Tristan Bancks - The Fall

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.

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.