Tristan Bancks

THE FALL

For Hux

^ONE

THE FALL

I woke to the sound of a voice pleading, high-pitched and urgent. I listened with my whole body. The man’s voice was coming from the apartment above. Or was it below? I couldn’t be sure. In the six days I’d been staying with my father I hadn’t heard much noise from the other apartments.

The microwave in the kitchenette read 2.08 am. My father had left the heaters on too warm again so my head was fuzzy and my throat was dead dry.

I sat up and the springs on the sofa bed squeaked. There were footsteps across the floor above now, and another man’s voice, low and threatening. I rolled off the couch, grabbed my crutches and stumbled to the wide window. I wiped the foggy glass with the palm of my hand, my bruised armpits resting painfully on the hard rubber crutch-tops. I looked out through the branches of a tall, leafless tree and across a yard to a wire fence and a mess of railway tracks beyond.

It was raining lightly. People said that winter had come early to the city this year but in the Mountains, where I lived with Mum, it was much colder than this already. I twisted the old latch and squawked the window open a little, pulling it in towards me. I put my ear to the narrow opening and was struck in the face by a rectangle of cold.

I listened.

The men’s voices sounded louder now but I still couldn’t make out what they were saying. I opened the window a little more, stuck my head out and looked up and to my left. I could see someone’s fingers curled over a balcony railing. All of the apartments had balconies but they didn’t hang out over the edge. They were set into the building next to the rear windows. That’s where the voices were coming from. The man who was pleading sounded small and thin, like a jockey. Another man was rough and phlegmy like he had crunchy gravel caught in his throat. He sounded stubborn, bullish, like Mr Mawson, my science teacher.

Something bumped my leg. I pulled my head back inside and looked down to see Magic, my father’s dog. My parents split up before I was born so Mum got me and my dad got Magic. Some days Mum acted like she got a raw deal. That’s why she called my father ‘The Magic Thief’. And for other reasons, I suspected.

Magic shook her head from side to side, her long ears slapping loudly against the top and sides of her head.

‘Shhhhh, girl,’ I whispered, rubbing one of those silky, soft ears for comfort. Magic was the oldest, fattest, brownest dog in the world. Also, the funniest. I had spent more time with her this week than I had with my dad.

On the balcony upstairs, the men’s argument intensified. I listened hard but the wind and rain seemed to dampen their voices. I thought about waking my father but I wasn’t sure Harry would appreciate it. That’s what he liked to be called – ‘Harry’. Never ‘Dad’.

The bigger-sounding guy coughed hard then spat over the balcony. The little guy raised his voice. One of them must have slammed against the railing or a door or wall. I could feel the impact through the window frame. I squeezed Magic’s ear hard with my free hand and she yelped quietly.

‘Sorry,’ I whispered.

I wanted to drink in every detail, like my father would when he was out covering a story. I turned to the microwave. It was 2.11 am. The small man screamed but the voice was quickly stifled, maybe by a hand. I turned back just in time to see a flash of black as something fell past my window.

Someone.

He flapped his arms and clawed at the air, trying desperately to hold onto something. He let out a strangled yawp as he fell.

Pushed was my immediate thought. He didn’t just fall. He was pushed.

I heard the impact and stared down through the gnarled tree branches at the body lying facedown in the mud beside the bin shed.

The body.

I was almost thirteen years old and I had never seen a dead human being before. At least, I figured the man must be dead. It’s further than you think, six storeys. He lay there, his body buckled, a crumpled mess of limbs, lit by a single railway security light on a pole at the edge of the train tracks. I wished that I hadn’t seen it. Now I couldn’t ‘unsee’ it. I felt like this image would be scorched into my brain forever. I wished I hadn’t begged to come to my father’s in the first place, and that I hadn’t behaved so badly that my mother had finally agreed.

A siren cut through the constant hum of traffic noise. Next came footsteps on the floor above, then the distant squeal of an apartment door. I turned and crutched across the seagrass matting to the bedroom, swinging my legs forward then reaching ahead with the crutches, not even feeling the pain in my armpits now.

‘Harry,’ I whispered.

No response.

‘Harry!’

I went to his bedside and shook the rumpled quilt but it gave way. I pulled the quilt back. My panic deepened. I fumbled for the lamp switch and flicked it on.

There was no one in the room but me.

^TWO

ALONE

I heard the rattle of the old lift climbing upwards, past our apartment, then the low thunk of it arriving on the sixth floor. I listened intently as the doors opened, closed and the lift clattered down again. I could imagine the scene in one of my comics: the large, dark shape of the man seen through the crisscross wire mesh window of the lift door.

I twisted awkwardly and crutched out of the bedroom to the bathroom door, which was open just a crack.

‘Harry?’

I shoved the door with the bottom of my crutch. Every nerve in my body lit up. The room was empty and dead dark, no windows. I flicked the dull light on, revealing old blue tiles, mouldy shower curtain, cracked mirror and the rust stain on the bath from the tap that would not stop dripping. But no Harry. I switched off the light.

It was a small, shabby one-bedroom apartment – a lounge room, sparsely furnished, with a crusty old kitchenette and noisy fridge on one wall, then the bedroom, bathroom and a small balcony. I slept in the lounge room. The front door led to the lift and stairs. There was nowhere else that my father could have been.

I headed back across the lounge room towards the window, whacking my right knee on the edge of the sofa bed and sending 50,000 volts of pain surging through my body. I swallowed a scream and squeezed the bandage on my knee, just above where they’d cut me open and inserted six large metal staples ten days ago. I dug my fingers in hard and stayed there, hunched over my pain in the darkness, thinking about my dad and trying not to cry.

Once the electric agony had softened to a dull throb, I stood and struggled back to the window, edging an eye out over the ledge. I looked down through the crooked, leafless branches and saw the shape there – a man twisted up like a pretzel, rain falling on his body. He did not move. I wanted to call out to the other people in the building. I wanted to scream loud enough to wake the people in the skyscrapers studded with lights on the far side of the railway tracks and beyond the old railway sheds, but something told me not to.

The man who fell was not my father. I repeated it again and again, making it true.

Text Mum, I thought.

I had no call credit till the start of the new month but I still had unlimited texts. I ran out of call credit and data my first day at Harry’s. There was no landline in the apartment. Only Harry’s mobile. It was locked with a code, which I had unsuccessfully tried to crack. No wi-fi either. There were forty-seven different wi-fi signals available from other apartments and shops but every single one of them was locked.

Harry had only lived here for about a month. He said he didn’t plan on being here long, that it wasn’t worth getting the web connected and that I could do better things with my time than stare at a screen. He said he was a Luddite, which meant he was allergic to technology. He used it only when necessary. But I don’t think he understood the seriousness of the situation. Kids can die from wi-fi starvation.

Mum said Harry only ever lived anywhere for a few weeks or months before he moved on. She called him ‘itinerant’. I was pretty sure it wasn’t a compliment. Texting her now would only confirm her belief that my dad was a hopeless, irresponsible little man.

I’ll just pop out and grab some milk. I’ll only be a minute. You go off to sleep. It’s late.

That’s what he’d said. Milk. And now he was gone. But he couldn’t be gone. Fathers don’t just disappear. Especially fathers who you barely knew, had barely had a chance to know.

I tried not to see newspaper headlines with his name in them. I went to the sofa bed and pulled my backpack out from underneath. I took my phone from the front zip pocket and texted my dad. I knew it wasn’t worth it but I tried anyway.

WHERE R U?

I heard a bing from Harry’s bedroom. He only sometimes took his phone with him. He said it was too easy to track, that phone tower records could be used in court and crime reporters like him were being sprung for meeting with criminals and forced to dob in their best contacts.

I wanted to turn on a lamp for comfort but I stopped myself. I didn’t want anyone to know that someone was awake in this apartment. There was enough city light pouring in through the window for me to get around. Night-time in the Mountains was pitch-black with millions of stars but the city sky on a cloudy night seemed almost as bright as day.

I moved slowly, quietly to the window again and pushed it open a little more. When I saw what was down there, my breath froze in my throat. There was a large black umbrella. Someone was standing over the body. I flicked my phone to camera. Gather details. That’s what Harry Garner would do when he was out on a story. I wondered if he was a crime reporter because he loved details, or if he loved details because he was a crime reporter.

As I reached out the window, in my excitement I knocked the phone hard against the timber window frame, making a loud clunk. The umbrella shifted to the side and the shape beneath it looked up, directly at me. He was larger than I had thought. Even from up here he looked big. An elephant of a man. His face was white and round as the moon. His hair was silver and his eyes were lit up by the security lamp. I stepped back from the window onto my bad leg, pressing my hand hard against my mouth.

What have I done? Why did I look? I had seen everything and the man knew it.

I’d never met a murderer but I figured they probably didn’t like it much when they realised that someone had seen them committing their crime and then tried to take photos of them standing over the body.

He would come up here. I had to go.

The stairs. Harry had told me to always use the stairs. And the man had used the lift. I could go to the police station. I had seen one on the street when I arrived. Or I could go to the convenience store across the road. It would be open.

I pulled a pair of shorts on over my boxers. As I threw my phone into my backpack, I saw Harry’s laptop sitting on the dining table. He worked on it constantly when he was home. He would want me to take it with me. I put it in my bag too. As I shouldered the backpack an electricity bill fluttered from the table to the floor. I left it, crutching quickly towards the front door.

Clink-screek. A sound from the ground below. The man escaping? Or coming upstairs?

‘Magic, come,’ I whispered.

She lumbered across the seagrass matting, thrilled to be going for a walk.

^THREE

DOWN

I eased my way, barefoot, down the creaky timber staircase. The cold wood bit the sole of my left foot each time it made contact with the stairs. I hadn’t crutched downstairs much. Tina, my favourite nurse at the hospital, had taught me on the fire exit just outside the ward. I tried to remember what she had said. Crutches first, then left foot, always keeping my right foot raised and out of harm’s way. If you swung your feet out first you could pole-vault down five or six stairs. Believe me. I knew.

I held tight to the crutch and Magic’s lead with my left hand to stop the 42-kilogram dog from losing her footing and shooting down the stairs like a furry torpedo and taking me with her. The collar pressing on Magic’s throat turned her noisy breathing into something like a bowsaw cutting down a thick gum tree.

The staircase smelt like mould and was lit by a cold, fluorescent strip light on each landing. There were two flights of stairs between each floor. Magic and I slowly weaved our way down.

‘Shhhhhh,’ I whispered to the noisy breather. I doubted that Magic had ever been walked in the thirteen years since my parents broke up. She didn’t even go outside to wee and poo, which, in my opinion, must be humiliating for a dog. She had a small doggy litter box in the bathroom and she didn’t like me watching her while she used it. In the time that I had been staying at Harry’s apartment, I had seen him feed Magic chocolate-chip biscuits, a whole banana, spaghetti bolognaise and half an extra-spicy Thai chicken pizza. So Magic’s weight and breathing problems weren’t a total mystery.

As we passed the two apartment doors on the third-floor landing I paused to listen, to make sure the man who had been standing over the body wasn’t using the staircase. I stared at 3A and 3B, wondering if either of them was unlocked. I thought about knocking and asking for help but my father had told me I wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone in the building. Harry was gone now, though, so why should I care about his stupid rules? The thought that he had left me alone in the apartment in the middle of the night made me angry. He had been upset with me before he left just after 10 pm – he hadn’t yelled or anything but I knew. I waited up for a bit but must have fallen asleep.

I’ll only be a minute. You go off to sleep. It’s late.

I could feel the wire coil of rage in my chest start to heat. That coil made me do stupid things. That coil was why I was here at Harry’s, why my mother had finally given up and sent me here after years of me badgering her. I tried to breathe, to stop it from glowing red.

Harry didn’t mean to stay out. He’s a good person. There must be a good reason.

‘You can’t be seen going in or out of the apartment. In fact I’d rather you didn’t go out on your own at all.’ That’s what he had said on the first morning.

‘Why?’ I’d asked.

‘A story I’m working on, something I’m involved with. I can’t go into it right now, but it’s important that you listen to me, okay?’

I had nodded.

‘Only the stairs, Sam. You promise me?’

At first I thought it was a bit harsh, him not letting me use the lift when I was on crutches. But then I realised that he was trusting me with his secret. I had no idea what that secret was but it still felt good to know that I had a role to play. I didn’t like the idea of crutching down all those stairs so I had spent the past six days inside: watching TV, playing my Xbox, writing a new comic book, trying to avoid the schoolwork Mum had made me bring and, at night, monitoring my father, trying to find out about the story he was working on.

A month ago I overheard Mum on the phone in her bedroom. She sounded kind of weird so I went to the door and listened. I realised that she was speaking to Harry, asking if I could come stay for a week after my operation. I sat in the hallway, back against the wall outside Mum’s room, and listened to their conversation. She only spoke to Harry every couple of years as far as I knew, usually about money. He was a little bit late in his child support payments. Nine years.

The last time Harry was in my life I was still in my mother’s belly so I don’t remember him too well. Mum never mentioned him and he wasn’t exactly trying to kidnap me to get custody. I think Mum thought I’d be better off without him. But this time, she was stuck. She couldn’t afford to take time off while I was home after the operation and she wasn’t leaving me alone to get into more trouble. She kept saying that she was ‘over it’. Over me.

When she was on the phone to Harry she said, ‘This past year he’s been behaving so out of character. He’s been just like you. Impulsive. Never thinking of anyone else but himself, like the universe revolves around him. You need to get involved in his life. Speak to him. At least show him what happens to selfish, inconsiderate people when they get old.’

Harry had said something then. It may have been ‘thanks’ or something more aggressive.

‘He needs a father,’ Mum told him. ‘A male role model.’

Harry argued – I could hear him raise his voice – and Mum told him to step up and be a man. ‘Grow a pair,’ were the words she used. Then she hung up.

It was nice to feel loved.

Magic and I made it to the second-floor landing and I stopped to rest my skinny arms. I pushed the dog’s overgrown backside to the floor and gingerly touched my armpits, which were rubbed raw from the crutches.

As I pushed her down, Magic’s feet slipped and her entire body flattened to the wood. I wondered if I should have left Magic in the apartment. But if the man came back up in the lift, what would he do to her? I thought of the black umbrella shifting to the side and the man’s eyes looking up at me through the crooked tree branches. That thought drove me down the last two flights of stairs.

I stopped in the small foyer at the entrance to the building. The room was dimly lit and had the same dark timber on the walls as my father’s place. The front door was straight ahead. I could exit onto the street and go to the police station a hundred or so metres from here. But I needed to know what happened to the man who fell. What if he was still alive now but by the time I got back from the cops he wasn’t?

I turned right and moved quickly down a narrow corridor towards a door that had a green ‘EXIT’ sign above it. I figured it opened onto the backyard of the building. I pressed my ear to the door. It felt cold on my skin. I heard nothing from outside.

I would just take a peek, then I’d go to the police. I eased the door open, the bottom of it scraping loudly on concrete. I pushed my eye to the gap and peered into the backyard. The bin shed was pressed up against the building, sulking in the gentle rain. It was covered in dead brown vines and smelt bad even from a few metres away. It stood between me and where the man had landed beneath the leafless tree. Above it was an expanse of pink-lit cloud, no stars.

There was no sign of anyone in the yard. Police hadn’t arrived. Was it possible that no one else had heard the strangled noise of the man falling? Or the sickening thump of him hitting the ground? Or had they? Maybe, in a city, when you heard something like that, you closed the blinds and ignored it, tried not to get involved. Maybe you learnt not to care.

Close the door and go to the police. Or go back upstairs.

But the apartment didn’t feel safe now either. The man had looked right at me. He knew what I had seen. Maybe he went up in the lift. He was probably outside Harry’s door at this very moment.

I needed to know if the other man was alive. People could survive big falls. I had seen it in a Ripley’s Believe It or Not book in the school library – a Ukrainian woman who survived a seventeen-storey fall because she was asleep. It helped if your body was very relaxed. But the guy who fell from the sixth floor had sounded tense and nervy, not relaxed at all.

I pressed my ear to the crack of the open door. Moan of garbage truck, squeal of brakes, noisy clashing of bins being collected. That noise seemed to go on all night in the city. There was a siren, but in the distance. No sounds from within the small yard. I took a deep breath, pushed the door open some more and squeezed out into the rain. Magic followed. I let the door rest gently against the lock, making sure it didn’t click shut. I scanned the courtyard. The only movement was from one enormous moth dive-bombing the security lamp. A moth should not be out here in the rain and cold.

There was a broken toy gun on the ground a couple of metres away. I thought about taking it with me for protection but it didn’t look very realistic. I wedged it in the door to make sure it didn’t close.

I stayed near the brick wall of the apartment building and crutched slowly, silently towards the dead-black shape of the bin shed.

^FOUR

THE BODY

I dodged around a bike chained to a clothes line and a crushed pot plant that must have fallen from a windowsill or a balcony. Kicked by one of the men? My crutches sloshed in small puddles and cold rain trickled down my neck and back. Magic strained at her collar, excited to be outside in the rain and breeze. I moved quickly to the door of the bin shed and peeked inside, alert for human shapes. The shed was about three metres wide and four metres long. It was empty. The wheelie bins must have been out in front of the building, lined up on the kerb.

I crutch-crept across the cracked pavers on the floor of the shadowy shed. Wind flurried outside, rustling the dead vines above and blowing a shiver right through me. Magic made a strange, high-pitched whine and I stopped for a moment, loosening my grip on her lead.

This is the dumbest thing I have ever done, I thought. And, according to Mum, I had done some pretty dumb stuff recently.

This is so typical of you, Sam. Even when she wasn’t with me, her voice was there. Can you please, just once, try to do the right thing? Make. Good. Choices!

I made it to the doorway on the other side of the shed. I had a clear view of the ground beneath the tree where the man had fallen. The patchy grass was painted with the knobbly shadows of tree branches, but the body was gone. The man had either crawled away or someone had taken him. It seemed to me that his crawling days were over, so that left only one possibility.

I spied a narrow driveway at the side of the building – just wide enough for a vehicle and blocked by a tall double gate. I had seen the caretaker’s dirty ute enter the yard through there earlier in the week.

I prayed that Magic would bark and bite rather than lick and sniff if we came upon the large man under the black umbrella. I eased my way out into the starless night, moving slowly towards the place where the smaller man had landed. I looked behind me and left and right but there was no sign of life.

I stopped and leaned heavily on my crutches. I pushed Magic’s bottom down again and the dog fell, spread-eagled in the mud, like a bearskin rug.

I thought about how my father might investigate a crime scene like this. I was pretty sure that’s what it was. Someone had pushed that man and then taken the body in the time it took me to get downstairs. I had never been at a crime scene before.

God is in the details. That was number one in ‘Harry Garner’s Ten Commandments of Crime Reporting’, an article that had been published about my father in the Herald a couple of years ago. I had the clipping folded up in my wallet and I read it all the time.

God is in the details. Don’t miss a thing, I heard my dad whisper to me. I had been probing him about his work all week. He’d told me that there are a couple of key things he focuses on at a crime scene in order to describe it clearly for his readers: Photograph and document the scene without contaminating it. Take note of any obvious physical evidence, like weapons or footprints; and biological evidence, like blood, hair and other tissues.

I noticed small, dark spatters on the grass – either mud or blood. I took a shot on my phone. It made a loud ch-kshhh sound as it snapped and I flicked it to mute. There was a shallow depression in the dirt where the man had landed, the weight of his life etched into the earth. I felt tears prick my eyelids. I swallowed hard, leaned down as far as my leg would allow and took a couple of shots of the hollow in the ground.

I touched the earth and wondered who the man was: if he’d had kids, if he left any mark on the world other than this one in the backyard of a shabby apartment building in a pretty bad part of the city.

I picked up a small piece of paper from the ground. A receipt, wet through from the rain and impossible to read. Magic yawned excitedly and looked as though she wanted to eat it.

Maybe it was evidence or just something that blew out of a bin. I took a photo and pocketed the receipt carefully, so as not to tear it. As I straightened up, there was a dull thud somewhere nearby.

I probably should have run but instead I froze, not breathing. I waited for a shadow or a voice. Seconds ticked by. No other sounds. I looked up at Harry’s apartment, the window still ajar. I half-expected to see someone looking down at me. I scanned the other windows and bal conies. All of them were closed against the cold and rain. I turned my attention to the ground once more.

I wondered if I had compromised the crime scene. Maybe the hoof-prints of my crutches had destroyed vital evidence.

Something glinted in the lamplight a couple of metres away. I moved closer, careful not to tread on the man’s indent. It was the arm from a pair of glasses. I picked the evidence up by the very tip, trying not to contaminate it with my fingerprints, and slipped it into my pocket.

There was a sound and I looked up to see one of the large gates at the side of the building begin to open. I panicked. ‘Magic, come,’ I whispered, pulling the dog to her feet by her lead. I crutched awkwardly towards the door to the apartment building.

What if it’s help? I wondered. What if it’s Harry? That’s what would happen in Harry Garner: Crime Reporter, my comic book series. I had been making the books for three years and I was up to issue seven. I wasn’t that good at drawing at first but I was getting better. In the books, Harry always saved the day. Or the night.

But I was not in a comic book and I wasn’t taking any chances. I imagined Death shadowing me as I lunged with my crutches, reaching ahead and swinging my legs forward. Magic waddled double-time to keep up. A couple of metres before I reached the door to the building I launched my crutches forward, smelling safety, and they slipped in the mud, sending me sliding onto the ground. I broke my fall with the palms of my hands and my bandaged right knee. Pain surged through me and I lost my grip on Magic’s lead but fear picked me up and sent me hopping to the door. I opened it and the plastic gun fell out onto the mud.

‘Come, girl!’ I pleaded with Magic. ‘Come!’

She ambled over, squeezed through the gap and I eased the door shut behind me, the bottom of it grating against concrete. I crutched down the narrow corridor to the foyer. I should have gone through the double doors and directly to the police station. But I didn’t want to be out on the streets of an unknown city, hobbling on crutches at 2.30 in the morning. What if the man had an accomplice who was waiting out front?

I eyeballed the lift that my father had strictly forbidden me to travel in. It was waiting there, calling me. My arms were tingly and numb, the top of my crutches cutting the blood flow, and I was wet and cold. I didn’t know if I could make it all the way upstairs and I was 94 per cent sure that Magic couldn’t.

I thought of the person coming through the gate in the backyard. I was pretty sure it was the creepy man with the umbrella, so I swung my leg forward and pulled the heavy old-fashioned lift door open. Magic shuffled in and I crutched after her into the tiny space, the smallest lift I had ever been in. I hit the ‘5’ button and prayed that I was doing the right thing.

The lift didn’t move so I tapped the button ten times in quick succession like it was my Xbox controller when the game wouldn’t load. Finally, it reeled upwards. I watched through the wire mesh window as the floors slowly, painfully drifted by. I wondered if I’d have been faster crutching up the stairs, if the man would walk up and be waiting for me at the top.

Why didn’t you go to the police? I thought over and over, the question rattling and squeaking through my brain like the lift through the shaft.

After what felt like an hour we arrived at level five and the lift made a soft, out-of-tune ding. I peered through the narrow window in the door, looking left and right. I couldn’t see anyone. Only the doors to 5A and 5B and, in between, the fire hose reel cupboard. I wondered if he had already called the lift from the foyer. Just in case, I pressed the button for every floor so that it would take forever to get down. I shoved open the door and Magic waddled out. I crutched across to Harry’s apartment, inserted the key and twisted. Magic pushed the door open with her nose, barrelled past me and slurped water noisily from her four-litre ice-cream container on the kitchenette floor.

I clicked the door quietly closed, my chest burning, feet freezing, listening for dear life. Magic collapsed to the floor. Her breathing sawed through the air, making it difficult to listen for the lift or for noises on the staircase.

‘Shhhh,’ I told her, but the chubby brown dog kept wheezing.

I called out ‘Harry?’ and checked the bedroom and bathroom again. Then I stood, watching the door for a couple of minutes, listening. I checked my phone.

Nothing.

Harry will be back soon, I thought.

I’ll just pop out and grab some milk. That’s what he’d said. I shouldn’t have asked him all those personal questions. I’d sent him away. It was my fault.

I heard the distant sound of a timber door grating on concrete five floors down.

^FIVE

THE CUPBOARD UNDER THE STAIRS

I clicked the cupboard door closed and sank into the darkness. The space was narrow, deep and reeked of cleaning products. The mouldy smell of wet mop cut through the chemicals. My nose twitched. I squeezed it to stop myself from sneezing and felt the sting across my cheeks and forehead. Magic panted, her heaving breaths filling the cupboard. The building’s heating system moaned all around. It was the most obvious hiding spot in the world, I knew that – right opposite our apartment, beneath the stairs next to the lift.

The pain just above my knee was apocalyptic and my hands and armpits ached. I started to complain to myself about my broken body but I stopped. I had learnt to do that. It was easy to whinge all the time but it didn’t change anything. Kids don’t let you forget that you walk funny. My spine was bent and my left leg was 5.5 centimetres shorter than my right. That’s why Dr Cheung had inserted the staples into my right leg last week, to slow the growth of the thigh bone. He reckoned it would allow my left leg to catch up, correct the dogleg in my spine and make me normal. I was scared of the surgery but scared of what might happen to my body if I didn’t have the surgery. Knowing that I was coming to Harry’s for the week after the operation had helped me push through the fear.

