A Small Free Kiss in the Dark

by Glenda Millard

  Then he stopped so suddenly I almost bumped into him. He spun around and grabbed me by the shoulders. ‘Listen kid, if I let you in here and you get sprung, the Welfare will be around to pick you up before you can blink. So you’d better make yourself scarce if you don’t want to end up back where you came from.’

  For a couple of seconds I thought he might be telling the truth. But it didn’t take me long to figure out he was only worried he might get kicked out if he let me stay. I was used to people not wanting me around. I don’t know why I thought Billy might be different.

  To our left was an old two-storey building. It was made of grey stone and had bars on the windows. A fence of metal spikes guarded the building and each one had a little arrow on top like a devil’s pitchfork. I watched Billy do something to a panel on the fence and then the gate opened and he limped past the pitchforks and disappeared himself into the bushes beside the building. I didn’t know if he left the gate open on purpose. I just made sure no one was watching before I walked through. Some of the blinds on the downstairs windows weren’t pulled right down and enough light leaked out for me to see a path. I followed it around the back of the building until I came to a small separate room with a wooden door and no windows. I felt for a switch, before I nipped inside, closed the door and turned the light on.

  There was a sink up one end and a broken toilet at the other, full of black water. Spider webs clung to the walls and ceiling. The floor was covered with used paper towels, dead leaves and other more disgusting things. I wondered about going someplace else but when I saw the lock on the door and remembered the lady-man at the traffic lights I spread Dad’s coat over everything and lay down. It stunk in there, so I jammed my face next to the gap under the door and breathed in silver and black, the smell of night. I promised myself I’d find a better place in the morning.

  I didn’t think anyone would be looking for me – they were probably glad I’d gone – but for the first two weeks I never slept in the same place twice in a row, just in case. It was hard to fall asleep some nights. There’s a lot of reasons why a person can’t go to sleep. Being hungry is one reason, or because of the places where they have to sleep, like under railway bridges or in builders’ skips. Sometimes I didn’t want to go to sleep in case I dreamt about lady-men with electric-blue eyelids. Other times I slept in the daytime, when there were plenty of people around, so I could stay awake at night. Running away was easy; not knowing what to do next was the hard part.

  I didn’t know if I’d ever see Billy again after that first day, because the city was so big and there were so many people. But I saw him often. I learnt to know the places I’d find him. Sometimes at Sam’s Kebabs, sometimes at the mall, watching people draw, and sometimes on the steps of St Mary’s. The first time I saw him, I sat close by, but I never talked to him. I thought he might still be mad at me for following him to the refuge. The next day I handed him half a pie I’d found in a bus shelter. He ate it but didn’t say anything. After that I used to go and sit with him whenever I saw him. Sometimes we’d talk and sometimes not, but I never asked him any questions in case I made him mad again.

  One day, about a month after I’d run away, I was headed down to the river to watch the boats. I heard the bells of St Mary’s ringing and I knew it must be six o’clock. That was dinner time at the refuge. I figured I wasn’t going to see Billy that day, although I’d looked in all the regular places. But when I got to the grass beside the water, Billy was sitting there at one of the tables. I’d got close enough to see the bandage before he saw me. Then he looked up and pulled his hand out of sight under the table. We watched the boats and talked until the lights came on in the cafes behind us. All that time Billy looked straight ahead and I never asked him about his bandaged hand.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said. ‘I gotta go. I found a place you can get bread for free. They leave their leftovers in a laneway, garbage bags full of it. But you’ve gotta get there before the charity people do or they take the lot.’

  I didn’t look back. I knew Billy would come with me if he wanted to eat. I heard him shuffling after me and smiled a bit. I didn’t see his face till we were waiting to cross the road. He had to turn his head to see the traffic. He could only see out of his right eye. The left side of his face was smashed. You couldn’t even tell if his eye was still there. Everything was swollen up like a rotten fish. I looked away fast. I thought I was going to spew in the gutter.

