by Cath Crowley
I imagine what Shadow looks like: paint-spattered clothes, a face that’s got a million ideas running underneath it. I imagine him touching me so I get static without having to rub my feet up and down on the carpet. Please, please, please.
‘Right,’ Dylan says slowly. ‘No problem.’
‘Now I have to go to the toilet.’ Ed looks at Leo and Dylan. ‘I got a feeling you both need to go too.’
‘Guys don’t go to the toilet together. That’s messed up,’ Leo says.
‘That’s not the only thing that’s messed up.’ Ed grabs Dylan’s shirt. ‘Move.’
I watch them till the toilet door swings shut. ‘You think Dylan’s telling the truth?’
Daisy checks her face in a little mirror then hands it to Jazz. ‘You want me to find out?’
‘Let’s not ruin the mood by calling them liars.’ Jazz looks in the mirror. ‘I hate my freckles,’ she says, and hands it to me.
‘I like freckles,’ Daisy says. ‘And I won’t ruin it. I’ve got this special way of getting the truth out of Dylan.’
‘How?’ I ask.
‘I kick him in the balls.’
‘That’s pretty special,’ I tell her, and hand back the mirror.
Jazz gives us a serious finger each. ‘Okay, let’s keep our feet to ourselves and not get paranoid.’ She lowers her voice. ‘Quick, Daisy. Spill everything you know about Leo before they get back.’
‘Okay. He’s pretty wild. Less wild since he moved in with his gran, but still, he does some crazy stuff.’
‘More crazy than when he used a chain of guys’ shirts to abseil out of the classroom window while the teacher’s back was turned?’ Jazz asks.
‘No, pretty much that level of crazy. His brother Jake’s been in some trouble with the police, though. I’m not sure of the details.’
‘Has Leo been in jail?’
‘He was taken to the police station but they didn’t lay charges. Dylan never told me what he’d done. Emma, his ex-girlfriend, said he vandalised her house.’
‘Emma Forest?’ Jazz asks. ‘His ex is the girl in Year 11 with the big . . .?’
‘That’s the one,’ Daisy tells her.
Jazz looks at her chest. I pat her shoulder. ‘Guys care about personality too.’
‘Girls like me started that rumour.’ She looks at Daisy. ‘When did they break up?’
‘Not sure, but it was a while ago. He hasn’t had a girlfriend since.’
‘No girls at all? If there’s been a drought I’m in with a chance.’
‘Well, no, he’s been with girls. Lots of girls. Lots and lots of girls. Lots and lots and lots –’
‘Okay, I get the picture,’ Jazz cuts her off. ‘What about Ed? Just in case Lucy needs a backup plan.’
‘I won’t need a backup plan. Ow. Don’t kick me.’
‘I don’t see him much since he left school. He was going out with Beth Darling. Private-school girl. St Catherine’s, I think. She’s pretty and smart. He works in a paint store now, somewhere in the city.’
‘Maybe that’s how they know Shadow. Maybe Ed sells him paint,’ Jazz says.
‘Maybe. Dylan never said.’
‘Why’d he leave school?’ Jazz asks.
‘Lucy.’
‘Me? Oh my God.’
‘Gotcha,’ Daisy says. ‘I don’t know why he left, exactly. The rumour was he cheated. Leo said that was crap.’
I always wondered why he left, if it was because he’d cheated or if it was something to do with me. I tried to look at him that day in Art when Mr Fennel caught him with the essay. He didn’t take his eyes from the window, though.
I missed him after he’d gone. I mean, it’s not like the tingle feeling stopped because he grabbed my arse. I spent the weekend after our date wishing I could stab him with my fluffy-duck pen and staring at the phone hoping he’d call. Dating is a very tricky business.
‘You’ve got a weird look on your face,’ Jazz says to me. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘Nothing,’ I tell her.
‘Is that possible?’ Daisy asks. ‘To have absolutely nothing in your brain? Because sometimes I ask Dylan what he’s thinking and that’s what he says. Just once I’d like him to say he’s thinking about world peace or saving the whales or something.’
‘It’s not possible,’ Jazz tells her.
