Graffiti Moon

by Cath Crowley

  Maybe I forget her

  Maybe I forget her

  Maybe I forget her

  But probably not

  Ed

  ‘I vomited,’ Lucy says, and I feel jaunty. Bert taught me that word and I like it. After my first date with Beth he drew a picture series of me being jaunty. He flicked through the pages and this little guy did a few side kicks in the air.

  ‘I felt like that after Valerie and I started dating,’ he said.

  I feel like doing some kicks tonight. Lucy liked me enough to vomit. ‘I’m sorry I grabbed your arse,’ I tell her.

  ‘What’s wrong with my arse, mister?’ she asks and smiles with that extra beat and I see that spot on her neck and I have an almost unstoppable urge to touch it. I don’t, though, because the definition of crazy is doing something close to the same thing twice and expecting a different end.

  You feel jaunty, so settle for that. Don’t go asking for more. Enjoy walking next to her. Enjoy showing her your pieces and hearing what she thinks about them. Enjoy saying goodbye before you rob her school. That last thought unjaunties me a little. Bert’s face floats in my head and he tells me that thieves don’t deserve jauntiness.

  ‘So we’re even,’ Lucy says on the way to Barry’s.

  ‘We can never be even,’ I tell her. ‘But we’re evener.’

  We walk further and the people have thinned out in the streets so there’s only a scattering left. Every now and then we step over a guy still going nowhere from the night before, determined to get there tonight. Leo never passes one of those drunk guys without giving him money, even if he only has a few coins in his pockets. He hasn’t gone home since the day he moved in with his gran. ‘Nothing to go back for,’ he says, but I don’t think it’s that simple. I figure the few coins he flicks at the drunks in the street are his way of saying sorry he can’t deal with the zoo inside his house.

  ‘You ever notice how the night changes shape?’ I ask Lucy. ‘It starts out thick with people and sound and then gets thinner till in the middle there’s almost nothing in it but you.’

  ‘Are you often awake in the middle of the night?’ she asks.

  ‘Not often. I start work early.’ Or I did. Since I lost my job over a month ago, the urge to paint’s been hitting me hard and I go half the night sometimes. I sleep late and spend the afternoons in the free galleries in the city. Bert and me used to go to them on Saturday mornings sometimes. We’d take our books and make notes about things we liked. We’d eat lunch in the park and then I’d go home. I never got sick of spending time with Bert. Never got sick of watching his old hands draw the world.

  ‘My bike’s still there,’ she says, pointing ahead. ‘You never know in this place. What you leave isn’t always there when you come back.’

  Her bike lock is the size of a chihuahua I had once and I tell her it’s unlikely someone’s carrying around boltcutters that big.

  ‘I like my bike. I want it to be safe,’ she says and buckles her helmet, which is blue with a lightning bolt on the side. I think about a piece I could do. A girl shaped like lightning in the sky and a guy on the ground with a lightning rod trying to catch her.

  ‘You like that helmet, too?’ I ask.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my helmet, mister.’ She points at two big steps on the back of her bike.

  ‘You have training . . . somethings? What are they?’

  ‘Feet platforms. My dad made them for my cousin to use. Step on.’

  ‘But I don’t have a cool helmet with a lightning bolt.’

  ‘Your head is hard enough.’

  ‘Funny.’ I steady myself without touching her.

  ‘To the train yard,’ she says and pushes on the pedals. We don’t move.

  ‘Anytime,’ I tell her. ‘You know. While we’re still young and beautiful.’

  She pushes hard again. ‘You weigh a tonne.’

  ‘You need me to drive?’

  ‘I need momentum, that’s all. Get off.’

  ‘You’re very charming, but you must hear that all the time.’

  ‘Get off,’ she says. ‘I’ll ride and you run after me and jump on the bike.’

  ‘Do many guys ask you out twice?’

  ‘Only the ones with balls.’

  I step off. She pedals away and I chase her tail-lights down the street. ‘Hurry,’ she yells. ‘I can’t slow down or I’ll lose momentum.’

