Inbetween Days (6 page)

I rode the last stretch home and dropped my bike on the front lawn. Trudy's friend Madison was over and I couldn't wheel past her car. Inside, they were drinking wine at the kitchen table and listening to the Cranberries; in another hour or two they would both be drunk and one of them would be wailing. I could never pick who it would be: Trudy, who got as far as Europe, or Mads, who never left Mobius and still lived in her parents' granny flat.

‘Jack's home,' Trudy said.

‘Hey!' Mads squealed. ‘We're drinking.' She was dark-haired, bird-boned and small-chested, with a pale, pinched complexion. Compared to Mads, Trudy and I looked as if we were born chewing cornstalks and hauling milk pails.

‘I can see that.'

‘What are you doing home? You're early,' Trudy said.

‘I'm late and I live here.' I grabbed a bag of popcorn from the pantry, threw my bag on the couch and heaved my body after it. My bones were beginning to ache.

Trudy started chattering about work in the high-pitched voice of a fresh-picked conversation. She closed the bi-fold door between the kitchen and the lounge. I took that to mean I wasn't invited to the party and turned on the television. It was a documentary about cheetahs. For once I didn't look away when it got to the killing scene. The cheetahs singled out a young antelope and separated it from the pack—got it running in ever-smaller circles until its legs gave out.

People do that, too.
Sisters
do that. I glared at the closed door and pitched popcorn at a hole in the veneer.

Through the door, I could hear Mads telling her story about the time she and Trudy had caught the bus out to a music festival, fallen asleep and woken up in the wrong town. It was a funny story. I'd heard it before and laughed so hard I had to cross my legs, but that day it made me sad. It was her best story and probably always would be.

Long after I'd gone to bed, I heard Mads leave and, not much later, Trudy in the bathroom, heaving. I padded in, handed her a cool flannel and held back her hair. Sunday.
Sundaysundaysunday
, my heart sang, but there was something wrong with my body.

While I slept my muscles had been shot full of lead. The sheets were soaked and I could only breathe through my mouth. I rolled onto the dry side (a queen-sized bed and I still slept on one side) and dangled one leg to cool off. Two minutes later I was freezing again. I called for Ma and my voice sounded like someone else's, then I remembered Ma wasn't there.

An hour later I stumbled into the hallway and made it to the bathroom. There was not much better than cold floor tiles on a hot cheek. I located my missing hairbrush underneath the cabinet but didn't have the strength to hook it out, and saw daylight through an open-ended copper pipe that fed through the wall. I spotted a lone, shrivelled sultana, too, and I'm pretty sure we had a conversation. I was still lying there when Trudy got up.

‘I'm sick,' I moaned.

‘What the hell is wrong with you? You sick?'

‘I just said that.'

‘So go back to bed. Quit drooling on the bathroom floor.' She took a step back. ‘Come on, I need to take a shower.'

I hauled myself upright using the side of the bathtub. ‘Can you drop me off at the dam in a couple of hours? I can't ride and, anyway, I've got no fuel.'

‘How will you get home?'

‘Walk.' I sneezed and wiped my nose on the back of my hand. ‘Crawl.'

‘Fine.'

I staggered back to my room and put my head on the pillow for just a few minutes, or so it seemed. When I woke, the house was quiet. Trudy had gone without me.

I whistled to Gypsy and hauled her onto the bed. The soft white patch on her chest was the shape of an upside-down heart; I pressed my face into it and I bawled. I'd got so used to slogging through the days with Sunday in plain sight—now I was sick and there was nothing to look forward to.

Luke would think I wasn't coming. Or maybe he wasn't going to turn up anyway after the night I called his mother. It was so hard for us to be together.

I jumped between both scenarios and decided I liked the one where he showed. To pass more time, I dozed and daydreamed. I counted the pounding pulse in my temple, per minute, the beats between Gypsy's snores. It was bad enough being stuck in Mobius—now my world had shrunk to the area of my bedroom and the bathroom.

That night I gave Trudy my coldest stare, plus another seventy-five dollars out of my savings under the mattress. I asked her to let Alby know I was taking a few days off and to please,
please
pay the phone bill. I slept again and the next time I woke it was past midnight, the horrible day over.

