Luca, Son of the Morning

by Tom Anderson

  She peered over. Leaned over, too. Like that, her head was on my shoulder.

  The photos were impossible to argue with. There it was, right in the guy’s hand. Not Alex’s father, but a different fire eater, in a different time. The baton, though, was there, zoomed in on for Gaby to see. I’d found a page of instructions for how to use them too, with close-ups of how to slide the rubber handle over the square end.

  ‘Nooooo waaaaaaaay!’ she whispered. ‘That’s so cool! How the hell did you find that?’

  ‘Mrs Rogoff’s Art pack,’ I said.

  ‘What? She had this?’

  ‘Well. Kind of. It was in a gallery off some web link on the back page of her study pack.’

  ‘The Colombia one? But Luca, nobody in our class looked in those packs. What came over you?’

  ‘Dunno,’ I lied, before layering it with a shred of truth. ‘Got a panic-on coz of the Maths classes they’re making me go to instead, I think. Realised I was, like, six months behind in Art so I’d better do something.’

  ‘That’s sooooo cooooooool,’ said Gaby again. ‘Send me that screenshot! Please?’

  ‘Yeah, no worries.’

  ‘Cool.’ She pulled out her phone, and unlocked the screen, while I pressed ‘share’ and ticked each of the photos to pass on. They were with her in just a minute or two, with that whooshing ‘send’ sound.

  ‘Nice one, Luca.’

  I tipped my phone her way and winked.

  ‘LL Cool J,’ she said, and barged me with her shoulder.

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Anyway. Wanna know what else I’ve got for you then?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I think you do.’

  ‘Okay then.’

  ‘It’s the coolest thing ever.’

  ‘Go on. Try me.’

  ‘Luca,’ she said. ‘I’ve drawn him again, too. A copy for you. Of Old Gigi. Wanna look?’

  What could I say to that? Sure Gaby, let’s have a look. Why me?

  She jumped back to the other chair and started rummaging in her backpack.

  ‘You’ll be able to make him out better, this time,’ she said. ‘I liked the way your face went last time you saw my drawings of him, so here’s a proper good one. Hang on… Here you go… Ah, here it is. Ready? Luca, meet Gigi!’

  Now my face did go. Despite me trying to keep it together. And why? Because there he was, and this time there was no doubt about it.

  ‘Like it?’ she said, as I made out the row of figures trudging behind him. Or was it a row of figures? She’d done that cryptic thing again, where she rubbed and smudged it all so much you kind of wondered if you were just imagining what you wanted from the picture.

  ‘Well? What d’you reckon, Lukee?’

  I had no reply.

  ‘Like it?’

  I tried to nod, catching dryness in my throat as I moved my neck.

  ‘Wicked,’ she grinned. ‘I thought you might.’

  Chapter 15

  How funny is it that Wentloog asked me to try and sketch the Gigi pic? Of course, that’s never gonna happen – because if I did then it would probably cause all kinds of crazy stuff to come to life. But I will have to give the Doc something one day. He wrote it into that behaviour contract he wanted me to sign up to.

  Contract? I know. I did have to do one, though. Brilliant isn’t it? More value for money from Wentloog the Wonder.

  I wanted to tell Gaby that I had beaten her to an official contract to draw something – but then I realised that she’d probably try and sue me because it was her concept. Intellectual theft, she used to call it. Also, the more I learn about her… well… who knows? She’s been super tense about how much detail I’ve given them about this guy. Come on, Miss Carranero. As if I’d go and tell them everything about him. She doesn’t need to worry at all. I’ve told her this. They won’t join those dots. I’ve promised her.

  ‘This man – this “Gigi” – he can go in your blue booklet, anywhere you like,’ said Wentloog, when I finally realised he wasn’t giving up on the idea. ‘He’s such an important character in our tale. We all recognise that. I think it’s important you feel what it’s like to sketch him. It’s such a liberating thing to do. Lots of young people in your position have found that the case. I’ve seen it work in my own practice plenty of times. You can even do it in pencil and rub him out afterwards. Some like to do that, while others are still a bit afraid to take such a step. I just think the process of creating this person with your own hands is the crucial bit, though. Realising that you control this character. It’s something I really do want you to do.’

