She rubbed her nose on her forearm, lifted the instrument to her lips and flung a silvery arpeggio around the room. The music was a bird, released from its cage and overjoyed to be free. Celebratory fireworks flared in my brain.
She broke off abruptly, grimacing; twisted the two halves of her flute, then tried again. A scale. A flurry of octaves. A snatch of Handel. Kit grabbed some sheet music from the piano stool and began to accompany her. He played a few wrong notes, and some of the keys sounded decidedly honky-tonk, but it was the most gloriously welcome sound I’d ever heard. They were laughing. Sacha was throwing insults at Kit in between phrases and he was hamming up his incompetence, bending low over the keys with a lolling tongue like the village idiot.
I began to pile books onto shelves, feeling an absurd bubble of happiness. Sacha was playing her flute once more. Kit was painting. From the bathroom upstairs I could hear the twins, sloshing. They were probably flooding the place, but who cared? They were barefoot wildmen, Stigs of the Dump. It had all been worth it.
What is it about the early hours? I ended the day happy, but three o’clock found me fretting about my future, my family, my smugly slumbering husband. It was that time of night when the world is at its darkest. My mind seemed to be beating its wings against a dusty window in a room that smelled of hot plastic. At first I obsessed about Sacha’s real father, and how I’d cheated them both. Then I thought about Dad and Lou and how I missed them. The more successful our emigration, the more certain it seemed that we wouldn’t be going home. Suddenly, I ached for home. Homesickness is a rat that eats you from the inside. It has sharp teeth.
I had to be out of that room. I was suffocating. Easing my feet into slippers, I felt my way to the French doors and onto the balcony.
It was deathly quiet outside. The air felt damp and still, but at least I could breathe. I stood with my hands on the dry solidity of the wooden railing, and immediately my attention was caught by a bizarre sight. Just past the garden, where last night had been pasture and sheep, I could see the opaque gleam of a deep and unruffled lake. This large body of water filled the valley, ghostly white. Fascinated, I leaned over the rail, straining my eyes into the dark and thinking of the restless taniwha who cloaked themselves in water.
A silent whisper of wind stirred the surface of the lake, and tendrils of it broke away and began to creep up the side of the valley towards me. I watched with a sense of complete unreality until it dawned on me that the lake was not made of water at all, but mist. I leaned my arms on the rail, feeling wisps of cloud drift over and around me. It seemed to cling, to caress my face with clammy fingers. I stood dozing in a dream world of isolation and profound silence.
That was when I heard the sound. I imagine it was the first stirring of some bird deep in the trees, herald of the dawn chorus. A bellbird, or a tui. It was a hypnotically lovely melody, liquid and piercing. Just five notes. Five notes of almost supernatural clarity. After a hush, it came again.
It sounded exactly like a flute.
At last, they take me to Finn. But they’re playing a cruel trick because this isn’t him—not my beautiful, wilful son. Who is this disfigured doll, his face a death mask? They’ve shaved his shock of dark hair right off. His scalp looks obscene, plucked, and there’s a dressing taped across it. His right arm is in plaster. A web of tubes and wires assaults his body, invades his mouth and nose, and there are monitors on his chest. Worst of all, his eyes are so swollen and bruised that I can’t imagine them opening ever again. Finn looks scarcely human. He looks scarcely alive.
I hear someone sob, feel myself stagger. A youngish man—a nurse, I think—steers me gently into a chair. The cubicle is like the bridge of a spaceship, humming and flashing and beeping with technology.
‘What’s happened to his eyes?’ I ask, horrified.
‘It’s the cranial bleeding,’ says the nurse. ‘People call it raccoon eyes. It’s perfectly normal in head injuries, but I’m afraid it may get worse before it gets better.’
I touch the waxwork face. ‘Can he hear me?’
‘He quite possibly can, at some level.’ The nurse is checking a drip. ‘So talk to him, sing to him, whatever you want.’
I hold a limp hand. I feel self-conscious at first, but I begin to talk. I talk nonsense. I tell Finn about the exciting helicopter ride, and how I’m here beside him, and how it’s breakfast time and Charlie will be up, and how his dad’s coming soon.
His dad. I tap out yet another text:
Kit please call me urgent!!!
Then I press
send
and imagine it flying through the ether, shaped like a little envelope, to land in Kit’s phone. Wherever it is. Wherever
he
is.
In desperation I call my father’s number in Bedford, cursing at the sound of his recorded message. I leave one for him:
Dad, it’s Martha here.