  We got cheese rolls and Danishes and went under the bridge to eat them. I had the apple Danish and I gave Billy the blueberry because they’re the best ones you can get. Billy took a long time to eat. After he was finished he said, ‘Thought I might rough it while the weather’s good.’

  Sometimes, if you waited long enough, Billy told you the answer before you asked the question. ‘I’ve moved out of the refuge,’ he said. ‘There was a bit of an incident.’

  I tried not to be too pleased that Billy was going to hang out with me. I reminded myself he was probably only there because he’d been in a fight and they’d kicked him out. It wasn’t as if I was the reason he’d left.

  When he found out I had trouble sleeping, Billy taught me about visualisation. He said it was a useful technique to use when you found yourself in difficult circumstances. Turns out, visualisation is what I do when I’m making pictures. I imagine things in my head and draw them, except I can’t imagine my mother’s face. When I’m trying to go to sleep, I like to picture some place I’ve been to in real life, or something that’s really happened to me. Billy said it’s okay to do that or you can make something up if you want to, like being on a tropical island. The thing I like to visualise best of all, especially when it’s cold, happened one hot night when I drew the wedding birds.

  It was on the Friday before pension day, almost three months after Billy and I met. Billy had no money and I was nearly out of chalk, so we pinched six packets from the Reject Shop. When we found out they were all white, I had the idea about seagulls. I wanted to draw a gigantic flock of them on the footpath outside St Mary’s Cathedral. There were always weddings there on Saturdays, and I wanted to make it look like my chalk birds were eating the rice that people threw at the bride and groom. Billy says throwing rice is supposed to bring good luck but I don’t know why, unless the people getting married haven’t got anything to eat.

  We stayed up till two o’clock in the morning. Billy kept a lookout in case the police came while I was drawing. I don’t think the police like art being done on footpaths. I was nearly finished. I used the last bit of my black to give the birds their shadows, and I had a stub of red left to draw legs on the ones that were standing in the gutter. Then I heard the footpath-sweeping machine. It came out of a laneway one block up, did a left-hand turn and was whizzing down our side of the street. Billy and me disappeared ourselves into the shadows beside the church.

  All the sweepers had a sign on them that said: ‘Caution, slow moving vehicle’. During the day that was true, but at night-time the drivers cut loose. I thought this one was going to run over my seagulls for sure, but he didn’t. He stopped and got out and squatted on the heels of his boots to take a closer look. Billy stepped out then and I heard the driver say, ‘They’re bloody unreal, mate. No kidding, I half expected ’em to fly away when I got close!’

  Billy turned around and signalled with his head and I knew it was okay to come out.

  ‘This is Skip,’ he said. He never called me ‘kid’ any more. ‘Skip drew the birds. He’s going to be a famous artist one day.’

  ‘Another Leonardo, mate?’ the driver said.

  ‘Could be,’ answered Billy, nodding.

  ‘Archimedes,’ said the driver, sticking out his hand, ‘Call me Archie.’

  He and Billy shook hands and then they sat down on the seat outside St Mary’s. Archie took a cigarette from behind his ear like he was a magician and he and Billy shared it as if they were old friends.

  They talked about my picture for a while and then Archie said
, ‘I reckon my old man could’ve been an artist, except he was a mollydooker. Back in them days the teachers used to give kids the cuts for drawing or writing with their left hand. So me old man gave up drawing. But later on, when he got crook and couldn’t work, he used to design stuff for a bloke who does tattoos. This is one of his.’

  Archie lifted up his high-visibility shirt and pointed to a tattoo of a leopard. It was really beautiful, even though it had tufts of black chest hair growing out of its back. When Archie flexed his muscles it looked like the leopard was going to leap off his chest.

  After that, he and Billy talked about pigeon poo on public buildings and the Grand Prix, which is a car race, while I finished off my wedding birds. I wondered if Archie was a racing car driver in his spare time because of the way he drove the footpath-sweeper.

