Graffiti Moon
Cath Crowley
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Graffiti Moon
Cath Crowley grew up in rural Victoria, Australia. She studied professional writing and editing at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and now works as a freelance writer in Melbourne. To find out more about Cath, please visit cathcrowley.com.au
Also by Cath Crowley
The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain
Gracie Faltrain Takes Control
Gracie Faltrain Gets it Right (Finally)
Chasing Charlie Duskin
First published 2010 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Text copyright © Cath Crowley 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Crowley, Cath.
Graffiti moon.
ISBN 978 0 330 42578 0 (pbk.)
For secondary school age.
Adolescence – Juvenile fiction.
Relationships – Juvenile fiction.
A823.4
Typeset in 11.5/16pt Sabon by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
These electronic editions published in 2010 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
Graffiti Moon
Cath Crowley
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To Teresa and everyone in the room.
And to Esther, who read it first.
Acknowledgements
Thank you very much Claire Craig, Brianne Collins and Simone Ford. Your careful editing is much appreciated. Thank you Elizabeth Abbot, Marcus Jobling, Duro Jovicic, Kirsten Matthews and Karen Murphy for talking to me about art. Thank you Bethany Wheeler for generously donating your time and knowledge about glass. Any errors are mine. Any good stuff is yours. Special thanks to the young adults who shared their stories with me. A big thanks to my nieces and nephews who let me ask all the questions I want and never tell me to go away. Thanks Alison Arnold for plotting in the car, Diana Francavilla for your scary amount of knowledge about young adult fiction and film, Emma Schwartz for your writing advice and Ange Maiden for always laughing. And lastly, thanks to my brothers, to Cate, Cella and Ras, and of course, to my mum and dad.
Lucy
I pedal fast. Down Rose Drive where houses swim in pools of orange streetlight. Where people sit on verandahs, hoping to catch a breeze. Let me make it in time. Please let me make it in time.
Just arrived at the studio. Your graffiti guys Shadow and Poet are here, Al texted, and I took off across the night. Took off under a sky bleeding out and turning black. Left Dad sitting outside his shed yelling, ‘I thought you weren’t meeting Jazz till later. Where’s the fire, Lucy Dervish?’
In me. Under my skin.
Let me make it in time. Let me meet Shadow. Let me meet Poet, too, but mainly Shadow. The guy who paints in the dark. Paints birds trapped on brick walls and people lost in ghost forests. Paints guys with grass growing from their hearts and girls with buzzing lawn mowers. A guy who paints things like that is a guy I could fall for. Really fall for.
I’m so close to meeting him and I want it so bad. Mum says when wanting collides with getting, that’s the moment of truth. I want to collide. I want to run right into Shadow and let the force spill our thoughts so we can pick each other up and pass each other back like piles of shiny stones.
At the top of Singer Street I see the city, neon blue and rising. There’s lightning deep in the sky, working its way through the heat to the surface. There’s laughter somewhere far away. There’s one of Shadow’s pieces, a painting on a crumbling wall of a heart cracked by earthquake with the words: Beyond the Richter scale written underneath. It’s not a heart like you see on a Valentine’s Day card. It’s the heart how it really is: fine veins and atriums and arteries. A fist-sized forest in our chest.
I take my hands off the brake and let go. The trees and the fences mess together and the concrete could be the sky and the sky could be the concrete and the factories spread out before me like a light-scattered dream.
I turn a corner and fly down Al’s street. Towards his studio, towards him sitting on the steps, little moths above him, playing in the light. Towards a shadow in the distance. A shadow of Shadow. There’s collision up ahead.
I spin the last stretch and slide to a stop. ‘I’m here. I made it. Do I look okay? How do I look?’
Al drains his coffee and puts the cup on the step beside him. ‘Like a girl who missed them by about five minutes.’
Ed
I spray the sky fast. Eyes ahead and behind. Looking for cops. Looking for anyone I don’t want to be here. Paint sails and the things that kick in my head scream from can to brick. See this, see this, see this. See me emptied onto a wall.
First thing I ever painted was a girl. Second thing I ever painted was a doorway on a brick wall. Went on to paint huge doorways. Moved on to skies. Open skies painted above painted doorways and painted birds skimming across bricks trying to fly away. Little bird, what are you thinking? You come from a can.
Tonight I’m doing this bird that’s been in my head all day. He’s a little yellow guy lying on sweet green grass. Belly to sky, legs facing the same direction. He could be sleeping. He could be dead. The yellow’s right. The green, too. The sky’s all wrong. I need the sort of blue that rips your inside out. You don’t see blue like that round here.
Bert was always looking for it. Every week or so at the paint store he’d show me a blue he’d special-ordered. ‘Close, boss,’ I’d say. ‘But not close enough.’
