‘I said to Lisa, you’re a dumb moll. Look at him, he’s out cold. We’ve got to get help. The kids were just carryin’ on so much. We took Jake out of the bath and put him in dry clothes on the lounge-room floor.’
And, of course, we knew that Lisa did call the ambulance. She called triple-O and said, ‘My kid’s been bashed.’
Now, I gather that Lauren has formed the opinion, in her own mind, that she caused Jake’s death by jumping off that bunk. I want to tell you: I’m not so sure about that. Yes, Jake had a dent in the head, but that could just as well have come from one of the adults shoving him in that damn bath. Maybe he took a kick in the head from Peter or even from Lisa, that they aren’t owning up to. We don’t know. Nobody knows. The point is, Jake died at the hands of his mother and her boyfriend, and I defy anybody to say different. And that’s why it made no sense to make the whole thing about Lauren jumping off the bunk public. What would have been the point? She wasn’t to blame. The terror she felt that day, I don’t want to think about it. So yes, we told the judge the whole story, but not the press, and I’m only guessing that more than a few of the social workers knew about it, because before long, a version of what happened was doing the rounds. But the end result was, Lisa went away for fifteen years; and Peter went away, too.
I would have liked for the parents to have got a bit more punishment, because in my opinion, whichever one of them was telling the story that was closest to the truth, both were monsters, and Lauren was just a kid. Our hope for her – my hope, anyway – was that she’d either forget it or put it behind her. In any case I wanted her to get on with her life, but I see now that’s a bit hard to do, when you’re carrying stuff like that around.
Lauren Cashman
If Harley had asked me that day in the Niagara what I remembered about what happened to Jake, I would have told him, ‘I don’t remember much.’ Because that’s true: I don’t remember much.
I remember that Jake had always been a good boy. It was Harley who was a handful. Harley had got into scraps and he liked to carry on. Harley fell out of trees and pulled stuff out of cupboards and drew on the walls. Jake was not like that. When he got smacked it was for no reason and even then, he wouldn’t cry out. He’d sulk a bit. He’d object to the injustice of it, but he didn’t cry out.
We were pretty close. Sometimes, at night, if we’d been whacked around the head for something or other, he’d sneak down from his bunk and come into my room and we’d tickle each other, on the bottom of the feet. We’d try not to laugh. We knew if we got caught there’d be hell to pay.
We weren’t supposed to lie, either, except when Mum told us to, so I think that Jake was telling the truth when he said he hadn’t touched Hayley, not that it helped him.
She told me to lie that day. She told me to lie to the police and to lie to the social worker and to lie in court. I used to wonder whether she did that to protect me, but I’ve got to be realistic. When I finally broke down and told police the truth she didn’t go crazy trying to shield me from my own admissions. She went nuts about the fact that I’d dobbed on her. Never once did I hear from anyone that she’d said, ‘Look, Lauren had nothing to do with this. Okay, it wasn’t a stranger, it was me, or it was him, but it wasn’t her.’ I thought maybe, before she died, there would be a letter, a note, something, because of course we never said a word to each other after that day with the police on Barrett, but there was nothing.
I’ve asked myself why I broke down that day, why I blabbed, and I think the closest I can get to an explanation is that I wasn’t frightened of telling the truth. That came later, with people I didn’t know that well, but there comes a point when you just can’t lie any more, not to people you love, and I suppose I reached that point with myself, and in the car with Harley, that day we drove out to his mum’s place in Exford.
We were maybe an hour from her door. I took a breath. I said, ‘Harley, I’ve got to tell you something.’
He said, ‘You don’t have to say anythin’.’
I said, ‘I do. I have to tell you this. I jumped, Harley. I jumped off the bunk.’
I waited for him to steer off the road, but he didn’t. He just didn’t, and I suppose there was a minute there when I thought, ‘He hasn’t heard me. I’m going to have to say it again,’ but he’d heard me. He said, ‘I know.’
I said, ‘You do?’
He said, ‘Yeah.’
I said, ‘Do you know everything?’
He said, ‘I reckon I do. They went ballistic because Jake was supposedly touching up Hayley, yeah? But I reckon that’s not right.’
I said, ‘I don’t know whether he did or not. I don’t think it’s right, either.’
Harley said, ‘He was what, five?’
I said, ‘Five.’
He said, ‘So they went nuts and they had us going crazy, too. This isn’t news to me.’
I said, ‘How do you know?’
He said, ‘How do you know?’
I said, ‘I was older.’
He said, ‘Yeah, but we were both just kids.’
It was such a relief to hear those words: We were both just kids.
We didn’t talk much after that. We smoked cigarettes. We made small comments about the things we saw out the windows. We listened to the radio. Freeway turned into suburban road, and then into the gravel outside his mum’s place. There was a long moment of silence in the car, and then Harley said, ‘Well, we’re home.’