  After Archimedes left, Billy and me went under the bridge near the station to sleep. At night you can’t tell the river’s muddy, and even though the sky is too full of light to see the stars you can see the city reflected in the water. It looks a bit like a painting Vincent van Gogh did before he cut off his ear. It’s called Starry Night over the Rhône River. It isn’t his most famous picture but it’s still my favourite. If I painted something as beautiful as that I’d never try to cut my ear off. Starry Night over the Rhône River makes me feel peaceful. On the hot night in March when I drew the wedding birds, I went to sleep trying to remember how many stars Vincent had painted in the sky. That’s the bit I visualise over and over again: Billy and me lying on the river bank, looking up at the sky. I hear water slapping against boats and I smell mud and water and hamburgers.

  One day I’ll make a plan and go to France. I’ll go at night and lie on my back and look up at the stars Vincent looked at. Maybe they’ll be the same stars Chief Seattle saw, only he was over in America. Anyway, I’ll look at them with both eyes at the same time because then I won’t be nearly twelve years old and I’ll know exactly who I’m supposed to be.

  3

  Overcoats and

  irises

  Sometimes I like to work things out backwards, from the end to the beginning. Like how come I wasn’t in the Queen’s Elbows on that freezing winter night in July. I’ll bet if you did a survey, most people would say it was because I was sleeping in the skip on the demolition site that used to be a hospital. But that was only the last thing. It’s a bit like when you ask someone where they come from and they tell you what suburb they live in, but if they kept on going backwards they would end up inside their mother’s belly or maybe even somewhere before that, like in the ocean or deep space or in God’s mind. I think this means that everyone really comes from the same place. People who believe in reincarnation could just keep on going backwards for infinity.

  When I was backwards thinking about the third of July, I only got as far as Michaela. She’s not in this story much, but she’s the reason why some of the things happened. And besides, I want to tell you about her because, if I don’t, no one else might. It’s possible that Billy and Max and me are the only ones left who knew her.

  When Billy found out I was interested in art he started taking me to the State Library. I didn’t think we’d be allowed inside, but Billy said the library belonged to the people and we were the people. He said even if you didn’t have a coat you could still go there, as long as your hands were clean. That was in the rules, he said, and he could prove it because someone wrote them down when they first built the library. It was warm in there and it was free, and Billy showed me where to find Ned Kelly’s original armour and a book worth twelve million dollars. But the best things were the books about art.

  That’s how we knew Michaela, because she worked at the library and wore a badge with her name on it. Michaela was beautiful. Her legs were way long, which must have come in handy for reaching books on high-up shelves. Her hair was cut short and spiked like boys’ hair. It was the colour of autumn leaves and it wasn’t fake colour, either, because the hairs on her arms were the same. The freckles on Michaela’s nose and cheeks looked like the flecks of colour Monet painted on pictures of his lily pond, to represent sunlight, and she wore seven studs in one ear and none in the other. I liked that because I like odd things. I think it’s because of my eyes. Michaela’s eyes were both the same. They were the colour of the irises in Monet’s garden.

  I don’t know if Michaela had any kids. She looked old enough to be married but she didn’t wear any rings on her fingers. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like if she took me home to her place to live. I imagined she’d have a lot of books at her house and she’d be kind. But I knew it was stupid to imagine things like that, especially after she spotted me outside the soup kitchen at the Queen’s Elbows.

  I was soaking up warmth from the red-brick wall behind me, with half a bread roll stuffed in my cheek and my hands wrapped around a mug of Salvation Soup that tasted exactly like Vegemite with hot water in it and looked like the vinyl on the floor in the toilets at McDonald’s. Most people don’t look at you when you’re in a soup queue; not really look. I think they’re scared to. But Michaela wasn’t scared. She did a double take and our eyes met and her mouth opened like goldfish lips, only pink, and I thought she was going to say something. It was me who looked away first.

