Graffiti Moon

by Cath Crowley

  The van pulls up and Leo and Dylan get out of the front. Leo walks over to Jazz and grins and in his grin I see what I didn’t see at the start. He really likes her. She gives him the serious finger. ‘I don’t date guys with prison records.’

  I watch him take one of her plaits and twist it slowly. ‘I will not be going to prison,’ he says. ‘I’m thinking about growing up.’

  I open the back door of the van, my zing re-reversing. ‘It’s empty.’

  ‘Because we decided not to rob the place,’ Leo says, still twisting Jazz’s plait.

  ‘But where’s Ed?’

  Leo stops twisting and looks at me. Without him saying anything, I know Ed’s with Beth. ‘Good for him.’ I sit in the gutter. ‘Good for him.’ I lie on the footpath. ‘Good for him.’

  Jazz lies next to me on the concrete. ‘I’m looking at the stars,’ I say.

  ‘Are you doing that thing where you try to feel small so your problems seem unimportant?’

  ‘Nope. I’m looking at them just because they’re not covered in smog. I want nothing else from them but to be in clear view.’

  ‘Are you having a breakdown?’

  ‘Nope. I’m upset. But at least I know the truth about Shadow. I’m pretty sure I know the truth about my parents. At least, I will when I ask them about the divorce this morning.’

  ‘I’m sorry I pushed you into tonight,’ Jazz says. ‘I’m a pushy friend. I’m always making comments about your mum and dad when I don’t even know them that well.’

  ‘You were right, though. Real is better. The truth is better.’ Painful, but better.

  ‘Is she okay?’ Leo asks.

  ‘She’s fine,’ Jazz says. ‘Come and join us on the footpath. We’re checking out the stars.’ We lie side-by-side and listen to Dylan and Daisy talking in the background.

  ‘I’m sorry I threw eggs at you on your birthday,’ he says.

  ‘Just write the date somewhere so you don’t forget it next year.’

  ‘Okay. What was the date yesterday?’

  ‘The nineteenth of October,’ we all shout.

  ‘So does this mean we’ll still be together next year?’ he asks.

  ‘It means you can be hopeful,’ Daisy tells him. ‘But you can’t lie to me again.’

  ‘If I can’t lie, you can’t call me stupid,’ he says.

  ‘That’s fair.’

  He takes a piece of paper out of his pocket and reads. ‘If my like for you was a footy crowd, you’d be deaf cos of the roar. And if my like for you were a boxer, there’d be a dead guy lying on the floor. And if my like for you were sugar, you’d lose your teeth before you were twenty. And if my like for you was money, let’s just say you’d be spending plenty.’

  ‘You didn’t write that, did you?’ Daisy asks.

  ‘They’re my ideas. Leo made them rhyme.’

  ‘Good enough,’ she says, and puts the paper in her pocket.

  I get up after a while and take my bike out of the back of the van. It’s a bit bingled but still in working order. I untie my helmet and put it on. I ride down the streets slowly, a cool wind on my skin. The glassy darkness will be gone soon and the day will be starting up. Birds go crazy and the world belongs to them for now. And to me. I ride from one side of the road to the other. I’m not thinking of last night as the time I got dumped for Beth. Or the time when I almost kissed Shadow. I’m thinking of it as an adventure. The start of something real.

  Poet

  5.30 am

  Here

  She says she’ll forgive me

  She says just this one time

  She says get on with it and kiss me

  She says do that twirling thing with my hair

  She says that was exactly what I was after

  She says she’s glad the cool change has come

  I say I’ll see her tomorrow

  She looks at her watch and says

  It’s here

  Ed

  While those birds fly I hold Beth’s hand. She stops whispering in my ear because she knows like I do that something’s different. That I came here to say sorry and to say that we’re really over. I can’t be with her if I’m thinking about Lucy.

  ‘At least I got to say goodbye. You were so awful when you left me.’

  ‘I thought you’d end up with one of those guys from your school.’

  ‘I wanted to end up with you.’ She sounds so sad it kills me.