I heard the lift clanking up through the shaft and soon it arrived on our floor. The door screeched open. There were fast footsteps and a thump. I pressed my ear to the thin cupboard door. Another thump, louder this time. And one more, then something clattering to the ground. It sounded like he had forced Harry’s apartment door.

I imagined him moving across the lounge room, past my sofa bed and into Harry’s room, and I felt sick and angry.

Just soften, Mum would say. You don’t always have to be on the attack. What’s got into you? You’re acting like a teenager.

Well, guess what? I am one. Almost.

I would turn thirteen tomorrow.

Something fell to the floor in the apartment. A book or ornament. Harry didn’t have many. Cupboards were opened and closed. Maybe someone else would hear it, too. Maybe one of the neighbours would come. Or Harry. Maybe he would come home.

After a minute or two the muted thuds and bangs eased. I clamped Magic’s snout shut to quiet the panting. She tried to shake her head from my grip but I wouldn’t let go.

The floorboards on the landing squeaked again as the man moved out of the apartment. He stopped. I could imagine his eyes resting on the cupboard door under the stairs. Magic’s breathing would give us away. Saliva dribbled out of her soft, warm mouth onto my hands but I held on.

I had a flash in my mind of the man looking up at me from five storeys below. I balanced on my chopstick of a left leg and silently shifted my grip on the crutch. I held it low and tight so that if the man opened the door I could deliver a hard, fast blow right up under his nose. I had never done anything like that before but my characters did that stuff all the time. It was easier to be violent with a pencil than it was with a crutch. I wondered if a blow like that could be deadly. I hoped not. I didn’t want to hurt anyone but I was pretty sure that the man did not have my best interests at heart.

Shhhhh-shhhhh-shhhh-shhhhh, said Magic’s nose, then I heard the grind and pop of floorboards as the man walked, slow and cautious. I felt the board beneath my foot rise gently. Maybe he was standing on the other end, pushing my end up like a seesaw. Could he feel my weight? The resistance? He coughed a big, meaty cough, and I felt the vibration of it along the board and up through my bare foot. I was all fear. No flesh or bones or breath. Pure fear. He knows I’m here. He knows.

I heard what sounded like two sprays of an asthma puffer. The floorboard lowered. The man moved off, suppressing another cough. I heard a door open nearby. A neighbour? No. Maybe the fire hose reel cupboard opposite the lift. He was checking in there. That meant he would check in my cupboard, too. He would be silly not to. I clutched that crutch handle like my life depended on it, because it did.

There were footsteps. The lift door screeched open, closed, and then it started moving off, down through the building and away.

^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 in 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.

^NINE

TRUST ME

I heard a loud bang. And another.

I didn’t know where it was coming from at first. I wasn’t deep enough asleep to be dreaming. I was still diving into the well of it. Bang. Hearing the noise, I tried to slow my fall and, for a moment, I didn’t know which way was up or down. I heard Magic bark for the first time since I’d arrived and I fought my way to the surface. Not such a bad guard dog after all, I thought as my eyes flicked open. I sat up.

Bang. The armchair and coffee table shunted back. I stood, grabbed my crutches and started towards the bathroom to hide as quickly and quietly as I could.

I heard a man grunt as the door was rammed again. It opened a crack and the tip of a hat appeared. The armchair and coffee table inched back across the floor. A head and body squeezed through the narrow gap. I stopped, the tips of my fingers resting on the bathroom doorhandle.

He stood, panting. Short, lopsided – one shoulder lower than the other. Dirty grey hat. Shirt untucked. Scuffed black shoes.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

Tears spat from my eyes. I tried to stop them but couldn’t. I felt so thankful and angry he was home. I crutched across to the door and hugged him, something we had never done before. His body was stiff and I didn’t know if he wanted me to hug him or not but I didn’t care. At the same time, I kind of wanted to scream at him for leaving me alone. But he must have had a good reason or he wouldn’t have left me. Surely. If it was Mum I’d have yelled at her without a second thought, but it’s easier to be angry at people you know.

He smelt like alcohol, which was strange because he said he hadn’t had anything to drink in nearly a year.

Magic ran over to us, skidding on the kitchen lino. Harry broke the hug and scruffed her neck, checking out the wreckage in the apartment. ‘What happened?’ he repeated.

‘Where were you?’ I asked, wiping tears away. ‘You said you were going for milk.’

He shuffled inside, shoved the door closed and looked around at the chair and table rammed up against the door, the deadlock lying on the floor. I noticed him sway a little and he rested a hand on the bench to steady himself. He was Captain Haddock in Tintin after too many whiskies.

‘Somebody broke in,’ I told him.

‘What?’ He squinted as though I was speaking another language. He looked crumpled and grey and old. He was older than any other kid’s father in my class. Old enough to be my grandfather, really. Mum had warned me but I had still been surprised when I first saw him in the flesh. The little square photo they used for his feature articles in the Herald must have been taken in about 1992.

‘And a man died,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Out there,’ I said. ‘He was pushed.’

Harry’s face fell straight and serious. ‘What do you mean?’

‘A man was pushed from up there.’ I pointed towards the sixth-floor balcony.

‘When? Tell me what happened,’ he said.

I relayed everything I had seen and heard. I acted out parts of it. I pointed to where the man had landed. I showed him the receipt and the arm of the glasses. He drank a steaming, three-bag, four-sugar tea, black, as there was still no milk, and listened carefully. I showed him my photos – the blurry one taken when I bumped the window, and the close-ups of the indent in the earth and other evidence at the crime scene. I watched his reactions carefully. I wanted him to say I’d done well, but he didn’t. He did not take notes. My comic-book Harry wasn’t a note-taker either.

He went to the small, round dining table. ‘Where’s my laptop?’

I grabbed my backpack and gave it to him. ‘I was trying to look after it.’

Harry opened the laptop, turned the screen away from me and sat down. ‘And the other man?’

‘I didn’t really see him that well. He had a sort of high-pitched voice and he sounded small. I think he was small, but I couldn’t really tell from up here.’

He tapped some keys and stared at the screen.

‘What are you looking up?’ I asked.

He ignored me, tapped some more, stared at the screen again for another minute or two.

I was desperate to know.

‘Oh, god,’ he said, still watching.

‘What?’ I asked, trying to see.

He closed the lid and looked at me, wide-eyed, as though he was staring right through me.

‘I’m sorry I went out.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said, even though I didn’t really think it was okay.

‘Do you think anyone else saw what happened?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think so. It was just me. Is it something to do with your story? Should we go to the police?’

He gazed out the window, his eyes bleary and hair a mess, unshaven, unwell.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

‘Not really.’

‘Did you have something to drink?’ I asked. ‘I thought you didn’t–’

‘I slipped up,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a lot to think about this week. And before you ask your next question, can you just give me a moment?’ He hobbled over to the armchair that had been wedged against the door and flopped into it. Magic rested her head in his lap. Harry took off his shoes and socks. His feet were road-mapped with thick blue veins. The skin on top of his feet was thin, the soles hard and yellow and crusty. I would never draw the Harry Garner in my comics like this. He looked way too real.

My Harry, superhero crime reporter, was an expert in jujitsu and boxing. He was a polyglot, which meant that he knew lots of languages – nineteen, in fact, including Swahili, just in case I decided to set a story in Kenya or Mozambique. He was rich and he travelled the world without even taking a suitcase. He could ride a motorbike, scuba-dive, fly a helicopter and captain a submarine in a pinch. He was a computer hacker and arms expert. He skied in Switzerland and climbed live volcanoes in Hawaii for exercise. Women loved him and men wanted to be him.

But sitting here, drunk and old, in this tiny apartment with peeling blue paint on the walls, was the real HG. My dad. Maybe the next issue of Harry Garner: Crime Reporter would be called ‘The Real Harry Garner’ and he’d have sore knees and a fat brown dog. At least I didn’t have to worry about people cancelling their subscriptions. That was the one advantage of me being my only reader.

‘Do you think we need to go to the police?’ I asked again.

‘No,’ he snapped. I think he realised how sharp his voice sounded and he softened. ‘Not right now. Listen, how would you feel about going home a day early?’

‘Home? Why?’

‘I have to go to work today.’

The thought of him leaving me again sent adrenaline racing through my veins.

‘It’s not safe for you here,’ he said. ‘I appreciate your telling me all these details but I think you’d be better off at home. I’ll give your mum a call. Maybe I can put you on a train this morning rather than tomorrow.’

He hoisted himself out of the armchair and limped towards the bedroom. He had a short leg and crooked spine like mine, but worse. He was what Dr Cheung had said I would become if I didn’t have the operation. And he seemed even more crooked after being out all night.

‘Please,’ I said to him. ‘I don’t want to go home yet. Can I stay?’ Even as I said the words, part of me regretted them. What if the man came back?

Harry took a fresh shirt from the wardrobe, turned and looked at me from under his thick, grey brows.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Please.’ I crutched towards him. ‘I can come to work with you. I won’t bother you.’

‘I don’t do the kind of work where I can–’

‘I’ll stay out of your way.’

‘You can’t come with me, all right?’ he said firmly, shrugging on the shirt.

‘Well, can I stay here?’

He motioned towards the mess at the front door, the lock lying on the floor. He pulled a fresh pair of pants from the wardrobe and pushed the bedroom door closed.

‘He won’t come back,’ I said, raising my voice so Harry could hear me. ‘We can put another lock on the door. I want Mum to think this went well. She won’t want me to come back here if you send me home early. Please, it’s only one night. I won’t be any trouble. I’ll go home tomorrow like we planned.’

I waited. He said nothing for a minute or two and I knew that he was going to say no. Eventually the bedroom door swung open and he stared at me.

‘Why would you want to be here with me?’ he asked.

I wondered if it was a trick question. ‘Because you’re my dad,’ I said.

He stared at me for a moment. ‘Please don’t hold me up as any kind of hero. Your mum deserves all the credit for the way you’ve turned out. You make sure you’re good to her.’

I nodded. ‘I will.’

‘You promise me?’

I nodded again.

‘If you see or hear anything even slightly suspicious you’ll call me or send me a message right away?’

‘Yeah.’

He rubbed his face with his hands.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You can stay till tomorrow morning.’

^TEN

SOLVE IT

Harry drove the final screw into the deadlock and mopped sweat from his forehead with a dirty tea towel. He had been to the mini Mitre 10 on the corner the minute it opened, bought two locks and a screwdriver and spent forty minutes fixing the locks to the door. They looked a little bit crooked to me, maybe because he had been drinking, but judging by the number of times he swore, it seemed like Harry didn’t do a lot of DIY. But it was done. I would stay till tomorrow morning.

‘I’ll be back by six,’ he said. ‘Hopefully before. Don’t open the door for anyone. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And are you sure you can be back by six because–’

‘I’ll be back by six. You have my word. And are you sure you can send me a message if you need to? You’ve got enough credit or whatever?’

‘Enough for messages.’

‘Well, I’m only a few blocks away. If you hear or see anything…’

I nodded. I wanted to suggest again that we go to the police. He must have read my mind.

‘Give me today,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I finish work and I’ll tell you more then. I just need some time to check some things. You’ve played hard, done good, telling me this information and now you have to trust me, Sam. Can you do that? Can you trust me?’

I wanted to. I really did.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can trust you.’

He unlocked the two new deadlocks, opened the door and said, ‘See you tonight.’

I wanted more than anything to go with him. I felt tired and like I might start bawling again so I just said, ‘Okay.’

Harry slipped out the door. ‘Lock it up,’ he said in a low voice.

I pushed the door closed and twisted the brass knobs. He tested the door and then said, ‘I love you.’

‘Huh?’ I asked.

I heard his quiet footsteps fade down the staircase.

Then it was just me and Magic again.

I love you? I thought. He had never said that before. Sure, he had said it through a door and then scurried away, but he had still said it. Hadn’t he?

I kneeled on Harry’s unmade bed and peered through the dirty window and down Victoria Street. I waited for him to appear, hobbling along in his coat and hat.

The young homeless lady in the purple puffer jacket was on the corner of the street diagonally opposite, breathing clouds of steam through cold air, shaking her paper coffee cup, asking for donations. I’d seen her on a couple of other days when I’d watched Harry leave. The lady was outside Pan, the bakery that Harry had gone to more than once during the week. The last few orange leaves fluttered down from the almost-bare tunnel of trees over the street.

Harry crossed the road towards Pan. I desperately wanted to go down in the lift and follow him. I did not want to be here alone. Watching him from above, I saw how bad his limp was, how bad mine might have become if Mum hadn’t forced me to have the operation. He heaved open the heavy door of the bakery and, a moment later, a woman – chocolate-brown hair, knee-length black coat – exited, coffee and brown paper bag in hand. Harry followed her out. His girlfriend? I wondered. That made me angry. I don’t know why. Why shouldn’t he have a girlfriend? Still, the uncomfortable feeling stayed with me.

‘Watch the bad feeling but don’t engage with it.’ That’s what Margo would say. She was a therapist Mum had been sending me to. I called her my coach. Her voice was annoyingly soothing but I kind of liked her anyway. She read comics, especially The Phantom, and she talked with me about them. Not in a fake adult way where she pretended to be interested just to make me have a conversation with her, but in a real way where she actually knew stuff.

‘Don’t push the anger away or act it out,’ she would say. ‘Just let it sit there. What’s behind it? Moods are like clouds passing the sun. Let them pass.’

In that moment, watching this lady coming out of the bakery with my dad, I felt really annoyed. He said he had to go to work and that he couldn’t stay with me or take me with him but he seemed to have time for her. As soon as I noticed that I felt annoyed, though, and I named it, the feeling kind of drifted away, like a cloud. It was one of the first times that I’d been able to do what Margo suggested and it actually worked.

I pulled out my phone, switched to camera, zoomed in and took a bunch of pictures. The woman looked much younger than Harry. Was she another journalist or maybe a cop? She could have been either. A criminal? Maybe. Probably not. She didn’t look like a criminal. But what was a criminal supposed to look like? A scar on her face? Shifty eyes and rubbing her hands together, like a bad guy in an old movie?

Commandment number six: Never assume anything. And don’t convict people. That’s the job of the courts. Just report the facts. Be as objective as you can. Innocent until proven guilty.

Harry and the woman walked off up Victoria Street, turning right at a little laneway with a backpackers’ hostel on the corner and disappearing from view. I wanted so badly to follow them. Where are they going? What is he going to do till 6 pm? Had he planned to meet her? Is he telling her about the crime I witnessed? Or is it totally unrelated?

I looked back through the pixelly, zoomed-in photos on my phone, then turned and looked around Harry’s dimly lit bedroom.

Solve it, said a voice in my head.

I didn’t feel sleepy at all now. I felt jumpy and alive.

Solve it.

7.57 am.

Harry was due to put me on the 8.01 train back to the Mountains tomorrow morning. I only had today to find out more. When Harry came home at six I would show him the fresh evidence I had found. He would be pleased. I could be useful to him, like a researcher or an assistant. He would love me for it. Maybe we could find the perpetrator of the crime and the man who fell. I had always wanted to be a crime reporter. Maybe this was my chance.

^ELEVEN

HARRY GARNER’S TOP TEN COMMANDMENTS OF CRIME REPORTING

1. God is in the details. Gather as many details as you can about the crime. Observe colours, sounds, textures, smells, even tastes.

2. Make contacts. You have to know crime fighters as well as criminals. You need sources of good information on underworld dealings.

3. Watch what you say about people. Build trust.

4. Sometimes criminals will try to make you see things their way. These are dangerous and often charismatic characters. You need to be clear with people which side of the law you sit on.

5. Don’t keep everything on a phone. It can be hacked for content and the digital trail you leave can be used as evidence in court by both police and criminals. Phone towers know where you are.

6. Never assume anything. And don’t convict people. That’s the job of the courts. Just report the facts. Be as objective as you can. Innocent until proven guilty.

7. Always be authentic. Don’t make things up or sensationalise the story.

8. Is the crime part of something bigger? Does it reflect changes happening in society? What does it say about us as humans?

9. Curiosity killed the cat. Be careful of becoming too obsessed. Sometimes a story can eat you up and take you to dangerous places, physically and mentally.

10. Show determination, patience, mindfulness. Evaluate all evidence.

^TWELVE

SNOOP

I sat on the windowsill and stared down through the bare tree branches. Fragments of what I had seen and heard last night flickered through my mind. That flash of black. His voice. The slunching sound of impact. The bang of my phone on the window. The round, white moon of the man’s face emerging from beneath the black umbrella.

The yard didn’t look as scary during the day. Trains snaked by, in and out of the city. Rain still fell. I could see where he had landed but not the shape of him, not from up here. But I could imagine it.

I felt a gut impulse to go back down there. I knew it was stupid but I wanted more than anything to find more evidence to show Harry.

I had promised to stay inside. He made me promise.

I turned away from the window, pushed the temptation aside.

I looked around the apartment. Harry had cleaned up a bit but there were still bits of broken bowl swept into the corner and open books spread across the floor like dead birds.

How can I help Harry? I wondered. Maybe the man had left DNA evidence in the apartment. I couldn’t test it but I could gather it. I had read stories about a single hair being used to convict a criminal even forty years after the crime had been committed.

And if this crime had something to do with the story Harry was working on, maybe there were notes or photos hidden somewhere in the apartment – if the man hadn’t already found them in the night. I could use them to help my own investigations.

I was pretty much addicted to snooping. At home, I knew where Mum kept chocolate (on top of the pantry in a plastic tub with the medical supplies), Christmas presents (window seat, under the spare pillows) and my Xbox controllers (bottom cupboard, behind the rice cooker).

I grabbed the back of a dining chair and awkwardly dragged it across the floor into the bedroom, in front of the old timber wardrobe. The chair wobbled as I swung my good leg onto it. I took a deep breath and pushed up, grabbing the top of the wardrobe for balance. Magic licked my toes.

‘Stop!’ I whispered sharply but she didn’t listen.

I felt around the top of the wardrobe. I was close to the ceiling, which meant I was close to the floor of 6A. Is anyone up there right now? I wondered. Magic continued to lick between my toes.

I couldn’t see what was on top of the wardrobe but I ran my fingertips through inch-thick dust, searching for anything Harry may have hidden.

My thumb scraped something flat and metallic. My heart skipped as I pried the object off the timber. A key. A very dusty key. Not from Harry, though. This key had been here a long, long time and my father had only lived here a month or so. I sneezed, wiped the dust on my shorts and lowered myself off the chair. I felt the sting of my stitches pulling and the deep throb of the staples grinding against my bones. I sat on the floor and pressed myself flat to the timber so that I could look under the bed.

Nothing. Just more dust bunnies. Not as thick as on the wardrobe. They were more like dust rabbits up there.

I sat up and looked at the brassy-brown key. It had a serial number carved into it. It was a regular key, not an old one. I twisted around, placed my hands on the edge of the bed frame and pushed myself up. My arms were so sore. I kept my leg straight, grabbed my crutches and hobbled out to the kitchen bench, where the busted lock was sitting with a hunk of splintered timber still attached. I picked it up and tried the key but it wouldn’t fit.

I went to the windows, trying to protect my red-raw armpits from the tops of the crutches. The windows didn’t have locks. I couldn’t think of anything else in the apartment that did. The key was no good to me for now.

I wondered if any of my evidence or photos had anything to do with the crime that had been committed. Maybe none of it was useful.

I continued to search the apartment – through every drawer, inside every book, under every cushion and pillow and mattress. The only thing that seemed to be gone was the electricity bill that had fluttered to the floor when I grabbed Harry’s laptop off the dining table. This played on my mind. Maybe Harry had picked it up, taken it with him. Possibly. But what if the man had picked it up? He would have Harry Garner’s name linked to this address. I thought about messaging Harry but decided not to bother him. I didn’t want him getting annoyed with me. I would tell him after work.

I searched the medicine cabinet, the fridge and oven. The walls were lined with timber from floor to chest height, then there was a small ledge and plasterboard up to the ceiling. I tapped the timber part of the wall, hunting for some kind of secret cavity. The fire hose reel cupboard was set into the other side of this wall but it mustn’t have taken up the whole space because, over by Harry’s front door, the wall sounded hollow. I tried to get my fingertips in between the boards but they were all nailed in tightly – there was no way to check what was behind them.

I decided to make a note on my phone of all my father’s personal items:

• 1 toothbrush, green and white, cheap, bristles chewed and splayed

• 1 tube Macleans toothpaste, almost empty

• 1/2 packet of Quick-Eze indigestion tablets. Use-by date: 2/2/13

• Fridge: rotten pear; empty pizza box; jar of chopped chilli

• Cupboard: packet of Uncle Ben’s Instant Rice; tin of Heinz baked beans; tin of Edgell red kidney beans; Saxa picnic salt; an onion with a green stalk growing out of it

• Wardrobe: 2 pairs of grey trousers; 2 white, long-sleeved button-up shirts (one with a pink stain on front); 6 pairs of underpants, all white-ish, two with holes near waistband at back; 1 pair of shoes

• 1 laptop and charger

• 1 hunting knife

I had to admit that the last one worried me. I found it in a very thin drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe between two larger drawers. Why does my father need a knife? He owned barely anything but he had this long, jagged knife with a black handle. Reporters in comics had guns. But my dad had a hunting knife. What was he hunting? Criminals?

What if he was involved in this crime? Is that how he knew something? Is that why he ignored me when I suggested going to the police?

I pushed the thought aside. It was stupid.

But was it? I hardly knew Harry, only a made-up, comic-book version of him. I met him six days ago and, before that, he was a fantasy to me. I had pictured calling him ‘Dad’ but instead he made me call him ‘Harry’. I imagined we’d have all these really big talks but, a lot of the time, he wasn’t even home. He had promised Mum that he would take the week off but he just kept working. ‘I haven’t had a day off in forty years,’ he told me. I believed him but I also thought that meeting his almost-thirteen-year-old son might be a good enough reason to have one. Sometimes it felt like he was avoiding me on purpose, like he didn’t know what to say or do when he was around me. That’s why he went out last night.

‘Crime reporter’ would be the perfect job for a criminal. He could know what the cops were thinking and he could feed that information into the underworld. His fourth commandment of crime reporting was:

Sometimes criminals will try to make you see things their way. These are dangerous and often charismatic characters. You need to be clear with people which side of the law you sit on.

But what if Harry hadn’t been clear? He had been reporting crime for forty years. That’s a long time to interact with these ‘charismatic characters’ and stay clean. Maybe he started out on the right side but at some stage he slipped. But that sounded suspiciously like a crazy plotline for one of my comics. It was ridiculous. My father was a crime reporter, not a criminal.

A sound popped out from the general background hum of traffic: the rev of an engine close by. I crutched over to the window and looked into the yard. There was an old guy down there with long silver hair but a bald patch on top. The caretaker of the building. He was climbing out of a rusty white ute parked right next to the bin shed, near where the man had fallen. The caretaker was wearing grey overalls, the kind that cover your arms and legs. I’d watched him come and go a couple of times during the week. When you’re stuck in an apartment by yourself every day you get to know the rhythm of the place. His shoulders were rounded, neck bent forward. He reminded me of a tortoise, especially on the day, earlier in the week, when he had worn the backpack for weed-spraying.

He clicked the door of the ute shut then walked back out of the gate and hauled all the bins in, two at a time, parking them in the bin shed. When he was done he poked his head out of the shed, looked around the yard, then up at the building. I pulled back from the window. I left it a few seconds, then I looked down again.

The man went into the shed and was out of view for maybe half a minute. I watched and waited. He emerged carrying a couple of black plastic bags. I wondered if they had been in there when I went through the shed last night or if they had been put there since. I slid my phone out of my pocket and took three quick shots of him as he threw the bags into the tray of his ute. He looked around and up again, then walked towards the building. I had to press my face right against the glass to keep him in view. I tried taking another shot but it was all reflection and windowsill. I wanted to open the window but was worried the noise would alert him.

He opened a door or a gate at the base of the building. I had seen him put a lawnmower in there earlier in the week. On Tuesday, I thought. The gate made a clink-screek sound as it opened.

I had heard that sound several times during the week. The clink of a metal latch, then the screek of rusty hinges as the gate opened. It was the sound I had heard last night after I saw the man standing over the body, after he looked up at me and I pulled back from the window.

Clink-screek.

Had he hidden something in that cupboard? And what if the thing was still there?

I leaned out the window to get a better look but the caretaker just closed the gate with a screek-clink and threw a shovel and a piece of folded black plastic into the back of his ute.

I needed to go down there. This guy had to be involved in some way.

Stay inside. Don’t go anywhere. That’s what Harry had told me. I would not break the one rule my dad had set for me.

But what if I could be useful? What if breaking the rule meant that I could uncover fresh evidence? Wouldn’t that make him proud?

