Graffiti Moon

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.

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.

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.’

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.