Remember Me, page 1
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 and telephone crisis line listener, she’s 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 Aotearoa New Zealand. Her first novel, Freeing Grace, was published in 2010. Second Chances (After the Fall) was a Richard and Judy Book Club choice and World Book Night title. Her most recent, The Secrets of Strangers, was a BBC Radio 2 Book Club choice for 2020, shortlisted for Best Crime Novel in the Ngaio Marsh Awards for Crime Fiction, and for best International Crime Fiction in the Ned Kelly Awards.
Also by Charity Norman
Freeing Grace
Second Chances
The Son-in-Law
The Secret Life of Luke Livingstone
See You in September
The Secrets of Strangers
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in 2022
Copyright © Charity Norman 2022
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 the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
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ISBN 978 1 76106 517 0
eISBN 978 1 76106 386 2
Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Cover design: Christabella Designs
Cover photograph: Jonathan Astin
For Pauline Perry
Contents
17 June 1994
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
Acknowledgements
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
—Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas
17 June 1994
‘I envy you,’ she says.
She doesn’t. Why would she envy me? She’s Dr Leah Parata, five years older and infinitely, effortlessly superior. Everything about the woman screams energy and competence, even the way she’s twirling that turquoise beanie around her index finger. She’s tall, light on her feet, all geared up for back-country hiking in a black jacket—or maybe navy blue, as I’ll later tell the police. Waterproof trousers, walking boots with red laces. Hair in a heavy plait, though a few dark tendrils have escaped.
‘I really do,’ she insists. ‘You’ve bought your ticket to Ecuador. What an adventure.’
‘Hope so.’
‘I know so.’ She grabs a bar of Cadbury’s from the display and holds it up to show me. ‘Got a craving.’
‘I didn’t know you were a chocoholic.’
‘Just when it’s cold. This should keep me going all the way to Biddulph’s.’
I’ve only once managed to haul myself up to Biddulph’s bivvy, a ramshackle hut on the bush line, built about a hundred years ago for professional rabbiters. They must have been hardy people. As I count her change, I peer out at the weather: standing water on the petrol station forecourt, raindrops bouncing high off the mustard-coloured paintwork of her car. The ranges are smothered in charcoal cloud, as though some monstrous creature is breathing out giant plumes of smoke.
‘Seriously?’ I ask. ‘You’re heading up there? Today?’
She takes a casual glance at the cloud cover. It seems to delight her. ‘Lucky me, eh? Perfect weather for finding Marchant’s snails. The first wet days after a dry spell bring ’em out. I’ve got a happy weekend ahead of me, crawling around in the leaf litter.’
I can’t imagine why anyone would choose to tramp through those rain-soaked forests and uplands, but then I’ve never been a mountain woman. Leah is, of course. She took her very first steps in the Ruahine Range. To her, that wilderness is home. She’s going on and on about her snails while I smile and nod.
‘They’re this big!’—holding up her fingers to demonstrate. ‘Carnivorous.’ She catches me blanching at the image of a giant, flesh-eating snail. ‘Okay, maybe not the sexiest of our native creatures. But their shells are works of art, they’ve been around for millions of years, and now they’re in trouble because everything preys on them. Possums, rats, pigs.’
Blah blah blah, I think, because I’m twenty-one, and empty-headed, and I’ve been jealous of Leah for as long as I can remember. Her teeth are a bit crooked. She has a high forehead, a small mole on her left cheekbone and a permanent concentration crease, a vertical line between her eyebrows. Yet somehow, these imperfections add to the hypnotic effect. I can see why my brother Eddie’s had a crush since he first clapped eyes on her, swimming her horse in the Arapito stream. They were both eleven then, and he was a scrawny kid from Leeds, but he still hasn’t given up hope.
Just as she’s opening the door to leave the shop, she drops her chocolate—oops—and swiftly stoops to pick it up again, flashing a wide, warm smile at me.
‘Ecuador! Good for you, Emily.’
‘I’ll see you before I go,’ I call after her.
I’m not sure she’s heard me. She’s striding across the flooded forecourt, pulling her beanie onto her head. The turquoise looks vivid even through rain-streaming glass. She checks her watch before getting into the car. I bet she’s already forgotten our conversation. She’ll be thinking about her snails, about what she’s got to achieve over the weekend.
Her brake lights flicker at the exit. Now she’s accelerating away, water rising in sheets as her wheels bounce through the flooded hollows.
•
They never found Leah Parata. Not a boot, not a backpack, not a turquoise beanie. After she left me that day, she vanished off the face of the earth.
ONE
February 2019
The sign I painted thirty years ago still hung beside the road gate: Arapito. The name means ‘End of the path’, which seemed eerily apt right now. I’d illustrated it with a pair of fantails in flight, though time and rust had obliterated all but their wings. Leaning out of the driver’s window, I opened the creaking metal mouth of the mailbox. Mainly junk. A bank statement.
