After the Fall

by Norman, Charity

  ‘Dad,’ I whispered, blinking.

  ‘Don’t imprison it in a box,’ he said, lifting it out of the velvet case and wrapping the gold band around my wrist. ‘Wear it. Better to wear such a lovely thing and lose it than keep it hidden away.’

  Lost for words, I hugged him frantically as though it was for the last time. Kit did much the same. Then Dad turned to Sacha, arms held wide. ‘This is a great adventure,’ he told her. ‘Grasp it with both your hands, my beautiful girl. Grasp it. Grasp it!’

  Sacha’s generous mouth twisted. She threw her arms around his neck and hung on. I had to prise her away. As I watched him take his leave of the twins, their cheerful ignorance almost broke my heart. They didn’t— couldn’t—comprehend that they might never see their grandpa again. They behaved as though they were just off to Wales for the week, on a jolly jaunt. Dad caught hold of one under each arm and lifted them clear off the ground. Closing his eyes, he squeezed his grandsons to his chest. It made them giggle and wriggle.

  Finally, he straightened. He saluted smartly, winked at me and turned his back. Swallowing hard, I watched my father walk away. I watched until he’d disappeared down the escalator.

  Long after he’d gone I kept scanning the space where I’d last seen him, hoping for another glimpse. I was still watching when Finn hit Charlie over the head with a water bottle and all hell broke loose.

  *

  Three hours later, flight NZ001 began its ponderous run-up to the ultimate high jump. We sat stunned in a roar of sound, vibration and bereavement. Sacha’s face was turned to the window. The boys were cheering. Kit reached across the high-fiving twins and fiercely laced my fingers through his.

  With a final jerk we felt England fall away beneath us, and then a grind and shudder as the landing gear was lifted.

  We’d left our country.

  Six

  The hospital night wears on. Hours pass, but there’s no news of Finn. No call from Kit either, and he isn’t answering his phone.

  I float in a pall of dread, staring in nauseated fixation at the covers of old magazines. Every time I hear footsteps, I brace myself. Finally I’m on my feet, haunting the hospital corridors with Buccaneer Bob against my chest. The pirate doll looks sad. We are restless ghosts, he and I. We don’t exist.

  Finn is five years old. Just five. He fell silently in his Mr Men pyjamas. Mr Happy. Mr Tickle. Mr Bounce, who bounced too much.

  Sometime during these nightmare hours, the police pay me a visit. Two broad young men, pacing sombrely down the disinfected corridor on their shiny shoes. They’re too big for the place. They have thick stab-proof vests and murmuring radios, and they walk in step. Perfectly matched, like bookends. Like twins.

  I see my Charlie walking alone through life with an empty space at his side; alone at the school dance, the graduation, the wedding. Not a ghost of his other half. Not even a shadow. Just an empty space. Perhaps Charlie will walk alone forever. You might as well cut off his arms.

  Just routine, say the twins in uniform, pulling out reassuring nods and notebooks as they sit down. Sorry to intrude at this difficult time. Now, er, what happened, exactly?

  I tell them how Finn wandered out of his room and climbed onto the rail, and then he fell. And I saw him falling, and I ran, but I couldn’t save him.

  One of the policemen scratches his nose, glancing covertly at his watch. But the other—actually, he’s older than I thought—gazes into my face without so much as a blink. He’s losing his hair. He has pale eyes. ‘Did anyone else witness the accident, Mrs McNamara?’

  ‘No, they were all asleep.’

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘Kit’s on his way back from Dublin.’

  Martha! yells my mother, arriving unannounced and uninvited. How can you? But I chase her out. I chase her right out, and I slam the door on her. Mentally dusting off my hands, I look the man in the eye. ‘I haven’t been able to contact him.’

  They offer to help. What flight is Kit on? He can be met.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say firmly, ‘but he’ll contact me once he’s landed. He’ll turn on his phone and see all the texts. I must tell him myself.’

  The older one seems to think for a moment, and I stop breathing. Then he asks me who else was in the house when Finn fell.

  I rub my eyes. ‘My daughter, Sacha.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Sacha? Seventeen. But she was out for the count. Been off school with flu. Then there was Charlie, Finn’s twin. He was fast asleep too—well, obviously, it happened at midnight.’

  His pen circles above the notebook. ‘Nobody else?’

