Graffiti Moon

by Cath Crowley

  ‘So?’ Leo asks me, hanging up and writing something down. I never could get my handwriting to look like his. Sundays after footy in Year 5 he’d take my hand and move it across the page for me till I got so mad I’d snap the pencil. Leo’d laugh and pull out another pencil.

  ‘I’m in,’ I say and close the book on me in the storeroom with Bert. I stick it in my pocket and lock up, even though there’s nothing here to steal.

  We cut across the train line to the high school. I sketched a picture of this place the day I left for good in Year 10. Buildings surrounded by wire and a little guy caught in the barbs. ‘Is he trying to get in or get out?’ Bert had asked. I wasn’t exactly sure.

  Dylan’s waiting for us, sitting in front of a wall that says Dylan loves Daisy in big red letters. Leo looks at it for a while. ‘We’re robbing this place later and you’re signing your name on the wall? Did you remember to leave the Media block window open this afternoon?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘We’re robbing the Media block?’ I ask. ‘That’s low.’

  ‘What do you care? They kicked you out,’ Dylan says.

  ‘Shut up,’ Leo tells him. ‘Ed left because he wanted to leave.’ And they start arguing about whether graffiti’s admissible evidence in court.

  I watch Leo yelling and sweating and I plan a piece I could paint, a guy with his back to the wall, crowded by dollar signs that are about to kick the life out of him. The cops won’t care how Leo and Dylan and me got here. All they’ll care about is that we’re filling the van with things that aren’t ours.

  While they’re yelling I spray every corner of the wall so there’s nothing to say I was ever here and while I’m doing it a siren goes off not far away. ‘I got a bad feeling,’ I tell them, but my voice gets lost in the mix of the city.

  Poet

  Assignment One

  Poetry 101

  Student: Leopold Green

  Where I lived before

  I used to live with my parents

  In a house that smelt like cigarettes

  And tasted like beer if you touched anything

  The kitchen table was a bitter ocean

  That came off on my fingers

  There were three doors between the fighting and me

  And at night I closed them all

  I’d lie in bed and block the sounds

  By imagining

  I was floating

  Light years of quiet

  Interrupted by breathing

  And nothing else

  I’d drift through space

  And fall through dreams

  Into dark skies

  Some nights

  My brother Jake and I would crawl out the window

  And cut across the park

  Swing on the monkey bars for a while

  On the way to Gran’s house

  She’d be waiting

  Dressing gown and slippers on

  Searching for our shadows

  She’d read us

  Poetry and fairytales

  Where swords took care of dragons

  And Jake never said it was a load of shit

  Like I thought he would

  And then one night

  Gran stopped reading before the happy ending

  She asked, ‘Leopold, Jake. You want to live in

  My spare room?’

  Her voice

  Sounded like space and dark skies

  But that night all my dreams

  Had floors

  Lucy

  I walk across to the wall. A yellow bird lies legs up under a blue sky and the word Peace is sprayed in fat letters across the clouds.

  ‘I guess it’s too late to give peace a chance,’ Al says. ‘Looks like it’s dead.’

  ‘Nope,’ I say. ‘It’s only sleeping.’

  Most times when I look at Shadow and Poet’s work I see something different from what the words are telling me. I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what’s on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird.

  I look and get a feeling, a tickling zing. That zing has nothing to do with sex like my best friend, Jazz, says. Okay, in the interest of honesty, maybe it’s got a little to do with sex, but mainly it’s got to do with knowing that there’s a guy out there who’s not like all the other guys out there.

  ‘I need more details,’ I say, my eyes still on the wall.

  ‘It’s like I told you. Shadow does the painting. Poet writes the words.’

  ‘Did you get a better look this time?’

  ‘Same look I had before. They’re young and scruffy,’ Al says. ‘About your age.’

  ‘Cute?’

  ‘I’m a sixty-year-old man. I really couldn’t say.’

  ‘Which direction did they go?’

  ‘My street hits a dead end, Lucy. They went in the only direction they could.’

  I walk over and sit next to him. I concentrate really hard.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m trying to bend the laws of time so I can get here five minutes earlier.’

  He nods and we watch the dirty silk of the factory smoke float across the sky.

  ‘Having any luck?’ he asks after a while.

  ‘Nope. I can’t get no time reversal.’

  He smiles. ‘You’ll see him, just a matter of waiting. Since this place became legal Shadow’s been working here a bit. And you finished Year 12 classes today. Are you and Jazz hitting the town?’

  ‘We’re meeting at Barry’s around nine-thirty.’

  ‘Late start.’

  ‘Jazz wants to have a late-night-all-night adventure.’

  ‘Got time to help me with a piece before you go?’ he asks, and I nod and follow him inside.

  I’m addicted to this place. To the heat coming off the furnace. To my muscles aching as I help Al blow glass. I ache with the weight of the piece on the end of the rod. Ache with the thought that in a place as ugly as this, a place of rust and sweat and steel, something shining like love can appear.

