The Mistake Read online

  Wendy James

  The Mistake

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part 2

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Part 3

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgements

  The Mistake

  Wendy James is the author of four books, including Out of the Silence, which won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime fiction and was shortlisted for the Nita May Dobbie Award for women’s writing. She currently lives in Armidale, New South Wales with her husband and two children.

  Praise For Wendy James’ Books

  ‘Beautiful yet disturbing, deep yet accessible, full of real, human characters yet exploring wider social and moral questions, combining the pace and story of commercial fiction with the range and depth of literary fiction.’

  Sophie Masson

  ‘A brilliantly cut literary gem sparkling from every angle.’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Thoroughly compelling, profoundly satisfying.’

  The Sun-Herald

  ‘Absolutely amazing … There is something for everyone in this fantastic book.’

  Bookseller + Publisher

  ‘A penetrating picture of our life and times … A knockout.’

  Canberra Times

  ‘James’s sure hands lead us through sometimes harrowing, sometimes redemptive moments in her beautifully rounded characters’ lives.’

  Who Weekly

  ‘Cunning psychological portraits and clean prose make for an absorbing domestic thriller.’

  The Age

  ‘Wendy James is a strong, versatile writer and this, her fourth book of fiction, will add to her growing reputation.’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  In loving memory of James Francis Kennedy

  12 AUGUST 1992 – 30 OCTOBER 2011

  For Jane and Anne, who made it possible.

  And for Darren, who made it.

  But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

  GENESIS 19:26

  It’s not the tragedies that kill us, it’s the messes.

  DOROTHY PARKER

  She wakes from that same nightmare of darkness, of heat, of airlessness. In the dream she is stricken, choking and gasping for air; feels her lungs about to burst, her body ablaze. It is hell, but even dreaming she knows that this is only a vision of hell, that the real nightmare is out in the waking world, waiting for her …

  Part One

  1

  If, before all this happened, before her – before their – unravelling, she had been asked how her life was, she’d have said that life was good. Not perfect, of course – when is it ever? In the way of all families, there had been problems, the commonplace complications of marriage and child-rearing, but nothing insurmountable – nothing they couldn’t get past, move beyond. They were happy. Happy enough.

  Later, when she looks back on that time – the time before it all began to change – Jodie will see that it was more than good, more than happy enough. It was idyllic.

  The day before Hannah left for her school’s Sydney excursion had been rather ordinary, really, a day busy with humdrum domestic activity. But it was the beginning of spring and the hint of warmth in the sunshine, flooding through the back windows and then in the air as Jodie hung out the washing, had made the day seem somehow special. Arding winters were long and hard and though she had imagined herself impervious after a lifetime’s exposure, Jodie had found this particular winter interminable. The change in season was more than just a calendar note, and the colour and warmth brought a palpable sense of pleasure, of anticipation. Spring – the season of hope, of rebirth, of new beginnings.

  For once the four of them were home together for dinner. Hannah had to leave for Sydney at some ungodly hour the following morning so there was no homework, nowhere else she needed to be. She had helped Jodie get dinner ready, chatting about this friend, that plan, offering up the odd bit of gossip about teachers, a friend’s parent. She had even given in to Tom’s pestering and played on the Wii with him before dinner – and was gracious in her defeat, letting her younger brother slay her in a second game, then a third. Angus had arrived home in time to eat with them, relaxed and expansive – asking Tom about his latest cricket score, regaling him with childhood sporting stories of his own, interrogating Hannah on the plans for the week in Sydney, recounting his own escapades during a high-school excursion, giving a comic impersonation of affronted hotel staff, an appalled teacher. Tom had giggled appreciatively, and even Hannah had appeared mildly amused.

  Jodie had joined in the conversation only occasionally, preferring to watch them, relishing the scene. It happened far too rarely of late, she thought – all four of them together like this, just enjoying one another’s company, being themselves: easy, unaffected. Angus, still handsome in his forties and grown into himself somehow, comfortable in his role; Hannah, her dark curls falling untidily over her face, her quick tongue, sometimes barbed humour, her little barking laugh, so oddly infectious; and the baby of the family, her darling Tom, trying hard to maintain an air of insouciance but failing, his cheeks pink with pleasure, his sentences tumbling together in his excited rush – his father’s undivided attention so rare and precious. Here: the family she’d worked so hard to put together – keep together. There were other things in Jodie’s life – friends, community – but her family was her core, her centre. This was all she wanted – and all she had ever wanted. All she would ever need.

  Later, she will wonder if it is a real memory, or whether the recollection has acquired the rosy glow of nostalgia, making it somehow softer, sweeter, more significant than it ever really was. She will remember this as their last night, although in truth there were plenty more nights when the four of them ate together, laughed together, nights that appeared carefree – but none after this could ever be, for her, as straightforwardly happy. For Jodie, each subsequent gathering came with the bitter landscape of the past and the uncertainty of the future casting their shadows, tainting every moment of joy with dread, with doubt.