He still hadn’t found it when he died two months ago. He got all the other colours I wanted. The green this bird’s lying on is a shade he found about two years back. ‘You had a good first day,’ he told me when he handed it over. ‘Real good.’
‘That is very fucking nice,’ I said, spraying some on a card and taking it as a sign that leaving school to work for him was the right thing to do.
‘It is very fucking nice,’ Bert looked over his shoulder, ‘but don’t say fuck when my wife Valerie’s around.’ Bert always swore like a kid scared of getting
caught. I laughed about it till Val heard me swearing. Bert had the last chuckle that day.
‘What’s so funny?’ a voice behind me asks.
‘Shit, Leo.’ A line of blue goes into the grass on the wall. ‘Don’t sneak up.’
‘I’ve been calling your name since the top of the hill. And the council made this place legal, remember?’ He finishes the last bite of his sausage roll. ‘I like the rush of working where we might get caught.’
‘I like the rush of painting.’
‘Fair enough.’ He watches me for a bit. ‘So I called your mobile earlier. It’s disconnected.’
‘Uh-huh. Didn’t pay the bill.’ I hand him the can. ‘Write the words. I’m hungry.’
Leo looks at my picture of a wide sky hanging over a sleeping yellow bird. He points at the kid on the wall. ‘Nice touch.’ He thinks a bit longer and while he does I look around. The old guy who works at the glass studio across the road is on the step, texting and staring at us. At least I know he’s not calling the cops.
Leo writes Peace in the clouds. I was thinking it was more like my future. ‘Not bad,’ I tell him.
His hand moves across the wall, signing my name under his.
Poet.
Shadow.
We walk along streets and alleys and cut through the old train yard. I look out for people working as we walk. I like seeing their thoughts hit the carriages. Makes the city as much ours as someone else’s.
‘So I saw Beth today,’ Leo says. ‘She asked me how you were doing.’ He throws stones at the dead trains. ‘Sounded like she wants you back.’
I stop and take out a can and spray a greeting card heart with a gun pointed at it. ‘We were over months ago.’
‘You mind if I ask her out, then?’
‘You mind if I spray a piece on the side of your gran’s house?’
He laughs. ‘Yeah, right. You’re over.’
‘I like her, just not anything more than that. She used to do this thing where she’d lean over and kiss me and then take a break to whisper hilarious stuff in my ear and then kiss me again. I’d be screaming, “What’s wrong with you? Fall in love with her, you dick.”’
‘She didn’t think that was weird?’
‘Inside. I was screaming on the inside. Anyway, I never fell in love with her so I guess the part of the brain that controls love doesn’t respond to being called a dick.’
‘For your sake, I’m hoping no part of your brain responds to being called a dick.’
‘Fair point.’ I wish I hadn’t thought about Beth doing that thing because now I can feel her at my ear, warm breath and sweet tickling and her voice sounding like that blue I’ve been searching for.
‘Were you in love with Emma?’ I ask.
‘I was hard-core obsessed,’ he says without thinking about it. ‘Not in love.’
‘What’s the difference?’
He’s about to throw a stone at the streetlight but stops. ‘Prison,’ he says, and puts the stone in his pocket.
Emma dumped him about a year ago now. He was crazier than usual after she did it. Kept begging me to paint this wall on the side of her house so she’d see it and take him back. She lived in the good part of town in a three-storey terrace. We weren’t painting anything on that and getting away with it.
There was no talking Leo down, though, so I sprayed what he wanted: a guy with the word ‘love’ cut out of his chest and a girl next to him holding some scissors. Emma came out and saw it and he got on his knees in the middle of the street, begging her to take him back.
She pulled out her mobile phone and called the cops. Leo wouldn’t leave and I wouldn’t leave without him and about ten minutes later we were in the back of a police van headed for fingerprinting.
We gave our statements and Leo told them everything, about being dumped, about wanting Emma back. They must have thought she was pretty cold because they called my mum and Leo’s gran and let us off with a warning and the understanding that we’d clean up the mess we’d made. I never heard Leo’s gran yell so much as when she was dragging him towards the car. He’s been mowing lawns on a Saturday for her friends ever since.
Mum was quiet till we got home. She’s never once told me I couldn’t hang out with Leo. Never said he couldn’t sleep on the couch when he turned up late. ‘He’s one of the good guys,’ she always said. ‘Just sometimes he’s working undercover.’
That night she killed the engine and stared at our house for a while. ‘I love Leo like a son, but he’s got to grow up sometime. And it’d be a shame for you to start wasting that hard-earned money of yours on bail.’ She slammed the car door shut and that was that.
