Sara MacDonald - The Hour Before Dawn

A white streak of lightning shot into the night making the children jump back. They all heard but could not see the fourth helicopter drop from the clouds. The engine was making a lot of noise as the pilot searched for the airfield lights below him.

The last helicopter emerged from cloud and circled. Daddy. It seemed to the twins to move nearer to the house, as if to say, I know you’re watching…I’ll be home in thirty minutes, Peapods.

Daddy was always last down. It is like being the captain of a ship, he’d told the twins. Your men’s safety comes first.

They saw the red flickering tail-light against the lightning as the helicopter hovered, tried to turn and drop out of the savage wind to land. But it was impossible. It was caught as the eye of the storm lifted and threw it about the sky like a toy. Pilot and machine were suspended and buffeted against a backdrop of lightning shooting and cracking across the sky like fireworks.

The helicopter looked pathetically small as it was thrown about the sky like an unbalanced bee and tossed this way and that. Fleur and the twins held their breath in hypnotised terror.

‘Land, Daddy. Land!’ Saffie cried out into the night. Nikki gripped the windowsill as they watched the tail rising, tail-blade whirring frantically as the engine screamed.

‘Holy Mary, mother of God… Please …’ Fleur was crying over and over. She clutched the twins, held them into her, gripped them so tightly she hurt, and her eyes never left the sky.

‘David…David…I’m willing you down…You can do it. I know you can do it…Come on, David…please, darling, get her down…’

Something terrible was gripping Saffie’s stomach in a cramp so painful she wanted to fall to the ground. Nikki was sobbing, still clutching the windowsill. They were only five but they both knew, like their mother, that their father was powerless to do anything to save himself, because he no longer had control of his machine, which was turning upside down and falling out of the sky and spiralling down to the ground so fast that if they’d blinked they would have missed it.

Already, far away, they could hear the sound of sirens. They heard the explosion as the aircraft hit the ground when it was out of sight. They saw the flames leap upwards into a sky cracking with thunder. They could not move, Fleur, Saffie and Nikki. They stood watching the sky where the helicopter had been a moment ago.

A long way away a telephone was ringing and Ah Heng ran in her little backless slippers to answer it. Still, the three figures stood, unable to take their eyes from the empty sky that was growing light now. The rain blew in great gusts sideways, filling the monsoon drains, flushing the snakes out of the dry collected leaves.

Into the dawn, low on the horizon, there suddenly sailed one small pink cloud. Fleur stared and stared at it. She said in a strange thick voice, ‘Twins…look…see? That cloud…Daddy will always be there to look after us. Always.’

Saffie reached behind Fleur for Nikki’s hand. They stared at the cloud in silence, their small bodies trembling, unable to entirely comprehend that their father was so suddenly dead. They did not want a pink cloud. They wanted their big, laughing, silly, whiskery, safe daddy, who called out each and every day, ‘Hey! I’m home! Where are my little peapods?’

Far away on the Chitbee Road they could see the military car containing the padre and the commandant and the military police making its way down the long road to their house.

‘Missie?’ Ah Heng touched Fleur’s arm, took the twins gently from her, holding them to her. ‘You come away from window now. You cold. You come away. I make Missie tea. Army men coming.’

But Fleur could not take her eyes from the cloud that was fading to orange and had only been the reflected colour of the flames.

‘You will always be with us to keep us safe,’ the twins heard her whisper. ‘Oh, David…David.’

But their father was not there to keep them safe. Did Nikki blame Fleur for what happened later? Was she angry with her? Yes, she was. If you had children you must look after them, no matter what happened to you or however sad you were. You must look after them and keep them safe forever, because you were their mother and if you didn’t, who would?

‘What time is your mother’s flight from Auckland?’ Jack asked me at breakfast. He was standing at the sink, buttering toast.

‘Five o’clock, I think. I’m going to check in a minute. It’s OK, Jack. I can meet her on my own.’

‘No, Nik, we’ll both go. I’ll make sure I’ve finished by four; it will give us an hour to get there. Just be ready, we don’t want her standing around jetlagged waiting for us. Did you tell her to stay in the main airport until it’s time for the flight to Kerikeri? That other terminal is the pits.’

‘Yes. I e-mailed. It’ll be a miracle if she’s got to Auckland and not sailed off to Hong Kong by mistake…’ I joked weakly. ‘I don’t think she’s travelled so far on her own for a long time.’

Jack gave me one of his looks. ‘Well, she’s had the courage to stop off in Singapore on her own so she can’t be quite as dumb as you make out…’ He paused and I waited. ‘Your Mom is staying two nights, just two nights, Nik. Surely it can’t be too hard to be nice to her for a fleeting visit.’

He’s right, it shouldn’t be too hard, but it will be.

I was aware that the fault lay with me, that I was carrying a perceived injury long after it should have healed, that my feelings were immature, to say the least, in someone of my age. I wasn’t a teenager, for heaven’s sake. But there are some people who are so different from you that they get under your skin and make you itch as soon as they appear. My mother is one of those people.

‘Will you try,’ Jack kissed me, his mouth full of crumbs, ‘to be kind? Or it’s going to be embarrassing, especially as she’s meeting me for the first time.’

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘Pollyanna is my middle name.’

‘Who?’

I grinned at him. ‘Just an American goody-goody schoolgirl book.’

When Jack had gone I wandered round the house tidying, trying to see all we had done here with my mother’s eyes. Then I took towels up to the spare room, which had its own balcony, and I looked out over the bay and then stared down at the bed my mother would sleep in. It seemed strange to think of someone I hadn’t seen for over three years lying there tonight.

Disturbing; a sudden mix of my two, so different, lives. One I had wanted to leave behind me, so that I could be born anew, slough off that old teenage skin and turn into someone else, perhaps the person I was now. I had come so far, to another culture and another continent, and it seemed suddenly as if my mother was following me, as if to remind me of the shadows I left and the person I once was. I didn’t want to be reminded.

The baby was moving now and I could feel the tiny flutter of life; a small, tentative movement to alert me to his presence, his curled life within me, slowly growing into the person he will be. And the person he will be will want to know his family and his English roots and his grandmother.

I knew, in the moment I stood by the bed my mother would sleep in, that I wanted them to know each other. I couldn’t deprive either of a relationship I had needed in my childhood.

I stared out to the yachts in the bay, beyond the garden Jack and I had created out of jungle, and remembered how hard I sometimes thought my grandmother was on my mother, yet I could do no wrong. I went out onto the balcony and breathed deeply, the sun warm on my face, and I swore that I would try my hardest to welcome my mother. She was obviously lonely without Fergus and seemed to have thrown herself into painting and studying the history of art.