‘It’s possible. He’s not a complete idiot.’
‘No, I mean it’s not possible to not think anything.’
‘That’s what I tell him. And you’d know, being psychic and all. How does that work, anyway? Do you hear people thinking?’
‘I get a feeling sometimes. My mum’s way more psychic than me. She’s got this sixth sense that she uses to track me day or night. This is my first chance in seventeen years to be off her radar. She’s overseas so I’m counting on the time zone messing her up.’
‘What are your parents like?’ Daisy asks me. ‘Do they let you do stuff?’
‘Yep. They’re artists. They met at uni and fell madly in love.’
I don’t look at Jazz. My parents are something we hardly ever talk about anymore. Not since I asked her to use psychic abilities to see if Mum and Dad’s living arrangement was a sign that they were getting a divorce. She took the lollipop she was eating out of her mouth. ‘It’s a billboard,’ she said. ‘And I don’t need psychic abilities to see it.’
I went quiet and she went quiet and it got awkward till she said she was sorry. ‘That was a bad joke, Luce.’ I told her it was okay. It was okay. She doesn’t know them like I do, that’s all. Mum says they’re not getting a divorce and she has a strict honesty policy so I believe her. I asked her straight out one night while we were in the bathroom getting ready for bed. ‘You’re divorcing Dad, aren’t you?’
She grabbed my shoulders and stared at me without blinking. ‘For the fiftieth time, I promise you we’re not. I love your father. I need headspace to finish my novel, that’s all.’ She squeezed past me to get her makeup remover. ‘This bathroom isn’t big enough to swing a cat,’ she said. ‘This house isn’t big enough to swing a cat.’
‘So it’s the cat’s fault,’ I said. ‘If only we had a cat.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘It’s no one’s fault. There’s no fault. We’re staying married. Not everyone lives like the dream you have in your head.’
That did not comfort me.
I tune back in and listen to Daisy. ‘Mum’s got ten senses going on when I’m out with Dylan. Every time he says or thinks anything about sex he gets this buzz of static electricity right where he’s thinking most about it.’
We laugh at Daisy miming how he jumps around when they kiss. ‘We should have started hanging out with you earlier,’ Jazz says. ‘I can’t believe we waited till a teacher put us in a group together.’
‘I like that we’re doing the first out-of-school thing on the last night of Year 12. Makes me feel like I’m moving on from Dylan.’
I look towards the toilet. ‘What do you think they’re talking about in there?’
‘I’ll take a lucky guess,’ Jazz says, ‘and say us.’
Ed
‘We’re not spending the night looking for ourselves,’ I tell Leo after he shuts the door. ‘It’s a complete waste of time.’
‘No, it’s fun and you are a guy in need of fun. You’ve been looking like this for months.’ Leo does something strange with his face.
‘I don’t look like that.’
‘Yeah. You do.’
‘I’ll look like that if Daisy dumps me and she’ll dump me if she thinks I lied,’ Dylan says.
‘You threw eggs at her head. Odds are she’s dumping you anyway.’ I turn to Leo. ‘We decided. We said that we weren’t telling anyone. We said it was art for art’s sake. We said the more people who knew, the more chance the cops’d pick us up. We said it was you and me, no crew.’
‘Are you sure I didn’t say it was to score girls?’
That actually sounds a whole lot like something Leo would
say. ‘I’m sure,’ I tell him.
‘None of us are scoring if we don’t lie.’ Dylan leans against the bench. ‘Ow. Shit.’
‘What?’ Leo asks.
‘Static electricity.’ Dylan shifts his jeans around.
‘On your dick?’ Leo laughs. ‘How’d you get a girl like Daisy in the first place?’
He ignores Leo and turns to me. ‘Go along with it, Ed. I am begging. I am on the ground begging you.’
‘You’re standing at a urinal about to take a piss.’
‘Don’t make me get on the ground. Do you know how many germs there are in a toilet?’
I shake my head and laugh and he knows he’s got me. ‘Two hours and that’s it,’ I say. ‘We don’t tell them it’s us, no matter what. We go to a few places, pretend to look and we find a way to change the plan.’
