Inbetween Days Read Online Free PDF Page A

and held her broom across the walkway like a boom gate. This week her hair was so black there would be no going back, with a perfect zigzag of white scalp, as if she’d been struck by lightning.
    Roland Bone pulled up in his old brown ute, parking diagonally in a parallel space. He laughed, pointed, and boosted the air horn.
    Mr Broadbent stopped dead and started spinning.
    ‘Shut up !’ I screeched. ‘You’re scaring him.’ I caught him and tried to still his flapping hands. ‘Where are you going, Mr Broadbent? Where are you headed this time? Look, Alby’s up there. The kettle’s on. You’ve got no clothes. Let’s get your shoes and you can go wherever you’re going. C’mon, I’ll take you. This way, that’s right…’
    ‘Stopped him, didn’t I?’ Roly leaned out of the window and grinned. He always looked like an animated scarecrow, pieces of him sticking out everywhere: his shirt collar, cowlick, one front tooth and a creased ear. ‘He belongs in an institution.’
    ‘Mind your manners,’ said Mrs Gates, lowering her broom. ‘The man is a goddamned institution.’
    ‘Thanks for nothing, Roly,’ I muttered.
    I ran my palm over the stalks of hair on Mr Broadbent’s head. Alby had shaved him again because his father had a habit of plucking when he was upset. Alby should have let him pull them out—it kept him busy for hours. I closed Mr Broadbent’s gaping robe and tied a bow, trying not to look. He seemed calm but you could never really tell. His eyes were a milky blue, like the dead carp’s, and they only ever seemed to focus on something far away. To me, Alby was already an old, old man at fifty. Mr Broadbent was a child—a wrinkled, naughty, insane child who belonged to our whole town.
    ‘You’re a good girl, Jack,’ said Mrs Gates, nodding. ‘Trudy says you saw a car go up.’
    ‘Probably just tourists,’ I said carefully. Mrs Gates had a big mouth and reserved seating in the saloon bar. ‘I’ll take him home now.’
    Mr Broadbent came quietly. I led him across the street.
    Roly reversed his ute and did a U-turn—it was only then that I noticed Jeremiah Jolley in the passenger seat.
    I steered Mr Broadbent up the steps.
    Alby met me at the door with more lines on his face than he’d had the week before. ‘You’re an angel, Jack.’
    I nodded and went downstairs to open the shop.
    ‘Who was the hulk with Funnybone?’ Astrid asked.
    ‘The prodigy son, returned.’
    ‘You mean prodigal.’
    ‘I know what I mean. It was before you came.’ I didn’t tell her that I used to catch Jeremiah Jolley looking at our bricks with a magnifying glass, or that he would taste everything, including our bricks. I just couldn’t warm to a kid who licked things. ‘He lived two houses down when I lived with Ma and Dad. Then he went away.’
    Astrid started checking for cracked eggs in some cartons on consignment. She would find an even dozen every time and take them home since we couldn’t sell them. ‘Quality control’ she called it. I could never see the cracks but she swore they were there.
    ‘Now, how are we going to fix this?’ Astrid placed her hand over my heart again.
    ‘Oh, please,’ I said, and shrugged her off.
    Across the street, Mrs Gates had hailed somebody passing the salon. She gestured at the oil stain Roly’s ute had left behind and pointed down the street. The ones who had stayed were always curious about the ones who came back.
    That night I paced from room to room and counted the knots in the oak-coloured floorboards. They looked real enough until you matched identical knots in every fourth board. It appealed to my sense of order but made the counting far too predictable.
    Outside, the trees rubbed and squeaked.
    Gypsy’s breathing seemed too slow and I found myself tallying her human years. If I ever got to a hundred, I decided, I would not sleep. I’d keep my eyes open until the moment my heart stopped. Dying in your sleep didn’t sound peaceful, it sounded