says.
I pop the glove box open, sift through six or seven scrunched tissues, two small notepads, eight or so chewed pens, a pair of yellow-rimmed sunglasses, a cassette tape of Disintegration by The Cure and, about the size of a lipstick, a small green flashlight with a black push-button on one end and a small bulb the size of a human iris.
I switch it on and the light flashes a pitiful beam of artificial light big enough to illuminate a night-time barbecue held by a family of green ants.
‘What sort of torch is this?’ I ask.
‘I use it when I can’t get my key in the door at home late at night.’
Caitlyn snatches the flashlight from my hand and sharpens her gaze ahead.
‘Here they come,’ she says.
A silver Mercedes Benz pulls out of the driveway. Chauffeur-driven. Tytus and his daughter Hanna Broz in the back seat. The Mercedes turns left out of the driveway, motors on towards the city. Caitlyn reaches into the footwell on my side, grabs her camera from the faulty camera cabinet and slings the black strap over her left shoulder.
‘Let’s go,’ Caitlyn says.
She slips out of the car, lifts her left Dr Martens boot up to the joint of the jacaranda tree where three main branches of the trunk split off in separate directions. A rip in the left knee of her black jeans stretches further as she hauls herself up. She then monkey crawls up one thick branch that rises up to the top of the clay-coloured fence. She doesn’t think. She only acts. Caitlyn Spies. A doer. I get lost for a moment just watching her move. The natural courage in her. Not even blinking before she crawls up a branch high enough to break her neck if her trusty British boots slipped off it.
‘What are you waiting for?’ she asks.
I lift my left leg up to the tree’s central trunk joint, my rear thigh muscle threatening to tear. She stands on the branch and walks it like a gymnast on a balance beam before lying down, hugging the branch momentarily and reaching her legs down ambitiously towards the clay-coloured wall the branch has grown above. Next, she stands on the wall, crouches down, then drops her legs over the side while pressing her belly hard against the top. She pays her potential landing only half-a-second of attention then releases her grip and vanishes.
I crawl up the branch, less graceful. Darkness now. I jump to the wall, dangle my legs over the side. I pray the landing is soft. Drop. My feet find earth and the impact knocks me off them. I stagger backwards and land hard on my arse bones.
A yard in darkness. I can see the lights on in Tytus’s mansion ahead but I can’t see Caitlyn in the dark of the lawn. ‘Caitlyn?’ I whisper. ‘Caitlyn.’
Her hand on my shoulder.
‘Minus ten for the dismount,’ she says. ‘C’mon.’
She scurries low and quick across the lawn, skirting the left side of the grand house we walked through with Hanna only hours ago. We’re like special ops soldiers. Chuck Norris in The Octagon. Low and hard. Round the corner of the house, onto the rear lawn. Stone fountains. Hedge mazes. Floral garden beds. We split through these, sprinting on towards the white door of the bunker being swallowed whole by vines and shrubbery and weed. Caitlyn stops at the door. We both keel forward, sucking in air, hands on thighs. Journalism and sprinting are chalk and cheese, oil and water, Hawke and Keating.
Caitlyn turns the silver knob on the door.
‘Locked,’ she says.
I suck in more air.
‘Maybe you should go back to the car,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘Sentencing ladder,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘The sentencing ladder,’ I say. ‘Right now we’re probably on the bottom rung of the sentencing ladder. Trespassing onto property. I’m about to go up a rung.’
‘To what?’
I walk to the small tool shed neighbouring the bunker.
‘Breaking and entering,’ I say.
The smell of oil and petrol in the tool shed. I pad down the side of the parked John Deere tractor. A row of gardening and lawn tools leaning against the back of the tool shed. A hoe. A pick. A shovel. A rusty-bladed axe. An axe big enough to chop off Darth Vader’s melon.
I pad back to the bunker door, holding the axe in both hands.
The answer, Slim. Boy finds question. Boy finds answer.
I raise the axe high above my shoulder, its heavy rusted blade aligned on a rough trajectory towards the five centimetres of door