by Cath Crowley
Lucy
After Jazz kicks me a second time I stop asking questions. I’ve got enough information for now, anyway. If Shadow’s finished Year 12 and he never went to our school then it makes sense that I’ve never met him. I’d know if I had, I’m sure of it. A guy like Shadow would stand out around here.
Jazz catches my eye and drums three fingers on the table. Three drumming fingers mean this guy I’m talking to is gorgeous. It’s not to be confused with four fingers drumming, which mean get me away from this guy if you have to set my hair on fire to do it. Five fingers means I’m screaming on the inside, for good reasons. Jazz lays her five fingers on the table.
Leo’s screaming good-looking, that’s for sure. Five fingers to the power of ten. And tall, which is Jazz’s type. I once saw him from a distance and thought a tree was strolling towards me. An oak tree with a shaved head, soft eyes, and a tattoo. He’s trouble and Jazz knows it. She’s just happy to not know it for a night. I did that with Ed and it got me space-like quiet, a quick grope and a whole lot of vomiting. Mr Darcy he isn’t.
Mum told me once that she knew Dad was the right guy because he could juggle and talk about the impacts of globalisation at the same time. ‘All the boys I knew could do one or the other and neither very well.’
Sometimes I catch her looking out the window at the little camping stove that Dad cooks on and I know she misses him living in the house. I saw them standing at the mirror yesterday, brushing their teeth at the same time. There’s tooth brushing and then there’s significant tooth brushing. They took time to floss and gargle and they were laughing.
Some nights Mum eats out at his place. He cooks for her on his stove and they lie on the grass in the front yard under the pear tree. He makes her laugh like no one else makes her laugh. He does magic tricks for her, pulls coins out of her ear. ‘Now if you could just pull the mortgage payment out of there we’d be set,’ she said.
I catch Dad, every now and then, coming out of their bedroom. He looks at me like he’s a thief. ‘It’s your bedroom, Dad,’ I say when it happens. I push past him and sit in the toilet for a while till I know he’s gone. It’s weird to catch your dad sneaking out of your mum’s bedroom. It’s weird to feel weird about it.
On the plus side, they’re obviously still doing the deed, which is even more significant than tooth brushing. On the minus side, the pizza delivery guy knows exactly where to bring Dad’s order and doesn’t knock on the front door of the house anymore. On the plus side, Dad has a picture of Mum and me on his bedside milk crate.
‘Jane Austen would be turning in her grave,’ I say to Mum sometimes.
‘Jane Austen was a writer. She’d understand completely,’ she answers, and I can’t argue with that but it does not comfort me.
I have this picture on my wall, a photocopy of a drawing by the artist Michael Zavros. It’s of a horse falling, tumbling from the sky, legs to the clouds. There’s no way to right itself. It seems to me it doesn’t know how it got there, or where it is, or why it’s falling. The picture is called Till the Heart Caves In, and that title tears me open. I love the horse, how real it is; I love the fine lines of its legs and head. But that’s not why some nights I can’t stop staring at the picture. I can’t say exactly why. Only, it’s got something to do with how love should be. You should feel it like a horse tumbling through you. You shouldn’t be able to sleep knowing that the person you love is lying in the shed.
I look at Leo, playing with one of Jazz’s plaits. She gives me the five-finger sign again. I hope he really likes her. I hope he’s worth liking but I don’t think so. I have this urge to drag her back into the cubicle of truth and keep her there. She’s the psychic but she can’t see what’s coming up: the intersection of hurt and more hurt. The blind spot there is a killer. Maybe if she found Poet he’d be right for her. If Leo hasn’t had a girlfriend since Emma, there must be a reason.
‘Why do you want to find him so bad?’ Ed asks, and when I look at him I can tell he’s already asked me the question more than once but I haven’t heard.
I flick Dad’s lucky wristband a few times. ‘I just do.’
