The Fall Read online

  There were bricks.

  Piles of old bricks.

  Not a body. I grabbed the pitchfork and shifted one of the other bags out of the way to reveal a long row of the same bricks running all the way along the back wall. There was no dead body in this little room. Not any more. I wiped the saliva and dirt off my phone, took three quick wide-shots with the flash on, then scrambled back out over the lawnmower, as quickly as I could.

  I made it almost to the entrance, drinking in the fresh air and natural light, when I saw something poking out of the loose dirt just inside the storage cupboard. I bent down and took the thing between my thumb and forefinger.

  It was small, maybe half the size of a five-cent piece, but not the same shape. It was straight on the sides and jagged, sharp-looking on one end. I held it in the palm of my hand, squinting at it in the silvery light from the doorway.

  It was a broken tooth, and it made my skin crawl.

  I stepped outside, stood up, grabbed one of my crutches. The other had fallen. I looked closely at the grubby tooth. I poked at it with my finger, scraping at the caked-on dirt with my nail.

  How long had it been there? Just a few hours? It seemed too dirty to be recent.

  One of the caretaker’s teeth? I wondered. He looked like the kind of guy who may have lost a few. Perhaps he had bent down to get the mower out and knocked his tooth on the handle, and had never been able to find it because of his bad eyes. Maybe.

  I sensed somebody watching me and I looked around, then up. There was a figure leaning out over a sixth-floor balcony railing, silhouetted against the white-grey sky. I felt a sharp jolt of fear in my chest, slipped the tooth into my pocket and grabbed the handles of my crutches. I started to back up but realised that the figure wasn’t on the balcony of 6A. It was on the balcony next door. My eyes adjusted and I recognised the girl I had watched going upstairs, the girl with the dyed-red hair. She looked like she was wearing a school uniform now, dark-green and white. She turned away and went inside. I heard a door slide and slam.

  Is she scared of me? I wondered. Or just surprised to be caught watching me? I could imagine her talking to the police, telling them that she had seen the crutch-boy with the bent spine from apartment 5A spying on her as she went upstairs, then later he was snooping in the caretaker’s cupboard, polishing dirt from a human tooth. Could she see the tooth from up there? Probably not.

  I needed to ask her if she had seen anything last night, but that would mean going up to the sixth floor and I couldn’t do that. What if he was up there? She would be going to school soon. I would wait for her, catch her on her way downstairs in a totally non-stalkery way. Maybe she saw what happened too. Either way, she would know who lived in the apartment next to hers. She could tell me things.

  FIFTEEN

  THE GIRL FROM UPSTAIRS

  I watched the stairs from the doorway of Harry’s apartment for ten minutes before the lift went rattling up to the sixth floor. I was terrified that it might not be the girl who came down. When I saw a glimpse of her uniform through the window of the snail-slow lift as it descended I lunged across the hall and slammed my hand on the old brass button. The lift lurched and strained, coming to a stop a few centimetres below my floor, then slowly rising to correct itself. I looked through the thick glass, catching her eye for a moment, like the flash of a fish in a stream. Then it was gone.

  She thinks I’m weird and creepy, I thought.

  I pulled the heavy metal door open and shuffled inside. My phone read 8.57 am – six hours and forty-nine minutes since I woke to the sound of raised voices in the apartment upstairs. And, for the second time since my father had left for work, I was breaking the one rule he had set for me. I was starting to understand what my mother was always going on about.

  I wiped my sweaty hands on my shorts. I hadn’t brushed my hair, which was sure to be wild. It always was in the morning. Like Harry’s. I hadn’t brushed my teeth either. They felt so furry I could have combed them.

