Clementine and Rudy

by Siobhan Curham

  Table of Contents

  Rudy

  Clementine

  Rudy

  Clementine

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  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This book is inspired by and dedicated to all of the

  activists, artists and creatives striving to make this

  world a better place. Keep on blazing your trail…

  “We never know how high we are

  Till we are called to rise;

  And then, if we are true to plan,

  Our statures touch the skies.”

  Emily Dickinson

  RUDY

  Tyler says that if you listen closely enough, everything has a soundtrack. He says that we’re so obsessed with what we see we’ve forgotten how to hear. Tyler says a lot of weird stuff like this and normally, I’m like, Yeah, whatever… before drowning him out with a hiss from the coffee machine. But now his words have come back to haunt me; now they are my soundtrack, along with the thumping bassline of my pulse.

  I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t dreaming about this moment – or practising for it. Whenever I’ve dreamed about it I’ve felt high with excitement. So why, now, do I feel sick with fear? That’s the thing about dreams, though. They exist in safe little bubbles inside our heads. They only become scary when we try to make them real.

  A distant yell cuts through my thoughts. It’s the middle of the night. The middle of a Sunday night. But this is Brighton. The city that never sleeps, not even on a Sunday. Not properly anyway. On a Sunday night Brighton’s like one of those old people you see dozing off on the bus or park benches. Jolting awake every few seconds.

  The sickness in my stomach grows. What if I get caught? What if I get arrested? What if I end up in jail? A picture of me languishing in an overcrowded cell flickers into my mind. Me and ten tattooed women, built like fridge-freezers. And a cockroach running up my leg. Sometimes having a warped imagination can be a Very Bad Thing.

  I reach the entrance to the alleyway and stare down into the gloom. I don’t have to do this. I could just go back home. But I know that if I back out now I’ll spend the rest of the week beating myself up for being a tragic loser. I pull my woolly hat down so far it’s almost covering my eyes and step into the darkness.

  I know exactly where I’m going – to a wooden door halfway down. I discovered this alleyway weeks ago. It seemed like the perfect place for my first time. Tucked away off the main road, with no passing cars. And hopefully no passing people. I glance up and down at the amber glow from the streetlights at either end. What made it seem like the perfect place in the daylight is now seriously freaking me out. It’s like a set from a movie – in the scene where the hooker with a heart of gold gets brutally murdered by her psycho pimp.

  I glance up and down one more time. The coast is definitely clear. But the longer I stand here, the more chance there is of someone coming along. I have to do it now or not at all. I slip off my backpack and put it on the floor. I take out the old paint tin and prise off the lid. Then I get the brush, load it with wheat paste and slap it on the door. I’m not exactly sure where the door leads. Someone’s backyard maybe? The main thing is, it’s clean and smooth. The perfect canvas.

  Once I’ve covered a big enough area with paste I put the brush down. The sick feeling in my stomach turns to excitement. I take the picture from my backpack and unroll it. My fingers are trembling so much I hang it at a slight angle. Crap! I try to straighten it but the paper starts to crinkle. I’ll have to leave it. I dunk my brush into the paste again and coat the paper all over. Done.

  I decided to do a paste-up for my first-ever piece, as it’s quicker and lessens the chances of my nightmare jail-cell-cockroach scene coming true. I take a step back and admire my work. For a moment, I’m not Rudy Knight, random teenager standing in a grotty Brighton alleyway; I’m Rudy Knight, internationally renowned urban artist, gazing proudly at one of my masterpieces on the side of some iconic building … in New York maybe. I hear what sounds like a footstep from the end of the alleyway. Shit! I shove the lid on the paste and stuff it and the brush into my backpack. I glance in the direction of the sound, preparing to run. A fox is silhouetted scrawny and black against the amber light, its ears pricked, its tail trailing on the ground. I breathe a sigh of relief so deep I swear it takes every last molecule of oxygen from me.

  Tyler says we all have an animal guide watching over us, protecting us from harm. Maybe my animal guide is the urban fox. I take a can of black spray paint from my bag and give it a quick shake. The rattle is amplified by the silence – or maybe it’s fear that makes it seem so loud. I quickly add my tag to the paste-up. Then I hoick my backpack over my shoulder and jog towards the street. It’s only when I’m down by the sea that I realize I forgot to take a photo. I gaze out across the water. It’s so dark I can’t tell where the sea ends and the sky begins. I breathe out and my breath appears like a cloud in the freezing air. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t get a photo. What matters is that, tonight, I finally took my dream from my head and made it a reality. Tonight, I officially became a street artist.

  CLEMENTINE

  INT. KITCHEN – DAY

  It’s early Monday morning. CLEMENTINE (15 but longing to be 18 so she can escape the hell that is her home life) and her brother, DAMON (8), sit at the granite-topped breakfast bar in their immaculate kitchen. CLEMENTINE’s mother JULIA (40 but in huge denial about that fact) rushes into the room. She looks as perfect and expensive as her kitchen – but don’t let that fool you…

  JULIA Clementine, have you had any breakfast?