I told Leo what she’d said while we were sweating and cleaning off paint. Emma walked past us with her friends. ‘Fuck growing up,’ Leo said, staring at her till she disappeared.
I flick on the light and Leo looks in the fridge for food. Comes up empty. I flick the aircon switch. Nothing happens. I smack it. Leo smacks it. He almost knocks it off the wall but it still doesn’t give any air. ‘We’re not meant to get hot days like this in October,’ I say, standing in front of the open freezer.
‘Where’s your mum?’ he asks.
‘Out at some big deal hocus-pocus night at the casino. Getting her fortune read. It’s an all-night thing because “magic” happens in the early hours.’
Leo raises his eyebrows.
‘Not that sort of magic.’
He leans against the bench and his legs almost reach the other side of the kitchen. It isn’t the smallness of this place that bothers me. It’s the grey that’s worked its way into the walls. It’s the stains on the carpet from some other life that came and left before ours. Bert always said he’d give me a good deal on paint but some places take burning down and rebuilding to make them shiny.
‘It’s too hot here,’ Leo says. ‘And it’s my last night of Year 12. We should go out, have some food, meet some girls.’
I shut the freezer door. ‘I got exactly fifteen dollars left in the world.’
He looks past me at the calendar and the circle around rent day. ‘No luck getting another job?’
‘Negative luck. People don’t even return my calls.’
‘I’m helping Jake this morning if you’re interested. We can get five hundred bucks each for two hours’ work starting at three am. All we have to do is pick up the van, load it, drive it away.’
‘Are you stupid?’ I ask.
‘That’s what it says on my report cards.’
‘Don’t even joke about this. Your brother gets caught every single time.’ Right back to when he was fifteen and he talked some guy at a car dealership into letting him take a Jag for a test drive. He’s even taller than Leo so the guy believed his fake licence. Plus, Jake’s got a way of talking that makes people believe.
He took the Jag and, instead of driving somewhere no one knew him, he rolled around the block near his house, music vibrating through the windows. His gran dragged him out by the ear in front of everyone on the street.
Leo reaches over and hits the aircon again. ‘I owe some money.’
He looks worried, which gets me worried because a team of footballers coming at him in a dark alley doesn’t bother him too much. That leaves one person. ‘Tell me you don’t owe money to Malcolm Dove.’
He stares out the window at the cats howling along the back fence.
‘Shit, Leo. Shit. The guy’s crazy.’
‘Define crazy.’
‘Eating a cockroach for a dare,’ I say.
Leo shrugs. ‘Okay, so he’s crazy. All the more reason to give him his money.’
I fish in the back of the cupboard for some chips and think about the seriousness of the situation. Malcolm’s about the same age as Jake but they’re not friends. Malcolm doesn’t have friends. He has a group of bad men that hang around, doing him favours. The only person I know who’s crazier than him is Crazy Dave. He needed to eat one more cockroach to beat Malcolm in that dare but he ate five for a laug
h. ‘They’re salty,’ he said, grinning.
‘Why’d you need five hundred dollars that bad?’ I ask. ‘You mow lawns every Saturday.’
‘Yeah, well, old ladies mostly pay in food. And my gran needed some things.’ He taps on the counter. ‘Malcolm’s coming for me tonight.’
‘How late is the payment?’
He looks from the window to the floor. ‘Two months.’
For Leo’s sake I try not to seem worried.
‘Look. All I need to do is dodge him till three and I’ll have the money.’
‘You can’t ask Jake for an advance?’
‘I don’t want him knowing I owe Malcolm.’
‘Has he been round to your house?’ I ask.
‘No. But I’m guessing he’ll pay Gran a visit if he doesn’t get what he’s owed tonight. Dylan said he’d help. We’re meeting him at school on the way to Barry’s. One job and we all start the month even. We’ve got at least a first offence before the cops even think about putting us in jail.’
‘That’s one bright future up ahead.’ I look past him at the calendar and the circled rent day. I think about Mum adding bleak numbers in the night, about her seeing psychics and looking for happy endings.
‘My son needs a job,’ the new owner of the paint store said when he sacked me six weeks ago. ‘It’s nothing personal.’ Funny. The real estate agent we owe money to is taking it very personal.
Leo gets a phone call and while he’s talking I flick through Bert’s little sketchbook. Valerie gave it to me at the funeral. Said Bert would have wanted me to have it. In our lunch breaks at the shop he’d sit there talking and drawing these pictures. Each one was on a different page, drawn almost the same as the one before. His old hands moved while he talked and by the end of lunch he’d always finished a new series. I’d flick the pages and the thing he’d drawn moved like it was on TV. I look at one he’s drawn of me while I wait for Leo. I watch myself eat sandwiches and talk to Bert while the clouds roll over my head, backwards and forwards.