^THIRTEEN

THE RETURN

I crutched through the bin shed – grim, even during the day. It smelt vegetabley and organic, worse than I remembered from the night before.

I had always loved puzzles and stories but I had never had anything to investigate before. Nothing had ever happened to me. Life was dull at home. Small town. Overprotective mum. School. Friends. Girls I loved but who didn’t love me so much. Now this.

I played last night over in my mind, from the moment I woke at 2.08 am through to the man following me upstairs.

Clink-screek.

That sound.

Clink-screek.

I’d heard it just after he looked at me, before I went downstairs. That sound would lead me to the body, I was sure of it.

I looked out the bin shed door. The caretaker’s ute was gone, leaving tyre tracks just metres from where the man had fallen to the ground.

Two trains rattled noisily by, one lumbering slowly, the other with places to go, people to see. Passengers were packed in, wearing suits and smart clothes. Regular people with regular lives, tapping their phone screens and reading their Friday-morning newspapers. People who had slept more than a couple of hours, and not in a cleaning cupboard. People who had not seen a man die in the night. This crime would not be in the news. Not yet.

I looked to where the man had lain and thought I could still make out the depression in the earth that I had felt with my fingertips the night before. Maybe I was imagining it. I scanned around for the other arm of the glasses and the lenses, but could see nothing. Maybe the larger man had picked them up, taken them with him.

I could see the little gate of the caretaker’s storage cupboard set into the wall. It looked like an entrance for elves or hobbits. It was only about the height of my bellybutton.

Clink. Latch. Screek. Hinges. There was no padlock on the cupboard. Anyone could hide anything in there. The man with that round face and those dead eyes could easily have dragged the body in there. And if he did the caretaker would have seen it just now, which would mean that he was definitely involved.

I would have to break cover to get across to the gate. I would be out in the open and could easily be seen from above. I wished that snooping was not in my DNA. I looked up through the tree branches. No humans. Just windows reflecting dark grey clouds above. Another storm on the way.

I eased my way along the outside wall of the bin shed, pressing myself against the rusty corrugated iron, then edged across the three or four metres of brick wall till I was standing right next to the storage cupboard.

The body will not be in there. Even if it had been, the man would have moved it by now, I told myself. I wanted to believe it.

I reached for the gate latch and felt a tingle in my jaw. I lifted the latch. It made a quiet tinkling sound. I pinched it between my fingers for a few seconds. I dropped it and there was a distinctive clink. I pulled it open slowly, closing my eyes for the first few centimetres. The hinge screeeeeeked, long and slow. I stepped back, bent down and peeked inside, squinting into the darkness. I could see the handles of five or six garden tools and, further in, the mower handle. I pulled the gate open some more.

Screeeeeeeek.

More tools and an earthy underground smell that stuck to my nostrils. Not disgusting like the bin shed but deep, moist and soily. Like a grave. The smell sat like a large piece of fruit in my throat.

The storage space went back a long way. It was too dark to see what was in there past the mower. There was a light switch on the wall to the right, below a shelf holding paint and weedkiller and hand tools. The switch was grubby with finger marks. I flicked it and a light globe snapped to life on the ceiling about two metres in. I peered in beyond the tools and paint and mower for anything that might hide a body – a sack or more of that black plastic.

There were piles of old tiles, some bricks, a stack of dark timber with long, rusted nails sticking out of it. I willed myself to go inside and look up the back. That’s what Harry Garner would do. He was known for going the extra distance to get the story. Commandment number ten:

Show determination, patience, mindfulness. Evaluate all evidence.

Harry was brave and determined. Was I?

^FOURTEEN

TOOTH

I leaned my crutches against the wall outside and climbed in over the lawnmower. A spear of pain jabbed me just above the knee as I twisted and knocked it against the mower’s engine. My mum would be so mad with me. I was supposed to be on bed-rest for the week.

I leaned against the wall and tools clanked together behind me. My hunched body cast a misshapen shadow on the rear wall of the low, rectangular cavern. The air was cooler and earthier the further I moved in.

I took a ton of photos, hoping that I could look back later and find a little detail, a piece of evidence that might unlock something. I took pictures of the dusty ground beneath the beat-up Adidas on my left foot. I took shots of the blade of a shovel and a pair of long-nosed garden shears. The images were blurred and grainy so I flicked on the flash. There was an explosion of white as I photographed a crumpled piece of grey clothing on the ground. Is that the colour he had been wearing? The small man? I poked it gently with my shoe, spreading it out and revealing a pair of grey overalls spattered in white paint, grease and dirt. The caretaker’s overalls, the same kind he’d been wearing earlier.

I took another photo and, again, the flash blew the image bright white. It made me think of the reporters and police forensics experts in the stack of 1950s and 1960s crime reporter comic books I had under my bed. Harry had sent them to me on my seventh birthday and I had read each one dozens of times. The comics had names like Authentic Police Cases and Crime Smashers – The Law Always Wins. The reporters used old cameras with giant round flashbulbs that exploded and had to be replaced after each use. In the front of the comic was an ad for cameras with exploding flashbulbs and, in the back, a coupon to buy a Simplex Typewriter for $2.98.

The books were from when my dad was a boy. They were the only things he had ever sent me. I wondered what had prompted that – why, for one moment, he decided to reach out and then went quiet for another six years. Mum thought they were inappropriate, which made them even more fun to read. Reading them and drawing my own comics made me feel closer to my dad – taking down bad guys, smashing crime and using lines like, ‘We’ve finally found your hideout, you crook. Now we’ll send you away for a long stretch. See?’ They always said ‘See?’ at the end of a line in those old books, so that’s the way they spoke in my Harry Garner: Crime Reporter comics, too.

I flicked my phone to ‘torch’, turned the light towards the very back of the low, narrow space and saw five plump white bags of fertiliser. On the side of the bags were the words ‘OSCO Fertiliser Co’ in brown lettering and an illustration of a barn with chickens running around. The bags were about a metre tall and they weren’t leaning directly against the back wall. The tops of the bags were about thirty centimetres out from the wall and the bottoms of the bags were even further, which made me think there must be something behind them.

I felt cramped and claustrophobic. I looked back at the square opening. I imagined someone closing the gate from the outside – screek-clink – and me being locked in here with whatever was behind those bags of fertiliser. I wanted out.

But I’d come so far.

Determination, patience, mindfulness. Evaluate all evidence.

All evidence.

I looked back at the bags.

I tried to control the fear inside me, imagining the colour-gauge Margo, my coach, had shown me for controlling anger. I tried to imagine the fear dialling back from deep, volcanic red to orange and then back into the blues and greens. This helped me a little, but not much.

I would check behind the bags. There would be nothing there. I would rule out one more possibility. I would move quickly towards the exit and up the stairs, into the apartment. I would lock the deadlocks my father had installed and I would not leave the apartment again today. I would be safe.

I reached behind me for a garden tool and remembered the shovel the caretaker had thrown into his ute. I kept my eyes fixed on the bags. My fingers clasped the splintery wooden handle of a pitchfork. I swung the long, sharp trident around and poked it towards the bags. I had never wanted and not wanted something at the same time as much as I did in that moment. If this was the body, then I had helped solve a crime. But if this was the body, I was alone inside a small, dark cupboard with a dead human.

I figured that if it came alive – if I saw a skeletal hand shoot up from behind the bag and I heard a hideous crushed-metal laugh, then the gate swinging closed behind me – at least I had a pitchfork. In comics, it was always a popular tool when dealing with the undead.

I leaned against the wall, using my left hand to hold my phone for light and my right to hold the fork. I poked the three sharp prongs into the bag and pulled, raking it back towards me. I prepared for the worst but the bag was heavy. The fork came free then fell from the handle, dropping to the dirt floor. The bag remained in place.

I jammed the end of my phone into my mouth, trying to keep the light trained on the bags. I took the pitchfork in both hands and poked it deep into the top of the bag, hearing the plastic pop and feeling the prongs slide into the fertiliser. I dragged the bag back again. The phone dropped from my mouth and, for the next few seconds, I was pure panic. I couldn’t see what was behind the bag. The phone had landed torch down, the bag had landed on my foot and the back of the cupboard was dead dark. I dropped the fork, picked up the phone and shone it into the space where the bag had been.

There were bricks.

Piles of old bricks.

Not a body. I grabbed the pitchfork and shifted one of the other bags out of the way to reveal a long row of the same bricks running all the way along the back wall. There was no dead body in this little room. Not any more. I wiped the saliva and dirt off my phone, took three quick wide-shots with the flash on, then scrambled back out over the lawnmower, as quickly as I could.

I made it almost to the entrance, drinking in the fresh air and natural light, when I saw something poking out of the loose dirt just inside the storage cupboard. I bent down and took the thing between my thumb and forefinger.

It was small, maybe half the size of a five-cent piece, but not the same shape. It was straight on the sides and jagged, sharp-looking on one end. I held it in the palm of my hand, squinting at it in the silvery light from the doorway.

It was a broken tooth, and it made my skin crawl.

I stepped outside, stood up, grabbed one of my crutches. The other had fallen. I looked closely at the grubby tooth. I poked at it with my finger, scraping at the caked-on dirt with my nail.

How long had it been there? Just a few hours? It seemed too dirty to be recent.

One of the caretaker’s teeth? I wondered. He looked like the kind of guy who may have lost a few. Perhaps he had bent down to get the mower out and knocked his tooth on the handle, and had never been able to find it because of his bad eyes. Maybe.

I sensed somebody watching me and I looked around, then up. There was a figure leaning out over a sixth-floor balcony railing, silhouetted against the white-grey sky. I felt a sharp jolt of fear in my chest, slipped the tooth into my pocket and grabbed the handles of my crutches. I started to back up but realised that the figure wasn’t on the balcony of 6A. It was on the balcony next door. My eyes adjusted and I recognised the girl I had watched going upstairs, the girl with the dyed-red hair. She looked like she was wearing a school uniform now, dark-green and white. She turned away and went inside. I heard a door slide and slam.

Is she scared of me? I wondered. Or just surprised to be caught watching me? I could imagine her talking to the police, telling them that she had seen the crutch-boy with the bent spine from apartment 5A spying on her as she went upstairs, then later he was snooping in the caretaker’s cupboard, polishing dirt from a human tooth. Could she see the tooth from up there? Probably not.

I needed to ask her if she had seen anything last night, but that would mean going up to the sixth floor and I couldn’t do that. What if he was up there? She would be going to school soon. I would wait for her, catch her on her way downstairs in a totally non-stalkery way. Maybe she saw what happened too. Either way, she would know who lived in the apartment next to hers. She could tell me things.

^FIFTEEN

THE GIRL FROM UPSTAIRS

I watched the stairs from the doorway of Harry’s apartment for ten minutes before the lift went rattling up to the sixth floor. I was terrified that it might not be the girl who came down. When I saw a glimpse of her uniform through the window of the snail-slow lift as it descended I lunged across the hall and slammed my hand on the old brass button. The lift lurched and strained, coming to a stop a few centimetres below my floor, then slowly rising to correct itself. I looked through the thick glass, catching her eye for a moment, like the flash of a fish in a stream. Then it was gone.

She thinks I’m weird and creepy, I thought.

I pulled the heavy metal door open and shuffled inside. My phone read 8.57 am – six hours and forty-nine minutes since I woke to the sound of raised voices in the apartment upstairs. And, for the second time since my father had left for work, I was breaking the one rule he had set for me. I was starting to understand what my mother was always going on about.

I wiped my sweaty hands on my shorts. I hadn’t brushed my hair, which was sure to be wild. It always was in the morning. Like Harry’s. I hadn’t brushed my teeth either. They felt so furry I could have combed them.

I raised my eyebrows to say ‘hi’, but she was no longer looking at me, her eyes cast down, reading a book with an orange-and-white cover, a classic of some kind. Her hair really was fire-engine red. Her eyes were dark-chocolate discs – 85 per cent cacao, like the Lindt Mum stashed in the first-aid kit. She had long fingernails painted pink and purple and yellow and green. I turned awkwardly on my crutches and pulled the door closed. The rubber foot of my crutch blocked it from closing so I jerked the crutch inside, knocking the girl’s shoulder.

‘Sorry.’

She smiled a pursed-lip smile, picked up her guitar case from the floor, and squeezed into the back corner of the lift. I rested my crutch against the wall and pressed ‘G’. Seconds ticked by like years before the lift jerked to life and continued its descent.

I apologised again for attacking her with my crutch but, with headphones in, she didn’t hear. We stood side by side. I stared straight ahead as we passed the fourth floor. I could hear the song she was listening to. I knew it and liked it a lot. She smelt sweet and bitter like the lemonade me and my cousins once made and sold at the top of my driveway in the holidays. We thought we’d be millionaires by the end of the day but instead we made $1.50, and that was from my mum.

I peeked from the corner of my eye. Her white school shirt had a stain on the collar, her green skirt was slightly crumpled. She wore shiny black steel-capped shoes. Her book was Wuthering Heights. The title was printed at the top of the page. Page 78. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have to remember that the girl was up to page 78 in Wuthering Heights but when you were programming your mind to devour details you couldn’t just switch it on and off.

She looked about a year older than me and was substantially taller, which made me more scared of her and confirmed my theory that she hated me. Tall, pretty girls don’t need to like people or to listen to them. That’s what my research over the past couple of years had revealed. They called the shots. And it was illegal, in my experience, for slightly older girls to show any interest in slightly younger boys. Not that I wanted her to show interest in me.

She had a badge hanging from her jumper but I couldn’t read what the dangly bit said. Prefect? Captain? Maybe not. She seemed a bit too edgy to be captain.

Who lives next door to you?

That’s what I desperately wanted to know.

Did you hear or see anything last night? Did you see a man fall from the apartment next to yours and die at around 2.11 am? Have you ever seen anyone come in or out of that apartment? And do you know who the small man might be? Did you hear him scream or the slunch of him hitting the ground?

But, like many of the taller, older girls that I had encountered, she had a force field installed that rendered me speechless. Abort, abort, my brain told me.

But I needed to know.

The lift banged hard into the ground floor. She pushed open the door and exited, gliding across the small foyer towards the front door.

‘Excuse me!’ I called, a few steps before the city swallowed her.

Maybe her music was up too loud or she really did hate me because she continued to glide towards that door. I called out again, louder this time.

‘Hey!’

She turned, right in the doorway, backlit by the flat light of day. She took out an earbud, looking a bit annoyed. She reached into her bag to pause the music.

‘Yeah?’ she said.

Mind: blank.

‘I just…’

Nothing. I just nothing. What I wanted to ask her seemed so intense as an opening line so I said ‘Hi’ instead, which was an odd thing to say when I was already speaking to her.

‘Hi,’ she said, almost as a question. ‘The bus is about to go. I’m already late for school.’

She’ll leave and I will be stuck here all day not knowing. So I said it.

‘Did you see anyone fall from the apartment next to yours last night at about 2.11 am?’

Her face dropped. ‘No. Did you?’

I nodded.

‘Really?’

A bus went past, groaning as it braked and pulled into the stop.

‘Are you sure it was the apartment next to mine? 6A?’ she asked.

I nodded again.

She looked out the door at the bus. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Can I maybe ask you a couple of questions after school?’

She looked like she wanted to say no but curiosity must have got the better of her. She looked down at my bandaged knee and crutches.

‘I’ve got a guitar lesson,’ she said. ‘But after that. Maybe five o’clock? I could meet you in the cafe.’

‘Which cafe?’

‘Next door. Cafe Oska, it’s called.’ She turned to go.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Scarlet,’ she said as she jumped down the three steps to the footpath, guitar case in hand. I crutched down the steps and watched her go. She was all legs and grace like a long-distance runner, and I was pretty sure she had information. There was something in the look that crossed her face right after I asked the question. How could I wait until five o’clock to hear what she knew?

I watched as she got on the bus and it pulled away into traffic. She stared at me from the back seat, then turned away as the bus took a right at the lights.

I looked up at the building, bent over me like an angry parent. Now that I was out I wanted to leave and never come back. Another bus pulled into the stop with a squeal of brakes and a belch of black smoke. People rushed past in suits and dresses and hoodies and uniforms. Everyone with somewhere to go, apart from me.

I wondered if I was being watched. The thought launched me back up the stairs and into the foyer of the building.

I noticed a pram outside one of the ground-floor apartments and a bank of mailboxes on the wall to my right. Tintin, Asterix and Smurf figurines sat on the ledge above the boxes.

I peeked into box 5A, my dad’s. There were a couple of letters in there. I tried to open the box but it needed a key. I pulled the key out of my pocket and tried it but it didn’t fit. Somewhere, in one of the apartments on the ground or first floor, I heard someone call out, ‘We’ve got to go!’ I quickly put my eye to box 6A.

There was a letter in there. I looked around to make sure that no one was coming and I tried the key in that box, too. Some part of me prayed that it would not fit because if my dad had the key to the mailbox of 6A it would only offer up more questions and I had enough questions already.

The key didn’t fit. I poked my finger into the wide mouth at the top of the box. The gap was only just tall enough for my finger to fit but my fingernail scraped the envelope. I pushed in a little further, grazing my skin at the knuckle. I managed to press a corner of the envelope against the front of the box and gradually eased it out.

I looked around again, my heart knocking hard on the inside of my chest like it was trying to escape. The lift made a loud clunk and started whirring upwards. I took a jagged breath and photographed the front of the letter then slid it back into the box. I started for the stairs.

^SIXTEEN

A SAFE PLACE TO HIDE

I stabbed my father’s hunting knife into the crack between the dark timber boards and pressed down on the handle, gently prying a board away from the wall. The primitive nails screamed as they squeezed out through hardwood. I was careful not to let the blade slip.

If I had to be here by myself all day, I wasn’t taking any chances. The apartment was my fortress. I needed a safe place, somewhere I couldn’t be found. I got the idea of hiding inside the wall from a TV show. One night a few months ago, when I was having trouble sleeping, I snuck out into the lounge room a little after midnight and watched the TV on mute. A Japanese game show was on. A family had to hide in their own home and two celebrity guests had half an hour to find them. It sounded easy but the family were hidden by ‘concealment experts’ who opened up the ceiling and built secret cavities into the floor and hid kids inside mattresses and book cases. The one family member the celebrities couldn’t find was a six-year-old kid secreted inside a wall. The family won a million yen. Or maybe ten million. I can’t remember.

The fire hose reel cupboard outside was embedded into the other side of the front wall of Harry’s apartment. When I was snooping around earlier I’d realised that the cupboard didn’t take up the whole space. There had to be a large cavity between it and the front door. It was the perfect place for me and Magic to hide if Mr Hill came back before Harry did.

Was that his name, the man from 6A? The envelope that I had photographed was addressed to J and M Hill. But was Mr Hill the moon-faced man under the umbrella or the man who fell? I hoped Scarlet could tell me.

I pulled the first board free, revealing a tangle of old electrical wires and some ancient orange insulation that looked like fairy floss covered in spider webs. It smelt dull, like dust and mould, a cross between the caretaker’s storage cupboard downstairs and my grandmother’s house in Melbourne. I took a handful of the insulation. It felt squeaky in my grip and made my teeth feel strange, like fingernails on a chalkboard or the skin of a peach on my lips. As I pulled the insulation out of the wall, dozens of tiny dead insects and roaches rained down on the floor.

I started work on the next board and the next, prying them off the wall and carefully inspecting behind them, waiting for something to jump out and kill me. Nothing did, but I found five mouse corpses – flattened, crispy animal husks – and a dead rat that looked as though it had been frozen mid-stride by some ancient curse.

Magic sniffed around, looking like she wanted to eat the rodents but I pushed her away. I inspected the bodies closely – legs and spines and skulls. They were like museum exhibits, only not behind glass, which made them more real and terrible and interesting to me. They had been alive and now they weren’t. Like the man who fell. Insects, ants, rats, mice, humans. They all die sooner or later.

I used to worry a lot about Mum or me dying. It scared me that the world would still go on after I was gone. And that it was here before me. On those nights when I was younger and I felt panicky, Mum would come into my room and stroke my hair till I fell asleep. It’s weird that something so simple could make you feel okay about a worry that felt so big. Mum called this ‘learning to suffer well’. She said that being happy wasn’t about slaying all the dragons and overcoming all the bad things. She said the dragons would always be there. Being happy was about learning not to panic or freak out every time you saw one. I tried to do this. I didn’t always win, but I tried.

I knew that the things lying on the floor were only bugs and vermin but I had never known anyone who had died. Not that I had known the rat either. Or any of the mice or insects. Or the man. But I didn’t want to just sweep them up and put them in the bin. I felt like I had a responsibility. I wanted to be respectful to them.

Magic’s nose was working overtime and she was drooling on the floor so I told her to sit. There was no way the stinky mutt was going to eat a dead rat in front of me. ‘You’ve had your two-day-old pizza,’ I told her and she started panting, her long, pink tongue lolling from her mouth like the pizza was the best thing she’d ever eaten.

I peered into the darkness of the wall. The cavity was just deep enough for me to squeeze into but did I want to? I wasn’t crazy about small spaces. But then, I wasn’t crazy about large men with fat faces who wanted to kill me, either.

It took a few minutes to get Magic inside the wall. She was not happy at all. Then I eased my damaged leg inside and squeezed my body in, trying not to think about all the live spiders and insects I must be brushing up against. Once I was in I crouched awkwardly. A timber beam ran across the wall above me. I placed all of my weight on my bent left knee and tried to keep my right leg straight. Magic groaned. But we were in.

Now I needed to make a door, a cover for my hatch. I imagined the four boards enclosing me in the wall and the fear of that made me want to go to the police right now. I prayed that I would never have to use this hiding space. And maybe I wouldn’t, but I needed to be sure. I needed to look out for myself.

Some part of me wanted to hide in here when Harry came home too, and just watch him for a bit through a crack between the boards. Not that I really believed he had done anything wrong. But something had made him go out drinking last night and he had told me that he didn’t do that any more. Not in almost a year. It was probably just because I’d asked all those stupid questions. But I wanted to know for sure. What if there was something else, too?

Promise me you won’t hold me up as any kind of hero, he had said.

I would just watch him for a little bit to confirm what I already knew – that he was a good guy.

^SEVENTEEN

DEAR DAD…

When I was eight I sent a letter to Harry. I waited and waited for him to reply, hoping that he would tell me everything I needed to know about him. I never heard back, but I remembered every word of that letter. I still wondered about most of this stuff.

Dear Dad

Hi. It’s Sam, your son. How are you? I’m good. I wanted to ask you if I could come and stay at your house sometime. Or if you could maybe come to our house for dinner. (Mum doesn’t know I’m asking but she wouldn’t mind.) I also have a list of other questions if that’s okay.

• What is your favourite colour?

• Where do you live?

Do you ever miss Mum?

• Mum says that you have one short leg and scoliosis too. I have to wear a built-up left shoe. I don’t mind but Mum says it will get worse when I’m older so I better have an operation. Do you mind having scoliosis?

• 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. Only 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 unusually 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:

Is the crime part of something bigger?

If it was him, that meant a crime reporter had been pushed from a balcony right above my father’s apartment. What are the chances? There might only be ten proper crime reporters in the entire city. Coincidence or something else? Did Harry know this was going to happen? Was he involved in it?

Goosebumps made a skirmish line from my neck down the right side of my body. I tried to remember what Merrin’s voice was like, if it matched the voice I heard upstairs last night. In the photo his glasses were bronze-brown metal, like the arm that I had found in the yard.

I carefully lowered my leg to the floor, grabbed my crutches and retreated from the window. I realised how dark it was in the room aside from the flickering TV. I muted the sports report and listened. The lift rattled and shuddered up or down the shaft. Up, I thought. I hoped and feared that it was my father.

I love you.

The last thing he’d said to me. Sure, he muttered it through a door but he had never said it before – not on the phone the time I had called him at the Herald when I was nine, not in the letter he didn’t send me or any time this week. The note with the pile of comics he had sent years ago read ‘For Sam’. That was it. Very touching and heartfelt and it must have taken him hours to write but it wasn’t ‘love’. I wondered if he had said it when I was in my mother’s belly.

He had definitely said it this morning before he left.

I love you.

Why?

Because he knew that he might not come back?

Because he knew he was going out to do something dangerous, something to do with the crime? That’s why he didn’t want me to go with him. That’s why he said ‘I love you’. But did that mean that he was involved in the crime? Or just that he was investigating it?

Maybe it meant neither, or nothing at all. Earlier in the week, late one night, I had asked Harry about his second commandment:

Make contacts. You have to know crime fighters as well as criminals. You need sources of good information on underworld dealings.

I’d asked him what it was like being friends with criminals and cops. He had sat thinking for a moment, then said, ‘They’re not that different.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Bad guys do the wrong thing with the same conviction that good guys do the right thing. Bad guys never think they’re doing the wrong thing. There’s always some justification for their actions. No one wakes up in the morning saying, “I’m going to do evil today”. Everyone’s doing what they think is right, even if other people don’t understand their logic.’

‘And you’re right in the middle,’ I had said.

‘That’s right.’ And then something interrupted us. We were watching TV or the jug boiled. Something broke the moment and the conversation was left hanging.