  It arrives, as such moments always do, without warning.

  Jodie had imagined it already, had rehearsed, if not this particular dissolution, then endless variations. When she and Angus were first married, she had obsessively conjured up scenarios of devastation: the police at her door, hats clutched respectfully, eyes downcast, voices hushed. Later, as a new mother, the nightmare visions had become more urgent – waking slowly from a rare undisturbed night’s sleep, she would imagine her babies gone blue and cold in the crib; or pushing a stroller along Arding’s busy streets she would be assailed by an image so vivid it would take her breath away – an out-of-control truck, the pram and baby crushed
, her own life over.

  But the moment, when it finally arrives, does not announce itself quite so dramatically.

  She’s just come in the back door, struggling with a load of washing, is yelling over her shoulder at Tom, who’s still in his PJs and standing zombified in front of the TV, to get changed quickly or they’ll be late for swim squad, when the call comes. She almost doesn’t make it, the contents of the basket spilling all over the table and onto the floor in her rush, but just before the call clicks over to message bank, she reaches the phone.

  ‘Mrs Garrow?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Dr Guilfoyle here.’

  Jodie notices immediately that the school principal, who she finds rather intimidating with her rounded vowels and precise enunciation, sounds unusally tentative.

  ‘Mrs Garrow … I’m afraid there’s been an accident.’

  Jodie feels her throat constrict. ‘Hannah?’

  ‘Now, don’t panic, she’s alive and well … She’s broken her leg.’

  ‘Oh.’ And then the draining away of terror, the relief settling; the ground shifts a little beneath her feet, rearranges itself, a chasm closes over. ‘How?’

  ‘Well, it sounds terrible, it is terrible. She was hit by a car.’ The head-mistress is brisk now that the worst is done. ‘I don’t know all the details, but from what Miss French told me, Hannah and Assia had been outside in the middle of the night, retrieving, they tell us, a dropped mobile phone. And somehow … well, somehow your daughter was hit by a passing vehicle. From the information I’ve been given, it seems it wasn’t necessarily the driver’s fault.’ Her characteristic dryness of manner has reasserted itself completely.

  ‘Oh, dear. And, what? She’s in hospital? Can they reset —’

  ‘Well, they’ve done a temporary cast, but I’m afraid it’s a rather nasty break, and she needs surgery – a plate, or pins they’re saying – and, well, no doubt you know more about these things than I do.’

  ‘Well, no, it’s not really —’

  ‘So I expect you’ll want to head down to Sydney immediately. We can’t have a teacher stay with her, you understand. And I’m sure you’ll want to be there to make decisions about treatment.’ The principal’s tone is somehow accusatory.

  ‘I do understand, of course. Thank you, Dr Guilfoyle. I’ll head down immediately. Which hospital? Is she at Westmead?’

  ‘Actually she’s at a small private hospital further west. I’m not quite sure why – beds, I suppose? In Greystanes. Bell something or other. Oh yes, here it is. Belfield Private. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Mrs Garrow? Jodie? Hello?’

  But Jodie isn’t listening. She has the phone clutched tightly to her chest, as if to calm the sudden rapid beating of her heart. She can sense the rift yawning open again; feel the faint but familiar tremor. Belfield Private. Belfield. Of all the hospitals in Sydney.

  She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. ‘Sorry, Dr Guilfoyle. I just dropped the phone. I’ll make arrangements and get down there right away. And yes, I know where Belfield is,’ she hears herself saying calmly. ‘I’ve been there before.’

  OCTOBER, 1986

  Jodie chooses the hospital quite carefully. She looks for one that is far enough away from her own suburb that she won’t have to worry about chance meetings with friends, neighbours, fellow students; a hospital in a less affluent suburb, where her situation won’t be regarded as anything out of the ordinary. She makes sure there is a cheap hotel nearby, and books a small and dingy room for the two weeks prior to the due date. What she never considers, though, is the size of the hospital, and as she waits for her first check-up with a midwife (A little bit late booking in, aren’t you, dear? You’re almost seven months. Tsk, tsk) she is struck by how small the maternity wing is. She can see the infants’ nursery from where she sits, and it is virtually empty; only two babies sleep on the other side of the glass. The wards themselves are just beyond the waiting room, along a hallway with four doors on either side – which means, she supposes, that there is a maximum capacity of between sixteen and twenty-four beds.

  She had imagined, when she allowed herself to think of it at all, that maternity wings were all vast and impersonal, like the wards in the huge public hospital where she’d done her last prac; that to be a patient was like being a tiny bit of plankton in the belly of a whale, that her presence would make no conceivable impact. She would be anonymous, virtually invisible; the baby could be born then instantly whisked away, taken for good and with no questions asked. But here, in this diminutive, cosy room, all timber and worn vinyl and muted colours, the middle-aged nurse on the desk brisk but kindly, it seems impossible that her desire to relinquish the baby will go unremarked – and without judgement.

