Inbetween Days (3 page)

‘You love too easy. You know what they say about giving the milk for free,' Trudy said.

I could tell that she realised as soon as the words left her: she sounded like Ma. She covered her mouth as if there might be more.

I let the silence linger, waiting for an apology. Instead, she yanked a tissue out of the box on my bedside table and swiped at the gloss on my lips.

I jerked back.

Gypsy barked, short and sharp.

‘Have you been feeding that damned cat?' Trudy asked again. She balled up the tissue, tossed it onto the floor and strode out.

A whole year and we were still getting to know each other. Somehow, we'd gone from a family who said too much to one who said hardly anything at all.

I remembered the box in the kitchen. I made a decision: for the next ninety-nine days, I would open a can of tuna and set it on the spare-room windowsill, on the dead side of the house, where Trudy couldn't see.

I kickstarted my trailbike and left an arc of churned-up gravel on the driveway. It was two kilometres to town and work, two and a half to my friend Astrid's house and just over three to the dam. I went everywhere on my Yamaha. Since I wasn't licensed to ride on the road, I had worn a path parallel to the highway. The town cop had cautioned me twice already. I rode too fast and without a helmet but usually there was only local traffic. Ma said it wasn't ladylike. I told her I'd ride side-saddle if it made her feel better.

Moseley's Dam was a hole that filled with pale green water, bubbling up from an underground spring. Trees grew sideways from the sheer rock walls, clinging by shallow roots. It was always full, even in high summer, and so deep in the middle that nobody I knew had ever touched the bottom. If you floated on your back, it felt like the world was caving in. Treading water: within seconds anything below your waist went numb.

I'd seen old photos of Ma when she was about my age, posing in a bikini top and cut-off shorts beside the dam. Two decades later, there was our Trudy, in a similar pose. During the sixties there was a short pier, in the eighties, a pontoon. In 1994, the pontoon had sunk to join the reef of junk underneath and Ma had stopped taking pictures a long time ago.

Trudy didn't know the half of it: I'd done my growing up while she was gone, whiling away drowsy summers at the dam, drinking stolen bottles of tequila, driving around looking for something—anything—to do within town limits. The boys found me early. I let a few do the things Ma warned me about and I liked it, so I let them keep doing them. I didn't fit in with other girls. I didn't stand out either. I'd made a few friends the hard way at school and lost them the same way when I left.

When I reached the dam, I left my bike parked in plain view so Luke would know I was waiting. I hiked through the scrub to the opposite side of the dam, shook out a blanket and spread it under our tree. It was a private place, hidden in deep shade, with a patch of soft, sandy ground that still held the shape of our bodies from the Sunday before.

I waited for an hour. Luke was late. Sometimes he didn't show up at all—it depended on his footy coach and his mates and if he had to work or whether he could borrow his dad's car. I came anyway. I came early so I could drag out the anticipation, which was beginning to feel better than the arrival, the duration, and sure as hell the leaving.

Overhead, clouds skidded past. Midday heat had settled in the valley and the steady hum of insects and whooping birdcalls made it too noisy to think. A dead carp was lying on the bank, its eye glassy and scales wet, still fresh. I would have thrown it back in to be eaten and at least have a chance of becoming part of another living creature but, when I got up and flipped it over with my foot, it was crawling with ants and hollow inside. As I stared, the lorikeets squawked and scattered, then the bush fell quiet.

I kicked sand over the carp, slugged from my water bottle, rinsed and spat. When Luke pushed his way through the trees I had arranged myself on the blanket, trying to look like he wasn't the last thought in my head every night.

‘Hey,' he said.

‘Hey, yourself.'

He took off his shirt.

At school I wasn't at the head of the line for somebody like Luke Cavanaugh. At school I'd stayed where I was put. Not in the library or behind the sheds but near the centre courts, on a splintered bench under a shadeless tree, or sometimes on the steps by the science lab. My skirts were regulation length because Ma checked. My lunches were homemade, no surprises.

But this was real life and there were new rules. I was different. In real life I borrowed a short skirt and a fake ID from my new friend Astrid, who was twenty-four; I shot pool using an umbrella at the Burt Hotel and danced with Astrid on a table. I blew my weekly paycheque in a single night and Astrid sang with the band and we lost our shoes.