My phone pinged, shaking me out of the memory.

Goodnight. If you’re still

awake. Which you shouldn’t

be because it’s 9.35 ;)

See you in the morning.

I can’t believe you’ll be 13!

I remember the day you

were born.

     Night

I thought for a moment, then I sent another message.

     I love you

Wow. You haven’t said

that in ages. I love you

too.

I sat on the couch, staring at the words on the phone. I wanted to say something, to tell her that Harry wasn’t back, that I was scared, that maybe she was right about me, right about Harry, right about everything.

Tell her.

It didn’t make sense to keep this from her. I wanted to tell the police, so why not tell Mum? She would know what to do. She would come get me.

I need to tell you something

I typed the words but didn’t hit ‘send’. Not yet. I reread the message and wondered exactly what I would tell her. Would I admit that I had messed this up, too? I had done so many stupid things at home and school to make her stressed and embarrassed. I was almost thirteen years old and I couldn’t be trusted to stay home by myself for a week while my mum was at work. It was pathetic. I didn’t want to be the ‘me’ that I had been before I came to Harry’s. I wanted to be someone new, someone better and more mature, who could make good decisions.

Make good choices, I heard Mum say.

I still had time to set things straight, to take action without my mother having to rescue me.

I deleted the words.

^TWENTY-TWO

COP

It was 9.47 pm. This was the last time I would travel in this lift. The information I had gathered rattled around my tired mind as the doors of 2A and 2B disappeared from view through the narrow lift window. I would tell the police what I had heard last night and what I’d seen on the ground. I would present them with my physical evidence and photos.

The rhythmic squeak of the lift whispered go back, go back, go back inside. I tried to ignore it.

I felt like I was giving up but I couldn’t spend another night in that apartment alone. Why hadn’t Harry come home? Or at least called? ‘That’s a promise,’ he had said. ‘I love you.’

Magic licked the palm of my hand as the first floor slipped past.

Scarlet had been right, too. About going to the police. I was annoyed when she said it. Crime reporters didn’t just squeal every time something went wrong. They sat tight. They showed determination, patience, mindfulness. They evaluated all evidence. Commandment number ten. But one thing I had discovered in the past nineteen-and-a-half hours was that I was not a crime reporter. I was a twelve-year-old boy. Mum reckoned boys didn’t grow up till they were twenty-five and some of them (a silent, ‘like your father, for instance’) never did.

I felt like I was betraying Harry by going to the police. Which was funny, because he’d betrayed me my whole life and probably was again tonight. But I couldn’t help feeling that something had happened to him. Part of me almost wished that something had happened just so it wouldn’t mean that he had broken his promise.

Go back, go back, go back.

The lift shunted to the ground. I pushed open the thick metal door and looked around carefully. Magic led the way out, pulling me along behind her. We moved quickly across the dirty-red-carpeted foyer.

Go back inside.

I could already feel the man’s hands on the back of my neck and the knockout blow delivered to my head with a bottle or the butt of a gun, like in Tintin or Crime Smashers. I reached for the front door of the building. He would be standing there and he’d say something like, ‘Looky what we have here,’ or ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ or ‘Wiseguy, see?’

But there was no one outside. Just wind and sideways rain pelting the dark, lonely street, and burnt-orange leaves blowing up in gusts and flopping down into puddles. I planted my rubber crutch-bottoms firmly on the path and launched myself down the three stairs.

Magic hauled me along the street, carving through the wintry night, my crutches reaching and launching my body forward in a blur of movement.

A car would pull up at any moment, I knew, and bundle me inside. A goon in a fedora hat would grab me and wrestle me into the back seat where the perp would be waiting. And with hardly anyone else on the street, no one would see. No one would ever know I’d been taken. Apart from Magic. And her English wasn’t so good.

I needed to slow my mind, to breathe. My fear and panic needle was edging into the red. I am not in a comic book, I told myself. This is real life and in real life there are no goons. In my entire twelve years, three-hundred-and-sixty-four days I have not encountered a single goon in a fedora or any other kind of hat. This made me laugh on the inside and brought my fear-ometer back to orange.

The glowing blue-and-white Police sign was fifty metres away. Safety had been this close the whole time. I ignored the pain in my leg, the agony in my armpits and hands. Once I was inside that building, there was nothing anyone could do to me. I charged along the footpath, in and out of long shadows and pools of streetlamp light. My hair was stuck flat to my forehead. Rain ran rivers into my eyes.

Footsteps approached quickly from behind and I twisted hard. A jogger ran by, a lady – blonde, in a black rain poncho, about twenty years old, I figured. She looked back at me, startled by my quick turn, then she continued.

I reached with my crutches and swung my legs forward. Reach and swing, reach and swing, until I felt the warm interior light of the police station on me and Magic sniffed the narrow gap between the heavy glass double doors. She shook from side to side, her ears flapping loudly against her cheeks, showering me with fine dog-stink spray.

Inside, an officer was working on a computer at the counter. I pushed open the door and crossed the threshold from danger to safety and I knew that everything was going to be okay. It was warm and smelt like fresh coffee and disinfectant and security. There was a sea of deserted desks behind the tall front counter. I crutched across the flat brown carpet of the waiting area and collapsed into a plastic chair against the wall. I breathed hard and looked back out into the darkness.

‘That’s a very nice dog,’ the officer said, ‘but you can’t actually bring dogs in here unless it’s a guide dog. You’ll have to take him outside.’

I pulled myself up on my crutches and hopped the four or five steps to the tall black counter, taking Magic with me. The officer had light-brown hair in a bun and olive skin. Her name tag read:

SENIOR CONSTABLE

KATE PINNEY

I noticed now that there was another officer sitting at one of the thirty or so identical desks behind the counter and another couple walking around the open-plan office space. There were six or seven glass-walled offices at the back of the station. I was surprised by how busy it was this late at night. But with people being thrown from buildings and disappearing all over the place, I figured I probably shouldn’t be surprised.

‘I need to report a crime,’ I said.

‘And what crime is that?’ She peered over the counter at Magic, who panted and looked up at her with a smile. A long string of drool hung from the side of the dog’s mouth, making a damp patch on the carpet.

‘A murder,’ I said. I almost didn’t believe the word as I said it. I’m not sure Senior Constable Kate Pinney believed it either.

‘Right. And where did this take place?’ She shifted a notebook across the desk and grabbed a pen.

‘Just up the street. About a hundred metres from here.’

She studied my face, probably searching for body language cues she’d learnt in training. I’d read about the techniques officers and detectives used to decide if a witness was telling the truth or not. Breaking eye contact, crossing arms or turning your body away told them you were lying. I did none of these things. Stretching and yawning wasn’t great either. Police officers analysed the speed of the person’s response and the tone and volume of their voice, too. I was aware of all this as I spoke to her, which probably made me seem totally suspicious.

‘When was this?’

‘This morning,’ I said. ‘Just after two o’clock.’

‘And why haven’t you reported the crime till now?’

I shook my head. ‘I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.’

‘Where are your parents?’ she asked.

‘I’m staying with my dad but I don’t know where he is.’

‘Tell me what you saw. Actually, can you wait here for one moment? I’d like to have a more senior officer present. You can take a seat again if you like and we’ll come around there. Can I get you some water?’

I shook my head once more.

She turned and strode towards one of the offices at the back of the station. A ball of hot acid burnt away at the lining of my stomach. I felt light-headed, exhausted, glad it was almost over. I hopped to the left to turn around and saw Kate Pinney knocking on the door of the glass-walled office in the far right corner.

I heard a big, meaty cough, like a man had gravel caught in his throat, and I saw someone inside the office that made my breath stop dead.

^TWENTY-THREE

RUN

The office windows reflected the fluoro lights from the main part of the station but I could still see him. I leaned in, squinted to sharpen my focus, my certainty. Kate Pinney opened the door and the man looked up.

He turned and stared right at me. His face was as white and full as the moon. I dropped down low behind the counter. I scrambled across the carpet towards the front door, dragging Magic, sliding my crutches along the floor. I tried to protect my right knee but in that moment I felt no pain. I pushed open the glass door and the cold night slapped me in the face. I pulled myself up on the doorhandle, staying as low as I could, and ducked to the right, across the slippery tiles at the entrance and out of sight. I did not look back.

How can he be a police officer? It’s not possible.

Sick, blind panic streaked through me. Magic and I ran up some steps, past a large fountain, across a patch of well-worn grass, then down a laneway between a restaurant and an apartment block. The lane was just wide enough for a car. I stayed to the right, against the wall, running on my crutches past overflowing bins at the back of another restaurant. Further down, I could see the small, steam-covered front window of another eatery. I ran past the window: ‘Red Dragon Food and Gifts’. There was a ‘Closed’ sign on the door. Inside, dumplings on a flour-covered bench. A lady spooning goop from a silver bowl into small, round wrappers.

I looked back to see if the cop was standing in the mouth of the alley, then I shoved the narrow red shop door. I was surprised when it opened. I poked my head inside. It was warm and smelt good.

The lady turned to me. ‘Not open, not open,’ she told me, waving her hand.

‘Please?’

‘Not open.’

I let Magic in and stepped in behind her. They wouldn’t be far away. Kid on crutches comes in to report a murder. Cop goes to alert a more senior officer and kid disappears. They would come for me.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘I’m very tired.’ I motioned to my crutches.

She regarded me, clicked her tongue, turned away and continued spooning mixture into dumpling wrappers. My stomach snarled. I had hardly eaten all day.

She shook her head. ‘Why are you alone?’

‘Just a few minutes, then I’ll go.’

‘Where are your parents?’

‘My dad’s at work,’ I said. ‘He’ll be home soon.’

She clicked her tongue again, like she knew I was lying, then waved a hand covered in dumpling-mush towards a small, red wooden table in the back of the store, near a scattered collection of teapots, lamps and bamboo steamers.

‘Thank you,’ I said and shuffled over. Magic was tired now and would only walk at a snail’s pace, so I pretended to browse the cumin seeds, crushed chilli and fish sauce bottles lining the counter. The lady was paying me no attention anyway, so I dragged Magic along, steered her into the corner and partially hid her behind a display filled with pink and red Chinese slippers.

I pulled one of the four small chairs out from under the table and flopped down onto it. I was physically exhausted, mentally on fire. I could still see the front window but I could easily lean to my right, out of view behind a shelf filled with lamps, if I needed to. It felt good to be in here, even though the lady with the dumplings couldn’t do much if a police officer tried to drag me away.

Being inside the shop made me feel like I had stepped outside time for a moment, like I’d gone through a portal. The music sounded like Buddhist monks chanting on a hilltop somewhere and the spicy smell and steam and colourful cushions and birdcages took me to some other place. It bought me a few moments to think.

How could he have pushed that man off a balcony and be a police officer? Maybe he’s not a police officer, I thought. Maybe they caught him. He was a criminal waiting to be charged. But he was in uniform.

Can you wait here for one moment? I’d like to have a more senior officer present. That’s what she’d said. Then she knocked on his door. She was a senior constable. He must have been a higher rank than that. He had a corner office that looked important somehow.

What am I involved in?

I thought of the other times in my life I’d had anything to do with police. Two young officers had helped us when our house was broken into. They took our fingerprints and one of them, a lady with blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and a super-heavy belt with pepper spray and a gun and a bunch of other stuff, had put her arm around my mum when she had cried. And Mum knew a cop called Clint from when she went to school. He worked at Katoomba Police Station now and she sometimes said hello to him when we were up in town. Once, he let me off with a warning for riding without a helmet. My only experiences with police had been good. They were supposed to be good people. So who was this guy? How did he get a badge?

My brain felt like dumpling mush. I stared out the front window, past the rhythmic rise and fall of the woman’s shoulders as she made her food.

Who do you go to? Who do you go to when you’re in very deep trouble and the police are not an option?

Mum, was my first thought. Before I get in any deeper.

I pulled out my phone and sent her a message.

Are you busy? I really need to

tell you something

^TWENTY-FOUR

HOW IT FEELS

I always thought that Mum didn’t understand how hard everyday life was for me, even though she tried. At the public school down the road, I used to get teased and pushed around for my hobbly walk. So she sent me to the independent school, which she couldn’t really afford but she said she would somehow. And guess what? Kids picked on me there, too. So I went back to the public school the next year.

She wondered why I was angry all the time, why I got in trouble, why I argued non-stop with her, why I seemed to get detention every second day, why I hit that kid one Friday morning.

The hit was a total accident but it was the thing that tipped Mum over the edge. These two kids had been hassling me all week, calling me ‘retard’ and ‘spaz’ and trying to trip me over. It wasn’t even a big thing that made me snap. One of them, Angus Dodson, threw my tennis ball under a classroom and I had had enough. I lashed out and punched him right in the mouth before I even knew what I was doing. I had never hit anyone before. I got his braces with my fist and the metal cut my finger open. I bent the braces and my mum had to pay for them. She took the money out of the savings account she’d been building for me, $20 a month since I was a baby. I hadn’t told any teachers about Angus teasing me every day so they thought I’d just lashed out without being provoked. That was a week before my operation. Mum had pleaded my case with Mrs Johnston, the principal, who decided not to suspend me but gave me a week of after-school detention.

This week, on one of those nights when Harry had sat at the dining table staring at his laptop screen, he asked what I’d done to make Mum want to send me away for a week. I knew that he knew because I’d heard Mum tell him, but I recounted the story about the kid called Angus and the fight. I told him about another time when I took the short cut home from school across the big water pipe that’s like a high bridge across the gully. It’s pretty dangerous but heaps of kids do it. We got caught and Mum found out. Then there was being late to class all the time, getting detention for swearing, arguing with teachers, the list went on and on. I had no idea why I was doing these things. I didn’t feel like I was choosing to. ‘Hormones!’ Mum always said.

Dad asked me about Mum. I didn’t want to say anything bad about her but I told him how it had been between us lately. Not like it used to be. We used to be good together. ‘You and me,’ she’d say, cuddling me into her on the couch while we watched re-runs of Doctor Who. But in the last couple of years, since she started working so much, life was different. When she first woke up things would be good. Or we might have a moment where things were okay but then we’d have an argument about homework or about how long I’d had the hot tap on or some misunderstanding about my sports uniform and we’d be off again. The storm never seemed to pass. Just when I thought it was over the wind would change and it’d circle back over us.

‘Maybe she suffers compassion fatigue,’ he’d said.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s where someone has to be so nice and understanding and kind and giving in their job that they forget about themselves. They don’t have anything left to give. Have you ever imagined how stressful it must be for her to work in an emergency unit?’

I hadn’t. I had honestly never thought about that in my life. She never talked about work, maybe because what she saw was so full-on. And I never asked. To me she was just someone who slept, froze dinners and left notes and texts for me to make my life difficult and to control me like some evil overlord. But working ten- and twelve-hour shifts must have been pretty hard. Twelve hours is two of my school days back to back.

Part of me wanted to tell my dad that if he paid her some child support maybe she wouldn’t have to work so much, but I didn’t say anything.

Sometimes, when she got up in the morning, Mum looked so tired. If I asked her where my school shirt was or some other little thing she would just lose it, telling me how irresponsible I was and that I needed to grow up and that I never lifted a finger around the house. Which totally wasn’t true. But it kind of was.

Compassion fatigue made me think about her in a whole different way. She was full up, which made me feel really sad for her. Maybe her working so much wasn’t turning out that well for either of us.

^TWENTY-FIVE

6A OR 6B

The lift opened and I stared at two doors lit by dim fluorescent light – 6A and 6B. The ‘A’ on ‘6A’ was slightly twisted to the right.

Which apartment was hers? The tangled vines of sleeplessness confused everything. Harry’s apartment is downstairs on the left so that means Scarlet is on the right. Left. Right. A. B. 6B. She’s in 6B. What if the cop had returned to the apartment while I was sitting in the dumpling place? What if he was watching me now through the peephole?

I trembled and gripped Magic’s lead tight. She panted and drooled, excited or worried. I moved carefully out of the lift, across the minefield of squeaky floorboards, and knocked gently on the door of 6B.

I checked my phone: three per cent battery. No response from Mum yet. This happened when she was busy. She couldn’t check her phone if she was trying to keep someone alive. And how was she to know that checking her phone tonight might keep me alive?

Mum?

I pocketed the phone and listened for thumps or footsteps or a creaking chair. It was late, ten-thirty maybe. I prayed that Scarlet would open quickly, that anyone would, except the policeman with the moon face.

If I had somehow picked the wrong door, I was ready to run as fast as my crutches would take me. Which wasn’t very fast. I would take three steps at a time, maybe four, and I would scream like a maniac, alerting every person in the building. Not that anyone would open their door to help, I figured.

I didn’t hear anything at all.

I knocked again, slightly louder this time.

Footsteps. Very light. Padding towards the door. Socks or slippers.

Then silence.

Someone was standing on the other side of the door, watching me.

Please let it be Scarlet rather than her mother, I thought. I stood up straight and forced a smile, which probably made me look crazy.

A lock twisted. A chain jangled. I took two steps back from the door as it inched open.

^TWENTY-SIX

SCARLET’S APARTMENT

Scarlet’s slightly puffy, just-woken face appeared in the gap between door and jamb.

‘What do you want?’ she croaked, squinting against the sickly yellow light from the landing.

‘Could I come in? Please? I need to tell you something.’

She looked uncertain.

‘It’s important,’ I said. ‘I’m worried. I don’t know where else to go.’

She looked at me the way the police officer had, sizing me up. Her face disappeared from view and the door closed. The chain slid across and the door swung open. Her hair was wild. She wore a pink onesie with thick, pink socks.

‘Don’t judge,’ she said. ‘Whose dog?’

‘Sorry, I–’

She bent down and ruffled Magic all around the face. ‘Cute,’ she whispered. Magic licked her neck and chin. She took the dog by the collar. ‘My mum’s asleep. We have to be quiet.’

I followed Scarlet and Magic down the dark, narrow hall to the lounge room. The apartment smelt like food. Something spicy. Magic’s never-been-cut toenails tapped loudly on the floorboards. We passed an open bedroom. It was dark and small with an empty single bed. Scarlet’s, I figured. There was a closed door on the left and a little bathroom – shower, sink and toilet. Then a tiny kitchen. A very different layout to Harry’s place. The same size but different.

The lounge room was shabby, which surprised me. I always imagine that other people must have perfect lives and live in perfect houses, have perfect families with perfect cats and well-behaved guinea pigs. I had assumed that about my dad, too. Not that I thought he had a guinea pig.

Scarlet’s place was hectic. A giant messy bookshelf filled one wall, with books parked at odd angles. There was a torn orange lamp on a table in the corner, a ratty old rug, vases and ornaments everywhere, magazines and papers on every available surface. Like Mum’s and my house, it was stuffed with life. Harry’s apartment felt temporary, like he was just surviving there for a moment. Scarlet’s apartment looked and smelt and felt like lives were being lived there.

I moved carefully towards the wide glass sliding door and peered out. I couldn’t see the other balcony from there. Still, my stomach flipped.

‘Does your dad know you’re here?’ Scarlet whispered, taking a seat on the tired grey leather couch. She flicked on the TV in the corner of the room and turned the sound down low.

I shook my head. ‘He didn’t come home.’

‘Why not? Did you go to the police?’ she asked.

I nodded.

‘What happened?’

Magic sniffed around the room, licking crumbs from under the coffee table. A music video played on the TV. An old hip-hop clip with a guy wearing a clock around his neck.

I had rehearsed what I would say but now I hesitated, unsure where to begin.

‘What?’ she asked, seeing my fear.

‘The man who I told you pushed the other man from the balcony…’ I whispered.

‘Did they catch him?’

I shook my head.

‘So what happened?’

‘He’s a police officer.’

Scarlet looked at me blankly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I saw him. Half an hour ago.’ I tried to keep my voice from shaking all over the place. ‘He was in uniform, in an office at the police station just down there.’

Scarlet watched me carefully, her left hand slowly scruffing the fur on Magic’s neck.

‘I swear it was him,’ I said.

‘Why would a police officer–’

‘I don’t know. But it was definitely him.’

‘That’s crazy. Are you sure?’

‘One hundred per cent.’

‘Did you see him close up?’

I thought about it, then shook my head.

‘From me to the front door away?’ she asked.

I looked down the darkened hallway and shrugged.

‘Further?’ she probed.

‘Yeah.’

‘Twice that far?’

I nodded. ‘Maybe three times.’

‘That’s like thirty metres or something. Are you sure–’

‘It was him.’

She raised one eyebrow. ‘I don’t know what police officers are supposed to do in the Blue Mountains but here, in the city, their job is to help people.’

‘That’s what I thought but–’

‘And I told you that the Hills are in Queensland. No one’s even living in that apartment.’

‘Well, there was someone there last night.’

‘Are you sure it was that balc–’

‘Yes, I told you! It was the balcony next door.’ I pointed outside, raising my voice.

‘Shhhhh.’

‘Sorry,’ I whispered.

Scarlet continued scratching Magic. She watched the TV screen. Another old rap video with three guys wearing thick gold chains. We didn’t talk for a while. Scarlet just sat there.

I looked at her silver bracelet. It had the words ‘Nanakorobi yaoki’ engraved on it and some Japanese characters underneath. Well, they looked Japanese. I figured Scarlet’s mum or dad or both might be from Japan.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘Fall down seven times, stand up eight. It’s about resilience,’ she said, and without missing a beat: ‘Last night, did you actually see the face of the man while he was speaking? Or did you hear his voice and see his face separately?’

‘What difference does it make?’

‘Just… did you?’

I thought about it. I had heard the voice upstairs although not exactly what he was saying, and then, later, I saw the man’s face down below, those eyes looking up at me. But I hadn’t actually seen his face when he spoke because he was up on the balcony.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But I heard his voice. Then I heard the footsteps and the lift. And then I saw his face down there.’

‘But did you ever actually hear that voice come out of his face?’

‘No,’ I said. Magic had settled in under Scarlet’s legs, the traitor. ‘But what difference does it make? I know it was him.’

‘Right,’ she said, looking at me like she was waiting for me to say something. ‘I know it’s a crazy idea but what if the man you saw last night was a police officer?’

‘He was!’ I said. ‘That’s what I’m telling you.’

‘But what if it wasn’t his voice that you heard above, the person who did the pushing? What if, when he was standing over the body, holding the umbrella, he was there on police duty? What if he lives in this building or the block next door or what if he was walking past and heard the guy fall and went to help him?’

‘Help him?’ I said. ‘He wasn’t helping him.’ I started to hate Scarlet in that moment.

‘What makes you so sure that you’re the only person in the world who saw him fall?’ she asked. ‘I mean, wouldn’t it make more sense if other people had seen it, too? There are fourteen apartments in our block and heaps next door on either side. You’re not in the Mountains any more.’

Anger bubbled up in me. I had to keep my head, though. ‘Why would he follow me upstairs? And break into the apartment? It was after two in the morning.’

‘Did you see him break into the apartment?’

‘What?’

‘Do you know for sure that it was him? Did you ever see him apart from when he looked up at you from the yard?’

I hesitated. ‘No.’

She looked at me like she pitied me. ‘So, one possibility is that they were two different people. Or maybe he thought you pushed the guy.’

‘What?’

‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘Two in the morning. A man is pushed from a building. A policeman goes to help him. He hears a noise from above and looks up to see a face at a window, someone taking a photo. The face disappears. What’s he going to do? He’s going to radio for someone to come investigate the scene and take the body to the morgue or something and maybe he’s going to go up and try to arrest whoever was at the window. Maybe he did break into your apartment. Maybe you’re the prime suspect.’

‘What?’ I snapped at her. ‘Firstly, he’d need a warrant to enter the apartment,’ I said, but it didn’t make me feel much better.

My head was swimming. How could she reverse everything I had worked out? I’d been thinking this through for twenty-something hours and she had taken two minutes to tear it all to pieces. How was it possible that I hadn’t seen him speak? I had played back the sound of the argument over and over again in my mind. I had replayed the image of the man’s face, I had looked at the blurred photo on my phone. When I was hiding in the cleaner’s cupboard I had been so close to him that I’d felt the floorboard lift as he stepped on it. And then I had seen him at the police station but, in all that time, I had not heard him speak and seen his face at the same time, which meant that… maybe the man I saw was not the man I heard in the apartment above.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t other police come to investigate the crime scene?’

‘You were in the cleaning cupboard all night, weren’t you?’ she asked. ‘Maybe it happened while you were in there.’

‘But the body was already gone before I hid in the cupboard,’ I said.

‘Look, I don’t have all the answers. It just seems like there are holes in your story. Maybe you don’t have all the answers either.’

I would have screamed at her if her argument didn’t make more sense than mine. If her logic was correct, I was accusing a police officer of a serious crime. Had I had put two and two together and made five?

Scarlet looked at me with those steady eyes. ‘I feel for you, Sam. I know what it’s like not to have a dad around but to have him go missing must make you feel really scared.’

I hated that word ‘scared’.

‘But that’s why you have to go back to the police. It sounds like the man you thought was the murderer might actually have been trying to help. And you should tell your mum, and tell her that your dad is gone. Do you want me to tell my mum? We could go down there with you now and talk to the cop.’

