The Fall

by Tristan Bancks

  What’s your favourite food? Mine is pizza and chips.

  What type of car do you have?

  Could you please send me your phone number? I tried your old one from a few years ago but it said that the number was disconnected.

  What’s it like being a crime reporter?

  Do you ever go undercover?

  Do you have an undercover identity? (I won’t tell anyone.)

  Do you live in a nice part of the city?

  Do you ever go on stakeouts?

  That’s all for now. Thanks for the comics you sent me a couple of years ago. I have read them all 150 bazillion times. Can you please write back to me with the answers at 12 Cavanbah Crescent Katoomba NSW Australia 2780. And if you want to know about me, just include some questions.

  Thanks.

  Sam.

  EIGHTEEN

  STAKEOUT

  I stared at Harry’s laptop for a long time before I opened it. I’m a snoop but I have boundaries. I would never search through someone’s personal files.

  Not usually. But I was trying to uncover the details of a felony. (I loved using the word ‘felony’ rather than ‘crime’.)

  I took the laptop into Harry’s bedroom and sat on the far side of his bed, making sure I wasn’t visible from the front door in case he came home. I lifted the lid and the screen demanded a password. I had no idea what it might be. You needed to know someone to guess their code.

  I punched in ‘0000’. I tried ‘1111’. I tried ‘9999’. I tried ‘1234’ and ‘9876’. I tried ‘magic’ and ‘harry’ and ‘harrygarner’. I tried his birthday: ‘230954’.

  Nothing.

  I shut the lid and put the laptop back in the cupboard under the kitchen bench.

  At midday, I flicked on the TV to catch the news. I prayed that there might be something related to the crime. What if, somehow, someone else had seen what had happened? Maybe the man had been arrested leaving the building. Maybe the body had turned up somewhere.

  The news anchor thanked us for joining her. The top story was about a footballer involved in a nightclub brawl – apparently the most important story in the world today. There were freak weather events across the country. The Prime Minister denied any connection between these events and climate change. There was a story on the crime wave ‘sweeping the city’ – young men using new technology to stay ahead of police. That was something my dad had reported on a few weeks back – a new breed of criminal using encrypted messaging apps and social media to organise themselves in ways that old-school police were finding impossible to keep up with. Next was a ‘Could it happen here?’ story on the fear of local terror attacks, encouraging citizens to remain ‘alert but not alarmed’. Then, ‘In sport, big news for the Brisbane Broncos, Geoff …’

  No story on the guy who fell or anything related.

  I switched off the TV.

  I sat.

  I waited.

  I worried.

  I listened.

  At one stage I thought I heard something. A single footstep twisting against a floorboard above. But then nothing more.

  I watched the yard and the train tracks from the rear window.

  I checked the door locks again and again.

  I turned over the events of last night in my mind, making notes when I thought of something to ask Harry.

  Mum texted.

  Are you doing your

  schoolwork?

  Are you doing your hospital

  work?

  Yes, as a matter of fact.

  Good girl

  I liked it when I managed to distract her from the truth without lying.

  I tried reading some of our novel for English – Number the Stars by Lois Lowry – just to make Mum happy, even though she would never really know.

  I did some work on my comic book.

  Next thing I knew, I woke up on the couch, my head resting on Magic, who was snoring. I wiped drool from my cheek and saw my notebook lying on the floor. I had only drawn a single frame of the comic before I fell asleep. I felt like a pretty lame cartoonist and crime reporter. What kind of reporter sleeps on the job? What if Moon Face had broken in? What if he’d sent someone to grab me?

  The only good news was that it was 4.47 pm. It was time to meet Scarlet. I would get as much information as I could and try to tell her as little as possible. The fewer people involved in this the better.

  NINETEEN

  INTERROGATION ROOM

  I folded the red serviette over and over again, into tinier and tinier squares until it wouldn’t fold any more. I was sitting at the back of the narrow cafe at a sticky table with wonky legs. The walls were bare concrete and the chairs were mismatched. I couldn’t work out if it was meant to be cool or if the owners were just cheap. I was the only customer in the cafe.

  The angry, bearded waiter – dressed like a lumberjack who had never been outdoors before – stood next to the coffee machine drying glasses with a red tea towel. He looked up at me occasionally, like he was suspicious I might steal a salt shaker or a sugar cube. I hadn’t ordered yet. I would wait for Scarlet. It was 5.07 pm. She’d said she’d be here at five. I prayed that Harry wouldn’t come back early and discover that I’d left the apartment.

  I mentally prepared to hold my first real-life interrogation. I would skilfully wheedle the following information out of her:

  1. Who are the Hills who live in apartment 6A?

  2. Did you see or hear anything from that apartment last night?

  3. Have you seen or heard anything recently that would raise suspicion?

  4. When this is all over, would you like to go see a movie with me?

  Not really the last one. But if I wasn’t a total chicken I would. I watched the front window of the cafe. From here, the peeling gold lettering of the words ‘Cafe Oska’ on the rain-spattered window looked like ‘Cafe Oska’. City workers hurried past the window in the semi-darkness, huddled under umbrellas and hooded raincoats.