  ‘It’s only properly creating if you do it for yourself and not anyone else,’ I told him.

  ‘You are going to do it for yourself, Luca,’ he replied, legs crossed and his hands on his knee. He was doing the look-right-through-you thing that always meant he wasn’t being straight.

  ‘Except you’ll see it,’ I said.

  ‘Only if you want me to.’

  ‘I won’t want you to.’

  Dr Wentloog smiled and said ‘But you will’. Only he said it without moving his face. He just meant it – which for him was as good as saying something.

  ‘Nothing in that blue book of yours is shared with anyone until you’re ready,’ he added.

  ‘Good. Because there’s nothing in it yet,’ I joked. His flat smile trembled for a second and he laughed, light and forced. ‘I told you I keep the pages of my notebooks blank, didn’t I?’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘If you’re not ready, then try to sketch him further in your mind’s eye first. That’s just as effective. That way you can make him more complex, and that comment you made about being creative will be true. It’ll be just for your own observation if it’s in your mind. True creativity, as you yourself just called it.’

  ‘Did you say “complex” though?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah. See, it’s only creative if it’s simple, too, see. So that won’t work either.’

  ‘Fine. Well then, Luca, you tell me what will?’

  ‘Okay. Tell you what, Dr W,’ I said. ‘If you promise to believe me, then I’ll do your drawing. Do we have a deal?’

  It wasn’t in the contract, of course. But why not ask, eh?

  He left the room shortly after that, and I scratched the first few lines of ‘Gigi Carranero by Gaby’ into the next page. For me, of course. I ripped it out and got rid of it nearly straightaway. But then again, we don’t need some pencil lines to bring him out, do we? Gaby did that for us anyway with the charcoal.

  Wonder if she was proper ‘creating’ when she did that? I mean, she did plan to show it to me, didn’t she? Maybe that’s how it happened.

  Ah, maybe we can just ask him sometime, anyway? No, not Wentloog. HIM. The man in the pencil lines. Except we can ask the real him, rather than the charcoal version, of course.

  Probably easiest, right?

  * * *

  Jeff was still there when I got back. He and my dad were hatching a plan to take the watches to market the next day – Sunday.

  My mum was sitting in the kitchen listening to dance music and baking.

  ‘Macaroons,’ she shouted, over the din.

  I went back into the living room. It was dark in there. The day had been pretty bright, but the curtains were closed and the air felt stale.

  ‘What’s happenin’ Lukee Boy?’ said Jeff.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Good one. Gonna come with us tomorrow then? Five a.m. start. Swansea. Bit of a drive but should be a good un. We’ll sell most of these, and then you know what happens next.’

  I didn’t. And the thing is, neither did they, really. I knew what the reply was, but that didn’t make it true.

  ‘Amser Aur!’ Jeff grinned. Dunno why he needed to say it in We
lsh.

  ‘Gold Time,’ translated my dad, just in case I hadn’t managed to pick up two of the most basic GCSE-level words out there.

  ‘Great,’ I said, rolling my eyes.

  ‘Lookin keen there, Lukee Boy!’ laughed Jeff.

  ‘He is. Don’t you worry about that,’ said my dad. ‘Just needs to catch up on a bit of kip, doesn’t he. Teenagers. Grumpy about anything.’

  He could talk. How many hours sleep had my folks had last night?

  Seemed Jeff was claiming even less:

  ‘Ah, no sleep’s good for ya sometimes,’ he said. ‘Only had an hour myself. Was, er, busy, like, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Met up with her again did you?’ said my dad.

  ‘Ooh yeah,’ said Jeff.

  ‘Yeah, well that’s all you’re gonna tell us, Jeff, mate. Not with Lukee here. He still thinks babies come from a stork.’

  ‘What d’you mean,’ said Jeff, winking at me. ‘They do, don’t they?’

