'Watch the game last night?' said Sam to Oliver.
'Sure did,' said Oliver with the air of a man about to finally sit a test for which he'd been studying hard. He had in fact watched 'the game' last night specifically so he could answer this question from Sam, as if faking an interest in sport would affect today's outcome.
Sam looked delighted. Normally sport was a conversational dead-end with Oliver. 'What about that tackle in the first half, eh?'
'Come on, now! We don't want to talk about football!' interrupted Clementine. 'Put us out of our misery. What's this mysterious thing we need to talk about?'
Erika saw Oliver look panicked. They were still milling about in the hallway. This was not the way it was meant to happen.
'We're not saying a word until everyone is sitting quietly in their designated positions,' said Erika. Maybe the pill was working. Her heart rate felt steady.
'Oh, she's a herrschsuchtige Frau,' said Clementine.
'What's that?' said Holly.
'It means bossy woman in German,' said Erika. 'I'm surprised your mum remembers such a long word. Shall we ask her to spell it?'
When they were thirteen Erika and Clementine had studied German at school and developed a love of German insults. They enjoyed the brutal snap of those Germanic syllables. Sometimes they'd shove each other at the same time: just enough to make the other one nearly but not quite lose her balance.
It was one of their few shared passions.
'Just because she got a higher mark than me.' Clementine rolled her eyes.
'Oh, only twenty marks or so higher,' said Erika. 'Dummkopf.'
(She got exactly twenty-two marks more than Clementine.)
Clementine laughed, fondly it seemed, and Erika felt herself relax. She had to remember to always be like this: sort of flippant and cool, not so intense, or she could be intense but in an amusing, endearing way, not annoyingly so.
In a few minutes they had everyone sorted: the girls were happily using their pink glitter glue sticks on cardboard. Erika saw with vindicated pride that the craft table was a hit. Of course it was. Little girls loved crafts. Clementine's own mother used to have a craft table like this for her when she was little. Erika had adored that craft table: the tidy little jars of gold star stickers, the pots of glue. Surely Clementine had loved that table as much as Erika, so why hadn't she set one up for her own children? Erika had known better than to ever suggest it; too often she saw her interest in the girls misinterpreted as criticism.
'I love these sesame seed crackers,' said Clementine as they sat opposite each other in the living room. She shuffled forward in a sitting position to take a cracker, and Erika saw a glimpse of cleavage. White bra. The emerald pendant necklace that Erika had got her for her thirtieth birthday dangled from her neck. The coffee table was too far away from the couch, so Clementine just sank gracefully to her knees, like a geisha girl.
She wore a turquoise cardigan over a white T-shirt, a full skirt in a fabric featuring giant white daisies against a yellow background, the skirt spread around her on the floor. She was a splash of colour in the middle of Erika's beige living room.
'I remembered you either loved them or hated them,' said Erika.
Clementine laughed again. 'I'm just so passionate about my crackers.'
'She's crackers about crackers,' said Sam as Clementine, without asking, cut him a piece of cheese, put it on a cracker and handed it to him.
'Dad joke,' said Clementine, rolling her eyes as she sank back on the couch.
'Had a manicure, have you, mate?' said Oliver to Sam, and Erika thought, What's he talking about? Is he trying to be all matey and 'I'm a straightforward Aussie bloke just like you' but he's getting it all wrong?
But Sam held up his hand to show that his fingernails were painted coral pink.
'Yep, Holly's work,' he said. 'I had to pay for the privilege.'
'She doesn't do a bad job,' said Clementine. 'We just have to remember to take it off before he goes to work tomorrow so no one questions his manhood.'
'No one would question my manhood!' Sam thumped his chest, and Oliver laughed, maybe a bit too enthusiastically but really, it was all good. The tone felt just right.
'Well,' said Oliver. He cleared his throat. Erika could see his knee jiggling. He put a hand on it as if to still it.
'So, to give you some background ...' began Erika.
'This must be serious stuff.' Clementine raised an eyebrow. 'Background.'
