Inbetween Days (15 page)

‘You should put some clothes on. It's after four. Thom will be here soon.'

I gestured at my drawstring pyjama pants and tank top. ‘I've got clothes on.' I tried to run my fingers through my snarly hair and they got stuck. ‘The female crabs release their eggs at the turn of high tide during the last quarter of the moon,' I pronounced. ‘They all wait on the beach for just the right conditions.'

‘Fascinating. Clever crabs.'

‘The males cut and run after mating.'

Trudy gave me a tender look. ‘I'm going to vacuum. Do you want me to do your room?'

Don't be nice
, I thought. ‘I'll do it later. Stay out of my room.' I fixed my stare on the screen. As the crabs crossed a road, a truck was running over them. The documentary makers had set up a camera at ground level to film the carnage; I wondered whether they'd got the footage in one take or asked the driver to back up for a better angle. I tried to calculate how many crabs would be killed in four takes. Four seemed like a reasonable average. Four times several thousand crabs for seven seconds of footage illustrating real-time roadkill. Bastards.

‘They close the roads. You know, to protect the crabs during migration,' Trudy said. ‘Oh, Ma wants us around there for Christmas dinner. We have to bring a dessert. So, anyway, they shut down the roads and the locals have to get around on foot. The crabs get right of way. I don't know why they keep showing this bit,' she finished, wrinkling her nose.

I turned away from the screen and buried my face in a pillow. I moaned, ‘Tell me when it stops,' and I didn't mean the crabs.

‘Surely you have better things to do than traipse up and down this mountain every day,' Pope said. He'd rolled his pants above the knee and torn the sleeves from his shirt. He was starting to bleed into the colours of the forest, or maybe he was disappearing. ‘You've got so much to look forward to. You're young. And you're pretty when you're not scowling and kicking things.'

‘I am not. And I don't.' I kicked the base of a tree with my toe. ‘Surely
you
have better things to do?' I countered. ‘You've been up here for weeks now. Don't you have a real life somewhere?' I dropped a brown paper bag just outside his tent flap. ‘Tofu salad,' I said. ‘What are you hiding in here, anyway?'

‘Salad?' He smiled and grabbed the bag. ‘You might have saved me from scurvy.'

‘You look happier,' I said, backing away, watching him eat. ‘That's good.' I scowled.

Pope stopped chewing and said, ‘I'm not gunning for happy. I'll settle for peace.'

‘Yeah. Me, too.' I sat on the ground, mindless of the dampness seeping through my shorts. ‘Pope?'

‘Yeah.'

‘What if there's only a certain amount of everything—you know, like money, how it changes hands, or like water. There's only so much of it and if you gain something it must be taken from someone else, and when you lose something, it means somebody else has gained.'

‘Forest philosophy,' he groaned. ‘Lord help me.'

‘I'm serious.'

‘What are we talking about?'

‘I don't know…love? Happiness? Good and evil?'

‘Well, for one thing, water and money are tangible. I don't believe we can measure those other things.'

‘It just feels like we can't all be winning at the same time. My sister is happy—and I hate it.'

‘If your theory is true—and I'm sceptical—it's probably not a proximity thing. She's not taking from your bucket just because she's family.'

‘It feels like it.'

‘Maybe that just makes you a shitty person with a hole in your bucket,' he said. ‘You should try being a decent human being sometime.'

‘Wow,' I said. ‘That's harsh.'

‘Look, I'm sorry. I'm not even talking about you, really. Forget it.' He stood. ‘Walk?'

‘I just walked two kays to get here.'

‘Come on. Clear your head.' He set off without me.

I watched him haul his body up the track, towards the ridge, as if his shoes were full of mud.

‘Do you like it up here?' I asked, catching up.

‘God, no.'

‘Then why? Why do you stay?'

‘It's something I have to do. Haven't you ever done something because there's no way around, so you have to go through?' He looked back at me. ‘It's awful up here at night. You have no idea—there are so many noises, and bugs, bugs everywhere. It's…very unpleasant.'

Only Pope would describe fear as ‘unpleasant'.

