Tristan Bancks - The Fall

Can you wait here for one moment? I’d like to have a more senior officer present. That’s what she’d said. Then she knocked on his door. She was a senior constable. He must have been a higher rank than that. He had a corner office that looked important somehow.

What am I involved in?

I thought of the other times in my life I’d had anything to do with police. Two young officers had helped us when our house was broken into. They took our fingerprints and one of them, a lady with blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and a super-heavy belt with pepper spray and a gun and a bunch of other stuff, had put her arm around my mum when she had cried. And Mum knew a cop called Clint from when she went to school. He worked at Katoomba Police Station now and she sometimes said hello to him when we were up in town. Once, he let me off with a warning for riding without a helmet. My only experiences with police had been good. They were supposed to be good people. So who was this guy? How did he get a badge?

My brain felt like dumpling mush. I stared out the front window, past the rhythmic rise and fall of the woman’s shoulders as she made her food.

Who do you go to? Who do you go to when you’re in very deep trouble and the police are not an option?

Mum, was my first thought. Before I get in any deeper.

I pulled out my phone and sent her a message.

Are you busy? I really need to

tell you something

I always thought that Mum didn’t understand how hard everyday life was for me, even though she tried. At the public school down the road, I used to get teased and pushed around for my hobbly walk. So she sent me to the independent school, which she couldn’t really afford but she said she would somehow. And guess what? Kids picked on me there, too. So I went back to the public school the next year.

She wondered why I was angry all the time, why I got in trouble, why I argued non-stop with her, why I seemed to get detention every second day, why I hit that kid one Friday morning.

The hit was a total accident but it was the thing that tipped Mum over the edge. These two kids had been hassling me all week, calling me ‘retard’ and ‘spaz’ and trying to trip me over. It wasn’t even a big thing that made me snap. One of them, Angus Dodson, threw my tennis ball under a classroom and I had had enough. I lashed out and punched him right in the mouth before I even knew what I was doing. I had never hit anyone before. I got his braces with my fist and the metal cut my finger open. I bent the braces and my mum had to pay for them. She took the money out of the savings account she’d been building for me, $20 a month since I was a baby. I hadn’t told any teachers about Angus teasing me every day so they thought I’d just lashed out without being provoked. That was a week before my operation. Mum had pleaded my case with Mrs Johnston, the principal, who decided not to suspend me but gave me a week of after-school detention.

This week, on one of those nights when Harry had sat at the dining table staring at his laptop screen, he asked what I’d done to make Mum want to send me away for a week. I knew that he knew because I’d heard Mum tell him, but I recounted the story about the kid called Angus and the fight. I told him about another time when I took the short cut home from school across the big water pipe that’s like a high bridge across the gully. It’s pretty dangerous but heaps of kids do it. We got caught and Mum found out. Then there was being late to class all the time, getting detention for swearing, arguing with teachers, the list went on and on. I had no idea why I was doing these things. I didn’t feel like I was choosing to. ‘Hormones!’ Mum always said.

Dad asked me about Mum. I didn’t want to say anything bad about her but I told him how it had been between us lately. Not like it used to be. We used to be good together. ‘You and me,’ she’d say, cuddling me into her on the couch while we watched re-runs of Doctor Who . But in the last couple of years, since she started working so much, life was different. When she first woke up things would be good. Or we might have a moment where things were okay but then we’d have an argument about homework or about how long I’d had the hot tap on or some misunderstanding about my sports uniform and we’d be off again. The storm never seemed to pass. Just when I thought it was over the wind would change and it’d circle back over us.

‘Maybe she suffers compassion fatigue,’ he’d said.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s where someone has to be so nice and understanding and kind and giving in their job that they forget about themselves. They don’t have anything left to give. Have you ever imagined how stressful it must be for her to work in an emergency unit?’

I hadn’t. I had honestly never thought about that in my life. She never talked about work, maybe because what she saw was so full-on. And I never asked. To me she was just someone who slept, froze dinners and left notes and texts for me to make my life difficult and to control me like some evil overlord. But working ten- and twelve-hour shifts must have been pretty hard. Twelve hours is two of my school days back to back.

Part of me wanted to tell my dad that if he paid her some child support maybe she wouldn’t have to work so much, but I didn’t say anything.

Sometimes, when she got up in the morning, Mum looked so tired. If I asked her where my school shirt was or some other little thing she would just lose it, telling me how irresponsible I was and that I needed to grow up and that I never lifted a finger around the house. Which totally wasn’t true. But it kind of was.

Compassion fatigue made me think about her in a whole different way. She was full up, which made me feel really sad for her. Maybe her working so much wasn’t turning out that well for either of us.

The lift opened and I stared at two doors lit by dim fluorescent light – 6A and 6B. The ‘A’ on ‘6A’ was slightly twisted to the right.

Which apartment was hers? The tangled vines of sleeplessness confused everything. Harry’s apartment is downstairs on the left so that means Scarlet is on the right. Left. Right. A. B. 6B. She’s in 6B. What if the cop had returned to the apartment while I was sitting in the dumpling place? What if he was watching me now through the peephole?

I trembled and gripped Magic’s lead tight. She panted and drooled, excited or worried. I moved carefully out of the lift, across the minefield of squeaky floorboards, and knocked gently on the door of 6B.

I checked my phone: three per cent battery. No response from Mum yet. This happened when she was busy. She couldn’t check her phone if she was trying to keep someone alive. And how was she to know that checking her phone tonight might keep me alive?

Mum?

I pocketed the phone and listened for thumps or footsteps or a creaking chair. It was late, ten-thirty maybe. I prayed that Scarlet would open quickly, that anyone would, except the policeman with the moon face.

If I had somehow picked the wrong door, I was ready to run as fast as my crutches would take me. Which wasn’t very fast. I would take three steps at a time, maybe four, and I would scream like a maniac, alerting every person in the building. Not that anyone would open their door to help, I figured.

I didn’t hear anything at all.

I knocked again, slightly louder this time.

Footsteps. Very light. Padding towards the door. Socks or slippers.

Then silence.

Someone was standing on the other side of the door, watching me.

Please let it be Scarlet rather than her mother, I thought. I stood up straight and forced a smile, which probably made me look crazy.