Um . . . please ring me on my mobile.
I read out the number.
We’re in, um,
a bit of trouble.
Then I sit and watch Finn’s breathing. In my state of panic and exhaustion, I honestly believe I can keep him alive as long as I count his every breath. In, out. Every breath is priceless. A watched kettle never boils. A watched child never dies.
In.
Out.
The sky is a black bowl, spangled with stars. My feet are pounding on the boards. And Finn plunges headlong, tiny hands clutching at nothing.
‘Mrs McNamara?’
I jerk upright, eyes snapping open. A figure looms beside my chair, her face a respectful distance from mine. Not young; a stately grandmother with tea-coloured skin. Strong silver brows and white hair, real white old-lady hair, brushed from her forehead and caught into a high ponytail that cascades to her shoulder blades. A plastic ID hangs from a lanyard around her neck.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I woke you.’
‘Just dozing.’
I’m rubbing the stupor from my face as she holds out a creased hand. ‘I’m Kura Pohatu, the paediatric social worker.’
My insides jolt. ‘Social worker?’
‘They tell me Finn’s doing pretty well.’
We both look at him. ‘I don’t know,’ I say faintly. ‘If he’s doing well, why is he hooked up to ten machines?’ I lean across to nuzzle Buccaneer Bob a little closer to Finn’s cheek.
‘A favourite toy?’ asks Kura.
‘Since the day he was born.’ I almost smile at the memory. The twins were eight hours old, and Great-Aunt Sibella’s arrival in the maternity ward seemed like a state visit from the Queen. She was ninety or so by then, swathed in a grey velvet coat and cameo earrings. She evoked adoration in Kit but a fair sprinkling of terror in everyone else, with her piercing eyes and merciless tongue. The nurses practically curtseyed. I sat on the edge of my bed trying not to look bloodstained and clutching a sapphire pendant Kit had given me.
Sibella halted by the babies’ cribs, fishing in a Harrods bag. ‘Be a pirate, nephew,’ she ordered, dropping Buccaneer Bob on top of Finn, who was myopically blowing bubbles. ‘
Not
an accountant.’ She’d brought Charlie a very snazzy remote-controlled car. He was asleep, and didn’t stir when the toy landed right beside his bald head. ‘Bit young, yet. But Kit will enjoy it. He’s always liked fast cars. Fast women, too.’
I laughed, and she peered at me. ‘How’s my nephew coping with a double dose of fatherhood?’
‘Kit? He’s euphoric!’
‘You need to watch him.’
I was bemused. ‘Why, Sibella? Look at this beautiful thing. He gave it to me this morning, just to say thank you for his sons.’ I held the pendant around my neck, and she moved behind me to do up the clasp.
‘Moods,’ she said dourly. ‘He has a temper on him.’
‘Oh, I can handle those. I’ve known him five years now. I’ve seen it all.’
‘Black dog. When
that
visitor is with him, he’s beyond help. Beyond help. You just have to wait it out.’ She lifted my curls to free them from the gold chain. ‘It takes one to know one, you see.’
Three weeks later, Sibella died in her sleep. I think she knew it was coming, and it wasn’t long before I understood what it was she’d been trying to tell me. Her death triggered a terrifying darkness in Kit, like nothing I had ever seen. He tried to stave it off, poor man, but it was inexorable. He told me he’d been there before: after his father died, and again when his first marriage failed. He refused to see a doctor, said he’d been down that road, never again; nothing helped. When life became unbearable he tried to escape by drinking himself into insensibility. For six months, depression stole the joy from our family. Then, for no apparent reason, it began to lift. Kit’s illness became a memory, a ‘bad patch’, something we rarely mentioned and hoped never to experience again.
I can see Kit stumbling, falling over the baby gym, and in the sleepless night pacing around Finn’s cot as the baby wails with colic. Finn has been wailing for hours, and we’re all at the end of our tether. Kit shouts. His fists smash against the bars. The baby screams still louder as I run to him.
Someone’s touching my shoulder. It isn’t Kit. I struggle to understand where I am, ebbing and flowing in waves of dream. Sorry, I say. Sorry. So tired.
Kura is watching me closely. ‘Have you eaten today?’
‘Not since . . . dunno when.’ Not since I shared fish fingers and peas with the boys, and Finn used his fork as a trebuchet and I snapped at him, and his face fell. Oh, how I long to turn back the clock. I would let him flick all the peas on his plate. I’d give him the whole packet and draw him a target.