I wondered where he came from. I imagined he had the kind of parents who lived in a house with hundred-year-old ivy growing on the outside walls and who slurped tea from fourth-generation heirloom teacups. But Pope wouldn't care about those things. He was the rebel of the family—he would have dropped out of uni to teach English to refugees or save endangered marsupials, or campaign for human rights. His hoity-toity parents were disappointed in him but they loved him anyway; they funded his travels on the understanding that he come home for weddings and funerals. He'd loved a girl once, but she'd broken his heart. His beaten-up car had once belonged to a dear friend who'd left it to him in his will and he was sentimental about things like that. That was as far as I'd got with my theories, and none of them explained why he was in the forest, putting up with bugs in his sleeping bag and listening to the wind play through that solitary bottle.

‘Of course I have an idea. I live here,' I said. ‘I know why I'm here. But what about you?'

‘Why
are
you still here, then?' he asked, turning it back on me. ‘I grew up in a small town like this. I couldn't wait to get out.'

The edges of the life I'd dreamed up for him blurred and shifted. Scrap the ivy—the teacups could stay.

‘I guess I don't know any different.'

‘Ignorance is bliss.'

‘Ignorance is boring,' I said. ‘But I'll find out one day. I have plenty of time.' I smiled but he only turned and started back down the hill.

‘I washed my clothes,' he called. ‘You were right about that middle machine. It shredded my jacket.'

‘I warned you.'

‘I know. I was in a hurry so I loaded all three at once.' He reached into his pocket. ‘I found this.' He handed me a single pearl earring.

‘Oh,' I said, recognising it. ‘I know where the other one is.'

He seemed unsurprised. ‘Well. You'd better be off, then.' He surveyed the patch of open sky above us. ‘It'll be getting dark soon. Gosh, the nights are long here.'

I nodded. I'd stopped being offended by him. ‘It's the ridge. It blocks out the sun. You're camped right in the armpit of hell. My dad says there's nothing else to do but sleep in Mobius, which is why it suits drunks and narcoleptics.'

‘I think I'd like your dad,' he said, chuckling. Then he seemed to remember he wasn't supposed to laugh and asked, ‘You haven't told anybody about me being up here?'

‘No.'

‘I appreciate it, and the visits. Like I said, you must have better things to do.'

I shrugged. ‘It's no big deal—I come up here all the time anyway. If someone asks I'll tell them you're communing with the ghosts.' His expression changed again and I was worried I'd upset him. ‘I don't sleep much these days,' I added in a hurry. ‘And you're my friend.'

‘I suppose I am,' he said.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The next time, we took Roly's ute. In the back we'd stashed some borrowed tools, a couple of paint-rollers and some cleaning supplies, plus a carton of beer. We were only missing white paint from our supply list. Since we couldn't pool enough money or fuel to drive to the paint store, I volunteered to break into my dad's shed.

‘Couldn't she just ask?' Roly said.

‘She doesn't go in the house,' Jeremiah said.

‘But it's a shed.'

‘I don't think that decision is based on an aversion to particular buildings, but you'd have to ask her.'

‘So how does she know there's any paint in there?'

‘It's a shed, Roland. The likelihood of paint is worth investigating.'

Roly nodded, as if it all made complete sense. I was getting used to being left out of their conversations, as if I was a coma patient who couldn't hear anything they said.

We waited at Jeremiah's house until both my parents' cars were gone. I couldn't be sure of their routines anymore—I only knew most places were within walking distance and if Ma had bothered to get into her car at all, it was likely she'd be gone for a while. I didn't mind so much about getting caught by Dad, but the same theory applied.

‘What now?' Roly said. ‘Do we come, too?'

‘I'll go by myself,' I said. ‘Just in case.'

When I told them I'd break in, I may have exaggerated—I knew there was a key in the hanging plant outside the door. The problem was finding the paint. Dad was still hoarding wood for his carvings. It was stacked along the rear wall and now it had begun to spill into his workshop area. There was an inch of sawdust underfoot. I loved the smell. It reminded me of playing hide-and-seek and winning. Nothing had changed in there, except the wood took up more space, which meant that he was using less or collecting more. On the tool-wall behind the bench, he had drawn around the shapes of hammers and chisels and mallets so they each had their own, exact, place to hang. I ran my finger through the dust on the workbench and left a deliberate trail leading to my handprint.

