Inbetween Days

by Vikki Wakefield

  I flinched and stepped back. ‘So?’

  ‘So who gave it to you? Where were you last night?’

  ‘How is that any of your business?’

  ‘It is my business. I’m your legal guardian.’

  ‘You are not and why do you even care?’ I scooped up my clothes and went to the bathroom.

  Trudy followed, her lips pressed so tight they’d disappeared. ‘I don’t want to send you back to Ma but I don’t see any other way. You’re not the easiest person to get along with. You’re self-destructing.’

  ‘You’re such a hypocrite!’ I yelled. ‘What is wrong with you people?’ I turned on the hot tap and let it run. ‘Can I have some privacy, please?’

  ‘Just listen for once,’ she pleaded. I was taken aback by her abrupt change of tone. ‘I wanted to protect you from all the shit I had to go through. I couldn’t stand the thought of her, chipping away at your self-esteem like she did mine—but if you keep carrying on like this I’ll have no choice.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’ I said. ‘How do you know most of the shit didn’t already happen while you were away? What if you were too late?’

  ‘It’s not too late. Think about it, Jack.’ She hovered in the doorway. The phone rang and she glanced over her shoulder. ‘It might be better for us both if you went back to Ma’s. I didn’t come home to find myself in the middle of another war.’ She waited.

  ‘I can’t change who I am.’

  ‘You can and you should,’ Trudy said.

  ‘Get the phone,’ I muttered. ‘It’ll be for you anyway.’ Steam clouded the mirror and Trudy’s face. I stepped into the shower and she was gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The drive-in became our secret project. It was something to do—with my mind, with my hands, and with other people who had nothing to do but kill time. But today Roly wasn’t there and I knew it was somehow my fault.

  Jeremiah was still waiting for Meredith to come home from hospital. I decided I was done waiting for Luke: I wouldn’t meet him or call him again, not even to say goodbye. There was no point trying to end something that had never really begun.

  For now there was the grey shadow in the corner of the screen to paint and, according to Jeremiah, the power to connect, the speakers to test and the projector to service. It was my job to check the globes inside the mushroom lights, too. We broke for a late lunch of sandwiches and cold thermos coffee at half past two.

  ‘So, what now?’

  ‘We have to turn on the electricity somehow,’ Jeremiah said.

  ‘What if it’s disconnected?’

  ‘It is, obviously, but I should be able to hook something up if it’s still on the grid.’

  ‘Don’t we need an electrician for that?’

  He just grinned around the screwdriver he had clenched between his teeth.

  ‘What if you blow yourself up?’

  ‘Ah ’on’t,’ he said.

  Summer beat on around us. Jeremiah worked steadily, trying to decipher the maze of wiring in the meter box. I stayed out of the way, in the shade inside the old kiosk and the projector room. I was useless for the technical stuff and the heavy lifting, so I cleaned and fetched drinks.

  Jeremiah pulled up an old three-legged stool and bent over to poke around inside the projection equipment.

  ‘Stupid question,’ I said, ‘but won’t we need a film to get it running?’

  ‘It’s not stupid,’ he answered. ‘But I’m more worried about broken parts. I mean, if there’s something missing I won’t know what it is. It’s like trying to complete a puzzle without a picture.’ His voice echoed inside the contraption.

  ‘We could ask Alby. He’s a walking history book. Maybe there’s an archive at the library or something.’

  ‘Then people will find out what we’re doing up here.’ He poked his head out. Spiderwebs had turned his hair grey. ‘If nobody but you, me and Roly knows then we’re not likely to run into any opposition. I’ll work it out.’

  I hoisted myself onto the bench. ‘Why didn’t Roly come?’

  Jeremiah shrugged. ‘He said he was busy.’ He brushed himself off. ‘I’m going to see if I can find the connection out on the road. Wait here and don’t touch anything.’

  ‘Roger.’ I gave him a salute. ‘But shouldn’t we have a distress signal?’

  ‘I’d say the smell of burning flesh would be unmistakeable.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ I reached out and put my hand on his forearm. The cords of muscle underneath jumped. ‘Be careful.’ I squeezed.

