Second Chances
Praise for
Freeing Grace
‘Intelligent and warm.’
Sunday Age
‘Last month I heralded
Room
as the best novel in a decade, but hot on its heels—as strong a contender—is this wonderful story about a baby waiting to be claimed by either a bereaved teenage father or two utterly lovable characters who have tried everything and been unlucky. No one is a villain here and the tale is satisfyingly complex and involving.’
Australian
Country Style
‘Charity Norman writes about social issues, as does Joanna Trollope, and there are similarities in this about commitment and adoption and dysfunctional family that will remind the enthralled reader of Trollope. You will be intrigued, and utterly delighted with this complex tale.
Freeing
Grace
ticks all the boxes for a fine narrative to entertain, and inform, you.’
Ballarat Courier
‘A tender and thought-provoking story.’
Launceston Examiner
‘This is a compelling, accomplished and often dark debut that takes lots of twists and turns.’
West Australian
‘A touching story that is gripping for its emotional content and a page-turner plot-wise . . .
Freeing Grace
will easily fill a few warm days in a hammock this summer.’
South Coast Register
‘A compelling look at the nature of home and family.’
Who Weekly
‘A lot of humour and heart . . . it marks an assured first outing for Norman . . . essential warmth and heart.’
Sunday Mail
‘Warmhearted and sensitive . . . beautifully bittersweet.’
Sound Telegraph
Charity Norman was born in Uganda and brought up in successive draughty vicarages in Yorkshire and Birmingham. After several years’ travel she became a barrister, specialising in crime and family law in the northeast of England. Also a mediator, she is passionate about the power of communication to slice through the knots. In 2002, realising that her three children had barely met her, she took a break from the law and moved with her family to New Zealand. Her first novel,
Freeing Grace
, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2010.
Second Chances
CHARITY
NORMAN
Second Chances
First published in 2012
Copyright © Charity Norman 2012
The children’s song on p. 168 appears to be a playground song which originated in the 1950s or earlier.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian
Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
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Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
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ISBN 978 1 74237 957 9
Set in 11.5/17 pt Minion by Post Pre-press Group, Australia
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Paul
Hawke’s Bay Today
Local News
In the early hours of this morning, the Lowe Corporation rescue helicopter was
scrambled to airlift a five-year-old boy from a coastal address north of Napier.
He was flown to Hawke’s Bay Hospital where he underwent emergency surgery
for extensive internal injuries.
It is understood that the child was injured as a result of a fall from a
first-floor balcony. However, hospital staff declined to speculate on the circumstances
of the incident.
‘I can confirm that a small boy with life-threatening injuries was admitted
earlier today,’ said a spokesperson. ‘At this stage it would be inappropriate to
comment further. Police and child protection agencies have been alerted, and
comprehensive enquiries are ongoing. I am not in a position to release any
details until that investigation has taken its course.’
The injured child remains in the hospital’s intensive care unit, where his
condition is reported to be critical. His name has yet to be released.
Contents
Finn fell.
I don’t think, if I used a million words, I could call up the horror. It isn’t a matter of words.
My son plunged headlong, tiny hands clutching at nothing. He never made a sound. I can see his pyjamas disappearing into the greedy dark. Mr Men pyjamas, from his Christmas stocking. I can see his pirate doll, cartwheeling out of reach.
No moon yet. In films, tragedy always strikes during a torrential storm amid lightning and thunder, and the heroine’s hair is plastered to her tear-streaked cheeks—though she’s wearing waterproof mascara so no harm done. But it was a calm night, when Finn fell. A starry winter’s night, and the hills were gentle swells against a singing sky. There was only the screech of a plover in the fields; the mother-in-law bird, bossy and reassuring. A calm New Zealand night.
And then the world exploded. I can still hear the swish of bushes. I can feel the thud as my baby hit the ground. Really, I can feel it. It shook the house. It shook the hills. It shook the heavens. I hurled myself down the stairs, trying to outrun this unholy terror.
Something lay lifeless beside a lemon tree, a dark little mound in the garden of my dream house. I thought my boy was dead. I touched the white face, feeling the miracle of his pulse, bargaining with a God in whose existence I’d never believed. You will, too. Oh yes you will, if ever your own nightmares come alive. You will pray with all your heart, and all your soul, and with some part of your brain that you’ve never used before, never even knew was there. Believe me, you will. At such a time, atheism is a luxury you can’t afford.
It took so long for them to come.
So
long, while Finn hung suspended over the abyss of death, and fear pressed us both into the black earth. Buccaneer Bob sprawled close by. Where Finn goes, his pirate goes too. At last I sensed the throb of rotor blades beating through the pitiless dark, the rhythm of rescue; brilliant lights rising over the hillside. The Heavenly Host. They landed in our front paddock in a hurricane of sound, sprinted towards my waving torch—two men in red coveralls, not a choir of dazzling angels—and worked with urgency and few words: fixed a line into Finn’s arm and a brace around his neck, muttering together about his spine as they lifted him across the lawn and into the helicopter.
