Free-Falling Read online

  ‘Twins!’ She immediately stuck her head back into her apartment to call out to her husband excitedly, ‘Frank, come and see!’

  As Mr and Mrs Crease were following them into the lift, intent on coming upstairs with them to see both babies, another apartment door opened and Mrs Pritchard appeared.

  ‘I see the twins are out and about already,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘All right, I guess I’d better come and give you a hand then.’ And she pulled on a dressing gown and joined them in the lift without waiting for an invitation.

  By the time they were back at Belinda’s apartment, they had picked up at least four more slipper-clad residents along their way. As tenants poked their heads out of their doors to see what all the noise was, Mrs Crease kept inviting them along. Bazza could easily imagine her at the opening of a circus tent, calling out, ‘Roll up, roll up!’

  ‘Do you know everyone who lives in this building?’ Belinda hissed at him as she let them all into her apartment.

  Stacey took one look at the convoy of people filtering into the lounge room and then handed the baby to the closest person, without even bothering to find out who it was. ‘Belinda, I’m sorry, but I’m outta here,’ she said, grabbing her jacket from the couch. ‘I’m going home to bed.’

  ‘Stacey!’ Belinda exclaimed in shock. ‘You’re going to leave me with a bunch of complete strangers? You don’t even know who these people are. That’s not like you!’

  Stacey paused to look at Bazza. ‘I know him,’ she replied. ‘And I’d trust him with my life. He saved yours, remember – so yeah, I’m going. Because if I hear one more crying baby, I’ll lose it. And you don’t want to see me lose it. I’ll call you tomorrow.’ She disappeared out the door.

  ‘He didn’t actually save my life – it was Shanks, remember, not an intruder!’ Belinda called out after her.

  The small crowd of people were now standing around Belinda’s lounge room, chatting happily as though they were at a cocktail party.

  Bazza turned to look at Belinda. ‘Do you trust me?’ he asked.

  There was a pause before she responded; she seemed to be gazing vaguely around at the bunch of complete strangers in her apartment. But, eventually, she looked him straight in the eye and said tiredly, ‘Yes. Yes, I do trust you.’

  ‘Good. Go and get into bed. We’ll take care of them for you. I promise.’

  Belinda stood up on her toes and kissed him gently on the cheek, and then turned and disappeared into her bedroom. As he watched her go, Mrs Crease appeared at his shoulder.

  ‘Does she know that it was you yet, fairy boy? All those lovely things you did for her?’ she whispered.

  ‘Nope. And I’m not gonna tell her either. Let the poor girl believe she did have a fairy godmother, right?’

  He didn’t see Belinda again until morning.

  Chapter 20

  Evelyn smiled as the young girl approached the counter, her face a picture of nerves, fear and giddy anticipation. ‘All done with your forms?’ she asked.

  The girl nodded and passed them over with shaky hands.

  ‘Great! Just wait right there and prepare to be blown away by the most unbelievable, incredible, terrifying experience of your entire life!’

  As Evelyn waited for James to come out and collect the girl for her on-ground training, she looked a little closer and realised that it was a face she recognised. She looked down at the name on the form.

  Tania Stevens.

  The girl gave her a worried look. ‘Is there something wrong with my paperwork?’ she asked.

  ‘No, not at all. I just remembered you. You went to the same school as my sons. Andrew and James McGavin.’

  The girl’s eyes widened. Evelyn hadn’t realised it would be possible for her to look even more frightened.

  ‘Mrs McGavin! I didn’t realise. I’m so sorry about that phone call I made to you after Andy, um . . . died. I was such an idiot, I didn’t know what to say. And it’s just that Andy and James were such great guys. Still are, I’m sure! I mean . . . James still is, obviously Andy’s dead . . . I mean, that doesn’t mean he’s not a great guy still. It’s just that, you know, he’s not actually alive and um—’

  ‘Tania,’ Evelyn cut her off.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re doing it again.’

  ‘I know. I don’t know why I get so flustered. But look, seeing as I’ve run into you, I have to ask you something, and if I don’t say this now, I never will. There was another reason why I called you that day. I was sort of hoping to . . . catch up with James. I mean, at the time it was more to see how he was doing, but I’d still really like to see him, umm, just, umm, because. Do you think there’s any chance that you could put me in touch with him?’

  Evelyn shrugged. ‘Sure. Why not?’ She paused then, before adding, ‘You’ll be in touch with him in about . . . three seconds.’

  Tania looked back at her in confusion and then widened her eyes in shock as James walked out of the staffroom towards her.

  ‘He helps me out on the weekends,’ Evelyn explained.

  ‘Tania!’ James exclaimed when he saw her. ‘Great to see you!’

  ‘I’m heading off now, James. Don’t forget, we’ve got the twins’ birthday party next weekend, okay? So don’t go scheduling in any jumps for yourself that day, got it?’

  ‘Sure thing, Mum. I’ll see you later,’ he called out as he guided Tania out the back to start her training.

