by Cath Crowley
Lucy’s looking at them and every now and then they try to drag her into the fight but she just shrugs and keeps watching them like a tennis match, back and forth and back and forth.
‘You could have hurt her,’ Daisy says.
‘It’s a fluffy heart. It’s not hurting anyone.’
‘Like the eggs, right?’ she asks.
‘That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? The eggs?’
‘Don’t say it like I’m being stupid. You threw a carton of them at my head.’
‘Exactly. A whole carton. I used the last of my eggs on you.’ He crosses his arms. ‘It was a celebration.’
‘You know what? Stay away from me on my birthday.’
‘Count on it. You know what? It’s over. O-V-A-R.’
Daisy laughs at him. ‘You spelt it wrong, idiot. It’s O-V-E-R.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘No it wasn’t, was it, Lucy?’ she asks.
‘I’m not really sure. Can we maybe open a window in here? I’m feeling kind of van sick.’
‘You’re an idiot,’ Daisy says to Dylan. ‘I’ve been dating an idiot.’
‘Leo,’ I yell. ‘Open your window. Quick.’
‘You don’t get to call me an idiot if we’re not dating anymore. I’ve got some self-respect.’
‘That’s a high benchmark you set for yourself. Only your girlfriends get to call you an idiot.’
‘Why are you so mad at me? We were kissing behind the sheds last week.’ He turns to Lucy. ‘Do you know why she’s so mad?’
‘Why would Lucy know?’ Daisy asks. ‘Why don’t you ask me?’
All the while Dylan and Daisy are yelling, Lucy’s getting whiter but they don’t notice, they just keep going at it. ‘Will you two shut up? Can’t you see she’s sick?’ I ask.
‘Let me out. Get me out,’ she says.
‘Stop the van, Leo,’ I yell.
Daisy looks at her. ‘She’s about to hurl. Stop the van.’
‘I’m on a freeway in the right-hand lane.’
‘Stop. The. Van,’ we shout, and Lucy hangs her head and I put my hand on her back and hold her so she doesn’t swing. I really like holding her, which feels kind of pathetic considering the situation.
‘Hang on, everyone,’ Leo calls, and the van moves and I grip her tighter. We stop and she gets out and falls on her knees. She doesn’t heave. She kneels there, but she doesn’t heave.
‘Sensitive, isn’t she?’ Daisy asks.
I pull her hair back and see that spot on her neck and think how I’d like to get closer. You’d have to be a different guy for that to happen, the shadows say. Maybe I could be. Maybe there’s a way I could be a different guy. What way, the shadows ask, but I don’t have an answer.
The others go across the road to the petrol station for food. I look around for a place Lucy and me can wait, other than the scene of her near-heaving. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ I say, and climb the fence next to the van. I’m level with the roof but I need to be higher. There’s no way to get across to it without standing on the very top of the fence and I think screaming while I fall will probably ruin my cool image.
‘You’d have to be Superman to get on that way,’ she says.
‘And I’m not?’
She grins and opens the driver’s door a little. Then she climbs the fence and uses the open door to step onto the roof.
I follow her. ‘Some girls let the boys look cool,’ I say.
‘What girls?’ she asks.
I don’t have an answer.
‘I’m not so cool,’ she says, lying back on the roof. ‘I keep nearly vomiting.’
I lie next to her and try to get a laugh by telling the story about me throwing up my lunch in the car when I was nine. I tell her every humiliating detail down to the bit about the busload of schoolgirls watching. ‘Scarred me for life.’
‘And them too, I bet,’ she says, flicking that band. ‘I wasn’t travel sick.’
‘Still thinking about the blood?’ I ask, turning my head to look at her. We’re close enough to touch but we’re not touching.
‘Not that either.’
I stare at her and she stares at the sky but she’s really staring at that thing in her head again.
‘My mum and dad fought like that. Almost exactly like Dylan and Daisy. Back and forth about stupid things. She once told him to stick the remote control in his uvula.’
‘That sounds bad.’
