‘Hey, Brad,’ I said. ‘What can I do for you?’
He cocked his head and gave an apologetic shrug, like he was still trying to place my face.
Maybe it was the juggling act my brain was trying to perform—either a new black tile had materialised or I had been counting wrong for seven years—but I had the sudden urge to make him remember.
The bells jangled again.
‘About a year ago. You and me.’
‘Sorry.’ He shifted uncomfortably. ‘I just want to know if you have any masking tape.’
‘We have sticky tape. Here.’ I reached behind me and slapped a roll onto the counter. ‘It was right after you broke it off with Tegan. We were drinking and you had to leave your car at the…’
‘I’ll just go to the hardware.’ He left.
My vision narrowed to a pinprick of light. I started at the beginning, counting slowly, stepping into each diamond as I worked my way down aisle one. If I could just get to four hundred and sixteen, I would go back to the counter, serve my eleventh customer with a smile on my face and everything would go back to the way it was.
‘Have you lost something?’ said a deep voice.
Yeah. I’d lost count. ‘No, I’ve found it, but I need to make sure.’
‘Can I help?’
The third thing: Jeremiah Jolley counted diamonds with me in Bent Bowl Spoon.
‘Where would you like me to begin?’
I asked him to start at the end, to only count the whole ones. We passed each other at the halfway point in aisle two; he didn’t look up, but I stopped counting and watched him right to the end. He gave every diamond grave attention, like he might be graded on his final answer.
It would have been a couple of years since I’d last seen him—I guessed he would be eighteen now. Jeremiah wore loose jeans and a sloppy black T-shirt that looked two sizes too big. His hair was the same: dark, shaggy, down to his shoulders. His voice was familiar but much deeper, his words still precise, as if he’d written them down earlier and knew them by heart. He walked the same way, as if he was being shoved along from behind by an invisible pair of hands, and he kept his head down the way I remembered, although that was probably because he was counting. But there was a startling difference: he’d grown so tall and broad it was a wonder he hadn’t split through his skin. Jeremiah was never present enough in my life for me to notice exactly when he left. He was always odd and kind of cold. I’d hoped life would work out for him, in the same way I hoped an unwanted puppy would be adopted from a shelter—I cared but he wasn’t the one I’d pick.
I continued, though I’d lost count. We met back at the front counter.
‘How is your mum?’ It seemed like the right question, though I had a dozen others I would rather have asked. You look different; do you feel different? Are you still the same scared, weird little kid on the inside? Did the bullying stop when you went away, or are people cruel wherever you go?
‘Certifiable. I came to sign the papers,’ he said.
Rumour had it he knew all the answers and then some, but Jeremiah’s gaze was a steady, dark-edged grey that revealed nothing.
‘Oh. Sorry.’ I looked away, embarrassed.
‘I’m joking. They’re trying to get her medication right.’
‘Well, I hope she’s better soon. She’s really proud of you. She talks about you all the time when she comes in.’
He seemed alarmed at that.
Roland Bone slammed his way through the door.
‘How long does it take you to get my smokes, J?’
Jeremiah shrugged. ‘Roly’s driving me around until I can fix Mum’s car.’
‘It’s great you guys are still friends,’ I said. Roly pointed and I reached for the packet of cigarettes. ‘I hardly see anyone from school.’
‘We’re not friends. We’re co-survivors,’ Roly said, and looked up at Jeremiah. ‘He got big, didn’t he? I’ll tell you, though, he could have bloomed earlier and saved us a whole lot of walking the long way home.’ He peered down at his own scrawny frame and flexed a bicep. ‘I tried protein shakes but nothing happened. Those guys on the label are probably on the juice—knowing my luck I’d just grow another head.’
‘Well, if you’re going to have two heads, Mobius is the right place for you.’ I passed him the packet. ‘Anyway, you look all right to me, Roly.’
He checked his watch. ‘I’ll be a man in sixty-five days, three hours and nine minutes. Will you wait for me, Jack?’
‘Not in your best sweaty dream, Roland Bone.’
Jeremiah handed me a twenty-dollar note.
Roly laughed. ‘Erin Morgan had six toes on each foot, remember? Geez, is there even a name for that?’
‘Polydactyly,’ said Jeremiah.
‘Ever met a chick with a third nipple?’ Roly unwrapped the packet, tapped out a cigarette and wedged it behind his ear.
Jeremiah didn’t blink. ‘It’s more common than you might think.’
Roly gave me a look loaded with apology. ‘He still thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us. I thought that might change once he discovered vaginas and marijuana. See ya, Jack.’
Jeremiah followed. When he reached the door he turned and mumbled, ‘It was before he broke it off with Tegan. And I counted four hundred and seventeen.’
That afternoon Ma strolled past the roadhouse again, dragging her shopping trolley behind her. It sagged, nothing inside it. She wore her town clothes, a white blouse and navy pants—she never left the house in a dress—and her hair was pulled into a tight bun that pulled the wrinkles from her face and squeezed them into her chin. She held her spine too straight; she walked like royalty in cheap shoes.
