A Small Free Kiss in the Dark (4 page)
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.’
I didn’t know how I was going to do all this stuff if I couldn’t go back to the library. I closed my fingers around the packet of chalks in my pocket and squeezed my eyelids shut. What Billy said was like something my dad would have said. But saying stuff, even if it’s good, isn’t enough. Dad never did anything, he just talked about it. Even I knew you needed plans.
After Billy went back to the Queen’s Elbows I climbed into the skip again and wrapped myself up. Then I started thinking about overcoats. That’s another thing I do sometimes when I’m trying not to think about stuff that’s happened or might happen or might not. This is what I know so far:
The word coat makes people think about feelings like comfort, warmth, friendship, safety and happiness.
Using an object this way when you write is called
symbolism
.
In real life, coats can be used to cover up things no one wants to know about: ugly stuff like bruises and half-smoked cigarettes you’ve picked up off the footpath to swap for something to eat. And stolen chalk.
Some people think you can use a coat, like a fake smile, to cover up invisible things like a broken heart or hate or being afraid. (If you have some or all of these things they say you are
damaged
.)
People who have invisible damage to hide sometimes wear khaki coats with metals buttons and medals on them.
My dad had a coat like that and so did Billy. (The young soldier at the Carousel of War and Peace had one too, but I didn’t know about him then.)
Sometimes the best disguise is not wearing a coat, so people think you have nothing to hide.
Number seven was why I decided to stop wearing Dad’s coat to the State Library. Billy and me had made a plan to go back there in the morning and I didn’t want to give Michaela another reason to think I was homeless.
The next day was Pension-day Thursday. That day only came around once a fortnight, and it was when Billy bought me new chalks. I stuffed Dad’s overcoat in my backpack and cleaned myself up in the McDonald’s rest rooms before I met Billy. Then we bought chalk for me and cigarettes for him before we went to the library to carry out the plan. As soon as we got inside Billy went over to Michaela and asked her where to find the art books, even though we both knew exactly where they were.
‘It’s for my grandson, Skip,’ Billy said and he winked at me with the eye that wasn’t next to Michaela. ‘He’s visiting from interstate while his family’s away on business. He’s an art student and he’s studying the Masters.’
‘I’ve seen your art on the footpath,’ Michaela said, and she was smiling. ‘I like it very much.’
That was the first time she ever spoke to me, and I couldn’t think of a single word to say back. I followed her and Billy to the art section, and I kept thinking about how she called my chalk drawings ‘art’ and how Billy pretended I was his grandson. I thought that was a stroke of genius because it wasn’t even part of the plan.
We spent all morning at the library and I felt different. It wasn’t just because I didn’t have Dad’s coat on. I felt safe, like I really did have a grandpa. When we went outside we sat on the steps. Billy opened his packet of cigarettes and I opened my new box of chalks and took out the blue and the green. I already knew what I was going to draw. I’d looked at the picture every time I came to the library and now I thought I knew it by heart. By the time I’d finished, the blue and the green were worn down to stubs but it was worth it.
I did a pond, like the one in Monet’s famous garden. I even drew pebbles on the bottom because in real life Monet made sure the water in his pond was so clear he could see the light reflected in it. And I drew waterlilies floating on top, and touches of white and yellow to show the light, the way Monet did, only his touches were paint and mine were chalk. I really like the way Monet did hundreds of tiny brushstrokes that look a bit blurry close up, then when you step back it all becomes clear. It’s a little bit like the 3D Magic Eye pictures they used to print in the newspaper on Saturdays, where you have to put the paper right up close to your eyes and then gradually move it further and further away until all of a sudden you can see something you couldn’t see before and it’s like you stepped right inside another world.
Sometimes I wonder if life is like that. I wonder if God is up there, standing back like Monet from his easel, and He or She can make sense of all the stuff that happens on earth: war and violence and everything. Or maybe God is like me, with different coloured eyes, and things are beautiful and happy, or sad and ugly, depending on which eye He closes and which one He leaves open. Michaela was beautiful whichever eye I looked out of, and even when I looked with both.
