Tristan Bancks - The Fall

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.

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.