  I thought she might be a do-gooder, and Billy had warned me about them. He said they were kind and well meaning but they didn’t always understand the complexities. Billy knows a lot of words. He believes in improving yourself. That’s another reason why he used to take me to the library. He also reckons the best way to understand something is to find it out for yourself. I found out what complexities are because of something that happened when Billy and me were looking for somewhere to stay at the end of June.

  Billy had to sleep inside when it was winter, on account of his arthritis. He got a bed in a place that used to be a pub. They turned it into a refuge and called it Hope House, but nearly everyone still called it the Queen’s Elbows. After he got his place sorted out Billy said he’d help me find somewhere to stay. I was a bit surprised; I didn’t think he’d bother about me, even though he hardly ever got mad with me any more.

  We found a hostel for women and children and Billy asked the person in charge if I could stay, but she said I’d have to be accompanied by an adult. Billy said he’d accompany me, but she told him he couldn’t come in there because it was only for women and children. I never had a woman look after me, except in the beginning when my mother was there, but I don’t remember that. And the ones who came after her don’t count because they didn’t look after me. I had Dad and then I had Billy. I couldn’t figure out why I needed a woman to get into that place or why they didn’t let kids in the men’s shelter if they were accompanied by an adult.

  This was a complexity. Complexities are like maths, I thought, and I’m dumb at both. The woman started asking questions. I got worried because Billy’s fists kept bunching up like he wanted to punch her lights out. His eye was nearly better and I didn’t want him getting in any more incidents. I touched his sleeve and he looked down at me and for a minute I thought I’d done the wrong thing. But then he took me by the hand and we walked back to the men’s place in the rain. No one had ever held my hand before except for Dad. I was surprised you can be as old as me and holding hands still feels okay. I wondered if Billy was like Dad but I didn’t want him to be because my father was a damaged man.

  Every night for three weeks I hid in the laundry of the Queen’s Elbows, but I hardly slept at all. I was scared someone would find me and Billy would get kicked out again. Then Michaela saw me in the soup queue and I knew I had to go back to sleeping rough in case she was one of those kind, well-meaning do-gooders that Billy told me about.

  I put Dad’s overcoat on before I wrapped myself up like a Christmas present in pink-and-silver builders’ foil. I was glad the kids at my last school couldn’t see, but it didn’t matter to me about the colours. Sometimes clouds are pink and so are watermelons and babies’ lips, and anyway, you
can see on a colour wheel that pink’s just red with white mixed in with it. I lay there in the skip for a while, looking out at the slice of neon sky. I hardly noticed the broken bricks digging into me because I kept thinking about never being able to go back to the State Library. I was trying to figure out some way around it when I heard Billy coming.

  I knew it was him because of the sound of his bad leg dragging on the footpath. In winter the cold got in his bones and made it worse. That’s why he nearly always had odd shoes on, because one wore out before the other. When he got another pair from the op shop he used to donate the one he didn’t need. He usually put it in a charity bin outside, but one day he gave it to the op shop lady and she said she couldn’t accept a single shoe until Billy told her there might be someone else out there who had a bad leg like him, except on the other side. She hadn’t thought of that, so she took the shoe and said, ‘God bless you, sir.’ This was another complexity because I couldn’t work out if Billy was being funny or kind, although he is both, but not always at the same time.

  I unwrapped myself from the foil and got out of the skip because it was hard for Billy to climb in when his leg was playing up. I told him about Michaela. I had to because he wanted me to go back to the shelter with him.

  ‘Do you think she’s a do-gooder?’

  ‘Dunno, Skip,’ he said. ‘She looks like she’d have a soft heart, but that’s the problem. They’re usually the ones who want to help and they just don’t know the right way to go about it.’

  Then I said the thing that worried me the most: ‘I can’t go back to the library then.’ It wasn’t a question so Billy didn’t have to answer, but I wanted him to say something. Something good.

  ‘You’ve got a gift; make the most of it, Skip,’ he said. ‘You gotta get an education and do something worthwhile with your life.’