Tristan Bancks - The Fall

‘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.

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.