Tristan Bancks - The Fall

‘Does Dad still think Uncle Chris is an idiot?’ Olive asked.

‘Shhh,’ Mum said. ‘He’s organised a new car for us to drive for the holiday.’ She gathered her things.

‘What?’ Ben asked.

Mum ignored him. ‘Everyone out.’

Ben looked through the back window to where Dad was shaking his brother’s hand. Uncle Chris gave Dad a grey nylon sports bag with black handles and looked over at Ben. Then they walked up the driveway to an old station wagon parked in the street.

Clumps of hair fell to the ugly orange tiles of the motel bathroom.

‘Hold still,’ Mum said.

‘How much are you cutting off?’ Ben asked. ‘I don’t wanna have a haircut.’

‘Don’t be silly. We’re all having haircuts.’

‘Why?’

‘Holiday haircuts,’ she said. ‘That’s what you do on holidays.’

‘As if,’ Ben said. The only guy he could remember coming back from holidays with a haircut was Robert Dewar, who lived two doors up from Nan. He’d fallen asleep chewing gum and it went all through his hair and he had to have it shaved. He’d returned to school bald.

‘It’s looking better already,’ Mum said. ‘I forgot you had eyes.’

‘Have you ever cut hair before?’ Ben asked, doubtful.

‘You know I’ve always wanted to. I’m going to cut mine in a minute,’ she said, snipping carefully away at his fringe. Ben could see her fingernails in close-up, bitten back to the nail bed. The tips of her fingers looked red and sore.

‘I hope you do as bad a job on yours as you’re doing on mine,’ Ben said. ‘And why aren’t you cutting Olive’s?’

‘Her hair’s too beautiful. She can wear pigtails or a bun. Look down,’ Mum said, her tongue poking out as she concentrated on steering around Ben’s ear.

‘Why don’t we just wait till morning and go to a hairdresser?’ Ben asked.

They had been driving for about five hours when the rain became too heavy to see the road. The wipers on the car Uncle Chris had lent them did not work well. The car was even older than the Green Machine. Ben couldn’t work out why they had bothered swapping. So they had pulled off the highway into Rest Haven, a deadbeat motel with a flickering fluorescent sign out the front.

‘Don’t use your whiny voice,’ Mum said.

She often accused him of whining, so Ben said in his deepest, most manly voice, ‘Why don’t we just go to a hairdresser?’

‘It’s more fun this way,’ she said.

‘What’s fun about having your hair hacked off by a maniac with a pair of nail scissors?’

‘Mind your tongue,’ she said. ‘Head down.’

Ben watched another handful of thick brown hair drop to the tiles. There was more hair on the floor than Ben remembered having on his head. Another large clump fell. He looked up into the mirror again and a tiny scream leapt from his mouth. His hair was an inch long.

‘I think it looks good,’ she said. ‘More like a boy.’

‘Good? I look like a toilet brush!’

‘Oh, stop complaining, you big boob,’ she said.

‘Boob?’ he said, raising his voice and standing up. ‘I’m not a “boob”. People are going to be cleaning toilets with my head.’

‘Sit!’ Mum said, like she was speaking to Golden, their dog.

‘No,’ Ben said.

‘Oi!’ he heard from the next room.

He looked at Mum, thinking for a second. There was no point getting Dad upset. He turned and studied his reflection in the mirror. ‘This room is where hair comes to die.’

‘It’s a new look.’

‘Holiday haircuts,’ he grunted as he flopped back into the chair.

A grin spread over Mum’s lips as she tidied up the sides.

‘I’m hungry,’ Ben said.

‘Well, we don’t have anything. It won’t hurt you to skip a few meals.’

Ben looked at her in the mirror. She knew he was paranoid about his weight because he’d told her the things kids said at school. She gave him an apologetic look and kept cutting.

‘Ow!’ he said, grabbing his ear. He looked at his hand. Blood.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Let me look at it.’

Ben stormed out of the bathroom, squeezing his ear to stop the blood flow. The room was dimly lit with brick walls, a double bed and a tired-looking couch. Dad was looking out the window through a gap in the faded pink curtains, speaking to someone on the motel phone. Olive was asleep on the bed with Bonzo, lit by the glow of a greyhound race on TV.

‘Ben!’ Mum called.

He headed for the front door and yanked it open but the security chain jarred it.

‘Hey!’ Dad said, putting the phone down.

‘What?’

‘Has your mother finished with you?’

Ben reached for his ear. He dabbed at it and showed Dad the blood seeping into the shallow channels of his fingerprints. If he was honest there wasn’t actually much blood. He would have liked there to be a bit more, but it was still blood. Mum came out of the bathroom.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She’s finished.’

Dad looked at Mum. Mum looked at Ben. Ben looked at Dad. And that is how his hair stayed. Short and spiky with sticky-uppy bits.

Dad was in the butcher’s chair next. He swore a lot and Mum threatened to cut his ear off too if he didn’t stop complaining. He stopped.

Ben sat on a green vinyl seat that had a dodgy leg, and stared into the car park through the rain-drizzled window. He grabbed his old brown leather notebook from his bag. Ben had found the notebook in the cramped office at the back of Nan’s house where she kept Caramello Koalas in the middle drawer of a roll-top desk. The notebook had been his grandfather’s. When Pop was alive he had jotted some numbers in the front. Sums written in smudgy blue ink. Ben could barely read the writing but he kept those pages in the book.

At the back of the notebook, on the last page, there was another bit of Pop’s scrawly writing. These words: ‘An old man tells his grandson one evening that there is a battle raging inside him, inside all of us. A terrible battle between two wolves. One wolf is bad – pride, envy, jealousy, greed, guilt, self-pity. The other wolf is good – kindness, hope, love, service, truth, humility. The child asks, “Who will win?” The grandfather answers simply. “The one you feed.”’

Ben liked the words. He liked that they were from Pop, who had died when Ben was two. Nan said that, up until then, the two of them had been inseparable. Pop had taken him everywhere, always repeating a rhyme that Ben had loved: ‘Ben Silver is no good. Chop him up for firewood. If he is no good for that, feed him to the old tomcat.’

Ben chewed on the rubber end of his pencil for a moment before writing this list:

Police

Holiday

Uncle Chris. Grey nylon bag. Black handles.

The new old car

Haircuts

Holidays were rubbish, Ben decided. And the cabin would be even worse. Nature. Ben wondered how long it would be till they could go home and he could finish making his movie. He was going to miss ordering his lunch at school tomorrow. And soccer at lunchtime. Why couldn’t James or Gus have come on holidays with them?

Cars pulled in and out of the car park, headlights shining on hundreds of little raindrop jewels racing down the window. Out the front, the sign for Rest Haven flickered to an uneven beat. The cranky lady from reception crossed the car park holding a red umbrella, a small carton of milk and some towels. She looked at Ben, quickly looked away but then glanced back. He wondered if she thought his hair was weird. Or his family.

When they checked in, Dad had refused to show her his driver’s licence, saying that he’d lost his wallet. Ben had seen him with his wallet at a petrol station on the motorway half an hour earlier so he went out to the car, brought Dad’s wallet to him and said, ‘Here it is!’ But, rather than being thankful, Dad was angry.