The Fall

by Tristan Bancks

  I sat with this strange feeling for a minute or more before Mick Kelly straightened up, took two more hits on his puffer and moved slowly away from the tree. He started to climb the next steep part of the hill, dissolving into darkness.

  Harry and I lay silent and still for another few minutes, my breathing falling into rhythm with his, our arms still pressed together. I turned my head back to him, scraping my nose on the tree again and whispered, ‘Should we go?’

  ‘Do you think he’s gone?’ Harry asked. ‘I can’t see.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s do what you said. We’ll go over the tree, head back towards the cliff, find that track.’

  I started to slide out and Harry wriggled out after me. I struggled to my feet.

  ‘Let me go over first,’ Harry muttered, groaning and holding his lower back as he straightened and stood. ‘Then I’ll pull you over. Give me a boost.’

  I locked my hands together and he put his left foot between them. I balanced on my left leg and boosted him up onto the tree that had saved our lives. He straddled the wide trunk then reached down for me. He grabbed my wrists and I grabbed his and he pulled hard. I tried to get a foothold but my sneaker skated off the slippery surface. He gripped my wrists tighter, yanked me upwards and, this time, I reached my left leg on top of the fallen tree and grappled my way over. Just as I made it to the top I stopped and listened: heavy footsteps crunching through bush further up the slope.

  ‘Get down!’ Harry tore me to the ground, slipped his arm around me and we ran as best we could, dodging thin saplings and wide gums, raindrops bombing us from above. Panic coursed through us as I leaned again on the surprising strength of my father’s tired, twisted body. The pain in my right knee beneath the blood-soaked bandage was nuclear, but Kelly was coming. He must have found a way up and around the tree.

  We drove forward, on and on, searching for any sign of the track we’d come down but nothing looked familiar. Moments later we came out of the tree line and Harry stopped sharp. A knife-like wind carved through us. We were standing just a metre or two from the cliff edge. We had missed the track somehow. Behind us, slightly further up the hill, Kelly stormed through the undergrowth.

  ‘Let’s go.’ I pulled Harry but he wouldn’t move.

  ‘I can’t.’

  Kelly’s footsteps were charging diagonally down the hill towards us.

  ‘Yes, you can.’

  ‘No. I can’t,’ he said.

  ‘Please.’

  Then Kelly was upon us. He materialised from the darkness, wheezing, exhausted, and pointing the gun directly at us.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE FALL

  Mick Kelly clipped me so hard across the face, the side of my head lit up like a firecracker. I was thrown down onto the rough sandstone. My ears rang and my vision danced with tiny, magical specks of white.

  Kelly punched Harry in the stomach and I felt it in my own stomach, felt the air evacuate his lungs as he doubled over. Kelly grabbed Harry’s shoulder and straightened him up.

  ‘Thanks for that,’ Harry said, stifling a cough.

  Kelly stood back, pointing the weapon at us. His hand was shaking. His breathing sounded like someone had their hand wrapped around his lungs, squeezing tight. I stood and looked behind me. There was a metre of sandstone before the cliff dropped away into that bottomless chasm below. The wind rushed up, turning my wet clothes to ice. Kelly wiped the rain and sweat off his face with the soaking sleeve of his long white shirt.

  You’re not a police officer, I thought.

  ‘What are you doing, Mick?’ Harry asked.

  I wondered how much history there was between them. Has Kelly always hated my dad? Is that what this is about? And what about the other reporter, Merrin?

  ‘Taking care of business,’ Kelly said.

  ‘You don’t need to.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’

  This was not a question. Harry was confirming with Kelly, like he knew. Kelly held my dad’s eye.

  ‘We’ve got video of the whole thing,’ Harry continued. ‘Sam’s not the only one who knows what you did. Silencing us won’t achieve anything.’

  Kelly didn’t speak.

  ‘We’ve looked at the footage,’ Harry said. ‘You didn’t mean to do it, did you? To push him?’

  ‘Don’t try to be pals with me now.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything to you,’ Harry said.

  ‘Outwitted,’ Kelly muttered.

  I knew what he meant right away. It was the title of the article my dad had written a few weeks back about cops being outmanoeuvred by young, tech-smart gangs.

  ‘I know what it’s like to feel like you’re past your use-by date,’ Harry said. ‘I feel the same way but this isn’t –’

  ‘Every day, one of you guys writes something about how useless we are and it just makes it harder. You’re s’posed to be working with us, not against us.’

  ‘So you think if you kill the messengers the news will stop flowing? That’s not how it works, Mick.’

  There was a sound further up the slope behind Kelly and he swung around to look, shining his torch again for a couple of seconds before snapping it off. He kept his gun trained on us. In Harry Garner: Crime Reporter my dad would have delivered a swift jujitsu chop to the neck and disarmed Kelly.

  The sound could have been a loud rain-splat or a possum or bird, I figured. Kelly must have thought the same. He turned back to us. The clouds parted for a moment, making everything silvery-edged. Kelly’s hair shone brightly.