CHAPTER FIVE

Four days passed before I felt human again. The flu had apparently ripped through most of the town. Alby had been sick, too, and since Astrid had recovered she'd been running the roadhouse singlehandedly. Trudy avoided me way more successfully than I thought possible, considering we shared a bathroom and I kept falling asleep on the floor. If we met in the hallway, she sidestepped me, holding a can of disinfectant in her outstretched hand like a bottle of holy water.

On Thursday morning I woke before six, temperature normal, legs weak, the skin around my nose red and chapped. I stripped my bed, washed my sheets and hung them outside. A warm, whippy breeze whistled down through the trees and tied the sheets in knots. Before Trudy got up, I'd showered, slipped on shorts and an old Joy Division T-shirt of hers that got mixed up with my washing, and siphoned a few litres of petrol from her tank.

I wasn't due back for a shift at Bent Bowl Spoon until the next day. I rode into town anyway, listened to the dial tone at the phone box for a few minutes, before deciding Luke would be at work. I pocketed the coins and pushed my bike down Main Street. Mobius was deserted and it was still half-dark.

I leaned my bike up against the stair railing and peered through the front windows of the roadhouse. Astrid wasn't there as far as I could tell, but she'd been busy over the last few days. Nothing much had changed for decades until I'd come along; now the displays I'd set up at the end of each aisle were different. The two checkouts had been shifted, leaving clean patches on the floor where the tiles hadn't seen the sun. I had a moment of unreasonable panic. I could move the checkouts back. The diamond puzzle could still be deciphered.
Please don't let anything else be different.

The upstairs flat was closed and silent. If Alby was feeling as deathly as I had felt, Mr Broadbent could be a spreading stain on the carpet and he wouldn't have noticed. I lingered at the bottom of the stairs. After a few minutes Mr Broadbent took up his place at the window, staring longingly down the street. I waved. His gaze shifted but settled on the middle distance.

What are you looking at, Mr Broadbent? What do you see?

A little after ten it was starting to get light. I wandered along Shirley Street. The smell of waffle cones was thick but the kiosk blinds were down and the parking bays around the man-made lake were empty. Mobius's World Famous Homemade Ice Cream Shoppe wasn't homemade at all, just Häagen-Dazs masquerading in Mobius's World Famous Homemade Ice Cream Shoppe tubs. The waffle-cone stink never really went away, though the tourists had stopped coming.

I was struck by how green the valley was, even in summer. I turned onto my old street. Ma and Dad lived in the middle of town, across from a playground that nobody seemed to use except me, on aimless days when I came to stare at the house.

I sat in one of the old tyre swings and toed the dirt.

‘Hello, house,' I said.

It was different. The front fence had been repainted a deep evergreen and the sand-coloured house bricks were white. The only things that hadn't changed were the things Dad was supposed to fix—the broken gate, the cracked tiles on the roof, the letterbox with a missing number five. Ma's car wasn't there but loud music was pumping from Dad's shed at the side of the house.

It had been nearly five months since I'd been home to visit—well, five months since I'd gone inside. It was easier to avoid Ma and whatever confrontation she had brewing, her forced silences, the way she got busy dusting knick-knacks as if they had genies inside them, while I sat there feeling like a stranger who was wasting her time. She would carry on cleaning as I sipped water from an old plastic beaker that bore my own teeth marks around the rim, resisting the urge to find out if my room had been preserved or desecrated, trying not to provoke her.

It was my fault she was angry. I'd picked Trudy. Things were bad before but now they were worse. Dad said to give her time.

I was so busy cataloguing the changes to the house and theorising about the rap music coming from the shed, I didn't notice Jeremiah Jolley until he squeezed into the tyre next to me.

‘So, when did you get home?' I asked.

‘Home,' Jeremiah said flatly.

‘Yeah, home. Here.'

‘A week ago,' he said. ‘I don't miss it.'

‘This place?'

‘This noise. Like too many voices inside your head, all gibbering at once.'

The steady hum of insects, the whooping birdcalls, the heavy jungle heat—they were so familiar, sometimes I forgot how constant everything was, the way you stop smelling your own perfume.