  He’s watching my mouth now, as though lies might come sidling out with labels on. He’s onto you, hisses Mum, with her echoing sibilance. Minimum words, maximum damage; that’s always been her special skill. He knows you weren’t alone on that balcony.

  ‘Nobody else,’ I whisper, and tears slide from the corners of my eyes. ‘I was too slow.’

  The policemen shut their notebooks. They have other things to be doing, I’m sure. More pressing jobs: criminals to catch, reports to type, cheeseburgers to eat. The pale-eyed one gives me a leaflet with his name scribbled on it.

  Once they’ve disappeared around the corner, hospital noises begin to blur in my inner ear. Sleep deprivation, I suppose, and the unreality of disaster. Squeaks of trolley wheels, murmuring of voices, shoes softly thudding on lino; all muffled in white cloud.

  Missed an opportunity there.

  ‘No. Yes. No. I don’t know what to do.’

  You can’t sweep this one under the carpet.

  ‘You don’t really exist, you know. You’re just an embodiment of my conscience.’

  This has gone too far, Martha!

  ‘Mum, I’m desperate. If I make the wrong decision my family will be obliterated. How about a bit of unconditional love?’

  I hear her sniff. Honestly, I swear she sniffs. All those years being dead hasn’t sweetened the bitter tang of her.

  ‘Okay,’ I concede. ‘Perhaps not unconditional love. But do you think you could manage forgiveness, after all this time?’

  Finn may die, she retorts. Who will you be forgiving then, Martha Norris?

  She has a point.

  Seven

  That was a long, long journey.

  Twenty-four hours in a metal cylinder with Finn and Charlie, and anyone would need to lie on a psychiatrist’s couch. I’m sure the four hundred or so other passengers all suffer from post-traumatic stress to this day. They probably have recurrent flashbacks of cabin-fevered fiends—one blond and cherubic, the other dark and diabolical—pelting up and down the aisle, upsetting the trolleys and howling like tortured banshees just when everyone had finally put on their eye masks and nodded off.

  Mercifully, jetlag has somewhat blurred the memory. Also faded, like dreams, are the August days we spent in Auckland, struggling to stay awake during the day and sleep through the upside-down nights. We’d left our beloved English summer, hay bales in the rain, and landed slap-bang in the middle of Antipodean winter. We stocked up on warm clothes, opened bank accounts and bought a people carrier from a car shark. It all seemed fresh and hazy at the same time, like a bracing swim on a hangover. After four days as tourists in the City of Sails we headed for Hawke’s Bay.

  I often think our new life began in a single moment, as we crossed the Napier-Taupo hills. Kit had taken over the wheel and was having a wonderful time on the hairpin bends, slamming the gear stick across and making very childish rally-car noises. I’m surprised nobody was carsick. We’d considered filling up with fuel as we left the lakeside town of Taupo but decided to press on. Since then we hadn’t passed a single petrol station. Indeed the hills seemed uninhabited, save for isolated dwellings with paint-peeling porches and murderous-looking hounds. I expected tumbleweed. You could almost hear the strumming of the banjo. The only human beings we saw were the drivers of monstrous logging trucks whose brakes hissed like man-eating pressure cookers.

 
‘You wouldn’t want to break down out here,’ remarked Kit blithely. I leaned past him to check the fuel gauge. It didn’t look too healthy.

  For miles the road wound through New Zealand’s native bush: subtropical rainforest complete with giant ferns, creepers and cabbage trees that looked like palms. Every bend brought another sharp-intake-of-breath view of raw-boned mountains and white waterfalls. These weren’t quiet English hills. They were angular and rock-strewn, like a Chinese painting; jagged peaks and drifting swathes of cloud.

  ‘It’s the jungle,’ murmured Finn, clutching Buccaneer Bob to his cheek and stroking his left ear. ‘Jungle bells, jungle bells, jungle all the way.’

  ‘Are there snakes?’ Charlie’s voice was muffled by Blue Blanket.

  ‘No snakes!’ yelled Kit gleefully.

  ‘Does Bagheera live here?’ The twins had watched The Jungle Book on the plane.

  ‘There he is!’ squealed Finn, pointing into the shadows. ‘Bagheera— I seed him looking at me from out of a tree.’

  Soon after that, all three children were asleep. It was night-time in Bedfordshire. The boys lolled in their booster seats, soft legs dangling, baby jaws slack. Sacha was holding Finn’s hand. The locket Ivan had given her— the one with both their photographs inside—was tangled around her hair. She never took it off.

