Tristan Bancks: The Fall

I imagined him moving across the lounge room, past my sofa bed and into Harry’s room, and I felt sick and angry.

Just soften, Mum would say. You don’t always have to be on the attack. What’s got into you? You’re acting like a teenager.

Well, guess what? I am one. Almost.

I would turn thirteen tomorrow.

Something fell to the floor in the apartment. A book or ornament. Harry didn’t have many. Cupboards were opened and closed. Maybe someone else would hear it, too. Maybe one of the neighbours would come. Or Harry. Maybe he would come home.

After a minute or two the muted thuds and bangs eased. I clamped Magic’s snout shut to quiet the panting. She tried to shake her head from my grip but I wouldn’t let go.

The floorboards on the landing squeaked again as the man moved out of the apartment. He stopped. I could imagine his eyes resting on the cupboard door under the stairs. Magic’s breathing would give us away. Saliva dribbled out of her soft, warm mouth onto my hands but I held on.

I had a flash in my mind of the man looking up at me from five storeys below. I balanced on my chopstick of a left leg and silently shifted my grip on the crutch. I held it low and tight so that if the man opened the door I could deliver a hard, fast blow right up under his nose. I had never done anything like that before but my characters did that stuff all the time. It was easier to be violent with a pencil than it was with a crutch. I wondered if a blow like that could be deadly. I hoped not. I didn’t want to hurt anyone but I was pretty sure that the man did not have my best interests at heart.

Shhhhh-shhhhh-shhhh-shhhhh, said Magic’s nose, then I heard the grind and pop of floorboards as the man walked, slow and cautious. I felt the board beneath my foot rise gently. Maybe he was standing on the other end, pushing my end up like a seesaw. Could he feel my weight? The resistance? He coughed a big, meaty cough, and I felt the vibration of it along the board and up through my bare foot. I was all fear. No flesh or bones or breath. Pure fear. He knows I’m here. He knows.

I heard what sounded like two sprays of an asthma puffer. The floorboard lowered. The man moved off, suppressing another cough. I heard a door open nearby. A neighbour? No. Maybe the fire hose reel cupboard opposite the lift. He was checking in there. That meant he would check in my cupboard, too. He would be silly not to. I clutched that crutch handle like my life depended on it, because it did.

There were footsteps. The lift door screeched open, closed, and then it started moving off, down through the building and away.

Before I opened my eyes I heard the roar of city traffic below. I waited for the sound of my father pouring hot water into his big Herald mug, jiggling three tea bags, stirring in four heaped teaspoons of sugar, plopping in a splash of milk and dropping the spoon noisily into the sink.

The sounds did not come. In their place was the huffing of Magic sleep-breathing, and the diabolical stench of her breath. I opened my eyes on almost complete darkness. My bottom felt as hard and cold as the timber floor beneath me. My leg was twisted. I tried to straighten it and felt bone grind against bone or metal beneath my skin.

Is Harry home? Maybe that’s what woke me.

Details of our last conversation washed over me. ‘Why do you think you and Mum broke up?’ That’s what I’d asked. Like an idiot. He had been at the dining table, laptop open, keeping an eye on the screen as he paged through a notebook, scribbling. I was tucked into the sofa bed, watching him. It must have been about 10 pm when I asked the question. He muttered an answer about ‘two people who love each other very much but sometimes…’ and so on. Mum had given me this one many times, but I wanted the truth. So I asked if he had thought about me much over the years and he ummed and aahed and got up to make tea. ‘Course I have,’ he said. ‘All the time.’

I asked why he had never been in touch and if he got the letter I sent. I was sitting up now. I really wanted to know. He stayed over in the kitchenette, not looking at me, as the jug boiled and roared. ‘Do you think I’ll see you again after this week?’ I asked.

He grabbed his coat off the back of a dining chair and said, ‘I’ll just pop out and grab some milk. I’ll only be a minute. You go off to sleep. It’s late. We’ll talk about all this tomorrow.’

And that was it. He hadn’t come back. If I hadn’t pressed him maybe I wouldn’t be in this predicament.

I pushed up with my good leg and eased my back up the cupboard wall. Magic struggled to her feet, too, yawning eagerly into the darkness. There was a weak crack of daylight beneath the door. I checked my phone: 6.06 am.

I eased the door open. Magic tap-danced around my feet. My stomach lurched and acid scratched at my throat as I peered out. The front door to my father’s apartment was open about a third of the way but I couldn’t see inside.

Someone ran downstairs from the floor above, making old timber groan right above my head. I panicked and closed the cupboard door again. Was it someone from the apartment directly above my father’s? 6A? The footsteps moved quickly across the landing and down the next flight of stairs. Not heavy footsteps. Light. A jogger. A lady or a kid. The girl I had seen through the peephole in Harry’s front door on Monday, maybe? Probably her. She was the only person I had heard or seen using the stairs. Was she from the apartment where the man fell? Had she been asleep? Was the big, asthmatic man her father? I couldn’t rule it out. Never assume anything. Number six in Harry’s Ten Commandments.

I carefully pushed the cupboard door open again. Magic scurried past me, sniffing the fire hose reel cupboard, then sniffing around the door of apartment 5B, the one next to ours.

The stairwell smelt like breakfast and sounded like morning TV.

I moved slowly towards Harry’s apartment, my mud-spattered feet so cold they no longer seemed to exist. My bandage was wet and filthy from my fall in the yard. I didn’t remember the doctor suggesting mud and lots of exercise to heal my leg.

‘Harry?’ I whispered.

I listened for movement.

‘Harry?’

I willed my father to appear – black shoes, smart grey pants, crisp white shirt, trench coat, collar up, neat black hair. Just like in Harry Garner: Crime Reporter . I imagined him just as I drew him and for some reason, in that moment, I couldn’t think what the real Harry looked like. I needed to hear him speak, to say to me, ‘How’d you sleep, fella?’ like he had every morning this week, to make him real again.

Magic sniffed at our door, nudging it wider. I grabbed her collar and saw the mess inside the apartment. The furniture was all in place and Harry didn’t have many possessions, but what had been on shelves or in drawers was now strewn on the floor – paper, books, food, a few ornaments, cushions.

Magic strained at her collar, trying desperately to run off into the apartment. In the end, I couldn’t hold her. The dog darted inside, feet sliding on the matting, her tail stiff. She sniffed everything that had fallen.

I flicked on the light, checked behind the door, then went to the kitchenette. I slid open a drawer and wrapped my icy fingers around a large knife. I gripped it tight and crutched across to the bathroom, knife pointed forward like a bayonet.

I listened through the ruckus of Magic’s doggy detective-work. I stopped a couple of metres back from the bathroom, took a breath and listened to the bath tap drip onto that rusty stain. I tried to think of my dad looking in the mirror each morning, plucking grey hairs from the side of his head as though it would somehow stop more from growing. He would stand back and look at himself, pleased, like he didn’t even see the other 25,000 grey hairs.