  Damon, why aren’t you dressed?

  DAMON ignores his mother and continues creating a sculpture out of soggy breakfast cereal. CLEMENTINE stares into space, wondering if it’s possible to die of longing.

  JULIA Damon! Stop playing with your food.

  Clementine, did you hear what I said?

>   “Yes. Sorry.” I snap back to reality. My English homework this weekend was to write a scene from my home life in screenplay form, as if it were a scene from a movie. It’s been surprisingly therapeutic – especially when you live in a house like mine, with a family as dysfunctional as mine. It can really help to pretend that it isn’t real; that it’s all just something that’s been imagined up for the silver screen. Certificate DD (for Deeply Disturbing).

  Mum opens the fridge and takes out a bottle of green juice. Then she slams the bottle back into the fridge and takes out a huge block of cheese. I look at the clock on the wall. It’s almost seven-thirty.

  “Where’s Vincent?” I ask. I refuse to call him Vinnie like everyone else does, on principle.

  “Vincent isn’t here,” Mum says curtly, hacking off a chunk of cheese.

  Uh-oh. Mum only calls him Vincent when he’s been horrible to her. She’s been calling him Vincent quite a lot lately.

  Damon finally stops playing with his cereal. “Where is he?”

  “At work.” Mum fills the cafetière with water.

  I take a moment to ponder this latest development. Vincent went to London yesterday to go to a football match with his friends. He was supposed to be back in time for dinner but called Mum to say there was a “problem with the trains”. There was no problem with the trains that I could see when I checked the Network Rail website. I wonder if Mum checked it too, and if he stayed in London all night. I was up till gone midnight, writing poems for my Instagram and I didn’t hear him come in. I don’t have many memories from when Mum left Dad for Vincent but one thing I do remember is Dad yelling at Mum, “If he’s cheated on his wife, he’ll cheat on you too!” I was only five years old at the time so I thought Dad was talking about some kind of game; like Vincent had put a hotel on one of his Monopoly properties when his wife wasn’t looking or something.

  Mum takes a pack of croissants from the cupboard. “Do you want one?”

  I don’t. I’ve already had toast and fruit but Mum is obsessed with what I eat. She’s always saying I don’t eat enough – even though I eat loads. And when I do eat loads, she gets all uptight about how I never put any weight on and how unfair it is. Apparently, she just has to look at a bar of chocolate and she puts on a kilo. She’s always on some kind of diet or working out like a maniac. According to an article I read in Cosmopolitan, I think she might have “projection issues” – as in, she’s projecting her issues all over me.

  “OK. Thanks.”

  She puts a croissant on a plate and hands it to me. Then she takes one for herself, along with a piece of cheese. The worst thing about her obsession with shrinking herself is that it’s all to keep Vincent happy. To keep him, full stop. I look at the framed black and white print of him staring down at us from the kitchen wall, taken when he was a big radio presenter back in the nineties. Back when his hair was still naturally brown and he didn’t look ridiculous in skinny jeans. Mum had the exact same picture on her bedroom wall when she was a teenager and he was her idol. I try not to think about this if I can help it, as it feels seriously creepy. They didn’t actually get together till she was in her twenties and working as a producer on his radio show but still… I look at Vincent’s cocky grin and grimace. While Mum’s been obsessively trying to lose weight, he’s grown a paunch and an extra chin.

  “Did Vincent come home last night?” I’m in a constant battle between not wanting to upset Mum and wanting her to wake up and see how unfair her situation is.

  “Yes.” Mum sits down opposite me but she avoids making eye contact, fiddling with her thick diamond-encrusted wedding band instead. “He – he had to go in early to have a meeting with his producers – about the show.”

  Vincent is still a radio presenter. He seems to think this makes him Boss of the Universe, even though his glory days are long over. He used to present the breakfast show on the biggest radio station in Britain. Now he presents the early-afternoon show on a local station and he does the voice-over for the most annoying commercial ever, for a beer called Brewer’s Dog, catchphrase: “Its bark is worse than its bite, all right! WOOF!” According to Mum, Vincent changed jobs because he wanted to be around for us more when she had Damon but on Wikipedia it says he was fired from the breakfast show after turning up late and drunk for work three times in a row. I know we’re not supposed to believe everything we read on Wikipedia but Vincent being more of a drunkard than a family man I can believe.

  INT. KITCHEN – DAY

  JULIA looks at CLEMENTINE, then looks pointedly at CLEMENTINE’s croissant, as if she’s waiting for permission to eat her own. CLEMENTINE takes a huge bite, even though her anger is making her feel sick.

