Ed

I painted those birds a while back. Took a chance early in the morning, on the way to open the store. The light coming over the buildings was burning back the night. I didn’t have to climb high. Just sat on a fence with a couple of real birds lined up beside me and did the whole thing above eye level. Balancing was the hard part. There was this one real crow laughing the whole time I worked, and as I did the last line he flew across the wall and into the sky. He circled back once, like he was saying, See? It’s easy when you figure out how.

Feels like art’s the only thing I ever figured out. Words, school, I never got the whole picture. I’d sit there trying to block the sounds of scraping chairs and the other kids. I’d try to make a tunnel round the teacher’s voice so it came to me clear. Most days I couldn’t do it. I’d hear it all and so I’d hear nothing. Like I was standing in a place where every sound was the same level and I couldn’t separate the threads. Like every door in the world was open and the sound was pouring in.

I couldn’t have got through to Year 10 without Leo. He helped me read and I gave him a place to crash and neither of us needed to know why. I went round to his place once when I was in Year 5. He opened the door and behind him I heard waves of music and yelling. When I think back to that day I hear the zoo. The sounds of things getting out of their cages. He shut the door and we didn’t say what I’d heard. We walked away.

He stayed at my place that night. I was almost asleep when he started talking from the floor beside me. About how he didn’t like the smell of beer. About how he liked that my house was quiet. He said sometimes he didn’t like sleeping because he dreamt. In the dark I told him about the open doors in the world and how I couldn’t do the assignment that was due.

Before he went home the next day he asked to see what I’d done and I showed him and he fixed it for me. Didn’t change anything. Just made it readable. He did that to every assignment from then on.

The pieces I paint come out of my head right. No spellcheck required. I hear people talking about the feeling they get when they paint stuff in illegal places. Leo says he gets this fast-moving fear swinging through him, running from his heart to every place under his skin. I paint so the fast-moving fear stops. I paint to close those doors.

Lucy stares at the birds tonight. I stare at her and try to work out what she’s thinking. Dreaming about some guy that doesn’t exist, I guess. A guy with the ocean pouring out of his can and words pouring out of his mouth, saying things she wants to hear. I wonder what Shadow looks like in her head. What he sounds like. She turns and catches me staring. ‘Come on,’ I tell her. ‘Train’s coming.’

Train’s coming and you have to go to a party to look for a guy you’ll never find. A guy who exists in your head, not the guy who did that piece. Not the guy who’s me.

The train belts along the line and the world outside the window rockets and blurs. Jazz and Leo take two seats on the left of the door. Daisy and Dylan take two on the right. There are no seats for Lucy and me so we swing with the motion of the train, listening to two separate conversations.

‘I bet they have air conditioning on the Camberwell train line,’ Jazz says. ‘They could at least give us windows that open.’

‘Kids’d stick their heads out and bam,’ Leo says. ‘Blood everywhere.’

‘Who’d be stupid enough to stick their head out of a moving train?’ Jazz asks.

‘It’d be great if you could stick your head out of the window,’ Dylan says to Daisy. She licks her finger and writes ‘idiot’ on the glass.

Lucy laughs and I can’t help laughing with her. We sway round each other, the train jolting as it shifts tracks to go south. Through the window I see flames shooting from the refinery and half a moon hanging that wasn’t there before. It makes me think of a wall that Leo and me did once. A graffiti moon cut by the shadow of power lines. A prisoner moon, Leo wrote.

I made drawings of that moon in my book before I painted it. I wanted it to be like one of those Dali dreamscapes Bert and me had seen at the gallery. I couldn’t get those watery images out of my head and that night I dreamt of a moon locked up by shadows.

‘Why’d you leave school?’ Lucy asks out of nowhere.

‘I was worried you’d beat me up again.’

The train stops and people push on. I let a few get between us so I don’t have to answer any more questions about why I left. Beth asked me once, too. I told her I got a job offer and my mum needed help paying the rent. It was half of the truth, the better half of it. The bad half was that I got caught pulling an essay out of my pants.

It was our first in-class Art essay. Until then I’d typed what I wanted to say and Leo had looked it over for me and fixed anything that didn’t make sense, like he’d done in primary school. But from Year 10 on we had to do all our work in class to get ready for Year 12 exams so I was stuffed. ‘You’re not stuffed,’ Leo said. ‘I’ll write what you want to say and then you sneak it in.’