The stereo was new. I'd heard it, but now I could see he'd mounted monstrous speakers in opposite corners. I switched it on and bass vibrated through the shed, clumps of congealed sawdust swirling and dancing. I jumped.

‘Shit!' I fumbled to turn it off.

No paint in the metal cupboard near the door, but I did find a box full of old toys Dad had made: a chequerboard, peg puppets, an abacus, and a bag full of miniature wooden doll furniture that had belonged to Trudy first, then me. I pushed my hand deep into the bag and searched until my hand closed around the familiar shape of the doll's toilet; I drew it out and opened the hinged lid. It was faded and crumbly but still there—Trudy's brown plasticine, which she had rolled into a coil and pressed into the bottom of the bowl. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, faced with proof of a memory that was so acute, yet so far away that I wasn't sure if it had been real.

I rummaged for more treasures, losing time as each wave of remembering hit. I found a battered suitcase with ‘Jack' written on the handle and snapped open the catches. Stuffed inside were dozens of small, wrapped bundles. Inside those were old drawings, macaroni necklaces and bits of clay figurines I'd made at school.

Eventually, I found the paint inside the broken freezer, the last place I thought to look.

‘Got it,' I said, panting.

Jeremiah and Roly were sitting on Meredith Jolley's front verandah, not moving, not speaking.

I reckoned there were about ten litres of white paint left—probably not enough but it was a start. My hand was indented with a purple crease from the metal handle of the paint tin. I'd heaved it back to Jeremiah's house, along with the bag of doll's furniture, three of Dad's wooden sculptures and, in my pocket, Trudy's cat's eye marble I'd coveted since I was three.

I'd got rid of all the reminders of my life before—now I was stealing them back.

Jeremiah saw me coming and jumped up. He took the bucket and nodded at the bag. ‘What's the other stuff?'

I massaged the blood back into my fingers. ‘Just some things that belong to me.'

‘Huh.'

Roly yawned and stretched. ‘Somewhere, people are leading productive, meaningful lives. Have we even considered if this is legal?'

‘I've considered it,' Jeremiah said. ‘Worst case scenario—we could be prosecuted for improvement of public property.' He lifted the bucket into the back of Roly's ute and stowed my loot behind the passenger seat. ‘Beer's getting warm. Ready?'

Jeremiah drove, Roly surfing in the back, holding on to the roll bar. I rode in the back, too, with the bucket pinned between my knees and the roller held aloft like a triton. We passed Astrid, who was writing specials on the front window of Bent Bowl Spoon, and Ma, who drove by in the opposite direction, upright and joyless. I waved at Ma. I waved at the closed blinds in Alby's flat and felt guilty that I had shirked even the minor responsibility of three afternoons a week—but in a moment the guilt was gone. I even waved at Astrid, who put her hands on her hips. I was young and free and nothing could stick.

‘You crazy kids!' yelled Mrs Gates, smiling.

We cruised down Main Street. As we passed the pub, Roly let go of the roll bar. ‘We're crazy kids!' he shouted and held his arms above his head.

The sun, high overhead, looked like it would never sink. The three of us, unlikely friends, were on our way to snatch back a wasted summer; nothing could touch us, not even me, who had a gift for ruining everything. This new Mobius was a copy of the original, only better.

Warm beer hits twice as hard as cold, especially on an empty stomach. A couple of hours later, our productivity had slowed. Jeremiah had become obsessed with the equipment and he hadn't emerged from the projector room. Roly and I painted the screen. So far, we'd finished most of the bottom section, except for one corner. We sat on the platform, legs swinging, drinking the last few beers.

‘It's looking good,' Roly said.

I disagreed. ‘Its glory days are over. Some things you can't bring back.' I thought of Mr Broadbent. ‘The past is the past is the past. God, I'm smashed.'

‘It's a long way down,' Roly said. He kicked off one shoe and watched, fascinated, as it fell. ‘This doesn't look very safe.' He wobbled the railing in front of us. It groaned and rusted chunks broke away, dropping into the weeds below.