Graffiti Moon (19 page)

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.

‘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.’

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 in 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.’

Everything is what it is, I think, watching Raff and Dylan and the girls walk towards us. I just wish it were something else.

The casino’s all zing, all everything that’s inside me. In the toilets we cram into the cubicle of truth. ‘Ed’s the one. It’s Ed,’ I say. ‘Not Shadow. Ed has great hair. He listened to me talking about Mum and Dad. He didn’t seem to be put off by my vomiting.’

‘All important qualities to take into account,’ Jazz says. ‘But the most important?’

‘Static. Definitely static.’

Jazz grins. ‘I knew it. I had a feeling.’

‘Do you have a feeling about me?’ Daisy asks. ‘About my static?’

‘I do. I think you’re going to meet someone who gives better static than Dylan.’

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely,’ Jazz says. ‘What you have to do is write a list of all the things you want and then you tell the universe and that’s what you get.’

‘Who is the universe, anyway?’ Daisy asks. ‘I mean people are always talking about it, but the universe must have better things to do than eavesdrop on three girls in a toilet cubicle.’

‘The trick with the universe theory is not to over-think it,’ Jazz says.

‘Okay.’ Daisy takes out her lipstick and starts writing a list on the toilet wall.

‘So you and Ed,’ Jazz says. ‘Leo and me. Everything’s turning out even better than I planned.’

‘I feel kind of stupid that I was chasing Shadow all this time. Do you think I was stupid?’

‘That’s the way it is. Most people don’t know what they want till it’s right in front of their face.’

‘I like Ed being right in front of my face.’

‘He seems to like being right in front of your face too.’