Inbetween Days

by Vikki Wakefield

  Alby cut me off. ‘When are you going to get it through your head, Jack? You can’t bring him back. All we can do is keep him safe. He doesn’t feel joy or pain anymore. Two things, Jack: you can’t teach him new tricks and he has nothing to show you. All he does is replay his remaining memories over and over, and half the pieces are missing.’ He sighed. ‘Look at him.’

  Mr Broadbent balled up his fists and rubbed his eyes. He looked like a child, standing there in his oversized tracksuit and party hat. He glanced at Alby, removed the hat and held it to his chest, running his other hand across the stalks on his head, as if he was paying respect at a graveside.

  Two things, Alby said, but it turned out he was only right about one.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Jeremiah took Alby’s consent and ran with it. He went to the flat and selected dozens of tapes, interrogated Alby about procedures, and finished painting the screen.

  The drive-in became our not-so-secret project. Locals started turning up to see what was going on. They hung around, telling stories about the first and last film they’d ever seen there, and the number of freeloaders you could fit into a boot.

  On the nights I didn’t go, I knew Jeremiah took Roly. We hadn’t been in the same space since the morning at Meredith Jolley’s house and I still didn’t understand why he was being so hostile. Had I messed up their friendship? Was Roly feeling like the third wheel? Or was it Jeremiah stuck in the middle, mediating between Roly and me—or Roly himself, whose absence was palpable whenever Jeremiah and I were alone?

  Over three nights, Jeremiah and I sat through nine films while he checked the sound quality and scrutinised every frame. I watched him closely. I learned how to run the equipment, only much more slowly and with far less care. I’d started to notice that Jeremiah couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do two things at once: whatever held his attention took his whole focus. When it wasn’t me, I might as well not have been there at all.

  On the fourth night, I was dozing in the front seat of the car while Jeremiah pulled apart an old refrigerated chest from the kiosk. We hadn’t spoken for two hours, and my thoughts were somewhere else, when he leaned through the window.

  ‘We should have a premiere night,’ he said.

  ‘Nobody will come. Why do you think Alby shut it down?’ I muttered, fanning myself with a newspaper. ‘God, this car is an oven.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong. Now what do you want to watch tonight?’

  I leaned back and closed my eyes for a moment. ‘I get a choice? Definitely something with kissing.’ I opened one eye.

  He wrinkled his nose. ‘How about cyborgs and time travel? The apocalypse?’

  ‘Kissing, broken hearts and a fire escape.’ I sat up.

  He stared at me blankly. ‘I can’t think of anything like that.’

  I laughed. I thought he was joking. But then I realised his attention was wholly, solely on me and he hadn’t blinked in a while—which could only mean he was going to say something profound or disturbing, or both.

  ‘Jack, there’s something I want to ask you…’

  ‘I have an idea. Let’s invite Roly. The more the merrier,’ I babbled. ‘And I’m starving. I need food or I’m going to pass out.’

  He slumped and nodded. ‘I already called him before I left home. I told him to bring deckchairs. But I need to…’

  ‘Lighten up, J,’ I said. ‘You’re so serious all the time.’

  We went to pick up takeaway burgers. Roly was waiting when we got back. We hauled deck chairs from the back of his ute and set them up in a row, using the esky as a table. Roly sprayed himself all over with a can of insect-repellent and Jeremiah, out of a desire for peace or an instinct for survival, took the seat in the middle.

  ‘Aahh.’ Roly cracked open a beer and put his feet up on the esky. ‘This is the life. Why didn’t we do this sooner?’

  ‘Because it was bloody hard work,’ Jeremiah said.

  ‘And you weren’t even here for most of it,’ I added. ‘You should pay full ticket price.’

  Roly bristled. ‘To watch St. Elmo’s Fire? Are you serious? You should be paying me.’

  ‘Jack picked.’

  ‘You picked last night and the night before,’ I reminded him. ‘There’s only so much sci-fi and time travel I can stand before brain fluid starts leaking from my ears.’

  ‘See?’ Roly stabbed his finger in my direction. ‘You two have absolutely nothing in common.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ I said, and folded my arms underneath my boobs so he couldn’t miss them, or my point.

