Tristan Bancks - The Fall

So I screamed my lungs out. It sounded to me, in my dazed state, like my scream was coming from someone else. I was pretty sure that screaming for help was not in ‘Harry Garner’s Ten Commandments of Crime Reporting’, but none of that mattered now.

I tried to sit up but, before I could, a gloved hand fit roughly across my face. It was clutching something moist and chemical-smelling. I saw his sickly, white, golf-ball-dimpled face and double chin in close-up. He pressed that wet cloth hard over my mouth and nose. I tried to turn my head, to shake off his hand, to hold my breath, but I had no choice but to inhale. His other hand grabbed the front of my shirt and I was dragged out the front door, down the stairs onto the wet street, into the sharp night air, my heels kicking behind me as I faded away.

I woke cold, with a dead-dry mouth and tongue, the smell of fuel and the roar of an engine all around me. My arms and legs and torso itched all over. I tried to sit up and smashed my head hard on metal, then fell back down. Pain ripped at my skull. I went to rub it but my hands were bent back behind me, tied with what felt like a thin wire or strap.

I was in the boot of a car. It slowed abruptly and I slid forwards and smashed my shoulder on something hard and sharp behind the back seat. The car took a left over rougher ground. My tailbone was now jammed against the wheel well. I could feel dirt or mud and rocks pinging up and hitting the metal, vibrating right through me. The back of the car went into a slide as though it was about to spin before the wheels gripped again and we sped forward.

I tried to drink in details. The smell of fuel and old, wet carpet and burnt brake pads. The deep snarl of the V8 engine. It had to be a V8, like my Uncle Chris’s Monaro that he only drove on weekends and that Mum said was a ‘total bogan-mobile’. On the right side, the rear lights made my feet and legs glow red. My feet felt wet, too. A steady stream of water leaked through a crack in the boot. Rain drummed loud and heavy above me.

The dirt road was filled with rough bumps and ruts. Through the engine noise I could hear the familiar guitar and vocal of the Rolling Stones song ‘Brown Sugar’ on the stereo. One of Mum’s favourites. It made me long for home, where I was safe and bored and angry. I made a vow that if I survived this, I would never be angry again. Boredom beat fear any day.

My head felt heavy and my eyes burnt hot. I had never been in a car boot before. I wondered how long I’d been unconscious. Unconscious , I thought. He had done something to me. Chloroform – was that what Mick Kelly had used on me? I’d looked it up when I was writing Harry Garner: Crime Reporter #2: The Case of the Human Skull and I read that it could take a few minutes to subdue someone with chloroform, so maybe not.

The car drove on and on along the rough dirt road. I felt like I was inside the pages of one of my own comics. It wasn’t as fun as I’d imagined it would be. I fought the cloudy feeling in my head but still I slipped in and out of time, the vibration of the car lulling me to sleep – in and out, in and out – before I woke sharply as the car slid to a stop. Engine off. Music off. Red light gone. Dead black. I stretched my eyes wide to make sure that they were actually open. I don’t think I really knew what darkness was till that moment.

The sound of heavy, beating rain.

I lay there, not moving. No one got out of the car. Minutes scraped and scratched by.

I thought of the phones that had been in the pockets of my shorts when I ran from the apartment – Scarlet’s and mine, one on either side. It didn’t feel like I had either of them now. He must have taken my backpack and both phones.

My throat burnt with thirst. I hoped the heavy rain would cover the gentle scraping sound I made as I carefully twisted my body around. I needed the water pouring through that crack like nothing else I had ever known. I slipped my mouth side-on beneath the leak, spraying my face and eyes. I couldn’t remember a better feeling in my life. My stomach and brain and skin and every sense jerked to life when that liquid hit my system, like I was reborn. I was in the worst situation I’d ever experienced and I was having the best feeling. Life was strange.

Was I thirteen yet? Probably. It had to be after midnight. Happy birthday to me. Thirteen years on the planet and I don’t think I had ever, for even a minute, really felt glad just to be alive or thankful for a birthday present as simple as a drink of water. I slipped my face out from beneath the flow and gently rested my cheek on the soggy, smelly carpet floor of the boot. The water felt cool and good pooling around my cheek and temple.

I lay there, almost happy, for a few minutes till the rain began to ease. It fell into a steady shhhh on the boot lid and, soon after, seemed to stop. A door opened, the suspension squeaked. Dread filled me. Someone stretched and groaned. Mick Kelly, I assumed, unless he had passed me on to someone else to do his dirty work.

Footsteps in muddy puddles moving towards the back of the car. I tried to sink back into the boot, to disappear. Click. I closed my eyes and lay dead still as the boot squealed open and I was assaulted by bright white torchlight. I breathed slow and steady, ready for what may come. A hand grabbed my shirt and dragged me up. An arm went under my legs and lifted me. It made me think of when I was little and I would pretend to fall asleep in the car so that Mum would carry me and put me into bed.

My head lolled against Kelly’s shoulder and I dared to squint. In the torchlight I glimpsed his silver hair and wrinkly neck and the treetops above. Kelly slammed the boot shut with his elbow, my head shifted and I got a good look at the car. It was old and red. Big. A V8, definitely.

Inside the car, through the rear window, I saw the back of another man’s head.

Mick Kelly dropped me hard to the ground, my ribs splat-cracking muddy earth, my arms tangled behind me. I swallowed the pain, didn’t make a sound.

Kelly opened the back door of the car and my father climbed out, hands tied like mine, his crooked shape set against the orange glow of the car’s interior light. He had a thick strip of silver tape across his mouth. The right side of his face looked bruised and bloody up to the corner of his eye. He was old and beaten but still alive.

I was so devastated and happy to see him. Devastated that he was in the same danger as I was. Happy that he was alive and that I wasn’t alone. This was the reason he hadn’t come back tonight. Mick Kelly had taken him. That’s why Harry broke his promise to me.

When did Kelly take him? I wondered. On his way back to the apartment? In the foyer? How did he know my dad lived there – was it the electricity bill? I cursed myself for not telling Harry about it.

He shuffled the three or four steps towards me. I struggled up from the ground, my hands still tied, and he gave me an armless hug, burying his head in my neck.

‘I’m sorry, Sam,’ he whispered, muffled and lispy through the tape on his mouth. Then he said something else. I heard it as ‘I’ll try to get us out of this’, but that may have been wishful thinking. He may have said ‘Let’s go catch a fish’, which seemed unlikely, or ‘I really need to do a whiz’, which was a definite possibility. I needed to go pretty badly myself.

Kelly pulled Harry away by his shirt collar and slammed the car door. I leaned on the side of the car to steady myself. I was crutchless. The wind swirled and the leaves hissed from the high tree canopy. It was a night-time sound I knew from the bush behind our house, but I was used to hearing it through a pane of glass, curtains drawn in the warmth of my room. I had spent so much of my life playing in the bush, building cubbies and climbing the tallest trees I could find, but I was always freaked by the bush at night, when it felt ancient and inescapable, like a black hole. It could inhale you in a single breath and you would cease to exist. There’s no arguing with a force that powerful.