The next day, I woke sprawled on Astrid's couch. I had a raw rash on my neck, my bra was on inside-out and Luke's name and phone number were scrawled on my arm. I had no memory of his face. I'd been reckless, buying rounds and dancing barefoot; I'd been somebody else, basking in Astrid's reflected light, and it had paid off.

Luke had long fingers I liked to tangle with my own, ribs I would trace with my lips and a smile that turned down. But he always looked happy. I often wondered how that could be. He'd shaved his head for charity and his hair was growing back darker, in different directions, as if he'd just crawled out of bed. My heart always twisted up with black envy of the family who had him six and a half days a week. People I'd never met: a mother and a father and a sister about my age.

Luke was twenty-one. To him, it made things complicated that I was only seventeen. I thought the difference between our ages wasn't as great as the distance between our towns and the long wait before Sundays, but it didn't matter—he wanted to lie low until I turned eighteen. It was almost a whole year away.

He threw himself down next to me. ‘What's been happening?'

I didn't answer. I kissed him, unzipped him, and he was groaning and grabbing me like I was all he'd been thinking about, too. I got him off quickly—twice meant he'd stay longer. I could be distant when he was in the moment. I'd look at him with his eyes closed and play through a whole other life: him, buying flowers on his way home from work, me, making dinner with a set of matching plates.

The sex part was easy. I found the before and after more difficult—I never knew if I was supposed to talk or just lie back with the feelings and say nothing at all.

‘Jesus, Jack, you're something.'

Straight after, he could never look at me, as if it was too much like birth or death, those moments when you get so close to another human being you overlap. He'd always find something to say about the weather, or the footy, or his mother's cooking.

‘It's like a jungle up here.'

‘It's summer,' I said. ‘What'd you expect?' I pressed my cheek to his heartbeat and drew lazy circles on his stomach with my fingertip. ‘I smelled snow today.'

‘I can't stay long. I have to help my cousin move into a new rental.'

‘I could help.'

‘Trust me, you don't want to do that.'

‘I've never seen snow.'

‘Jack…'

‘So that's it, then?' I said it pleasantly and focused hard on drawing those circles. ‘Maybe one day we could do something normal together, like go to the movies?'

‘Yeah. Sure. Why not.'

‘Did you know it's been six months today since we met?'

‘Jack…'

I sighed and ran my hand over the muscles of his thigh. Touch was the only language I could speak without stumbling; touch could always reel him back in. Luke wasn't somebody I could think out loud with. Sex was simple. Sex and love together left me confused—I would rather freeze, for fear of making the wrong move.

He wanted me again and that made me feel powerful. I pressed myself against him and he couldn't help it, he responded, because guys have one thought in their head and another in their pants, and the one in their pants got the deciding vote. So Trudy said.

‘Good?' he asked after.

Always, that question.

‘Good,' I said though he didn't seem to need an answer.

He lifted himself off me, dipped down to give me a hard, smacking kiss, and rolled onto his back. It was like he counted to ten in his head. He shimmied back into his jeans.

‘So that's it,' I said again.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Nothing.'

He sighed and crooked his elbow over his eyes, so all I could see were his lips moving. ‘It's easy being with you. You don't expect anything, you're just—here,' he said. ‘Other girls want everything. You're not sitting around waiting for me to call.'

What other girls? I'm no different. I want everything.

But I couldn't say it. That would make me like other girls.

‘Still, I wouldn't mind a change of scenery every now and then,' I said carefully. ‘Sheets might be nice. But let's not think too far ahead.'

He snorted. ‘See, I love that about you. You live for the moment.'

He was wrong.
I love that about you
. He loved the one thing about me that wasn't even true. I couldn't understand why I craved him, yet he always left me empty.

We were both silent for so long the water birds resettled in the reeds. Luke appeared to fall asleep. A king-sized marron crawled out of the mud and died, baking in the sun. Its skeleton turned from glossy black to chalk-grey.

How quickly I got used to this: sex, the great mystery, him so close and our skins slipping together. Six months of Sundays and love below the neck. Lopsided love. My eyes ached and my nose burned from keeping too many emotions in check. Grief, sadness, heartbreak—physically, they all felt the same. It was only that your mind gave the feeling a name. There should be a pill to numb the heart so it didn't hurt anymore.