  Jeremiah turned red and got up to start the film.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said and pushed him into his chair.

  Roly clapped his hands together and jigged in his seat.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Dancing.’

  I laughed. ‘It isn’t dancing if you don’t move your feet.’

  Jeremiah laughed, too. ‘Agreed. That’s slipshod preentertainment.’

  Roly dropped his arms and glared at me. ‘Stop choosing her side, J.’

  ‘There are no sides, Roly.’ Jeremiah sighed. ‘And I shouldn’t have to choose.’

  I marched up to the projector room, wishing Roly would leave, even if it meant being alone with Jeremiah and whatever was on his mind. I set the reels and started the film, but I stayed in the booth, leaning in the doorway. Roly and Jeremiah weren’t watching the screen at all, but leaning close, arguing. They missed the flash of lights. Three sets of headlights were heading up the road, strobing through the trees.

  I jogged down to where they were sitting. ‘We’ve got visitors.’

  ‘Who is it?’ Roly held up a hand, shielding his eyes from the glare as the cars turned into the driveway.

  Empty bottles were tossed out of the windows and smashed on the asphalt. We heard loud music along with the breaking glass. Just kids looking for something to do, I thought, then realised the ‘kids’ were Ben, Becca and Cass, plus some townies from Burt. They were our age, they were drinking, and they were looking for trouble.

  ‘J, press inflate and tell them all to piss off.’

  ‘Inflate?’ I resisted the urge to hide in the projector room.

  ‘Have you seen him when he inhales? Dude doubles in size.’ Roly let out a shaky laugh.

  ‘Grow up, Roly. I can’t believe you still have so many hang-ups from high school,’ I said, but I felt sorry for him. I was such a hypocrite.

  ‘I’ll never forget,’ Roly said. ‘I have huge grudges. My grudges are so big I need a sherpa.’ He took a few steps back to stand behind Jeremiah.

  Jeremiah just shook his head. ‘We’ll just tell them we’re not ready but they’re welcome to come back when it’s all up and running,’ he said.

  The cars did a lap around the perimeter of the drive-in, rocking and bumping over the cracked asphalt. The girls screamed. Another bottle smashed close by.

  Roly flinched.

  Jeremiah stood taller and took his hands out of his pockets.

  We stayed in the centre as they circled.

  The cars lined up along the last row of speakers, idling, with the headlights trained on us. The occupants went quiet and the music turned off.

  ‘This is like a scene from Christine. What now, Mr Diplomacy?’ Roly asked. ‘Do you still want to negotiate?’

  ‘Calm down,’ Jeremiah said, shifting his weight to one foot. ‘They’re not going to do anything.’

  My palms were sweating but I didn’t feel threatened. I could always look after myself physically—it was the emotional stuff that found a way through. What I did feel—and I was ashamed of it—was embarrassment. In my so-called grown-up life I was hanging out at an abandoned drive-in, standing next to a Barbie car and the biggest drop-out loser in the history of Burt Area School. And a guy whose murky legend wasn’t of the flattering kind. Did they recognise me? Why did I even care? I covered my face with my arm.

  Roly, on the other hand, was terrified. I recog
nised that deer-in-the-headlights expression from way back in our first year of high school. Whenever he was asked to stand up to answer a question, he’d freeze like that.

  ‘Oh, how far we’ve come,’ Roly muttered. ‘We’re doomed.’

  Jeremiah picked up an empty beer bottle and started walking towards the cars.

  ‘J…’

  ‘Oh, shit.’ I started after him, shaking off Roly, who’d grabbed hold of my arm.

  One of the cars took off. Seconds later, the others followed. They threw a few more bottles onto the road, but that was it.

  I struggled with the feelings left behind.

  Roly did, too. His face was white. He did a kind of jelly-flop onto the ground and sat there, stunned. His was a different kind of embarrassment. I recognised it.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I held out my hand.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, but he accepted Jeremiah’s hand when he offered it. ‘Why did you do that?’

  Jeremiah pondered the question. ‘People I don’t care about can’t hurt me, I guess.’