  I raised my eyebrows to say ‘hi’, but she was no longer looking at me, her eyes cast down, reading a book with an orange-and-white cover, a classic of some kind. Her hair really was fire-engine red. Her eyes were dark-chocolate discs – 85 per cent cacao, like the Lindt Mum stashed in the first-aid kit. She had long fingernails painted pink and purple and yellow and green. I turned awkwardly on my crutches and pulled the door closed. The rubber foot of my crutch blocked it from closing so I jerked the crutch inside, knocking the girl’s shoulder.

  ‘Sorry.’

  She smiled a pursed-lip smile, picked up her guitar case from the floor, and squeezed into the back corner of the lift. I rested my crutch against the wall and pressed ‘G’. Seconds ticked by like years before the lift jerked to life and continued its descent.

  I apologised again for attacking her with my crutch but, with headphones in, she didn’t hear. We stood side by side. I stared straight ahead as we passed the fourth floor. I could hear the song she was listening to. I knew it and liked it a lot. She smelt sweet and bitter like the lemonade me and my cousins once made and sold at the top of my driveway in the holidays. We thought we’d be millionaires by the end of the day but instead we made $1.50, and that was from my mum.

  I peeked from the corner of my eye. Her white school shirt had a stain on the collar, her green skirt was slightly crumpled. She wore shiny black steel-capped shoes. Her book was Wuthering Heights. The title was printed at the top of the page. Page 78. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have to remember that the girl was up to page 78 in Wuthering Heights but when you were programming your mind to devour details you couldn’t just switch it on and off.

  She looked about a year older than me and was substantially taller, which made me more scared of her and confirmed my theory that she hated me. Tall, pretty girls don’t need to like people or to listen to them. That’s what my research over the past couple of years had revealed. They called the shots. And it was illegal, in my experience, for slightly older girls to show any interest in slightly younger boys. Not that I wanted her to show interest in me.

  She had a badge hanging from her jumper but I couldn’t read what the dangly bit said. Prefect? Captain? Maybe not. She seemed a bit too edgy to be captain.

  Who lives next door to you?

  That’s what I desperately wanted to know.

  Did you hear or see anything last night? Did you see a man fall from the apartment next to yours and die at around 2.11 am? Have you ever seen anyone come in or out of that apartment? And do you know who the small man might be? Did you hear him scream or the slunch of him hitting the ground?

  But, like many of the taller, older girls that I had encountered, she had a force field installed that rendered me speechless. Abort, abort, my brain told me.

  But I needed to know.

  The lift banged hard into the ground floor. She pushed open the door and exited, gliding across the small foyer towards the front door.

  ‘Excuse me!’ I called, a few steps before the city swallowed her.

  Maybe her music was up too loud or she really did hate me because she continued to glide towards that door. I called out again, louder this time.

  ‘Hey!’

  She turned, right in the doorway, backlit by the flat light of day. She took out an earbud, looking a bit annoyed. She reached into her bag to pause the music.

  ‘Yeah?’ she said.

  Mind: blank.

  ‘I just …’

  Nothing. I just nothing. What I wanted to ask her seemed so intense as an opening line so I said ‘Hi’ instead, which was an odd thing to say when I was already speaking to her.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, almost as a question. ‘The bus is about to go. I’m already late for school.’

  She’ll leave and I will be stuck here all day not knowing. So I said it.

  ‘Did you see anyone fall from the apartment next to yours last night at about 2.11 am?’

  Her face dropped. ‘No. Did you?’

  I nodded.


  ‘Really?’

  A bus went past, groaning as it braked and pulled into the stop.

  ‘Are you sure it was the apartment next to mine? 6A?’ she asked.

  I nodded again.

  She looked out the door at the bus. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Can I maybe ask you a couple of questions after school?’

  She looked like she wanted to say no but curiosity must have got the better of her. She looked down at my bandaged knee and crutches.

  ‘I’ve got a guitar lesson,’ she said. ‘But after that. Maybe five o’clock? I could meet you in the cafe.’

  ‘Which cafe?’