  RUDY

  I hate Mondays because I have to work for two hours at the café before going to school. But this morning, when the alarm on my phone goes off, I actually wake up with a grin. And trust me, this never happens on a Monday morning. I have a quick shower, shove my school uniform in my bag and put on my café uniform of black T-shirt and skinny jeans. I dab some oil on my hair, then pull it back from my face with my skull-and-crossbones bandana. I’m feeling pirate-style badass today, now that I’m an urban artist and all. Before I head for the door I grab my latest So Dark Fairy from my desk and apply some glue to the back.

  I started making my So Dark Fairies a few years ago, when Mum sent me to this crappy art camp in the community centre on our estate over the Easter holidays and the woman running it told us girls to “draw some pretty fairies”. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not exactly the pretty-fairy type, so I drew a fairy dressed in black, with a Mohican and the tattoo of a cobweb on its face. This did not go down well at all. The woman running the camp emailed Mum to say she was concerned an eleven-year-old would draw something “so dark” and thought I might have some “unresolved anger issues”. This, in turn, ended up triggering Mum’s own “unresolved anger issues”, AKA her infamous hot-headed temper, and she stormed down to the community centre and accused the woman of being a “bleeping judgmental bleep who had no bleeping right to accuse her daughter of having issues.” (It’s way too early on a Monday morning for all that cursing.) I spent the rest of the holiday hanging out in Tyler’s flat, drawing an entire family of “so dark” fairies and I still draw them to this day. They’re my comfort art; something I do when I want a quick creative fix but I don’t have the time or energy to work on something bigger. My latest So Dark Fairy is inspired by Tyler. Thin, with long hair and rocking out on an electric guitar, his wings covered in musical notes.

  I creep down the hallway past Mum’s bedroom. Mum works in Russian Roulette, a casino down by Brighton Marina, which means she doesn’t get home from work till around three or four in the morning, so she’ll have only just gone to sleep. I let myself out of the flat and scour the harshly lit corridor for somewhere to stick my fairy. It needs to be somewhere Tyler will see it so I head to the stairwell. Tyler lives in a flat on the top floor of our block, or as he likes to describe it: the Penthouse Suite. (As well as being a musical genius, Tyler is next level when it comes to irony.) I put the Tyler fairy just above the skirting board by the door inside the stairwell. My So Dark Fairies are only about four centimetres tall but I know Tyler will spot his because he’s always on the lookout for them. I started sticking them in random corners around the estate about a year ago, when I realized that I wanted to be a street artist but didn’t have the guts to do it properly. I only put up about one a month but people seem to like them. No one’s taken them down yet and someone even wrote, SICK! in black marker by the one I put up in the corner of the lift. My first-ever art review.

  As I head towards the North Laine part of Brighton I think of my picture on the door in the alley. My baby is now out there all alone, unprotected. I hope people like her. Who cares what people think? I tell myself as I check my reflection in the guitar shop window. But it’s hard not to care. I pour so much of myself into my artwork, it’s like my blood is mixed in with the paint. I
adjust the collar on my leather jacket and look down at the flashes of brown through the rips in my jeans. Whenever I wear these jeans Mum tells me off for showing too much skin. To which I always say, “Er, hello?” She claims she has to wear short skirts in the casino – it’s part of the job description. Knowing that makes me even more determined to only ever work for myself. There’s no way I want people telling me what I can and can’t wear. I know I have a job at Kale and Hearty but that’s only while I’m at school. And anyway, Jenna and Sid aren’t like proper bosses – they’re all about freedom of expression. Sid even has a tattoo saying BORN TO BE FREE on the inside of his arm. I turn right down Sydney Street. It’s only half past six but it’s already starting to bustle with the first of the commuters heading to the station. Trev, the fruit and veg man, is standing outside the café by a pile of crates. Tyler and I have this theory that Trev is half man, half vegetable, as his cheeks are as shiny and red as a pair of tomatoes and his body is as lumpy and round as a giant potato.

  “Morning,” I say as I walk past him.

  “All right, Rudy, love,” he says. “I’ve got some right tasty spinach for you lot today.”

  “Yay!” I immediately feel bad for sounding sarcastic. I became a vegetarian after I got the job here because Jenna made me watch this really gross movie about thousands of cows being crammed into a shed like sardines in a tin and after that I was like, OK, pass the plants, but even so, I’m just not that fussed about food. I can’t get excited by a vegetable, no matter how organic it might be. I let myself into the café. Nirvana is playing through the speakers in the ceiling, because Tyler begins even earlier than me on a Monday, but for once I don’t care that he’s got his grungy rock playing. I’m way too excited about what I’ve got to tell him.

  “Hey, Rudy!” Jenna calls from one of the tables at the back, where she’s putting out the breakfast menus. Her short bob, which was scarlet the last time I saw her, two days ago, is now bright turquoise. “How are you?”

  “Great, thanks. Like the hair.”

  Jenna smiles. “Thank you. I wanted to try and brighten up February.”