After the Fall

by Norman, Charity

  ‘The two aren’t mutually exclusive.’

  ‘Look,’ I say, ‘I feel really awful about not spotting this fracture, but Finn’s an adventurous five-year-old. If we carted him off to hospital every time he fell off his bike or out of a tree, we’d spend our lives in a queue!’

  She just looks at me. I fear her; she is too perceptive.

  ‘I’d like to go back to him now,’ I say, standing up. I’m afraid I’m going to cry.

  Kura doesn’t move. ‘Martha. I really am not the enemy, you know. Why won’t you tell me who is?’

  The hospital gift shop is closing for the evening, which doesn’t matter much as I have no need of a helium balloon in the shape of a heart. There are armchairs nearby. Hiding in one, I call home.

  Ira answers. No, Kit hasn’t been in touch. Everything there is fine.

  Beyond the empty café I find a door marked Chapel. The lights are on but the room’s empty. There is a small altar in front of a stained-glass window, and a book in which people have scribbled messages or prayers. I suppose it was cathartic for them. A note promises that the chaplain will pray for those in the book.

  I leaf through it. Each line tells its own tale. Everyone in the world has their story.

  Please walk with Cynthia as she makes her lonely journey.

  Dear Lord, comfort Ruth and family at their sad loss.

  Thank you!!! Bryan going home today. You answered our prayers!

  Don’t take my little boy away from me.

  Actually, I wrote that last one. Sorry. Hard not to be banal when life has fallen apart.

  Twenty-five

  April. A blue-sky morning with a distinct nip in the air. As Pamela promised, autumn had brought yet another glorious palette of colours to our world.

  The Easter holidays had come and gone. Kit was making school lunches while harrying the boys to get dressed. Sacha was still in her nightshirt. It had coffee spilled down the front, and she was riffling through her schoolbag. She walked to the laundry and looked in, then back to her bag. She seemed distracted.

  ‘Lost something?’ asked Kit.

  ‘Just need a shirt.’ She picked her barefoot way out to the washing line.

  ‘Peaky,’ remarked Kit, watching her tug a shirt from the line.

  ‘She’s run-down. You don’t think it might be glandular fever?’ I fretted. ‘Or some kind of post-viral thing?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I think it’s too much hard work, too many late nights and maybe too much dieting.’

  Sacha reappeared and I dropped the subject. It wasn’t the moment for serious discussion, anyway. Kit and the boys were going on a school outing for the day to the National Aquarium in Napier, followed by a pantomime. They’d be home after supper at McDonald’s. Kit was condemned to spend all day with a posse of women and thirty small children before eating a Big Mac and fries. He looked astonishingly cheerful about it.

  Sacha scratched her arm with furious fingers. ‘This is driving me crazy. Frigging chickens have lice.’

  ‘Maybe we should spray the smoko hut?’ I suggested. ‘It might be infested with something.’ I glanced at my watch—the waterproof one I wore for work—and realised it had stopped. Cursing, I nipped upstairs and spent too long searching for the one Dad gave me. I looked in my jewellery box, which was where I’d last seen it; then I checked in my drawers.

  Perhaps the patupaiarehe had been at it again. One day, I thought as I hurried back downstairs, I’d stumble upon the lair of that mischievous spirit. I’d find the precious watch, and Sacha’s locket, and Kit’s camera, and all those other things it had spirited away with wicked little fingers.

  ‘Maybe we should have this house exorcised.’ I wasn’t quite joking. ‘My gold watch has disappeared now.’

  ‘Dad’s coming on the bus,’ chanted the boys, dancing around their sister like a Sioux war party circling a totem pole. ‘Dad’s a parent helper, Dad’s a parent helper.’

  ‘Stop it.’ Sacha pressed her hands to her ears.

  But they didn’t stop. They cavorted and shrieked until Finn careered into the kitchen table.

  ‘Frick’s sake, will you ever shut up?’ screamed Sacha. Shouldering her schoolbag, she pushed Charlie so hard that he sprawled on the floor. Then she banged out of the house.

  The little boy lay where he’d fallen. ‘Sacha was mean,’ he whimpered.

  ‘Women, eh?’ Kit held out his arms. ‘Come and have a cuddle, buddy.’

