Harry turned and rested against its smooth surface for a moment, taking fast, shallow breaths, then he leaned forward, dry-retching.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
He answered by vomiting loudly. I felt it splat around my feet and ankles and I rested my hand on his back. His shirt was soaked with sweat.
Kelly was running through the bush below us now. We were out in the open, sitting ducks.
‘We’ve got to move,’ I whispered. ‘If we get over the tree and keep going across the slope here, maybe we can make it back to the track we came down in the first place.’
‘Give me a minute,’ Harry said, stifling a cough.
Kelly flicked on his torch again for a second and sprayed the bush just below us with light. I saw my sneakers glow for a moment before the torch went off again.
‘We don’t have a minute,’ I whispered.
I bent down and looked beneath the fallen tree. There was a narrow crawl-space beneath the trunk. I grabbed the shoulder of Harry’s shirt and pulled him to the ground. My chin hit hard and I wondered if my face had landed in my father’s vomit.
‘Go under,’ I whispered and Harry slid back along the wet, mulchy earth, slipping into the thirty-centimetre gap beneath the fallen gum tree. I slid in too, my cheek scratching the paper-thin bark and leaf litter on the ground.
I strained to hear Kelly’s movement between the night sounds of insects, a low, mournful bird and the fast rhythmic splat of raindrops. He had seen or heard us, I knew.
I turned my head towards Harry, the tip of my nose scraping the underside of the tree.
‘Can you go right under?’ I asked, hoping we could slip beneath the tree and get out the other side. The trunk wasn’t lying flat on the ground. Roots or branches must have held it up at either end.
‘The gap’s not wide enough,’ he said. ‘I’m wedged in as far as I can go.’
‘Are you okay?’ I whispered.
‘I’m okay,’ he croaked.
Harry will get us out of this, I thought.
But I didn’t believe it any more.
I heard the crack and snap of Kelly coming up the slope. He was so close now I could hear his asthmatic wheeze, and I turned to see the dark, round shape of his head appear above the edge of the rock. He pulled himself up onto flatter ground, pushed up off his gut, knelt, stood and hunched forward, hands resting on his knees. He took three belts on his puffer. His breathing sounded a lot worse than Harry’s.
It was thirty seconds or so before he straightened and moved on, his heavy boots crunching the ground, steps slow and deliberate, drawing nearer and nearer to our hiding place. He pulled up maybe four metres away and stood dead still. My ears felt hot and I could hear my pulse banging away in them. Surely he could hear it, too. Kelly took a few more steps until he was standing right next to the fallen tree – so close I could have reached out and pulled one of the laces on his black boots. I could almost smell the crooked cop through the thick, raw scent of damp earth. He turned around, facing the other way. He must have known he was close but not how close.
He leaned back against the fallen tree, right where Harry and I had been leaning. The heel of his boot was about twenty centimetres from my face. I breathed so slowly and quietly I started to wonder if I was getting enough oxygen. I could feel Harry’s shoulder pressed against mine and there was an electric current that passed back and forth between us like we were two integral parts of a circuit. I had always dreamt of being this close to my father, working on a case together. This wasn’t quite what I had planned but, pressed in on all sides by the wet, night earth, a fallen tree, a broken police officer and my dad, I almost felt like I knew him. All the chasing and wondering who my dad was and whether he cared about me felt like it had been pointless. Here we were, breathing the same air, connected and stuck, all out of choices, and the mystery of him fell away. We weren’t so different. I’d always wondered who he was but maybe I was really wondering who I am. And in that moment I knew. We were two branches of the same tree. He was part of me and I was part of him. Inseparable. All the anger and fear seemed to fall away.
I sat with this strange feeling for a minute or more before Mick Kelly straightened up, took two more hits on his puffer and moved slowly away from the tree. He started to climb the next steep part of the hill, dissolving into darkness.
Harry and I lay silent and still for another few minutes, my breathing falling into rhythm with his, our arms still pressed together. I turned my head back to him, scraping my nose on the tree again and whispered, ‘Should we go?’
‘Do you think he’s gone?’ Harry asked. ‘I can’t see.’
‘I think so.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s do what you said. We’ll go over the tree, head back towards the cliff, find that track.’
I started to slide out and Harry wriggled out after me. I struggled to my feet.
‘Let me go over first,’ Harry muttered, groaning and holding his lower back as he straightened and stood. ‘Then I’ll pull you over. Give me a boost.’
I locked my hands together and he put his left foot between them. I balanced on my left leg and boosted him up onto the tree that had saved our lives. He straddled the wide trunk then reached down for me. He grabbed my wrists and I grabbed his and he pulled hard. I tried to get a foothold but my sneaker skated off the slippery surface. He gripped my wrists tighter, yanked me upwards and, this time, I reached my left leg on top of the fallen tree and grappled my way over. Just as I made it to the top I stopped and listened: heavy footsteps crunching through bush further up the slope.
‘Get down!’ Harry tore me to the ground, slipped his arm around me and we ran as best we could, dodging thin saplings and wide gums, raindrops bombing us from above. Panic coursed through us as I leaned again on the surprising strength of my father’s tired, twisted body. The pain in my right knee beneath the blood-soaked bandage was nuclear, but Kelly was coming. He must have found a way up and around the tree.
We drove forward, on and on, searching for any sign of the track we’d come down but nothing looked familiar. Moments later we came out of the tree line and Harry stopped sharp. A knife-like wind carved through us. We were standing just a metre or two from the cliff edge. We had missed the track somehow. Behind us, slightly further up the hill, Kelly stormed through the undergrowth.
‘Let’s go.’ I pulled Harry but he wouldn’t move.
‘I can’t.’
Kelly’s footsteps were charging diagonally down the hill towards us.
‘Yes, you can.’
‘No. I can’t,’ he said.
‘Please.’
Then Kelly was upon us. He materialised from the darkness, wheezing, exhausted, and pointing the gun directly at us.
Mick Kelly clipped me so hard across the face, the side of my head lit up like a firecracker. I was thrown down onto the rough sandstone. My ears rang and my vision danced with tiny, magical specks of white.
Kelly punched Harry in the stomach and I felt it in my own stomach, felt the air evacuate his lungs as he doubled over. Kelly grabbed Harry’s shoulder and straightened him up.
‘Thanks for that,’ Harry said, stifling a cough.
Kelly stood back, pointing the weapon at us. His hand was shaking. His breathing sounded like someone had their hand wrapped around his lungs, squeezing tight. I stood and looked behind me. There was a metre of sandstone before the cliff dropped away into that bottomless chasm below. The wind rushed up, turning my wet clothes to ice. Kelly wiped the rain and sweat off his face with the soaking sleeve of his long white shirt.
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