Leo grins. He’s enjoying this way too much. I can see him out there now. Jazz’s saying how cool she thinks the writing is and he can’t hold the secret in. I look him in the eyes. ‘No matter what, we don’t tell them.’
‘No matter what,’ Leo says.
I don’t believe him for a second, but I’m not telling Daisy that Dylan lied because I know what it’s like to want a girl that much. To get dragged in the dirt behind her hoping you won’t lose your grip.
I know because of Beth.
Before her I had this sense that things were moving somewhere else but that around me they’d stopped. Kids walked past the paint store laughing and carrying schoolbags and I watched them feeling like I was that guy in the Jeffrey Smart painting. The one standing in a concrete world with the expressway sweeping round him. That guy could shout but his voice would only bounce around and come back to him, bounce and come back for the rest of his life.
Then one afternoon Beth came in with a couple of guys from her school. Guys in white shirts and ties, looking at me like I was a bag of nothing. While I got the paint they needed for their school banner one of them asked, ‘You work here full-time?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Good career move.’
I took the money and passed the box across the counter and said politely, ‘Your choice of colour really lacks style.’ I smiled and Beth laughed and the guy asked to see my manager.
I got Bert and he leant over the box and looked at the paint and said, ‘Ed was being polite. Your choice of colour is shit.’
Beth laughed even more and it was that laugh that got me. She stayed after those white-shirted wankers left, wandering round the aisles, looking at me every now and then.
‘You should ask her out,’ Bert said. ‘No guts, no glory.’
‘Last time I asked a girl out I got two black eyes. No guts, no broken nose as far as I’m concerned.’
But before Beth left she came up to the counter and said, ‘You should ask me out.’
After that day she took the world off my chest, lifted it so I could breathe. We’d sit on the hill near her house at night and talk. Then we’d ride our bikes home through a sea of sky where all the lights on the shitty factories were stars and the world was a place we could swim right through.
At the start there were moments, blinking moments, when we were lying together and it was warm and I could smell flowers on her skin and turps on my hands and I heard her voice with my nerve endings. Heard her with my blood and skin and I forgot things. Like how one day she’d finish Year 12 and leave me behind. Like how stupid I was compared to her. I forgot because she was hanging over me, and the world was liquid and spinning and for once I was liquid and spinning with it.
I didn’t think that one day she’d write me letters and wonder why I never wrote back. That she’d think it was because I wasn’t into her when really it was because my writing was like the jungle and every time I tried to type the words they came out wrong. ‘Doesn’t make sense,’ Leo said, reading one of my letters. ‘You want me to write it for you?’
‘No, I don’t want you to write it for me.’
I threw it out. I did pieces for her instead. Beth walls. All around the city. I did them thinking she’d see and know me and keep whispering those secrets in my ear. There’s one near the Hoover Street Station with a picture of me, grass growing out of my heart while I’m talking to her. Months later I painted the last wall next to it. A picture of her starting up a lawnmower.
I painted it on the night we broke up. We’d had dinner with her parents and they’d asked me what I was planning to do with my life and the words I didn’t say hung in the air. Before I left Beth said, ‘You’re planning on doing something else, right? Other than the paint store?’
I told her yeah, but there was no skin on my voice and she heard the bones in my words like I did. And I knew. One day a wanker in a white shirt would take her. A wanker who had uni while all I had was a piece on a wall. So I left.
‘Who else have you told?’ I ask Dylan before we go back out.
‘No one. Just Daisy.’
I put my arm across the door.
‘Okay, and Raff, but that’s it.’
He goes to move but I keep my arm where it is.
‘And one or two of Raff’s mates. That’s really it.’
‘Raff has the biggest mouth in the city. What if we run into him tonight?’
‘We won’t. He’ll be hanging at the casino like always. He won’t be anywhere near us.’
I lean in close to him. ‘You say one more word to anyone and I’m telling people you cried in here tonight because you thought Daisy was breaking up with you.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
Leo’s phone rings. ‘He would,’ he says, laughing as he answers it.
He talks for a bit and hangs up. ‘We have to swing by a party and sort out some details about the job with Jake. It won’t take long.’
