Tristan Bancks: The Fall

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Two Wolves

The Fall

Mac Slater, Coolhunter

Mac Slater, Imaginator

It’s Yr Life (with Tempany Deckert)

My Life & Other Stuff I Made Up

My Life & Other Stuff that Went Wrong

My Life & Other Massive Mistakes

My Life & Other Exploding Chickens

My Life & Other Weaponised Muffins

‘You keep runnin’, you’ll only go to jail tired,’ Ben Silver muttered.

He hit the photo button on his battered video camera and took another picture. He reached across his forest set and moved the legs on two small clay figures. Ben was eye-level with the action, peering between trees made from cellophane and toilet rolls and other found things.

He often mumbled his characters’ lines as he shot a movie. Later, after he’d filmed everything, he would record the voices and add them to the pictures. He jotted the line in his brown leather notebook:

‘You keep runnin’, you’ll only go to jail tired.’

Ben took a bite from a microwaved jam doughnut. The jam was lava on his tongue and he dropped the doughnut onto the plate. The floor around him was littered with clothes, shoes, a game console, two controllers, a bike wheel with no tyre, a skate-board deck, schoolbooks, soccer boots, a jumbo-size packet of chips and plates from long-forgotten afternoon snacks. Ben’s favourite place. It was dark with the curtains closed, the only light coming from two lamps trained on the stop-motion set on his desk. Outside, his dog Golden barked like mad.

Within the Woods was Ben’s seventh stop-motion movie. In this scene a zombie thief named Dario Savini was running down a forest track with Detective Ben Silver, Sydney’s toughest cop, in pursuit. The detective was famous in Ben’s movies for vanquishing werewolves, delinquent kids and zombies.

There was a heavy knock.

‘Hello. Police!’

Ben froze. He looked at his clay cop, but clay Ben just stood there on one foot, mid-stride, frozen.

Another heavy knock on the front door. It definitely didn’t sound like Olive. She was in the backyard, playing pirates on the trampoline like she did every day after school.

Ben stood, walked quietly out of his bedroom and tiptoed up the hall, heart keeping time with his footsteps. He moved through the lounge room to the front window and peered carefully from behind the dusty grey curtain.

It was raining and two police officers were huddled under the front awning. One fat. One skinny. Skinny was a lady. A couple of police cars were parked on the kerb with two more cops standing under dark blue umbrellas next to one of the cars. Ben’s body surged with excitement and fear. His dream was to become a detective once he had finished high school.

Ben’s little sister came in through the broken sliding back door, soaking wet. ‘Who is it?’ Olive asked.

‘Shhh,’ he whispered, raising a hand to tell her to stop, but Olive kept coming. She was small, white-blonde, seven years old, one of the smartest kids Ben knew. She had already read The Hobbit by herself. For three weeks afterwards she refused to speak unless people called her Gandalf.

The knock again. The lady officer walked past the window. Ben tucked himself in behind the curtain. The officer disappeared around the side of the house.

Olive shuffled in front of Ben. ‘Police!’ she said in a too-loud voice. He placed his hand over her mouth. She peeled it off. ‘They’re coming to get you for what you did.’

Ben swallowed hard and moved slowly toward the door, wondering if Olive was right. Earlier, he had tied her to a chair in the bathroom and dangled a cockroach in front of her face, then dipped her toothbrush in the toilet. But it seemed like overkill for four police officers to be assigned to the case, even if it was a slow Tuesday at the station.

Ben opened the door just enough to peek out.

‘Good afternoon,’ the policeman said.

‘Hello,’ Ben said, squeezing his bottom lip.

The officer’s hand rested on the butt of a gun nestled in the holster on his right hip. ‘Are your parents in?’

Ben shook his head, still looking at the officer through a thirty-centimetre gap between door and frame. Ben was pleased to see that being slightly overweight didn’t stop you from getting into the force. Ben was slightly overweight himself. His nan said it was from the rotten dinners his parents fed him from the burger chain on the corner.

‘Can you please tell me where they are?’

The murmur of the highway nearby and the low hum of the tall electrical tower in the empty block across the street filled the space between them.

‘At work.’

‘You sure about that? We just need to have a quick word to them,’ the officer said, looking past Ben into the house.

‘Mm-hm.’

‘Have you seen them this afternoon at all?’

Ben shook his head. ‘They’re at work till 4.30.’

The officer flipped open a small notebook with a leather cover. ‘Ray Silver Motor Wreckers, 137 Hope Street?’

Ben nodded.

The female officer returned. ‘No one round there,’ she said, posting a tight-lipped smile to Ben.

‘Thank you for your help,’ said the man and they turned to go.

‘Do you want me to give them a message?’ Ben asked.

‘No, we’ll catch up with them,’ said the lady officer.

They walked quickly into the rain and up the cracked concrete path, past the three rusted, doorless cars that sat in the long grass of the Silvers’ front yard. Golden, a three-legged, sandy-coloured kelpie cross, was tied up to one of the decaying cars. She barked excitedly at the officers as they climbed into their vehicles. The hum of the electrical tower was swallowed by the roar of the police cars as they sped off up Cooper Street.

Ben Silver closed the door and stood there, not knowing what to do. Sweat trickled down both sides of his forehead.

‘Are they going to put you in jail?’ Olive asked.

He went to the coffee table and picked up the phone, thoughts whirling. He put the phone down. He squeezed his bottom lip.

‘What did they want?’ Olive asked. ‘Did they say that dipping your sister’s toothbrush in the toilet was a very bad thing to do?’

Ben picked the phone up again and dialled the number for the wreckers. The phone rang. And rang.

He heard tyres skidding on gravel out the front.

‘Cop!’ Ben’s dad called from the car. That was his nickname for Ben, because he asked so many questions.

Ben raced to the door and looked out. The Green Machine, his father’s 1967 Valiant 770, was parked half on the road, half on the footpath. Painted flames licked the side and bonnet of the car.

‘Let’s go!’ Dad shouted. Mum walked quickly toward the house, high heels clattering on the wet path. Olive squeezed past Ben and ran out into the rain to meet her.

‘Grab a few things to do in the car,’ Mum said. ‘We’ve got a surprise for you.’

‘What is it? What is it?’ Olive asked.

‘If I told you it wouldn’t be a surprise. Quick as you can.’

Ben thought for a second and headed to his room. He grabbed his schoolbag, threw in his notebook and pencil, his camera, some batteries. He scurried up the hall, pulled the front door closed and jammed his feet into a pair of sneakers. He held his backpack over his head as an umbrella and ran up the path. The back door of the car hung open and Olive was inside. Mum slammed the front passenger door and strapped her belt.