‘I’d like us to talk,’ says the social worker, ‘and work out how best I can help.’
‘I can’t leave him.’
Her smile is too wide. ‘The staff will page me in a flash if there’s any change.’
‘I could murder a . . .’ I stop, think, and then guiltily ditch the metaphor. ‘I’d love a strong cup of coffee.’
The hospital is shadowy. We pass an incredibly old man who touches the wall with trembling fingers as he navigates a mile of lino. He might have been inching down that corridor for weeks. We pass orderlies wheeling trolleys whose occupants look dead already. We pass the gift shop, skirting around its display of heart-shaped helium balloons on sticks.
The café isn’t busy. We buy our coffee, and Kura insists that I eat a sandwich as well because my little boy doesn’t need me fainting from hunger. She has natural authority. I picture her as Maori royalty, a queen in a cloak of feathers. She chooses a table to one side, far from eavesdroppers, and parks me closest to the wall. Perhaps she wants to block my escape.
‘What we talk about here is in confidence,’ she says. ‘It’s just between you and me, unless someone’s safety is at risk. Do you understand that?’
Yes
, I think.
I understand all too well.
‘Is there anything you need at this stage? Start with practicalities.’
‘A toothbrush,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve just spent my last cent—you don’t think to grab your handbag. Luckily my phone was in my pocket.’
‘Okay . . .’ I can see she’s making a mental note. ‘No problem. Now, who’s at home at the moment?’
‘My other children. Sacha and Charlie, seventeen and five.’
‘Quite an age gap.’
‘Sacha’s my daughter from an earlier relationship.’ I have no intention of discussing Sacha’s paternity with a stranger.
‘Do you need me to arrange care for them?’
‘No. Sacha’s very capable, but she’s in bed with this winter bug that’s going around. So my neighbour’s looking after Charlie.’
‘Who’s the neighbour?’
‘Just a neighbour.’
Bloody woman’s like a terrier. ‘I might know her. I’ve worked in Hawke’s Bay for thirty years.’
I sigh. ‘
His
name is Tama Pardoe. The children know him well. And thank God, he answered his phone last night.’
She looks at me, assessing the information. ‘So this neighbour, Mr Pardoe, came around after the accident?’
‘Yes,’ I agree firmly. ‘
After
. I called him once the helicopter was on its way.’
‘What about Finn’s father?’
‘Kit’s been in Dublin. He’s an artist, and he’s just had his first exhibition.’
‘He must be rushing back?’
Fearful tears burn my eyes. ‘That’s the awful thing. He doesn’t know yet . . . I’m still trying to get hold of him.’ I don’t want questions about when Kit’s due to land, what flight he’s on, so I deflect them. ‘Oh! Those finger bruises. I’ve solved the mystery. Finn slipped in the bath last night. I grabbed his arm to try to stop him.’ I reach out my hand, snatching at an imaginary child. ‘He bruises very easily.’
The social worker looks non-committal. She’s storing the explanation away, ready to write up her notes. No doubt she will talk to Sutherland and the giraffe, and ask if my story holds water. ‘How long have you lived in New Zealand, Martha?’
‘A year. We’ve got a lifestyle block out at Torutaniwha.’
The silver brows rise a fraction. ‘Oh! Way out there? Unusual, for an English family.’
‘It’s beautiful.’ I tell her about the little school, and the beach, and the river. She listens carefully, laughing when I describe Bleater Brown, our pet lamb. And even though I know she’s merely doing her job, establishing rapport, I find myself giving her my life history. Well, some of it. The concise and abridged version.
‘It sounds as though you haven’t looked back,’ she says.
‘Not too much.’
‘Got any family here?’
I shrug regretfully. ‘Just the five of us. I’m very close to my sister and father in England, so we talk a lot on the phone.’
‘You must miss them.’
‘I do. Of course I do. It’s been a massive upheaval.’ Suddenly, I’m tired of this game. ‘And yes, we’re very homesick sometimes. Yes, we’re isolated. And yes, sometimes it’s bloody hard. But no, you’re wrong if you think I harmed my own child.’
She watches me without comment.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, rubbing my forehead. ‘I’m very, very tired.’
‘Could you take me through what happened on the balcony?’
‘Um, do I have to? It’s so . . . awful.’ My hands shake at the memory, and coffee slops onto the table. I’m like the old man in the corridor, trembling. I imprison my hands between my knees.