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.
‘Don’t stick your big bib in!’ he shouted as they drove across to the car space in front of their room.
Ben didn’t even wear a bib. What did ‘stick your big bib in’ mean?
Soon Dad emerged from the bathroom with close-cropped hair – another unhappy customer. Ben tried not to laugh.
‘Go to sleep,’ Dad grunted, switching off the TV and lamp and flopping onto the big bed.
Ben lay down on the couch in a rectangle of light from the bathroom. When Mum appeared half an hour later she was hardly recognisable. Her hair, usually halfway down her back, was now boyish and weird-looking.
‘Why did you do that?’ Ben asked.
‘Go to sleep. We leave early.’
He watched her. She laid Olive down on a blanket on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed with her back to him for a long while.
‘How early do we leave?’ Ben whispered into the darkness.
‘Four.’
‘Why?’
‘Because your father says so … Go to sleep.’
Ben lay there, eyes open, listening to rain beating the roof. The couch cushions smelt mouldy and felt itchy. He wondered if there were bedbugs. He imagined his body swarming with mini-beasts, hundreds of thousands of them eating him alive. He closed his eyes and saw it like a stop-motion movie with tiny bedbugs made of clay.
Dad’s snoring filled the room.
Ben tried not to think about the bites. He thought about Nan, his dad’s mum. She lived around the corner from them, right on the highway. She always had time for him and was interested in what he had to say. Nan was rake-thin, a tough old bird, one of those old people who sat on the front steps watching the world go by. She had probably seen their car leave town. Ben wondered if she had picked up Golden. Even though it was past midnight, he knew that Nan would be lying awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to talk radio and world news. She only slept for a couple of hours just before dawn.
Ben’s eyes closed. He thought about the four police officers. He had asked Mum about them again and she said that there was a break-in at the wreckers. That’s why the police showed up. But who would steal something from that place? It was a dump. An actual dump.
Ben touched his spiky hair and scratched his skin. He felt hungry. He silently prayed for the holiday to be over soon.
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Version 1.0
The Fall
ePub ISBN 9780143783046
First published by Random House Australia in 2017
Copyright © Tristan Bancks 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Random House book
Published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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www.penguin.com.au
Addresses for the Penguin Random House group of companies can be found at global.penguinrandomhou
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Creator: Bancks, Tristan, author
Title: The fall / Tristan Bancks
ISBN: 9780143783046 (ebook)
Subjects: Detective and mystery stories
Cover images: main image Hayden Verry/Arcangel; boy and dog image majivecka/Shutterstock; branches seeyou/Shutterstock
Cover design by Christabella Designs
Ebook by Firstsource
The Fall Page 16