‘A party of Jake’s will be hard to explain to the girls,’ I say.
‘A party of his will be perfect. He doesn’t know I’m Poet.’
‘And if the girls hear about the job?’
‘They won’t.’
‘They might.’
Leo tells Dylan to meet us at the table. When we’re alone he says, ‘Look. You don’t have to do this job but you have to tell me now. After we talk to Jake, that’s when things’ll be set.’ He lets me think. ‘I won’t care. Jake won’t either.’
‘I know.’ Leo doesn’t get pissed. I’ll write your essay, I’ll forge your note, I’ll kick the crap out of that guy for you, no problem. That’s Leo all over but he can’t forge and kick forever. He can’t pay my rent. ‘I’m in,’ I say, and he nods. That’s it. He won’t ask again.
Back in the booth Dylan tells the girls we’re going to a party where we might see Shadow and Poet. Jazz and Daisy believe him but Lucy turns the spotlight on. She flicks the band on her wrist for a second and then starts with the questions. ‘Whose party?’
Leo steps in. ‘A friend of my brother’s.’
‘So Shadow doesn’t go to our school?’ she asks Dylan.
‘I think they’ve both finished Year 12,’ he tells her.
‘Did Shadow do Year 12 at our school?’
‘I think so,’ he says.
‘You think so?’ she asks.
‘Who are you, the cops? I don’t remember.’
I can’t help laughing. She’s whip smart, that’s what Bert would say. Two months ago, on the day before he died, we ate in the storeroom. Valerie had packed a cold beer into our lunches and mine loosened me up so I said, ‘I got to stop falling for the smart chicks.’
‘I went for a smart chick,’ Bert told me.
I held up the beer. ‘You sure did. How’d you get her?’
‘Asked.’ He took a sip. ‘She said yes.’
‘Asking’s the easy bit. Then there’s everything that comes after.’
We leant against the boxes of paint and finished our beers. Bert’s old hands shook but no more than usual. The counter bell went and he creaked up to get it. A second later there were cans rolling all over the floor. ‘I’m okay,’ h
e called as I came into the shop. ‘Didn’t see them. Visitor for you.’
There was Beth, holding my stuff in a box, handing back the bits of me that I’d left with her. She could have dropped them at my place when I wasn’t there or kept them as payback, but she isn’t like that. She wanted to see if I was okay and she wanted me to have the stuff I cared about. A book of Jeffrey Smart’s paintings that I’d lent her. A t-shirt I made in a Year 9 screen-printing class. A Ramones CD.
‘You should tell her you want her back,’ Bert said after she’d gone.
‘Only I don’t.’
‘No guts, no glory.’ He finished his beer.
I stood at the counter thinking of all the ways I could get her back but every one led to the same place. Me telling her I wasn’t going anywhere and her leaving me behind. I got that feeling, like the world was crowded inside me.
I told Bert I had to leave early and I took a can and my brain clicked off and my hands clicked on and I escaped onto the wall, a painted ghost trapped in a jar. I stood back to look at it and I knew the sad thing wasn’t that the ghost was running out of air. The sad thing was that he had enough air in that small space to last him a lifetime. What were you thinking, little ghost? Letting yourself get trapped like that?
Jazz tells Lucy to relax and tries to kick her under the table. I know this because she kicks me instead. ‘Aim more to the left,’ I tell her, and she has another go. ‘Further left,’ I say, and enjoy watching her hit the target a couple of times.
Everyone starts talking about the night. Leo flirts with Jazz. Dylan tries to flirt with Daisy while she flicks sugar packets in his face. He’s got stamina, I’ll give him that. Lucy looks out the window, staring at something that’s in her head, the same way she did two years ago when I watched her.
She hasn’t changed much. Long dark hair still bunched up with paintbrushes. Still smiling like she’s thinking something you want to hear.
‘Why do want to find him so bad?’ I ask after a while, but she’s not listening. I watch her a bit longer. ‘Why do you want to find him so bad?’ I ask again.
She blinks and comes out of her dream. She flicks the band on her wrist. ‘I just do.’