The landscape was a bleached desert, acres of desiccated grassland even up here in the foothills. Dust billowed in a beige cloud as I nosed my car up the drive. A small flock of sheep sprinted ahead, tightly bunched together, docked tails bouncing. Familiar things: the school bus shelter at the gate, the derelict woolshed, the backdrop of mountains. At the end of the drive a long, single-storey villa, surrounded by trees, clad in white weatherboards with heat haze dancing off its tin roof. Arapito. My home.
Dad was standing on the back porch, wearing canvas trousers and a polo shirt. Upright, tidy, self-contained. I waved as I rounded the house. I waved again, smiling, once I’d cut my engine. He simply watched me, shielding his eyes with one hand.
Silence. For one final breath, I hadn’t quite arrived. I was still on my journey, still free. I had a desperate impulse to turn the key, reverse and speed away—back to the airport, back to my own life.
Why was I here? What possessed me?
I was here because of that phone call. Just a month ago, a wake-up call. I’d worked in my studio all day, gone out on the town to celebrate a friend’s promotion, fallen into bed long after midnight. Four hours later, the blaring of my phone dragged me from the paralysis of dream.
Still dark, silly o’clock. Must be Nathan, calling from … Malaysia? No, he’d moved on. Jakarta. My son never worried too much about what time it was in London, especially when he’d run out of money and wanted a payout from the Bank of Mum.
‘Nath? Whassup?’ My tongue was still numbed by sleep.
Not Nathan. My caller was a woman.
‘Oh, Emily, I’m so sorry! Have I woken you?’
I lay with my eyes shut, trying to place the voice. A New Zealander, for sure. I wasn’t in touch with many people in Tawanui, and these deep, placid tones certainly didn’t belong to my sister. Carmen always sounds as though
‘I forgot the time difference,’ the woman said.
Ah! Now I had it. Raewyn Parata. Our neighbour, our school bus driver. Leah’s mother, the woman whose name was synonymous with tragedy. Raewyn had ample reason to be angry with the world and yet she always sounded pretty much as she did now: interested, gently determined.
Something must be wrong with Dad. I couldn’t remember when I last lifted the phone to call him. Damn it, I meant to! If the worst had happened, I’d fly back for the funeral. Be easier to talk to him when he’s dead.
I didn’t say any of that. You don’t. You observe the social niceties, even when you know bad news is coming.
‘Raewyn! How are you?’
‘Good. I’m good.’
I was pulling a jersey over my head, feeling guilty, thinking about funerals.
‘What’s happened? Something up with Dad?’
‘Well …’ A hesitation. ‘You heard about his accident?’
‘Accident?’
‘Nobody’s told you. Uh-huh. Thought not. About a week ago, he and his car somehow ended up in a ditch next to Arapito Road. He wasn’t hurt—just bruises—but they kept him in Hastings hospital overnight in case he was concussed. Ira dragged his car out of the ditch and took it to the panelbeater. Anyway, it’s not just that … um, where do I start? For quite a while now I’ve been bringing him meals, shopping, doing a bit of cleaning.’
‘He can afford a cleaner, Raewyn.’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘You shouldn’t be cleaning for him.’
It’s tricky to pull on your jeans with a phone tucked under your chin. I managed it somehow before blundering into the kitchen. Tea. Milk. I pictured Raewyn in her own kitchen, on the other side of the planet. She stayed on after her son Ira moved out—stayed on alone, despite the shadows gathered there. A wooden house with peeling paint and rotting boards; fruit trees in the garden, generations of sheep grazing up to the fence.
‘The doctors were worried,’ she was saying. ‘He kept asking how he’d got there. He was trying to examine other patients, checking their charts! We’ve known for ages, haven’t we?’
‘Have we?’
‘But—oh, Felix!—he’s refusing to take any medication. He says he’s not going to prolong the inevitable.’
‘He was fine when I was last home.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ I heard the small silence of her disapproval. ‘That was …’
‘Getting on for three years ago, now.’
‘Long time. He was already hiding it then. Battling on. That’s why he resigned from everything, that’s why he’s become such a recluse. Manu did the same: quietly gave things up when he knew he couldn’t manage.’
The fridge door closed with a gentle click. It was covered in photos, mainly of Nathan at every stage from babyhood to twenty-two. Nathan, the cleverest little knock-kneed toddler who ever lived. Ten-year-old Nathan whizzing down the slide in our local playground. My favourite was quite a recent one of the two of us, skating on the Somerset House ice rink with our arms linked.
And there was Nathan with his grandfather on the porch at Arapito. Dad looked handsome in his gardening hat, neatly shaved, Mediterranean-blue eyes in a face that somehow seemed both delicate and heavy. Nathan was a nineteen-year-old beanpole with copper hair, freckles and glasses. My father and my son both stood very straight, wearing their photo smiles, awkward grins they stuck on whenever a camera was pointed at them.
