Tail

by Julian Duenker

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ever since Kevin had stopped with his garage he had found various ways to fill his time. The garden being one of them and his wall being another. Susan always thought it was an odd place, a strange hobby, an obscure excuse to leave the house, but it worked for him and she couldn’t complain about that. Basically it was a blank concrete wall oddly placed in the middle of some baron field outside the city. He found it one day and just decided to use it as his own. He’d spend weeks trying to get the perfect graffiti on the wall. Susan always wondered why it was there in the first place. Naturally, it’s a fucking bizarre sight to behold, which is one of the main reasons why Kevin got attached to it.

  The place was a far distance out form the bulky armpits of the city. As Susan pulled her car up to the side of the dirt road she saw the silhouette of her father entertaining the wall. It was a baron place still holding onto what was left of its farming heritage. In the distance one could see the hairline of the city with each rooftop marking its spot across the postcard view. There was an area of abandoned concrete smothered across a nearby field crawling its way towards Kevin. Grass from the fields tried desperately to exist over the abandoned and messy concrete.

  A fair distance out into the field was a single wall, built carefully and with artistic touch. It was new and wasn’t torn or abrupt in its appearance. The wall was placed on a hip of a hill in the middle of the field, with grass and the odd flower leaning up against it. Kevin was facing the wall with every inch of his movements focused on the graffiti that he was painting. Suppose it gave him a sense of youth to do it. From the side it looked as if he was wedged between the city and the rocked grip of the hilled landscape. Beside him he had a plastic bag, the same appearance as the one left in the kitchen. With the assumption that it was another bag of spray paint Susan marched forward across the field.

  She wanted to look at Kevin as she lifted herself across the field, but the countless grooved bumps and deceptive clumps of the dirt demanded her attention to be locked to the ground. Her boots feared each and every next step, and loathed every crevasse they had to slide into.

  Susan eventually reached the wall expecting him to say hello, but his posture refused to acknowledge anything from his surroundings. With his locked gaze on the wall she walked around letting him have his moment as she took in the graffiti with a confused face.

  Each side of the wall had its own predesigned painting by the shprayed noise of the can. Susan circled around the wall without either of them saying anything. The filthy wet grass beneath her provided obstacles for her boots as she attempted to get every single angle of the wall. It was quiet, almost frightening as if Kevin was in another zone possessed by whatever drove him out into the field in the first place.

  Her movements around the wall were perfectly shaped like a circle. Each step of hers dug more worry into the grass below her. This inevitably made the walk around the wall more and more difficult. Susan’s face began to slowly melt once she saw the demented painting that he was working on. The first shade of the wall was one entire painting with drips of running spray paint rolling down the smoothed plastered wall.

  At the centre of the picture was a hollow bald man hunched over his own spine. His body had bones subtly erupting from the folds of his skin. His body was coloured by that sickly green colour that thrives within the rejecting howls of one’s stomach. The edges of the picture were inflicted by a cool shade of blue. It was deceiving to look at, the colour lured you in with a sort of shiny finish, slapping Susan across the face with its frozen fingers. His expression was hidden from view, burying his neck into his chest, taunting Susan to close in on the picture. As she closed in on the painting a purple hue from something square was clearly seen being held by the sick man. He held it tight with a grip so demanding it made his knuckles burst from his skin and crack to the air. All in order to keep that purple close to his chest. Bottom line; it was a fucking strange abstract painting and it freaked the shit out of Susan.

  She had seen the wall before but had never seen the finished painting in its entirety. Only at the very instant did she realise something was up with Kevin, which drove a cool fingered stroke up the back of her neck slicing all the way around to the bridge of her nose. It made the carousel walk around the wall all the more difficult.

  She went there with the intention of asking for money, but quickly threw that notion under the bus. All that was left for her to think about was that poking question; shouldn’t there be more to a family than this? The lack of interaction from him further solidified that question. She couldn’t help but look at herself and Kevin, entertaining themselves over a wall out in the middle of a baron field. This was her entire family, all her relatives that she had ever known stood there and then fixated at that pained man plastered. Thinking about this she no longer had the strength to circle the wall. The picture on the other side was still an unknown to her, but she found it difficult to care.

  “How did you get out here? Long distance, you didn’t drag your knees all this way.” She said hiding her eyes beneath the back of his head.

