Tristan Bancks - The Fall

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.

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.