Tristan Bancks - The Fall

‘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.

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.

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.