Ghost Child Read Online Free Page A

too far.
    Look, don’t get me wrong. I would have been affected by it. I’m not made of marble. I’ve got kids of my own. But the thing is, I was working for The Sun , and we had a couple of editions to fill every day, and news moves pretty quickly. We might have had a horse race one day – the Melbourne Cup, right? – and then a bashed kid the next day, and after that, an election, and then it’s Christmas and it’s time to do the cricket stories, and, well, life goes on, doesn’t it?
    By rights, I shouldn’t have been out on the road the day that Jake Cashman got bashed. I was the news editor. That means I was supposed to sit at the desk at The Sun ’s old headquarters in Flinders Street, ashtray to my left, keeping track of the stories coming in. On November 11, we wouldn’t have had anything much, just theusual pictures from the Remembrance Day ceremony, standard fare that nobody much cares about any more. We covered it because we at the Sun had respect for the diggers. Then the call came through from the bloke on police rounds, saying, ‘We’ve got something.’
    Police rounds weren’t based at the paper. They were down at Russell Street, where they had the scanners, so he would have called me up and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got a kid – a five-year-old – and the official story is he was grabbed by a man at the local school and left on the ground and his kid brother ran home to Mum and she had to carry him home.’
    I would have thought, ‘That’s a good yarn.’ I told the editor, ‘We’ve got an ambulance on the way to a kid, and it looks like a bashing.’ Probably he said, ‘Beauty,’ because that’s what we would have felt. It’s not callous, it’s just, like I say, we’ve got a paper to put out and we need stories to fill it. The editor would have wanted to know where the kid lived and I would have said, ‘Barrett Estate,’ and he would have rolled his eyes because Barrett … look, I’m sure the people who live there will tell you it’s a good neighbourhood, but it’s got something of a reputation.
    The editor would have wanted to know: ‘You got anyone to send?’ That was part of my job, to find a reporter to get to the scene, but I didn’t have anyone, or maybe I did but I just felt like doing it myself. Sitting in the office all day, it used to get me down, so I wouldhave rounded up a snapper – a photographer, an old hand – we’d have made sure we had a pack of smokes between us, and driven out to Barrett. We’d have had to step on it because if we left it too long, the ambos and the coppers would be gone and we’d have nothing.
    I remember we had a bit of trouble finding the place because DeCastella Drive was not actually in the Mel-ways . We had to ask a guy at the servo where it was, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, coupla weeks ago the council decided to create some chaos by renaming all the streets.’ Apparently, they had a Main Road West, and a Main Road East and an Old Main Road or something and they reckoned that was confusing, so they were having a competition to rename the roads, and people could put forward suggestions. This was just, like, weeks after the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, and everybody was all excited about all these gold medals that the Aussies had won in the pool, and the weightlifting, and the marathon with Deeks in it, so all the councillors went down there in their robes and put up new signs that said ‘Lisa Curry Court’ and ‘Dean Lukin Close’ and ‘DeCastella Drive’, which was where the Cashmans now lived, and the road we had to find.
    Anyway, we needn’t have freaked out because we were first on the scene. First reporters, I mean. When a kid gets in strife, it’s not really a story for The Age. They’ll cover it, but usually from some wanky social-justice angle, and two days after everyone else has pickedit to pieces. Not like The Sun. We’d get it on the front page and make the most of it.
    There were no TVs there – no TV