  If this was a scene from one of my comics, the hulking figure of the man from last night would pass the window under his black umbrella. At the last moment he would look up and see the kid in the cafe. He would stop. Their gaze would lock. The kid in the cafe’s eyes would go wide and he’d stand, knocking over his chair, causing the lumberjack to look up. The kid would drop the folded serviette to the floor and run through the kitchen, past the toilet and out the back door of the cafe into an alley where he would be confronted, once again, by the enormous man. The man’s eyes would glow yellow as he coughed broken glass and laughed like a chainsaw.

  In reality, the front door of the cafe swung open and a girl with rain-soaked, dyed-red hair, a backpack and a guitar case wiped sheets of water off her arms and legs, flicked it onto the floor, then looked down the length of the narrow cafe towards me.

  She mouthed the word ‘sorry’ and the lumberjack put his glass and tea towel aside to escort her to her chair. She walked towards me, her guitar case swinging gently beside her. In my comic, it would not be a guitar that she was carrying in that case.

  I wondered if she had dyed her hair bright red because her name was Scarlet or if she had changed her name to match the hair – unlikely, but you never know.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘My lesson went on forever and the bus was late.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  She put her case down, took off her backpack and sat in the rickety wooden chair opposite me.

  ‘I can’t stay long. Mum’ll want to know where I am.’

  She drummed her multicoloured fingernails excitedly on the table and said, ‘So … tell me.’

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ Lumberjack asked, looming behind her.

  ‘I’ll have a small, skinny, decaf flat white, extra hot,’ Scarlet said.

  ‘Me, too,’ I said.

  They both looked at me in a ‘Really, you want a small, skinny, decaf flat white, extra hot?’ kind of way and I tried to look back in a ‘Sure, that’s what I always have’ kind of way. Onl
y I’m not sure how convincing I was.

  He walked off and Scarlet and I were left looking at each other. I sat up as tall as I could in my chair.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this all day,’ she said in a low voice.

  I told her what I had seen the night before and she studied me with solemn brown eyes, weighing every word I said for the truth.

  The lumberjack brought our drinks and Scarlet sipped hers. Once he was gone she whispered, ‘What did the police say?’

  ‘Do you know who lives there?’ I asked, pretending I hadn’t heard her question and that I hadn’t raided their mailbox.

  ‘The Hills,’ she said. ‘They’re an old couple. They go to Queensland with their caravan every year for four or five months, for the weather. I think he has arthritis or something.’

  I jotted these notes on the crime reporter’s notepad inside my brain.

  ‘Are they away right now?’

  ‘They left about six weeks ago,’ she said.

  ‘So who –’

  ‘There’s no one there.’

  ‘There was someone there last night,’ I told her.

  ‘I haven’t heard or seen anyone there since they left,’ she said.

  ‘It was the apartment right above mine and we’re in 5A.’

  ‘That’s their apartment but I swear –’

  ‘What else can you tell me about the Hills?’ I asked her.

  ‘Wow. Is this an interrogation?’

  I smiled. ‘Do you know them very well?’

  ‘Not really. But they seem pretty nice.’

  ‘What do they look like?’ I asked.

  ‘Marilyn, I think her name is, is short, brown hair, always smiling. Jack or Jim is tall, blacky-greyish hair, skinny. What about you?’ she asked. ‘How long have you been living downstairs?’

  ‘I’m just staying with my dad for the week. I –’

  ‘Did he see what happened?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Just me.’

  ‘What did he say when you told him?’

  Do you think anyone else saw what happened? How would you feel about going home a day early? Promise me you won’t hold me up as any kind of hero. They were the things he had said.

  ‘Not much,’ I said.

  ‘Did he call the police right away?’

  I bit my cheek hard enough to scrape shreds of skin loose inside my mouth. Cheek-biting was something I had trained myself out of but when I got really anxious I started to do it again.

  I took my first sip of coffee to stop the biting and tried not to wince at the taste. It was like mud with old sock sweat squeezed into it. I shook my head.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘Why not?’

  I really didn’t know why he hadn’t called the police. He hadn’t told me. Can you trust me? That’s what he’d asked. And now here I was blabbing everything to a girl I’d barely even met.

  ‘What did your mum say when you told her?’ she asked.

  ‘My mum lives in the Blue Mountains.’

  ‘Did you call her?’

  I looked at Scarlet like a deer in headlights. She seemed to have turned my interrogation around on me.

  ‘I think I’d better go see if my dad’s home,’ I said. I stood. I didn’t want her questioning me all the way back up in the lift.

  ‘Do you want me to go to the police with you? It’s only just down there.’

  ‘No, I’m okay. My dad and I are going tonight.’

  It was 5.31 pm. Harry would be home in twenty-nine minutes. He was probably back there already.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Good luck. Can you let me know what the police say?’

  I wished that I hadn’t said anything in the first place. I had failed my first ever interrogation.

  ‘Sure. Thanks,’ I said. I put four dollars on the table and headed for the door.

  TWENTY

  ALONE BUT NOT LONELY

  When I was at home I was alone a lot, but I never felt lonely. When I got back from school, Mum was usually at work, which meant I could do whatever I wanted. Other friends had their parents fussing over their homework or giving them jobs. I got to be free. I ate and watched TV and read comic books and wrote comic books.