'We've been trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant for the last two years,' said Erika. Just get it out there. Move it along.
Clementine removed the cracker she'd been about to bite from her mouth and held it in front of her. 'You've what?'
'We've been through eleven rounds of IVF,' said Oliver.
'What?' said Clementine.
'I'm sorry to hear that,' said Sam quietly.
'But you never ...' Clementine looked flabbergasted. 'I thought you didn't want children. You always said you didn't want children.'
'We want children very much,' said Oliver. He lifted his chin.
'That was when I was younger,' explained Erika. 'I changed my mind.'
'But I assumed Oliver felt the same way,' said Clementine. She looked at Oliver accusingly, as though she expected him to back down, admit she was right and say, 'Oh sorry, of course you're right, we don't want children at all. What were we thinking?'
'I always wanted children,' said Oliver. 'Always.' His voice thickened. He cleared his throat.
'But eleven rounds of IVF?' said Clementine to Erika. 'And you never told me? You went through all that without saying a word? You kept it a secret for the last two years? Why wouldn't you tell me?'
'We just decided to keep it to ourselves,' said Erika uncertainly. Clementine sounded hurt. Almost angry. Erika felt everything shift.
Wait ... was that wrong? It had never occurred to her that she had the power to hurt Clementine but now Erika saw that yet again, she'd got it wrong. Clementine was her closest friend and you were meant to share things with your friends: your problems, your secrets. Of course you were. My God, everyone knew that. Women were notorious for sharing everything.
The problem was that Oliver had been so insistent that they tell no one about any of it, and to be fair, Erika hadn't objected. She had no desire to share. She didn't want to tell anyone about it. Her fantasy had been calling Clementine with the good news. The good news that never came.
And, after all, she had plenty of experience keeping secrets.
'I'm sorry,' she said.
'No, no!' said Clementine. She still hadn't eaten her cracker. Her face was pink. 'I'm sorry. Gosh, this isn't about me. Of course, it's fine if you didn't want to talk about it. I respect your privacy. I just wish I could have been there for you. There were probably times when I was complaining about the girls and you were thinking, Oh for God's sake, shut up, Clementine, don't you know how lucky you are?' She sounded like she was close to tears.
There had been times like that.
'Of course I never thought that,' said Erika.
'Anyway, we know now,' said Sam. He put his hand over Clementine's. 'So, obviously, anything you need ...'
He looked wary. Maybe he thought they needed money.
There was silence for a moment.
'So the reason we wanted to talk to you today,' began Oliver. He looked at Erika. This was her cue. But it was all wrong. She'd stuffed it up. If she'd just been like a normal friend about this the whole way through, if she'd told Clementine, right back at the beginning, when they'd first started IVF, then this conversation would have had a proper, solid foundation. Each disappointment, each failure over the last two years would have been like a deposit of sympathy. They could have called on that deposit. But now, Erika sat opposite a confused, hurt friend and there was nothing in the bank to withdraw.
Self-loathing rose within Erika's stomach like nausea. She never got it quite right. No matter how hard she tried, she always got it just
a tiny bit wrong.
'My doctor has said that the only option now for us is to find an egg donor,' she said. 'Because my eggs are of very poor quality. Useless, in fact.' She tried to bring some lightness into the conversation, the way it was in the hallway, but she could tell by everyone's faces that it wasn't working.
Clementine nodded. Erika could see she had no idea what was coming next.
A memory came to her of blonde, pretty Diana Dixon marching up to Clementine in the school playground and grimacing at the sight of Erika, the sort of grimace you might give a cockroach. 'Why are you playing with her?' said Diana, and Erika never forgot either Clementine's lightning-quick flash of humiliation, or the way she lifted her chin and told Diana, 'She's my friend.'
'So we wondered ...' prompted Oliver. He waited for Erika. It was clearly her job to ask the question. Clementine was her friend.
But Erika couldn't speak. Her mouth felt dry and hollowed out. The tablet, maybe. It was probably a side effect. She'd meant to read the little leaflet about side effects. She fixed her eyes on the yellow daisies on Clementine's skirt and began to count them.
