Pam rubbed Oliver's arm gently to make up for Martin's thumping. 'You are a hero,' she said, her voice full of emotion. 'You and Erika are heroes. Once Ruby is home and feeling better we'll have you over for a special dinner. A dinner fit for heroes! I'll make that carrot cake I know you like.'
'Oh, delicious, wow, that's very kind of you,' said Oliver, stepping back and ducking his head like he was fourteen.
'Where is Erika?' said Pam.
'She's asleep actually,' said Oliver. 'She wasn't feeling ... quite right.'
'Probably the shock,' said Pam. 'Everyone is feeling - well, look who's here! Hello, darling. Look at those fairy wings!'
Holly headed straight to her and buried her face in Pam's stomach.
'Hello, Grandma,' she said. 'I am "exhausted".' She lifted her fingers in quotation marks. Her funny little habit.
'Right,' said Oliver. 'I'll grab your rock collection, Holly.'
'No. I don't want it,' said Holly almost belligerently. 'I told you I don't want it. You keep it.'
'Well, I'll take care of it for you,' said Oliver. 'If you change your mind you can have it back.'
'Come to Grandpa, Holly.' Martin held out his arms to Holly and she leaped up, her legs wrapped around his waist, her head on his shoulder. No point telling Martin not to carry her after his knee operation. He needed to carry her.
Holly fell asleep in the car and didn't wake when Martin carried her in, or even when Pam changed her into a spare pair of pyjamas she kept in the house. Martin didn't see the need to change her but Pam knew you were always so much comfier in pyjamas.
But as Pam leaned in to kiss her good night, Holly's eyes sprang open.
'Is Ruby dead?' she said. She was lying on her front, her head turned sideways on the pillow, a tangle of hair obscuring her face.
'No, darling,' said Pam. She lifted the hair off Holly's face and smoothed it back from her forehead. 'She's at the hospital. The doctors are looking after her. She's going to be fine. You go back to sleep.'
Holly closed her eyes, and Pam rubbed her back.
'Grandma,' whispered Holly.
'Yes, darling?' Pam was feeling tired herself now.
Holly whispered something Pam couldn't hear.
'What's that?' Pam leaned forward to listen.
'Are Mummy and Daddy very, very angry with me?' whispered Holly.
'Of course not!' said Pam. 'Why would they be angry with you?'
'Because I pushed her.'
Pam froze.
'I pushed Ruby,' said Holly again, louder.
Pam's hand lay flat and still on Holly's back, and for a moment she didn't recognise it; it looked too old and wrinkled to belong to her.
'She took my bag of rocks,' said Holly. 'She was standing on the side of the fountain with my bag and she wouldn't let me have it, and it's mine, and I was trying to get it off her, and then I got it, and I pushed her because I felt really, really angry.'
'Oh, Holly.'
'I didn't mean for her to be drowned. I thought she would chase after me. Will she go to heaven? I don't want her to go to heaven.'
'Did you tell anyone?' asked Pam.
'Oliver,' mumbled Holly into the pillow, as if she were worried that was also a transgression. 'I told Oliver.'
'What did Oliver say?' said Pam.
'He said when I see Ruby at the hospital I should whisper "sorry" very quietly in her ear and that I should never, ever push her again.'
'Ah,' said Pam.
'He said it was our secret and he would never tell anyone in the whole world ever,' said Holly.
He was a lovely man, Oliver. A good man. Trying to do the right thing.
But what if Holly never got that chance to whisper 'sorry' in Ruby's ear? Ruby was stable. Ruby would not die in the night.
But if she did die, Pam refused to have her beautiful innocent granddaughter pay the price for Clementine's inattention.
'You know what, I don't think she fell in when you pushed her,' she said firmly. 'That probably happened later. After you ran away. She probably slipped. I think she slipped. I know she slipped. She fell, darling. You did not push her. I know you didn't. You were having a little argument over the bag by the fountain and poor Ruby fell in. It was just an accident. You go to sleep now.'