  ‘Dad’s going to sit next to me,’ said Finn, unruffled by his sister’s outburst.

  ‘Me,’ insisted Charlie through his tears.

  ‘We’ll go on the back seat, all three of us, and do moonies out of the big window,’ said Kit.

  ‘What’s a moony?’ asked Charlie. Finn, with an air of sophistication, cupped his hand and whispered in his brother’s ear. I caught the giggled word bums. Charlie’s tear-filled eyes grew large, and he covered his mouth with his fingers. ‘We can’t!’

  I watched Sacha get into my car. I could have cried. ‘What are we going to do about her?’ I asked.

  ‘Hard to believe these two cherubs will ever end up like that, don’t you think?’

  I smiled weakly. ‘They’ll be worse. And two at once.’

  ‘Great gangly gargoyles, breaking out in acne,’ groaned Kit, clapping a hand to his brow. ‘Wearing their baseball caps back to front and their jeans halfway down their arses.’

  I kissed the three of them goodbye. Kit was looking romantic in a pale blue shirt and khaki shorts, and I felt a twinge of jealousy. ‘The other mothers are going to have a lovely time,’ I sighed.

  I was giving Sacha a lift to school that day. We travelled in silence until we were on the main road.

  ‘What was that about?’ I asked. No reply. I turned the radio off. ‘I’d appreciate an answer, Sacha.’

  ‘They do my head in. Why do they always have to be such maniacs?’

  ‘No, but you—’

  ‘Leave it, will you?’ Her voice was high and strained. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Sorry, I just—’

  ‘I hate the way you always have to know everything that’s going on in everybody’s lives, all the time. Just keep out for once, for fuck’s sake!’

  She might as well have slapped my face. I drove mechanically for the next fifteen minutes, feeling utterly miserable. ‘Sorry,’ I said eventually. ‘Whatever it was I did, or said, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what you did. You cheated me of my real father. You made me come out here. You put Kit and the boys first. You always have, and you always will.’

  She’s got a point! crowed Mum.

  ‘It was for all of us, Sacha, because we’re a family! If we’d stayed in England we’d be living in a concrete box right now, and you’d have changed schools, and Kit would be . . . God knows. We’d probably be divorced.’

  The anger seemed to have gone from her. ‘I just want to go home.’

  ‘Have you heard from Lydia lately?’

  ‘It’s hard with people in the opposite time zone—especially with no broadband. Anyway, we’ve nothing much to say any more.’

  ‘You’ve got your new friends.’

  ‘They’re just . . . I just miss everyone so much.’ She rubbed her eyes on her sleeve.

  ‘Sorry, doll.’

  I parked a little distance from the school gates and stroked her head. She sat, winding her hands around one another.

  ‘Orchestra tonight?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. I’ll get the later bus. Mum . . .’

  I was watching her hands. There was something disturbing about the way she was wringing them. It was as though she was compulsively washing, trying to erase some dirty spot, like Lady Macbeth. ‘I’m all ears,’ I said. The hand rubbing grew more frenzied. ‘Sacha? Are you in some kind of trouble?’

  ‘No.’ She reached down for her bag. ‘Just leave it. See you.’

  Once she’d disappeared through the gates, I checked my work diary. I had a hectic schedule that
day, starting with a staff meeting. Soon my car was headed towards Capeview, but my mind wasn’t.

  Just before the meeting began, Sacha sent a text. She must have been hiding her phone under her desk, because lessons started at eight thirty.

  Soz mum luv you sooooo much xxx grumpy teen

  The sun burst through the clouds.

  No probs doll love you too XXXXX

  Keith plumped himself down beside me as I was pressing send. ‘Soppy text to Sacha,’ I explained sheepishly. ‘Actually, I’m in a state of panic.’ I described the morning’s events.

  He looked sympathetic. ‘That all sounds familiar. Parenthood’s terrifying, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t think she could be bulimic? Or . . .’

  He waited, eyebrows raised. ‘Or?’

  ‘Or, well, bipolar or something?’

  ‘Sacha?’ Keith looked amused at the suggestion. ‘I had a long chat with her at your party—a confident young woman, having a ball. She’s doing nothing mine didn’t do. What makes you think yours should be perfect? Many teenage girls—and boys too—have irrational tantrums. You know that! It’s what they do, even if they haven’t just emigrated. I suspect you’re letting Sacha’s mood swings rule your life.’

