Tristan Bancks: The Fall

‘See you in seven minutes,’ Dad said into his phone. He threw it into Mum’s lap. ‘Turn that off for me. Get in, Ben!’ he said, revving the engine. The car jerked forward.

Ben slid into the back seat. ‘The police just came to our house!’ he said, breathless.

He heaved the door closed as Dad spun the car around, laying rubber on the road. ‘What are you doing? Where are we going?’

No one said anything.

‘Mum?’

‘Holidays,’ Mum said.

They had never been on a holiday before. Ben got up on his knees and looked through the dirty back window. Golden, the tripod dog, was still tied up to the rusted, doorless car on the front lawn.

‘What about G–’

‘Nan’s coming to get her,’ Mum said. ‘Put your belt on.’

Ben heard a siren as the car swung around the corner onto the old highway.

‘Red light!’ Mum shouted.

Dad kept driving.

No one said anything for a few minutes. Olive sat there, looking out the window, sucking her thumb and clutching Bonzo, her dirty, grey stuffed rabbit.

Car yards flicked by.

‘Where are we going on holidays?’ Ben asked.

Dad adjusted his side and rear-view mirrors, weaving between utes, vans and semitrailers.

‘Mum?’

She did not respond. Everything felt odd. Maybe it was because Ben had never been on holidays before. Maybe because the police had just knocked on their door. He slumped down on the back seat, thinking.

‘Why are we in such a damn hurry?’ he asked.

‘Watch your language!’ Mum said.

‘Did you hear me say that the police just came to our house?’ Ben continued. ‘And why didn’t you tell me this morning that we were going on holidays?’

Dad hit himself on the forehead four times with a balled fist. ‘That kid asks so many questions!’

‘Sorry,’ Ben said.

‘Don’t apologise all the time,’ Dad snapped. ‘It’s weak.’

‘Sorry,’ he said again.

‘The holiday was a surprise,’ Mum told him. ‘You’re always asking about a holiday. This is it. Our first family holiday.’

It felt weird to hear Mum saying ‘family holiday’. They weren’t really one of those family-movie-night, camp-in-the-backyard, let’s-discuss-this-and-get-everyone’s-opinion kind of families. They were more of a dinner-in-front-of-the-TV, key’s-under-the-mat, if-you-want-breakfast-make-it-yourself kind of family.

‘Can I bring a friend?’ Ben asked.

‘No,’ his parents both said at once.

‘But James took Gus when he went on holidays.’

No one said anything.

‘Where are we going?’

Rain drummed on the car roof as they charged past a petrol station, a funeral home, a chicken shop.

‘Just up the coast,’ Mum said, looking at Dad, whose eyes darted from road to rear-vision mirror and back again.

‘Where to? Gosford?’

‘No.’

‘Kings Bay? We’re going to the beach at Kings Bay!’ Ben said excitedly. He had wanted to go to Kings Bay ever since Nan had sent him a postcard from there when he was little.

‘No.’

Mum’s phone pinged. She picked it up and started typing.

‘Turn it off!’ Dad said.

‘Why?’

Dad gave her a fierce look.

Mum switched off the phone.

Ben and Olive glanced sideways at one another. They had never seen their mother switch her phone off before.

‘We’re not going to the cabin, are we?’ Ben asked.

Mum turned and looked through the gap between headrest and seat. ‘Yes, we’re going to the cabin.’

‘Yessss!’ Olive said, raising both arms in the air, then plugging her thumb back into her mouth.

‘Boooooo!’ Ben said. ‘I don’t want to. I want to go home. I’m in the middle of my movie.’

He had been hearing about his grandfather’s cabin in the hills behind Kings Bay all his life. When Dad was a kid Pop went up there, fishing and hunting rabbits, a couple of times a year. Dad said he was hardly ever allowed to go, even though he’d really wanted to.

Nature wasn’t Ben’s favourite thing – freaky insects, animals, dirt. He preferred being in his room playing games, watching TV, eating. This had never been a problem because the Silvers had not left the suburbs in the thirteen years since Ben was born.

‘Get out of the way!’ Dad yelled at someone through his open window.

Dad was skinny and serious. An ex-mechanic, salesman, now motor wrecker. He wore an armful of tattoos, black wraparound sunglasses and a dirty cap with a petrol company logo on it. In the rear-view mirror Ben could see Dad’s chipped front tooth. He looked rat-like.

Ben sometimes wondered how Dad had ended up with Mum. April Silver: ten years younger than Dad, tall, brown hair. People said she could have been a model years ago, but then Ben was born and that changed everything. So now she worked at the wreckers instead. Dad thought he ran the business but Mum did. Ben knew.

Ben sat back and looked out the window at the signs going by. AAA Lighting. Craig’s Concreting. The Golden Wok Chinese. He thought about police and squeezed his bottom lip. He closed his eyes and saw his stop-motion movie playing on the cinema screen at the back of his eyelids. He saw what he had already shot – the crime, the car chase, then the run through the forest. Maybe heading toward a creepy cabin. It wasn’t in the script yet but maybe they would go to a cabin, the zombie thief’s hideout – abandoned, trees hanging low over the roof.

The car jerked and revved hard as Dad flung it back a gear. Ben’s eyes snapped open, ending his imaginary cinema show.

They hurried along the old highway, wipers scraping the windscreen. Ben didn’t mind his characters going to a creepy cabin but he did not want to go to one himself. He wanted to be back in his room, happy, comfortable. He tried to think of anything that might stall them.

‘What about clothes and stuff? I’m still in school uniform.’

‘It’s all right,’ Mum said. ‘We’ll get new ones.’

‘New clothes?’

‘Yep. That’s what you do on holidays.’

Ben thought about this for a second. He had never heard of it before.

‘I thought you guys hated holidays,’ he said.

Dad laughed, which Ben liked. Usually Dad only laughed when he was with his mates.

‘What about school?’ Ben said. ‘Didn’t we just have school holidays?’

‘Now you’ve got more,’ Mum said.

‘Can you please tell Maugrim to slow down,’ Olive said quietly, then stuck her thumb back into her mouth.

‘You tell him,’ Ben said.

Olive shook her head. She had not spoken to Dad in over a week. One night at dinner, during the ads, she had called him Maugrim, the evil wolf from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Dad was so angry when he found out who Maugrim was, he sent her to her room with no dessert and put Bonzo away for a week. Since then she had only spoken to Dad when necessary and only through an interpreter. Olive did that kind of thing sometimes. She was a tough little kid. Ben would never dare stand up to Dad like that.

Dad checked his rear-view and side mirrors and took a sharp right in front of oncoming traffic. Ben was thrown sideways toward Olive, who shoved him away. ‘Get off me. You stink like poo,’ she said.

Ben sat up. Dad swung a fast left, then gunned it up a street lined with brown brick houses. They were a bit nicer than Ben’s house. Most had basketball hoops and toys and bikes strewn around the yard. Two kids in yellow raincoats ran off the road as Dad powered toward them. A hundred metres further up, he pulled into a driveway where a man stood next to an empty garage. He wore a white, pinstriped business shirt and black pants. He was tall and skinny with ginger-coloured hair, thinning on top. Uncle Chris. Even though he lived so close, they had not seen Dad’s brother in over a year. Dad drove into the garage, switched off the engine and got out.