  I run as hard as I can till I almost touch the back of her bike. ‘I’m not Superman,’ I call. She slows a bit and I do a huge leap and hit the concrete. It goes like that for a while, me running and leaping and falling and wondering how doing this proves I have balls. ‘It’s not possible to get on this way.’

  ‘Try one more time,’ she says.

  Once more and then that’s it, I think, and run, yelling all the way like that’ll give me speed. She slows a little and I leap and land with one foot on, which is a miracle. ‘A miracle,’ I shout.

  ‘Finally,’ she says.

  ‘You know, Leo’s brother’s hooking me up with a car when I get my licence. I’m making you get in while it’s still moving.’

  ‘You’ll drive me places?’

  ‘If your aerobic fitness is up to it, sure I’ll drive you places. Take a left here. We’re going to Fraser Street, you know where that is?’

  ‘Behind the school?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I close my eyes and let the movement take me somewhere else, let walls drop into my head the way they do when I feel space around me. Maybe later I’ll go somewhere and paint the dark that’s sitting behind my eyes. A dark filled with the sounds of the city and her breathing. ‘This isn’t bad,’ I say. ‘Feels like we’re not really here.’

  ‘Don’t get too comfortable. You have to get off and walk if there are hills.’

  ‘There aren’t hills. I’m not taking you anywhere that’s hard to get to.’ All my good stuff is hidden. Down on the docks and inside old factories. ‘I’m taking you to Shadow walls where no effort is required. Here,’ I say.

  We get off and she clicks shut her chihuahua lock and we walk into the train yard. We wander through dead carriages sprayed with Leo’s and my late-night thoughts. Polar bears holding matches to glaciers, painted after Leo heard some politician say people didn’t cause global warming. You’re right. It’s the animals. The earth wearing a hand-knitted jumper and a beanie. Maybe this is why it’s getting warmer? Leo had a bit of a run about the environment and I didn’t mind doing the pictures for him. I understand some of his stuff and some I don’t. We walk past one of his poems, The ticking inside, and Lucy stops long enough to read it. I feel like she’s walking through my head and it feels strange, like we’re in a dream I’m having.

  ‘Sometimes he’s like a poet,’ Lucy says. ‘And sometimes he’s more like a social commentator.’

  ‘I guess.’ I never really thought about it. Lately he’s been writing longer stuff but I figure he’s just got more to say. Some days Leo wants to talk about what he’s heard in his Philosophy class and some days he wants to sit quietly and eat a sausage roll.

  ‘I’ve never been here,’ Lucy says.

  ‘I stop by sometimes,’ I say. ‘To look at the stuff. Some of it’s pretty cool.’

  ‘So you like graffiti?’ she asks, walking away before I answer, looking at the next carriage.

  ‘I like some. I don’t like others,’ I say, but she’s not listening.

  I look over her shoulder at a piece Leo and me did a while back for a laugh. There’s a guy holding out his thumb on a highway in the first frame and a guy picking him up in the second and the car driving away in the third. The car’s numberplate says Psycho. I have a chuckle. Leo thought of that. I was just painting some guy escaping.

  ‘See,’ she says. ‘He’s funny.’

  ‘I never said he wasn’t.’ We walk to the next carriage. ‘So you like him because he’s funny?’

  ‘I like him because he’s clever. And you know, he and I are both artists so we have somethi
ng in common.’ She flicks her wristband. ‘I’ve been taking glassblowing lessons from Al for almost two years now. He helped me finish my folio.’

  ‘What’s that like?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s cool to get an idea and make it with my hands. You know?’

  ‘I guess,’ I tell her, but what I want to say is yeah, I know. I know all about it late at night when a thought hits me and I can’t sleep till it’s out and onto the wall.

  ‘Al makes these mobiles that cover the whole ceiling, like flowers hanging from the sky. They tap against each other and because they’re different sizes and thicknesses they make different noises. It’s like a ceiling of singing flowers.’

  I looked through his studio window once and thought they were clouds of trumpets. I like them even more now I know they make noise. I couldn’t hear that from outside. ‘I’ve seen them,’ I say, before I think about it.

  ‘Where?’ she asks.

