Tristan Bancks - The Fall

You’re not a police officer, I thought.

‘What are you doing, Mick?’ Harry asked.

I wondered how much history there was between them. Has Kelly always hated my dad? Is that what this is about? And what about the other reporter, Merrin?

‘Taking care of business,’ Kelly said.

‘You don’t need to.’

‘You don’t think so?’ Kelly asked.

‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’

This was not a question. Harry was confirming with Kelly, like he knew. Kelly held my dad’s eye.

‘We’ve got video of the whole thing,’ Harry continued. ‘Sam’s not the only one who knows what you did. Silencing us won’t achieve anything.’

Kelly didn’t speak.

‘We’ve looked at the footage,’ Harry said. ‘You didn’t mean to do it, did you? To push him?’

‘Don’t try to be pals with me now.’

‘I haven’t done anything to you,’ Harry said.

‘Outwitted,’ Kelly muttered.

I knew what he meant right away. It was the title of the article my dad had written a few weeks back about cops being outmanoeuvred by young, tech-smart gangs.

‘I know what it’s like to feel like you’re past your use-by date,’ Harry said. ‘I feel the same way but this isn’t–’

‘Every day, one of you guys writes something about how useless we are and it just makes it harder. You’re s’posed to be working with us, not against us.’

‘So you think if you kill the messengers the news will stop flowing? That’s not how it works, Mick.’

There was a sound further up the slope behind Kelly and he swung around to look, shining his torch again for a couple of seconds before snapping it off. He kept his gun trained on us. In Harry Garner: Crime Reporter my dad would have delivered a swift jujitsu chop to the neck and disarmed Kelly.

The sound could have been a loud rain-splat or a possum or bird, I figured. Kelly must have thought the same. He turned back to us. The clouds parted for a moment, making everything silvery-edged. Kelly’s hair shone brightly.

‘Let us go, Mick,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve known you twenty-five years. You’re a good bloke. You pushed him in a struggle. You’ll do some time but it’ll be worse if you follow through with this. They’ll put you away for life.’

‘Not if it looks like you did it.’

‘What?’ Harry asked.

‘Jealous father doesn’t want to give kid back to his mum and, whoops, they both go over a cliff. I don’t think people will have too much trouble believing that.’

Harry lunged forward without warning, grabbing Kelly’s arm. The weapon fired in the struggle. The blaze of orange light from the barrel and the sharpness of the bang cut the night in two and the next second seemed to stretch for a minute. I thought the shot had missed us, had fired out over the cliff, but then my father bent double, growling and grarling with pain. I saw blood blooming like a flower at the knee of his grey pants. I’d read somewhere that it was one of the most painful places to be shot, the knee. Harry put his hand over it to stem the blood flow and, without thinking, I put my hand over his, feeling the warmth of his blood on my palm, and I cried.

There was screaming then and I looked up.

‘Police! Nobody move! Drop the weapon!’

The voice was like an explosion. Kelly turned and slammed on his torch to reveal two men in dark blue raincoats moving quickly towards us from behind the fat trunks of two ghostly gum trees. Their torches and weapons were trained on Kelly.

‘Show me your hands. Hands over your head!’ said another voice.

‘DROP IT NOW!’

Police officers. Real ones. Not like Kelly. I didn’t know how but they had come for us.

Kelly raised his forearm to his eyes, hiding his face from the torchlight, then turned and waved the gun at me, shaking it again. Instinctively, I stepped back, trying to protect myself.

‘DROP THE WEAPON!’ one of the officers said. ‘LAST CHANCE!’

My foot reached for the ground behind me but I felt only open space. I looked down and realised I was falling. My dad’s hand reached for my shoulder. ‘Sam!’ He caught the neck of my t-shirt and ripped it all the way to the bottom but I continued to slip away over the edge. I leaned forward, clutching and scraping at the air to take his hand, but I was too late. I scratched at wet earth and rock on the cliff face as it blurred by, tearing my fingertips, ripping off my nails, then grating my face. My chin knocked something hard and my brain seemed to fly apart. There was freefall, infinity, empty air, as I twisted down into the abyss.

It isn’t like the funerals you see on TV – people with black hats, trench coats and umbrellas standing around a hole in the ground as the coffin is lowered, the camera craning down through an elm tree while an old guy with a white collar mutters, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

Hardly anyone wears black. Outside, the morning light is soft and there are little kids running around on the grass at the side of the church playing tip. No one is happy, exactly, but most people greet each other with a smile. Over near a birdbath, a lady about the same age as my dad cries and a man in a crumpled oversized suit hugs her.

I’ve never been to a funeral before. I had never done a lot of things before the past couple of weeks – met my father, seen a dead body, helped solve a crime.

Inside, my dad rests his hand on my shoulder for a moment as he wheels my chair, which makes it not so scary.

The funeral is not mine. I did not die. Well, I did, and then I didn’t.

I spent nine days in hospital, until a little over an hour ago. My first couple of days I was living inside a thick cloud but I have two clear memories. One where my eyes slammed open and the world rushed in, warm and yellow. It was daytime and my parents were there. Both of them. My mother’s face erupted in tears. She said things but I can’t remember what. I was coming down from anaesthetic and painkillers, but the memory will stay with me always – the first time in my life I had seen my parents in the same room together.

My second memory, when my mind felt slightly less muddled, was of Scarlet and her mum sitting by my bed. Scarlet told me what happened the night I was kidnapped. She had taken Magic upstairs and woken her mum. They had rushed down and seen the broken glass of the foyer door. They saw Kelly slamming the boot of a red car out front. They called the police on Scarlet’s mum’s phone and realised that I still had Scarlet’s phone. They gave the police the login for Scarlet’s phone-finder app and the cops followed Mick Kelly’s car out west all the way to Lithgow. He had not switched off the phones. My dad said this was sloppy, a rookie mistake.

‘When do you think it’s going to start?’ I ask Harry.

‘Soon,’ he says and he pushes my wheelchair right down to the front of the church, so we’re not blocking the aisle. I feel self-conscious in the chair. In hospital nobody looked at me funny but this is my first time out. A lady stares at me, but when she sees me looking she quickly averts her eyes. It kind of annoys me.

People are still filing in, filling up the seats in the long, narrow church. There are a few uniformed police officers up the back; men and women, stern-faced, maybe ashamed of what Kelly is responsible for. They still showed up. Harry nods his head to one of the cops, who nods back. Harry’s commandment number two states that crime reporters need to know cops and criminals. Merrin must have worked closely with these guys.

There is a group of four large men in the middle of the church, five o’clock shadows, two of them in sunglasses, all of them sweating and squeezed into black or blue suits. They seem bound together by some invisible thread. Crims? I wondered. Although who knows what a criminal is supposed to look like. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in the past couple of weeks it’s commandment number six: never assume anything.