Ghost Child (25 page)

1. Who do you think bears responsibility for the death of Jacob Cashman? Why?
   
2. Did the Department and its social workers fail the Cashman children? Did they do enough to encourage a relationship between the surviving children? Was it important to keep the children in touch with their mother?
   
3. What is Lauren seeking, in her series of sexual encounters before she leaves foster care? Why do you think she became celibate?
   
4. Why do you think Lauren chose to move interstate and to live alone, after she left foster care? Do you
   believe that she was happy alone, or was she in hiding? Does she give any clues about her need to be with others or her fear of the way others will treat her?
   
5. Do you believe that the loss of an arm changed the way Harley saw himself and the way others saw him? What does Harley mean when he says he’s pleased to be the ‘guy with one arm’?
   
6. Why does Lauren choose to enter her first adult relationship with a married man? Do you get the sense that she is trying to borrow some status and respectability from Stephen Bass? Or is a married man a safer option, emotionally?
   
7. What is Stephen Bass’s motivation for pursuing a relationship with Lauren? What do you believe would have happened if Lauren had told him about Jacob before they became lovers? Would he have gone ahead with the liaison?
   
8. Why did Harley go to Lauren the day he saw her in the newspaper? Why did he take her home to his mum’s? Is there a sense that he was taking her home?
   
9. Do you believe Harley and Lauren will remain close? Has Lauren healed or merely begun healing? Will she be able to make peace with herself? Do Lauren
   and Harley need each other more, or less, than siblings raised together? What does Harley think about Lauren’s role in Jacob’s death?
   
10. What will become of Hayley Cashman and her daughter, Jezeray? Would her life have been different if she’d been able to stay with her siblings? Who does she blame for the death of Jake: her mother, her sister, or all of the people in the house that day? Do you think she will find room for Lauren in her life, or are they too different?
    

Caroline Overington is the author of two non-fiction books,
Only in New York
and
Kickback
, which won the Blake Dawson Prize for Business Literature. She has twice won a Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism, and has also won the Sir Keith Murdoch Award for Journalistic Excellence.

Her debut novel,
Ghost Child
, was published to great acclaim in 2009. Her second novel,
I Came to Say Goodbye
, was published in 2010.

She lives in Bondi with her husband and their young twins.

I
T WAS FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE
morning. The car park outside Sydney Children’s Hospital was quiet. A 27-year-old woman, dressed only in a dressing-gown and slippers, pushed through the front revolving door.

Security staff would later say they thought she was a new mother, returning to her child’s bedside – and in a way, she was.

The woman walked past the nurses’ station, where a lone matron sat in dim light, playing laptop Solitaire. She walked past Joeys – the room where pink and puckered babies lay row by row in perspex tubs – and into Pandas, where six infants – not newborns but babies under the age of one – lay sleeping in hospital cots.

The woman paused at the door for a moment, as though
scanning the children. She then walked directly across the room, where a gorgeous baby girl had kicked herself free of her blankets. She was laying face down, the way babies sometimes do, her right cheek flat to the white sheet, her knees up under her chest. The white towelling of her nappy was brilliant against her dark skin.

The woman took a green, nylon shopping bag from the pocket of her nightie. It was one of those ones that had
Woolworths, the Fresh Food People
written across the side. She put the bag on the floor and lifted the baby girl from the cot.

The infant stirred, but she did not wake. The woman placed her gently in the bottom of the shopping bag, under a clown blanket she had taken from the cot. She stood, and looked around. There was a toy giraffe on the windowsill. The woman put that in the bag with the baby, too. Then she walked back down the corridor, past the matron at her laptop, through the front door and back into the hospital car park.

There is CCTV footage of what happened next, and most Australians would have seen it, either on the internet or the evening news.

The woman walked across the car park towards an old Corolla. She put the shopping bag on the ground, and opened the car’s rear door. She lifted the giraffe and the blanket out of the bag and dropped both by the wheels of the car.

For one long moment, she held the child gently against her breast. She put her nose against the rusty curls on the
top of the girl’s head, and with her eyes closed, she smelled her.

She clipped the infant into the baby capsule, and got behind the wheel of the Corolla. She drove towards the exit barrier and put her ticket in the box. The barrier opened and the woman drove forward, turning left at the lights, towards Parramatta Road.

That is where the CCTV footage ends. It isn’t where the story ends, however. It’s not even where the story starts.

www.randomhouse.com.au