  ‘Next door. Cafe Oska, it’s called.’ She turned to go.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Scarlet,’ she said as she jumped down the three steps to the footpath, guitar case in hand. I crutched down the steps and watched her go. She was all legs and grace like a long-distance runner, and I was pretty sure she had information. There was something in the look that crossed her face right after I asked the question. How could I wait until five o’clock to hear what she knew?

  I watched as she got on the bus and it pulled away into traffic. She stared at me from the back seat, then turned away as the bus took a right at the lights.

  I looked up at the building, bent over me like an angry parent. Now that I was out I wanted to leave and never come back. Another bus pulled into the stop with a squeal of brakes and a belch of black smoke. People rushed past in suits and dresses and hoodies and uniforms. Everyone with somewhere to go, apart from me.

  I wondered if I was being watched. The thought launched me back up the stairs and into the foyer of the building.

  I noticed a pram outside one of the ground-floor apartments and a bank of mailboxes on the wall to my right. Tintin, Asterix and Smurf figurines sat on the ledge above the boxes.

  I peeked into box 5A, my dad’s. There were a couple of letters in there. I tried to open the box but it needed a key. I pulled the key out of my pocket and tried it but it didn’t fit. Somewhere, in one of the apartments on the ground or first floor, I heard someone call out, ‘We’ve got to go!’ I quickly put my eye to box 6A.

  There was a letter in there. I looked around to make sure that no one was coming and I tried the key in that box, too. Some part of me prayed that it would not fit because if my dad had the key to the mailbox of 6A it would only offer up more questions and I had enough questions already.

  The key didn’t fit. I poked my finger into the wide mouth at the top of the box. The gap was only just tall enough for my finger to fit but my fingernail scraped the envelope. I pushed in a little further, grazing my skin at the knuckle. I managed to press a corner of the envelope against the front of the box and gradually eased it out.

  I looked around again, my heart knocking hard on the inside of my chest like it was trying to escape. The lift made a loud clunk and started whirring upwards. I took a jagged breath and photographed the front of the letter then slid it back into the box. I started for the stairs.

  SIXTEEN

  A SAFE PLACE TO HIDE

  I stabbed my father’s hunting knife into the crack between the dark timber boards and pressed down on the handle, gently prying a board away from the wall. The primitive nails screamed as they squeezed out through hardwood. I was careful not to let the blade slip.

  If I had to be here by myself all day, I wasn’t taking any chances. The apartment was my fortress. I needed a safe place, somewhere I couldn’t be found. I got the idea of hiding inside the wall from a TV show. One night a few months ago, when I was having trouble sleeping, I snuck out into the lounge room a little after midnight and watched the TV on mute. A Japanese game show was on. A family had to hide in their own home and two celebrity guests had half an hour to find them. It sounded easy but the family were hidden by ‘concealment experts’ who opened up the ceiling and built secret cavities into the floor and hid kids inside mattresses and book cases. The one family member the celebrities couldn’t find was a six-year-old kid secreted inside a wall. The family won a million yen. Or maybe ten million. I can’t remember.

  The fire hose reel cupboard outside was embedded into the other side of the front wall of Harry’s apartment. When I was snooping around earlier I’d realised that the cupboard didn’t take up the whole space. There had to be a large cavity between it and the front door. It was the perfect place for me and Magic to hide if Mr Hill came back before Harry did.

  Was that his name, the man from 6A? The envelope that I had photographed was addressed to J and M Hill. But was Mr Hill the moon-faced man under the umbrella or the man who fell? I hoped Scarlet could tell me.

  I pulled the first board free, revealing a tangle of old electrical wires and some ancient orange insulation that looked like fairy floss covered in spider webs. It smelt dull, like dust and mould, a cross between the caretaker’s storage cupboard downstairs and my grandmother’s house in Melbourne. I took a handful of the insulation. It felt squeaky in my grip and made my teeth feel strange, like fingernails on a chalkboard or the skin of a peach on my lips. As I pulled the insulation out of the wall, dozens of tiny dead insects and roaches rained down on the floor.