  I’ve got Mrs J, my Art teacher, to thank for introducing me to Al. In Year 10 she took us on an excursion to his studio and we stood behind a wire safety fence and watched him and another guy turn glass, heat it in a furnace and turn it again. The heat was burning me up but it felt like it was happening from the inside out. I’d never wanted to do something so bad.

  Al offered a free six-week glassblowing course to one of Mrs J’s students and she gave it to me. After the course was done Al said he’d keep being my teacher. I worked off half my costs by cleaning his studio every week. Mum and Dad paid the other half. I’ve been cleaning and taking lessons here ever since. Yesterday, thanks to Al, I finished my Year 12 Art folio.

  ‘Concentrate,’ he says, and uses wet newspaper to turn and shape the shiny mass. He nods, and I blow into the mouthpiece and cover the opening with my thumb to trap the air; the vase inflates with my breath. He uses the newspaper to turn and shape some more. The paper heats and burns, flecking the air with stars.

  His old hands move smooth as water as he cracks the glass off the end without breaking it. After we put it in the annealer to cool, he says, ‘So, I think you’re ready for a promotion. I thought you could keep working here while you’re at uni and I’d pay you in cash instead of in classes. No cleaning. Strictly glasswork.’

  ‘You’re serious? I’d be your assistant?’

  ‘You’d work with Jack and Liz. You interested?’

  Al’s one of the top glass artists in the city. I nod so much there’s a nodding festival going on. ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Good.’

  We sit outside for a bit longer, me hoping that Shadow will make a return appearance. I get this heavy feeling when I daydream about him. I’m not awake and I’m not asleep. I’m in a soft blue corridor that runs between the two.

  ‘How are things at home?’ Al asks.

&nbs
p; ‘Okay. Better. Dad’s still living in the shed but he comes into the house more and more, and not just to use the bathroom. I really think he’ll be moving back in soon.’

  ‘That’s great news.’

  ‘Yep. It was only ever meant to be a temporary move. And now they’re not fighting anymore, so, you know.’ I look across at that sleeping bird. I imagine Shadow arcing his arm and spilling yellow across the grey. Spilling sunshine.

  For a couple of months before Dad moved into the shed, he and Mum had huge fights about stupid things. Mum’s a part-time dental nurse and part-time novelist. Dad’s a comedian/magician and a part-time taxi-driver. They had some imaginative ideas about where the other person could stick the remote control.

  Then they just stopped fighting. I came home from school one day and felt the quiet drifting along the street. When I walked into the yard Dad was standing in front of the shed, sipping lemonade and cooking sausages and dehydrated potatoes over a little camp stove.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m moving into the shed for a while. Just till your mother finishes her novel and I get my next show written.’ He waved the barbeque tongs. ‘You want to have dinner at my place?’

  ‘Your place is my place, Dad.’ I sat next to him while he cooked and tried to figure things out. Sure they’d been fighting, but Dad and Mum had been together for thirty years. Dad was always going on about how romantic it was that they met in the university cafeteria. He asked for Mum’s salt and she asked for his sugar. ‘Romance like that can’t end in dehydrated potatoes,’ I said to Mum.

  She answered, ‘Lucy, you’re lucky if romance ends in something you can add water to and rehydrate.’

  This did not comfort me.

  She ate dinner with us that night when she got home, which was even more confusing. They didn’t fight. Mum told Dad the potatoes were delicious. ‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she said. ‘Your dad and I need space to write. I can’t suck the saliva out of people’s mouths for the rest of my life and your dad can’t drive a taxi.’

  I could understand that. Mum and Dad aren’t exactly typical. Mum’s got a picture of Orson Welles on her wall and she wears a t-shirt to parent–teacher interviews that says: If you don’t want a generation of robots, fund the arts. Dad can pull flowers out of his ears and juggle fire.

  But they were always typical when it came to love and marriage. Dad’s been out of the house for about six months now. He visits us quite a bit; he just lives in the shed. They seem happy but, if you ask me, the whole thing is weird.

  ‘Who gets to say what’s weird?’ Mum asks when I bring up the subject.

  ‘Me,’ I tell her. ‘I get to say.’

  She rolls her eyes.

  I wheel my bike to the wall before I leave Al’s. When I touch the painting some clear blue sky comes off on my hands. I didn’t notice before, but in the corner there’s a confused kid staring at the bird. ‘There’s a kid, did you see?’ I call.

  ‘I saw,’ he says.

  I wave goodbye and push my bike up the hill. Jazz phones when I’m halfway to the top. ‘Daisy and I are already here. How far away are you?’

  ‘I’m close. I took a detour because Shadow and Poet were at Al’s.’

  ‘You saw them?’

  ‘I missed them by five minutes but I have even more proof now that Shadow exists and that he’s my age.’ I know exactly what she’s going to say.

  ‘Luce, his art’s definitely cool and I’m not saying don’t make it with him if you meet him. But in the meantime, I could name at least one and a half guys who’d like to go out with you.’

  Okay, so I almost knew what she was going to say. ‘One and a half? Did some guy get caught in a bus door?’

  ‘Simon Mattskey might be interested but he’s worried about the nose thing. I told him it was urban legend.’

  ‘I’m hanging up.’