Poet
Assignment Two
Poetry 101
Student: Leopold Green
Love in handcuffs
The girl I loved called the cops
And had me arrested
She said it was the smartest thing she ever did
Apart from dumping me in the first place
She waved goodbye
As they cuffed me
She thought it was hilarious
How I tried to wave back
The guy in the van with Ed and me
Smelt like my dad
After a hard night on the beer
Fruity and sour
And it made me think about her
About how the first thing I noticed
Was that she was nothing
Like anything I’d had before
Lucy
Leo checks his watch. ‘If we hurry we can make the ten-fifteen train.’ He and Jazz walk ahead. Daisy walks to the side and Dylan shadows her so that leaves me with Ed. He’s taller than he was two years ago. His hair’s still unplanned, though. There’s still that space around him. He’s wearing a t-shirt with a rabbit reading a book on it.
‘You keeping looking at me sideways,’ he says, ‘like any second I’ll grab your arse. Relax. I got a girlfriend and for your information we had a great first date.’
‘Maybe you learnt something from how our date went,’ I tell him. Take that, mister.
‘We didn’t have a date. A date ends in a kiss, not blood and broken cartilage.’
‘Well, sure, if we’re getting technical.’
Ed raises his eyebrows then rolls his eyes. ‘For the record,’ he says, ‘she grabbed my arse.’
‘Sounds romantic.’ I pick up a stick and pretend it’s a glass blowpipe; I spin molten stars.
‘It was romantic,’ Ed says, watching me put the stick to my lips. ‘She didn’t give me some pop quiz and then slam me when I didn’t get the answer right.’
I blow a gold glass ocean. A sky. Some clouds. ‘Beth sounds like the perfect girl.’ Damn it. I know he’s grinning.
‘Never said her name was Beth.’
‘Well, all girls called Beth are arse grabbers.’ I try as hard as I can to act like that wasn’t a stupid thing to say. Trying. Trying. Nope. No good. I make a silent apology to all the girls called Beth.
‘Are all girls called Lucy nose breakers?’
‘You’re chattier than you were two years ago. I’m not sure I like it.’
‘Should I duck?’ he asks.
I don’t answer. I’m not used to people not liking me. At the very least they don’t mind me. Although, in fairness to Ed, I haven’t smacked the people I’m basing that on in the face.
I concentrate on the scenery, half-dark streets and traffic lights blinking because the grid can’t take the air conditioner surge. I use my stick to draw some things onto the world that are missing. An extra tree here and there. Some fireflies. A shadow.
‘What are you doing?’ Ed asks.
‘Drawing.’
I don’t have to be a psychic to know what he’s thinking. I put down my stick. I’ve got this hazy feeling under my lids like I’m walking through a neon dream. The heat was nuclear yesterday, too, so I didn’t sleep much last night. Maybe I’m asleep now and Ed’s something my subconscious conjured up.
Some guys drive past and hang their IQs out of the window, which is disturbing if my dream theory is true. Leo waves. ‘Friends of yours?’ I ask Ed.
‘Something wrong with that?’
‘I didn’t mean it in a bad way. I’m sure guys who moon people are very smart.’
He lifts his eyebrows and taps his hands against his legs.
‘You have paint on you,’ I say.
‘I work in a paint store.’
‘Right. Is that how you met Shadow? Does he buy supplies
from you?’
‘I work in a place where little old ladies come to match paint with floral quilts. You think Shadow’s in there chatting to them while he buys his caps? Do you actually know anything about guys like him?’
‘I know about graffiti,’ I say, and the words come out like an old lady saying she likes the hip-hop.
Ed laughs.
‘Okay, so I don’t know where he buys his paint or even what you call the paint. I know I like his art. I know sometimes I’ll be on a train passing a corner overgrown with grass and pollution and then all of a sudden there’s this painting of an ocean. In the middle of factory land, there’s the mouth of the sea.’
I look across at Ed expecting him to still be laughing. He’s staring straight ahead like he’s trying as hard as he can to block the sound of my voice.