  Then both of them laughed.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Jeff. ‘Let’s get on with these labels. Lukee, you gonna help us?’

  ‘If I have to.’

  ‘G’boy,’ said Jeff. ‘Right. You’ve seen how it works. Here’s a sheet with the trade price on them. We need trade plus thirty per-cent plus VAT minus a fiver. That’s our bottom line. Add twenty to that if it’s under forty. Add thirty if it’s over. Then we know how far down we can haggle. Got that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So go on then. A watch is labelled up at eighty-nine,’ said my dad. ‘What can we drop to and still make our share?’

  ‘Fifty-nine.’

  ‘Good, Luca. And they write us these letters home saying they’re worried about your Maths!’

  ‘He’s doing great if you ask me,’ said Jeff. ‘So then, Lukee Boy. Howsabout this one… Watch price is eighty-nine, but you can see it’s already been reduced a tenner from ninety-nine… What happens then?’

  ‘Er…’

  ‘Go on, Lukee Boy. Be bold!’

  I knew what was coming here.

  ‘Go on. Say it.’

  I sighed: ‘Sixty-nine.’

  ‘Wahey!’

  Both of them laughed again.

  ‘Childish twat,’ said my dad, and Jeff winked again.

  * * *

  Back in the kitchen, my mum was arranging some CDs, as she waited for her macaroons to crispen.

  ‘How’s Lukee then?’ she said.

  ‘Alright,’ I told her.

  ‘They finished their price indexing?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Mum,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What made you put this on the other day?’ I held up the Thickest Thumps of Two-Tone CD, and ran my thumb along the track list. There it was. Number nine. Max Romeo. ‘Chase the Devil’. That was it. The one that used my line in its intro and outro.

  ‘Oh, did you hear it? I thought you were still asleep! I dunno. You know the way it is. It was its turn to go on.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s how I run our CDs. Just change them over every now and then. It must have come from upstairs. Why? Does it still make you feel creepy, then? God it must be ten years, now, Lukee.’

  ‘I don’t know if it does or not,’ I said. ‘But I heard it and then it was, like, kind of stuck in my head afterwards.’

  ‘That’s coz it’s such a catchy tune, Luca,’ she said, smiling and flicking the kettle on.

  ‘Wanna put it on?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Okay. Cup of tea?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Don’t blame Max Romeo, anyway,’ said my mum. ‘It’s not his fault you spent like two years thinking he was singing your name instead of Lucifer.’ She chuckled again at the memory.

  I could have sworn they had it on a tape deck back then.

  ‘How old was I?’ I asked her.

  ‘Gosh, like four? Maybe five? You have to admit. It was cute. You thought it said “Luca, son of the morning” in the first line and you used to come running when it went on. Then you used to dance in circles to the beat. You can see why we didn’t want to tell you what the lyric really said.’

  Yeah, nice one, Mum and Dad. Lovely touch. Let your kid think there’s some catchy song on the stereo with his name in it.

  And then one day tell him it’s actually about Satan.

  Yeah, good one.

  ‘It is about the devil though, isn’t it?’ I said to my mum, remembering how I screamed through the night as my dad tried to explain the complex details of a reggae legend’s lyric choices. They might recall me as a dancing baby instead, but I could still feel the fear of first finding out.

  ‘Kind of,’ said my mum. ‘That first line isn’t by a songwriter anyway. It’s from the Bible. Ask your dad. He’d know. It’s Isaiah, verse something or other. It means the morning star, like, as in Venus or Mercury. You know they called the “star of the morning” by that name – “Lucifer” – too, see. So it was a star’s name, anyway, as well as the devil. A star, Lukee! Someone who brought light to people’s worlds. The one that was shining brighter than the others. The star that ended the night. The bringer of dawn. The morning.’

  ‘A five- or six-year-old kid isn’t really going to get that, though, are they?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You were our star of the morning anyway.’

  ‘Not much chance of that now, eh?’ I said.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Me… being star of the morning.’

  She laughed and grabbed me into a hug.

