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 wouldn’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.