than cheeriness. Harry never wanted to stand around chatting for long. She wondered if something had happened to him, if he was sick perhaps, or if he was fine and poor, responsible Oliver was going to get his head snapped off for interfering.

  A flash of lightning lit up the city skyline like a firework and Erika imagined how she would look to someone on the street below, if they happened to glance up at the rainy sky right at that moment and see her dark, solitary figure illuminated against the window.

  The image carried a memory ... perhaps it did, maybe it did ... of hands pressed against glass, a face without features except for the idea of a mouth, a gaping mouth, but then the memory split and fractured into a thousand tiny pieces. Was it possible she'd done something irreparable and catastrophic to her brain chemistry that day?

  She turned away from the window and hurried back to her desk to open a spreadsheet, any spreadsheet, as long as it made sense, it added up, and as the soothing figures filled her computer screen, she picked up her phone and rang her psychologist's number and said to the secretary, lightly, as if it didn't really matter, 'I don't suppose you have any cancellations for tomorrow?' But then she changed her mind and begged, 'Please?'

  chapter eleven

  Oliver put down the phone from Erika and blew his nose hard. He picked up his umbrella. It was not the best for his health to be traipsing about in the pouring rain checking on elderly neighbours but there was no way he could delay it a moment longer.

  He had a terrible feeling about this. The last time he could remember seeing Harry was the day before the barbeque, before there was any plan of a barbeque, before Erika's curve ball, when it was still just afternoon tea with Clementine and Sam and the girls, as per the plan.

  That Saturday afternoon Harry had ambled over for a chat and given Oliver some tips about the correct way to hold the whipper-snipper. Some people didn't like being given unsolicited advice but Oliver was always happy to learn from other people's experiences. Harry had complained about Vid and Tiffany's dog. Its barking kept him up at night, apparently. Oliver had found that hard to believe. Barney was such a little dog. Harry had said he was calling the police, or it might have been the local council, but frankly Oliver hadn't taken that much notice. Harry was always making official complaints through whatever official channels he could find. Making complaints was like a hobby for him. Everyone needed an interest when they retired.

  That was two months ago now and Oliver couldn't remember seeing Harry since then.

  He opened his front door and jumped back when he saw Tiffany there, her umbrella tipped back on her shoulders as she stood on the shelter of their front veranda, her hand up as if she'd been just about to knock.

  'Sorry,' she said. 'I know you're sick, but it's just that I've been thinking about Harry. I really think we should try to break in. Or call the police. Vid can't remember seeing him for weeks either.'

  'Neither can Erika,' said Oliver. 'I was just about to go over.' He was suddenly frantic. It was as if every minute counted now. 'Let's go.' The wind picked up. 'My God, this rain.'

  They held their umbrellas up like riot shields and ducked behind them as they hurried over the lawns and back onto the front veranda of Harry's house.

  Tiffany dropped her umbrella in a soggy heap and began banging on the door with a closed fist. 'Harry!' she called over the noise of the rain. There was a panicky note in her voice. 'Harry! It's just us! Just the neighbours!'

  Oliver lifted up a heavy sandstone pot. No key underneath. There was a set of crappy old green plastic pots with very dead plants and dry crumbling soil. Surely Harry wouldn't keep a key under one of them? But he lifted the first pot and there it was. A small gold key. Harry, old mate, thought Oliver. That's not great security.

  'Tiffany.' Oliver held up the key to show her.

  'Ah,' said Tiffany. She stood back as Oliver went to the front door and put the key in the lock.

  'He might have gone away,' she said tremulously. 'To see family.' But they both knew he hadn't gone away.

  'Harry!' called out Oliver as he opened the door.

  'Oh God, no, no, no,' said Tiffany immediately. The smell took a fraction longer to get past Oliver's blocked nostrils and then it was like he'd walked smack-bang into a wall of it. A wall of smell. Sweet, rotten smell. It was like someone had sprinkled cheap perfume over meat that had gone off. His stomach heaved. He looked back at Tiffany and he was reminded of the day of the barbeque, how in times of crisis a person's face is somehow stripped back to something essential and universally human: all those labels like 'beautiful', 'sexy', 'plain' became irrelevant.