When I finished my pond Billy said, ‘Makes me want to take my boots off and dip my feet in, Skip.’
Billy never washed his feet in winter. He said it was bad for you because it stripped all the natural oils from your skin and let the chill seep up through your feet into your body. But I knew he was giving me a compliment about my drawing.
After a while I noticed people were walking around my pond instead of across it. Billy noticed too. I remember the smile on his face. I wished Michaela would come out and have her lunch on the grass like she sometimes did. I wanted her to look into Monet’s pond with her iris-coloured eyes. But even though the sun was shining and the sky was pure blue, the air was cold because it was July, and Michaela didn’t come out. I didn’t know I would never see her again.
Red is brave, happy, loud and fast, and sometimes dangerous or angry. Black is soft, slow, silent and sad, but it can be angry, too. I know this because of the words chalked on the footpath next to Chief Seattle:
‘When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, it denotes that their hearts are black.’
War is mostly black and red.
Bradley Clark thought everyone else was the devil when he had his fits. He tried to stab people with his potato peeler, and hurled furniture at the walls of the refuge. He was like a shattered stained-glass window: something beautiful that’s broken; a million colours fallen on the ground where no light can get through.
When I woke up in the night after I’d drawn the lily pond there was no colour and no light. There was only sound. More sound than I’d ever heard in my life. Enough to make my eardrums bleed. My eyes, nose and mouth were full of dust. No room for air, no breath to scream for help and no way anyone could have heard. My body hurtled out of control. I was a star falling into a black hole. I was Bradley Clark, possessed by the devil, inside a concrete mixer or an earthquake, going mad. I was a damaged person. And then something clicked in my brain and I knew I was in the skip. I had to get out, dodge bricks, broken concrete, cover my head, find the lid and breathe. My lungs were about to explode when the skip slammed hard into something and stopped. The lid peeled back as easy as a note off a sticky pad. The skip was on its side. Rubbish spewed out on the street. I dragged a mixture of dust and air down my windpipe, pulled my legs free and crawled out into the red and the black.
The world was full of screaming: people, sirens, alarms and machines. Fires burnt everywhere. The skyline was a bleeding mouth of broken teeth.
I ran and ran, looking for a place I knew, a face I knew; looking for Billy. I dodged massive concrete columns flung across the streets like pick-up sticks, ran past stairways going nowhere, windows with no glass, piles of steel spaghetti and water gushing metres high from broken pipes. I saw lanes of cars crushed flat, like soft-drink cans, with their drivers still inside them. I threw up beside an upside down bus. Its windows were filled with squashed faces and staring eyes that didn’t see me. My sneakers stuck to the dark stains that leaked out on the footpath, and I ran again. Clouds of dust and smoke and darkness made it hard to find my way.
‘Billy! Billy!’ I screamed, thinking I’d never find him because I didn’t even know where I was. Then I saw a huge, stained-glass window. There was no building, not even a wall, just the window with a fire burning somewhere behind. It was a miracle. I thought that window might be the last beautiful thing left on earth, so I scrambled over the rubble and stood in front of it. The crimson and the amber fell across my bleeding arms. The man in the glass had blood on his head and his hands and on his pure, white robe. He had a long beard, and for a second I thought he might be a terrorist, but then I noticed he was holding a lamb and a curly walking stick, not a gun.
Behind me, a building erupted like a volcano, spewing red-hot lava into the streets. I turned to run again and saw the church spire of St Mary’s, only it wasn’t where it used to be. It was lying across the footpath and in the gutter where my wedding birds had been. The bells had buried themselves in concrete, and if you didn’t know anything about concrete you’d think it was soft as butter. Because of St Mary’s, I knew which way to go to find Billy.
A rhyme pounded against the inside of my head in time with my footsteps: ‘Here’s the church and here’s the steeple, open the door and you’ll see all the people.’ Words from way back, when I was a little kid, when I had a father, before he let the ghosts get him. I played them over and over, like a scratched CD, to block out the black and the red: the bodies, the blood, the fire, the smoke, the hate, the anger and the damage. What had happened could only be war, and I knew all about what war did to people.