  “Buses and a few quiet minutes of shuffling across the roads. So what do you think?” Kevin asked while maintaining his gaze on the wall.

  “Well what do you want me think about it?” she had moved herself to the side of Kevin facing the picture head on. She blocked her view of the crippled man with Kevin.

  “You know that whenever I’m out here, I want to be alone. So since you refuse to follow that I would like to have your opinion. It’s not like a lot of people come out here anyways, and I don’t think the odd farmer would be interested much in this kind of shite.” He said with a smudged laughter withholding itself across the gap of his lips. At that point he had stopped spray painting and turned around to see the face of his daughter. Her face was holding down every aspect of itself, the lips, the eyes and her cheeks in an attempt to give a visage that said nothing. Pouring her heart out that early would have been a mistake.

  “I would never have taken you as a painter. Really expressive. Very dark though. It almost looks kinda evil… How long do you spend out here doing this?” she said to him.

  “Weeks, I suppose. I don’t know. Haven’t really been timing myself every time I come out here.”

  “Is this all that this family is. Just us standing here behind a wall behind the city.” She said abruptly cutting off his breath. She left him paused atop the hilled wall dashing his eyes from every baron corner of the field to the next.

  “What do you expect me to have a couple of relatives behind my back, do ya? We’ve made due with just having each other for the past twenty something years, so why is it bothering ya now?”

  “It has been bothering me for the past twenty years, only now I’m actually asking you and all you do like always is grab my questions and fucking throw them away as if they mean nothing. Stop hiding behind your stupid wall and talk to me. Please…I’m your daughter, not… some pet you can just go to whenever ya need company.” She said with one boot dug into the hill and one lip shivering from unexpected emotion. Kevin dropped his can and lowered himself a slight bit until he was level with Susan. She was expecting him to calm her down and further belittle her curiosity, but none of that happened. It was as if he was reluctant to touch her, with an expression of sorrow. All that he gave her was a face of reluctance, chewing on bones of memories. The longer he took to come up with a response the more frustrated she became, loosening the screws on her drilling words.

  “It will always just be you and me, and I know that it’s hard” he said being cut from her hand.

  “You don’t get it. What I want to know is that why have we never talked about them, leaving them to be ideas. I don’t want my relatives to be ideas. What were my grandparents like? What did they do, you spent twenty years of your life with them and you can’t share a single memory with me? For fuck sake what was my mother like? Why don’t I know what she looked like? My entire life you have just shoved all of y
our family aside. Well I don’t want to live with the idea of them anymore, I want to know everything about everyone.” She tore the reluctant life out of his breath. Every word came punching across the line of conversation, leaving large dripping holes in his cheeks. That clicking noise he heard from her words timed his movements across the grass, shoving himself on the circled path around the wall. It looked as if he was avoiding her words. Susan followed him trying to stab further questions into him but everything that penetrated his skin was simply pulled back out by his quivering hands. Kevin knew Susan would eventually reach this point. Right there he realised he had been living in denial her entire life. Every step that he took from her somehow hurt his breathing. His heart raced to a scary pace making his lungs feel as if they were filled with bags of rocks.

  “Stop moving...., please...., stop hiding behind the wall. Fucking talk to me.” She said as she dug her hands into the sleeve of his warm jacket. She could barely feel his arm with the layered jacket. The tighter she grabbed the less she felt of his bones and muscle. He turned and said a few simple things.

  “You know it’s just… It’s too painful for me to talk about my parents.”

  “It’s been a couple of decades, how is it still painful?” she said with strong words heaving and shoving his chest, inflating his ballooned breathing even further. He knew he wasn’t in any pain over his parents, just every time he brought them into the fore front of his view they reminded him of a part of his life that he preferred to have buried beneath heaps of snow.

  Beneath the sharp bricked fringe of the wall he knew that what he had to do was tell Susan about her grandparents. But before he could throw out anything, she broke him off with further hooked questions.

  “When was the last time you talked to someone apart from me?” she said closing in on him grabbing his eyeballs in her hands and pointing them straight at herself. His lungs heaved and whimpered desperately looking for an answer.

  “I talk to people, today ... the guy at the shop where I bought the cans.”

  “You don’t even know his name, do you?” she said stabbing a few heavily worded fingers into his chest right between his coated ribs. She was a fingernail away from poking at his heart, but he distanced himself away tripping over hilled lumps of grass. Supported against the wall, backed up against the concrete, he used every cup of air that he could possibly fit into his lungs and threw a defence straight towards her.