  Roly got back on his feet. ‘Easy for you to say—you’ve got the fists to back it up,’ he said. ‘They probably thought you were a Yeti.’ He dropped Jeremiah’s hand and threw me a rueful smile. ‘He’s always been like this. Nothing gets in. My head would be lodged under some guy’s armpit and J would be, like, la-la-la, with his nose in a book. “Hold your breath, Roly, just let me finish this chapter.”’

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ Jeremiah said. ‘Your problem is you still insist on mapping your own position relative to everybody else’s. It’s no wonder you’ve lost all sense of direction.’

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ Roly said. ‘Fuck off, Freud.’

  Jeremiah frowned. ‘I’m saying the difference between you and me is that you’re always checking who’s behind you and who’s in front. I just keep my head down and read my own compass.’

  I smothered a laugh.

  Roly glared at me. ‘And you, you stand for everything we said we’d never be,’ Roly said. ‘You’re the enemy. J’s one of the good ones and you’re recruiting for the other side.’

  ‘What the hell?’ I looked at Jeremiah. ‘Are you going to say anything?’

  He shrugged helplessly. ‘He has a point. I don’t mean about recruiting for the other side—not that—but a lot happened to him at school. The only difference between him and me is that I don’t think about it anymore.’

  ‘That’s because you have a future,’ Roly said, shaking his head. ‘I’m seventeen and I haul bricks three days a week for a sadistic bastard who flicks lit cigarettes at my butt-cleavage every time I bend over. And I bend over a lot. School sucked, so I ain’t going back there. And if I don’t go back it’s pretty hard to go forward, isn’t it?’ He pulled out another beer and chugged it back. ‘And it’s people like your girlfriend here who made school suck.’

  I flushed and fired back. ‘That is all kinds of screwed up, Roly. What did I ever do to you?’

  ‘You didn’t do anything, unless you count looking the other way, which I take very, very personally.’

  ‘I didn’t…’

  ‘Let me refresh your memory.’

  ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ I yelled. ‘Yeah, so maybe I should have sat next to you on the bus or in class or whatever. So what if I had said something when you were being picked on? Do you think that would have changed anything? Or would there just be more of us?’

  ‘You’re not an us. You’re a them.’

  ‘I was never a them.’ I stabbed my finger towards the road. ‘You just lump me in with people like that because it’s easier for you to hate everybody. What do you think—I left school because everything was so fantastic for me? Don’t you get it? I wanted to be them. And you can deny it all you want, but you wanted to be them, too. That makes us an us.’

  Roly made a hissing sound and slapped his leg.

  ‘She has a point,’ Jeremiah said. ‘And us and them are weird words when you say them too many times.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ Roly and I said together.

  I picked up a stick and whipped viciously at the weeds. ‘Anyway, you’ll be glad to know things aren’t working out quite the way I planned either, Roly.’ As I said it, I realised Jeremiah would think I was talking about him instead of my spectacularly unimpressive life so far.

  Roly glanced at Jeremiah. ‘What about you, J?’

  Jeremiah scowled. ‘I’m happier right now than I’ve ever been,’ he said, sliding a glance at me.

  ‘Right.’ Roly picked up the last two empty bottles and skimmed them like stones across the asphalt.

  Jeremiah came up behind me and slid his arms around my waist. He’d never touched me like that in front of Roly before. I turned around and put my head on his chest, feeling sorry for myself, sorry for the way my brain worked, sorry for everything I couldn’t change.

  ‘Are you done?’ I asked Roly when he was finished breaking things. ‘Because I’m feeling a bit fragile right now and I think I want to go home.’

  Roly turned around. ‘One more thing,’ he said. He caught Jeremiah’s eye. ‘One more thing…’ He stopped again. Then he wiped his palms on his jeans and reluctantly stuck out a hand. ‘I’m blaming you for all of it. I’m sorry.’

  I shook it once and let go. ‘Yeah. Me, too.’

  At least one thing was clearer to me after that night: Jeremiah was the odd one out. He was the only one of us who’d moved on.

