Tristan Bancks: The Fall

There are lots of journalists, too. They keep coming up and shaking my dad’s hand. A woman with dark-brown hair and a knee-length black coat, a little older than Mum, says, ‘Hello, Harry.’ I recognise her immediately. It’s the woman I saw him meet in Pan, the bakery across the street from the apartment.

My dad shakes her hand and she smiles at him but in the restrained, wistful way that I figure you’re supposed to smile at a funeral. She smells like musk sticks.

She looks at me. ‘I’m Kate. I’ve heard all about you,’ she says in a hushed tone, reaching down to shake my hand. ‘I didn’t even know your father had a son until this week, but in the story we ran he says you’re a more savvy crime reporter than he is. I might have to hire you in a few years’ time.’

I know it’s just one of those dumb things adults say to make kids feel good but I can’t stop the smile from creeping across my face.

‘This boy’s a lifesaver,’ Harry says.

Me? I thought. He gave me CPR at the bottom of a cliff for half an hour and he calls me a lifesaver? Although maybe he means it in a different way. Not literally saving his life but changing it.

‘Enjoy your break, Harry,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to see you back there for a while. You’ve got forty years of holidays owing.’ She continues to the far end of the front row.

I shift uncomfortably in my chair, adjusting the hot, itchy cast on my leg. My right wrist and right leg were broken in the fall. My staples had to be removed and reset. Lots of cuts and bruising and swelling. My face looks fatter than Kelly’s. But they say my injuries are a miracle after a three-storey fall.

Harry and one of the officers found a way down the cliff in the light from the officer’s torch. Harry insisted on climbing down even with a bullet in his leg. I’d stopped breathing by the time they got there.

I landed on a thin strip of soft, muddy ground between two large sandstone slabs. Had it not been raining or had I landed thirty centimetres to the left or right I wouldn’t be here. I’d be in a coffin right now like John Merrin.

Harry had learnt to revive a plastic dummy on one of those first-aid courses that the Herald had forced him to take. He never thought that he’d have to use it on a living, breathing human, on his own flesh and blood.

My only memory of that time at the bottom of the cliff is of there being nothing and then, suddenly, feeling light and air being stuffed into me, like I was a soccer ball being pumped full of sunlight. The Herald article said my dad and the police officer kept me alive, lying there in the hammering rain and shivering dark, till the paramedics arrived.

‘We are gathered here,’ says a short, white-haired lady standing at a lectern at the front, ‘to pay our respects and to celebrate and honour the life of a brave journalist and much-loved husband and son, John Merrin. His family have requested that this not be a morbid occasion, rather a meditation on a life lived deliberately, with love, and in service to truth.’

My eyes flick from the lady speaking to the coffin containing Merrin to the stained-glass Jesus watching over it all and I wonder where the justice is in any of this. Mick Kelly is in jail awaiting trial but he’s still alive, while a man who dared expose incompetence in the police force lies here dead.

When Kelly received bad press for being an analogue, old-school cop in a digital world – a bit like my dad being an analogue journalist in a digital world – he didn’t adapt to new technology. Instead, he decided to firmly ‘encourage’ the city’s top crime journalists to stop reporting the story. He had spoken to Harry at a pub where journos and cops hang out together. Then he’d followed Harry home to give him a stronger hint as to how serious he was. Harry got curious and discovered the apartment that Kelly was using for off-the-record interrogations. Like Scarlet said, the apartment belonged to Marilyn Hill, who turned out to be an ex-cop, and her husband, Jack. They didn’t know what Kelly was using the apartment for. Harry moved in downstairs to keep an eye on things and had a friend set up the camera system. He hadn’t expected anything this bad to happen.

Based on Harry’s surveillance footage and my photos and statement, the investigators decided that it was a heated argument that went wrong, an accident. Kelly had brought Merrin to the apartment to warn him not to keep running these stories. They had argued, it got out of hand, Kelly pushed Merrin against the railing and he had fallen. This seemed to fit what I had heard and seen. Kelly was accused of manslaughter rather than murder, because they say he hadn’t planned it beforehand.

My dad squeezes my hand. Merrin’s brother stands at the front of the church next and tells funny stories about the two of them growing up together. He describes how his brother once locked him out of the house for an entire day and how they pranked each other with a remote control spider and chased each other with goat poo on a stick. He also talks about how he looked up to his brother, how he admired him for his belief in the power of journalism to inform and inspire.

A few others speak but the ceremony is short and soon the light-coloured timber coffin is carried past us by six men. We turn and watch it disappear through the tall double doors of the church, swallowed up by sunshine.

It could have been us. Both of us. My dad could have been the crime reporter having a disagreement with Kelly on that balcony. The afternoon that Kelly abducted me he had picked up Harry on the street outside the apartment building and held him in a storage facility. He could have done anything to him during that time. On the cliff face Harry could have been shot somewhere more serious than the knee. And I survived a four-storey fall. It’s hard not to look at the world a bit differently now.

Harry hobbles on his injured knee and wheels my chair up the aisle, following the procession of people. An old couple comes up and thanks me for my role in things. As they walk away Harry tells me they are Merrin’s parents and I try to think how they must feel.

Even though I’m being wheeled around, by the time we reach the tall, brass double doors I’m exhausted and feel like I want to sleep for ten hours. But when the warm May sun hits my face it reminds me of that feeling at the bottom of the cliff when my father brought me back to life and I’m glad for everything. Glad to be here, glad to have a father, a mother, happy to feel air in my lungs. In that moment, I don’t feel as though I have anything to be angry about any more.

Harry’s car pulls up in front of my house and I know that this is it. I look at him and he reaches over to the glove box and takes something out. He hands it to me – a single piece of blue-lined paper, folded into a rectangle. It fits neatly into the palm of my hand.

‘Read it,’ he says, and I feel a tightness in my throat.

I slowly unfold it and stare. It’s the letter that I sent to him when I was eight. I can’t believe he kept it. His answers are scrawled in blue pen next to my questions.

‘Turn it over,’ Harry says.

I do and there’s a letter from him.

Dear Sam

I have an apology to make. Many apologies, but let’s do it all in one. This is the hardest and most important thing I’ve ever written and I know I’ll mess it up. I’m allergic to soppiness and emotion, which may be why I’m so lonely.

I’ve been so focused on my work for years that I think I’ve probably pushed away anything else that could have given me happiness. I lost your mum and she’s the best person I ever met.

Spending these past couple of weeks with you, seeing how funny, smart and brave you are, I wish I’d been a better father. I’ve been kidnapped, shot and I almost lost you. That’s enough to jolt me out of my selfishness, for the moment at least. You’ve un-stuck me. I hope I’m not too late to earn back your trust.