I hung my head. All the tiredness and pity and anger washed over me and I had no energy at all. Scarlet stood and put a hand on my back. I hated that. It confirmed that I was the little kid and she was the smarter, older girl. I had fooled myself today into thinking that I was more mature, more in control than I had ever been in my life. Now I felt like a baby. Or like everything Mum had said about me taking stupid risks, not thinking things through, being ‘ruled by hormones’ was right. I felt so tired. How stupid to try to be a crime reporter, using techniques from comic books, when an actual crime had been committed and I needed to tell someone.

‘It’s all right,’ Scarlet said.

But it wasn’t. Nothing was all right. I bent down and picked up my backpack, wiping my face and turning away from her.

‘Magic, come.’ I crutched across to the hallway.

‘Why don’t I tell my mum and–’

‘No. Don’t. It’s okay. I can work it out. Thanks.’

‘But if your dad’s not home…’

‘He might be now.’

I moved quickly and quietly down the darkened hall to the door.

I tried to open the latch, but couldn’t. Scarlet reached past me and opened it easily. Another dent to my pride.

I went across to the top of the stairs.

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to–’

‘I’m fine,’ I said firmly.

‘Okay, well… I want to help you. Just knock if–’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I will.’

She watched me for a few seconds longer and then clicked the door closed, leaving me there in the empty stairwell with my smelly old dog. A few moments passed before her footsteps padded away up the hall.

Idiot, I thought. I am an idiot.

Magic bent down and licked her own bottom.

I turned and looked at the door of 6A. Murky grey like all the others, a brassy handle and a couple of locks. Had I, somehow, dreamt the whole thing? Could I be as wrong as she said I was?

Magic looked up at me as if to say, ‘Can we go?’

We moved off towards the stairs and something shiny caught my eye at the edge of the door of 6A. I moved as quietly as I could towards it, trying to stay out of view of the peephole.

It was tape. A small piece of sticky tape near the top of the door. One end was stuck to the door, the other to the doorframe.

Huh, I thought. Why would an elderly couple place a piece of sticky tape on the door? I had seen police use this in a Crime Smashers story called ‘Underworld Rats’. The officer stuck a small piece of tape on the door so that she could tell if someone had entered her apartment while she was out. But would the Hills, a nice, elderly couple travelling in their caravan, do that?

Probably not.

A police officer would, though. One with a secret.

^TWENTY-SEVEN

CODECRACKER

I sat on the floor, my back against the wall of the dark room, my face lit up by the phone screen. It was 11.17 pm. Magic was lying on her side next to me, doggy-dreaming – growling and yipping, her paws twitching. The door of my hiding space in the wall was on the ground next to her. I had built it during the day, using two timber boards from the wall behind the wardrobe to connect the four boards that I’d removed from the lounge room wall. I’d re-used the rusty nails to run one length of timber across the top of the four boards and another along the bottom. There was no hammer in the flat, so I’d bashed the nails in with the handle of Harry’s hunting knife. The job was far from perfect but I felt ready. I sure hoped Harry didn’t mind me ripping his apartment to pieces.

I had locked the front door deadlocks. I had practised getting myself and Magic into the wall. Magic hated it but I could get us inside, fully concealed, in thirty seconds if the man came back here.

He won’t, I told myself.

He will, I replied.

I thought about the knife in the cupboard, but I left it there. I didn’t know how to handle it. He could use it against me. I thought of all those news stories about kids in America playing with their parents’ weapons and hurting themselves or a friend or a family member. I hated those stories.

My phone pinged.

Sorry Sam. Busy night.

Still awake? What do you

need to tell me?

My skin tingled all over. She would come get me, could be here by 1.15 am.

     Can you come get me now?

     I’m in trouble

I hit ‘send’ and the screen immediately went black. I pressed the home button but nothing happened.

I hit the power button. Nothing. The battery was dead. How, in all that waiting, had I not plugged the phone in? I tried not to think the word ‘idiot’ again but it was difficult.

Did the message go? Did she get it?

I checked the wall for power points. There were none near my hiding spot, so I took Harry’s laptop and my phone charger cord out of my backpack. I flipped the laptop open and tried to plug the cord into the side of the computer but my hand was shaking. She’ll be waiting now, worrying. Or not. Did it go? I used both hands to guide the plug into the slot. I watched the black phone screen, urging it to life, my face bathed in blue laptop glow. The computer screen read:

Please Enter Your Password

I want to, I thought. I had already tried a bunch of passwords earlier. The cursor winked at me, daring me to try something else.

I shook the phone but that didn’t seem to help.

Please Enter Your Password

Who is my father? I wondered. Born 23 September 1954. Crime reporter. Cranky. Not a big talker. A bit reluctant to have me stay with him these past thirteen years. Secretive. Not that tech savvy.

I had read something online about the easy passwords people choose, especially older people who aren’t that good with technology. Even smart older people. While I waited for the phone screen to come alive I tried a few passwords that I could remember from the list and a few that seemed like Harry:

123456

password

12345

12345678

123456789

football

boxing

Magic1

browndog

letmein

abc123

111111

crime

Crime

krime

crimereporter

123123

Trustno1

Nothing.

Phone still dead. If Mum received my message she would be panicking now.

I tried Harry’s birthdate again.

230954

Nothing.

Out of desperation, I tried my own birthdate.

060504

A little blue circle started to spin in the centre of the screen. A fan whirred at the back of the machine.

There is no way he used my birthdate.

But a warm feeling rose in my chest. This morning my father said he loved me. Tonight I discovered he uses my birthdate as his password. I wouldn’t have thought that he even knew my birthday.

‘Father Loves Son and Uses Birthdate as Laptop Code.’ For most kids this would not be headline news. I tried to push the warm feeling away but I couldn’t.

My mum had done pretty much everything for me my whole life. Harry had done pretty much nothing, apart from once sending me a pile of old comic books. Knowing my birthdate did not suddenly make him World’s Greatest Dad. And it was probably a stupid code, really, for someone so worried about cyber-security that he’d often leave his phone at home. But it felt good. I couldn’t help it. It meant that he thought about me sometimes, maybe even every time he punched in that code. It meant that I mattered to him. I sent out a prayer that he was okay, wherever he was. Even if he was out drinking again.

The blue circle stopped spinning and the laptop screen came alive. The image filling the screen was divided evenly into four black-and-white rectangles. I stared at them, my eyes flicking between the four until I realised what they were and the hairs on my neck stood on end.

The window in the top-left quarter of the screen looked like a wide security-camera shot of the inside of Harry’s apartment. The kind of image you see on the news or in a movie when a petrol station or convenience store is robbed. I looked carefully at the grainy picture and I thought I could see the side of my own head at the bottom-right. I waved my hand in the air and watched my hand rise on-screen. I pulled my hand down and it disappeared from view. My heartbeat quickened. I turned to look up into the corner of the room where the camera must have been, but I couldn’t see anything.

Why would he have surveillance inside his own apartment?

I turned back to the screen and waved my hand again, then struggled to my feet. I picked up my crutches and moved to the corner of the room, using the light of the laptop screen to make out where the camera must be.

I thought of a horror movie I’d seen during one of my sleepless nights at home a few months back. In the movie, the phone kept ringing and the owner would pick up, only to hear heavy breathing. It happened again and again until police were brought in. They tapped the phone and the lady was asked to keep the caller on the line so that they could tell where the call was coming from. She did, and they got a reading on it. The call was coming from inside the house.

I hadn’t slept for nights after that and for weeks afterwards I freaked every time the phone rang.

Why would Harry have been watching his own apartment? All those nights I had seen him keeping an eye on the laptop screen, not pressing buttons, just watching. Was he watching me? Was he watching me now from another computer?

I stared hard into the corner of the lounge room, the corner diagonally opposite the front door. He was watching the door, I thought. Did he think that someone would break in? Or was it just a precaution?

A little way along, halfway between the corner of the room and Harry’s bedroom door, was a pine bookcase, the one the man had raked books off the night before. There wasn’t much on the bookcase but on the very top shelf was a brass elephant about the size of a guinea pig. I reached up. I wasn’t tall enough so I used my right crutch to push the ornament towards the edge of the shelf, just gently, not wanting to break it. I reached up again and could only just get my fingertips to scrape the elephant’s front foot. I pushed it another few centimetres with the crutch and the elephant reached out over the edge of the shelf, tilted sharply and began to fall. I dropped my crutches and tried to catch it, but it was too heavy, too slippery. It fell through my fingers and onto my left foot. Hard.

Pain shot up my leg like someone had poked the hot metal tip of a spear through my foot. I bit my hand to stop myself from screaming. I bent down to grab my toes. They felt angry and swollen from where Dumbo had landed. Magic arrived on the scene and licked my face, then my fingers and toes. I shrugged her off and stayed there for a moment till my pulse slowed.

The elephant lay on its side. I picked it up and inspected it. I noticed, in the dim laptop glow, that one of its eyes looked shinier than the other. I twisted it right and left to see if there was light reflecting in that eye. It looked like a small camera lens, shiny and glassy. I glanced back at the laptop sitting on the floor. In the top left of the screen, I could see the side of my face in close-up. My dad had been watching me. Why was he watching me? Was he watching now? Could he hear me? I looked into the lens and pleaded, ‘Come home. Please.’ Just in case.

^TWENTY-EIGHT

SURVEILLANCE

The other three cameras were filming a balcony, the inside of another apartment and a front door. The number on the front door said ‘6A’. The ‘A’ was slightly twisted to the right.

Each of the four video images had timecode running beneath. In twenty-four hour time it was now 23:28:16. The 16 turned to 17, then 18 as the seconds ticked over. Next to the timecode was today’s date: 05.05.17. I wondered why security cameras always seemed to record such murky, grainy images when this was the one time you really needed to see clear detail.

There were ‘play’, ‘fast-forward’ and ‘rewind’ buttons under each video feed. I clicked on the timecode and realised that I could change it. My eyes flicked to the camera view showing what had to be the inside of apartment 6A, looking out towards the balcony. The camera was filming from up high. I wondered if they had an identical elephant or if the surveillance company offered a variety of heavy brass animals. My toe throbbed.

How did he get a camera inside 6A? Had he broken in? No, he wouldn’t have known how to set it up. Someone else must have done it for him. I took a sharp breath and typed in 02:10:00. That was 2.10 this morning.

My skin seeped dread.

The picture flickered for a second and the two men appeared on the balcony. I could see the big man from behind. He was blocking the view of the other man’s face.

My concentration was broken by a sound on the stairs outside Harry’s front door. I hit pause on the video and looked up from the laptop screen, listening carefully. I was ready to climb inside the wall and close the hatch, but the noise seemed to pass. I waited and waited, to be sure.

I pressed play again and watched. The big man moved to the left a little, pointing in the face of the smaller man. I hit pause. I clicked on a button with a magnifying glass and a ‘+’ symbol and zoomed in. I recognised the smaller man’s face right away. His skin was white and blurry from the zoom, and he was older than he looked in the photo I had taken on my phone from the news story. He had a shiny bald patch at the front of his hair. But, even so, I was 90 per cent sure it was John Merrin, the missing journalist. I wanted to take a shot of the screen but my stupid phone still hadn’t come back to life.

I hit play again and watched the two men argue on the balcony. Merrin pointed his finger into the big man’s face and then Moon Face’s hand went over Merrin’s mouth, trying to silence him. They struggled for a moment, Merrin pushing Moon Face back before the big man shoved him very hard. Merrin went over the railing and I saw the back of the larger man as he looked over the balcony for a few seconds, then he turned and walked quickly across the apartment, directly towards the camera. I could hear his footsteps in my mind, the way I’d listened to them last night. I paused again and looked at him. Silver hair, double chin, wide, waxy face like the moon. His eyes were heavy, dark, wrinkled sockets. He looked like a banker or the head of a company. I did not need to zoom in. It was him, the cop.

Harry Garner had known this would happen, had expected it. He had surveillance footage of the death of another crime reporter. But he had not been around to see it. Why had he not taken his laptop with him today? I scanned the interface of the video surveillance program. I went into Preferences and, under ‘General’, a box had been ticked: ‘Stream to Cloud’. I figured this meant that Harry could watch this footage from somewhere else. From everywhere else. ‘Stream to Cloud’ also meant that Harry had wi-fi here, which really annoyed me. I’d been going mental all this week without the web and he’d had it all along.

Who had set the cameras up for him? This was a pretty sophisticated system for a guy as tech-phobic as my dad. Unless he was the world’s greatest actor and liar and secretly he was a tech-genius, which seemed pretty unlikely to me. He had tried to help me set up my Xbox when I first arrived and he was hopeless. Someone had installed this system for him. Someone from the Herald? The woman he met at the bakery? I wondered how they got the cameras into the other apartment. In comics and movies, surveillance experts broke into apartments all the time, but I had never thought about it happening in real life.

I had everything I needed to identify the perpetrator of this crime. My phone screen finally came alive. There were three texts from Mum and seven missed calls. Another text buzzed in as I went to my messages. She said:

What trouble? What’s

happened?

Sam?

Why won’t you answer

the phone? I’ll come

right now.

Getting in car. Please text

me back so I know you’re

okay.

There was a knock on the front door of the apartment. Only quiet, but it felt like a shotgun blast to my heart. I pocketed the phone, clicked the laptop closed and slipped it into my backpack.

‘C’mon, girl,’ I whispered. I dragged Magic up by her collar. She snorted and grunted, then sneezed. I led her to the hole in the wall. She tried to refuse but I lifted her front paws and then her wide behind in and I pushed her into the narrow cavity, down to the right. She growled as I slid her along and I felt bad but it was for the best. I would give her snacks later to make up for this. If there was a later.

I placed my backpack inside the wall to the left, pressing it into the darkness and breaking the silvery thread of a spider web that hadn’t been there earlier in the day. I put my left leg inside the wall, crouched, leaned heavily on my crutches, then eased my right leg in, keeping it as straight as I could. I rested my crutches against the wall, hoping they wouldn’t give me away. I picked up the hatch door and set it into the wall, entombing myself. Thirty-five seconds was my guess. Maybe forty. Not as fast as in practice. Should have been faster.

The knock came again, still quiet but firmer this time. And a voice with just one word: ‘Sam!’

^TWENTY-NINE

IN THE BUILDING

I waited for the voice to come again. My legs and body felt jumpy. I needed to move, but I didn’t dare. Magnesium, I heard Mum say. Have you taken your magnesium?

I hadn’t.

I wanted to check my phone to make sure it was on silent but it was wedged tight into my shorts pocket, jabbing my hipbone. Something crawled across my neck and up into my hair but I didn’t move. Couldn’t. I thought of all the dead things I’d found in the wall earlier in the day and I prayed that I would not be like them soon. The city had been full of dead things for me – mice, rats, bugs, humans. The thing crawling across my scalp was not dead.

‘Sam!’

It was definitely her. I practically burst from the wall, pushing the timber hatch away and rolling out, face-planting on the cold, hard floor. I swiped and scratched madly at my hair to try to remove the spider/cockroach/very small rat that had crawled up my neck. Magic backed up and leapt out, shaking off the cobwebs and spinning in a circle, trying to bite her own tail.

‘Coming!’ I whispered hard into the dark as I pushed up, grabbed my crutches and hobbled to the door.

‘Scarlet?’ I whispered when I was close.

‘Open up!’

My fingers trembled with relief as I twisted the locks. When I saw her face I wanted to kiss it. She was still in her pink onesie and she pushed past me to get inside, out of the hallway.

‘Lock it,’ she said.

I did. Magic sniffed and licked her.

‘Sorry it’s so dark in here. I just don’t want to–’

‘Is your dad home yet?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry about before. I–’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said.

‘I couldn’t stop thinking after you left. I wanted to be sure about that apartment. My mum’s the strata manager so she knows all the tenants. She’s got a file on everyone. I took a look at 6A and I have something for you.’

She held up a small scrap of paper.

‘The Hills left the number of someone in their file, a contact for while they’re away. His name is Mick Kelly. You could ring the number.’

I nodded in the darkness. ‘Can I show you something?’ I took the laptop out of my backpack and placed it on the kitchen bench. I flipped open the lid and punched in my birthdate, which gave me that warm feeling again. I showed Scarlet the video that proved the man who had pushed John Merrin over the balcony was the man I had seen standing over the body down below and the same man I had seen in the police station.

‘This is so bad,’ she said. ‘You should come up to my place. We’ll tell my mum. But maybe we should still call the number.’

‘Really?’ I had all the evidence I needed. It seemed like a good time for us to tell Scarlet’s mum and to wait for mine to get here. I needed to text her that I was okay. ‘I can’t make calls on my stupid phone anyway.’

Scarlet pulled a phone out of a pouch in her onesie and grinned gently. She tapped the number in and handed me the phone. I held it up between us so that we could both listen. It was already ringing.

‘Can you hear that?’ I whispered.

There was a phone ringing somewhere in the building at the same time as the ringing in the earpiece. Scarlet pressed ‘end’ and the ringing in the building stopped a second later.

We looked at each other in the light of the phone.

‘That was weird,’ I said.

I grabbed the phone and pressed the green button to re-dial the number. Silence. We both listened, faces pressed close to the phone. The earpiece rang. A second later the phone rang again in the stairwell. Or was it in an apartment? It was the ‘old phone’ ringtone that I used to have on my phone, a bit like the one in the horror movie I saw. A shiver wriggled through me.

After one more ring the call was answered and the phone outside fell silent.

‘Yeah,’ said a voice.

We heard the man out on the stairs, maybe one floor down. I ended the call.

‘It’s him.’ I lowered the phone. It bumped on the handle of my crutch and clattered to the floor. So loud.

Silence for a moment.

Then steady footsteps up the stairs.

I picked up the phone and ushered Scarlet towards the bathroom.

^THIRTY

SIEGE

Scarlet gripped one of my crutches, pointing the foot of it at the locked bathroom door, prepared to attack if the door should open. I held two chemical spray bottles, ready to squeeze the triggers into the intruder’s eyes.

I got us into this, I thought. I did this. Now Scarlet is involved, too.

I could hear his footsteps, slow and deliberate, out in the hall. Every second was an hour. Magic rubbed against my leg, breathing quietly for the first time since I’d met her. She knew how serious this was now.

Why hadn’t we run for our lives up to her apartment?

There seemed to be so little oxygen. I felt droplets on my arm. Sweat of mine or Scarlet’s. I wasn’t sure. We were bound together in this.

There was a loud bang on the front door of the apartment. Not a fist. A shoulder. We both jumped. A second bang followed by clattering. I pictured the door falling open, heavy deadlock parts scattering to the floor for the second time today.

For a moment the crack beneath the bathroom door glowed yellow with light from the stairwell. Then it was gone. He had closed the front door.

A shadow passed the bathroom door, left to right towards my father’s bedroom.

We should have run while he was in there. Was he at the entrance or right inside the bedroom? I listened hard but he was very quiet.

Harry’s cheap metal coathangers clanged gently together like wind chimes. I prayed that he wouldn’t check the lower drawers in the wardrobe, particularly that thin, middle drawer with the small, hanging, brass handle where the knife was.

‘Let’s run,’ I whispered, close to Scarlet’s ear.

‘No.’

‘We should.’

‘What if–’

The handle twitched on the bathroom door. It was a low, silver handle, hip height, the kind you push down to open. I could just make out the shadow of it. I knew that the lock was a piece of flimsy plastic.

Please make him go away.

The handle twitched a second time and there was a loud crack of plastic and metal. The door flew back, revealing the enormous silhouette of him painted pitch-black against the backdrop of city light from the rear window. He was even bigger than I had remembered or imagined, towering over us, filling the doorway.

Magic barked while I squeezed both triggers, filling the man’s eyes with long, thin jets of spray. He reached for his eyes and I sprayed again and again. Scarlet whacked him under the chin with the crutch. He stumbled back. She rushed forward, ramming her shoulder into his gut, and he fell against the bookcase. Scarlet ran and I pole-vaulted forward on my crutches, dragging Magic out of the bathroom and across the apartment to the front door.

Scarlet flung the door wide. I felt fresh, cool air hit my nostrils. The fluorescent light blinded me after so long in the dark. Scarlet headed for the stairs to the sixth floor.

‘Come!’ she called.

But I knew I couldn’t make it up the stairs fast enough and running up there would mean being trapped in the building. He would follow me, not Scarlet. I had to go down, had to get outside. I could hear the enormous man’s feet lumbering across the apartment already. I thought of the lift for a split-second but it would be slow, a deathtrap.

‘Take Magic,’ I said, pressing the collar into her hand.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Run!’ I said, taking my crutches in my right hand, the dark timber banister in my left, and launching myself down the first three stairs. I landed on my left foot, feeling the deep impact in my ankle, jarring my knee hard, but my body quickly wrapped the pain in an adrenaline bandage and I hopped down to the first landing. The stairs snaked their way down next to the lift. Two flights for each storey. Ten flights to the bottom. I had to keep moving.

I looked up and saw Scarlet’s hand sliding up the banister as she ran.

I leapt down five steps and then another three to the next landing. I caught a blurred glimpse of Mick Kelly coming down the stairs after me, blood smeared across his wide face from Scarlet hitting him with the crutch. He was not in uniform. This was not official police business. He did not deserve to be a police officer.

It made me so angry I felt sparks fly up from my chest and into my brain. The anger drove me on and down the stairs. He would get what he deserved. I would make sure of it.

I hopped across the landing to the top of the next set of stairs, clutched the banister and made two giant leaps down to the fourth floor. Every time I landed I felt the two phones in my shorts pockets, Scarlet’s and mine. Damn. I’d pocketed hers when we’d run for the bathroom.

I saw a fire alarm button behind glass. I tried to stab it with the rubber end of my crutch, but missed and hit the wall. I stabbed again, got it this time, smashing the glass and hitting the button squarely, but no alarm sounded. I pressed the button with my thumb but, again, nothing happened. So I hopped across to the next set of stairs, knowing that I had wasted precious time.

He’s going to get me, I thought. He’s going to get me.

But people would hear the noise of our chase. They would come to their doors. They would know that Kelly was a bad man, chasing a child at midnight.

I jumped and landed hard on my working leg over and over again. Down, down, down, leaping and jarring the staples in my right knee, crunching the cartilage in my left, my foot screaming from the recent attack by the flying elephant. Third floor, then second.

Kelly was halfway down the same set of stairs as me now. I could feel the dark shape of him looming. He was big and slow but I, with my stupid leg, was slower. My breath burned in my chest and sweat spilt from every pore. The sparks of anger were a fire inside now, burning me up and blending with fear to make molten lava. I made it to the first-floor landing, hopped across and launched myself down towards the foyer.

He was three steps behind as I swung myself around the banister onto the final flight. I could see the front door and freedom. I breathed hard, feeling broken. Mick Kelly reached for me and I jabbed the feet of my crutches back at him, stabbing him in the hip, shoving him off balance. I felt such panic that, rather than leaping three or five steps, I made the split-second decision to leap down all eight steps at once. If I could land on my feet, I would almost certainly get away.

I jumped. A strangled ‘Gah!’ escaped my mouth. I swam through the air, spinning my arms for balance like a long-jumper. I realised that I was going to overshoot the end of the stairs. It would be a crash-landing. I had brought this on myself – this fall, this end. Another poor decision.

I hit hard and stopped dead. Blunt pain shot through my feet and calves, into my shins and knees. My hips and back jarred and my spine seemed to collapse like a domino run, each small bone colliding with the one above it. The pain split me in two.

I tried to roll and absorb the forward motion but I fell on my shoulder, flipped, then slammed the front door with the soles of my sneakers with such force that the safety glass shattered, raining down on my legs and torso.

I couldn’t move. I saw the brown-yellow of timber and foyer light above me and felt the pain, complete and deadening. Then there was the shape of Mick Kelly standing over me, shoulders heaving with exertion.

Mum always told me, ‘If you’re in trouble, make sure you never get taken to a second location. If someone grabs you, scream your lungs out, fight, let everyone know you need help. If you’re taken to another, more private place, that’s where bad things can happen.’

So I screamed my lungs out. It sounded to me, in my dazed state, like my scream was coming from someone else. I was pretty sure that screaming for help was not in ‘Harry Garner’s Ten Commandments of Crime Reporting’, but none of that mattered now.

I tried to sit up but, before I could, a gloved hand fit roughly across my face. It was clutching something moist and chemical-smelling. I saw his sickly, white, golf-ball-dimpled face and double chin in close-up. He pressed that wet cloth hard over my mouth and nose. I tried to turn my head, to shake off his hand, to hold my breath, but I had no choice but to inhale. His other hand grabbed the front of my shirt and I was dragged out the front door, down the stairs onto the wet street, into the sharp night air, my heels kicking behind me as I faded away.

^THIRTY-ONE

BOOT

I woke cold, with a dead-dry mouth and tongue, the smell of fuel and the roar of an engine all around me. My arms and legs and torso itched all over. I tried to sit up and smashed my head hard on metal, then fell back down. Pain ripped at my skull. I went to rub it but my hands were bent back behind me, tied with what felt like a thin wire or strap.