  “I don’t have to know his name. Acchh! don’t fucking assume that I need them.”

  “Really? You don’t need people? The strong soldier himself leaning on his wall. You think that slab of concrete is going to protect ya? Maybe this piece of brick is my mother.... huh have you been hiding her from me all along.” She turned her look to the wall and chopped the line of communication from her father.

  “I have finally met you mom. I never realised that you were this solid. Wow I really like your style, a little bit of rough rash I see, but that’s nothing cream can’t handle.” She said with flailing arms. With all said and done she swam over to her father pressing up against his thin chest. His breathing grew heavy forcing him to grab onto the wall with his palms. Her words punched him directly in the chest snapping a few ribs as they tore through the interior of his insulated coat.

  “Well I guess this wall is all that you have left.” With that she thought for a moment eating away at the pupils of his eyes in search for a reply. She couldn’t ever see him discussing her family to her. She knew it was the truth, for whatever truth, she ate it and spat it out in disgust. All she wanted was to know about her grandparents and her mother, but Kevin was fixated on walling up his mind that she expected him to never share. Her hollow expectations reflected back to her from the cusp of his pupils. Once more heavy punches tortured his breathing filling them with a slight tearing sound from his throat. With Susan’s blind frustration she was incapable of seeing the current pain that he was in. Allowing her final words to rest she walked away towards her car.

  The distance between the two grew with every one of her steps. It was silent, not only from the loud noise that shouted within her own head, but also because Kevin had collapsed behind her leaving no sound to be held. Hyperventilating back up against the wall, he watched her walk away from the lumped nature of the field. His jaw shook with force trying to find breath to form words of help, but all his lips created was the foetus of nothing. Desperately trying to get her help, he flung his arms as if trying to throw lumps of words at her. Eventually he created a noise, unknown from language, but it grabbed her attention.

  She threw her head around with all of her hanging thoughts thrashing with the force of the turn. She saw him leaned up against the wall clasping for her help. Everything that she had shouted within her head, everything that she had dug up had been placed away for a later time. She knew that regardless of her anger with him, he was still the only person that she had. She loved him. She needed him. She required him.

  Running to him she lifted her knees high as if trying to hover over the dirt. Grabbing his neck she held her forehead against his and whispered hushed words of comfort. They weren’t as much words as cloudy noises. She saw from his purpled cheeks that it was real, real danger laughing itself under the shadow of the wall.

  They held each other with a grip, a hilted and strong grip, digging red lines into each other’s skin. The clear day filled its way with a new sense of wind. It came howling across the grass, shifting the bodies of green towards them. Susan sat holding the back of his neck, protecting herself against the sea of grass that awoke across the shore of mud. Her boots were deafened by the quiet hush of each body of grass smashing against each other. Moments slaughtered themselves atop the hill, leaving their bodies to disintegrate against the wall.

  She felt his breathing slow down alongside her thoughts. It was the calmest slice of memory she had felt in a long time. With his breathing now at walking pace she lifted him up and placed his arm around her shoulder. Having received the nod of O.K. she moved forward towards her car. At that point she was getting tired of walking in fields, enjoying the thought of her comforting bucket of a car and getting her father home. Rest is what he needed, it’s what he’ll get, and it’s what he wanted. All the while she pondered the idea that it might have been just some ploy to avoid her questions. But even so she didn’t want to risk losing him entirely, despite his thin weak skin.

  The distance of the field felt twice as long with the short pace that they were at. She saw the head of the car over the line of rocked walls. Making her way across at an angle she was against the other side of the wall. Somehow she felt a slight urge to look back and take in the other graffiti.

  It was covered in heaps of white spray paint, thrashing the image of snow across the wall. There was no subject or person frolicking about in the waves of white. It was empty and only entertained itself with its own baron colour. She looked at it, burning the image into her eyelids. It was a quiet and calm image, presenting nothing but peaceful strokes. When she turned and headed towards the car all she saw were the corners of it. Somehow it threw violent pokes straight to her stomach. The tranquil image of the snow was more traumatic and vulgar than the other painting. Baffled, but it proved to be no priority. The walk made the idea of her comforting car more and more like a safe house, a quit button, and a pillow. She sped up grabbing tighter onto the lining of her father’s jacket.