Oliver spoke up, like an actor saving the day by taking someone else's line in the script. There was a thin edge of hysteria to his voice. 'Clementine,' he said. 'We're asking ... the reason we wanted to talk to you today, well, we're wondering if you would consider being our egg donor.'
Erika looked up from the daisies at Clementine's face and saw an expression of utter revulsion fly across it as fast as the flash of a camera. It was there and gone so quickly she could almost choose to believe she'd imagined it, but she hadn't imagined it because reading faces was one of her skills. It was a legacy of a childhood spent reading her mother's face, monitoring, analysing, trying to modify her behaviour in time, except that her skill rarely allowed her to get things right; it just meant that she always knew when she got things wrong.
It didn't matter what Clementine said or did next, Erika knew how she really felt.
Clementine's face was composed and very still. It was the look of focused concentration she got when she was about to perform, as if she were taking herself to another plane, a transcendent level of consciousness that Erika could never reach. She pushed back a stray lock of hair behind her ear. It was the same long curly lock of hair that fell towards her cello when she played, somehow never quite touching the strings.
'Oh,' she said steadily. 'I see.'
chapter seventeen
The day of the barbeque
'So, this is a big thing we're asking of you, and it's absolutely not something we'd expect an answer on right away,' said Oliver. He leaned forward with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands locked together. He brought to mind a mortgage broker who had just given a lengthy explanation of a complex loan arrangement.
He looked gravely at Clementine and indicated a cream manila folder on the coffee table in front of him.
'We have some literature ready for you.' He enunciated the four syllables of the word 'literature' with tiny lip-smacks of satisfaction. It was the sort of word that both Oliver and Erika found soothing. Like documentation. Like procedure. 'It explains exactly what would be involved. Frequently asked questions. The clinic gave it to us to pass on, but if you'd rather not take it now, that's fine, we don't want to overload you, because at this stage we're just, you know, putting it out there, I guess is the right way to describe it.'
He sat back against the couch and glanced at Erika who, bizarrely, had chosen this moment to kneel down beside the coffee table and cut a piece of cheese from the (tiny, Clementine didn't know they made them that small) wheel of Brie.
Oliver looked away from his wife and back at Clementine. 'All we're saying today is: Is this something you would possibly consider? But, as I said, we don't need any response at all from you, and, by the way if, down the track, you were to say you would consider it, there's a mandatory cooling-off period of three months. And you can pull out any time. Any time. No matter how far we progress. Well, not quite any time. Not once Erika is pregnant, obviously!' He chuckled nervously, adjusted his glasses and frowned. 'Actually, you can pull out right up until when the eggs are inseminated but at that point they legally become our property, um ...' His voice drifted. 'Sorry. That's far too much information at this early stage. I'm nervous. We're both a bit nervous!'
Clementine's heart twisted for him. Oliver generally avoided hazardous topics of conversation - anything political, sexual or overly emotional - but here he was soldiering on his own through this most awkward of conversations because he wanted so badly to be a father. Was there anything more attractive than a man who longed for children?
Sam cleared his throat. He put his hand on Clementine's knee. 'So, mate, I'm just getting my head around this. It would be your ...'
'It would be my sperm,' said Oliver. He coloured. 'I know it all sounds sort of ...'
'No, no,' said Sam. 'Of course not. I've got a good friend who went through IVF so I've got a basic sort of understanding of the, you know, ins and outs.'
The ins and outs.
She'd tease him about that unfortunate turn of phrase later on. Clementine knew Sam was talking about his friend Paul, and that in reality Sam had been entirely oblivious to the 'process', except for his joy at the outcome: a baby boy for Paul and Emma. Sam loved babies (in Clementine's experience no man loved babies more; Sam was the first in line for a cuddle of a newborn and would scoop older babies straight from their parents' arms) but he hadn't wanted to hear Paul and Emma talking about 'egg retrievals' and 'embryo transfers'.