  'Fuck,' she said sadly.

  Oliver pushed the door all the way open and took a step forward into the dim light. He'd never been inside before. All his interactions with Harry had taken place in front yards. Harry's front yard. His front yard.

  A single light burned overhead. He could see a long hallway with a surprisingly beautiful red runner leading off into darkness. A staircase with a curved wooden banister.

  At the bottom of the staircase lay a large unfamiliar object, and of course he knew already it had to be Harry's body, that exactly what he'd feared had happened, but still for a few seconds he stared, trying to puzzle it out, as if it were one of those tricky optical illusion pictures. It just didn't seem possible that cranky, stomping, spitting Harry was now that bloated, blackened, silent thing of horror.

  Oliver registered certain things: Harry's socks weren't matching. One black. One grey. His glasses had sunk into his face as if they'd been pressed firmly by an unseen hand into soft, yielding flesh. His white hair was still as neatly combed as ever. A tiny swarm of busily buzzing flies.

  Oliver's stomach recoiled. He stepped back on trembling legs and pulled the door shut while Tiffany vomited into the sandstone pot and the rain continued to fall and fall.

  chapter twelve The day of the barbeque

  Dakota sensed a flash of movement in her peripheral vision. She looked out the window and saw Barney streak across the lawn. The front door flew open with a bang and she heard her dad shout, 'I've had just about enough of that man! Tiffany! Where are you? He's crossed a line! There is a line, Tiffany, a line! And this time that man has crossed it!'

  She heard her mother from somewhere else in the house call out, 'What?'

  Pardon, thought Dakota.

  'Dakota! Where is your mother? Where are you?'

  Dakota was exactly where she had been all morning, reading her book on the window seat, but of course her dad didn't notice details like that.

  The house was so big they could never find each other. 'You need a map to get around this place,' Dakota's auntie said every single time she came over, even though she'd been here a million times and did not need a map at all. She even knew exactly where everything went in the kitchen cupboards better than Dakota did.

  Dakota didn't answer her dad. Her mum had said she could finish the chapter before she had to help tidy up the house for the visitors. (As if the visitors were her choice.) She looked up, considering, because she'd actually sneaked just a little way into a new chapter, but she looked back down at the page and just seeing the words was enough to pull he
r back in. She felt it like a pleasurable physical sensation, as if she were literally falling, straight back into the world of The Hunger Games, where Dakota was Katniss and she was strong and powerful and skilled, but also very pretty. Dakota was one hundred per cent certain that she'd be like Katniss and sacrifice herself in the Games for her cute little sister, if she had one. She didn't particularly want one (her friend Ashling's little sister was always there, hanging about, and poor Ashling could never get rid of her) but if Dakota did have a little sister, she'd totally die for her.

  'Where are you, Dakota?' called out her mother this time.

  'Here,' whispered Dakota. She turned the page. 'I'm right here.'

  chapter thirteen

  'Harry is dead,' said Oliver, almost the moment Erika arrived home from work and put down her briefcase and umbrella. She touched her neck. Ice-cold raindrops were running down her back. Oliver was sitting on the couch surrounded by a little lake of squashed, used-up tissues.

  'Seriously?' said Erika. She was focused on the tissues. 'What happened?' The sight of the tissues made her heart rate pick up. Visceral response linked to childhood trauma. Perfectly natural. Three deep breaths. She just needed to get rid of those tissues.

  'Tiffany and I found his body,' said Oliver as Erika hurried to the cupboard under the kitchen sink to find a plastic bag.

  'Where?' said Erika, scooping up tissues. 'At his house, do you mean?'

  She tied the handles of the plastic bag into a firm, satisfying knot and took it over to the bin and dropped it in.

  'Yes,' said Oliver. 'You were right about the key. It was under a pot.'