  ‘Let us go, Mick,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve known you twenty-five years. You’re a good bloke. You pushed him in a struggle. You’ll do some time but it’ll be worse if you follow through with this. They’ll put you away for life.’

  ‘Not if it looks like you did it.’

  ‘What?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Jealous father doesn’t want to give kid back to his mum and, whoops, they both go over a cliff. I don’t think people will have too much trouble believing that.’

  Harry lunged forward without warning, grabbing Kelly’s arm. The weapon fired in the struggle. The blaze of orange light from the barrel and the sharpness of the bang cut the night in two and the next second seemed to stretch for a minute. I thought the shot had missed us, had fired out over the cliff, but then my father bent double, growling and grarling with pain. I saw blood blooming like a flower at the knee of his grey pants. I’d read somewhere that it was one of the most painful places to be shot, the knee. Harry put his hand over it to stem the blood flow and, without thinking, I put my hand over his, feeling the warmth of his blood on my palm, and I cried.

  There was screaming then and I looked up.

  ‘Police! Nobody move! Drop the weapon!’

  The voice was like an explosion. Kelly turned and slammed on his torch to reveal two men in dark blue raincoats moving quickly towards us from behind the fat trunks of two ghostly gum trees. Their torches and weapons were trained on Kelly.

  ‘Show me your hands. Hands over your head!’ said another voice.

  ‘DROP IT NOW!’

  Police officers. Real ones. Not like Kelly. I didn’t know how but they had come for us.

  Kelly raised his forearm to his eyes, hiding his face from the torchlight, then turned and waved the gun at me, shaking it again. Instinctively, I stepped back, trying to protect myself.

  ‘DROP THE WEAPON!’ one of the officers said. ‘LAST CHANCE!’

  My foot reached for the ground behind me but I felt only open space. I looked down and realised I was falling. My dad’s hand reached for my shoulder. ‘Sam!’ He caught the neck of my t-shirt and ripped it all the way to the bottom but I continued to slip away over the edge. I leaned forward, clutching and scraping at the air to take his hand, but I was too late. I scratched at wet earth and rock on the cliff face as it blurred by, tearing my fingertips, ripping off my nails, then
grating my face. My chin knocked something hard and my brain seemed to fly apart. There was freefall, infinity, empty air, as I twisted down into the abyss.

  THIRTY-SIX

  FUNERAL

  It isn’t like the funerals you see on TV – people with black hats, trench coats and umbrellas standing around a hole in the ground as the coffin is lowered, the camera craning down through an elm tree while an old guy with a white collar mutters, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

  Hardly anyone wears black. Outside, the morning light is soft and there are little kids running around on the grass at the side of the church playing tip. No one is happy, exactly, but most people greet each other with a smile. Over near a birdbath, a lady about the same age as my dad cries and a man in a crumpled oversized suit hugs her.

  I’ve never been to a funeral before. I had never done a lot of things before the past couple of weeks – met my father, seen a dead body, helped solve a crime.

  Inside, my dad rests his hand on my shoulder for a moment as he wheels my chair, which makes it not so scary.

  The funeral is not mine. I did not die. Well, I did, and then I didn’t.

  I spent nine days in hospital, until a little over an hour ago. My first couple of days I was living inside a thick cloud but I have two clear memories. One where my eyes slammed open and the world rushed in, warm and yellow. It was daytime and my parents were there. Both of them. My mother’s face erupted in tears. She said things but I can’t remember what. I was coming down from anaesthetic and painkillers, but the memory will stay with me always – the first time in my life I had seen my parents in the same room together.

  My second memory, when my mind felt slightly less muddled, was of Scarlet and her mum sitting by my bed. Scarlet told me what happened the night I was kidnapped. She had taken Magic upstairs and woken her mum. They had rushed down and seen the broken glass of the foyer door. They saw Kelly slamming the boot of a red car out front. They called the police on Scarlet’s mum’s phone and realised that I still had Scarlet’s phone. They gave the police the login for Scarlet’s phone-finder app and the cops followed Mick Kelly’s car out west all the way to Lithgow. He had not switched off the phones. My dad said this was sloppy, a rookie mistake.

  ‘When do you think it’s going to start?’ I ask Harry.

  ‘Soon,’ he says and he pushes my wheelchair right down to the front of the church, so we’re not blocking the aisle. I feel self-conscious in the chair. In hospital nobody looked at me funny but this is my first time out. A lady stares at me, but when she sees me looking she quickly averts her eyes. It kind of annoys me.

  People are still filing in, filling up the seats in the long, narrow church. There are a few uniformed police officers up the back; men and women, stern-faced, maybe ashamed of what Kelly is responsible for. They still showed up. Harry nods his head to one of the cops, who nods back. Harry’s commandment number two states that crime reporters need to know cops and criminals. Merrin must have worked closely with these guys.

  There is a group of four large men in the middle of the church, five o’clock shadows, two of them in sunglasses, all of them sweating and squeezed into black or blue suits. They seem bound together by some invisible thread. Crims? I wondered. Although who knows what a criminal is supposed to look like. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in the past couple of weeks it’s commandment number six: never assume anything.

  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 fun
ny 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.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  HOME

  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.