  It wasn’t always like that. Only in the past year or so since Mum’s brother, Chris, and his family moved away. They used to live two blocks from us on Prince Street but he was in the army and got posted to Townsville so they left. He took my two best friends, my cousins Abbey and James, with him. They used to have me at their place a lot while Mum was working. They were the only family we had around. Now that they were gone, Mum still had to work, so I stayed home alone.

  Harrison, a friend of mine, asked me a few months ago if it was lonely having no brothers or sisters or cousins or dad and being at home by myself. I told him I didn’t mind so much. ‘Lonely’ sounds like you wish things were different. ‘Alone’ means there’s no one around but you’re kind of okay with it.

  At my dad’s, though, it felt different. I was so used to Mum driving my PE uniform to school when I forgot it, applying for a new bus pass every time I lost it, making and freezing meals for me, placing reminder notes all over the house, waking me up, sending me to bed or calling from the hospital to say goodnight, telling me every single thing I had to do. I didn’t really have to think.

  But now here, without Harry around, it felt like the first time I had to stand on my own two feet. One foot, really. Two crutches. I had to face this big, scary problem alone. No aunty, no uncle, no cousins, no mum. It was Sam versus the World and, for the first time in my life, I actually felt lonely.

  TWENTY-ONE

  MISSING JOURNALIST

  I sat on the wide, deep windowsill, my leg outstretched, watching, waiting, listening, on alert. I’d left the lights off so that I’d be harder to spot by anyone watching from below. Trains hissed and squirled and clattered, snaking their way into the rainy night. The lift rattled up and down, vibrating right through me. Every time I heard it I crutched across to the front door and pressed my eye to the peephole. It stopped on our floor once and every pore in my skin stung with sweat. But it wasn’t Harry or the man. No one got out. The lift moved on.

  It was 9.31 pm and Harry wasn’t home. I’d messaged him a bunch of times like he said I could but there was no response. Maybe he was out of battery. He must have had to work late. I tried not to think that something may have happened to him. I hadn’t really expected him to be back right on 6 pm. He had worked late every night this week, but not three-and-a-half hours late. During the day, I had put in a special request to the giant puppeteer who controlled the universe that Harry be home by seven at least. I thought it might help.

  You have to trust me, Sam. Can you do that? Can you trust me?

  There was a channel 9 news update on the TV in the corner of the room. More ‘breaking news’ on the footballer in the nightclub. A reality TV star had hit town to promote her new perfume. Fifty-three people out of one hundred surveyed on a Sydney street believed that a terror attack was ‘possible’ on Australian soil at some time in the future. More on the youth crime wave. I unmuted to hear a story about a 72-year-old granny jailed in the US state of Wyoming for trying to claim a $17 million lottery prize with a fake ticket.

  Harry had been saying all week what a joke the news was these days. I’d wondered what he was talking about but maybe now I understood. ‘These young journalists might know how to podcast and vlog,’ Harry had muttered, ‘but they don’t know how to investigate, how to tell a story.’ I flicked channels and found the ABC news. There was a story on the situation in Syria.

  I looked out the window, down through that arthritic, leafless tree, and I played last night over in my mind, trying to work out if I could have done something to save the man. There were minutes when I had listened to the argument as it became more and more ferocious and I could have called out to let them know that I was there. But I hadn’t. And then his shadow fell past the window and it was too late.

  It was unusual
ly dark outside. Last night the moon had painted the clouds silver at the edges, but tonight they were thick and black. Magic lay on the floor at my feet, snoring loudly. I prodded her in the ribs with my big toe. She didn’t wake. Funniest dog in the world. Worst watchdog. Although she did bark that one time, which was good. She was the best friend I had right now.

  ‘… missing journalist …’

  The newsreader’s voice came into focus and I spun towards the TV. I knew it was my dad. That’s why he wasn’t home. Something had happened to him. The man had done something to him and it was my fault. Why hadn’t I followed him?

  The screen cut to a photo of a man with dark curly hair, brown eyes, a narrow face, high cheekbones and glasses. Not my dad.

  ‘The thirty-seven-year-old ABC news journalist was last seen by staff on Thursday evening around 7.30 pm in Chippendale.’

  That was the next suburb from here. I took a shot of the TV screen on my phone just before the man’s face disappeared.

  ‘Anyone with information on John Merrin’s whereabouts should contact Crime Stoppers on the number at the bottom of your screen.’

  I opened the photo on my phone and zoomed in as far as I could. I stared into his pixelated eyes. Was that the man who fell?

  John Merrin.

  Merrin.

  I knew his face. I could picture him reporting. He was older than this picture now, I was pretty sure. Mum watched only ABC. John Merrin. Not just a journalist. He was a crime reporter. I had seen him reporting on a bank hold-up – or was it one of those stories where someone had rammed their ute into an ATM and tried to drive away with it? Something like that. They’d said it was part of the bigger crime wave. Young men, new technology, police unable to stop them, like in ‘Outwitted’, the story Harry had written for the Herald. Commandment number eight: