The tiny white bodies making shadows and their skinny legs pointing at the air. Those birds were small enough to fit in my hand but the day before they’d been flying. ‘I felt like that painting, when I found Bert lying in aisle three.’
It’s quiet after I say that, so quiet. And I’m not that low river on the inside anymore. I’m high tide and trying to keep my head above the water while I’m back in the store looking at Bert, lying face up, his old drawing hands not moving.
Apart from Mrs J, he was the only person who believed I was more than some loser writing on the side of his shop. ‘Everyone gets the chance to start again,’ Bert said when I made a mistake. And he never went on about it either, the way some people did. He pointed it out and we moved on.
‘What do you miss the most about him?’ Lucy asks.
That’s easy. ‘I miss the look he’d get on his face when he swore and then checked to see if Valerie had heard him.’ We’re at the top of the hill now and we sit to rest for a while.
‘He sounds like a good guy,’ Lucy says. ‘A little like Al, maybe.’
Now that she knows about Beth it feels like there’s not such a big gap between her and me. Instead of two people in the middle of us there’s only one. Shadow. And I’m him so it’s almost just her and me.
‘You left school right in the middle of that Jeffrey Smart assignment we were doing. You acted like you didn’t care about any of it,’ she says, and I know where she’s going and I don’t want her to ask me again why I left because maybe this time I won’t be able to lie.
‘It was bad timing. Bert offered me the job and Mum needed the money. I wanted to finish the assignment.’
‘You like his work?’
‘Him and Vermeer,’ I say. ‘I like them most of all.’
‘They’re so different,’ she says.
‘Maybe. Feels like life’s not moving much in either of them, though.’
She’s quiet and I don’t want her wondering too much about me leaving school so I say something just to say something. ‘Can you believe it’s this hot in October?’
‘It’s weird. But I don’t mind. It’s like we’re in a little bubble of December floating in the wrong part of the year.’
‘I like that thought.’
‘Me too,’ a voice behind us says.
Lucy turns. ‘Hey, Malcolm.’
Shit.
Shit.
‘You know him?’ I ask. ‘He’s the guy I met outside at the party.’
I look at his suit. ‘You thought he was Shadow?’
‘Lucy and I had a lovely chat about where I might find you tonight,’ Malcolm says.
‘You told him where we were going?’
‘Yes,’ she says, sounding confused.
I fill her in quickly. ‘He’s a psychopath.’ I look at the bike and Malcolm wags his finger. He’s brought along the bad men and they’re standing behind him with their arms folded. Shuffling and waiting, shuffling and waiting. The bad men aren’t people you want to meet in the dark. The bad men aren’t people you want to meet in the light.
‘So. Leo owes me money.’
‘You’ll have it tomorrow.’
‘I want it now.’
‘You tricked me,’ Lucy says. She’s gone from confused to angry in less than a minute. I consider putting my hand over her mouth but there’s no time. ‘You acted as if you liked me to find out where we’d be tonight. You’re not nice at all.’
And even though it’s stupid of her to say because we’re in what Bert would call a sticky jam, I can’t help laughing at the surprised look on her face. Like it’s a shock that some guy she just met isn’t what she wanted him to be. Like it’s a shock that a guy in a sharp suit isn’t nice.
‘That’s right. You’re just
good friends
,’ he says, and I put my hand on Lucy’s arm so she doesn’t attack.
‘Don’t let him get to you,’ I tell her. ‘He eats cockroaches.’
Malcolm grins. ‘Just the one.’
‘Cockroaches? How do I miss that about someone?’ she asks, looking pretty disturbed by her lack of judgment.
‘In your defence, that’s not the sort of thing you just assume,’ I say.
‘Enough.’ Malcolm’s voice is serious now and we both get quiet. ‘I want you to give Leo a message for me.’
‘That’s it? You want us to pass on a message?’ I ask.
‘That’s it.’
‘Okay,’ I say, feeling pretty lucky until he and the bad men move closer and I get the feeling that the message is going to be in the form of a big bruise on my face. I can’t stop looking at Lucy’s bike that’s lying on the ground. ‘If you try to run,’ Malcolm says, ‘I’ll give her the message instead.’
I like Lucy’s face, like it more and more as the night thins out. So I let him get closer and as he does the world inside me moves fast and the world outside stays deadly still.
‘Why don’t you give the message straight to Leo?’ Lucy asks, and he ignores her. It took her two meetings but she’s figured Malcolm out. That he’s giving me the message because Leo could probably take him and his bad men, or at least have a good crack. Malcolm’ll deal with Leo if he needs to, but why not start with something easy? Plus, it’s like it was with the cockroach. Sometimes Malcolm likes to do strange stuff.
The bad men hold me and I don’t like to admit it but my knees are making clackitty-clack sounds. They shake even more when he pulls out a compass and twirls it round his fingers like a naughty circus performer. ‘I’m going to give you a nipple ring.’
He’s giving me a present? No, that’s not right, he’s not giving me a present. I’m all whirl inside, all spin. Where’s Leo? Leo and me are always together when stuff like this happens, that’s why it’s funny. It’s funny because we get away. It’s not funny if we don’t get away. If we don’t get away it’s shit.
‘Pull up your shirt,’ Malcolm says, and he’s got this puppy smile going crazy. He puts the compass to my skin. I close my eyes and feel the point. It’s going to hurt so, so bad. Lucy takes hold of my hand, which is nice but I’m not really in the mood right now.
Malcolm stops. ‘I’ll do you a favour. How’s that?’
‘That’s great,’ I say. ‘That’s so great.’
‘I’ll pierce your ear first.’
‘We need to talk about the definition of a . . . fuuuuuuuck!’ I yell, as he pushes the compass straight through my ear. ‘You are crazy,’ I say, shoving him off. He’s laughing harder than the day he ate the cockroach.
That’s when it happens. Lucy cracks him in the face. I look away for a second and then I look back. It’s too good to miss. There’s blood and screaming and I feel better because I didn’t scream when she hit me and I only cried later, which was the effect of the anaesthetic.
‘That wasn’t an accident, mister,’ she says. And then she goes white and while the bad men are busy checking out Malcolm’s nose I pick up the bike, tell her to get on and I ride, her lightning bolt helmet bumping against the handlebars.
My legs pump and my heart spins crazy and it feels so good not to have given in to some loser who thinks he can tell us what to do and we’ll just do it because he’s got us up against a wall and it looks like there’s no way we can escape. But we can escape. We do. We spill across the park, spill and fly and there’s light rising from somewhere ahead, from the skate park, from the light that hangs over the wall I want to show her. ‘How are we doing?’ I call.
‘I’m about to vomit.’
‘Well, that’s bad, since it’ll land on me, but I meant, are we losing them?’
I feel her twist and turn back. ‘We’re doing good. I can’t even see them. How is your ear?’
‘It has a compass-size hole in it so, you know. It’s sore.’
Her hands are on my back and we’re rolling through the park, rolling on our getaway bike. I’m back to where I was with Beth, the air moving again, making way for me, making way. I stop at the skate park and we topple onto the grass, close, circled by heat from the air and heat from our breath. ‘You really cracked him hard.’
‘I hope he’s okay,’ she says.
‘I hope he’s hospitalised.’
‘Do you think we’re safe here? He might be chasing us.’
‘Trust me, I’ve been where he is. He’s not running anywhere. And even if he is, by the time they cover the ground we did on the bike, Leo’ll be here.’
She pulls a tissue from her pocket and it’s old and dirty and she’ll probably kill me with infection but I don’t say that because I don’t care. I don’t care because I’m close to her now and I see that mark on her neck and I’m back at that wall, painting those lines on a face that’s all mystery, all something I want to understand. Only this time my car’s not blowing smoke because she’s interested, maybe.
And she looks over my shoulder, touching my ear, taking in my wall. A huge storm, a monster. Waves bigger than buildings. It took me all night to get the blues and the greens moving in and out of each other. To get the yellow sky swirling above the dark waves, swirling above these two figures on the shore. A guy with a surfboard and a little fish, next to him. Me and Beth at the beginning. Me and Bert, too. Me and Leo.
She looks at it and looks back at my ear and I don’t know if she sees me in the piece or not. How could she not see me in it? That’s all I am, some guy on a shore, trapped by waves and looking for a way to swim. ‘What do you think?’ I ask her, but she’s back to looking at my ear.
‘It’s not completely pierced. I think you could let it heal or go all the way.’
I’m making travel plans again and getting real close, my breath touching hers and she’s not moving back. She’s not moving at all. ‘I choose go all the way,’ I tell her and feel like a complete wanker, but being a wanker doesn’t ruin the moment. She leans forward and I’m about to kiss her. Finally, I’m about to kiss her. I lean in, my mouth so close, so close. And then she goes white and I roll out of the way because I’m pretty sure she’s about to heave.
Ed’s breath wanders over me, and he spotlights that freckle on my neck with his eyes and the heat of the night is sharper than ever and it feels like we’re hanging from the sky or the ceiling. Swaying around each other without our feet on the ground. If we touched I wouldn’t be surprised to hear chiming. I press that tissue to his ear and my fingers tingle. He asks me what I think and I tell him he could let it heal or go all the way. He chooses go all the way.
He says it in a voice that makes me think cool, not idiot, and a line like that is one hundred per cent risk. I’m not sure of anything, not sure if he means what I think he means, not sure if the adrenalin is playing tricks on me. Not sure if he’s the one I like or if the one I like is Shadow. Maybe it’s both. It’s definitely not Malcolm Dove.
Like I said before, a girl doesn’t think clearly when faced with electrocution, and if Ed is a toaster then I am a girl with a knife. I’m about to say something in reply, maybe ask him what he means or just let him kiss me, which I think is where we’re headed, when I have a flash of Malcolm’s nose and a flash of him eating a cockroach and this wave rises in me and I’m pretty sure I’m going to throw up.
I think all the experts agree that throwing up while a guy tries to kiss you is bad. It puts all but the very, very keen off and I’m not sure that Ed is very, very keen. I try hard to stop thinking about Malcolm’s blood but the harder I try the more I think.
‘It’s Malcolm’s nose,’ I say to Ed, so he doesn’t get the wrong idea. ‘And the cockroach.’ I don’t want him to think it’s the thought of his kiss that’s making me sick.
‘Lean forward,’ he tells me. ‘And think about something else.’
‘Like what?’
‘Something good. What’s something good?’
We can definitely rule out this exact moment. ‘My glass. I like my glass.’
‘Okay, so talk about the studio. How long have you been working there?’
‘Since Year 10.’ I lean further forward and take deeper breaths. ‘My parents couldn’t afford the whole cost so I cleaned in exchange for lessons.’
‘Not a lot of money in writing or comedy, huh?’
‘Not a lot. But they have jobs on the side and one day Dad’ll get famous and Mum’ll get published. You don’t need money, anyway.’
‘You need it to pay the rent,’ he says.
‘But not to be happy.’
‘Glass makes you happy. Can’t do that without money.’
I sit up. ‘No. But there are ways. You find ways. Like cleaning.’
‘You think you could be happy? Cleaning for a living?’
‘Yep. If it meant I could do my glassblowing.’
‘You’d eventually want to work on your glass all the time though, wouldn’t you? Are your parents happy, working at some shitty job on the side of what they really love?’
‘I didn’t say that they have shitty jobs,’ I keep taking those deep breaths. ‘They have jobs on the side but they’re happy. Lately, Mum’s been writing loads. She’s nearly finished her novel.’
Since Dad moved into the shed she’s stopped saying she’s too tired to write. She comes home and cooks us dinner and we talk. She likes hearing about glass, about what I learn from Al. How I have to cool my pieces the right way or internal pressures make them explode.
After dinner I do my homework while Mum types away. We go until midnight sometimes, stopping for cups of tea but not talking because Mum says an artist needs headspace. Mrs J and Al say the same thing. So does Dad.