‘Mum’ was too soft for somebody like Ma. She was all acute angles and short sentences and sharp slaps, if we asked for it, and we often did. Trudy had worn the edges off Ma’s temper by the time she left, and I got off lightly. I wondered if Dad was copping it now. Still, I felt a surge of affection for her swollen ankles and sensible shoes.
I’d ignored the diamonds successfully for a couple of hours. Instead I focused on unpacking Alby’s botched order of forty cartons of toilet paper. I began building a display, hoping to shift as many rolls as I could before they ended up in our spare room. I stacked two solid piers on either side of aisle two and tried to join them with an arch in the middle, but the arch collapsed. I settled for using a bridge of cardboard and the thing ended up looking like a doorway.
Upstairs, the old man moaned and shrieked. I thought of Gypsy, going quietly. Mr Broadbent, not so.
Alby called me. ‘Latch the shop door, Jack. It will only take a few minutes, if you don’t mind.’
I went up. Alby, still wearing pyjamas, was trying to open his father’s mouth.
I picked up two yellow pills. ‘Won’t he take them?’
Alby shook his head. He wiped his hands on his pyjama bottoms. ‘He wants his whisky and I’m not giving it to him. ’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Ask him,’ he whispered. ‘He might do it for you. Otherwise we’ll have to hold him down.’
Mr Broadbent tapped his foot and whistled through his false teeth.
Me, half the size of them both, trying to hold a grown man down while Alby forced pills down his throat? Not likely.
‘Please, will you…?’ I leaned across suddenly and pinched Mr Broadbent’s nostrils. His mouth opened and in went the pills, far enough down his throat that he either had to swallow or choke. I pulled my fingers back before he bit. He swallowed. And shrieked.
‘Now why didn’t I think of that?’ Alby sighed. ‘Can you watch him while I take a quick shower? Shop’ll be all right.’
‘Of course.’
I sat on the windowsill next to his recliner, reading aloud from the newspaper, one eye on the street in case a customer came by. I’d done the same thing dozens of times before. Alby always took ages. I would, too, if I had to put up with all that shrieking. As long as he was done by half past four, I
didn’t mind. Alby had hidden the clocks, but somehow Mr Broadbent knew—in the same way Gypsy knew we were going for a walk before I picked up her lead. I could handle most things, but not his four-thirty routine.
I fed him small pieces of a corned-beef sandwich and half-filled a glass from the whisky bottle hidden up high on the kitchen cupboard.
I found a box of Jenga blocks under the coffee table and started building a tower. Mr Broadbent’s foot stopped tapping. He watched. His eyes shifted from my face to my hands, back again. He let me put the last block in place, waited until I turned back to the window, stretched out a shaky finger and knocked the tower down.
‘Alby, look,’ I said when he came out, dressed and shaven. ‘Watch this.’
I built the tower again and Mr Broadbent did the same thing.
Alby only flinched at the clatter. ‘Gettin’ him to stack it would be real progress. But you’re…’
‘…a good girl. Yeah. I know,’ I grumbled.
I don’t know what made me think I could bring him back. He would respond to certain things, like food, open doors, loud noises, but he reminded me of a wind-up toy: bam, then nothing. Maybe it was only one way from wherever he was—one foot in another world and no crossing back.
I packed the blocks away. Mr Broadbent fell asleep with his mouth open. I hoped Alby wouldn’t smell the whisky on his breath.
I walked my bike to Astrid’s after I finished work. The fuel tank was almost empty—the fumes would just about get me home. Astrid lived in a saggy two-bedroom house at the edge of an empty paddock, half-hidden by thigh-high weeds and an abandoned tractor. She adored company. I’d sit at her kitchen table while she smoked and paced and made plates of finger-food out of whatever she could find in her cupboards.
It took three knocks before she answered. Her eyes were streaming and she had a twisted piece of tissue sticking out of one nostril. Behind her, the TV blared. Adam was sitting cross-legged on the floor, still wearing pyjamas, hypnotised by a cartoon. His dark hair was a static mess and the carpet was littered with lolly wrappers.
‘Oh, you’re really sick.’
‘It’s worse than it looks.’ She sniffed and removed the tissue. ‘And what do you mean, really? You mean very sick, or actually sick?’
‘Actually.’
‘Nice.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Did we get paid?’ Astrid asked.
‘No. Not yet.’
‘Motherfuck. Sorry, hon,’ she called to Adam.
‘Alby said tomorrow. He has to liquidate some assets.’
‘Which is code for?’
‘I wouldn’t count on it.’
‘Motherfuck.’
‘So, can I come in?’
‘Look at me,’ she wailed. ‘I’m Typhoid Tess.’
‘I won’t breathe in.’
‘It’s not a good time,’ she said. ‘You should go home.’
‘I think I might be going mad.’
‘Are you kidding me? You’re the most together person I know.’
‘I spent the afternoon looking after Mr Broadbent. Come on, let me in. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Go home, Jack,’ Astrid repeated with a sigh. ‘I’m going back to bed.’ She closed the door.
I wasn’t used to being left standing on her verandah. I wondered what I’d done wrong. I can’t read subtext—I never could. It seemed to me that if people would just say what they meant, we’d all get back half our lives in wasted time.
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 phon
e 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.
Inbetween Days Page 4