  ‘You’re a funny little bugger when you want to be,’ she said, reaching across the table and grabbing the cup of tea she’d made me. ‘Sugar?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Two! Cutting down then, Lukee?’

  ‘Saving the higher doses for the mornings,’ I said.

  She laughed again. ‘Good idea. So you going to go with them tomorrow?’

  ‘Probly.’

  ‘Use it as your song,’ she said. ‘Your wake-up track. It’ll be perfect. Star of the morning! Come on!’

  ‘What’s the next line?’ I asked.

  ‘You know that. Come on, Luca.’

  ‘No. I mean from the Bible verse. Not the song.’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. Ask your dad once Jeff’s gone.’

  ‘Nah, it’s okay. I can look it up myself sometime.’

  * * *

  It was ages before Jeff left, and by then my mum had turned back to being full-on buddies with my dad again. I couldn’t figure out at all why she wasn’t giving him the usual grief about buying crap goods and fetching wrong prices. These watches didn’t seem any better than any of the other junk which he sold for so little profit that there was never any pocket money for me and I had to watch Gaby drink coffee down at the Quarters Cafe.

  Anyway, for some reason that I couldn’t get anywhere near, my mum had gone soft over him on this latest deal. That kind of messed with the balance of our household. My mum always put the daggers in if Dad set himself up for another bum deal, and I was sort of missing the reassurance of seeing that happen this time. I know people don’t like their parents arguing, but my parents arguing meant all was well.

  Hearing them in the living room that night, though, the reason for her being so easy on him was getting nearer, now lingering somewhere behind that cloud of smoke as they puffed on a few roll-ups and drank a bit more rum.

  So I listened in.

  ‘Really gonna sell enough for us to put a stake in some gold then, is it, Steve?’

  ‘Ooh, dunno. Gold costs a fortune, Hann.’

  ‘I bet it does. Costs the earth.’

  ‘Aye. Literally!’

  My mum was laughing.
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  ‘Unless,’ grinned my dad, leaning right back into the darkest edges of our tatty sofa, ‘…unless you know a source who can get you some for a mega cut-down price. Some that can easily melt and get sold again on the markets clean. Some salvage surplus!’

  My mum giggled, again, and then drank another sip, judging from the way her laugh was cut short. ‘Now that would be cool,’ she said.

  I went upstairs.

  I didn’t try listening to or googling ‘Lucifer son of the morning’ that night. Like running Street View on a map of Cartagena, it was as if there was some sort of living lump inside me, waiting to rub cotton wool on my brain or poke out my eyes from within, any time I entertained the idea of clicking on the right button to do it.

  Instead, I ended up listening to Bob Marley’s ‘Concrete Jungle’ while reading some online stuff about Satan in music. There was stuff about Voodoo and the formation of jazz – music my mum listened to often. Then there was something about a Rolling Stones song, which I clicked on to listen to. It sounded familiar but then my heart started thumping and my breath sped up and I felt hot in the face and needed to go back to Bob to hold the right rhythm in place.

  Then, a few links later, it came round to the same guy. My song! Max Romeo. There he was and then there the verse was: the lines from the Bible that I was scared to search. The singer himself was saying some pretty cool stuff about how he wrote the song because he thought people had it wrong believing the devil was a person or something living. ‘The Devil is in all of us!’ he was saying, and somehow I could cope with hearing it, because Max had that soothing voice that reggae singers do, and all the while Bob was winding down his lovely riff with that jiggy shake of guitars in the background, and the harmonies of The Wailers were locked in his trance.

  I was learning something here.

  Wonder if Dr Wentloog is actually going to ever read this stuff? Hopefully not. He wouldn’t get it, anyway. So how’s this for a theory?

  The devil… Lucifer… don’t matter what we call him. Well, he’s just the evil in each of us. We create him with our own bad thoughts, the ones we keep to ourselves, the ones which we can’t do anything about because they’re just our own mind’s rhythm. Then God, and you can call him – or her – whatever, too. That’s just the good in each of us. How simple is that? Surely it’s simple enough to count as creative, if we’re still going by that rule?