  We sit under the tree for a bit longer and talk. Then she says, ‘You have to leave now.’ She lets go of my hand.

  Because she is a very cool girl she lends me her bike and gives me two of her dad’s beers. She is very fucking cool, Bert would be saying, and I have a chuckle at the look he’d have on his face while he was saying it.

  ‘Ed,’ Beth says before I go, ‘don’t do the same thing with her.’

  I ride to the corner of her street and I stop to wave. But she’s not standing there anymore.

  I pedal down to the docks and find Bert where I left him. I crack open the beers and we have a chat about last night. About places I might be going. ‘You got one more place to go,’ he says, and I know I do. Lucy might not want to be with me but I have to finish things off with her. Try, maybe. No guts, no glory.

  I stop off at home on the way to get some paint. Mum’s sitting at the table, scribbling her bleak numbers. I kiss her on the cheek. ‘How was Maria?’

  ‘A load of rubbish,’ she says, smiling. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Out on the town. Celebrating Leo’s last night of Year 12.’ I take a piece of her toast. ‘You know he’s been studying poetry?’

  ‘No. But I’m not surprised. My boys are talented.’ She messes up my hair.

  ‘So how are the numbers adding up?’

  She looks at her book and runs her pen down the columns. ‘We can make the rent. The wolf’s away from the door for this month.’

  I make her a cup of tea before I take off again. The wolf might be with us now, but he won’t be with us forever. I think of a wall, with wild dogs running, and me chasing them in a McDonald’s uniform. At least it’s not an orange jumpsuit.

  Lucy

  Mum and Dad are sitting on deckchairs out the front of the shed when I walk my bike through the gate. They’re drinking coffee and talking. ‘It’s six am. Are you waiting up for me?’

  ‘We’re enjoying the cool change,’ Mum says. ‘And congratulating ourselves on a few things. Like having raised a daughter who finished Year 12 yesterday.’

  ‘Congratulations, Lucy Dervish,’ Dad says. ‘You made it.’

  ‘I’ve still got exams and my interview with the organiser of the art course.’

  ‘You’ll get through.’ Mum smiles. ‘We went down to Al’s last night. He called to see if we wanted to look at your folio before he packed it up and took it to school.’

  ‘What’d you think?’ I sit on the ground between them.

  ‘I thought it was the most spectacular thing I’ve ever seen,’ Mum says. ‘My daughter the artist.’

  ‘You put me in a bottle. How’d you get me in there?’ Dad asks.

  ‘I made you collapsible. I put you in and raised you with string and made you stay there with putty.’

  ‘Gee. You went to a lot of trouble.’

  ‘You’re important to me, Dad. So what are the other things you’re celebrating?’

  ‘Well, I finished my novel.’

  ‘That’s great, Mum.’

  ‘And your father is almost finished his new act. I won’t give anything away, but he performed it for me last night and it’s good. Sad and funny.’

  Dad smiles. ‘Humour without sadness is just a pie in the face.’

  I wouldn’t mind a pie in the face if it meant we were all happy. ‘I can’t wait to see it, Dad.’

  ‘To us,’ Mum says, and raises her coffee cup.

  ‘You forgot one thing. You forgot to say that you’re getting a divorce. It’s okay,’ I tell her when she shakes her head. ‘I’m almos
t eighteen now. I can take it.’

  ‘We’re not getting a divorce, Lucy. I’ve told you that a million times. I love your father. He loves me.’

  ‘He lives in the shed.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll move into the shed to write my next book,’ Mum says. ‘Maybe Dad will live in the house. Or I might go away for a month or two. You’re older now, so I think that would be okay. Would that be okay?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’ And then I can’t keep inside the thing that’s busting to get out. ‘You’re weird. That’s weird. You’re married. You should want to be together all the time.’

  Mum laughs. ‘We raised a very conservative daughter. Too much Pride and Prejudice.’

  ‘That could change,’ Dad says. ‘There’s still time to get her onto Margaret Atwood.’

  ‘Funny. Hilarious. I’m going into the world of adult relationships. I need some solid advice.’