‘That would be the sound of Mobiites, cloning and feeding,' I said. ‘How long will you stay?'

For the billionth time I thought how monumentally stupid it was to build a town between two immense slabs of rock. It's like they found the arse-crack of two tectonic plates and figured the scenery outweighed the risk. The epicentre was right there, in my old backyard. The Bradley house, separating our place from Meredith Jolley's, had stood empty since Mrs Bradley died six years ago. Even from across the street, I could see the giant crack dividing the house in two.

‘Five, maybe six weeks.' He tilted his head. ‘Run DMC.'

‘Pardon?'

‘The music. Coming from your shed. “Walk This Way”.'

‘Technically, it's Aerosmith and it's not my shed,' I corrected, but he had left his tyre swinging and crossed the street.

If you didn't lift our broken front gate as you opened it, the hinges juddered and gave an unholy screech. Jeremiah lifted the gate. He walked right up to the house and ran his hand over the bricks.

When he came back he said, ‘You painted over the bricks.'

‘Well,
I
didn't. I don't live here anymore. I live with my sister.' I angled my body away from him. He'd always been a strange kid. Now he was a strange
man
who took up way too much space. ‘What is it with our house bricks, anyway?'

Jeremiah shrugged.

‘You don't say much, do you?'

He shook his head.

‘I assumed you'd gone to live with your dad, wherever he is. After the way you were treated here…I mean, I wouldn't blame you. Your mum was so lost after you went. My mum used to take her food, but she put the untouched plates back on our doorstep. Eventually, Ma was like, well, she's obviously not going to top herself or anything, and…' I stopped my babbling too late. ‘Sorry. I bet she's glad you're home to take care of her.' I got up and steadied the swing. To hide the heat in my face I said, nastily, ‘Nice chatting with you.'

Jeremiah took the longest breath. I started walking as he began talking, fast, like he couldn't stop.

‘Home,' he repeated. ‘I kicked dirt into that hole two years, two hundred and twelve days ago. Yes, I'm counting. Did you have Mrs Denton at school? I liked her. When I was ten, she told the class to write three hundred words about Mobius. Easy enough. At that time, our population was nine hundred and seventy-two. Also, a week before that, Mrs Denton put her hand on my shoulder. I shrugged her off because I can't stand people touching me, and since then she'd been giving me these wounded looks. I felt bad. She was nice.'

‘She was nice,' I murmured but he kept on, drawling, staring ahead like he was reading from a teleprompter.

‘I wrote three whole pages, which was above and beyond the requirement, except I never mentioned our town's name. I wrote a lot about sheep tails…well, lamb tails, because sheep don't have them. When the lambs are a few days old, the farmer puts a small rubbery band around the tail, about four or five centimetres from its base. A few minutes later, the lambs take off on a crazy lap around the paddock trying to shake this thing off. Eventually, the tail goes numb, and after about ten days it dies. The tail, not the lamb. It sounds barbaric, but if you don't dock them, they get flyblown, which is—apparently—infinitely more distressing than having your tail drop off in a paddock. I wrote about Mercy Loop, except—and again, maybe I was
too
obtuse here—I didn't mention the name. I wrote about how Mercy Loop folds back onto itself, so you come and go the same way, and then it diverts back onto the main highway. I detailed the impact the bypass road had on Mobius, but I may have veered into even deeper allegorical territory by likening it to a drip-feeding tube that keeps a brain-dead person alive. I even drew pictures.'

I slid back into the tyre swing and nodded politely, wanting it to be over, wishing I could end a conversation abruptly the way Trudy could. Or Astrid. Jeremiah had a mind like the White Rabbit—I couldn't keep up.

‘You know, I still remember the look on Mrs Denton's face when she read it. I knew I'd done something that couldn't be undone. Mrs Denton called my mother and we waited for her on those sticky vinyl chairs outside Principal O'Malley's office. I was terrified—it was the first time I'd ever been in there. Mrs Denton kept letting out these shaky sighs and shuffling the pages. Eventually, she said, “So, the part when you…you're saying…cut off the road and the town will die and…?”. I was so proud. She'd got it. My stupid ten-year-old self beamed at her and said, “Yes! It would be kinder to the sheep!”'