  ‘Of course I am. My happiness is dependent upon hers. She’s been my constant companion since I was twenty-one. In a way, we’ve grown up together.’

  He patted the back of my hand. ‘He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune. Francis Bacon, I think. Makes you wonder why so many of us do it, really.’

  As I turned up our drive that evening, I had a kaleidoscope of half-formed thoughts in my head. I considered spraying the smoko hut for fleas, and decided to Google bedbugs when I had a moment. I worried about a client I’d just left, a teenage boy with spinal injuries. Finally I imagined Kit at McDonald’s with thirty screaming five-year-olds. The image had me chuckling as I crunched into first gear for the steepest part of our hill.

  I was still smiling crookedly as I parked under the walnut. It was fruiting now, and I gathered a couple of nuts from the ground. Muffin was lying in a patch of sunlight, but she came plodding over to greet me, crooning a hello. When I squatted down to give her a pat, her coat felt dusty and warm. The kitchen door wasn’t shut; Kit must have left it open for the dog. I hoped the chickens hadn’t got in and made a mess.

  They hadn’t. The room seemed just as I’d left it. Muffin turned round and round in her basket while I dropped my jacket over a chair. I’d picked up the post from our letterbox at the road gate. Junk mail, two bills and a postcard from Dad, who was on a walking holiday in the Lakes. I was engrossed in his handwriting as I reached for the kettle.

  Windermere in winter is wondrously winsome, wantonly windy and wistfully wet.

  My searching fingers didn’t touch anything. Reluctantly, I lifted my gaze from the postcard and looked to see where the kettle had got to. It wasn’t in its usual place by the bread bin. With my mind still on Dad’s holiday, I searched the other surfaces.

  I saw Mrs Tiggywinkle today. Jeremy Fisher, too. He was out fishing in the rain again. You’d think he would learn.

  I wondered vaguely why Kit had moved the kettle. Perhaps he’d had a last-minute tidy-up before he left. Come to think of it, the room might be slightly neater than usual. I stopped reading and looked around.

  No, not neater. Emptier. Finally, I focused.

  No radio.

  No microwave.

  No bottles in the wine rack, and the tin where we kept spare cash was upside down on the floor.

  With a feeling of sick certainty I ran across the hall and into the sitting room. Television and DVD player, both gone. They’d left the dinosaur desktop, though—presumably there was no market for them. It was an efficient violation, and chillingly tidy. These intruders hadn’t pulled out drawers or smashed windows. They’d taken their time, as though they knew they had all day.

  A nasty thought struck me: perhaps I had disturbed them. Perhaps they were still here. I stepped out through the kitchen door and into the low autumn sunlight, looking around. There was no sign of a vehicle, but my skin was crawling as I shaded my eyes and peered into the gloom of the bush.

  A small violence in the branches of the walnut made me jump half out of my skin, but it was only a tui launching itself with a whirr of wings. I considered driving off somewhere, maybe to ask for help from Tama, but I wanted to be here when the rest of the family came home. Anyway, I could no more leave my house alone and undefended than I could have abandoned one of my children.

  In the end I used my mobile to call the Napier police station. The woman on duty took my details and said they’d see who was in my area. I had the impression they might make it by Christmas if they really hurried, and made a mental note to call a twenty-four-hour plumber if there was ever a real emergency—a crazed axe murderer, for example. The nice man in his van would probably be the first to arrive by several hours.

  I tried Kit’s phone, which went straight to his messages. He’d have turned it off in the theatre. I sent him a text. Then I forced myself to walk back inside and creep up the stairs. I felt sure someone—or something— was inches behind, leering at the back of my head. Once I felt a touch on the shoulder and swung around in abject terror, eyes popping, heart going like the clapper of a church bell. But it was only my hair.

  Something was moving on the landing. I froze, then realised it was a curtain, flapping lazily in the breeze.

