Graffiti Moon (2 page)

‘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 laugh. ‘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.

‘So?’ Leo asks me, hanging up and writing something down. I never could get my handwriting to look like his. Sundays after footy in Year 5 he’d take my hand and move it across the page for me till I got so mad I’d snap the pencil. Leo’d laugh and pull out another pencil.

‘I’m in,’ I say and close the book on me in the storeroom with Bert. I stick it in my pocket and lock up, even though there’s nothing here to steal.

We cut across the train line to the high school. I sketched a picture of this place the day I left for good in Year 10. Buildings surrounded by wire and a little guy caught in the barbs. ‘Is he trying to get in or get out?’ Bert had asked. I wasn’t exactly sure.

Dylan’s waiting for us, sitting in front of a wall that says
Dylan loves Daisy
in big red letters. Leo looks at it for a while. ‘We’re robbing this place later and you’re signing your name on the wall? Did you remember to leave the Media block window open this afternoon?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘We’re robbing the Media block?’ I ask. ‘That’s low.’

‘What do you care? They kicked you out,’ Dylan says.

‘Shut up,’ Leo tells him. ‘Ed left because he wanted to leave.’ And they start arguing about whether graffiti’s admissible evidence in court.

I watch Leo yelling and sweating and I plan a piece I could paint, a guy with his back to the wall, crowded by dollar signs that are about to kick the life out of him. The cops won’t care how Leo and Dylan and me got here. All they’ll care about is that we’re filling the van with things that aren’t ours.

While they’re yelling I spray every corner of the wall so there’s nothing to say I was ever here and while I’m doing it a siren goes off not far away. ‘I got a bad feeling,’ I tell them, but my voice gets lost in the mix of the city.

Assignment One

Poetry 101

Student: Leopold Green

Where I lived before

I used to live with my parents

In a house that smelt like cigarettes

And tasted like beer if you touched anything

The kitchen table was a bitter ocean

That came off on my fingers

There were three doors between the fighting and me

And at night I closed them all

I’d lie in bed and block the sounds

By imagining

I was floating

Light years of quiet

Interrupted by breathing

And nothing else

I’d drift through space

And fall through dreams

Into dark skies

Some nights

My brother Jake and I would crawl out the window

And cut across the park

Swing on the monkey bars for a while

On the way to Gran’s house

She’d be waiting

Dressing gown and slippers on

Searching for our shadows

She’d read us

Poetry and fairytales

Where swords took care of dragons

And Jake never said it was a load of shit

Like I thought he would

And then one night

Gran stopped reading before the happy ending

She asked, ‘Leopold, Jake. You want to live in

My spare room?’

Her voice

Sounded like space and dark skies

But that night all my dreams

Had floors

I walk across to the wall. A yellow bird lies legs up under a blue sky and the word
Peace
is sprayed in fat letters across the clouds.