  Evelyn grabbed her handbag and headed to her car. She paused to look back at the SkyChallenge warehouse. Only a year or so ago she never would have imagined that she’d be here now, running a skydiving business and having her son happy to work for her on weekends.

  She’d misunderstood that day last year when Bazza had first asked her to consider a partnership with his boss Jack. She’d thought he was trying to set the two of them up on a date. But then he’d explained that Jack was looking for another director to invest in the company and run it alongside him.

  ‘Oh, that sort of partnership,’ she’d said at the time.

  ‘McGavin! Surely you’d never suspect me of trying anything as tacky and underhand as setting you up with my divorced boss, who happens to be at the distinguished age of sixty and enjoys card games in his spare time and owns a private bungalow on the beach in Thailand!’ Bazza’s highly offended tone was surprisingly convincing.

  Evelyn and Belinda were sitting cross-legged on the floor on opposite sides of Evelyn’s coffee table. The older woman was marking items off the list in front of her and the younger was stretching her arms up above her head like a cat.

  ‘That must be about it. What else can we possibly need for a double one-year-old birthday party?’

  ‘You can never be too organised, Belinda. I just want to be certain we’re all set for Saturday.’

  Belinda smiled. ‘You do realise the girls won’t even remember this, right?’

  Evelyn opened her mouth to respond, but was interrupted by the sound of the doorbell. ‘Hold that thought,’ she instructed, before climbing to her feet and heading out to answer the door.

  When she came back into the room, she was followed by a young girl with long blonde hair. The girl was clutching the hand of a toddler dressed in bright red overalls, who stood close to her side and sucked his thumb energetically.

  ‘Belinda, this is Lara. Apparently she was there in the convenience store the day that Andrew died and she has something important to tell us. Lara, meet Belinda, the girl my son was engaged to.’ Evelyn’s voice was slightly strained.

  Belinda frowned in confusion but stood up to shake Lara’s hand. Lara sat down on the couch and pulled her little boy onto her lap. She sat quietly for several seconds, her chin resting on her son’s head. Evelyn and Belinda waited. Eventually she spoke.

  ‘It
’s taken me a very long time to work through what happened that day. And I still don’t like to talk about it. But I’ve never known what sort of details the police would have given you, and I’ve realised that it’s not fair if you don’t know the truth.’ Her voice was unsteady and she kept her eyes down. It was as though she’d practised the speech over and over and she just wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. She took a deep breath and continued.

  ‘The boy who killed your son . . . and your fiancé, well, he was just about to take my son, my baby, away from me.’ Her grip tightened on her little boy. ‘He was just three months old at the time. A tiny, helpless baby, and that monster was going to hurt him, maybe even kill him, just because he wouldn’t stop crying, just because . . .’ She petered off, looking as though she might lose her nerve.

  Belinda swallowed and nodded her head slightly, the most encouraging action she could bring herself to do. Evelyn continued to sit stock-still, her face rigid as she waited. Lara then took another deep breath and ploughed on.

  ‘Andrew was killed because he intervened. That guy – the drug addict – he hit me across the face with his gun. The sound of Zach crying seemed to be sending him crazy. He was in the middle of trying to pull him away from me when Andrew ran straight at the guy, knocked him away from us. He didn’t even think about himself, just about my baby boy, about keeping him safe.’

  Finally Lara raised her eyes and looked straight at Evelyn and then Belinda. ‘He was a hero. He died to save my baby boy. And I know that doesn’t make it okay. I know that doesn’t bring him back, but I thought you needed to know. I thought you deserved to know.’ Her speech finished, she stood up, hoisted the little boy onto her hip and left.

  Belinda and Evelyn sat without speaking for a good five minutes after she was gone. Finally Belinda broke the silence.

  ‘Did you know?’ she asked in a small voice.

  ‘No,’ responded Evelyn, her voice hoarse.

  ‘He really was amazing, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Yes he was.’

  Belinda rushed around from one picnic table to the next, trying desperately to get the tablecloths to stay put.

  ‘Argh,’ she groaned to herself. ‘It’s too windy!’ This was impossible to do on her own; it was simply too much for one person. And what about the cakes? How were the birthday candles going to stay lit in this wind?

  ‘Need a hand?’ said a voice from behind her.

  She looked up from trying to sticky tape down a corner of one of the tablecloths and grinned. ‘Baz, thank God you’re finally here. Did the girls have their nap okay? Cause you know I don’t want them to be in a bad mood for the party. And did you remember the camera? And the bread rolls! I forgot to tell you they were on the kitchen bench!’

  ‘Relax. The girls slept for over two hours. I almost thought I was going to have to wake them. Stacey and Shanks are getting them out of the car. I’ve got the camera, I’ve got the bread rolls, and Ev’s picking up the chicken on her way. Everything’s under control.’

  Belinda started to calm down, then the panic wound back up again. ‘What if my parents don’t get here in time? It’s a long drive down from Wahdoonga, and they haven’t been to this park before. What if they get lost?’

  ‘Got a call from your mum about ten minutes ago. They should be pulling up any second. Trust me, it’s going to be perfect.’

