The last time Harry was in my life I was still in my mother’s belly so I don’t remember him too well. Mum never mentioned him and he wasn’t exactly trying to kidnap me to get custody. I think Mum thought I’d be better off without him. But this time, she was stuck. She couldn’t afford to take time off while I was home after the operation and she wasn’t leaving me alone to get into more trouble. She kept saying that she was ‘over it’. Over me.
When she was on the phone to Harry she said, ‘This past year he’s been behaving so out of character. He’s been just like you. Impulsive. Never thinking of anyone else but himself, like the universe revolves around him. You need to get involved in his life. Speak to him. At least show him what happens to selfish, inconsiderate people when they get old.’
Harry had said something then. It may have been ‘thanks’ or something more aggressive.
‘He needs a father,’ Mum told him. ‘A male role model.’
Harry argued – I could hear him raise his voice – and Mum told him to step up and be a man. ‘Grow a pair,’ were the words she used. Then she hung up.
It was nice to feel loved.
Magic and I made it to the second-floor landing and I stopped to rest my skinny arms. I pushed the dog’s overgrown backside to the floor and gingerly touched my armpits, which were rubbed raw from the crutches.
As I pushed her down, Magic’s feet slipped and her entire body flattened to the wood. I wondered if I should have left Magic in the apartment. But if the man came back up in the lift, what would he do to her? I thought of the black umbrella shifting to the side and the man’s eyes looking up at me through the crooked tree branches. That thought drove me down the last two flights of stairs.
I stopped in the small foyer at the entrance to the building. The room was dimly lit and had the same dark timber on the walls as my father’s place. The front door was straight ahead. I could exit onto the street and go to the police station a hundred or so metres from here. But I needed to know what happened to the man who fell. What if he was still alive now but by the time I got back from the cops he wasn’t?
I turned right and moved quickly down a narrow corridor towards a door that had a green ‘EXIT’ sign above it. I figured it opened onto the backyard of the building. I pressed my ear to the door. It felt cold on my skin. I heard nothing from outside.
I would just take a peek, then I’d go to the police. I eased the door open, the bottom of it scraping loudly on concrete. I pushed my eye to the gap and peered into the backyard. The bin shed was pressed up against the building, sulking in the gentle rain. It was covered in dead brown vines and smelt bad even from a few metres away. It stood between me and where the man had landed beneath the leafless tree. Above it was an expanse of pink-lit cloud, no stars.
There was no sign of anyone in the yard. Police hadn’t arrived. Was it possible that no one else had heard the strangled noise of the man falling? Or the sickening thump of him hitting the ground? Or had they? Maybe, in a city, when you heard something like that, you closed the blinds and ignored it, tried not to get involved. Maybe you learnt not to care.
Close the door and go to the police. Or go back upstairs.
But the apartment didn’t feel safe now either. The man had looked right at me. He knew what I had seen. Maybe he went up in the lift. He was probably outside Harry’s door at this very moment.
I needed to know if the other man was alive. People could survive big falls. I had seen it in a Ripley’s Believe It or Not book in the school library – a Ukrainian woman who survived a seventeen-storey fall because she was asleep. It helped if your body was very relaxed. But the guy who fell from the sixth floor had sounded tense and nervy, not relaxed at all.
I pressed my ear to the crack of the open door. Moan of garbage truck, squeal of brakes, noisy clashing of bins being collected. That noise seemed to go on all night in the city. There was a siren, but in the distance. No sounds from within the small yard. I took a deep breath, pushed the door open some more and squeezed out into the rain. Magic followed. I let the door rest gently against the lock, making sure it didn’t click shut. I scanned the courtyard. The only movement was from one enormous moth dive-bombing the security lamp. A moth should not be out here in the rain and cold.
There was a broken toy gun on the ground a couple of metres away. I thought about taking it with me for protection but it didn’t look very realistic. I wedged it in the door to make sure it didn’t close.
I stayed near the brick wall of the apartment building and crutched slowly, silently towards the dead-black shape of the bin shed.
FOUR
THE BODY
I dodged around a bike chained to a clothes line and a crushed pot plant that must have fallen from a windowsill or a balcony. Kicked by one of the men? My crutches sloshed in small puddles and cold rain trickled down my neck and back. Magic strained at her collar, excited to be outside in the rain and breeze. I moved quickly to the door of the bin shed and peeked inside, alert for human shapes. The shed was about three metres wide and four metres long. It was empty. The wheelie bins must have been out in front of the building, lined up on the kerb.
I crutch-crept across the cracked pavers on the floor of the shadowy shed. Wind flurried outside, rustling the dead vines above and blowing a shiver right through me. Magic made a strange, high-pitched whine and I stopped for a moment, loosening my grip on her lead.
This is the dumbest thing I have ever done, I thought. And, according to Mum, I had done some pretty dumb stuff recently.
This is so typical of you, Sam. Even when she wasn’t with me, her voice was there. Can you please, just once, try to do the right thing? Make. Good. Choices!
I made it to the doorway on the other side of the shed. I had a clear view of the ground beneath the tree where the man had fallen. The patchy grass was painted with the knobbly shadows of tree branches, but the body was gone. The man had either crawled away or someone had taken him. It seemed to me that his crawling days were over, so that left only one possibility.
I spied a narrow driveway at the side of the building – just wide enough for a vehicle and blocked by a tall double gate. I had seen the caretaker’s dirty ute enter the yard through there earlier in the week.
I prayed that Magic would bark and bite rather than lick and sniff if we came upon the large man under the black umbrella. I eased my way out into the starless night, moving slowly towards the place where the smaller man had landed. I looked behind me and left and right but there was no sign of life.
I stopped and leaned heavily on my crutches. I pushed Magic’s bottom down again and the dog fell, spread-eagled in the mud, like a bearskin rug.
I thought about how my father might investigate a crime scene like this. I was pretty sure that’s what it was. Someone had pushed that man and then taken the body in the time it took me to get downstairs. I had never been at a crime scene before.
God is in the details. That was number one in ‘Harry Garner’s Ten Commandments of Crime Reporting’, an article that had been published about my father in the Herald a couple of years ago. I had the clipping folded up in my wallet and I read it all the time.