SIX
THE APARTMENT
Before I opened my eyes I heard the roar of city traffic below. I waited for the sound of my father pouring hot water into his big Herald mug, jiggling three tea bags, stirring in four heaped teaspoons of sugar, plopping in a splash of milk and dropping the spoon noisily into the sink.
The sounds did not come. In their place was the huffing of Magic sleep-breathing, and the diabolical stench of her breath. I opened my eyes on almost complete darkness. My bottom felt as hard and cold as the timber floor beneath me. My leg was twisted. I tried to straighten it and felt bone grind against bone or metal beneath my skin.
Is Harry home? Maybe that’s what woke me.
Details of our last conversation washed over me. ‘Why do you think you and Mum broke up?’ That’s what I’d asked. Like an idiot. He had been at the dining table, laptop open, keeping an eye on the screen as he paged through a notebook, scribbling. I was tucked into the sofa bed, watching him. It must have been about 10 pm when I asked the question. He muttered an answer about ‘two people who love each other very much but sometimes …’ and so on. Mum had given me this one many times, but I wanted the truth. So I asked if he had thought about me much over the years and he ummed and aahed and got up to make tea. ‘Course I have,’ he said. ‘All the time.’
I asked why he had never been in touch and if he got the letter I sent. I was sitting up now. I really wanted to know. He stayed over in the kitchenette, not looking at me, as the jug boiled and roared. ‘Do you think I’ll see you again after this week?’ I asked.
He grabbed his coat off the back of a dining chair and said, ‘I’ll just pop out and grab some milk. I’ll only be a minute. You go off to sleep. It’s late. We’ll talk about all this tomorrow.’
And that was it. He hadn’t come back. If I hadn’t pressed him maybe I wouldn’t be in this predicament.
I pushed up with my good leg and eased my back up the cupboard wall. Magic struggled to her feet, too, yawning eagerly into the darkness. There was a weak crack of daylight beneath the door. I checked my phone: 6.06 am.
I eased the door open. Magic tap-danced around my feet. My stomach lurched and acid scratched at my throat as I peered out. The front door to my father’s apartment was open about a third of the way but I couldn’t see inside.
Someone ran downstairs from the floor above, making old timber groan right above my head. I panicked and closed the cupboard door again. Was it someone from the apartment directly above my father’s? 6A? The footsteps moved quickly across the landing and down the next flight of stairs. Not heavy footsteps. Light. A jogger. A lady or a kid. The girl I had seen through the peephole in Harry’s front door on Monday, maybe? Probably her. She was the only person I had heard or seen using the stairs. Was she from the apartment where the man fell? Had she been asleep? Was the big, asthmatic man her father? I couldn’t rule it out. Never assume anything. Number six in Harry’s Ten Commandments.
I carefully pushed the cupboard door open again. Magic scurried past me, sniffing the fire hose reel cupboard, then sniffing around the door of apartment 5B, the one next to ours.
The stairwell smelt like breakfast and sounded like morning TV.
I moved slowly towards Harry’s apartment, my mud-spattered feet so cold they no longer seemed to exist. My bandage was wet and filthy from my fall in the yard. I didn’t remember the doctor suggesting mud and lots of exercise to heal my leg.
‘Harry?’ I whispered.
I listened for movement.
‘Harry?’
I willed my father to appear – black shoes, smart grey pants, crisp white shirt, trench coat, collar up, neat black hair. Just like in Harry Garner: Crime Reporter. I imagined him just as I drew him and for some reason, in that moment, I couldn’t think what the real Harry looked like. I needed to hear him speak, to say to me, ‘How’d you sleep, fella?’ like he had every morning this week, to make him real again.
Magic sniffed at our door, nudging it wider. I grabbed her collar and saw the mess inside the apartment. The furniture was all in place and Harry didn’t have many possessions, but what had been on shelves or in drawers was now strewn on the floor – paper, books, food, a few ornaments, cushions.