  I cough to give myself a little thinking time. ‘Somewhere in the city. There’s a few glass shops near the paint store.’

  She nods. ‘He exhibits in most of the glass galleries.’

  I think about how very cool it would be to exhibit somewhere. I know most guys who do walls say they don’t need a gallery, but I wouldn’t mind a white room with my pieces hanging in it. Bert and me went to an exhibition of Ghostpatrol, this street and gallery artist. ‘You could be here,’ Bert said. I told him he was dreaming. He told me dreaming’s the only way to get anywhere.

  ‘So what’s your folio?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s five bottles called The Fleet of Memory. Al helped me with the name. Inside the bottles are things I like remembering. They’re meant to be like those bottles you see with the ships trapped inside.’

  ‘So what’s in them?’

  ‘Stuff I remember. Like, in one there’s a tiny cape and a wand to remind me of when I was ten. My mum sewed costumes for me and her so we could be in Dad’s magic act. He’s a comedian but sometimes he does kids’ parties for extra money. Mum and I got into the box and Dad tapped it and when he opened the curtain we were gone and when he tapped it again we were back.’

  ‘So, what, you went out through a back door?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ she says. ‘The way I remember it, we really did go somewhere. I mean, I know now there was a trick to it but back then Mum knew what it was and I didn’t. The way I remember, Dad made it happen.’

  ‘My dad was a magician too. Got in his car and disappeared.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says with this strange look on her face.

  ‘Don’t worry. He did it before I was born. My mum’s cool.’ We walk further through the train yard, stopping every now and then to look at something Leo and me painted.

  She stands in front of one I don’t want her to see. There’s nothing funny about the white ocean. There’s a rhythm in the paint, like the water’s trying to catch its breath. The disappointed sea, Leo’s written underneath.

  ‘You ever feel like that?’ Lucy asks. ‘Just flat to the edges?’

  I shrug. I don’t want to get into this tonight. ‘What I’m really disappointed about is that Veronica Mars didn’t go past a third season,’ I say. ‘And that Turkish Delights don’t come in king-size.’

  ‘They do now.’

  ‘Well that’s very good news.’

  ‘I want peppermint Freddoes to come in king-size but it’s never going to happen,’ she says.

  It does seem strange, now that I think about it. ‘You’re right. Why don’t they make the others bigger?’

  ‘It’s a mystery.’

  ‘You could buy three and melt them down and freeze them,’ I say.

  ‘It’d be messy.’

  ‘It’d still be chocolate. It’d still taste the same.’

  ‘I guess. But I like my Freddoes neat, with the peppermint inside.’

  ‘You’ve got a pretty hardline stance on the inside/ outside thing.’

  ‘I do,’ she says, and I like that she can talk about art and Freddoes in the same conversation. I like the idea of her memory fleet, things bottled in so they can’t float away.

  We leave the painting and head towards her bike. ‘I always wondered how they got those ships inside the glass.’

  ‘Al showed me how,’ she says. ‘You make the bottle first. Or you buy it. The ship goes in after. You build it outside, with collapsible masts. You lay a sea of putty in the bottle and then you slide the ship through the neck and raise the sails from outside. That’s how I got my memories in there. I made them small and collapsible. I think I liked those bottles better when they were still mysterious, before I knew how they worked.’

  She’s got this chip in her front tooth and I think about running my finger along the edges of it. But then I think about her finding out I’m Shadow. I think about her being disappointed because I’m a guy going nowhere, not a guy who’s sensitive and smart and funny. I think about her going to uni and making glass and me staying where I am spraying walls and scraping rent.

  ‘I can show you how to get the ship in the bottle,’ she says. ‘If you want.’

  ‘I don’t know. Seems like a lot of trouble for a boat that’s going nowhere.’

  Poet

  Assignment Five

  Poetry 101

  Student: Leopold Green

  The ticking inside

  On the inside of him there’s a wire fence

  And past the wire fence is a dog

  And past the dog are thieves

  And past the thieves

  Is a gang of bad dreams

  And past the dreams

  If you can get past the dreams

  Are the things that make him tick

  Tick, tick, tick

  Lucy

  Ed and I walk through the carriages and I’m in a Shadow world that I didn’t know existed. I imagine him here alone, painting in the blush of light from the next street, and I want to find him even more. Every now and then I think he’s here because in the dark Ed looks like a shadow that someone else is casting.