From my seat behind the dirty windscreen, I could see what Harley couldn’t: his mother was standing behind the screen door waiting for us to move. Harley went to open his door. Ruby came out on the porch, leaving the door swinging behind her. She had one hand on a walking stick. She was wearing some kind of robe.
Looking at her, I didn’t feel anything. I just thought, ‘So that’s the woman who raised my brother.’ I tried to conjure up some emotion about that, but there was none.
She took a few steps across the porch and said, ‘Hey, honey.’
Harley had got out of his side of the car. He said, ‘Hey, honey.’ This ‘honey’ business is a joke between them. She calls him honey; he calls her honey; they both called Tony honey.
I looked over the roof of the car.
‘You must be Lauren,’ she said.
I said, ‘Hello, Mrs Porter.’
What was she thinking, at that moment? I didn’t know how much she’d read in the newspapers. Harley had told me that she wouldn’t give ‘a rat’s arse’ about the affair with Bass but that she’d be terribly concerned about Baby Boyce because she herself lived with a disability. She’d want to know what I thought about whether or not the child would have lived or died.
Harley was two steps ahead of me, on his way up to the porch, but Ruby wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at me. I walked toward her. She dropped her cane. I went to shake her hand, but she gathered me into a bosom that smelled of tobacco. I wasn’t used to being that close to people. I didn’t like it at all. ‘Lauren,’ she said. ‘The long-lost Lauren Cashman.’
We curled like kittens into the Papysan chairs. We talked a bit. We had some kind of lentil dish for tea and we drank Bacardi. It wasn’t long before I found that I was no longer sitting upright and trying to be polite. Ruby kicked off her shoes and when Tony came in he gave me a big bear hug and undid the buttons at the centre of his shirt. Harley put his silicon arm on the coffee table, upright, and put a cigarette between the fingers.
At some point, I began to have fun. The evening wore on. I must have been tired and maybe I even nodded off for a moment, because I felt Tony tucking a quilt around my chair. Part of me wanted to feign sleep, so I could hear what they might say about me when they thought I wasn’t listening, but sleep came, and apparently it was only when Harley had enough of my snoring that he kicked my ankle and escorted me to my room.
I wanted to sleep in the room that had been his as a child, but he told me to bugger off and put me in the spare room instead.
I woke
to the sound of Ruby in the kitchen, hobbling between the wooden benches.
I said, ‘Good morning, Mrs Porter.’
She said, ‘For the love of God, Lauren. The three-years-olds at the childcare centre call me Ruby, so I don’t see why you don’t.’
She is Ruby to me now, of course, and I suppose I’d have to say that she’s also … well, not family, but one of my dear friends. Harley is my brother. He’s also my flatmate. We live together on Sydney’s northern beaches. I’m no longer an aide, I’m at nurse’s college. Harley lets me live rent-free.
We don’t see much of Hayley. There’s no animosity between us. It’s just that whenever we go to Melbourne she says she can’t fit us in, or see us for long. I went through the process of telling her what I remembered about DeCastella Drive, but I’m not sure what any of it means to her. All she said was, ‘I don’t remember Jake,’ and then, ‘I don’t want to talk about it with Jezeray around.’
As for my relationship with Jacob, well, in the week I spent at Exford I spoke to Ruby about him. She wanted me to do so from the comfort of her expansive lap, with my head buried against her soft bosom, but I kept my distance and hid myself behind a swirl of cigarette smoke. She listened and said things like, ‘Every thing happens for a reason,’ and ‘You must have been so afraid.’
I sobbed so hard that I felt I had to apologise to her the next morning, but she dismissed my concerns with a wave of the spatula and went on making pancakes.
After that, I went through a stage where I had to say Jacob’s name out loud, to hear how it sounded. I suppose it’s part of the process of owning something new, to acknowledge that there was a little boy whose name was Jacob Cashman and, however much I wish it were otherwise, the last contact I had with him was on the floor in his bedroom in DeCastella Drive, with him curled into the foetal position, desperately trying to avoid a blow from above. That’s the way it is.
Now, when people ask me whether I’ve got any siblings, I no longer say no, but nor do I say, ‘I had two brothers but one is deceased,’ the way some people do. I just say, ‘Yes, I do.’
I’m Harley’s sister. I’m Jacob’s sister too, obviously, but the difference is, Harley’s in my life and, I hope, my future; Jacob’s in my past, and in my bones.
Would it be right to say that I miss him? Yes, it would. It would also be right to say that there are some things I wish I knew.
Did I try to comfort him, as he lay curled on the floor that day? I don’t know.
Did I say anything to him, before the paramedics came to take him away? I don’t know.
Did I whisper to him, ‘Please, Jacob, don’t die?’
I don’t know.
Does he know how much I wished he’d lived? I don’t know.