Magic strained at her collar, trying desperately to run off into the apartment. In the end, I couldn’t hold her. The dog darted inside, feet sliding on the matting, her tail stiff. She sniffed everything that had fallen.
I flicked on the light, checked behind the door, then went to the kitchenette. I slid open a drawer and wrapped my icy fingers around a large knife. I gripped it tight and crutched across to the bathroom, knife pointed forward like a bayonet.
I listened through the ruckus of Magic’s doggy detective-work. I stopped a couple of metres back from the bathroom, took a breath and listened to the bath tap drip onto that rusty stain. I tried to think of my dad looking in the mirror each morning, plucking grey hairs from the side of his head as though it would somehow stop more from growing. He would stand back and look at himself, pleased, like he didn’t even see the other 25,000 grey hairs.
I edged forward and peered around the doorframe, a white-knuckle grip on the knife. But Harry was not at the basin. I approached the mouldy shower curtain that was pulled around the bath. I couldn’t remember whether the curtain had been pulled across when I’d checked the bathroom during the night. A lot had happened since then. My hand shook with the knife in it. I wasn’t sure if I had the guts to use it. My teeth chattered quietly.
I reached my left crutch out towards the curtain and my mind flicked through every scary comic I had ever read. I waited for an explosion of human body through curtain or a single deadly shot. Thwack. Pow. Kaboom.
SEVEN
THE VISITOR
There was nothing. Just that rusty-red stain. Drip … drip … drip. I reached into the bath and squeaked the tap hard clockwise, but the drip would not stop.
I moved out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, twisting and turning to look behind the door and flick open the wardrobe. I dropped awkwardly to the floor to see under the bed.
Nobody.
I had checked the entire apartment. I laid the knife on the floor. In a horror comic like Weird Terror or Tales from the Crypt, this was the part where the killer rolled out from nowhere, grabbed the knife and plunged it deep into the victim’s chest.
I picked up the knife and rested it in my lap. As I did, I heard someone bounding up the stairs. I crawled to the bedroom door, dragging my crutches and leg behind me. I peeked out, saw the front door still open and stood awkwardly, leaning against the bedroom doorframe. I crutched across the lounge room, the footsteps still winding their way upwards. I pressed myself against the wall as a shadow appeared on the front door. I took a chance and peered out to see the girl from upstairs – dyed red hair, black sweat pants, black hoodie, white earbuds and an earring up high on her left ear. She looked a year or two older than me.
She saw me and looked startled. I withdrew into the apartment and waited till she had gone by. I peered out again and she looked back at me as she climbed the next flight of stairs. Then she was gone, up the final flight to the sixth floor.
I pushed the door closed. It banged on the jamb and swung open again. The deadlock was lying on the dirty lino of the kitchen floor with splinters of wood still attached to it. I closed it again and rested my forehead against the murky-grey-painted timber.
Why didn’t I ask her if she heard anything? I wondered.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I took it out and stared at the screen.
Mum. My heart rose and sank simultaneously. What would I say? She would expect a message back right away. Otherwise she would call and I couldn’t have that. I was tired and confused and scared, and I would tell her everything. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want her to have to save me.
My mother had honed the fine art of over-parenting me from a distance. When I was little she only worked three days a week at the hospital, but when I was i
n second grade she said that we needed more money. So she started doing five, sometimes six days, mostly in Emergency, which meant that they asked her to stay back if there was a car accident or some other big event. She couldn’t afford to say no. I used to like going to my cousins’ house while she was at work but, lately, it felt like she was hardly ever at home or awake when I was. Sometimes early shifts, sometimes late. But, even though she wasn’t physically at home, she always seemed to be there looking over my shoulder – texting and calling, checking in, knowing what I was doing before I knew. I clicked on the message.
Morning Sammy. Did you
sleep well?
Sammy. I had told her about using that name. I wondered how I could answer honestly without telling her that I had witnessed a possible murder, that the perpetrator was after me and that my father was missing. Sometimes mothers needed to be protected from small pieces of disturbing information.