Holly's breathing slowed.
'You just put it right out of your mind,' she said. 'It was an accident. A terrible accident. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't really anyone's fault.'
She kept rubbing Holly's back, in ever-increasing circles, like the endless ripples created by a tiny pebble thrown in still water, and as she did she talked, she talked and talked, making the memory disappear, just like the ripples, and the funny thing was that she could feel her anger towards Clementine ebbing away as if she'd never felt it in the first place.
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 he
r 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.'
Acknowledgements
Thank you so much to everyone at Pan Macmillan with special thanks as always to the wonderful Cate Paterson, as well as to Mathilda Imlah, Brianne Collins, Tracey Cheetham and Lara Wallace. Thank you also to my editors in the US and the UK: Amy Einhorn and Maxine Hitchcock.
Since becoming an author I've been so amazed at how kind people are when it comes to sharing their expert knowledge for fictional purposes. Thank you to Fenella for giving so incredibly generously of her time and expertise. Thank you to Rowena Macneish for patiently answering questions about life as a cellist, and to Cat Seekins for answering questions about her former life as a dancer. Thank you to Chris Jones for answering my medical questions. (As this is a book about neighbours, I would like to note that I was put in touch with Chris by his parents, Sue and Ken Jones, the loveliest next door neighbours you could ever hope to have.) Thank you Liz Frizell for answering my uneducated musical questions. All mistakes are sadly mine and mine alone.
Thank you to my friends and fellow authors Ber Carroll and Dianne Blacklock for their friendship and support with this novel.
Thank you to my lovely literary agent, Fiona Inglis, as well as my US and UK agents, Faye Bender and Jonathon Lloyd. Thank you to Jerry Kalajian for my entry into the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Thank you to Mum, Dad, Jaci, Kati, Fiona, Sean and Nicola, with special thanks to Kati and Fiona for help with proof-reading, and to Fiona for that sentence I stole. Thank you to Adam, George and Anna for being you. I'm so lucky I got the three of you. Thank you to Anna Kuper for everything you've done for our family.
Two characters in this book are named after people in the real world. Steven Lunt was the winning bidder at the 'Get in Character' fundraising auction run by CLIC Sargent Cancer Support for the Young. Robyn Byrne was the winner of the 'Be Immortalised in Fiction' competition at the Sisters in Crime Australia Davitt Awards.
I've dedicated this book to my sister, the amazing novelist, Jaclyn Moriarty, because I couldn't have finished this book without her help and support. Actually, I know I wouldn't have finished any of my books without Jaci.
*
The following books were helpful to me in my research about hoarding: Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding (2011) by Jessie Sholl and Coming Clean: A Memoir by Kimberly Rae Miller (2014). The website www.childrenofhoarders.com was also a great resource.
About Liane Moriarty Liane Moriarty is the author of six bestselling novels, Three Wishes, The Last Anniversary, What Alice Forgot, The Hypnotist's Love Story, The Husband's Secret and Big Little Lies. Her books have been read by more than six million people worldwide.
Writing as L.M. Moriarty, she is also the author of the Space Brigade series for children. The Husband's Secret was a number one New York Times bestseller. It has been translated into more than thirty-five languages and film rights have been acquired by CBS Films. Big Little Lies reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of publication - the first time this had been achieved by an Australian author. It was also number one on the Australian fiction charts and is currently being adapted for television by HBO, starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon. Liane lives in Sydney with her husband, son and daughter.
You can find out more about Liane's books at her website www.lianemoriarty.com
Also by Liane Moriarty
Three Wishes
The Last Anniversary
What Alice Forgot
The Hypnotist's Love Story
The Husband's Secret
Big Little Lies
Writing as L.M. Moriarty
The Petrifying Problem with Princess Petronella
The Shocking Trouble on the Planet of Shobble
The Wicked War on the Planet of Whimsy
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