Erika lifted a cracker between her fingers. 'More cheese, Sam?'
Everyone stared at her.
'No thanks, Erika,' said Sam. 'I'm good.'
It was clearly Clementine's turn to say something but there was a constricted feeling around her chest that seemed to be preventing her from talking. She wished one of her daughters would yell for her, but predictably, they were being quiet and well behaved the one time she would have liked them to interrupt.
They seemed to love Erika's craft table.
Erika would be an excellent mother, a craft-table, watch-your-manners, hand-sanitiser-in-the-handbag sort of mother. Oliver would be a good father too. Clementine could see him doing something old-fashioned and painstaking with a dear studious little boy, like making model aeroplanes.
To their own child, thought Clementine despairingly. They'd be good parents to their own child. Not my child.
It wouldn't be your child, Clementine. But it would. Technically, as Holly would say, it would be her child. Her DNA.
People do this for strangers, she told herself. They donate eggs just to be nice, to be kind. To people they've never met. This was her friend. Her 'best friend'. So why was the word 'No!' so loud in her head?
'Well,' she said finally, inadequately. 'This is a lot to think about.'
'Absolutely,' said Oliver. He looked again at Erika but she was still no help to the poor man. She had laid out a line of crackers and was placing a thin sliver of cheese on each one. Who did she think was going to eat them? Oliver blinked once and smiled apologetically at Clementine. 'Please don't think this is the end of the road for us if you decide it's not for you. There will be other options. It's just that you were the first person we thought of, being Erika's closest friend, and you're the right age, and you're done having kids -'
'Done having kids?' said Sam. His hand tightened on Clementine's. 'We're not necessarily done having kids.'
'Oh,' said Oliver. 'Sorry. Gosh. I thought, that is, Erika was definitely under the impression -'
'You said you'd rather poke your eyes out than have another baby,' said Erika to Clementine in that truculent way she had when she could disprove something with facts. 'I asked you. It was last September. We had yum cha. I said, "Are you done with babies?" You said, "I'd rather poke -" '
'I was joking,' interrupted Clementine. 'Of course I was joking.'
She hadn't been joking. Oh God, but was this he
r only way out now? Would she have to give birth to get herself out of this situation?
'Well, you can certainly still donate eggs if you want to have more children,' said Oliver. Three deep, corrugated lines furrowed his forehead, like a cartoon character frowning. 'The clinic does prefer known donors to have completed their families but it's, ah, it's all there in the literature.'
'You said that you'd rather poke your eyes out than have another baby?' said Sam to Clementine. 'You really said that?'
'I was joking!' repeated Clementine. 'I'd probably had a bad day with the kids.'
Of course she'd always known this was an issue. Her deluded hope had been that he'd just, well, get over it. Every time the girls were badly behaved, or when the house seemed too small for the four of them and they kept losing things, or when they worried over their financial situation, she secretly hoped that Sam's hopes of another baby were gently, sensibly fading away.
She should never have told Erika she was done with babies. It was a flippant remark. A carefully constructed flippancy was her default position with Erika. She should have confided that Sam didn't feel the same way, because there had always been the risk it could come up in conversation, just as it had today.
She rarely shared information like that with Erika. She deliberately withheld herself. With other friends she didn't think twice, she chatted about whatever came into her head, because she knew they'd probably forget half of what she said. There was no one else in the world, not her mother or her husband, who listened so ravenously to what she had to say, as if every word mattered and was worthy of being filed away for future reference.
As a child, whenever Erika had come to play, she would first do a peculiar audit of Clementine's room. She'd open every drawer and silently examine its contents. She'd even get down on her hands and knees to look under Clementine's bed, while Clementine stood, mutely infuriated but, at her mother's request, being kind and polite. Everyone is different, Clementine.
Erika had obviously learned some social niceties as a grown-up, and didn't go through her cupboards anymore, but Clementine still sensed that avaricious gleam in Erika's eyes whenever they were in conversation. It was as though Erika's desire to look under Clementine's bed was still there and so was Clementine's mute outraged resistance.