I was in the boot of a car. It slowed abruptly and I slid forwards and smashed my shoulder on something hard and sharp behind the back seat. The car took a left over rougher ground. My tailbone was now jammed against the wheel well. I could feel dirt or mud and rocks pinging up and hitting the metal, vibrating right through me. The back of the car went into a slide as though it was about to spin before the wheels gripped again and we sped forward.

I tried to drink in details. The smell of fuel and old, wet carpet and burnt brake pads. The deep snarl of the V8 engine. It had to be a V8, like my Uncle Chris’s Monaro that he only drove on weekends and that Mum said was a ‘total bogan-mobile’. On the right side, the rear lights made my feet and legs glow red. My feet felt wet, too. A steady stream of water leaked through a crack in the boot. Rain drummed loud and heavy above me.

The dirt road was filled with rough bumps and ruts. Through the engine noise I could hear the familiar guitar and vocal of the Rolling Stones song ‘Brown Sugar’ on the stereo. One of Mum’s favourites. It made me long for home, where I was safe and bored and angry. I made a vow that if I survived this, I would never be angry again. Boredom beat fear any day.

My head felt heavy and my eyes burnt hot. I had never been in a car boot before. I wondered how long I’d been unconscious. Unconscious, I thought. He had done something to me. Chloroform – was that what Mick Kelly had used on me? I’d looked it up when I was writing Harry Garner: Crime Reporter #2: The Case of the Human Skull and I read that it could take a few minutes to subdue someone with chloroform, so maybe not.

The car drove on and on along the rough dirt road. I felt like I was inside the pages of one of my own comics. It wasn’t as fun as I’d imagined it would be. I fought the cloudy feeling in my head but still I slipped in and out of time, the vibration of the car lulling me to sleep – in and out, in and out – before I woke sharply as the car slid to a stop. Engine off. Music off. Red light gone. Dead black. I stretched my eyes wide to make sure that they were actually open. I don’t think I really knew what darkness was till that moment.

The sound of heavy, beating rain.

I lay there, not moving. No one got out of the car. Minutes scraped and scratched by.

I thought of the phones that had been in the pockets of my shorts when I ran from the apartment – Scarlet’s and mine, one on either side. It didn’t feel like I had either of them now. He must have taken my backpack and both phones.

My throat burnt with thirst. I hoped the heavy rain would cover the gentle scraping sound I made as I carefully twisted my body around. I needed the water pouring through that crack like nothing else I had ever known. I slipped my mouth side-on beneath the leak, spraying my face and eyes. I couldn’t remember a better feeling in my life. My stomach and brain and skin and every sense jerked to life when that liquid hit my system, like I was reborn. I was in the worst situation I’d ever experienced and I was having the best feeling. Life was strange.

Was I thirteen yet? Probably. It had to be after midnight. Happy birthday to me. Thirteen years on the planet and I don’t think I had ever, for even a minute, really felt glad just to be alive or thankful for a birthday present as simple as a drink of water. I slipped my face out from beneath the flow and gently rested my cheek on the soggy, smelly carpet floor of the boot. The water felt cool and good pooling around my cheek and temple.

I lay there, almost happy, for a few minutes till the rain began to ease. It fell into a steady shhhh on the boot lid and, soon after, seemed to stop. A door opened, the suspension squeaked. Dread filled me. Someone stretched and groaned. Mick Kelly, I assumed, unless he had passed me on to someone else to do his dirty work.

Footsteps in muddy puddles moving towards the back of the car. I tried to sink back into the boot, to disappear. Click. I closed my eyes and lay dead still as the boot squealed open and I was assaulted by bright white torchlight. I breathed slow and steady, ready for what may come. A hand grabbed my shirt and dragged me up. An arm went under my legs and lifted me. It made me think of when I was little and I would pretend to fall asleep in the car so that Mum would carry me and put me into bed.

My head lolled against Kelly’s shoulder and I dared to squint. In the torchlight I glimpsed his silver hair and wrinkly neck and the treetops above. Kelly slammed the boot shut with his elbow, my head shifted and I got a good look at the car. It was old and red. Big. A V8, definitely.

Inside the car, through the rear window, I saw the back of another man’s head.

^THIRTY-TWO

ALL IS LOST

Mick Kelly dropped me hard to the ground, my ribs splat-cracking muddy earth, my arms tangled behind me. I swallowed the pain, didn’t make a sound.

Kelly opened the back door of the car and my father climbed out, hands tied like mine, his crooked shape set against the orange glow of the car’s interior light. He had a thick strip of silver tape across his mouth. The right side of his face looked bruised and bloody up to the corner of his eye. He was old and beaten but still alive.

I was so devastated and happy to see him. Devastated that he was in the same danger as I was. Happy that he was alive and that I wasn’t alone. This was the reason he hadn’t come back tonight. Mick Kelly had taken him. That’s why Harry broke his promise to me.

When did Kelly take him? I wondered. On his way back to the apartment? In the foyer? How did he know my dad lived there – was it the electricity bill? I cursed myself for not telling Harry about it.

He shuffled the three or four steps towards me. I struggled up from the ground, my hands still tied, and he gave me an armless hug, burying his head in my neck.

‘I’m sorry, Sam,’ he whispered, muffled and lispy through the tape on his mouth. Then he said something else. I heard it as ‘I’ll try to get us out of this’, but that may have been wishful thinking. He may have said ‘Let’s go catch a fish’, which seemed unlikely, or ‘I really need to do a whiz’, which was a definite possibility. I needed to go pretty badly myself.

Kelly pulled Harry away by his shirt collar and slammed the car door. I leaned on the side of the car to steady myself. I was crutchless. The wind swirled and the leaves hissed from the high tree canopy. It was a night-time sound I knew from the bush behind our house, but I was used to hearing it through a pane of glass, curtains drawn in the warmth of my room. I had spent so much of my life playing in the bush, building cubbies and climbing the tallest trees I could find, but I was always freaked by the bush at night, when it felt ancient and inescapable, like a black hole. It could inhale you in a single breath and you would cease to exist. There’s no arguing with a force that powerful.

For a moment I thought I heard the distant hum of an engine, but then it was gone, muffled by the sounds of a struggle between my father and Kelly. Hands tied, Harry was fighting a losing battle. I wondered what Harry Garner: Crime Reporter would do in this situation. The truth was that I would never have written anything this real. Even when all seemed lost, my readers (that is, me) somehow knew that Harry would get out of it. He was a black belt in jujitsu, a firearms expert, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the human body and its most vulnerable points for attack. My father, my non-comic-book father, was strong, determined, focused, but he was not a deadly weapon.

I’ll try to get us out of this.

But could he?

Kelly shone his torch towards the mouth of a narrow, overgrown track. He shoved me in the back.

Harry tried to say something through the tape.

‘Walk,’ Kelly said over him.

I tried to put my right foot down and take a step. The pain was like a cartoon electrocution. I could almost see my bones through flesh.

‘I can’t,’ I told him, my voice trembling. ‘My knee. I need crutches.’

Harry tried to speak again and Kelly pointed the torch beam directly into his eyes. Harry lowered his head in surrender, squeezing his eyes shut against the blinding white light. Then Kelly’s fat, hairy hand reached out and ripped the tape off Harry’s mouth in one quick movement.

Harry’s face contorted with pain. ‘Don’t do this, Mick.’

Harry knew him?

‘Move,’ Kelly demanded.

‘Cut the strap and I’ll help the kid walk,’ Harry said.

Kelly kept the torch trained on Harry’s face, unmoving. He must have decided that he was better off having Harry help me walk than helping me himself. He took a knife from his pocket, flicked the blade out and said, ‘Turn around.’

Harry did and Kelly cut the wrist strap. Harry flexed his fingers, then rotated and rubbed his wrists.

‘I’m going to need to put his arm around my neck,’ he said. ‘To take his weight.’

Kelly considered this too. In the low light, I thought I saw a hint of a grin wash over his face but he said nothing. Was Harry pushing him too far?

The knife flicked open again and he turned me around roughly by the shoulder and slit the tie on my wrist. He pointed the knife at each of us in turn then flicked it closed, pocketed it and pulled a fat, black pistol from the back of his waistband. Everything inside me turned to water.

Harry lifted my right arm, which ached from being stretched backward for so long. He slipped his left arm around my back, his hand beneath my armpit.

Kelly shoved Harry in the back with the barrel of the gun and we started off slowly into the dark, following the bouncing ball of light cast by Kelly’s torch. I leaned heavily on Harry, hopping on my left leg. He didn’t complain.

I tried to find a flat place for my foot to land each time I hopped but the track was narrow and rough and in the middle of it was a tiny stream, ten centimetres wide, rushing downhill. I could see the bandage on my knee lit from behind. It was soaked in blood. Not just a patch like before. The whole thing was drenched, dark and wet. I needed a doctor. But if Mick Kelly did what I imagined he was going to do, I wouldn’t have to worry about a doctor.

He led us down the track, further from safety with every step. Not that there was safety in a crooked cop’s car, on an unsealed bush road in the middle of nowhere after midnight. I tried to transform the anxiety rising in my chest into clear thinking. Maybe Harry really did have a plan. He had to have a plan. He had been in dangerous situations before and he was still alive. He was known for putting himself in the line of fire to get the story. I wondered if he had experienced anything like this before.

Kelly coughed, made a throaty hoik sound and spat. He took two quick sprays of his asthma puffer as we continued down the track. Harry’s rib cage bumped against mine and he breathed heavily under the weight of me. I waited for him to whisper something, a plan of some kind, but that didn’t happen.

I listened for a river or a creek at the bottom of the gully but the air was filled with frog chorus and the rustle of wind-blown trees. The track became rougher now, rockier, steeper. Water seemed to rush in from both sides forming a wider stream beneath our feet. Does he know where he’s taking us or is he making this up as he goes? Has he been here before? Has he planned this? The idea that Kelly had thought this through, had pre-meditated it with the precision of a high-ranking police officer flooded me in muddy panic. He had done this alone. Maybe he was the only other person in the world who knew where we were.

The bones in my left foot began to freeze as water soaked through my sneakers. Prickly plants and sapling branches scratched and scraped me now and I yowled quietly when a sharp rock poked through the toe of my shoe.

We weaved our way down for another ten minutes over rocks and roots until we came out of the trees and there was a vast, open clearing on our right and trees on our left. Intense, buffeting wind hit me hard in the face.

‘Stop,’ Kelly said, wheezing. Another round of chunky coughing.

I looked down and I could make out the three gently glowing stripes on each side of my sneakers and the rough texture of the sandstone beneath me. Two or three metres beyond that, the rock seemed to disappear and there was blackness, lots of it. We were not standing in a clearing. We were on the edge of a cliff.

^THIRTY-THREE

SILENT PRAYER

I’m not ready to die, I thought. I have things I want to do. Like turn fourteen, because thirteen wasn’t working out as well as I might have hoped.

I looked out across the sea of black to the horizon where a small patch of low cloud glowed pink. The city? I wished I was back there. If I had stayed in the police station, at least there would have been other officers around. Kelly couldn’t have done anything. I had been safe. If I hadn’t freaked out and run, I would have been okay. Instead, we were out here in the shivering wild with him.

Kelly took another two hits on his asthma puffer. What if he made us walk the plank and we fell and animals and insects picked our flesh until there was nothing left? What if a bushwalker stumbled across our bones in three or five years’ time? Forensic experts might identify us if we were lucky. I had seen and read stories just like this. I was fascinated by lost bushwalker stories. But Harry and I were not lost bushwalkers. And this was no accident.

I felt like bawling my eyes out but instead I closed them and breathed slowly, deeply, calming my mind. Margo, my coach, would have been proud. I tried to imagine my anger and fear passing like clouds. Those feelings would do me no good at this point. ‘Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured,’ Margo told me almost every week, quoting the guy who wrote Huckleberry Finn. Fear was the same, I figured. It could only hurt me. I stayed like this, breathing in and out, and the cold and wind and rain and anger and fear seemed to ease. I sent out a silent prayer of love to my mum and Harry and Magic and one to the universe for a miracle.

That’s when I heard the sound of a car engine on the road above us. There was no mistaking it this time. It was up on the road we’d driven in on – quiet, not speeding, then the engine was killed a moment later. Kelly switched off his torch and craned his neck, listening.

I thought of a line they always used in Crime Smashers: ‘We’ve got company.’

‘Stay here,’ Kelly whispered and I heard a distinct ‘click’ from his weapon. I wondered if he’d taken the safety off. Was that how it sounded? ‘Don’t take a single step.’

He moved quietly away from us, back across the sandstone shelf towards the bottom of the track. He walked slowly, steadily, into the dark until I couldn’t see him any more.

Whoever had driven down that road was not someone he had expected. This was good for us, but who was it? Scarlet and her mother? Scarlet was the only person who knew I was in trouble. But how would they have followed us all the way out here without being seen by Kelly?

Can you come get me now? I’m in trouble.

They were the last words I had texted to Mum.

I’ll come right now, she had said. Getting in car. Please text me back so I know you’re okay.

But I didn’t. And I’m not. She would be at Harry’s now. Maybe she drove right past us. I had never in my life wanted so badly to see her.

‘Sam,’ my father whispered, close enough to my ear that I could feel his breath but still only just loud enough to be heard.

‘Yes.’

‘We’re going to run.’

‘What about–’

‘We don’t have a choice. If we stay here, someone’s going to get hurt.’

‘Okay,’ I said, swallowing hard. ‘Who do you think was in that car?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know, but obviously he doesn’t either, which is good. We’re on the edge of a steep drop, so be careful. We’re going to slip across into the tree line there when I say.’

I turned and saw that the line of trees began about four or five metres back from the cliff edge. Its tall, sinister outline was even blacker than the sky.

‘Okay,’ I whispered, not knowing if I should act brave or say the next thing on my mind. ‘I’m scared.’

‘Me too,’ Harry said, his eyes trained on the dead dark void to our left that had swallowed Kelly moments before.

I wanted to cry or puke. It was one thing to be scared yourself but when your father, a crime reporter and your hero, whispers to you that he is scared while being held captive by an armed and dangerous man on the edge of a cliff in the middle of the night, it feels like the end of the world.

Can I outrun Kelly? I wondered. I couldn’t run, let alone outrun. I could hop, but I was fairly sure that I couldn’t hop faster than a police officer, even an outrageously overweight one. And I certainly couldn’t hop faster than a speeding bullet.

I listened hard for Kelly and looked back up towards the road but I didn’t hear a car or people, just fat raindrops falling from nearby trees.

Trying to escape was another risky move that my mother would advise against, but Harry was right. Our prospects weren’t good if we just stood here. I had seen what Kelly was capable of, and he hadn’t driven us to a remote location and walked us through the bush in the early hours of the morning to watch the sun rise.

‘You ready?’ Harry whispered, wrapping my arm tightly around the back of his neck.

‘Yep.’

Now or never. My saliva was thick, my throat sore with thirst. A shiver rippled through me but I kept my body tight, muscles tensed. Adrenaline, rage and fear boiled beneath my skin. All I could do was trust my father. I barely knew him but I put every thread of faith I had into him in that moment.

‘Let’s go,’ he whispered and we limped, top speed, into that dead, black night. Full dark, no stars. Across the rock, through the grass and into the trees.

^THIRTY-FOUR

NOW OR NEVER

Kelly sprayed the bush to the right of us with torchlight, casting hundreds of shifting, tangled tree shadows across our path as he gave chase. Then he snapped the torch off again after a couple of seconds. Maybe he was trying to avoid being seen by whoever was in that car.

I waited for the loud bark of his weapon and a sharp explosion of pain between my shoulderblades, a feeling I had imagined many times while writing my comics.

But the gun didn’t fire and Kelly didn’t say a word. He moved steadily through the undergrowth about thirty metres back and to the right of us, hunting us down like deer, or foxes. Foxes, I thought. We needed to be wily, determined, resilient and cunning, not frightened and skittish.

Maybe we should have been screaming for help. Would that make the driver of the vehicle come towards or away from us. Scarlet? I wondered again, but it didn’t add up. Campers maybe. Or teenagers.

I leaned heavily on Harry as we three-legged-raced through the night. I took most of my weight on my left leg, but my right foot touched the ground lightly between hops, propelling me forward. It hurt so bad but we were running for our lives, so the pain seemed a worthwhile investment.

I hoped that Harry could see what was up ahead better than I could. For all I knew we were running towards another cliff. Tree trunks sped towards my face and Harry pulled me right or left before another tree appeared. Ghost gums, I thought. Their tall white shapes appeared from nowhere.

There was a patch of moonlight for a moment, tiny knives of silver light cutting through the tree cover, revealing steeper, rockier ground up to our left before the clouds smothered the moon once more.

‘Up there?’ I whispered, knowing how difficult this would make it for Kelly to follow but not considering how difficult it would be for us to find a way. We veered to the left and up the slope. It was the same hill we had come down with Kelly but about fifty metres further along, away from the cliff. There was no visible track. Just steep, uneven ground peppered with slippery rocks that were carpeted in what felt like moss beneath the soles of my squelchy, waterlogged sneakers.

We came to a very steep section and Harry grabbed hold of a meaty tree root poking from a crack in a slab of sandstone. The rock was as tall as me and, from what I could see, sloped back up the hill at about 45 degrees. I could hear the shiny bottoms of Harry’s smooth-soled city shoes slipping and sliding on the surface. Harry tried to keep his arm around me and drag me up with him but I was slipping behind. I twisted a thin vine around my hand and used every splinter of strength I had to pull myself upwards. My left knee dug into the mossy rock, shredding layers of skin. Harry groaned under my weight then squeezed my upper arm and pulled even harder, heaving me onto the next flattish section of ground, only to face a steeper, rockier incline a few metres further on.

I heard Kelly swear quietly somewhere in the pit of blackness we were climbing out of but I couldn’t tell where it came from or how close he was.

There was another moment when the cloud cover thinned and, squinting into that foggy, dark wild, I made out a diagonal sliver of track up to the left.

‘What about here?’ I whispered, panicky.

The little I could see of the narrow gap was choked with leaves, fallen branches and smaller rocks. Harry scrambled up first, his shoes scratching for grip on anything they could find. He leaned down, grabbing my hand, dragging me up. I scraped and clawed and clambered onto the flat, bashing my injured knee in the process. I sat at my father’s feet and whined quietly, massaging above and below my knee.

‘This is insane,’ Harry croaked, already exhausted. He grabbed my hand again, helping me to my feet, and we stumbled on into the night. Harry steered us left, along flatter ground. It felt like we might be circling back towards the track we had come down with Kelly, back towards the cliff edge.

I heard Kelly again, moving through the bush below. I tried to make out the shape of him but it was hopeless.

Soon Harry and I came across a fallen gum tree blocking our path. It was almost as thick as I am tall and there was no clear way to get past it. To my right it seemed as though its roots had been torn from the ground. They towered over us like a giant claw at the base of the next steep section of the slope. We would have to go up that slope and around the roots, or climb right over the thick trunk in front of us.

Harry turned and rested against its smooth surface for a moment, taking fast, shallow breaths, then he leaned forward, dry-retching.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

He answered by vomiting loudly. I felt it splat around my feet and ankles and I rested my hand on his back. His shirt was soaked with sweat.

Kelly was running through the bush below us now. We were out in the open, sitting ducks.

‘We’ve got to move,’ I whispered. ‘If we get over the tree and keep going across the slope here, maybe we can make it back to the track we came down in the first place.’

‘Give me a minute,’ Harry said, stifling a cough.

Kelly flicked on his torch again for a second and sprayed the bush just below us with light. I saw my sneakers glow for a moment before the torch went off again.

‘We don’t have a minute,’ I whispered.

I bent down and looked beneath the fallen tree. There was a narrow crawl-space beneath the trunk. I grabbed the shoulder of Harry’s shirt and pulled him to the ground. My chin hit hard and I wondered if my face had landed in my father’s vomit.

‘Go under,’ I whispered and Harry slid back along the wet, mulchy earth, slipping into the thirty-centimetre gap beneath the fallen gum tree. I slid in too, my cheek scratching the paper-thin bark and leaf litter on the ground.

I strained to hear Kelly’s movement between the night sounds of insects, a low, mournful bird and the fast rhythmic splat of raindrops. He had seen or heard us, I knew.

I turned my head towards Harry, the tip of my nose scraping the underside of the tree.

‘Can you go right under?’ I asked, hoping we could slip beneath the tree and get out the other side. The trunk wasn’t lying flat on the ground. Roots or branches must have held it up at either end.

‘The gap’s not wide enough,’ he said. ‘I’m wedged in as far as I can go.’

‘Are you okay?’ I whispered.

‘I’m okay,’ he croaked.

Harry will get us out of this, I thought.

But I didn’t believe it any more.

I heard the crack and snap of Kelly coming up the slope. He was so close now I could hear his asthmatic wheeze, and I turned to see the dark, round shape of his head appear above the edge of the rock. He pulled himself up onto flatter ground, pushed up off his gut, knelt, stood and hunched forward, hands resting on his knees. He took three belts on his puffer. His breathing sounded a lot worse than Harry’s.

It was thirty seconds or so before he straightened and moved on, his heavy boots crunching the ground, steps slow and deliberate, drawing nearer and nearer to our hiding place. He pulled up maybe four metres away and stood dead still. My ears felt hot and I could hear my pulse banging away in them. Surely he could hear it, too. Kelly took a few more steps until he was standing right next to the fallen tree – so close I could have reached out and pulled one of the laces on his black boots. I could almost smell the crooked cop through the thick, raw scent of damp earth. He turned around, facing the other way. He must have known he was close but not how close.

He leaned back against the fallen tree, right where Harry and I had been leaning. The heel of his boot was about twenty centimetres from my face. I breathed so slowly and quietly I started to wonder if I was getting enough oxygen. I could feel Harry’s shoulder pressed against mine and there was an electric current that passed back and forth between us like we were two integral parts of a circuit. I had always dreamt of being this close to my father, working on a case together. This wasn’t quite what I had planned but, pressed in on all sides by the wet, night earth, a fallen tree, a broken police officer and my dad, I almost felt like I knew him. All the chasing and wondering who my dad was and whether he cared about me felt like it had been pointless. Here we were, breathing the same air, connected and stuck, all out of choices, and the mystery of him fell away. We weren’t so different. I’d always wondered who he was but maybe I was really wondering who I am. And in that moment I knew. We were two branches of the same tree. He was part of me and I was part of him. Inseparable. All the anger and fear seemed to fall away.

I sat with this strange feeling for a minute or more before Mick Kelly straightened up, took two more hits on his puffer and moved slowly away from the tree. He started to climb the next steep part of the hill, dissolving into darkness.

Harry and I lay silent and still for another few minutes, my breathing falling into rhythm with his, our arms still pressed together. I turned my head back to him, scraping my nose on the tree again and whispered, ‘Should we go?’

‘Do you think he’s gone?’ Harry asked. ‘I can’t see.’

‘I think so.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s do what you said. We’ll go over the tree, head back towards the cliff, find that track.’

I started to slide out and Harry wriggled out after me. I struggled to my feet.

‘Let me go over first,’ Harry muttered, groaning and holding his lower back as he straightened and stood. ‘Then I’ll pull you over. Give me a boost.’

I locked my hands together and he put his left foot between them. I balanced on my left leg and boosted him up onto the tree that had saved our lives. He straddled the wide trunk then reached down for me. He grabbed my wrists and I grabbed his and he pulled hard. I tried to get a foothold but my sneaker skated off the slippery surface. He gripped my wrists tighter, yanked me upwards and, this time, I reached my left leg on top of the fallen tree and grappled my way over. Just as I made it to the top I stopped and listened: heavy footsteps crunching through bush further up the slope.

‘Get down!’ Harry tore me to the ground, slipped his arm around me and we ran as best we could, dodging thin saplings and wide gums, raindrops bombing us from above. Panic coursed through us as I leaned again on the surprising strength of my father’s tired, twisted body. The pain in my right knee beneath the blood-soaked bandage was nuclear, but Kelly was coming. He must have found a way up and around the tree.

We drove forward, on and on, searching for any sign of the track we’d come down but nothing looked familiar. Moments later we came out of the tree line and Harry stopped sharp. A knife-like wind carved through us. We were standing just a metre or two from the cliff edge. We had missed the track somehow. Behind us, slightly further up the hill, Kelly stormed through the undergrowth.

‘Let’s go.’ I pulled Harry but he wouldn’t move.

‘I can’t.’

Kelly’s footsteps were charging diagonally down the hill towards us.

‘Yes, you can.’

‘No. I can’t,’ he said.

‘Please.’

Then Kelly was upon us. He materialised from the darkness, wheezing, exhausted, and pointing the gun directly at us.

^THIRTY-FIVE

THE FALL

Mick Kelly clipped me so hard across the face, the side of my head lit up like a firecracker. I was thrown down onto the rough sandstone. My ears rang and my vision danced with tiny, magical specks of white.

