Tristan Bancks - The Fall

Silence for a moment.

Then steady footsteps up the stairs.

I picked up the phone and ushered Scarlet towards the bathroom.

Scarlet gripped one of my crutches, pointing the foot of it at the locked bathroom door, prepared to attack if the door should open. I held two chemical spray bottles, ready to squeeze the triggers into the intruder’s eyes.

I got us into this, I thought. I did this. Now Scarlet is involved, too.

I could hear his footsteps, slow and deliberate, out in the hall. Every second was an hour. Magic rubbed against my leg, breathing quietly for the first time since I’d met her. She knew how serious this was now.

Why hadn’t we run for our lives up to her apartment?

There seemed to be so little oxygen. I felt droplets on my arm. Sweat of mine or Scarlet’s. I wasn’t sure. We were bound together in this.

There was a loud bang on the front door of the apartment. Not a fist. A shoulder. We both jumped. A second bang followed by clattering. I pictured the door falling open, heavy deadlock parts scattering to the floor for the second time today.

For a moment the crack beneath the bathroom door glowed yellow with light from the stairwell. Then it was gone. He had closed the front door.

A shadow passed the bathroom door, left to right towards my father’s bedroom.

We should have run while he was in there. Was he at the entrance or right inside the bedroom? I listened hard but he was very quiet.

Harry’s cheap metal coathangers clanged gently together like wind chimes. I prayed that he wouldn’t check the lower drawers in the wardrobe, particularly that thin, middle drawer with the small, hanging, brass handle where the knife was.

‘Let’s run,’ I whispered, close to Scarlet’s ear.

‘No.’

‘We should.’

‘What if–’

The handle twitched on the bathroom door. It was a low, silver handle, hip height, the kind you push down to open. I could just make out the shadow of it. I knew that the lock was a piece of flimsy plastic.

Please make him go away.

The handle twitched a second time and there was a loud crack of plastic and metal. The door flew back, revealing the enormous silhouette of him painted pitch-black against the backdrop of city light from the rear window. He was even bigger than I had remembered or imagined, towering over us, filling the doorway.

Magic barked while I squeezed both triggers, filling the man’s eyes with long, thin jets of spray. He reached for his eyes and I sprayed again and again. Scarlet whacked him under the chin with the crutch. He stumbled back. She rushed forward, ramming her shoulder into his gut, and he fell against the bookcase. Scarlet ran and I pole-vaulted forward on my crutches, dragging Magic out of the bathroom and across the apartment to the front door.

Scarlet flung the door wide. I felt fresh, cool air hit my nostrils. The fluorescent light blinded me after so long in the dark. Scarlet headed for the stairs to the sixth floor.

‘Come!’ she called.

But I knew I couldn’t make it up the stairs fast enough and running up there would mean being trapped in the building. He would follow me, not Scarlet. I had to go down, had to get outside. I could hear the enormous man’s feet lumbering across the apartment already. I thought of the lift for a split-second but it would be slow, a deathtrap.

‘Take Magic,’ I said, pressing the collar into her hand.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Run!’ I said, taking my crutches in my right hand, the dark timber banister in my left, and launching myself down the first three stairs. I landed on my left foot, feeling the deep impact in my ankle, jarring my knee hard, but my body quickly wrapped the pain in an adrenaline bandage and I hopped down to the first landing. The stairs snaked their way down next to the lift. Two flights for each storey. Ten flights to the bottom. I had to keep moving.

I looked up and saw Scarlet’s hand sliding up the banister as she ran.

I leapt down five steps and then another three to the next landing. I caught a blurred glimpse of Mick Kelly coming down the stairs after me, blood smeared across his wide face from Scarlet hitting him with the crutch. He was not in uniform. This was not official police business. He did not deserve to be a police officer.

It made me so angry I felt sparks fly up from my chest and into my brain. The anger drove me on and down the stairs. He would get what he deserved. I would make sure of it.

I hopped across the landing to the top of the next set of stairs, clutched the banister and made two giant leaps down to the fourth floor. Every time I landed I felt the two phones in my shorts pockets, Scarlet’s and mine. Damn. I’d pocketed hers when we’d run for the bathroom.

I saw a fire alarm button behind glass. I tried to stab it with the rubber end of my crutch, but missed and hit the wall. I stabbed again, got it this time, smashing the glass and hitting the button squarely, but no alarm sounded. I pressed the button with my thumb but, again, nothing happened. So I hopped across to the next set of stairs, knowing that I had wasted precious time.

He’s going to get me, I thought. He’s going to get me.

But people would hear the noise of our chase. They would come to their doors. They would know that Kelly was a bad man, chasing a child at midnight.

I jumped and landed hard on my working leg over and over again. Down, down, down, leaping and jarring the staples in my right knee, crunching the cartilage in my left, my foot screaming from the recent attack by the flying elephant. Third floor, then second.

Kelly was halfway down the same set of stairs as me now. I could feel the dark shape of him looming. He was big and slow but I, with my stupid leg, was slower. My breath burned in my chest and sweat spilt from every pore. The sparks of anger were a fire inside now, burning me up and blending with fear to make molten lava. I made it to the first-floor landing, hopped across and launched myself down towards the foyer.

He was three steps behind as I swung myself around the banister onto the final flight. I could see the front door and freedom. I breathed hard, feeling broken. Mick Kelly reached for me and I jabbed the feet of my crutches back at him, stabbing him in the hip, shoving him off balance. I felt such panic that, rather than leaping three or five steps, I made the split-second decision to leap down all eight steps at once. If I could land on my feet, I would almost certainly get away.

I jumped. A strangled ‘Gah!’ escaped my mouth. I swam through the air, spinning my arms for balance like a long-jumper. I realised that I was going to overshoot the end of the stairs. It would be a crash-landing. I had brought this on myself – this fall, this end. Another poor decision.

I hit hard and stopped dead. Blunt pain shot through my feet and calves, into my shins and knees. My hips and back jarred and my spine seemed to collapse like a domino run, each small bone colliding with the one above it. The pain split me in two.

I tried to roll and absorb the forward motion but I fell on my shoulder, flipped, then slammed the front door with the soles of my sneakers with such force that the safety glass shattered, raining down on my legs and torso.

I couldn’t move. I saw the brown-yellow of timber and foyer light above me and felt the pain, complete and deadening. Then there was the shape of Mick Kelly standing over me, shoulders heaving with exertion.

Mum always told me, ‘If you’re in trouble, make sure you never get taken to a second location. If someone grabs you, scream your lungs out, fight, let everyone know you need help. If you’re taken to another, more private place, that’s where bad things can happen.’