  In our bedroom the drawers had been left open. I had a pervading image of dirty, thieving hands digging through our clothes, and sure enough the snazzy little video camera was gone from my socks drawer. My jewellery box had moved slightly, though its lid was closed. There wasn’t much of great financial value in it: a string of pearls Dad bought for my eighteenth, a brooch that had been Mum’s, and the sapphire pendant Kit gave me when the twins were born. I reached out with shaking hands—I could actually see the tremor—and lifted the lid.

  Empty. I sat on the bed with it in my hands, feeling sick. Then, struck by a new thought, I hurried down the landing to the boys’ bedroom. A shaft of afternoon sunlight spilled an oval pool onto their worn carpet. The cupboard doors were wide open: lake-coloured doors, with Sacha’s careful flamingos spread across them. The shelves were bare, the boys’ clothes and books strewn across the floor. In a daze I began to pick everything up, wanting to have it all tidy and normal before the twins came home. They were too young to be confronted by such callousness.

  It wasn’t until I had everything back in place that I realised what was missing. It was painfully obvious, because there was a blank space on the shelf: the blue piggybanks with their Christmas money. I searched the room, frothing with rage, but there was no sign of the two tipsy pigs. By the time I closed the cupboard doors I was ready to kill. Jewellery, DVD players—bad enough. But what kind of a perverted monster steals a child’s piggybank?

  I began to roam through the house, teeth gritted, looking for clues. I wasn’t afraid any more. If I had found a man lurking in the pantry with a stripy jersey, a mask and a bag marked swag, I swear I would have kneed him where it hurt. String’em up, I muttered to myself, every last one of ’em. That was pretty hypocritical, as I have been a member of Amnesty International all my adult life and abhor the death penalty. But dammit, piggybanks!

  A racing engine. Some vehicle was heading up the drive, and fast. My bravado faltered. I caught myself squinting out from behind a curtain while calculating how long the bathroom door would hold if I locked myself in there. The car swirled into the yard and Kit leaped out, hair standing straight up.

  ‘How bad?’ he yelled, as Finn and Charlie spilled out of their doors in a thrilled little flood.

  ‘Did we really have a buggerer?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Burgerer,’ corrected Finn. ‘We’ve been burgered.’

  ‘Did they take Blue Blanket?’

  ‘No, no!’ I hoped I sounded cheerful. ‘Blanket and Buccaneer Bob are
still here. Nice, tidy little buggerers.’

  Then I broke the news about their piggybanks.

  ‘Gone?’ repeated Charlie pathetically, his eyes pooling as he looked up at me.

  ‘My money!’ Finn’s fists became balls.

  Kit and I began a systematic search of the house, trying to work out exactly what had gone.

  ‘Oh no. Bastards have taken my laptop,’ he moaned when we got to the sitting room. ‘That’s going to be a real pain.’

  Charlie had crouched down on all fours and was staring into the denuded DVD cupboard. ‘Did they really need Mary Poppins?’

  When Sacha arrived home from orchestra, the twins rushed to tell her the news.

  ‘A feef came to the house and took our things,’ screeched Charlie.

  Sacha’s hand flew to her mouth. She turned slightly green, as though she was about to be sick.

  ‘Your room looks okay,’ I said quickly. ‘Helluva mess, but I don’t think that’s the burglar’s fault.’

  She swung around the kitchen, staring at the blank spaces. Then she spun on her heels, crashed through the door and pelted towards the smoko hut. There was a short silence before an anguished yell tore the air. Kit and I met at the kitchen door, both running, and sprinted down the track. The boys trotted after us.

  Sacha was kneeling on the floor of her hut, smashing her fist against the wooden wall. ‘The bastards!’ she screamed. ‘The fucking idiots!’

  ‘Hey, calm down,’ I said, taking hold of her shoulder. ‘You’re scaring the little ones.’

  ‘Those sodding bastards, I’ll kill them! They took my stuff.’

  We looked at her, baffled. She wasn’t Sacha at all. This was a different being altogether: a furious, maddened creature.

  ‘What stuff?’ I asked.

  ‘My stuff! My new iPod. My speakers. My money. Even my little telly.’ She drove her fist right through a rotten piece of wall. ‘This is bullshit!’

  ‘Mine too,’ said Finn. ‘I told you. They took our piggybanks. Our special piggybanks, that Grandpa gave us.’

  ‘All gone,’ added Charlie sadly.