Kelly punched Harry in the stomach and I felt it in my own stomach, felt the air evacuate his lungs as he doubled over. Kelly grabbed Harry’s shoulder and straightened him up.

‘Thanks for that,’ Harry said, stifling a cough.

Kelly stood back, pointing the weapon at us. His hand was shaking. His breathing sounded like someone had their hand wrapped around his lungs, squeezing tight. I stood and looked behind me. There was a metre of sandstone before the cliff dropped away into that bottomless chasm below. The wind rushed up, turning my wet clothes to ice. Kelly wiped the rain and sweat off his face with the soaking sleeve of his long white shirt.

You’re not a police officer, I thought.

‘What are you doing, Mick?’ Harry asked.

I wondered how much history there was between them. Has Kelly always hated my dad? Is that what this is about? And what about the other reporter, Merrin?

‘Taking care of business,’ Kelly said.

‘You don’t need to.’

‘You don’t think so?’ Kelly asked.

‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’

This was not a question. Harry was confirming with Kelly, like he knew. Kelly held my dad’s eye.

‘We’ve got video of the whole thing,’ Harry continued. ‘Sam’s not the only one who knows what you did. Silencing us won’t achieve anything.’

Kelly didn’t speak.

‘We’ve looked at the footage,’ Harry said. ‘You didn’t mean to do it, did you? To push him?’

‘Don’t try to be pals with me now.’

‘I haven’t done anything to you,’ Harry said.

‘Outwitted,’ Kelly muttered.

I knew what he meant right away. It was the title of the article my dad had written a few weeks back about cops being outmanoeuvred by young, tech-smart gangs.

‘I know what it’s like to feel like you’re past your use-by date,’ Harry said. ‘I feel the same way but this isn’t–’

‘Every day, one of you guys writes something about how useless we are and it just makes it harder. You’re s’posed to be working with us, not against us.’

‘So you think if you kill the messengers the news will stop flowing? That’s not how it works, Mick.’

There was a sound further up the slope behind Kelly and he swung around to look, shining his torch again for a couple of seconds before snapping it off. He kept his gun trained on us. In Harry Garner: Crime Reporter my dad would have delivered a swift jujitsu chop to the neck and disarmed Kelly.

The sound could have been a loud rain-splat or a possum or bird, I figured. Kelly must have thought the same. He turned back to us. The clouds parted for a moment, making everything silvery-edged. Kelly’s hair shone brightly.

‘Let us go, Mick,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve known you twenty-five years. You’re a good bloke. You pushed him in a struggle. You’ll do some time but it’ll be worse if you follow through with this. They’ll put you away for life.’

‘Not if it looks like you did it.’

‘What?’ Harry asked.

‘Jealous father doesn’t want to give kid back to his mum and, whoops, they both go over a cliff. I don’t think people will have too much trouble believing that.’

Harry lunged forward without warning, grabbing Kelly’s arm. The weapon fired in the struggle. The blaze of orange light from the barrel and the sharpness of the bang cut the night in two and the next second seemed to stretch for a minute. I thought the shot had missed us, had fired out over the cliff, but then my father bent double, growling and grarling with pain. I saw blood blooming like a flower at the knee of his grey pants. I’d read somewhere that it was one of the most painful places to be shot, the knee. Harry put his hand over it to stem the blood flow and, without thinking, I put my hand over his, feeling the warmth of his blood on my palm, and I cried.

There was screaming then and I looked up.

‘Police! Nobody move! Drop the weapon!’

The voice was like an explosion. Kelly turned and slammed on his torch to reveal two men in dark blue raincoats moving quickly towards us from behind the fat trunks of two ghostly gum trees. Their torches and weapons were trained on Kelly.

‘Show me your hands. Hands over your head!’ said another voice.

‘DROP IT NOW!’

Police officers. Real ones. Not like Kelly. I didn’t know how but they had come for us.

Kelly raised his forearm to his eyes, hiding his face from the torchlight, then turned and waved the gun at me, shaking it again. Instinctively, I stepped back, trying to protect myself.

‘DROP THE WEAPON!’ one of the officers said. ‘LAST CHANCE!’

My foot reached for the ground behind me but I felt only open space. I looked down and realised I was falling. My dad’s hand reached for my shoulder. ‘Sam!’ He caught the neck of my t-shirt and ripped it all the way to the bottom but I continued to slip away over the edge. I leaned forward, clutching and scraping at the air to take his hand, but I was too late. I scratched at wet earth and rock on the cliff face as it blurred by, tearing my fingertips, ripping off my nails, then grating my face. My chin knocked something hard and my brain seemed to fly apart. There was freefall, infinity, empty air, as I twisted down into the abyss.

^THIRTY-SIX

FUNERAL

It isn’t like the funerals you see on TV – people with black hats, trench coats and umbrellas standing around a hole in the ground as the coffin is lowered, the camera craning down through an elm tree while an old guy with a white collar mutters, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

Hardly anyone wears black. Outside, the morning light is soft and there are little kids running around on the grass at the side of the church playing tip. No one is happy, exactly, but most people greet each other with a smile. Over near a birdbath, a lady about the same age as my dad cries and a man in a crumpled oversized suit hugs her.

I’ve never been to a funeral before. I had never done a lot of things before the past couple of weeks – met my father, seen a dead body, helped solve a crime.

Inside, my dad rests his hand on my shoulder for a moment as he wheels my chair, which makes it not so scary.

The funeral is not mine. I did not die. Well, I did, and then I didn’t.

I spent nine days in hospital, until a little over an hour ago. My first couple of days I was living inside a thick cloud but I have two clear memories. One where my eyes slammed open and the world rushed in, warm and yellow. It was daytime and my parents were there. Both of them. My mother’s face erupted in tears. She said things but I can’t remember what. I was coming down from anaesthetic and painkillers, but the memory will stay with me always – the first time in my life I had seen my parents in the same room together.

My second memory, when my mind felt slightly less muddled, was of Scarlet and her mum sitting by my bed. Scarlet told me what happened the night I was kidnapped. She had taken Magic upstairs and woken her mum. They had rushed down and seen the broken glass of the foyer door. They saw Kelly slamming the boot of a red car out front. They called the police on Scarlet’s mum’s phone and realised that I still had Scarlet’s phone. They gave the police the login for Scarlet’s phone-finder app and the cops followed Mick Kelly’s car out west all the way to Lithgow. He had not switched off the phones. My dad said this was sloppy, a rookie mistake.

‘When do you think it’s going to start?’ I ask Harry.

‘Soon,’ he says and he pushes my wheelchair right down to the front of the church, so we’re not blocking the aisle. I feel self-conscious in the chair. In hospital nobody looked at me funny but this is my first time out. A lady stares at me, but when she sees me looking she quickly averts her eyes. It kind of annoys me.

People are still filing in, filling up the seats in the long, narrow church. There are a few uniformed police officers up the back; men and women, stern-faced, maybe ashamed of what Kelly is responsible for. They still showed up. Harry nods his head to one of the cops, who nods back. Harry’s commandment number two states that crime reporters need to know cops and criminals. Merrin must have worked closely with these guys.

There is a group of four large men in the middle of the church, five o’clock shadows, two of them in sunglasses, all of them sweating and squeezed into black or blue suits. They seem bound together by some invisible thread. Crims? I wondered. Although who knows what a criminal is supposed to look like. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in the past couple of weeks it’s commandment number six: never assume anything.

There are lots of journalists, too. They keep coming up and shaking my dad’s hand. A woman with dark-brown hair and a knee-length black coat, a little older than Mum, says, ‘Hello, Harry.’ I recognise her immediately. It’s the woman I saw him meet in Pan, the bakery across the street from the apartment.

My dad shakes her hand and she smiles at him but in the restrained, wistful way that I figure you’re supposed to smile at a funeral. She smells like musk sticks.

She looks at me. ‘I’m Kate. I’ve heard all about you,’ she says in a hushed tone, reaching down to shake my hand. ‘I didn’t even know your father had a son until this week, but in the story we ran he says you’re a more savvy crime reporter than he is. I might have to hire you in a few years’ time.’

I know it’s just one of those dumb things adults say to make kids feel good but I can’t stop the smile from creeping across my face.

‘This boy’s a lifesaver,’ Harry says.

Me? I thought. He gave me CPR at the bottom of a cliff for half an hour and he calls me a lifesaver? Although maybe he means it in a different way. Not literally saving his life but changing it.

‘Enjoy your break, Harry,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to see you back there for a while. You’ve got forty years of holidays owing.’ She continues to the far end of the front row.

I shift uncomfortably in my chair, adjusting the hot, itchy cast on my leg. My right wrist and right leg were broken in the fall. My staples had to be removed and reset. Lots of cuts and bruising and swelling. My face looks fatter than Kelly’s. But they say my injuries are a miracle after a three-storey fall.

Harry and one of the officers found a way down the cliff in the light from the officer’s torch. Harry insisted on climbing down even with a bullet in his leg. I’d stopped breathing by the time they got there.

I landed on a thin strip of soft, muddy ground between two large sandstone slabs. Had it not been raining or had I landed thirty centimetres to the left or right I wouldn’t be here. I’d be in a coffin right now like John Merrin.

Harry had learnt to revive a plastic dummy on one of those first-aid courses that the Herald had forced him to take. He never thought that he’d have to use it on a living, breathing human, on his own flesh and blood.

My only memory of that time at the bottom of the cliff is of there being nothing and then, suddenly, feeling light and air being stuffed into me, like I was a soccer ball being pumped full of sunlight. The Herald article said my dad and the police officer kept me alive, lying there in the hammering rain and shivering dark, till the paramedics arrived.

‘We are gathered here,’ says a short, white-haired lady standing at a lectern at the front, ‘to pay our respects and to celebrate and honour the life of a brave journalist and much-loved husband and son, John Merrin. His family have requested that this not be a morbid occasion, rather a meditation on a life lived deliberately, with love, and in service to truth.’

My eyes flick from the lady speaking to the coffin containing Merrin to the stained-glass Jesus watching over it all and I wonder where the justice is in any of this. Mick Kelly is in jail awaiting trial but he’s still alive, while a man who dared expose incompetence in the police force lies here dead.

When Kelly received bad press for being an analogue, old-school cop in a digital world – a bit like my dad being an analogue journalist in a digital world – he didn’t adapt to new technology. Instead, he decided to firmly ‘encourage’ the city’s top crime journalists to stop reporting the story. He had spoken to Harry at a pub where journos and cops hang out together. Then he’d followed Harry home to give him a stronger hint as to how serious he was. Harry got curious and discovered the apartment that Kelly was using for off-the-record interrogations. Like Scarlet said, the apartment belonged to Marilyn Hill, who turned out to be an ex-cop, and her husband, Jack. They didn’t know what Kelly was using the apartment for. Harry moved in downstairs to keep an eye on things and had a friend set up the camera system. He hadn’t expected anything this bad to happen.

Based on Harry’s surveillance footage and my photos and statement, the investigators decided that it was a heated argument that went wrong, an accident. Kelly had brought Merrin to the apartment to warn him not to keep running these stories. They had argued, it got out of hand, Kelly pushed Merrin against the railing and he had fallen. This seemed to fit what I had heard and seen. Kelly was accused of manslaughter rather than murder, because they say he hadn’t planned it beforehand.

My dad squeezes my hand. Merrin’s brother stands at the front of the church next and tells funny stories about the two of them growing up together. He describes how his brother once locked him out of the house for an entire day and how they pranked each other with a remote control spider and chased each other with goat poo on a stick. He also talks about how he looked up to his brother, how he admired him for his belief in the power of journalism to inform and inspire.

A few others speak but the ceremony is short and soon the light-coloured timber coffin is carried past us by six men. We turn and watch it disappear through the tall double doors of the church, swallowed up by sunshine.

It could have been us. Both of us. My dad could have been the crime reporter having a disagreement with Kelly on that balcony. The afternoon that Kelly abducted me he had picked up Harry on the street outside the apartment building and held him in a storage facility. He could have done anything to him during that time. On the cliff face Harry could have been shot somewhere more serious than the knee. And I survived a four-storey fall. It’s hard not to look at the world a bit differently now.

Harry hobbles on his injured knee and wheels my chair up the aisle, following the procession of people. An old couple comes up and thanks me for my role in things. As they walk away Harry tells me they are Merrin’s parents and I try to think how they must feel.

Even though I’m being wheeled around, by the time we reach the tall, brass double doors I’m exhausted and feel like I want to sleep for ten hours. But when the warm May sun hits my face it reminds me of that feeling at the bottom of the cliff when my father brought me back to life and I’m glad for everything. Glad to be here, glad to have a father, a mother, happy to feel air in my lungs. In that moment, I don’t feel as though I have anything to be angry about any more.

^THIRTY-SEVEN

HOME

Harry’s car pulls up in front of my house and I know that this is it. I look at him and he reaches over to the glove box and takes something out. He hands it to me – a single piece of blue-lined paper, folded into a rectangle. It fits neatly into the palm of my hand.

‘Read it,’ he says, and I feel a tightness in my throat.

I slowly unfold it and stare. It’s the letter that I sent to him when I was eight. I can’t believe he kept it. His answers are scrawled in blue pen next to my questions.

‘Turn it over,’ Harry says.

I do and there’s a letter from him.

Dear Sam

I have an apology to make. Many apologies, but let’s do it all in one. This is the hardest and most important thing I’ve ever written and I know I’ll mess it up. I’m allergic to soppiness and emotion, which may be why I’m so lonely.

I’ve been so focused on my work for years that I think I’ve probably pushed away anything else that could have given me happiness. I lost your mum and she’s the best person I ever met.

Spending these past couple of weeks with you, seeing how funny, smart and brave you are, I wish I’d been a better father. I’ve been kidnapped, shot and I almost lost you. That’s enough to jolt me out of my selfishness, for the moment at least. You’ve un-stuck me. I hope I’m not too late to earn back your trust.

I’m not asking you to forgive me. Only that you’ll spend a bit more time with me. If your mum’s okay with it. I promise not to get you kidnapped again. Or to go out drinking when you ask me a few questions about the past. I have a new place already, down by the beach and, as far as I know, there are no crooked cops using the apartment upstairs for covert meetings.

I need some help with technology, too. Maybe you could come and stay every couple of weeks and teach me a few things, help me with the stories I’m working on. I’m also wondering if you could install some hidden cameras for me. (Joke.)

Have a think about it.

Love, Dad

I look up at him.

‘You signed it “Dad”,’ I say.

He nods.

‘Not “Harry”?’

He shakes his head.

I reach over and give him a hug, resting my head on his chest. I hear his heart beating. It’s going pretty fast. Feeling the rough, bristly warmth of him I want to forgive him for everything he’s ever done. Or hasn’t done. But if I did, I know I’d only be doing it to please him and I don’t need to do that. He’s not just a superhero any more.

‘There’s your mum,’ he says. I feel the words vibrate through him.

I turn to look down the path and she’s standing there with the screen door half-open. She smiles and waves. I swing open the car door and light and air flood in. Home looks different now. It’s the first time I’ve been here in sixteen days – a week in the city and nine days in hospital – the longest I’ve ever been away. But it’s not just time. There’s something else. The lawns have been mowed. Mum and I never mow the lawn. The gardens have been… gardened. Or something. Mum looks like she’s wearing a dress, too. She never wears dresses.

My dad wrestles the wheelchair out of the boot and rolls it around to my side of the car, then lifts me into it. My back and leg hurt but I’ve felt much greater pain than this so I suck it up. He eases the chair down the path. Mum wears a half-smile. She looks so happy to see me but I bet she feels weird about my dad being here.

He’s behind me. Mum in front. Me in the middle.

I don’t wish that they were going to get back together again or any of that soppy sitcom stuff. I can see why my parents aren’t meant to be together. It’s just that this moment, right now, is the best moment of my life so far. Nine days ago was the worst day of my life and this one is the best. And it’s not that I want it to last forever. I’m just so deeply in it that it feels like forever. That feeling flows through the three of us.

Magic waddle-runs up the path to greet us and I scruff her around the neck. She’s stayed with Mum for most of the time I’ve been in hospital. Dad has stayed a few nights in the Alpine Motor Inn on the highway. He leans down and Magic licks his face and puts her front paws up on his hands. Then Mum’s arm is around me and she kisses me on the side of the head.

‘Guess who’s here?’ she says.

Two figures appear behind Mum and I feel a grin roar across my face.

‘Surprise!’ Scarlet says. Her mother smiles and says hello. If it weren’t for them calling the police or for Scarlet’s phone, things would have turned out very differently.

My chair comes to rest at the front door and Scarlet bends down to hug me.

‘Are you okay?’ she asks.

‘Pretty good,’ I say. She stands up and I thank her and her mum. It’s kind of hard to show how grateful you are to someone who saved your life.

‘Well…’ says Dad. ‘I’d better go.’

I crane my neck to look up at him.

‘You be good,’ he says, squeezing my shoulder. ‘I hope you’ll take me up on that offer.’

‘I will,’ I say, gripping the letter tighter in my hand. I don’t want him to go. It’s quiet and a bit awkward for a moment.

‘Do you want to come in for a cup of tea?’ Mum says quickly, as though it was a dare.

‘I’d better not,’ he says.

‘Why not?’ she asks.

‘Yeah, why not?’ I ask.

‘I just…’ He looks down at me.

I give him puppy dog eyes, my best Magic impersonation.

His shoulders drop. ‘Yeah, all right. Why not? Thanks, Lisa.’

Mum takes the front of my chair and Dad takes the back and they lift me up the front step.

Mum makes tea and I talk to Scarlet and my parents speak to one another and I feel like I’m floating over it all, watching it from above, drinking it all in. Three of these people saved my life and one gave birth to me in the first place.

After Dad finishes his three-bag tea I see him hand an envelope to Mum and mutter something to her while she’s stacking the dishwasher. Mum brushes him off but he keeps at her. From the way they speak I get the feeling it might be money. I don’t imagine it’s nine years’ back payment but maybe it’s a start. She puts it in the cupboard with the bills and stuff next to the fridge and Dad comes to shake my hand.

‘Not this weekend but the weekend after,’ he says.

‘Deal.’

‘Your mum and I have arranged for you to take care of Magic for a bit,’ he says.

‘Really?’

‘Just until I can sneak her into my new apartment. The real estate agent’s not a big dog fan. But Magic looks like she’s lost weight. Make sure you don’t starve her.’

‘I think Mum might have been feeding her actual dog food rather than Thai chicken pizza and choc-chip biscuits,’ I say.

We shake hands, he says goodbye and he’s off up the path.

Scarlet and her mum leave soon after. Back to the apartment building. Scarlet says she’s not scared though. Mick Kelly is in jail awaiting trial and they reckon he won’t be out for a while. The Hills came back early from their trip after hearing what happened in their apartment. Scarlet says she’ll come visit when I stay at Dad’s new place. She’s older and taller and smarter so I know she doesn’t have to, but she says she wants to, which is cool.

Then it’s just me and Mum again. Back to normal, with the house creaking and expanding around us in the afternoon sun. Only it’s not normal. I died and came back to life. Literally died. Something in the universe has shifted now, something major. This is what it took for me to not be angry any more. It’s almost funny.

‘What would you like for dinner?’ Mum asks.

‘I’m cooking,’ I say.

‘What?’ she asks, like she doesn’t understand the words I said.

‘Spaghetti à la Garner.’

She snorts. ‘You?’

‘Don’t laugh. I had to cook at Dad’s one night and all he had was an old pack of spaghetti, a couple of random vegetables and a slightly rusty can of whole peeled tomatoes.’

‘Wow. Sounds delicious,’ she says.

‘It’ll be good. Seriously. I’m a chef.’

‘Okay. It’ll be a bit difficult in the chair.’

‘I’ll be fine. You relax. Read a book or something.’

She arches her brows.

I wheel my chair around the big island bench that divides the lounge room from the kitchen. Mum sits tentatively on the edge of the couch.

‘Read!’ I say.

She picks her book up off the side table, a John D MacDonald novel that she started reading about a year ago, and starts to flick through the pages to find her spot. I wheel over to the pantry and stare up at the vast array of ingredients. It’s so strange to see a kitchen cupboard with more than five items in it.

‘Mum, where do we keep the spaghetti?’ I ask.

She helps me find everything. We even have stuff like garlic and basil for flavour. It’s incredible. She puts the pot of hot water on the stove to boil and helps me up out of my wheelchair onto a stool at the kitchen bench so that I can chop things and reach the stove.

I send her back to the couch and she starts to read her book again. She looks nervous at first, the way someone does when they think you may be about to burn down their house or poison them. These are both strong possibilities so I understand her concern.

When we finally sit down to eat, the sauce tastes weird and the spaghetti has stuck together, making it like gluey rope. But Mum demolishes hers and says it’s the best thing she’s eaten in ages. This has to be a lie but she kind of looks like she means it. For me, it’s strange to eat a dinner at home that hasn’t been frozen with a Post-it note on the lid.

While we eat I ask her about a few things I’ve been wondering. Just little things like, ‘Why do people die?’ and ‘What is justice?’ and ‘Do you think Dad really means it when he says I can stay at his place?’ and ‘When I catch a plane will the staples in my knee set off the metal detector?’ and ‘If even senior police officers can make such bad mistakes, what hope is there for the rest of us?’ and ‘Why do people cry and laugh at funerals?’ and ‘Is being an adult harder or easier than being a teenager?’ and ‘What do you want for dessert?’ and a few other things. Mum does the best she can but I get the feeling I’m going to have to come up with my own answers to these questions. Except for dessert. She wants frozen berries with custard so we have that.

Later, I join her on the couch and start work on a brand new Harry Garner: Crime Reporter comic. Magic is curled up on the floor, keeping my feet warm. I already know what the comic is going to be about. It will be based on the story that I’ve just told you. Harry’s not so perfect any more. Not a jujitsu expert or a ladies’ man, none of that James Bond stuff. He has a crooked spine and walks with a limp. He’s been shot in the knee and he’s old and gruff. He doesn’t have all the answers. But he’s whip-smart and he’s prepared to put his life on the line for his brilliant, mostly not-angry kid tech-expert assistant. It’s going to be the best comic I’ve ever made. I might even let someone else read it.

Mum is engrossed in her book and she looks happy. She hasn’t looked that way in a long time. Everything is different now.

She sees me watching her. I realise my legs are jiggling up and down. She narrows her eyes and says, ‘Have you taken your magnesium?’

Almost everything.

^THIRTY-EIGHT

SAM GARNER’S TEN COMMANDMENTS OF LIFE

I’ve learnt a lot over the past few weeks. This morning I was in my coach Margo’s waiting room. She’s helping me work through everything that’s happened. I pulled my dad’s ‘Ten Commandments of Crime Reporting’ article out of my wallet and got inspired like I always do. But I also realised that every one of those commandments could be applied to living a good life, not just reporting crime. So I decided to write my own version of them. Here it is. My manifesto for life. (What I’ve learnt is in italics.)

1. God is in the details. Pay attention to this moment right now. Stop worrying so much.

2. Make contacts. Reach out to other people, even if they make life difficult sometimes.

3. Watch what you say about people. Try to think the best of other humans. Everyone is trying their best with what they’ve got.

4. You need to be clear with people which side of the law you sit on. Do what you know is right. Use your instincts.

5. Don’t keep everything on a phone. I’m not sure about this one. Maybe it means ‘Back up regularly’ or ‘Keep your memories safe’ or maybe ‘Buy a notepad’?

6. Never assume anything. Nothing is ever as it seems.

7. Always be authentic. ‘Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.’ (I actually stole this from a magnet we have on our fridge.)

8. What does the crime say about us as humans? Every choice you make says something about who you are.

9. Curiosity killed the cat. Be careful of becoming too obsessed. The answers are inside yourself, not outside.

10. Show determination, patience, mindfulness. Fall down seven times, stand up eight.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Like all books, this one has been a labour of love. It takes me years to find the voice and pacing and to build up the layers of character, plot and theme to make a story like this. I have written it while travelling in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia, on planes, trains, buses and trams and in dozens of different cafes, libraries, museums, houses, apartments and tents. (Actually, not dozens of tents, but one or two.)

Thanks to Amber Melody for her unerring support of my creative endeavours and her belief that we can make a living and a life by creating things. Thanks to Huxley and Luca for constantly reminding me of the energy, wonder and challenges of childhood.

Thanks to Zoe Walton, Kimberley Bennett and Jo Butler for helping to push the book to the end of the line and asking the tough questions on timing and geography and my understanding of architecture, dado rails, fire escapes, lifts, surveillance techniques, punctuation and human nature. And to Jo, Anthony Blair and Catherine Drayton for being a constant source of excellent advice and for sharing my stories with the world.

Penguin Random House Australia has such a tight, clever and supportive team who believe in the power of children’s and teen literature and literacy to change lives. Without that team, no one would ever have a chance to read this book. So, thanks to Julie Burland, Laura Harris, Dorothy Tonkin, Zoe Bechara, Suzannah Katris, Angela Duke, Nerrilee Weir, Vicki Grundy and the rest of the editorial, design, production and sales team for their belief in my stories.

