Ghost Child Read Online Free Page B

reporters, I mean – because the call to the ambulance had come in late, so they wouldn’t have bothered. No point going out there if you can’t get it to air for the 6 p.m. bulletin, right? In those days, a story was only a story if Brian Naylor told you so. On the papers, we had a bit more time. It was actually better if something happened a bit late, because we knew we’d have it on our own, and if it turned out to be a good story the TVs would be onto it the next day.
    The ambulance was still there when we arrived, thank God. The snapper jumped out of the car and got a shot of the kid getting loaded in. The coppers were there, too, so there was no point knocking on the door. There’s no way they’d let us in, so we hung around the front of the house for a while, talking to the neighbours. I ascertained pretty quickly that a fair number of kids lived in the house, that the mother was on welfare, and that it was a Commission house. I would have been thinking, ‘This isn’t ideal’ – not from a news point of view, because it’s always a bit better when the family aren’t bogans, but how often do kids in the good neighbourhoods get bashed? Not often, mate, let me tell you, not often. But then again, we always made a point at The Sun that half our readers were probably on minimum wage and just because people were poor didn’tmean they were up to no good. We didn’t look down on them like The Age .
    I thought to myself, ‘Hang around, Frank, and just see what happens,’ but it was getting late and I didn’t have much copy to fill out a story, so we spoke to the media guy – the police media guy – and he said, ‘Yeah, you’ve got at least half an hour before there’ll be any action here, so if you want to go for a quick lap around the block that’ll probably be okay.’ So we did that. We tracked down the kind of guys you can rely on to give you a couple of quick quotes – the priest we found at Barrett Anglican, for example, and the mayor – so that we’d have some kind of story whether the cops came out to talk to us or not. The cops were pretty helpful in those days, though, and we knew they’d give us a few quotes if we hung about long enough, so we went back and, yep, they were good to us.
    First, they invited our guy in to copy the portrait of the kid, which saved us from tracking one down ourselves. It can be a real pain in the arse: you have to find classmates, you have to find grandparents, you have to try to talk them into giving you a snap, and it’s not always easy. So it was good when the cops handed over a pic, and I remember when I finally saw it back at the darkroom, I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s all right,’ because the kid, from a news point of view, was pretty much perfect: very Aussie-looking, pale and freckly, and not Aboriginal, which was good, becauseit’s much harder to work up sympathy when the kid’s Aboriginal.
    After we got the pic copied, the cop came out and told us the story about the kid being bashed, which I took down verbatim despite thinking it was bullshit. What else can you do? You can’t really write, ‘Oh, the cops say this and this, but we reckon they’re full of it.’ That’s not what a newspaper does.
    I wouldn’t have had a mobile phone with me. It was before mobiles, really. Some people had them but they were big, blocky things that you carried around in a suitcase, so I’d have had to find a phone box – preferably one that wasn’t all smashed up, preferably one where the kids hadn’t cut the cord, before they got the idea of making them out of that stretchy steel stuff – to let the editor know that we had the story and it was a goodie, and would run for a few days. Otherwise, he’d be sitting in the office, wondering what the hell was going on. Filing copy was a pain, too – no laptops in those days, only copy-takers back at the office, amazing old chicks who would sit on the phone with you, and take it down in shorthand, and then enter it