  Jeremiah reacted as if I’d stubbed a lit cigarette out on his skin: he snatched his arm back and muttered something about it getting dark soon. I watched him make his way down to the road and nursed my hurt.

  Don’t touch anything, he’d said.

  I stared at my hands. They were just ordinary hands—they didn’t seem capable of provoking such a strong reaction.

  He was gone for a long time.

  I climbed up to the platform and started painting over the shadow in the corner. The areas we’d already painted were beginning to peel and millions of tiny bugs had stuck to the wet paint and died. I gave it two coats but a hard, pelting rain came from nowhere and I ran back to the kiosk for cover. From the shelter of the doorway I watched the paint wash away in streaks. The now-familiar shadow appeared again.

  It was useless, like trying to give mouth-to-mouth to someone long dead.

  I chucked the paintbrush into a bush. Jeremiah was out there standing in a puddle, playing with electricity. My nerves were completely shot.

  Something whirred in the far corner of the room. I lifted a piece of sacking; beneath it, a fan inside a metal cage was spinning fast. It took a few seconds to sink in. The power was on. I flicked a light switch but nothing happened. I tried a different one and the globe outside the door popped and blew.

  The rain came down in buckets. The gutters groaned and overflowed. I ran outside, jumping the white river that had sprung from underneath the bush. Wet, broken chunks of asphalt winked like fool’s gold and I counted nine out of thirty-four mushroom lights, glowing in the dusk. I fiddled with the dial on the nearest speaker. It crackled and spat static. Elated, I punched the air and searched the haze obscuring the driveway out to the main road.

  After a few minutes, Jeremiah appeared, hunched against needles of rain.

  ‘You did it!’ I raised the crackling speaker as a boom of thunder rolled over the top of the ridge.

  ‘You’ll be Frankenstein’s bride if you don’t put that thing down.’ He took it from me and set it back in its cradle.

  We ran, jumping puddles and leapfrogging speaker-posts. We sat up on the platform, admiring our wonderland, uncaring that we were soaked through. A broad patch of shadowy forest separated us from the lights of Mobius, spread out like a circuit board below; a spectacular storm passed right overhead with sheet lightning and bursts of rain that sounded like applause.

  ‘Look at it,’ I pointed across the valley to the black hole of Pryor Ridge. The rain had become a mist. Our skin steamed. ‘Why do you think they go there?’

  ‘Who? The doers or the watchers?’

  ‘The watchers, I guess.’ Again, I thought of Pope but I kept it to myself. Which was he?

  ‘I don’t know—maybe it’s as close as they can get without stepping off the ledge themselves. Death is life-affirming for some people.’

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  Jeremiah shrugged. ‘It’s nothing new. In the eighteenth century, the Georgians used to pay entry to asylums so they could ogle the insane. Public hangings drew packed crowds. Do people stand on the Golden Gate Bridge and wonder at the brilliance of its engineering? No, they peer over the edge. This whole area is so rich in gold-mining history. We should wonder at the tenacity of humans who had no business being that far underground with fuck-all else but a shovel, a pick and a dream. But no, instead people come to see where other people came to die.’ He threw up his hands. ‘It’s such a waste of cur
iosity.’

  ‘Have you ever been down a mine shaft?’

  ‘Of course. You think I stopped at licking bricks?’ He laughed, then turned serious. ‘Have you ever thought about getting out of this town? New horizons and all that?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘My horizon is right there. Same place it’s always been.’ I pointed to the thin wash of pink in the sky, to the west.

  ‘Well, that’s only because you’re sitting still.’ Jeremiah swayed and inhaled, close to my ear.

  ‘Are you sniffing my hair?’ I teased.

  ‘What? No!’ He shook his head, shuffled further away.

  ‘What does it smell like?’ I pressed. ‘Apples and cinnamon? Vanilla? Does it smell like raspberries?’

  ‘I was not smelling your hair.’

  ‘I used a bath bomb this morning,’ I said. ‘It was called Tutti Frutti but I thought it smelled more like bubble gum.’

  ‘Did you wash your hair with it?’

  ‘Of course not. It was a bath bomb.’

  ‘Then why would your hair smell like bubble gum?’