  ‘All I can tell you is to have the relationship that’s good for you. I need to write. So does your dad.’ Mum shrugs. ‘You see how we fight when we don’t get time for that. But we love you. You get that, right, Luce?’

  ‘I get that.’ I don’t get a lot of other things but I always got that. ‘It’s still weird.’

  ‘To the Dervish family,’ Mum says, holding up her coffee again. ‘Great, and just a little bit weird.’

  I guess it’s like art. What I saw in Mum and Dad was more about me than them. I watch them chatting and laughing. Who says romance is dead? It’s not. It’s just living in the shed. I crack myself up a little at that thought. ‘What about firing up your camping stove and cooking me some pancakes?’

  ‘Magic,’ Mum says.

  I take off my wristband and give it back to Dad. ‘For luck with your new act. Although after last night I have serious doubts about the ability of that band.’

  My phone buzzes while Dad’s cooking and it’s Al. Shadow is here. Right now. I think about Ed painting a wall and I hope it’s different from the ones scattered around the city. But I know that even if part of it’s hopeful because he’s back with Beth, there’s still a corner that belongs to me. A corner where I’m telling him it matters that he can’t read, that he’s broke, that he doesn’t have a job. I don’t want him to paint me like that.

  I put on my helmet and grab my bike. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Where’s the fire, Lucy Dervish?’ Dad asks.

  In me. Under my skin. I figure I’ve got enough to give a little to Ed. I take off under a dark sky fading out and turning pink. I owe him some words. To you. It’s important to you.

  I pedal down Rose Drive where rubbish trucks are collecting bins and clouding the smell of jasmine. Tangled gardens hold up drunken houses along the street. Please let me make it in time. Let me make it to Ed before the night’s officially over and he paints that corner of the wall with me in it, telling him he’s less than what he is.

  The speckled lights of the factory stars are fading. In the background the city rises, grey buildings pointing at the sky. I like this place in the light as well as the dark. I like the crates stacked up on the docks and the old buildings. I like Al’s street, all the industry piled together. I like how his glass studio and Shadow’s walls take me by surprise in the middle of it all. At the top of the hill I take my hands off the brakes and I let go.

  Ed

  I spray the sky fast. Eyes ahead and behind. Paint sails across the wall and the things that are in my head sail from can to brick. See this, Lucy. See me and you emptied onto a wall. See us so big that you can’t miss it, even if you get here after I’ve gone.

  Lucy’s boss sits on his step, watching and texting. Every now and then I turn to check for Lucy and see that he’s still there.

  I finish and stand back to take it in and I know it’s my best wall yet. I hear slurping behind me. The old guy hands me a coffee. ‘I like your work,’ he says. ‘Shadow, right?’

  ‘Right. Actually it’s Ed.’

  ‘Al.’ He puts out his hand and I shake it. ‘It’s different from your other pieces,’ he says, pointing at the wall.

  ‘I’m trying a new style.’

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘I like your stuff, too. The ceiling flowers. I thought they were trumpets but then Lucy set me straight. You’ve texted her, right?’

  He only looks surprised for a second. ‘A few times.’ He texts her again. ‘I expect she’ll come speeding over that hill any second. You’re working early today.’

  ‘I haven’t been to sleep yet. I’m not so much working early as working late.’

  ‘I always work this early,’ he says. ‘Sun coming up is the best time to make glass. No other time has such great colours.’

  I see why Lucy likes Al. He reminds me a bit of Bert. I ask him about the course she mentioned and I tell him I can’t read too well and he says universities can help with that. ‘Maybe you qualify for a scribe. Someone who writes things down. You ever had someone like that?’

  ‘Leo used to write for me, when I was at school. I left in Year 10. I don’t have a folio.’

  Al sips his coffee and looks at the wall. ‘Maybe you do. Lucy takes a good photograph. You and she could borrow my camera. Take some shots of your paintings.’

  ‘And that could be a folio?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But there’s a woman I know, Karen Josepha. I could ask her.’

  ‘Mrs J.’