  Gradually, native bush gave way to forestry and farmland. As we crossed the last summit, Kit swerved onto a verge and cut the engine. In the sudden silence, he and I stepped out and stood leaning against the bonnet.

  Above and around us rolled an immense pine forest, but the valley ahead opened its arms as though welcoming us to the coast. In the distance lay the Pacific, glittering in a mist of opal light, beckoning all the way to Chile. On the coast, as unexpectedly lovely as a mirage, we glimpsed a little city.

  ‘Must be Napier,’ I said, squinting at the map. ‘Hastings is beyond, but I don’t think we can see it from here.’

  From our height, distance and state of jetlag Napier seemed a Greek village. White houses jumbled up the slope of a hill that rose straight out of the sea, like the shell of a giant turtle.

  ‘We’ve made it,’ said Kit. ‘This is home.’

  We based ourselves in a motel and tried to hit the ground running. Napier was a small city—about fifty thousand people—with a Mediterranean climate, a thriving port and Pacific beaches. That much we knew from the guidebook. What we hadn’t expected was its picture-postcard beauty. Flattened by a catastrophic earthquake in 1931, it had risen phoenix-like from the ashes. The result was an art-deco town with wedding-cake buildings and a seafront boardwalk. On our first morning we had breakfast in a café by the marina. We sat out on a wooden deck in the winter sun, gazing across the clinking masts of yachts to snow-capped hills. I couldn’t quite believe it was real.

  An affable estate agent called Allan, who knew we’d brought sterling and sensed an obscenely large commission, devoted himself to showing us what he called ‘lifestyle blocks’. Allan looked about sixty, with hair that swirled into a shining chocolate peak like a walnut whip. I think he had the wrong idea about us at first, and we hated everything he showed us. Modern monstrosities they were, on over-manicured subdivisions; not at all what we’d expected of this enterprising, militantly nuclear-free country. This was the land of the All Blacks and the Rainbow Warrior; this was Mordor and Rivendell. We weren’t ready for electric garage doors and ludicrously phallic gateposts. Anyway, they cost too much; the exchange rate had been hopeless. We rejected them all, but Allan had the patience of Job.

  ‘Impress your friends!’ he crowed, throwing open the doors to yet another stone-grey kitchen. We trooped in, making awed noises about the view—which, incidentally, was stunning: orchards, basking in golden sunshine. Then Kit and I exchanged despairing glances.

  ‘Not your cup of tea, is it?’ Allan looked baffled. ‘Homes of this calibre at this price rarely come on the market, you know. The discerning buyer—’ ‘Look, Allan,’ said Kit, holding up his hands. ‘It’s still more than we can afford. And anyway, I couldn’t live in a house that’s designed purely to impress. This place is just a monument to somebody’s ego.’

  ‘Kit!’ squeaked Sacha, rolling her eyes. ‘You are so embarrassing.’

  ‘We don’t have any friends to impress,’ I explained sheepishly. ‘Not within twelve thousand miles, anyway. C’mon, Allan. Isn’t there anything a bit . . . I don’t know . . . older? Less, um, tidy?’

  Kit pointed out of the window. ‘Like that, over the valley—see? Bit small, that one, but you get the idea. Those old weatherboard things.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. You’re looking at the traditional New Zealand construction method,’ said Allan, following Kit’s gaze towards a white wooden cottage wreathed in foliage. I bet there was a rocking chair on the front porch.

  ‘They’re lovely,’ I said.

  ‘They’re a pain in the backside. Millstone around your necks. You have to paint them every five years or the wood rots away. They’re draughty. Dark. No indoor–outdoor flow.’

  ‘They’re still lovely,’ I insisted. ‘Find me one of those.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Sacha smiled up at Allan from the floor, where she was tickling Charlie’s tummy. ‘Sorry to waste your time. My family are idiots.’

  Allan twinkled at her and rubbed his chin. ‘Okay,’ he mused. ‘I’m thinking . . . you need at least four bedrooms, ideally more, bit of land, some kind of space for Kit’s painting . . . and you’ll be working north of Napier, Martha?’

  ‘That’s right. Capeview Lodge.’

  ‘D’you mind living in the Wop-wops?’

  ‘The where?’