I talked to Ruby about whether we should find where Jake is buried. I had this idea that maybe I could talk to him, through the soil, and perhaps ask for his forgiveness, but she said, ‘You don’t need to visit Jacob’s grave to speak to Jacob. If you want to talk to him, Lauren, you just go ahead and speak.’
So I do. Late at night, when I’m alone, I say, ‘Jacob, I’m sorry.’
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
I say it with such fervour that sometimes I’m sure that he can hear me. I say it so desperately that sometimes I’m sure that I can will him back to life. But Jacob is gone. He’s long been gone. He’s also what those of us who are left behind are not, and will never be: he’s an innocent soul and he’s completely at peace.
Reading Group Questions
Who do you think bears responsibility for the death of Jacob Cashman? Why?
Did the Department and its social workers fail the Cashman children? Did they do enough to encourage a relationship between the surviving children? Was it important to keep the children in touch with their mother?
What is Lauren seeking, in her series of sexual encounters before she leaves foster care? Why do you think she became celibate?
Why do you think Lauren chose to move interstate and to live alone, after she left foster care? Do you believe that she was happy alone, or was she in hiding? Does she give any clues about her need to be with others or her fear of the way others will treat her?
Do you believe that the loss of an arm changed the way Harley saw himself and the way others saw him? What does Harley mean when he says he’s pleased to be the ‘guy with one arm’?
Why does Lauren choose to enter her first adult relationship with a married man? Do you get the sense that she is trying to borrow some status and respectability from Stephen Bass? Or is a married man a safer option, emotionally?
What is Stephen Bass’s motivation for pursuing a relationship with Lauren? What do you believe would have happened if Lauren had told him about Jacob before they became lovers? Would he have gone ahead with the liaison?
Why did Harley go to Lauren the day he saw her in the newspaper? Why did he take her home to his mum’s? Is there a sense that he was taking her home?
Do you believe Harley and Lauren will remain close? Has Lauren healed or merely begun healing? Will she be able to make peace with herself? Do Lauren and Harley need each other more, or less, than siblings raised together? What does Harley think about Lauren’s role in Jacob’s death?
What will become of Hayley Cashman and her daughter, Jezeray? Would her life have been different if she’d been able to stay with her siblings? Who does she blame for the death of Jake: her mother, her sister, or all of the people in the house that day? Do you think she will find room for Lauren in her life, or are they too different?
Caroline Overington is the author of two non-fiction books, Only in New York and Kickback, which won the Blake Dawson Prize for Business Literature. She has twice won a Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism, and has also won the Sir Keith Murdoch Award for Journalistic Excellence.
Her debut novel, Ghost Child, was published to great acclaim in 2009. Her second novel, I Came to Say Goodbye, was published in 2010.
She lives in Bondi with her husband and their young twins.
Prologue
IT WAS FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE morning. The car park outside Sydney Children’s Hospital was quiet. A 27-year-old woman, dressed only in a dressing-gown and slippers, pushed through the front revolving door.
Security staff would later say they thought she was a new mother, returning to her child’s bedside – and in a way, she was.
The woman walked past the nurses’ station, where a lone matron sat in dim light, playing laptop Solitaire. She walked past Joeys – the room where pink and puckered babies lay row by row in perspex tubs – and into Pandas, where six infants – not newborns but babies under the age of one – lay sleeping in hospital cots.
The woman paused at the door for a moment, as though scanning the children. She then walked directly across the room, where a gorgeous baby girl had kicked herself free of her blankets. She was laying face down, the way babies sometimes do, her right cheek flat to the white sheet, her knees up under her chest. The white towelling of her nappy was brilliant against her dark skin.
The woman took a green, nylon shopping bag from the pocket of her nightie. It was one of those ones that had Woolworths, the Fresh Food People written across the side. She put the bag on the floor and lifted the baby girl from the cot.
The infant stirred, but she did not wake. The woman placed her gently in the bottom of the shopping bag, under a clown blanket she had taken from the cot. She stood, and looked around. There was a toy giraffe on the windowsill. The woman put that in the bag with the baby, too. Then she walked back down the corridor, past the matron at her laptop, through the front door and back into the hospital car park.
There is CCTV footage of what happened next, and most Australians would have seen it, either on the internet or the evening news.
The woman walked across the car park towards an old Corolla. She put the shopping bag on the ground, and opened the car’s rear door. She lifted the giraffe and the blanket out of the bag
and dropped both by the wheels of the car.
For one long moment, she held the child gently against her breast. She put her nose against the rusty curls on the top of the girl’s head, and with her eyes closed, she smelled her.
She clipped the infant into the baby capsule, and got behind the wheel of the Corolla. She drove towards the exit barrier and put her ticket in the box. The barrier opened and the woman drove forward, turning left at the lights, towards Parramatta Road.
That is where the CCTV footage ends. It isn’t where the story ends, however. It’s not even where the story starts.
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Ghost Child Page 25