  ‘I’m just saying. So, you didn’t get a whiff of blood orange, or grapefruit? I know…sandalwood. And lilacs. Frankincense and myrrh.’

  ‘I don’t even know what those things smell like. Olfactory sense is linked to—’

  ‘I must say, I’m disappointed.’ I sighed theatrically. ‘You’re supposed to notice these things. “Oh, she smells of pine needles and fresh air, sunshine and bliss, musk and debauchery.” You don’t have to say it aloud but you can think it.’ I sniffed the skin inside my forearm. ‘What’s the point of all our lotions and potions?’

  Jeremiah squirmed. ‘Roses?’

  ‘Roses are common. Roses are granny’s house and big knickers on the washing line.’

  ‘How about frangipani?’

  I pulled a face. ‘I smell like frangipani?’

  ‘Well, no, not really. But at least I know what it smells like.’

  ‘Oh, never mind.’ I leaned closer to Jeremiah and looked down. The ground was blurred and far away. I refocused on his face. He wore a baffled expression. ‘I’m just teasing you,’ I said. ‘I fully expected you’d say my hair smelled like hair.’

  ‘This is all incredibly complicated,’ he said quietly and screwed up his nose. ‘I suppose I would rather tell her how she makes me feel.’

  ‘How does she make you feel? You can practise on me.’ I laughed and folded my hands in my lap.

  Jeremiah looked away. ‘I would tell her that I like her hands,’ he began. ‘I would tell her that I don’t like to be touched, but her hands are the exception. I don’t like to be made fun of—and she’s done that, many times, either implicitly or overtly—but I would take her ridicule over her not knowing I existed, any day. I’d confess I don’t like being wrong about anything but I hope I’m wrong about her—she’s not right for me, I know that, but I want her anyway. I would tell her that being back here is only bearable because she’s here too and, for the first time ever, I don’t want to leave. I wish I knew how to tell her how I feel without bringing on an ending of some kind, but I know it’s inevitable. And I would tell her I understood if she told me she didn’t feel the same way.’ He folded his hands in his lap, too, but he stared at mine. ‘That’s how she makes me feel.’

  I looked over my shoulder. Our shadow-selves were merged on the screen, though we were more than two feet apart. I understood what he was asking. I had an out: I could go on, pretending ‘she’ was not me—make fun of him, as he’d pointed out so gently, and leave things the way they were.

  He wasn’t the one I’d pick. But I wanted so, so badly to be adored. To patch up the hurt with something new.

  ‘This is going to make things incredibly complicated,’ I said primly.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ he replied.

  We bumped teeth and my lip bled. It wasn’t great, not the first time. But we didn’t have to make it perfect. We just had to make it work.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I saw Pope in town a few days later. I was going to look after Mr Broadbent—I felt guilty about letting Alby down and I needed the money. Mads dropped me off on her way to an afternoon shift at the pub.

  Pope was standing by his car outside the bakery, looking bewildered, as if Main Street was far too much civilisation for him. At least he’d survived the storm.

  ‘How are you?’ I said. ‘Tried the Bushman’s pie? The apricot strudel is pretty good, too. Avoid the Cornish pastie—it tastes like parsnip and toenails.’

  ‘You haven’t been up for a while,’ he said. ‘I find myself looking forward to our odd conversations. I was craving human contact of the deranged variety but then some old guy in a bathrobe flashed me and ran off down the street.’ He patted his pockets, looking for something. ‘So, yeah, I’m good.’

  I laughed before I realised what he meant. ‘Which way did he go?’

  He jabbed a thumb east, which I suspected already. ‘Another guy’s gone after him—and a woman, brandishing a broom.’

  I nodded.

  ‘None of this is surprising to you, is it?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  He smiled. ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Why is that excellent?’

  ‘It means I haven’t gone completely mad.’

  ‘Oh contrary,’ I said. ‘It just means you’re becoming a local.’

  ‘Contraire,’ he said.

  Astrid came out the front of Bent Bowl Spoon and rubbed out the old specials on the sandwich board. It was bad timing. Pope saw her, too, and of course she looked like an album cover with her Sunsilk hair and hitched skirt and her battered cowboy boots.

  ‘Your friend’s waving,’ Pope said, raising his own hand.