Tonight’s going to be one of those things that seem to last forever. Maybe even longer than an after-winter wax. Leo and Jazz are laughing; I hear it emptying into the street. For Jazz, at least, time’ll be moving differently. For that week after Ed asked me out and before we went on the date I felt like the world was heated glass and I was glad to be trapped.
Ed’s still tapping his hands on his legs and not talking when we reach the station. Dylan stops and points to the sky. It takes me a couple of seconds to see what he’s pointing at but finally I do and I want to cut out what I see and take it home so I can keep it close.
‘That’s one of Shadow’s?’ Jazz asks. ‘I like it.’
‘You’ll like Poet’s stuff too,’ Leo says. ‘They usually work together.’
Ed gives him a dirty look. Leo grins. Dylan twitches. It feels like something’s going on, I think loudly, and I know that Jazz hears my thought because she gives me her serious look and blows a chewing-gum bubble in my direction.
‘Everyone stop acting weird,’ Daisy says. ‘It’s freaking me out.’
An announcement tells us that the train is running five minutes late so while they walk through to the platform I stay for a bit longer. On a wall in the distance, under a light from a tower, is Shadow’s piece. It’s a painted night sky that’s faded at the edges so I can see the wall underneath it. Painted birds fly across, hit the line where the sky blurs into brick, and turn back. Their feathers glow. Moon birds trapped on a brick sky. They’re not dirtied by the world; from here they look more beautiful than the real ones flying around them.
I turn and see Ed watching me watching. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Train’s coming.’
Ed
I painted those birds a while back. Took a chance early in the morning, on the way to open the store. The light coming over the buildings was burning back the night. I didn’t have to climb high. Just sat on a fence with a couple of real birds lined up beside me and did the whole thing above eye level. Balancing was the hard part. There was this one real crow laughing the whole time I worked, and as I did the last line he flew across the wall and into the sky. He circled back once, like he was saying, See? It’s easy when you figure out how.
Feels like art’s the only thing I ever figured out. Words, school, I never got the whole picture. I’d sit there trying to block the sounds of scraping chairs and the other kids. I’d try to make a tunnel round the teacher’s voice so it came to me clear. Most days I couldn’t do it. I’d hear it all and so I’d hear nothing. Like I was standing in a place where every sound was the same level and I couldn’t separate the threads. Like every door in the world was open and the sound was pouring in.
I couldn’t have got through to Year 10 without Leo. He helped me read and I gave him a place to crash and neither of us needed to know why. I went round to his place once when I was in Year 5. He opened the door and behind him I heard waves of music and yelling. When I think back to that day I hear the zoo. The sounds of things getting out of their cages. He shut the door and we didn’t say what I’d heard. We walked away.
He stayed at my place that night. I was almost asleep when he started talking from the floor beside me. About how he didn’t like the smell of beer. About how he liked that my house was quiet. He said sometimes he didn’t like sleeping because he dreamt. In the dark I told him about the open doors in the world and how I couldn’t do the assignment that was due.
Before he went home the next day he asked to see what I’d done and I showed him and he fixed it for me. Didn’t change anything. Just made it readable. He did that to every assignment from then on.
The pieces I paint come out of my head right. No spellcheck required. I hear people talking about the feeling they get when they paint stuff in illegal places. Leo says he gets this fast-moving fear swinging through him, running from his heart to every place under his skin. I paint so the fast-moving fear stops. I paint to close those doors.
Lucy stares at the birds tonight. I stare at her and try to work out what she’s thinking. Dreaming about some guy that doesn’t exist, I guess. A guy with the ocean pouring out of his can and words pouring out of his mouth, saying things she wants to hear. I wonder what Shadow looks like in her head. What he sounds like. She turns and catches me staring. ‘Come on,’ I tell her. ‘Train’s coming.’
Train’s coming and you have to go to a party to look for a guy you’ll never find. A guy who exists in your head, not the guy who did that piece. Not the guy who’s me.