  ‘The Bundu,’ said Allan, helpfully. ‘The back of beyond.’

  Finn had been watching the estate agent with goggle-eyed interest. If he stood very straight, the tip of his sticking-up hair was on a level with the man’s waistband. ‘Will I ever talk like him?’ he asked, jabbing a thumb.

  ‘No, silly.’ Charlie leaned down from Sacha’s lap, spinning a Dinky car across acres of concrete floor. ‘We’ll nevereverever sound like them. They talk in baby language.’

  Sacha yelped and clapped her hand over his mouth, but Allan bent to ruffle Charlie’s curls. I think he genuinely liked children. ‘There’s a Grand Old Lady with the acreage you’re looking for. It’s way up north, in tiger country. Much longer commute than I’d like, but you Poms are probably used to that, and it’s on a school bus route. Needs, erm . . .’ He faltered a little, looking for a euphemism. ‘Needs a bit of TLC. Home handyman’s paradise. Might suit you.’

  I grabbed the car keys from Kit’s pocket. ‘Lead on!’

  ‘It’s quite a long way,’ warned the estate agent.

  He never spoke a truer word. After a lifetime of following Allan’s truck down deserted country roads through banjo country I’d begun to doubt the man’s sanity. Perhaps we’d pushed him over the edge; he was leading us into the wilderness and a slow death. Maybe he was going to tie us all to trees and use us for target practice. The road meandered through landscape that was a little like Scotland, and a little like a Pacific Island, and a lot like nowhere else on earth. There was pine forestry with wisps of cloud rising like steam; there were ravines, and black cattle, and glimpses of rocky coast. I was groping for the map, last seen under my seat among two weeks’ worth of rotting chips and sweet wrappers, when Allan flicked an indicator and turned up a farm track.

  A rusting letterbox squatted by the gate. It proclaimed, in faded paint: 6001—Patupaiarehe. And in a different script, hawke’s bay today, which I knew was the local newspaper. It all sounded vaguely intrepid.

  We crossed the cattle grid with a satisfying rumble. Our people carrier— suddenly puny and low-slung—tilted unhappily, jolting as we negotiated boulders in the drive. Charlie, who’d taken off his seatbelt when we turned off the road, was bounced so high that his hair actually touched the roof. Allan’s rugged four-wheel drive crunched ahead, throwing up a festive swirl of dust. We ground our way
uphill past grazing sheep, willows and stands of scrubby cypress trees before turning along a ridge. Then Allan swung around a hairpin bend and up an even wilder incline.

  ‘He has to be joking,’ I clucked, spinning the wheel with both hands. Stones and dust slid beneath our tyres. Terrifyingly far below, a river sparkled cheerily as it wandered in a lazy blue arc between limestone cliffs.

  ‘Oh my God,’ gasped Sacha. ‘We’re all going to die.’

  I pictured our car slipping, sliding backwards down that rocky precipice. I could hear the screaming of the twins as we plunged into the cold water. Sweating now, I changed into first gear, revving the accelerator and letting out the clutch with a shaking foot.

  ‘Christ,’ breathed Kit beside me. It was a prayer rather than an oath. I’m fairly sure he crossed himself. He’s never a better Catholic than in times of peril. Useful trick, that: instant faith at the touch of a button, but no nagging guilt when life is going well.

  ‘I want a four-wheel drive,’ I whimpered. ‘Right now.’

  Abruptly, the ground levelled out and looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth. The drive—suddenly pretending to be regal and gracious— widened into an open space under the shade of a wise old tree before disappearing into the canopy of native bush on the far side. The house was waiting patiently, watching us from under heavy lids. I had an impression of cream weatherboard, of wide verandahs and magnolias. It reminded me, immediately and irrevocably, of Kit’s Great-Aunt Sibella.

  ‘I recognise this place!’ I cried happily, craning my neck for a better look. I’d seen it from my magic carpet as I floated in the dark. Perhaps, without realising it, I’d been looking for this very house ever since we came to Hawke’s Bay. Arriving was like sinking into one of those really comfortable sofas you can’t get out of gracefully.

  We passed a couple of sheds and pulled up next to Allan under that gnarled grandfather of a tree. It was a walnut, I later discovered, and it had seen a bit of life. Jubilant to be free, the boys leaped out and began to swing like gibbons on tyres that hung from the ancient boughs.