‘It’s the little flap at the back of the throat.’
‘Not as bad as I thought, then.’
‘He told her to stick it in her punchline.’
‘Your parents sound kind of strange,’ I say.
‘They are sometimes. Mostly they’re great. They only fought like that for about two months and then they stopped. They don’t fight anymore. Dylan and Daisy reminded me what it was like, that’s all.’
‘I’m glad I don’t have parents that fight,’ I say. ‘Even if that means it’s only me and Mum.’
‘Jazz says my parents are getting a divorce.’
‘What do you say?’
She thinks a bit. ‘I say she’s probably right.’
I want to hold her hand and I’m not sure if I can or if I should. I feel like I’m on a shaky staircase in one of those surrealist paintings. This night came out of nowhere and it’s hanging midair, half-finished.
From across the road I hear Daisy yelling at Dylan. ‘Why is she so mad?’ I ask.
‘He forgot her birthday.’
‘That’s it? I’ll tell him and he can buy her a card.’
‘I don’t think it’s that simple,’ she says, and reaches her arms up, grabbing at stars.
Lucy
‘I don’t think it’s that simple,’ I say to Ed.
If you treat glass right it doesn’t crack. If you know the properties you can make things the colour of dusk and night and love. But you can’t control people like that and I really, really wish you could. I want the world to be glass.
I think I knew as soon as I saw Dad drinking his lemonade out the front of the shed that he wasn’t moving back in. I think I knew when I heard the quiet that followed him leaving. I don’t know why they’re getting a divorce. I know they still love each other, but I guess love’s kind of like a marshmallow in a microwave on high. After it explodes it’s still a marsh mallow. But, you know, now it’s a complicated marshmallow. In those two months when they were fighting, before Dad moved out, they exploded a lot.
The reason I love that Rothko painting so much is because, like Ed said, I don’t have to put what I feel into words. I look at it and while I’m staring I understand something about love. It’s not pink. It’s different reds bleeding into each other. Mum and Dad are somewhere in those reds. They were closer to crimson when they were fighting, but since Dad moved out there’s been this quiet around Mum. She’s nearly finished her book and she doesn’t snap about small things and sometimes I catch her stretching out on the bed like a starfish and sighing. She’s doing that while he’s nailing new numbers on the door of the shed. So why don’t they get on with it and divorce each other? I guess maybe they’re staying together for my sake.
That’s the thought that made me sick. I tried to have an out-of-body experience in the back of the van but it wasn’t any good. A girl can’t levitate to get away from the truth. Even if she can, sooner or later she’ll fall back into the world how it is.
And Mum and Dad how they are, divorced or not, are okay. Sure they’re a little weird and the great love they had ended in potatoes that can’t be rehydrated, but the way they love me, that’s lasting. They’re never moving me into the shed.
I reach up and draw a few wishes in the air. I draw Dad in a place that has a nice view and a good coffee shop around the corner that’s not too far from me. I draw a shed empty of him. I put a desk in there so Mum can use it for an office. They’re complicated drawings so I draw something simple as well.
I draw me kissing Ed.
&nb
sp; ‘It’s been a long night,’ he says. ‘We’re nearly at the thin part.’
‘And we’ve still got to get back in the pink van and go to the casino.’
‘You didn’t even get to meet Shadow.’
‘You know,’ I say, ‘I’m losing interest in the whole Shadow thing.’
I turn to look at him and he’s looking at me and our noses are almost touching. He’s got tiny dots of white paint on his ears. ‘You mean you don’t want to do it with a guy who likes art anymore?’ The way he says ‘do it’ makes me zing quite a bit.
‘Other guys like art. You like art.’ Go on, I think. Go on and give me a kiss.
‘Lucy, there’s something I need to tell you.’
You’re dying to kiss me; I knew it. ‘What?’
‘It’s about Shadow. About me and Shadow.’
Enough talking, mister. Grab my arse.