If Mrs J had been at school that day the whole thing would have gone down different. She was sick, though, and Fennel was the substitute. He caught me taking the paper out of my pants and went off. Like me doing that was somehow all about him. He said to the class, ‘If anyone else’s brains are in their trousers they can come sit with me at the front of the class.’ What sort of idiot says trousers?

I didn’t look at Lucy all class. I wanted to look. I wanted to give her some sign that I wasn’t a cheat but I couldn’t think of what that would be since I’d just taken an essay out of my pants.

When the bell went she left with the others and Fennel shoved me towards the office. While we were walking a kid came up behind him and made this clown face and pretended to wank himself. I knew it’d be all over the school in a second. When I think back to that day all I see are wanking clowns.

Fennel got this brainwave in the coordinator’s office. Told me to sit there and write the sentence This essay is not mine so he could compare handwriting. He’d had Leo in Woodwork for years so he knew whose handwriting it was. The essay was mine so I gave him some suggestions about where he could put it for safekeeping. ‘Till Mrs J comes back.’ He didn’t think much of them so he dragged Leo in.

‘Not my writing,’ Leo said. ‘It’s Ed’s.’ He sat there with his legs stuck out and his arms crossed, staring Fennel down. We both got suspended, more for the suggestions we gave Fennel about where he could shove the essay than anything else. Leo went back after a week.

I trawled paint stores for blue during the day and I painted skies at night. Found a blue close to what I wanted in Bert’s shop, only it was in a tin so I had to keep going back for more.

‘I hope you’re not one of those little delinquents who’ve been vandalising the side of my shop,’ he said one day as he was ringing up my stuff.

‘If I was I doubt I’d tell you,’ I said, expecting him to kick me out.

‘You get those two black eyes because you got a smart mouth?’ he asked.

‘I got two black eyes because I don’t have a smart mouth,’ I said, and when he laughed I told him about Lucy. He kept laughing till Valerie walked in and then he invited me to stay for lunch.

‘I’m not bombing the side of your store with paint from a tin,’ I told him while we were eating. ‘You should stop selling the stuff in cans if you don’t want people writing on your place.’

‘I stock it for the art studio down the road.’ He stared at me for a while. ‘Why aren’t you in school?’

‘I quit.’

‘No future in quitting.’

‘I got a future in art.’ I pulled out my sketchbook.

He looked through it slowly, creaky old hands turning the pages. After a while he pulled out his book. By the end of the day I was a subversive with a solid career in home decoration retail and a discount on my paint.

Mrs J visited after a week or two. Leo told her where to find me. She walked in and pretended to look at the paint. When I said hello she opened her eyes wide. ‘Ed, what a lovely surprise. I’m glad I caught up with you. I read your essay.’ I didn’t even have to tell her it was mine.

Bert made her a cup of tea and gave her a chair and we talked about the colours of Rothko’s paintings, how they took you some other place that was all hazy sky. ‘You could come back,’ she said. ‘I could help and there’s a department in the school that can make things easier.’

‘Thanks but no thanks. I got everything I need here.’

‘For now,’ she said, and I shrugged. I knew what she meant. The days were already dragging but Bert was a good boss and I figured that was the price I had to pay for being safe.

‘You got lucky,’ Mrs J told Bert on her way out.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he said.

The train stops and people get out. Lucy’s in the same place she was before. There’s no one between us but she doesn’t ask the question again. She looks out the window, maybe at that hanging moon or the shooting flames and tells me, ‘I like that the skies go nowhere. In that painting. I like that the birds want to get away but they can’t. I like the reflection of paint in the dark.’ The train starts again and I hold tight to stay steady.

The party’s on Mason Street, a few minutes from the station. Leo takes the long way there, though, and I know it’s to show Jazz one of his poems called The daytime things.

While the girls are reading it I give him a what-do-you-think-you’re-doing? look. ‘It’s the plan,’ he mouths. But he’s not showing her this piece so she can think some other guy did it. Sooner or later he’s planning on telling her he wrote the poem.

‘I like it,’ Jazz says. ‘I like that he cares about the world.’

Leo grins. ‘Yeah,’ he says, looking thoughtful. ‘He seems like a good guy.’

This poem’s longer than Leo’s usual stuff. He read it to me before it went up on the wall. ‘When did you write that?’ I asked him.

‘Sitting at the servo. This guy started talking to me while I was waiting for Jake.’

I walk ahead and leave Leo and Jazz looking at the wall. You got to keep moving round here.