  I started work on the next board and the next, prying them off the wall and carefully inspecting behind them, waiting for something to jump out and kill me. Nothing did, but I found five mouse corpses – flattened, crispy animal husks – and a dead rat that looked as though it had been frozen mid-stride by some ancient curse.

  Magic sniffed around, looking like she wanted to eat the rodents but I pushed her away. I inspected the bodies closely – legs and spines and skulls. They were like museum exhibits, only not behind glass, which made them more real and terrible and interesting to me. They had been alive and now they weren’t. Like the man who fell. Insects, ants, rats, mice, humans. They all die sooner or later.

  I used to worry a lot about Mum or me dying. It scared me that the world would still go on after I was gone. And that it was here before me. On those nights when I was younger and I felt panicky, Mum would come into my room and stroke my hair till I fell asleep. It’s weird that something so simple could make you feel okay about a worry that felt so big. Mum called this ‘learning to suffer well’. She said that being happy wasn’t about slaying all the dragons and overcoming all the bad things. She said the dragons would always be there. Being happy was about learning not to panic or freak out every time you saw one. I tried to do this. I didn’t always win, but I tried.

  I knew that the things lying on the floor were only bugs and vermin but I had never known anyone who had died. Not that I had known the rat either. Or any of the mice or insects. Or the man. But I didn’t want to just sweep them up and put them in the bin. I felt like I had a responsibility. I wanted to be respectful to them.

  Magic’s nose was working overtime and she was drooling on the floor so I told her to sit. There was no way the stinky mutt was going to eat a dead rat in front of me. ‘You’ve had your two-day-old pizza,’ I told her and she started panting, her long, pink tongue lolling from her mouth like the pizza was the best thing she’d ever eaten.

  I peered into the darkness of the wall. The cavity was just deep enough for me to squeeze into but did I want to? I wasn’t crazy about small spaces. But then, I wasn’t crazy about large men with fat faces who wanted to kill me, either.

  It took a few minutes to get Magic inside the wall. She was not happy at all. Then I eased my damaged leg inside and squeezed my body in, trying not to think about all the live spiders and insects I must be brushing up against. Once I was in I crouched awkwardly. A timber beam ran across the wall above me. I placed all of my weight on my bent left knee and tried to keep my right leg straight. Magic groaned. But we were in.

  Now I needed to make a door, a cover for my hatch. I imagined the four boards enclosing me in the wall and the fear of that made me want to go to the police right now. I prayed that I would never have to use this hiding space. And maybe I would
n’t, but I needed to be sure. I needed to look out for myself.

  Some part of me wanted to hide in here when Harry came home too, and just watch him for a bit through a crack between the boards. Not that I really believed he had done anything wrong. But something had made him go out drinking last night and he had told me that he didn’t do that any more. Not in almost a year. It was probably just because I’d asked all those stupid questions. But I wanted to know for sure. What if there was something else, too?

  Promise me you won’t hold me up as any kind of hero, he had said.

  I would just watch him for a little bit to confirm what I already knew – that he was a good guy.

  SEVENTEEN

  DEAR DAD …

  When I was eight I sent a letter to Harry. I waited and waited for him to reply, hoping that he would tell me everything I needed to know about him. I never heard back, but I remembered every word of that letter. I still wondered about most of this stuff.

  Dear Dad

  Hi. It’s Sam, your son. How are you? I’m good. I wanted to ask you if I could come and stay at your house sometime. Or if you could maybe come to our house for dinner. (Mum doesn’t know I’m asking but she wouldn’t mind.) I also have a list of other questions if that’s okay.

  What is your favourite colour?

  Where do you live?

  Do you ever miss Mum?

  Mum says that you have one short leg and scoliosis too. I have to wear a built-up left shoe. I don’t mind but Mum says it will get worse when I’m older so I better have an operation. Do you mind having scoliosis?