‘I do know him. I mean, I’ve met him. I never said because I thought you might be disappointed. In him. He’s not what you think. He’s not a bad guy. But he lost his job a while back and his mum isn’t all that good at paying the bills. All that romance you want, that perfect guy you’ve got in your head. He’s not that.’
‘I don’t need the perfect guy. That was stupid of me, thinking I did.’ I’m not talking about Shadow, now. I don’t want Ed to think I don’t want him because our first date wasn’t perfect. I think about that blindfolded kissing couple. Who’s to say what’s perfect and what’s not perfect? Right now, I’d be willing to kiss Ed through a bag. So it’s true what they say about teenage hormones. It seems I’m raging out of control. It’s not very Jane Austen of me but it feels pretty good.
The problem is, Ed’s acting all Jane Austen on me and he won’t stop talking. Shut up, I want to say. All talk and no action is really kind of frustrating.
‘He’s not even close to that guy you want,’ Ed says, and sits up.
‘Okay, I get it. Shadow bad.’ Ed good. Lucy stupid. Everything’s much simpler than I thought it was. Now lie down again.
‘No, you don’t get it.’ He leans his elbows on his knees and his hands tap away on his boots. ‘Shadow’s planning on stealing some stuff later. From your school. From the Media block.’
‘Mrs J’s block? He’s stealing from other artists?’ I sit up. I think about it. ‘He’s stealing at all? He’s a criminal.’
‘Well, you knew that. He’s a graffitist.’
‘That’s different from being a thief.’
Ed nods slowly, his eyes escaping with every car on the freeway. ‘It is different.’ I watch the cars too. We watch for ages. Just two people stuck on the side of the road, alone on the roof of a free love van. I’m not sure what Ed’s thinking but I’m thinking about how wrong a person can be.
‘A lot of people going somewhere,’ Ed says eventually. ‘That blue one. Where do you think it’s headed?’
I’ve played this game before. ‘To the desert. To red dust and hot stillness.’
‘The desert’s ugly. It’s mostly dead, isn’t it?’ Ed asks.
‘Not when you know where to look.’ I flick that band three times for luck and courage before I say what I’m thinking. ‘It’s okay. That you didn’t tell me about Shadow.’ I flick it again. ‘I understand why. Things are different now, anyway.’ I move so that my arm is against his arm. He moves, too.
We sit in this place that’s real and not something I invented to keep me going. Shadow can rob the school; he can paint oceans. He can do whatever he wants. I’m brushing against Ed.
I scratch at the paint of the van with my nails and some of it comes off. ‘You know,’ I say, ‘I think in another lifetime, this van might have been blue.’
Ed
I’m looking right at her. There’s one movement between me and that freckle and I could lean over and start this whole thing off between us. ‘Lucy, there’s something I need to tell you.’ She asks me what and I tell her it’s about Shadow. ‘About me and Shadow.’
The words are finally out there. I’m painting a wall for us, a Shadow stepping back into the person who cast it, and becoming solid. I can’t think of the words quick enough to tell her, though, and she’s filling in the outline for me and somewhere in the telling and the hearing I’m sitting instead of lying next to her.
‘He’s a criminal,’ she says.
And I am but I’m not and I want to put her on pause and paint a wall where I explain everything. A wall that starts years back and goes until now. A guy with thoughts bashing at the inside of his head with no way to get out. A guy with the doors in his brain open to the world but closed to him. A guy sitting on the side of the road, watching a blue car go past.
She tells me that car is going to the desert. That it’s not an ugly place. That if I looked I’d see signs of life. I’m tired of looking. I want something to be easy. I want to get in one of those cars and go someplace where I can paint on air so people know what I’m thinking without me having to say.
She moves closer and I move closer and I’m back at that wall, painting that ghost in a jar. I’m brushing against her. She smiles at me and I’m lost. She tells me that the van we’re sitting on was blue in another lifetime. I want to believe it.
Leo and the guys come back across the freeway and we climb off the roof and cram back into the van. Leo takes off and I talk to hear her talk back. ‘Pink is a shitty colour.’
