He grunts. “All right. I’ll take it.”
“Say what?” I glance at Gemma and Amber huddling by the end of the bus.
“Petrol for the nudie mags. Fair trade. Keep your five dollars.”
“Really?” I ask, feeling momentarily torn up about it. “You sure you want those?”
“Oh, just give him my uncle’s porn stash, Josh,” Gemma hisses.
I do as she says, bringing them out of the bus and placing it in Mr. Friendly’s arms. “Do you want some Pink Floyd tapes to go with it?”
He scrunches up his face, the first emotion I’ve seen from him, and passes me the jerry can, before walking back up the hill, the dog trotting after him.
“Thank you!” I call after him. I look at Gemma who is shaking her head, her brows pinched in worry as she pushes past me to the driver’s side.
“Hey,” I say, touching her arm for her to stop. “I’ll drive. You just relax.”
“I’m fine,” she says, lying once again.
So I let her be, knowing if I insist, she’ll snap. She seems very close to losing it. I go and pour the can of petrol into the bus and Amber gets in the backseat, making sure I’m up in the front beside Gemma.
She starts the car and slides The Wall into the cassette player, as if to punish me for trying to sell the tapes to Mr. Friendly.
“Hey You” starts to play and my mind is focusing on the lyrics, applying them to Gemma. Is she feeling so desolate, alone, wanting to give in without a fight? It’s a tumultuous, heady song and it takes us down the steep dirt road, to the paved one that runs along Lake Pukaki. To my surprise she takes a right, heading back the way we came from Twizel.
“Aren’t we going to Mount Cook?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Lake Tekapo.”
I shrug, but I’m actually relieved that we’re heading back toward civilization. The whole running out of petrol and trading porn with a sheep farmer has put me in a weird mood, and tensions in the bus are running high, crisscrossing like threads in danger of snapping.
“What’s in Lake Tekapo?” I ask, trying to get her to talk, to open up. She’s slipped her sunnies on her eyes so I can’t try and read them.
“A very blue, very cold lake,” is her simple answer.
I eye Amber in the rearview mirror and she gives me a worried look in exchange. We’re just along for the ride.
We motor away from the mountains and toward the cloud-filtered sunshine and rolling brown hills of the east. Lake Tekapo seems to be a popular stop, and as we get closer I can see why. The lake is even bluer than Pukaki was and the town along the banks is a pleasing slice of civilization.
But we don’t stop there like I thought we would. Gemma keeps driving until we come to a turnoff and then she’s gunning it toward the lake. On one side of us the road curves along pine trees and holiday homes; on the other there is a stream and a picturesque stone church surrounded by snap-happy tour bus groups.
At a gravel lot at the very end, not far from the shore, she angrily slams Mr. Orange into park and jumps out of the bus. Instinctively I do the same, jumping out after her.
As I stand there watching, I know the memory is being ingrained into my head. The van is still running and “Comfortably Numb” is blaring from the speakers as Gemma strips down to her underwear and runs to the edge of the lake. She’s barefoot and she doesn’t even slip on the rocks as she goes. She’s running from something, she’s running to something. The water will be ice cold.
It’s just what she wants. She wants to be numb.
I’ve listened to this album enough damn times now to know that “Run Like Hell” will play soon. So I do. I run like hell toward her. I leave Amber in the back of Mr. Orange, puttering on Lake Tekapo’s shore, and I’m sprinting toward the water, unwilling to let her out of my sight.
She’s already splashing into the water, like a mermaid returning to a kingdom of blue milk. If the cold is shocking her, she doesn’t show it, it doesn’t slow her down. The lake splashes around her in Technicolor brilliance, her darkly tanned skin shimmering from the reflection.
In seconds she is diving under and I hold my breath as my legs and blood pump me forward. I’m bizarrely, acutely aware that she might not come up again. I think about what she told me, huddled in my rain jacket. I think I ache for things I may never get. I long for purpose, for life and yet sometimes I think I’m too afraid to live.
My fear is in not living.
We need to meet in the middle.
So I go into the lake after her. I’m stripped down to my boxers and T-shirt, my dusty jeans and flip-flops discarded somewhere between me and the bus, in a patch of purple and pink foxgloves.