  ‘Miss J, actually,’ he says. ‘She’s Lucy’s Year 12 Art teacher.’

  ‘I know her. She’s very cool.’

  ‘She is very cool,’ he says.

  We look at the hill, waiting for Lucy, who’s taking her sweet time, as Bert would say.

  ‘I like Vermeer. Do you like Vermeer?’ I ask after a bit.

  ‘I do,’ Al says. ‘You go to the exhibition earlier this year?’

  ‘Me and a friend went. My old boss at the paint store. I lost my job, after he died.’

  ‘I’m looking for a cleaner. You got references?’

  ‘Uh-huh. I got references.’

  And just like that he offers me a job. We go inside his studio and he shows me round. I give him Valerie’s number. ‘You could ask Mrs – I mean, Miss J too. She’ll tell you I’ll do a good job.’

  ‘I’m sure you will.’

  I wander around, looking at the glass. ‘The Fleet of Memory,’ I say, picking up one of her bottles. They’re the coolest things. Memories sitting on putty. It’s like the inside of her head’s out there on the table. The last bottle in the series has a tiny Shadow wall inside. It’s the one I did of a blue sky on bricks. ‘You never see blue like that around here,’ I tell Al. ‘That blue’s exactly right.’

  I leave a message for Lucy with Al and head off. I’m at the end of the street when I see her, that helmet with the lightning bolt on the side flying towards me. I stop and wait for her to arrive.

  ‘Hi,’ she says.

  ‘Hi,’ I say back. ‘I met your boss. He offered me a job cleaning his studio.’ I want her to know straight away that I’m not the guy I was last night. I don’t know who I am but I’m not that guy.

  ‘That’s great, really great,’ she says, taking off her helmet and hanging it over the handlebars.

  ‘You don’t look all that happy. You look like this.’ I make her face.

  ‘Really? I meant to look happy for you,’ she says. ‘Are you sure that’s what I look like?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Maybe this would be easier if you covered my face.’

  ‘Still a romantic, I see.’

  She covers her own face. ‘Before you left the casino, I meant to say it’s important to you. All those things like leaving school and not having a job and not being able to read all that well are important to you, not to me.’

  I got something inside me now. It’s not much but it’s more than I had. ‘I didn’t rob the place.’

  ‘I know. I went to save you.’

  I look at that spot on her neck and make a few travel plans.

  ‘Do
you think I’ll be on the run from Malcolm all my life?’ she asks.

  ‘Uh-uh. Leo’s brother took care of it. But I’d stay out of dark parks.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have lied to me all night,’ she says. ‘I feel really dumb now because of all the things I said about Shadow. You should have told me the truth. That bit matters.’

  ‘I know.’ I keep looking at that spot. I owe her something for what I did. I think of that Vermeer painting with the scales. You got to weigh something, in the end. Even if it’s not very much. ‘I like you. I didn’t want you to think I was stupid so I lied. I tried to tell you when we stopped at the freeway.’

  She’s quiet for ages.

  ‘Now would be a good time to tell me I’m not stupid,’ I say.

  ‘Why did you get back with Beth if you like me?’ she asks.

  ‘I didn’t get back with Beth.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Okay, take your hand off your face, it’s too strange.’

  She takes it off and smiles and I think of wall after wall after wall. Green mazes wandering and two people wandering through them. Doorways that lead somewhere. Skies the exact kind of blue I’ve been looking for.

  Lucy

  I listen to Ed with my eyes closed. There’s something in his voice that wasn’t there before. The truth, maybe. He likes me. Three colliding words. He didn’t get back with Beth. ‘Really?’

  ‘Okay, take your hand off your face, it’s too strange.’

  I do and we smile at each other for a while and it’s not awkward. Ed’s not back with Beth. My parents are in love but they don’t want to live together all the time. Dylan and Daisy fight but they’re staying together, at least until her next birthday. Leo is a poet and he likes Jazz and that’s the score.

  I know nothing about love. But I know that I want to kiss Ed. I know that I want him to be happy. He’s happier than he was; I see that, now that I don’t have my hand over my face.