I am also indebted to the generosity of the children’s and YA literature community – talented authors, illustrators and publishing people who work hard, share information freely, stand up for issues that matter and celebrate one another’s successes. I’m proud to be part of such a kind, selfless and kooky group of humans.

Thank you to the booksellers, teachers, librarians and parents who share my stories with readers and inspire kids and teens to pick up a book.

Biggest thanks go to you, the reader, for choosing this book. I hope you enjoyed the ride.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tristan Bancks is a children’s and teen author with a background in acting and filmmaking. His books include the My Life series, Mac Slater series (Australia and US) and Two Wolves (On the Run in the US), a crime-mystery novel for middle-graders. Two Wolves won Honour Book in the 2015 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. It also won the YABBA and KOALA Children’s Choice Awards. Tristan’s most recent book is My Life & Other Weaponised Muffins, a fifth book of weird-funny-gross, semi-autobiographical short stories. Tristan is a writer-ambassador for literacy charity Room to Read. He is excited by the future of storytelling and inspiring others to create. You can find out more about The Fall and Tristan’s other books, as well as win prizes, watch videos, play games and chat to the author, at www.tristanbancks.com.

ABOUT TRISTAN BANCKS AND ROOM TO READ

Tristan Bancks is a committed writer–ambassador for Room to Read, an innovative global non-profit that has impacted the lives of over ten million children in ten low-income countries through its Literacy and Girls’ Education programs. Room to Read is changing children’s lives in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Laos, Nepal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Vietnam and Zambia – and you can help!

In 2012 Tristan started the Room to Read World Change Challenge in collaboration with Australian school children to build a school library in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Over the years since, Tristan, his fellow writer–ambassadors and kids in both Australia and Hong Kong have raised $100,000 to buy 100,000 books for children in low-income countries.

For more information or to join this year’s World Change Challenge, visit http://www.tristanbancks.com/p/change-world.html, and to find out more about Room to Read, visit www.roomtoread.org.

Books by Tristan Bancks

Two Wolves

The Fall

Mac Slater, Coolhunter

Mac Slater, Imaginator

It’s Yr Life (with Tempany Deckert)

My Life & Other Stuff I Made Up

My Life & Other Stuff that Went Wrong

My Life & Other Massive Mistakes

My Life & Other Exploding Chickens

My Life & Other Weaponised Muffins

Read on for a sample of Tristan Bancks’ award-winning novel

^ONE

COPS

‘You keep runnin’, you’ll only go to jail tired,’ Ben Silver muttered.

He hit the photo button on his battered video camera and took another picture. He reached across his forest set and moved the legs on two small clay figures. Ben was eye-level with the action, peering between trees made from cellophane and toilet rolls and other found things.

He often mumbled his characters’ lines as he shot a movie. Later, after he’d filmed everything, he would record the voices and add them to the pictures. He jotted the line in his brown leather notebook:

‘You keep runnin’, you’ll only go to jail tired.’

Ben took a bite from a microwaved jam doughnut. The jam was lava on his tongue and he dropped the doughnut onto the plate. The floor around him was littered with clothes, shoes, a game console, two controllers, a bike wheel with no tyre, a skate-board deck, schoolbooks, soccer boots, a jumbo-size packet of chips and plates from long-forgotten afternoon snacks. Ben’s favourite place. It was dark with the curtains closed, the only light coming from two lamps trained on the stop-motion set on his desk. Outside, his dog Golden barked like mad.

Within the Woods was Ben’s seventh stop-motion movie. In this scene a zombie thief named Dario Savini was running down a forest track with Detective Ben Silver, Sydney’s toughest cop, in pursuit. The detective was famous in Ben’s movies for vanquishing werewolves, delinquent kids and zombies.

There was a heavy knock.

‘Hello. Police!’

Ben froze. He looked at his clay cop, but clay Ben just stood there on one foot, mid-stride, frozen.

Another heavy knock on the front door. It definitely didn’t sound like Olive. She was in the backyard, playing pirates on the trampoline like she did every day after school.

Ben stood, walked quietly out of his bedroom and tiptoed up the hall, heart keeping time with his footsteps. He moved through the lounge room to the front window and peered carefully from behind the dusty grey curtain.

It was raining and two police officers were huddled under the front awning. One fat. One skinny. Skinny was a lady. A couple of police cars were parked on the kerb with two more cops standing under dark blue umbrellas next to one of the cars. Ben’s body surged with excitement and fear. His dream was to become a detective once he had finished high school.

Ben’s little sister came in through the broken sliding back door, soaking wet. ‘Who is it?’ Olive asked.

‘Shhh,’ he whispered, raising a hand to tell her to stop, but Olive kept coming. She was small, white-blonde, seven years old, one of the smartest kids Ben knew. She had already read The Hobbit by herself. For three weeks afterwards she refused to speak unless people called her Gandalf.

The knock again. The lady officer walked past the window. Ben tucked himself in behind the curtain. The officer disappeared around the side of the house.

Olive shuffled in front of Ben. ‘Police!’ she said in a too-loud voice. He placed his hand over her mouth. She peeled it off. ‘They’re coming to get you for what you did.’

Ben swallowed hard and moved slowly toward the door, wondering if Olive was right. Earlier, he had tied her to a chair in the bathroom and dangled a cockroach in front of her face, then dipped her toothbrush in the toilet. But it seemed like overkill for four police officers to be assigned to the case, even if it was a slow Tuesday at the station.

Ben opened the door just enough to peek out.

‘Good afternoon,’ the policeman said.

‘Hello,’ Ben said, squeezing his bottom lip.

The officer’s hand rested on the butt of a gun nestled in the holster on his right hip. ‘Are your parents in?’

Ben shook his head, still looking at the officer through a thirty-centimetre gap between door and frame. Ben was pleased to see that being slightly overweight didn’t stop you from getting into the force. Ben was slightly overweight himself. His nan said it was from the rotten dinners his parents fed him from the burger chain on the corner.

‘Can you please tell me where they are?’

The murmur of the highway nearby and the low hum of the tall electrical tower in the empty block across the street filled the space between them.

‘At work.’

‘You sure about that? We just need to have a quick word to them,’ the officer said, looking past Ben into the house.

‘Mm-hm.’

‘Have you seen them this afternoon at all?’

Ben shook his head. ‘They’re at work till 4.30.’

The officer flipped open a small notebook with a leather cover. ‘Ray Silver Motor Wreckers, 137 Hope Street?’

Ben nodded.

The female officer returned. ‘No one round there,’ she said, posting a tight-lipped smile to Ben.

‘Thank you for your help,’ said the man and they turned to go.

‘Do you want me to give them a message?’ Ben asked.

‘No, we’ll catch up with them,’ said the lady officer.

They walked quickly into the rain and up the cracked concrete path, past the three rusted, doorless cars that sat in the long grass of the Silvers’ front yard. Golden, a three-legged, sandy-coloured kelpie cross, was tied up to one of the decaying cars. She barked excitedly at the officers as they climbed into their vehicles. The hum of the electrical tower was swallowed by the roar of the police cars as they sped off up Cooper Street.

Ben Silver closed the door and stood there, not knowing what to do. Sweat trickled down both sides of his forehead.

‘Are they going to put you in jail?’ Olive asked.

He went to the coffee table and picked up the phone, thoughts whirling. He put the phone down. He squeezed his bottom lip.

‘What did they want?’ Olive asked. ‘Did they say that dipping your sister’s toothbrush in the toilet was a very bad thing to do?’

Ben picked the phone up again and dialled the number for the wreckers. The phone rang. And rang.

He heard tyres skidding on gravel out the front.

^TWO

THE HOLIDAY

‘Cop!’ Ben’s dad called from the car. That was his nickname for Ben, because he asked so many questions.

Ben raced to the door and looked out. The Green Machine, his father’s 1967 Valiant 770, was parked half on the road, half on the footpath. Painted flames licked the side and bonnet of the car.

‘Let’s go!’ Dad shouted. Mum walked quickly toward the house, high heels clattering on the wet path. Olive squeezed past Ben and ran out into the rain to meet her.

‘Grab a few things to do in the car,’ Mum said. ‘We’ve got a surprise for you.’

‘What is it? What is it?’ Olive asked.

‘If I told you it wouldn’t be a surprise. Quick as you can.’

Ben thought for a second and headed to his room. He grabbed his schoolbag, threw in his notebook and pencil, his camera, some batteries. He scurried up the hall, pulled the front door closed and jammed his feet into a pair of sneakers. He held his backpack over his head as an umbrella and ran up the path. The back door of the car hung open and Olive was inside. Mum slammed the front passenger door and strapped her belt.

‘See you in seven minutes,’ Dad said into his phone. He threw it into Mum’s lap. ‘Turn that off for me. Get in, Ben!’ he said, revving the engine. The car jerked forward.

Ben slid into the back seat. ‘The police just came to our house!’ he said, breathless.

He heaved the door closed as Dad spun the car around, laying rubber on the road. ‘What are you doing? Where are we going?’

No one said anything.

‘Mum?’

‘Holidays,’ Mum said.

They had never been on a holiday before. Ben got up on his knees and looked through the dirty back window. Golden, the tripod dog, was still tied up to the rusted, doorless car on the front lawn.

‘What about G–’

‘Nan’s coming to get her,’ Mum said. ‘Put your belt on.’

Ben heard a siren as the car swung around the corner onto the old highway.

‘Red light!’ Mum shouted.

Dad kept driving.

No one said anything for a few minutes. Olive sat there, looking out the window, sucking her thumb and clutching Bonzo, her dirty, grey stuffed rabbit.

Car yards flicked by.

‘Where are we going on holidays?’ Ben asked.

Dad adjusted his side and rear-view mirrors, weaving between utes, vans and semitrailers.

‘Mum?’

She did not respond. Everything felt odd. Maybe it was because Ben had never been on holidays before. Maybe because the police had just knocked on their door. He slumped down on the back seat, thinking.

‘Why are we in such a damn hurry?’ he asked.

‘Watch your language!’ Mum said.

‘Did you hear me say that the police just came to our house?’ Ben continued. ‘And why didn’t you tell me this morning that we were going on holidays?’

Dad hit himself on the forehead four times with a balled fist. ‘That kid asks so many questions!’

‘Sorry,’ Ben said.

‘Don’t apologise all the time,’ Dad snapped. ‘It’s weak.’

‘Sorry,’ he said again.

‘The holiday was a surprise,’ Mum told him. ‘You’re always asking about a holiday. This is it. Our first family holiday.’

It felt weird to hear Mum saying ‘family holiday’. They weren’t really one of those family-movie-night, camp-in-the-backyard, let’s-discuss-this-and-get-everyone’s-opinion kind of families. They were more of a dinner-in-front-of-the-TV, key’s-under-the-mat, if-you-want-breakfast-make-it-yourself kind of family.

‘Can I bring a friend?’ Ben asked.

‘No,’ his parents both said at once.

‘But James took Gus when he went on holidays.’

No one said anything.

‘Where are we going?’

Rain drummed on the car roof as they charged past a petrol station, a funeral home, a chicken shop.

‘Just up the coast,’ Mum said, looking at Dad, whose eyes darted from road to rear-vision mirror and back again.

‘Where to? Gosford?’

‘No.’

‘Kings Bay? We’re going to the beach at Kings Bay!’ Ben said excitedly. He had wanted to go to Kings Bay ever since Nan had sent him a postcard from there when he was little.

‘No.’

Mum’s phone pinged. She picked it up and started typing.

‘Turn it off!’ Dad said.

‘Why?’

Dad gave her a fierce look.

Mum switched off the phone.

Ben and Olive glanced sideways at one another. They had never seen their mother switch her phone off before.

‘We’re not going to the cabin, are we?’ Ben asked.

Mum turned and looked through the gap between headrest and seat. ‘Yes, we’re going to the cabin.’

‘Yessss!’ Olive said, raising both arms in the air, then plugging her thumb back into her mouth.

‘Boooooo!’ Ben said. ‘I don’t want to. I want to go home. I’m in the middle of my movie.’

He had been hearing about his grandfather’s cabin in the hills behind Kings Bay all his life. When Dad was a kid Pop went up there, fishing and hunting rabbits, a couple of times a year. Dad said he was hardly ever allowed to go, even though he’d really wanted to.

Nature wasn’t Ben’s favourite thing – freaky insects, animals, dirt. He preferred being in his room playing games, watching TV, eating. This had never been a problem because the Silvers had not left the suburbs in the thirteen years since Ben was born.

‘Get out of the way!’ Dad yelled at someone through his open window.

Dad was skinny and serious. An ex-mechanic, salesman, now motor wrecker. He wore an armful of tattoos, black wraparound sunglasses and a dirty cap with a petrol company logo on it. In the rear-view mirror Ben could see Dad’s chipped front tooth. He looked rat-like.

Ben sometimes wondered how Dad had ended up with Mum. April Silver: ten years younger than Dad, tall, brown hair. People said she could have been a model years ago, but then Ben was born and that changed everything. So now she worked at the wreckers instead. Dad thought he ran the business but Mum did. Ben knew.

Ben sat back and looked out the window at the signs going by. AAA Lighting. Craig’s Concreting. The Golden Wok Chinese. He thought about police and squeezed his bottom lip. He closed his eyes and saw his stop-motion movie playing on the cinema screen at the back of his eyelids. He saw what he had already shot – the crime, the car chase, then the run through the forest. Maybe heading toward a creepy cabin. It wasn’t in the script yet but maybe they would go to a cabin, the zombie thief’s hideout – abandoned, trees hanging low over the roof.

The car jerked and revved hard as Dad flung it back a gear. Ben’s eyes snapped open, ending his imaginary cinema show.

They hurried along the old highway, wipers scraping the windscreen. Ben didn’t mind his characters going to a creepy cabin but he did not want to go to one himself. He wanted to be back in his room, happy, comfortable. He tried to think of anything that might stall them.

‘What about clothes and stuff? I’m still in school uniform.’

‘It’s all right,’ Mum said. ‘We’ll get new ones.’

‘New clothes?’

‘Yep. That’s what you do on holidays.’

Ben thought about this for a second. He had never heard of it before.

‘I thought you guys hated holidays,’ he said.

Dad laughed, which Ben liked. Usually Dad only laughed when he was with his mates.

‘What about school?’ Ben said. ‘Didn’t we just have school holidays?’

‘Now you’ve got more,’ Mum said.

‘Can you please tell Maugrim to slow down,’ Olive said quietly, then stuck her thumb back into her mouth.

‘You tell him,’ Ben said.

Olive shook her head. She had not spoken to Dad in over a week. One night at dinner, during the ads, she had called him Maugrim, the evil wolf from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Dad was so angry when he found out who Maugrim was, he sent her to her room with no dessert and put Bonzo away for a week. Since then she had only spoken to Dad when necessary and only through an interpreter. Olive did that kind of thing sometimes. She was a tough little kid. Ben would never dare stand up to Dad like that.

Dad checked his rear-view and side mirrors and took a sharp right in front of oncoming traffic. Ben was thrown sideways toward Olive, who shoved him away. ‘Get off me. You stink like poo,’ she said.

Ben sat up. Dad swung a fast left, then gunned it up a street lined with brown brick houses. They were a bit nicer than Ben’s house. Most had basketball hoops and toys and bikes strewn around the yard. Two kids in yellow raincoats ran off the road as Dad powered toward them. A hundred metres further up, he pulled into a driveway where a man stood next to an empty garage. He wore a white, pinstriped business shirt and black pants. He was tall and skinny with ginger-coloured hair, thinning on top. Uncle Chris. Even though he lived so close, they had not seen Dad’s brother in over a year. Dad drove into the garage, switched off the engine and got out.

‘Does Dad still think Uncle Chris is an idiot?’ Olive asked.

‘Shhh,’ Mum said. ‘He’s organised a new car for us to drive for the holiday.’ She gathered her things.

‘What?’ Ben asked.

Mum ignored him. ‘Everyone out.’

Ben looked through the back window to where Dad was shaking his brother’s hand. Uncle Chris gave Dad a grey nylon sports bag with black handles and looked over at Ben. Then they walked up the driveway to an old station wagon parked in the street.

^THREE

HOLIDAY HAIRCUTS

Clumps of hair fell to the ugly orange tiles of the motel bathroom.

‘Hold still,’ Mum said.

‘How much are you cutting off?’ Ben asked. ‘I don’t wanna have a haircut.’

‘Don’t be silly. We’re all having haircuts.’

‘Why?’

‘Holiday haircuts,’ she said. ‘That’s what you do on holidays.’

‘As if,’ Ben said. The only guy he could remember coming back from holidays with a haircut was Robert Dewar, who lived two doors up from Nan. He’d fallen asleep chewing gum and it went all through his hair and he had to have it shaved. He’d returned to school bald.

‘It’s looking better already,’ Mum said. ‘I forgot you had eyes.’

‘Have you ever cut hair before?’ Ben asked, doubtful.

‘You know I’ve always wanted to. I’m going to cut mine in a minute,’ she said, snipping carefully away at his fringe. Ben could see her fingernails in close-up, bitten back to the nail bed. The tips of her fingers looked red and sore.

‘I hope you do as bad a job on yours as you’re doing on mine,’ Ben said. ‘And why aren’t you cutting Olive’s?’

‘Her hair’s too beautiful. She can wear pigtails or a bun. Look down,’ Mum said, her tongue poking out as she concentrated on steering around Ben’s ear.

‘Why don’t we just wait till morning and go to a hairdresser?’ Ben asked.

They had been driving for about five hours when the rain became too heavy to see the road. The wipers on the car Uncle Chris had lent them did not work well. The car was even older than the Green Machine. Ben couldn’t work out why they had bothered swapping. So they had pulled off the highway into Rest Haven, a deadbeat motel with a flickering fluorescent sign out the front.

‘Don’t use your whiny voice,’ Mum said.

She often accused him of whining, so Ben said in his deepest, most manly voice, ‘Why don’t we just go to a hairdresser?’

‘It’s more fun this way,’ she said.

‘What’s fun about having your hair hacked off by a maniac with a pair of nail scissors?’

‘Mind your tongue,’ she said. ‘Head down.’

Ben watched another handful of thick brown hair drop to the tiles. There was more hair on the floor than Ben remembered having on his head. Another large clump fell. He looked up into the mirror again and a tiny scream leapt from his mouth. His hair was an inch long.

‘I think it looks good,’ she said. ‘More like a boy.’

‘Good? I look like a toilet brush!’

‘Oh, stop complaining, you big boob,’ she said.

‘Boob?’ he said, raising his voice and standing up. ‘I’m not a “boob”. People are going to be cleaning toilets with my head.’

‘Sit!’ Mum said, like she was speaking to Golden, their dog.

‘No,’ Ben said.

‘Oi!’ he heard from the next room.

He looked at Mum, thinking for a second. There was no point getting Dad upset. He turned and studied his reflection in the mirror. ‘This room is where hair comes to die.’

‘It’s a new look.’

‘Holiday haircuts,’ he grunted as he flopped back into the chair.

A grin spread over Mum’s lips as she tidied up the sides.

‘I’m hungry,’ Ben said.

‘Well, we don’t have anything. It won’t hurt you to skip a few meals.’

Ben looked at her in the mirror. She knew he was paranoid about his weight because he’d told her the things kids said at school. She gave him an apologetic look and kept cutting.

‘Ow!’ he said, grabbing his ear. He looked at his hand. Blood.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Let me look at it.’

Ben stormed out of the bathroom, squeezing his ear to stop the blood flow. The room was dimly lit with brick walls, a double bed and a tired-looking couch. Dad was looking out the window through a gap in the faded pink curtains, speaking to someone on the motel phone. Olive was asleep on the bed with Bonzo, lit by the glow of a greyhound race on TV.

‘Ben!’ Mum called.

He headed for the front door and yanked it open but the security chain jarred it.

‘Hey!’ Dad said, putting the phone down.

‘What?’

‘Has your mother finished with you?’

Ben reached for his ear. He dabbed at it and showed Dad the blood seeping into the shallow channels of his fingerprints. If he was honest there wasn’t actually much blood. He would have liked there to be a bit more, but it was still blood. Mum came out of the bathroom.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She’s finished.’

Dad looked at Mum. Mum looked at Ben. Ben looked at Dad. And that is how his hair stayed. Short and spiky with sticky-uppy bits.

Dad was in the butcher’s chair next. He swore a lot and Mum threatened to cut his ear off too if he didn’t stop complaining. He stopped.

Ben sat on a green vinyl seat that had a dodgy leg, and stared into the car park through the rain-drizzled window. He grabbed his old brown leather notebook from his bag. Ben had found the notebook in the cramped office at the back of Nan’s house where she kept Caramello Koalas in the middle drawer of a roll-top desk. The notebook had been his grandfather’s. When Pop was alive he had jotted some numbers in the front. Sums written in smudgy blue ink. Ben could barely read the writing but he kept those pages in the book.

At the back of the notebook, on the last page, there was another bit of Pop’s scrawly writing. These words: ‘An old man tells his grandson one evening that there is a battle raging inside him, inside all of us. A terrible battle between two wolves. One wolf is bad – pride, envy, jealousy, greed, guilt, self-pity. The other wolf is good – kindness, hope, love, service, truth, humility. The child asks, “Who will win?” The grandfather answers simply. “The one you feed.”’

Ben liked the words. He liked that they were from Pop, who had died when Ben was two. Nan said that, up until then, the two of them had been inseparable. Pop had taken him everywhere, always repeating a rhyme that Ben had loved: ‘Ben Silver is no good. Chop him up for firewood. If he is no good for that, feed him to the old tomcat.’

Ben chewed on the rubber end of his pencil for a moment before writing this list:

Police

Holiday

Uncle Chris. Grey nylon bag. Black handles.

The new old car

Haircuts

Holidays were rubbish, Ben decided. And the cabin would be even worse. Nature. Ben wondered how long it would be till they could go home and he could finish making his movie. He was going to miss ordering his lunch at school tomorrow. And soccer at lunchtime. Why couldn’t James or Gus have come on holidays with them?

Cars pulled in and out of the car park, headlights shining on hundreds of little raindrop jewels racing down the window. Out the front, the sign for Rest Haven flickered to an uneven beat. The cranky lady from reception crossed the car park holding a red umbrella, a small carton of milk and some towels. She looked at Ben, quickly looked away but then glanced back. He wondered if she thought his hair was weird. Or his family.

When they checked in, Dad had refused to show her his driver’s licence, saying that he’d lost his wallet. Ben had seen him with his wallet at a petrol station on the motorway half an hour earlier so he went out to the car, brought Dad’s wallet to him and said, ‘Here it is!’ But, rather than being thankful, Dad was angry.

‘Don’t stick your big bib in!’ he shouted as they drove across to the car space in front of their room.

Ben didn’t even wear a bib. What did ‘stick your big bib in’ mean?

Soon Dad emerged from the bathroom with close-cropped hair – another unhappy customer. Ben tried not to laugh.

‘Go to sleep,’ Dad grunted, switching off the TV and lamp and flopping onto the big bed.

Ben lay down on the couch in a rectangle of light from the bathroom. When Mum appeared half an hour later she was hardly recognisable. Her hair, usually halfway down her back, was now boyish and weird-looking.

‘Why did you do that?’ Ben asked.

‘Go to sleep. We leave early.’

He watched her. She laid Olive down on a blanket on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed with her back to him for a long while.

‘How early do we leave?’ Ben whispered into the darkness.

‘Four.’

‘Why?’

‘Because your father says so… Go to sleep.’

Ben lay there, eyes open, listening to rain beating the roof. The couch cushions smelt mouldy and felt itchy. He wondered if there were bedbugs. He imagined his body swarming with mini-beasts, hundreds of thousands of them eating him alive. He closed his eyes and saw it like a stop-motion movie with tiny bedbugs made of clay.

Dad’s snoring filled the room.

Ben tried not to think about the bites. He thought about Nan, his dad’s mum. She lived around the corner from them, right on the highway. She always had time for him and was interested in what he had to say. Nan was rake-thin, a tough old bird, one of those old people who sat on the front steps watching the world go by. She had probably seen their car leave town. Ben wondered if she had picked up Golden. Even though it was past midnight, he knew that Nan would be lying awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to talk radio and world news. She only slept for a couple of hours just before dawn.

Ben’s eyes closed. He thought about the four police officers. He had asked Mum about them again and she said that there was a break-in at the wreckers. That’s why the police showed up. But who would steal something from that place? It was a dump. An actual dump.

Ben touched his spiky hair and scratched his skin. He felt hungry. He silently prayed for the holiday to be over soon.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

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Version 1.0

The Fall

ePub ISBN 9780143783046

First published by Random House Australia in 2017

Copyright © Tristan Bancks 2017

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

A Random House book

Published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

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www.penguin.com.au

Addresses for the Penguin Random House group of companies can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com/offices.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Bancks, Tristan, author

Title: The fall / Tristan Bancks

ISBN: 9780143783046 (ebook)

Subjects: Detective and mystery stories

Cover images: main image Hayden Verry/Arcangel; boy and dog image majivecka/Shutterstock; branches seeyou/Shutterstock

Cover design by Christabella Designs

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