‘I’ll have a small, skinny, decaf flat white, extra hot,’ Scarlet said.
‘Me, too,’ I said.
They both looked at me in a ‘Really, you want a small, skinny, decaf flat white, extra hot?’ kind of way and I tried to look back in a ‘Sure, that’s what I always have’ kind of way. Only I’m not sure how convincing I was.
He walked off and Scarlet and I were left looking at each other. I sat up as tall as I could in my chair.
‘I’ve been thinking about this all day,’ she said in a low voice.
I told her what I had seen the night before and she studied me with solemn brown eyes, weighing every word I said for the truth.
The lumberjack brought our drinks and Scarlet sipped hers. Once he was gone she whispered, ‘What did the police say?’
‘Do you know who lives there?’ I asked, pretending I hadn’t heard her question and that I hadn’t raided their mailbox.
‘The Hills,’ she said. ‘They’re an old couple. They go to Queensland with their caravan every year for four or five months, for the weather. I think he has arthritis or something.’
I jotted these notes on the crime reporter’s notepad inside my brain.
‘Are they away right now?’
‘They left about six weeks ago,’ she said.
‘So who–’
‘There’s no one there.’
‘There was someone there last night,’ I told her.
‘I haven’t heard or seen anyone there since they left,’ she said.
‘It was the apartment right above mine and we’re in 5A.’
‘That’s their apartment but I swear–’
‘What else can you tell me about the Hills?’ I asked her.
‘Wow. Is this an interrogation?’
I smiled. ‘Do you know them very well?’
‘Not really. But they seem pretty nice.’
‘What do they look like?’ I asked.
‘Marilyn, I think her name is, is short, brown hair, always smiling. Jack or Jim is tall, blacky-greyish hair, skinny. What about you?’ she asked. ‘How long have you been living downstairs?’
‘I’m just staying with my dad for the week. I–’
‘Did he see what happened?’ she asked.
‘No. Just me.’
‘What did he say when you told him?’
Do you think anyone else saw what happened? How would you feel about going home a day early? Promise me you won’t hold me up as any kind of hero. They were the things he had said.
‘Not much,’ I said.
‘Did he call the police right away?’
I bit my cheek hard enough to scrape shreds of skin loose inside my mouth. Cheek-biting was something I had trained myself out of but when I got really anxious I started to do it again.
I took my first sip of coffee to stop the biting and tried not to wince at the taste. It was like mud with old sock sweat squeezed into it. I shook my head.
‘What?’ she said. ‘Why not?’
I really didn’t know why he hadn’t called the police. He hadn’t told me. Can you trust me? That’s what he’d asked. And now here I was blabbing everything to a girl I’d barely even met.
‘What did your mum say when you told her?’ she asked.
‘My mum lives in the Blue Mountains.’
‘Did you call her?’
I looked at Scarlet like a deer in headlights. She seemed to have turned my interrogation around on me.
‘I think I’d better go see if my dad’s home,’ I said. I stood. I didn’t want her questioning me all the way back up in the lift.
‘Do you want me to go to the police with you? It’s only just down there.’
‘No, I’m okay. My dad and I are going tonight.’
It was 5.31 pm. Harry would be home in twenty-nine minutes. He was probably back there already.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Good luck. Can you let me know what the police say?’
I wished that I hadn’t said anything in the first place. I had failed my first ever interrogation.
‘Sure. Thanks,’ I said. I put four dollars on the table and headed for the door.
TWENTY
ALONE BUT NOT LONELY
When I was at home I was alone a lot, but I never felt lonely. When I got back from school, Mum was usually at work, which meant I could do whatever I wanted. Other friends had their parents fussing over their homework or giving them jobs. I got to be free. I ate and watched TV and read comic books and wrote comic books.
It wasn’t always like that. Only in the past year or so since Mum’s brother, Chris, and his family moved away. They used to live two blocks from us on Prince Street but he was in the army and got posted to Townsville so they left. He took my two best friends, my cousins Abbey and James, with him. They used to have me at their place a lot while Mum was working. They were the only family we had around. Now that they were gone, Mum still had to work, so I stayed home alone.
Harrison, a friend of mine, asked me a few months ago if it was lonely having no brothers or sisters or cousins or dad and being at home by myself. I told him I didn’t mind so much. ‘Lonely’ sounds like you wish things were different. ‘Alone’ means there’s no one around but you’re kind of okay with it.
At my dad’s, though, it felt different. I was so used to Mum driving my PE uniform to school when I forgot it, applying for a new bus pass every time I lost it, making and freezing meals for me, placing reminder notes all over the house, waking me up, sending me to bed or calling from the hospital to say goodnight, telling me every single thing I had to do. I didn’t really have to think.
But now here, without Harry around, it felt like the first time I had to stand on my own two feet. One foot, really. Two crutches. I had to face this big, scary problem alone. No aunty, no uncle, no cousins, no mum. It was Sam versus the World and, for the first time in my life, I actually felt lonely.
TWENTY-ONE
MISSING JOURNALIST
I sat on the wide, deep windowsill, my leg outstretched, watching, waiting, listening, on alert. I’d left the lights off so that I’d be harder to spot by anyone watching from below. Trains hissed and squirled and clattered, snaking their way into the rainy night. The lift rattled up and down, vibrating right through me. Every time I heard it I crutched across to the front door and pressed my eye to the peephole. It stopped on our floor once and every pore in my skin stung with sweat. But it wasn’t Harry or the man. No one got out. The lift moved on.
It was 9.31 pm and Harry wasn’t home. I’d messaged him a bunch of times like he said I could but there was no response. Maybe he was out of battery. He must have had to work late. I tried not to think that something may have happened to him. I hadn’t really expected him to be back right on 6 pm. He had worked late every night this week, but not three-and-a-half hours late. During the day, I had put in a special request to the giant puppeteer who controlled the universe that Harry be home by seven at least. I thought it might help.
You have to trust me, Sam. Can you do that? Can you trust me?
There was a channel 9 news update on the TV in the corner of the room. More ‘breaking news’ on the footballer in the nightclub. A reality TV star had hit town to promote her new perfume. Fifty-three people out of one hundred surveyed on a Sydney street believed that a terror attack was ‘possible’ on Australian soil at some time in the future. More on the youth crime wave. I unmuted to hear a story about a 72-year-old granny jailed in the US state of Wyoming for trying to claim a $17 million lottery prize with a fake ticket.
Harry had been saying all week what a joke the news was these days. I’d wondered what he was talking about but maybe now I understood. ‘These young journalists might know how to podcast and vlog,’ Harry had muttered, ‘but they don’t know how to investigate, how to tell a story.’ I flicked channels and found the ABC news. There was a story on the situation in Syria.