Morning Lisa.
Bit restless
Not exactly a lie, I figured.
Don’t call me Lisa.
Don’t call me Sammy
You’ll be home tomorrow.
I’ve missed you. I’m sorry
I let you go.
I know. You told me that.
It’s okay
I didn’t think I had any
choice.
It’s okay
I’m a terrible mother.
No you’re not
Well he’s a terrible father
and I’m a terrible mother for
letting you stay
with him.
I know Mum. You’ve told me that
before too
Many times, I wanted to add, but I didn’t.
ok
‘ok’ was Mum-speak for ‘I’m sad that you seem to be enjoying yourself so much and sorry I said anything’. The short, lower-case answer came with an invisible sad-face emoji. I felt bad. My mum was an emotional wreck. Probably because of me. She was a good person. She did everything for me. Why did I have to upset her all the time? And the truth was that I really hadn’t been enjoying myself so much. Even before Harry went out for milk. I hadn’t told her about him working every day, being late every night, about how impatient he’d been with all my questions, and about him being old and distant and smelling slightly weird.
Take your magnesium.
She thought magnesium would solve everything – my jumpy legs, stomach pains, anxiety, inexplicable rage and ‘very poor decision-making’. So far, only the jumpy legs had been cured. I went over to the bed, my leg howling in pain now that the tide of adrenaline had gone out. I flopped down, reached into my backpack, grabbed a small brown glass bottle of magnesium, shook a couple of tablets out into my hand and chewed them.
Just took some
Good boy.
‘Good boy’ was another thing I had banned her from saying, especially in front of my friends. Mum wanted me to be four years old forever. She had, so far, chosen to ignore the hairs poking from my chin. There were only three of them but I was letting them grow out. There was no way she hadn’t seen them. If I pressed my chin to my chest in the bath they were really spiky.
Are you looking forward to
your party? Lachie’s mum
messaged me to say he
could come.
I had forgotten about my party. It wasn’t really a party. Just friends coming over to play video games and watch movies.
Yep. Great
Bye teenager.
Bye little old lady
Watch it.
I squeezed my phone into my pocket and spent a few minutes wrestling a heavy armchair up against the front door, hopping on my good leg. I shoved the coffee table behind the armchair for extra protection and stood back, assessing my work.
Magic looked up at me, smiling. I opened the fridge and took out a pizza box. There were two pieces of two-day-old Meatlovers. We had eaten pizza five of the six nights I’d been staying with Harry. He would nibble one piece and I’d devour about seven. He couldn’t believe how much I ate. Every night he’d watch me, shake his head and say, ‘You must have holes in the bottoms of your feet.’ Which I took as a challenge to eat more.
I’d told Harry that pizza was my favourite food on my first night but now I wasn’t so sure. I could feel a soccer ball of mozzarella cheese pocked with ham and pineapple sitting in my gut. On Tuesday night, the only non-pizza night, I had tried to surprise him by making pasta with red sauce, a recipe we’d made in Food Tech at school – but it was cold by the time he got home at 7.30.
I grabbed the two pieces of pizza, left the box in the fridge, dropped one piece on the floor for Magic and took a bite out of the other. It was like eating the sole of a sneaker. Magic inhaled hers then looked up at me with a twinkly ‘give-me-that-pizza-or-I-may-bite-you’ eye. I dropped my slice on the floor and gave her a pat as she vacuumed it up.
I crutched over to the sofa bed, dog-bone tired and sore all over. The dressing on my leg was caked with mud and a bit of blood. I took a clean dressing from my backpack and peeled off the old bandage. It was pretty messy under there with fresh blood and a clear, yellowy liquid seeping from between the stitches. I prayed that the fall in the yard and all the knocks to my knee hadn’t displaced my staples. Mum had spent thousands on the operation, even after Medicare. She had told me this at least twelve times in the lead-up. I cleaned the knee with a sharp-smelling medical wipe, wrapped my leg the way Tina had taught me in the hospital and stretched the little elastic catch across to secure the bandage.