  Jodie is quick to realise that she has made a mistake, but does nothing about it. She could have walked out then, booked in elsewhere – gone to the large hospitals her GP has suggested, RPA, Women’s – but instead, when the nurse beckons her over, hands her a disposable cup and directs her to the nearby bathroom, she acquiesces. This baby is going to be born; surely where it’s born isn’t going to be all that significant.

  It takes her a little less than an hour to arrange all that needs arranging. To call Angus, her mother-in-law, Tom’s school, to pack an overnight bag for herself, a few pairs of pyjamas for Hannah. She is too busy to really think about the situation too much until she is in the car, and then, even with the radio on, it’s difficult not to think, impossible to ignore the panic edging through. It’s enough that her teenage daughter has been hit by a car in a faraway city, that there’s some intimation of fault or bad behaviour – there’s sufficient here to induce obsessive wondering and worrying, the mind’s inexorable, crazy gallop into a nightmare future. Will there be some sort of lawsuit against Hannah? (Car damage, dangerous behaviour, emotional trauma.) Could the surgery provoke a fatal morphine reaction, or worse – addiction, or even death from anaesthesia? (Hannah’s never been under the knife.) Or further on, might not there be social isolation generated by the break itself – or the pain, or the scar? (Oh, it requires no effort to follow this trajectory to its inevitable conclusion: from broken leg to depression, self-harm, drugs, suicide …)

  More than enough here to be anxious about, even without the prospect of revisiting Belfield. Her disquiet about returning there is merely a vague and formless apprehension, one she has no intention of examining. Despite her fevered prophesying, Jodie has no real inkling of what lies ahead. She weaves the car carefully up and around and then down the dazzling green ranges, accelerates along the long coastal highway that leads to the capital; rushes blithely, unsuspecting and utterly unprepared, straight into her own catastrophe.

  Jodie experiences a slight shock every time she’s reunited with her teenage daughter after any sort of separation. When she thinks of Hannah it’s always as a younger incarnation – in Jodie’s imagination she’s still twelve or so, still slender, her chest flat, her hips narrow. This evening Jodie pauses, confused, in the doorway of the hospital room, before she realises with an odd pang that the rather pudgy adolescent lying slumped and dazed, half asleep, mouth open and tongue protruding slightly, a plump, plaster-encased leg hanging from a frame above the bed – is in fact her daughter. But it’s only a momentary lapse, and she pushes herself over the threshold.

  ‘Now, here’s someone you’ve been waiting for, sweetheart,’ a nurse announces cheerfully. ‘Mum’s here.’ She pats Jodie on the shoulder as she leaves. ‘Kids! Can’t leave them alone for five minutes.’

  Hannah glares at the woman’s retreating form before sinking back into her pillows, turns a pale and miserable face to her mother, but says nothing, waits for Jodie to approach. Jodie greets her daughter with a smile, being careful not to appear too anxious, too intense. ‘Hello, my darling.’ Jodie hates herself for the slight uncertainty in her voice, but can’t disguise it. ‘Hello, Mum.’ Hannah’s voice is as plaintive as her expression, and though Jodie would love to wrap her arms arou
nd her daughter, hold her tight, she knows better. She accepts the proffered cheek, the brief hug that’s made only slightly more awkward by the IV lines, the cannula in her daughter’s hand. Hannah had never been an especially cuddly child, but there’s a definite distance now, a prickly withdrawal, and even in Hannah’s current vulnerable state Jodie knows that to display too much affection would be seen as an unwarranted invasion, likely to be met with not so subtle resistance. Hannah’s no real exception – most of the teenage girls she knows are similarly stand-offish with their parents – but there’s a pang, nevertheless.

  She sits on the edge of the bed. ‘How is it, Hannie? Are you in any pain? Have they got you on morphine?’ She pushes a wayward curl off her daughter’s face, gives a sympathetic smile.

  ‘Oh, you know … it’s not that bad, really – I get to shoot myself up when I need to.’ Hannah’s smile is wry, she waves the little hand pump. ‘I’m just really uncomfortable.’ She looks uncomfortable too, her leg hoisted up so brutally, her hospital gown pulled at a rather immodest angle, gaping open at all the wrong places, her pillow slipping down behind her head.

  ‘Okay. Well how about I try and get you more comfy while you tell me what happened?’

  Hannah makes a face. ‘Oh, God. Do I really have to talk about it right now, Mum? I’m just – I just feel really out of it. And I’m really, really hungry. The food in here is totally disgusting.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s not that bad.’ She eases one pillow out from behind her daughter, plumps it up. ‘Come on, tell me, and then I’ll go and get you some rubbish from the kiosk. Dr Guilfoyle seemed to think there was some uncertainty about what happened. I’m just concerned.’

  ‘There’s no uncertainty. I was hit by some idiot in a car. I said I don’t want to talk right now. I’m tired and I’m starving. Why do you have to go on about it?’