  I scowled and kicked a tyre. ‘We’re not friends.’

  ‘There you go again,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ve got to go.’ He slid into the front seat and turned the engine over. It sputtered and caught, belching a cloud of black smoke.

  Astrid stared at us, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  I lingered, waving at the car until it disappeared. Astrid didn’t know everything about me anymore. I waited at the top of the steps. Alby and Mrs Gates hauled Mr Broadbent back home between them, their elbows locked with his. He looked like a prisoner.

  ‘How far did he get?’ I asked.

  ‘Pretty far,’ Alby puffed. ‘He’s had some training lately.’ He glared at me.

  Mrs Gates offered Mr Broadbent’s elbow.

  I took hold of him. ‘What if we take him for a walk every now and then? Maybe he needs more fresh air.’

  Mrs Gates snorted. ‘He needs more trousers. I have to be off. I’ve got a client over the basin.’ She nodded at me. ‘We need to freshen up that colour before somebody shoots you for a fox.’

  ‘Thanks, Marie,’ Alby said.

  ‘Anytime, Albert.’

  A wheezing sound came from Mr Broadbent’s throat.

  ‘Is he choking?’ I said, trying to pinch his mouth open.

  ‘He’s laughing,’ Alby said. ‘He’s got a taste for it now, no thanks to you.’

  We wrestled Mr Broadbent inside and settled him in his chair. He dropped into it like a fallen kite. I draped a blanket over his knees and turned on the TV.

  Alby gathered his wallet and keys. ‘He’s eaten. I should only be a couple of hours. Think you can handle it this time?’

  ‘I’m a good girl,’ I reminded him.

  Mr Broadbent watched him leave, eyelids drooping.

  I opened up the blinds and let the late-afternoon sunlight pour in. The only place open was the salon—no wonder he was always searching for a way out.

  A small sound. I turned around. So much for sleeping. Mr Broadbent reached under the table, pulled out the Jenga box and set it on his lap. He shook it.

  ‘Faker,’ I said.

  He gurgled. His eyes crinkled at the corners.

  I set up the tower four times. Four times he knocked it over. But on the fifth, he car
efully pinched one piece at the bottom and slid it out, leaving the tower standing.

  I clapped.

  He stuck the piece between his lips, like a cigar.

  ‘Now you’re going backwards,’ I said. ‘Come on, we were making progress.’

  I took the piece away. He flapped his hands so I gave it back. This time he held the piece differently, as if it was a pencil; he drew shapes in the air, withdrew another three pieces and lined them up on the table, slowly pushing them around with his forefinger as if they were letters on a Ouija board. I watched, fascinated, waiting for a pattern to emerge. He did the same thing for forty minutes—there was no pattern, just an obsession with pushing the blocks around.

  Fed up, I went to the kitchen to make myself a mug of coffee. It was almost five, well past crazy hour. Alby’s kettle was old and shrill; clouds of steam misted the glass. I wrote Luke’s name in the condensation—then crossed it out and wrote a looping J instead. I rubbed that out, too, as if someone was looking over my shoulder. Over the last two days Jeremiah had called twice and left messages, one on the machine and another with Trudy. I couldn’t help feeling as if I needed to stop thinking about Luke before I called him back. And I couldn’t stop.

  The kettle screeched. I switched it off at the wall. As the whistle faded I heard another noise, like streamers flapping in a breeze. Mr Broadbent wasn’t in his chair; the front door was still closed and latched.

  ‘Where are you?’ I called. ‘What are you up to now?’ The sound stopped.

  I checked the bedrooms: both empty, beds made, matching sets of striped pyjamas folded on the pillows. On the other side of the flat, a long hallway led to the bathroom and toilet. The toilet door was closed but he wasn’t there. I whipped back the shower curtain in the bathroom. Not there, either.

  I was frantic—I’d only left him for a few minutes. I rattled the lounge-room windows and checked the pavement below, looked under the beds and the kitchen table, behind the couch, the bedroom curtains and doors.

  On my second lap I heard the flapping again.

  ‘Ready or not, here I come!’ I called.

  A throaty gurgle came from behind the door to the linen cupboard.