I put on some fresh shorts and a t-shirt and called Magic, who was still desperately licking and sniffing the floor for pizza crumbs. She toddled towards me. I reached down, put my arm beneath her ample backside, hauled her up onto the bed with a groan and, within seconds, I was tumbling down into sleep.
EIGHT
HOW I WONDER WHO YOU ARE
I had thought about my father every day of my life for as long as I could remember. Sometimes more than once. I wondered where he was. I wondered who he was. I wondered who I was. I knew that I was a Scottish-French-Aboriginal Australian. Whatever that meant. My mum’s side was Scottish and she’d told me that Dad’s was French and Aboriginal a couple of generations back. And I was me. But I felt like my dad held some vital piece of the puzzle and if I could just get to know him, then I could unlock who I was and I’d have all the answers. Or some of them.
I asked Mum about him a lot. He wasn’t a popular topic of conversation, but I couldn’t help myself. If your dad lived two hours away from you and you had never met him, wouldn’t you be curious? At least once a day – when I was in maths or walking home from school – I thought, ‘I wonder what he’s doing now?’
Sometimes, when people have body parts removed, they feel as though the part is still attached. They call it a ‘phantom limb’. Well, my dad had never been part of my family but I still sensed him like a missing body part. It was as though I was born without a left leg and yet, every day, I was surprised that I didn’t have a left leg. The space in my life where he should have been seemed to tingle and itch and sometimes burn.
Reading his articles helped. From fourth grade on, I made sure I got to the bus stop in the mornings with fifteen minutes to spare so that I could cross the road to the newsagency and scour the pages for one of his stories. I would flick and flick through the paper, praying to see the words in bold print at the top of a story: By Harry Garner. Sometimes there was nothing but, when there was, it made my stomach drop. It was cool to see my own name in a newspaper: Garner. I liked that. But it was mostly about seeing my father’s name. It made him real. I loved hearing his voice in the stories, the way he strung words together, the way he looked at the world. I built him up so much in my head that he became magical and mythical.
I wanted to tell Mrs Li, the newsagent, but she was usually glaring at me in a ‘this is not a library’ kind of way. Sometimes the bus would arrive when I was in the middle of a really juicy story and I�
�d have to finish reading it online at school, but I preferred to read it in print. After I had started one of his articles I would hardly talk to anyone on the bus. I’d stare out the window imagining what was going to happen at the end. He had this way of unravelling a crime like it was fiction – not in a boring way like a normal newspaper story about the Prime Minister or the economy, but in a way that made you need to know what happened next.
Harry covered murders, robbery sprees, prison escapes. His life seemed so much more interesting than mine. Nothing ever happened to me. I lived in the most boring town since the invention of towns, while I imagined my father was living an amazing life in the city: reporting crime, earning lots of money and living in a big house with no one to tell him what to do.
That’s why I started making my comic. I wanted to get down what I thought it must be like for him, and imagine my own future life as a second-generation crime reporter.
I once tried calling him at home on a number I found in my mum’s phone but it rang out ten times. Another time, my mum let me try to call him at work at the Herald. I was so nervous, but I actually got to speak to him. The only time in my life until this week. The call was only short. He was just about to go away and he said he couldn’t meet up with me, but that he’d call when he got back. He didn’t know exactly when he would be back. Probably an overseas assignment, I figured. He couldn’t tell me so it must have been a really big story. When I got off the phone I didn’t want to look at my mother’s face, didn’t want to see her pity or outrage or anything. I just wanted to be alone and to stop the hot sacks of tears beneath my eyes from spilling over.
My dad was busy. I understood. He had an important job. I’d meet him one day. I knew I would. Maybe I’d even live with him sometime. I didn’t mention that plan to Mum. But I knew. One day. And it would be perfect.
The Fall Page 3