Neither asked how it happened. Not yet. They knew—as I knew—that this could be Finn’s last journey. He’s in trouble, they were thinking. Head injury, internal bleeding, God knows what else. In all likelihood, this one isn’t coming home.
We were gone within minutes, Finn and I, lifting tail-first into the future.
Even as we landed, people and equipment appeared out of nowhere, mobbing us in an efficient scrum. Through a fog of panic I heard that Finn’s blood pressure was falling, that heart and respiration rates had increased. Figures were called out—eighty–forty; sixty–thirty—with increasing insistence. They cut away his favourite pyjamas and covered him with a worn flannel blanket. Now he was anonymous.
I was with him when they began a blood transfusion, when they fed a plastic tube through the gentle mouth and into his airways, when his lonely body moved through the massive complexity of the CT scanner. I couldn’t hold him, I couldn’t care for him. I was useless. Soon they took him away, wheeling him rapidly through impassable doors to where surgeons’ knives were waiting.
I know someone led me to this quiet cubicle and tried to explain what was happening. They’ve done their best, but my mind has seized. I’m hunched in a plastic chair, my fingers wrapped around a white mug that has inexplicably appeared in one hand. I clutch Buccaneer Bob’s floppy body to my chest. We’re trying to comfort one another.
Finn is alone under vicious white lights and the eyes of adult strangers. They’ll be discussing the weather as they cut my baby open. Hardest frost on record . . . nearly two metres of snow up at Ruapehu, going to extend the ski season. We’re losing him, says the anaesthetist.
A woman ambles past. Another patient’s mother, I imagine. She has wide hips and a comfortable bread-dough face, and she reminds me of Louisa. I’d give anything to see my sister’s matronly form in a flowered skirt, swinging solidly up the hospital corridor with her arms held out wide and love in her smile. I’d give anything to see an old friend, someone who likes and trusts me because we go back a lifetime. I’ve no old friends here. In this whole country, this whole hemisphere, there’s not one person outside my family—no, including my family—who truly knows me.
I curl my legs onto the sharp plastic of the chair, knees pulled up. I know I look a sorry sight, a bag lady on a bad day. A passing nurse obviously thinks so because she turns into my cubicle, tugging on the curtain. She’s a tidy creature with a curling fringe. When she speaks, I dully register a familiar accent. Liverpool, I’d say.
‘How’re you doing?’ It’s made-in-China sympathy, but better than nothing.
I shake my head, driving my teeth into my knees. I’m rocking.
‘Whoops! You’re going to spill that.’ She takes the mug from me, resting it on a stainless-steel trolley. ‘What a horrible thing to happen. He’s getting the best possible care, that’s the main thing.’
Then she asks the question. She’s the first, but I know she won’t be the last.
‘How did he come to fall?’
Honesty is the best policy!
hisses Mum, right in my ear. Makes me jump. She’s long dead, my mother, but that doesn’t stop her and her clichés. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not having auditory hallucinations, nor—so far as I know—am I a medium. My mother’s personality was so assertive and censorious that she took up residence in my head when I was about three. I’ve been trying to evict her ever since. Sometimes she disappears for months at a time, but always pops up to twist the knife when the going gets tough.
The truth sets us free!
she whispers now.
I think about the truth. I really do. I turn it over and over with a sense of horrified disconnection. I look at it from every angle, like a 3-D image on a computer screen. And on that screen I see police, and a courtroom, and a prison cell. I see disaster.
Finn’s a sleepwalker, I tell the kind nurse. Always has been. It’s funny because his twin brother never does it. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. I should have locked their door. It’s my fault.
That last part is true, at least.
‘Nah. Could have happened to anybody,’ she croons, in comfortable ignorance. She isn’t really listening. People don’t. ‘It’s an accident waiting to happen when they mess about in their sleep. I’ve got one who did it till he was thirteen. We lost him in a resort in Fiji, two years old!’
‘Awful.’
‘Worst ten minutes of my life. Lucky he wasn’t floating face down in the pool.’
‘Lucky.’ I think of Finn, whose luck ran out.
‘So what brought
you
out here?’ she asks.
It’s a perennial question. This country is home to many immigrants, and every one of us has our story. I wonder how many tell the whole truth.
‘My husband,’ I say. ‘He fell in love with the place years ago, always wanted to come back. You?’
‘Married a Kiwi. Broke my mum’s heart, but what can you do?’
I try to answer, but Finn is falling. He’s falling, and I hear the thud. The nurse pulls some tissues from a box, handing them to me with a sisterly rub of my shoulder.