I held my forefinger to my lips, pressing the kiss onto the beloved boy in the picture. I took this photo as we were setting out for the airport, the last time I saw Dad. He looked perfectly normal. I didn’t remember anything … oh. Yes, I did, come to think of it. Little eccentricities, just a few wacky moments. He tried to serve us frozen green beans instead of ice cream. And there was that day he nipped into town to get milk but came back hours later with no shopping at all. He seemed angry, said he’d been collared by an old patient who talked so much that Dad had completely forgotten what he’d come for. Nathan called him an absent-minded professor. Now that I thought back, perhaps he wasn’t angry. Perhaps he was frightened.
‘They did tests at the hospital,’ Raewyn said. ‘They got him to see a consultant.’
‘And?’
‘I’m afraid they think it’s Alzheimer’s.’
Alzheimer’s. Among people my age—the sandwich generation, squashed between parents and children, never quite coping with either and feeling constantly inadequate—the word had friends recoiling with grimaces and sympathetic tuts. Oh no! I’m so sorry, that’s a cruel thing. We’re all afraid it’s coming for us too. We’re all terrified when we forget someone’s name.
Raewyn was talking about the diagnosis, about what it meant for Dad.
‘They’ve told him he has to stop driving,’ she said. ‘He’s given me his car keys in case he forgets.’
‘No! How’s he meant to manage? You guys live miles out of town.’
‘The thing is, Emily, this isn’t new. He forgets to pay his bills. His electricity got cut off. I’ve even found him gardening in his pyjamas at midday.’
This, somehow, was more upsetting than his driving into a ditch. I couldn’t imagine my father in any state other than that of immaculate dignity. He always—always—wore a jacket and tie to work, his shirt collars literally starched, a Panama hat for gardening.
‘Today was the final straw for me,’ Raewyn said. ‘I went round with his shopping. I’d only just walked in when a frying pan burst into flames. These wooden houses can turn into infernos within minutes.’
‘Do Carmen and Eddie know about this diagnosis?’ My siblings.
‘They do now. I don’t think they were surprised.’
‘So what’s the plan?’
‘They both lead such busy lives. They think he needs to go into a care home, probably St Patrick’s, but he won’t hear of it. That’s why I’m phoning you, Emily. You’re the one person I could think of who might be able and willing to help.’
I indulged in a moment of smugness at being the one person—but I could see exactly where all of this was leading, and I didn’t want to go there.
‘I think you should come home for a while,’ she said.
There it was.
‘I don’t live in the next town,’ I reminded her.
‘I know that.’
‘I don’t even live in the same hemisphere.’ I sounded like a petulant teenager. I felt like one. ‘I’ll phone him today, I promise. But I can’t simply drop everything, and there’s the cost.’
‘Imagine if you never got to say goodbye.’
Raewyn knew all about saying goodbye; she knew about never having the chance to say it. Manu. Leah.
‘My useless brother and sister are both twelve thousand miles closer,’ I moaned.
The kitchen door was inching open. A chubby-faced tabby squeezed through the gap and made a beeline for his bowl of biscuits. Max, my lodger’s cat. My good friend, who spent his mornings curled up on a cushion in my cramped little studio. He was the model for Admiral Flufflebum, a wise, kind cat who lived in Buckingham Palace in a series of books I illustrated, whose success helped to pay the mortgage on this flat.
Raewyn aimed another shot.
‘Come and see him while he still knows you, Emily. Don’t just come for his funeral.’
‘We’re not very close.’
‘You love him, though.’
After we’d hung up, I sat at the table and tried to kid myself that my father wasn’t my responsibility. A bus came gliding past, early-morning commuters on the upper deck gazing straight into my world, and I into theirs. Nathan was gone, and the nest felt empty. Christmas was a tinsel-strewn memory. The truly dark days of winter were just beginning: January, February. Rain and greyness and political division.
But it was summer in New Zealand. Temperatures in the thirties, endless blue skies, evening dips in the Arapito stream—our deliciously clear little river, with its pools and cliffs and pockets of native bush.
You love him, though.
I was ten, charging around the house, looking for my gym bag, screaming at Eddie that he’d messed with my effing stuff—and he was screaming back that he hadn’t touched my effing stuff, he wouldn’t touch it with an effing barge pole, and Mum was slumped on the porch in her housecoat, smoking bitterly, and Carmen was cleaning her muddy riding boots among the cereal bowls on the kitchen table, and it was always like this—always, always, every morning. Dad was dressed for work after his run, looking about ten years younger than his wife, who was creased around all her edges. He behaved as though his family were characters on the telly, and he wasn’t even watching the show. He wasn’t abusive; he was simply absent. He didn’t seem to care.