  I tell Ed the things I want to tell Shadow. I tell him about my folio, The Fleet of Memory. The bottles are full of things I remember about Mum and Dad before the weirdness of the shed.

  In bottle two is a clay fish. It’s small enough to fit through the bottle’s neck because some things you can’t collapse. It’s in the memory fleet because we used to camp at Wilson’s Promontory. Mum would pretend to cook what Dad had caught but really they weren’t big enough so she bought dinner from the fish and chip shop and we all pretended that the fish had come from the ocean. Dad pretended so good I was never really sure if he knew the truth.

  In bottle three there are a few things stuck in the putty: the corner of a page from Mum’s manuscript, a tiny piece of my glass, and a joke from one of Dad’s acts. ‘Art is more important than money, Lucy,’ Mum said when I told her about Al’s offer to teach me. ‘We’ll afford it somehow, don’t you worry about that.’

  I tell Ed about the colours of Al’s studio, the flowers hanging from the ceiling. I helped Al make those flowers. I turned the pipe while he blew on the end and we watched melting glass become petals.

  Some days I don’t want to go home from the studio. I want to stay with those flowers because the light shining through them makes the studio a pastel sky and the shed where Dad lives is falling down. He tapes plastic bags on the windows to keep out the insects and rain.

  ‘My dad was a magician too,’ Ed says. ‘Got in his car and disappeared.’

  He says it like it doesn’t bother him at all and we move through the paintings, to the middle of the yard, till there’s nowhere to go but the last painting. The disappointed sea, Poet’s written. I feel like that when I see my dad walking out of the shed in the morning in his dressing gown and slippers, carrying his little toilet bag.

  ‘You ever feel like that?’ I ask. ‘Just flat to the edges?’

  I don’t know what I expect Ed to say but I don’t expect him to talk about Veronic
a Mars and Turkish Delight and Freddoes. I like that he can talk about art and chocolate and TV and I like that it doesn’t feel awkward. At least till I offer to show him how to make a ship in a bottle and he tells me it’s a waste of time. Nothing about art is a waste of time. ‘It’s the time wasting that gets you somewhere,’ Al says.

  Shadow would have known that. He would have said yes and we’d have headed back to Al’s to see my folio and made collapsible ships that sail on putty. I imagine him, in his silver suit, leaning over his ship, gently bringing up the sails.

  ‘You don’t have to look for Shadow with me,’ I say when we get back to my bike. ‘You can leave. Or I can ride you to Beth’s place if you want.’ I put on my helmet.

  He looks at me long enough for it to feel kind of awkward. Then he shrugs and says, ‘If you want you can drop me at the station.’ He crouches like a runner. ‘Okay, I’m ready. Go.’

  ‘You’re making fun of me.’

  ‘Uh-uh. I’m excited by the challenge.’

  He looks so stupid that it cancels out my stupid so I give in and ride and he runs and gets on the bike after only two tries. ‘That was much easier,’ I say.

  ‘You run next time. We’ll compare definitions of easy.’

  Mum says be careful of boys who never take anything seriously. Dad says a boy needs a good sense of humour to get through his love life. Jazz says my dad must need a sense of humour to get through his love life, if he’s living in the shed.

  ‘So who else’s nose have you broken since mine?’ Ed asks.

  I make like I’m counting. I don’t want to tell him that I’ve had exactly no dates since him. I’ve spent my time looking for Shadow. Which could, to some people, Jazz says, look a little pathetic.

  ‘That many, huh?’ Ed asks.

  ‘Okay, well, David Graham asked me on a date. I said yes but I backed out after I heard him say in Art that anyone could paint the shit he saw at the Picasso exhibition. Anyone who thinks that is stupid.’

  ‘That is stupid. Woman with a Crow. Not everyone could paint that.’