  The party was a disaster.

  There were the babies from Belinda’s mothers’ group, who kept eating the pebbles out of the rock garden. There was the huge fight between Violet’s daughter, Matilda, and Bazza’s niece Sophie, because they’d worn the same party dress. And there were the plastic cups and paper plates that kept getting whipped into the air every time the wind picked up.

  But they were all the things that came hand in hand with a double one-year-old birthday party. You just had to accept it. And later, these weren’t the moments that Belinda remembered. What she remembered was meeting Evelyn’s business partner, Jack, and watching her blush as she told them about the ‘business trip’ they were planning to take to Thailand together.

  She remembered her dad giving her a big hug as he told her how proud he was of her, and how amazed he was to hear that she was already going back to uni next semester to finish off her degree. She remembered James whispering to her that he’d got a phone number off some girl called Tania last week and they were going on a date next weekend and he was absolutely stoked because she was the hottest girl from Hunters Hill High, and even though Andy had kissed her first he could let that one slide because apparently she’d always really had a thing for him.

  She remembered Bazza proudly telling Stacey about his first week of his new job as a school counsellor at Belmore High, and Stacey immediately informing him that she actually knew quite a bit more about psychology than he did, thanks to the internet, and she would be happy to give him any tips he needed. She remembered her mum giving her a nudge as she said, ‘I like Bazza. And what a lovely name he has, don’t you think?’ She remembered watching Evelyn and Violet, who were sitting together and giggling like school girls as they fought over the lolly bags, and thinking to herself, I hope my girls grow up to be as close as those two are.

  But most of all, she remembered her girls’ faces as they sat on her lap together while everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to them. They looked around in delight, as though to say, ‘Is this all for us?!’

  And then Andi leant forward and stuck her hand right in the middle of one of the cakes, and Isabelle sneezed on the other one, and everyone laughed, and Belinda looked up to see Bazza smiling and she thought, Life is good. And although a part of her would always miss Andy, she knew that he would be happy for her too. After all, how could he not? According to Stacey, he’d orchestrated the whole thing.

  Epilogue

  On the night that Andi and Isabelle were preparing to be born, a nineteen-year-old girl, wearing knee-high boots and a long leather jacket, with bright-pink streaks all through her hair, stood outside a nightclub in the middle of Perth. She checked her watch. It was almost midnight – her friend was supposed to have met her here half an hour ago. Extremely agitated, she typed a short, blunt text into her phone to send to her friend.

  As she was keying in the phone number, she felt a soft, warm breeze against her neck. She shivered as the breeze turned into a chill that seemed to tingle up her spine, and she felt goose bumps appear on her arms. She fumbled with the buttons and accidentally hit the wrong number on the last digit before hitting ‘send’.

  She had absolutely no idea that the text was now travelling right across the country to New South Wales, and was zipping its way into the bedroom of a guy who was fast asleep at three in the morning.

  The message simply said:

  Acknowledgements

  First a general thank you to my family, Steve’s family, the Crestwood Girls, the Gilroy Kids and Tag-alongs and my mother’s group for all of your support and advice. Thank you to Steve Menasse, Liane Moriarty and Jaci Moriarty for reading my earliest drafts and giving me so much incredible feedback and encouragement. I am also very grateful to Diane Moriarty, Kati Harrington, Fiona Ostric, Rebecca Saunders, Michelle Foster, Kate Fitzpatrick and Allyson McKinnon-Howett for all being such kind and wonderful readers of later drafts.

  Thank you to Kerry Lockwood for sharing stories with me about life in the country, and to Brooke McDonald for telling me what it’s like to be pregnant with twins. Thank you to Justin Saunders for answering my questions about police protocol, and also for crashing your mum’s book club with your mates while wearing pastel coloured cardigans.

  Tara Wynne at Curtis Brown was the first professional in the literary industry (who wasn’t related to me) to read this book, so thank you Tara for loving it and for passing it on to Pippa Masson, who then became my lovely and supportive agent. Thank you to Beverley
Cousins and Maisie Dubosarsky at Random House for all your hard work editing this book and making it so much shinier!

  Finally to my family – to Mum, Dad, Madeleine Menasse and Arthur Menasse, I appreciate so much all of the babysitting, support and encouragement. To Maddie and Piper, thank you for being beautiful and inspiring and allowing me to write while you are sleeping or at day-care, and sometimes while you’re watching Sesame Street. But most of all, thank you to Steve for letting me share so many of our own stories with the world and for putting up with me reading over your shoulder, watching for your reactions while you were reading this book. Sorry I kept prodding you if you didn’t laugh or look upset quickly enough in the right bits.

  Nicola Moriarty lives in Sydney’s north west with her husband and two small daughters. She has a serious literary pedigree as the younger sister of bestselling authors Liane Moriarty and Jaclyn Moriarty. Free-Falling is Nicola’s first novel.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Free-Falling

  Published by Random House Australia 2012

  Copyright © Nicola Moriarty

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A Bantam book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

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