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.'
'So he was ... dead?' said Erika as she stood at the sink, scrubbing her hands. People always asked if she'd been in the medical profession because of the way she washed her hands. When she was in public she tried to be less obviously rigorous, but now that she was home with Oliver, she could scrub and scrub without worrying that someone would diagnose her with OCD. Oliver never judged.
'Yes, Erika,' said Oliver. He sounded aggravated. 'He was very dead. He'd been dead for some time. Weeks and weeks, I'd say.' His voice broke.
'Oh. I see. Oh dear.' Erika turned from the sink. Oliver looked very pale. His hands lay limply on his knees and he sat upright, his feet flat on the floor, like a kid in the throes of terrible remorse, sitting outside the school principal's office.
She took a breath. Her husband was upset. Extremely upset by the look of it. So he probably wanted and needed to 'share'. People with dysfunctional childhoods like hers didn't have the best interpersonal skills when it came to relationships. Well, it was just a fact. No one had modelled a healthy relationship for her. No one had modelled a healthy relationship for Oliver either. They had their dysfunctional childhoods in common. That's why Erika had invested close to six thousand dollars to date in high-quality therapy. The cycles of dysfunction and mental illness did not have to carry over from generation to generation. You just had to educate yourself.
Erika went and sat on the couch next to Oliver and indicated by her body language that she was ready to listen. She made eye contact. She touched his forearm. She would use hand sanitiser once they finished talking. She really didn't want to catch that horrible cold.
'Was he ...' She didn't want to know the answers to any of the questions she knew she should ask. 'Was he ... what, in bed?' She thought of a maniacally grinning corpse sitting upright in a bed, one rotting hand on the coverlet.
'He was at the bottom of the stairs. As soon as I opened the door we could smell it.' Oliver shuddered.
'God,' said Erika.
Smell was one of her issues. Oliver always laughed at the way she'd drop rubbish in the bin and then jump back so the smell couldn't catch her.