The train belts along the line and the world outside the window rockets and blurs. Jazz and Leo take two seats on the left of the door. Daisy and Dylan take two on the right. There are no seats for Lucy and me so we swing with the motion of the train, listening to two separate conversations.
‘I bet they have air conditioning on the Camberwell train line,’ Jazz says. ‘They could at least give us windows that open.’
‘Kids’d stick their heads out and bam,’ Leo says. ‘Blood everywhere.’
‘Who’d be stupid enough to stick their head out of a moving train?’ Jazz asks.
‘It’d be great if you could stick your head out of the window,’ Dylan says to Daisy. She licks her finger and writes ‘idiot’ on the glass.
Lucy laughs and I can’t help laughing with her. We sway round each other, the train jolting as it shifts tracks to go south. Through the window I see flames shooting from the refinery and half a moon hanging that wasn’t there before. It makes me think of a wall that Leo and me did once. A graffiti moon cut by the shadow of power lines. A prisoner moon, Leo wrote.
I made drawings of that moon in my book before I painted it. I wanted it to be like one of those Dali dreamscapes Bert and me had seen at the gallery. I couldn’t get those watery images out of my head and that night I dreamt of a moon locked up by shadows.
‘Why’d you leave school?’ Lucy asks out of nowhere.
‘I was worried you’d beat me up again.’
The train stops and people push on. I let a few get between us so I don’t have to answer any more questions about why I left. Beth asked me once, too. I told her I got a job offer and my mum needed help paying the rent. It was half of the truth, the better half of it. The bad half was that I got caught pulling an essay out of my pants.
It was our first in-class Art essay. Until then I’d typed what I wanted to say and Leo had looked it over for me and fixed anything that didn’t make sense, like he’d done in primary school. But from Year 10 on we had to do all our work in class to get ready for Year 12 exams so I was stuffed. ‘You’re not stuffed,’ Leo said. ‘I’ll write what you want to say and then you sneak it in.’
If Mrs J had been at school that day the whole thing would have gone down different. She was sick, though, and Fennel was the substitute. He caught me taking the paper out of my pants and went off. Like me doing that was somehow all about him. He said to the class, ‘If anyone else’s brains are in their trousers they can come sit with me at the front of the class.’ What sort of idiot says trousers?
I didn’t look at Lucy all class. I wanted to look. I wanted to give her some sign that I wasn’t a cheat but I couldn’t think of what that would be since
I’d just taken an essay out of my pants.
When the bell went she left with the others and Fennel shoved me towards the office. While we were walking a kid came up behind him and made this clown face and pretended to wank himself. I knew it’d be all over the school in a second. When I think back to that day all I see are wanking clowns.
Fennel got this brainwave in the coordinator’s office. Told me to sit there and write the sentence This essay is not mine so he could compare handwriting. He’d had Leo in Woodwork for years so he knew whose handwriting it was. The essay was mine so I gave him some suggestions about where he could put it for safekeeping. ‘Till Mrs J comes back.’ He didn’t think much of them so he dragged Leo in.
‘Not my writing,’ Leo said. ‘It’s Ed’s.’ He sat there with his legs stuck out and his arms crossed, staring Fennel down. We both got suspended, more for the suggestions we gave Fennel about where he could shove the essay than anything else. Leo went back after a week.
I trawled paint stores for blue during the day and I painted skies at night. Found a blue close to what I wanted in Bert’s shop, only it was in a tin so I had to keep going back for more.
‘I hope you’re not one of those little delinquents who’ve been vandalising the side of my shop,’ he said one day as he was ringing up my stuff.
‘If I was I doubt I’d tell you,’ I said, expecting him to kick me out.
‘You get those two black eyes because you got a smart mouth?’ he asked.
‘I got two black eyes because I don’t have a smart mouth,’ I said, and when he laughed I told him about Lucy. He kept laughing till Valerie walked in and then he invited me to stay for lunch.
‘I’m not bombing the side of your store with paint from a tin,’ I told him while we were eating. ‘You should stop selling the stuff in cans if you don’t want people writing on your place.’