‘It depends,’ she says. ‘Last year Mrs J took us to this exhibition by an artist called Angela Brennan. It was full of paintings that were so vivid: pink and green and red. I think you would have liked it.’
‘Not really a pink kind of guy.’
‘You’d have liked the title. It was called Everything is what it is and not some other thing.’
‘Be easier if we all called things what they really are.’
‘What would you do if you weren’t at the paint store?’ she asks.
‘Work at McDonald’s, probably.’
‘No you wouldn’t,’ she says.
‘No I wouldn’t. I’d study art, I guess. But I don’t have Year 12.’
‘At Monash University you can do this course that’s like Year 11, but if you do well in it you go through to the uni. Al told me about it when I was in Year 10.’
‘So you do all practical stuff?’
‘I guess some essays, but mostly practical. Why don’t you apply?’ she asks.
‘No money to do a course.’
‘You can get grants and you could keep working at the paint store, part-time.’
‘Maybe,’ I say, and catch Leo looking at us in the rear-view.
But like the lady says, everything is what it is and not some other thing. I can’t write essays and I don’t have a job at the paint store. I don’t have choices. Maybe things would have been different if I’d heard about the course when Bert was alive. ‘No guts, no glory,’ he’d have said before he helped me get on with it.
Leo pulls into a car park near the casino. The night’s thick and humming here, even though it’s close to two. We walk over and watch people go headfirst into the glitter.
The queue for Maria runs all the way alongside the taxi rank. I guess a lot of people in the city are looking for magic. My mum’d give her last five dollars to that woman for a bit of hope, and when a person’s hoping that hard it’s wrong to take their money.
‘I got a bad feeling about this,’ I say to Leo and Dylan while the girls are in the toilet. ‘I don’t want to go in.’
‘You’ve been telling your mum this is stupid for years and now suddenly you believe it?’ Leo asks. ‘Maria Contessa is not going to bust us in front of the girls.’
‘I can’t explain it. But I don’t want to go in there.’
‘I want to go in there,’ Dylan says. ‘I want to find out why Daisy’s so mad.’
‘You forgot her birthday,’ I tell him.
His pupils dilate a bit. ‘I knew there was something I meant to get with the eggs. Don’t go in without me. Tell the girls I’m i
n the toilet or something.’ He runs to the doors and disappears into the casino.
‘I’m serious, I’m not going in,’ I say to Leo while we wait. ‘I’m asking Lucy if she wants to get some food with me before we take her home. I’ll meet you back here at two-thirty. Half an hour’s heaps of time to drop them off and get to the school.’
‘I know you’re pissed at me,’ Leo says. ‘I know why.’
‘Forget it. I’m worried about getting caught, that’s all.’
‘I didn’t know the van was Crazy Dave’s. Jake told me to go to Montague Street and by the time I worked out it was his house it was too late to turn back. But I told Jazz she couldn’t come in there with me.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m not a total idiot. I’m not completely out of control.’
‘You really like her, huh?’
‘She eats a lot of lollies,’ he says. ‘More than I eat sausage rolls.’
‘That’s quite a few lollies, then.’
‘Quite a few.’ He keeps watching the doors, waiting for her to come back through them. ‘I wish I hadn’t borrowed that money. If I could think of any other way to get it than doing the school over . . .’
‘So we’ll think of something. We’ll deal with Malcolm some other way.’
‘There isn’t another way,’ he says. ‘I’ve been thinking all night, while she was dancing around me. That’s all I could think about. But you shouldn’t come with me. It’s my problem.’
‘If you go, I go.’
It feels like we watch those doors for hours, waiting for what we want to walk on through. A light goes on and off over our heads making us nervous shadows. After a while Leo says, ‘I want to tell her I’m Poet. Not to score her. Just so she knows.’
‘Catch 22,’ I say. ‘Once you tell her, there won’t be any scoring.’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Still.’
I nod. ‘How do you want to tell them? You want to go with straight honesty?’
‘That’s the plan,’ he says, and then we see them coming out of the doors. ‘That’s bad.’
‘Uh-huh.’