‘Sometimes I wish we hadn’t done it,’ Dad said.

Ben waited, his mouth dry. He pressed the video camera speaker to his ear, listening over the burble and swish of the creek. He sat on the bank, his back against a tree. He had escaped the cabin with his bag, camera and a spare battery before anyone else woke. The sky grew orange but the sun had not yet risen over the wall of sandstone on the other side of the creek.

The picture on the camera’s flip-screen was too dark to see and the sound was low, so he kept the speaker pressed to his ear, swatting at mosquitoes on his ankles and neck.

‘Ray, please don’t fall to pieces on me now. You got us in. You get us out,’ said Mum’s voice.

‘I hate this place.’

‘Welcome to the club,’ Mum said. ‘Why didn’t you think about that before you drove us all the way up here?’ Then, in a quieter voice, ‘What about the kids? What are they thinking?’

Sometimes the words weren’t clear but Ben filled in the gaps for himself.

‘I didn’t have a lot of time. And the kids’re fine. They’re kids.’

‘Just because –’

‘As soon as we get these papers we go,’ Dad hissed.

More shuffling sounds. No speaking for a while. Ben listened with every cell, muscles tight, breath short. He wondered if he should scan forward. Someone lay down on an air mattress and it squeaked softly on the floorboards in the background.

‘Worst case, we can’t get the passports, we go into the desert, somewhere that doesn’t even exist.’

‘Great,’ Mum said. ‘Sounds fantastic. I’ve always wanted to live in the desert, Ray. If you’re falling apart here imagine what you’ll be like out there.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that!’ he snapped.

‘I just wish you’d listened to me in the beginning.’

Ben listened for a long time but there was nothing more.

Soon Dad snored loudly. Mum must have elbowed him because the snoring stopped. Three short, sharp snorts. Then silence.

Ben scanned forward but that was it. He rested the camera on his lap and listened to it over again. He pulled his notebook and pencil from his backpack and wrote these words:

‘Wish we hadn’t done it.’

‘As soon as we get papers we go.’

‘Passports’

‘Disappear into desert’

He re-read the notes. Passports. That was the most important piece of evidence. Where were they going? They had never been anywhere before. Dad always said that he knew Australia was the greatest country on earth so why would anyone want to leave. Even when Ben pleaded to go to Fiji or New Zealand like some kids in his class, Dad said no. Ben ran his fingers over the words on the page. He figured that this is what a real detective would do – chew over the evidence, ratchet through the possibilities.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe they really were just going on holidays. Maybe they were getting passports for Fiji or New Zealand and were only stopping in at the cabin for a few days on the way to the airport. Dad was probably joking about the desert. Ben let out a breath and bit his bottom lip. Sometimes he wished that his imagination wasn’t quite so good. He could never walk down a dark hallway or put out the garbage or stay home by himself without thinking scary thoughts.

He went to his raft and uncovered it. He took one end in his hands and struggled down over the rocks, carefully laying it in the water. He crouched and crawled on board, floating at the shallow edge of the creek. Water rushed beneath him. The raft wobbled. Some of the grass ties split with the pressure of his body so he shifted his weight, which made the back of the raft move away from the creek’s edge. He scrambled for balance.

The ties continued to split. Ben clutched the narrow logs like he was a baby and they were his mama. He fell into knee-deep water, standing quickly, the freezing creek ejecting him. The raft drifted away toward the far side, where there was a two-metre drop over a waterfall into a lower section of creek.

Ben was not a strong swimmer. He moved from knee-deep to waist-deep water with a sharp in-breath, the cold pinching him. The raft was three metres away now and the same distance from the far bank, where it would be swept downstream and over the falls. He waded until he was chest-deep, the force of the water pulling him forward. He pushed off a rock with his toes and surged toward the raft, reaching for the back left-hand edge with two fingers.

He caught it, clamped it with his thumb and pulled back, getting a better grip with his other hand. He swam with everything he had, trying to drag the damaged raft back toward the boulders that stretched halfway across the creek.

The relentless pull of water made Ben panic. He was losing the battle. Just as he decided he needed to let go of the raft or go over the waterfall, his foot touched a rock at the creek’s bottom. He dug in and pulled hard against the current and, finally, nudged up against the large, smooth, mossy boulders that reached across the creek. He hung on, breathing hard, feeling alive.

After a few minutes he began the difficult climb up the slippery rocks. At the top he collapsed, panting and wet. He laughed. His first attempt at building a raft, at building anything other than clay figures and miniature stop-motion sets, had been a disaster. He slapped at mosquito bites on his neck and face and arms.

Wish we hadn’t done it.

Passports.

‘It’. What did Dad wish they hadn’t done?

Ben stood and hauled the loosely connected branches of his raft along the boulders and up onto the creek bank, dropping them next to his notebook and camera. He took the knife from his pocket, flicked out a blade and cut the remaining grasses away. The knife was sharp and worked well. He headed off into the heavy shadow of the trees and came across some tough, root-like vines growing along the ground at the base of a hoop pine. They would do.

The raft needed bracing, something going across to hold the longer branches together. Ben remembered this from a school excursion to the maritime museum in third grade. He’d seen a giant raft that had been across the Pacific Ocean. It had a sail and cross-bracing.

He worked as sunrise turned to daylight, wondering if the physical work and the hunger were making him any less fat. He hoped so. Nobody called for him and he heard no other human sounds for a long time. He sawed a branch into three equal lengths, gnawing away at it with the tiny saw blade on his knife. He carved grooves in the longer logs and laid the shorter pieces across to brace the raft. He lashed his new raft together with the vines, working quickly, his body moving constantly to keep the mosquitoes away. They ate his ears and ankles for breakfast.

It.

I wish we hadn’t done it.

Sold the business? Ben wanted to believe it, but he couldn’t. He knew how much his parents hated the wrecking business. They’d started losing money the second Dad bought it.

Ben had done well to record their conversation but now he needed to discover where the money came from, why they needed passports, where they were going. He needed to interrogate his father, to pry and uncover more evidence. He had somehow become a detective years before he ever expected to. It was scarier and less fun than he had imagined.

He pulled a vine tight and knotted it.

Bang!

He ducked, pressing himself into the rough bark of his raft. He had never heard a real gunshot before but that was what it sounded like.