  Roly and I were stuck with our compasses still spinning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The next day was almost hot enough to blister. Perfect for swimming. I called Jeremiah and asked him to drive us to Moseley’s Dam. I had to get out of the house, and the dam was the only body of water within forty kilometres that didn’t heat up to air temperature. In my possessed bedroom, moisture was trickling down the walls and the window had swollen shut. I had another motive: I hoped that revisiting the scene of my summer bliss might banish my ghosts. It felt as if I was half in love, with only half my heart to give. Jeremiah was easy, he was safe, he was there. I loved too easily, Trudy had said, but it wasn’t easy at all.

  We pulled into the car park. Jeremiah reversed into a bay and we put our towels and esky under the wooden shelter. The dam was as still as a glass table, opaque all over, as if it had been stirred with a spoon. The water-level had dropped by about half a metre—I’d never seen it that low before.

  Jeremiah eyed the dam suspiciously. ‘I’ve never been swimming here,’ he confessed.

  ‘How is that possible?’ I shook my head. ‘It’s a route of passage, isn’t it?’

  ‘Rite,’ he said. ‘Let’s just say I took the route less travelled and stayed in the shallow end of the Burt Public Pool while my mother held on to the back of my jocks.’

  ‘You can’t swim?’

  ‘Not even almost. I paddle pretty well. I excel at floundering.’ He wandered down to the edge and stood on the bank, staring out across the water. ‘I suspect this dam is seething with Naegleria fowleri.’

  ‘Is that some kind of fish?’ I stripped down to my bikini.

  ‘It’s a single-celled amoeba. If it gets up your nose, you’re toast.’ He bent down and ran his fingers through the water. ‘The temperature might not suit proliferation, though.’

  I threw up my hands in frustration. ‘Why did you agree to come, then?’

  ‘I liked the idea of seeing you half-naked outside of my sheets,’ he said without turning around. His ears turned red.

  I was half-naked right then, but he didn’t seem to notice. I took a long run-up and bombed off the end of the wooden jetty, staying under for as long as I could. When I surfaced, Jeremiah had his shirt off.

  ‘Were you going to jump in after me?’ I teased.

  ‘I hadn’t made up my mind yet. That would have meant two of us needed saving.’ He sat at the end of the jetty, swinging his legs. He was annoyed with me. ‘You should at least hold your nose when you go under.’

  ‘Come i
n. I can touch here, look.’ I put my arms above my head and dunked, but I was wrong. It was far deeper than I thought. My hands went under as my toes just brushed the silty bottom. I came up. Already, my legs were tingling from the cold.

  Jeremiah wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘Are we having fun yet?’ I snapped, and immediately felt guilty. ‘Just walk in and cool off at least.’

  Reluctantly, he waded out up to his knees. I stayed just beyond reach to entice him further. ‘You want this? Come and get me.’

  ‘I’m not a fan of venturing blindly where I can’t see the bottom,’ he said.

  ‘It’s only mud and a few yabbies.’

  ‘You’re missing my point.’ He grimaced.

  ‘As far as I can tell you didn’t make one,’ I said. But I knew he was talking about us. And he knew I knew.

  He stopped where he was. ‘Aren’t you afraid of anything?’

  I turned on my back and floated. ‘Are you kidding?’ The sound of my own voice reverberated inside my head. I could almost pretend he couldn’t hear me. I closed my eyes. ‘I’m afraid of everything.’

  I must have drifted nearer to the bank; Jeremiah would not have voluntarily stepped out where the floor dropped away. He reeled me in by my left ankle and suspended my body, his palms under my shoulders and my upper thighs. I opened my eyes. He was looking me over. With the flat of his hand, he followed the path his gaze was taking, skimming my skin, raising more goosebumps. He kissed the tip of my nose, took his hand away and returned to his careful scrutiny. It was unnerving, intense and somehow…physical. Waiting for touch.

  Jeremiah’s lips moved around the words: I love you.

  There it was, the feeling I had been waiting for. Or was it? I stared up at the sky with my ears still underwater, willing the desire to take over my mind the way it had taken over the rest of me. And it didn’t. My mind stayed clear and detached. Trudy might believe her theory about a guy not being able to choose between the thought in his head and the one in his pants, but I wanted to tell her she was wrong. It wasn’t that simple. It worked both ways. To be desired was as powerful as desiring, but it wasn’t the same thing—it didn’t have the same reach. I couldn’t bear to hurt Jeremiah, and so I chose to lie.