And while I was thinking, looking at the water, a blank screen with my thoughts upon it like a moving picture, the surface of the dam lurched. There was no other way to describe it—it
lurched
and a wave of nothing became a bubble, three metres across, that rolled and opened up in slow motion as if the water was thick as oil. In seconds it was gone and I thought I'd imagined it, except for the sound: hissing and fizzing and a final gulp.

‘What was that?' Luke said, and sat up.

‘I don't know.' I stared at what was left, just a few bubbles and a small wake that rolled to the edges of the dam. ‘I don't know.'

We waited for something to happen but nothing did.

I stayed there, by the dam, long after he had gone. Luke kissed me when he left. It meant we weren't over. Or did it? I could fake most things, but not a kiss.

Trudy was right: ask for too much and you might end up with nothing.

More marron marched out of the mud, beaching themselves on the bank. I checked for the tinge of an algal bloom, but the water was always greenish. I wandered along the edges where the reeds were thin. An opalescent layer of scum swirled on the surface—proof that something foul could still make a rainbow.

I picked the marron up one by one, turned them around and nudged them back towards the water. They were passive, hardly flapped their tails at all—it was like something had called to them and they'd given up their lives for it in answering.

I did this for an hour until it was plain that throwing them back wouldn't save them. I didn't want to go home to the house, empty except for Gypsy, who didn't meet me at the door anymore.

I thought I was going mad. I could still smell snow.

CHAPTER THREE

There were probably a million Main Streets in a million small towns all over the world and, until I got past the age of ten, I believed they were all just like ours. Our Main Street was the stubborn trunk of a dying tree: new shops sprang up to replace those that had closed, but they were feeble shoots feeding off cheap rent and novelty. They withered fast, sometimes so fast they recycled the same CLOSED sign, over and over.

The pub thrived, and the TAB, the newsagent, bakery and chemist. That about summed up the locals: hard-drinking, pie-loving, pill-popping people who were born in Mobius and would most likely die there, too—but not before they had read that day's newspaper and placed a bet. Since the gold rush boom in the mid-1800s, the only sure thing to draw tourists was the suicide forest and only then in the year of a fresh death. Hardly anything was open before ten o'clock. People drove in by accident and left on purpose.

At the four corners of Mobius, like goalposts, stood Pryor Ridge and Mount Moon, Moseley's Dam and the abandoned drive-in. With only one town cop—who didn't live in Mobius and who knocked off early so he could be home in time for dinner—it wasn't hard to dodge the law if we were up to no good.

I always got to work an hour before opening. Bent Bowl Spoon had a fruity, overripe smell that triggered old memories: me riding Ma's hip, Trudy stealing tampons (Ma would only let us use sanitary pads), bribing the older kids to buy me cigarettes. The Burt Area School bus picked up outside. If I timed it just right, I'd park my bike as the bus was leaving to avoid running into anyone I used to know. Afternoons were a different matter. When the bus pulled in I'd cross my fingers and hope that Ben Matthias wouldn't be craving his daily frozen lemonade, and Jenna Briggs, Cass Johnston, Will Opie and Becca Farmer wouldn't follow him inside. I went so far as to sabotage the slushie machine by jamming a washer onto the spindle. It grated for a week but kept on turning. Astrid was resigned to me disappearing at quarter past four. I'd find something to do out the back so I wouldn't have to wonder if they looked up to me now, or if they were still looking down, or, if what I suspected was true: that I didn't exist for them.

Originally, back when it was the general store and Mr Broadbent's parents were running it, the neon sign had read: Broadbent's Country Bowl & Spoon. Over the years the letters had stopped working and so had Mr Broadbent's mind; Alby added a single stuttering petrol bowser that pumped more air than fuel and locals started calling it Bent Bowl Spoon. Now he owned the bric-a-brac store and the laundromat, too. Hardly anybody went to either, so he only opened them on weekends. By age four I knew there were exactly thirty-eight black vinyl diamonds between the entrance of Bent Bowl Spoon and the front counter; by the time I was nine I'd counted four hundred and sixteen in the whole store. I'd heard of people who counted obsessively but it wasn't like that for me—I just liked to know that some things didn't change.