Ed

I’m looking right at her. There’s one movement between me and that freckle and I could lean over and start this whole thing off between us. ‘Lucy, there’s something I need to tell you.’ She asks me what and I tell her it’s about Shadow. ‘About me and Shadow.’

The words are finally out there. I’m painting a wall for us, a Shadow stepping back into the person who cast it, and becoming solid. I can’t think of the words quick enough to tell her, though, and she’s filling in the outline for me and somewhere in the telling and the hearing I’m sitting instead of lying next to her.

‘He’s a criminal,’ she says.

And I am but I’m not and I want to put her on pause and paint a wall where I explain everything. A wall that starts years back and goes until now. A guy with thoughts bashing at the inside of his head with no way to get out. A guy with the doors in his brain open to the world but closed to him. A guy sitting on the side of the road, watching a blue car go past.

She tells me that car is going to the desert. That it’s not an ugly place. That if I looked I’d see signs of life. I’m tired of looking. I want something to be easy. I want to get in one of those cars and go someplace where I can paint on air so people know what I’m thinking without me having to say.

She moves closer and I move closer and I’m back at that wall, painting that ghost in a jar. I’m brushing against her. She smiles at me and I’m lost. She tells me that the van we’re sitting on was blue in another lifetime. I want to believe it.

Leo and the guys come back across the freeway and we climb off the roof and cram back into the van. Leo takes off and I talk to hear her talk back. ‘Pink is a shitty colour.’

‘It depends,’ she says. ‘Last year Mrs J took us to this exhibition by an artist called Angela Brennan. It was full of paintings that were so vivid: pink and green and red. I think you would have liked it.’

‘Not really a pink kind of guy.’

‘You’d have liked the title. It was called Everything is what it is and not some other thing.’

‘Be easier if we all called things what they really are.’

‘What would you do if you weren’t at the paint store?’ she asks.

‘Work at McDonald’s, probably.’

‘No you wouldn’t,’ she says.

‘No I wouldn’t. I’d study art, I guess. But I don’t have Year 12.’

‘At Monash University you can do this course that’s like Year 11, but if you do well in it you go through to the uni. Al told me about it when I was in Year 10.’

‘So you do all practical stuff?’

‘I guess some essays, but mostly practical. Why don’t you apply?’ she asks.

‘No money to do a course.’

‘You can get grants and you could keep working at the paint store, part-time.’

‘Maybe,’ I say, and catch Leo looking at us in the rear-view.

But like the lady says, everything is what it is and not some other thing. I can’t write essays and I don’t have a job at the paint store. I don’t have choices. Maybe things would have been different if I’d heard about the course when Bert was alive. ‘No guts, no glory,’ he’d have said before he helped me get on with it.

Leo pulls into a car park near the casino. The night’s thick and humming here, even though it’s close to two. We walk over and watch people go headfirst into the glitter.

The queue for Maria runs all the way alongside the taxi rank. I guess a lot of people in the city are looking for magic. My mum’d give her last five dollars to that woman for a bit of hope, and when a person’s hoping that hard it’s wrong to take their money.

‘I got a bad feeling about this,’ I say to Leo and Dylan while the girls are in the toilet. ‘I don’t want to go in.’

‘You’ve been telling your mum this is stupid for years and now suddenly you believe it?’ Leo asks. ‘Maria Contessa is not going to bust us in front of the girls.’

‘I can’t explain it. But I don’t want to go in there.’

‘I want to go in there,’ Dylan says. ‘I want to find out why Daisy’s so mad.’

‘You forgot her birthday,’ I tell him.

His pupils dilate a bit. ‘I knew there was something I meant to get with the eggs. Don’t go in without me. Tell the girls I’m in the toilet or something.’ He runs to the doors and disappears into the casino.

‘I’m serious, I’m not going in,’ I say to Leo while we wait. ‘I’m asking Lucy if she wants to get some food with me before we take her home. I’ll meet you back here at two-thirty. Half an hour’s heaps of time to drop them off and get to the school.’

‘I know you’re pissed at me,’ Leo says. ‘I know why.’

‘Forget it. I’m worried about getting caught, that’s all.’

‘I didn’t know the van was Crazy Dave’s. Jake told me to go to Montague Street and by the time I worked out it was his house it was too late to turn back. But I told Jazz she couldn’t come in there with me.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m not a total idiot. I’m not completely out of control.’

‘You really like her, huh?’

‘She eats a lot of lollies,’ he says. ‘More than I eat sausage rolls.’

‘That’s quite a few lollies, then.’

‘Quite a few.’ He keeps watching the doors, waiting for her to come back through them. ‘I wish I hadn’t borrowed that money. If I could think of any other way to get it than doing the school over . . .’

‘So we’ll think of something. We’ll deal with Malcolm some other way.’

‘There isn’t another way,’ he says. ‘I’ve been thinking all night, while she was dancing around me. That’s all I could think about. But you shouldn’t come with me. It’s my problem.’

‘If you go, I go.’

It feels like we watch those doors for hours, waiting for what we want to walk on through. A light goes on and off over our heads making us nervous shadows. After a while Leo says, ‘I want to tell her I’m Poet. Not to score her. Just so she knows.’

‘Catch 22,’ I say. ‘Once you tell her, there won’t be any scoring.’

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Still.’

I nod. ‘How do you want to tell them? You want to go with straight honesty?’

‘That’s the plan,’ he says, and then we see them coming out of the doors. ‘That’s bad.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Everything is what it is, I think, watching Raff and Dylan and the girls walk towards us. I just wish it were something else.