  ‘Just remember, paintings proved that cavemen existed, too. Shadow might not be the guy you’ve been waiting for.’

  I click my phone shut and take my time walking. Jazz thinks I haven’t had enough action in the guy department. I’ve had action with other guys around here and that’s how I know that I don’t want action with them again. The nose thing happened before Jazz started at our school. She never heard the real story because by the time she arrived it had been mixed up, made bigger and half forgotten, and I wanted it to stay that way.

  The guy was a sheddy, one of the kids who spent a lot of time leaning against the back sheds skipping classes. Every time he looked at me I felt like I’d touched my tongue to the tip of a battery. In Art class I’d watch him lean back and listen and I was nothing but zing and tingle. After a while the tingle turned to electricity, and when he asked me out my whole body amped to a level where technically I should have been dead. I had nothing in common with a sheddy like him, but a girl doesn’t think straight when she’s that close to electrocution.

  I liked that he had hair that was growing without a plan. A grin that came out of nowhere and left the same way. That he was tall enough so I had to look up at him in my dream sequences. I really liked his t-shirts. When he asked me out he was wearing this one with a dog walking a man on a leash. And there was always this space around him. The sort of space you’d queue to get into. I saw other girls trying but they didn’t get past the bouncer at the door.

  Anyway. The night didn’t go so well because I broke his nose, which was an accident that happened when I hit him in the face because he touched my arse.

  Dad was still living in the house then and before I left for the date I told him all the things I hoped this guy and I would talk about. ‘Maybe To Kill a Mockingbird, the book we’re studying. Maybe Rothko, the painter Mrs J showed us.’

  ‘Sounds like it’ll be romantic,’ Dad said. ‘Your mum and I had a romantic first date. She was studying serious writing and I was studying comedy, so we went to a Woody Allen film that was somewhere in between. I don’t remember the film but I remember she smelt like sweet green tea.’

  I had that story in my head when I turned up for my date at Barry’s, the all-night café where the sheddies hang out. There wasn’t any cool conversation, though. We sat in a void of sound only astronauts can understand until we left for the movie. While we were walking I brought up To Kill a Mockingbird and he went to a level of quiet beyond the quiet we’d had before and grabbed my arse.

  ‘Shit,’ he yelled as I elbowed him in the face. ‘Shit, I think you broke my nose.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have grabbed my arse. You don’t do that on a first date. Atticus Finch would never have done that.’

  ‘You’re out with me and you have a boyfriend?’ he yelled.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then who’s Atticus Finch?’

  ‘He’s in the book we’re reading at school.’

  ‘You’re talking to me about books? When I’m bleeding all over the road? Shit. Shit.’

  ‘Stop swearing at me.’ It was stupid to talk to him about books when it was my fault his shirt was covered in blood, but everything was going the opposite way to how I planned and I can’t stand the sight of blood and I was so disappointed that he’d turned out to be an arse grabber that I ran and I didn’t look back.

  Mum took one look at me when I got home and said, ‘Quick, over the laundry sink.’ She held my hair away from my face while I threw up so hard I almost flipped inside out. I didn’t tell her what I’d done; I told her he wasn’t who I thought he’d be. Mum stroked my hair and said, ‘Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they make you vomit.’

  This did not comfort me.

  But Shadow won’t make me vomit. I feel very sure about that. He’ll be a guy who talks about art, not an arse grabber. And like Dad says, love and romance are things worth waiting for.

  I reach the top of the hill and get on my bike and let go. The lights of the city reflect and bounce and I fly along my soft corridor thinking about Shadow. Thinking that somewhere in the glassy darkness,
he’s out there. Spraying colour. Spraying birds and blue sky on the night.

  I lock up my bike and walk into Barry’s. I don’t come here all that often on account of it being the crime scene of my first date. Jazz and I mostly hang at the coffee shop on Kent Street. She works there every Saturday telling people’s fortunes.

  Jazz swears she’s psychic and I’d say that was rubbish if her predications didn’t have this way of coming true. She predicted I’d be allergic to guava juice, which was something I’d never tried. I drank a litre of it in the name of scientific research. Dad called me Big Face for weeks.

  When I arrive she’s sitting in the back booth, dressed for action and sucking on a lollipop. Mum leaves out horror dentist photos whenever Jazz stays over at my place. ‘Takes more than that to shock me, Mrs Dervish,’ Jazz tells her. ‘I see into my future and my teeth are just fine.’ Mum rolls her eyes.

  Her long dark hair has little plaits and flowers here and there and she’s wearing a pink dress and killer boots that she bought at a secondhand store on Delaney Street. The price tag said fifteen dollars but she beat the guy down to ten.

  Next to her, Daisy’s even more dressed for action in a black singlet dress and green silk slippers. Her outfit matches her eyes. They’re winter seas lashed with black that stand out even more because of her short blonde hair. She’s the sort of girl who gets stared at. She’s the sort of girl who likes being stared at.

  I check my reflection. I look like I slept in my faded jeans and Magic Dirt t-shirt. Maybe I did sleep in them, come to think of it. I pull up my hair and push a couple of paintbrushes through the bundle to keep it out of the way.