The Falling of Shadows

By Jenny Harrison

Saturday morning was fresh with the damp lawn still unmarked by footprints. The garden, recklessly overgrown with weeds, called to me. Clouds moved across the sky like alien craft looking for a place to land. It looked like it was going to be a lovely day.
I was standing at the kitchen window dressed in my gardening jeans, so worn you could see the shape of my old-maid’s knickers underneath, when I looked up and saw him.
Oh, God.
I knew him. In a surge of memory that came from the gut, I knew the boy. I hadn’t seen him since he was six years old but the shape of his head, his eyes.
'There was no mistake.
It was Bailey Chance.
It was then I saw it. Close to him, a second self, a dark shape wavering like kelp in a rough sea. I couldn’t make out any more than that, just a shadowy pulsating outline.
But I knew it. I knew it as I know my own fingernails. They were back. Together with the memories of that awful past came the Shadows of my youth.
Oh, God. I thought I was free.
Seeing Bailey brought back memories I wasn’t sure I could handle. His presence conjured up all the baggage I hoped I’d left behind as I’d moved from my teen years to a precarious adulthood. You think you can leave the past behind. But you can’t. It’s always there like a dark shape attached to your heels ready to trip you up.'
Tessa Godwin is forced to revisit dark events fron her past, but the process shines a light
that helps others who were caught up in those long-ago tragedies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jenny Harrison
• Release date: Jan 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458140333

Jenny Harrison

I only started writing in 1995 in my late 50s (yeah for us late bloomers!). Debbie’s Story - the story of childhood sexual abuse - was a huge hit when published in 1997, one of those books that appeared just at the right time and in the right place. It was second on the bestseller list for that year. We immigrated to New Zealand in 1997 and in 2000 I co-authored a book called A New Life in New Zealand with my good friend Surita Nortjé. That has since become the preferred textbook for potential immigrants to New Zealand. After that there was a lull when I wrote almost exclusively for magazines and newspapers, in particular Connections and Migrant News. In 2006 I published a gift book called To the Child Unborn, a delightful book filled with wisdom and love which, I think, is the best thing I've done. 2007 and 2008 marked the start of my life as a fiction writer. I wrote The Falling of Shadows, The Indigo Kid and Accidental Hero - all set in the fictional small town of Panui. You can buy print copies through my website, www.jennyharrison.co.nz I recently launched the fourth book in the Panui series, Rusty & Slasher's Guide to Crime, on an unsuspecting world.

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