Lucy

Ed and I walk through the carriages and I’m in a Shadow world that I didn’t know existed. I imagine him here alone, painting in the blush of light from the next street, and I want to find him even more. Every now and then I think he’s here because in the dark Ed looks like a shadow that someone else is casting.

I tell Ed the things I want to tell Shadow. I tell him about my folio, The Fleet of Memory. The bottles are full of things I remember about Mum and Dad before the weirdness of the shed.

In bottle two is a clay fish. It’s small enough to fit through the bottle’s neck because some things you can’t collapse. It’s in the memory fleet because we used to camp at Wilson’s Promontory. Mum would pretend to cook what Dad had caught but really they weren’t big enough so she bought dinner from the fish and chip shop and we all pretended that the fish had come from the ocean. Dad pretended so good I was never really sure if he knew the truth.

In bottle three there are a few things stuck in the putty: the corner of a page from Mum’s manuscript, a tiny piece of my glass, and a joke from one of Dad’s acts. ‘Art is more important than money, Lucy,’ Mum said when I told her about Al’s offer to teach me. ‘We’ll afford it somehow, don’t you worry about that.’

I tell Ed about the colours of Al’s studio, the flowers hanging from the ceiling. I helped Al make those flowers. I turned the pipe while he blew on the end and we watched melting glass become petals.

Some days I don’t want to go home from the studio. I want to stay with those flowers because the light shining through them makes the studio a pastel sky and the shed where Dad lives is falling down. He tapes plastic bags on the windows to keep out the insects and rain.

‘My dad was a magician too,’ Ed says. ‘Got in his car and disappeared.’

He says it like it doesn’t bother him at all and we move through the paintings, to the middle of the yard, till there’s nowhere to go but the last painting. The disappointed sea, Poet’s written. I feel like that when I see my dad walking out of the shed in the morning in his dressing gown and slippers, carrying his little toilet bag.

‘You ever feel like that?’ I ask. ‘Just flat to the edges?’

I don’t know what I expect Ed to say but I don’t expect him to talk about Veronica Mars and Turkish Delight and Freddoes. I like that he can talk about art and chocolate and TV and I like that it doesn’t feel awkward. At least till I offer to show him how to make a ship in a bottle and he tells me it’s a waste of time. Nothing about art is a waste of time. ‘It’s the time wasting that gets you somewhere,’ Al says.

Shadow would have known that. He would have said yes and we’d have headed back to Al’s to see my folio and made collapsible ships that sail on putty. I imagine him, in his silver suit, leaning over his ship, gently bringing up the sails.

‘You don’t have to look for Shadow with me,’ I say when we get back to my bike. ‘You can leave. Or I can ride you to Beth’s place if you want.’ I put on my helmet.

He looks at me long enough for it to feel kind of awkward. Then he shrugs and says, ‘If you want you can drop me at the station.’ He crouches like a runner. ‘Okay, I’m ready. Go.’

‘You’re making fun of me.’

‘Uh-uh. I’m excited by the challenge.’

He looks so stupid that it cancels out my stupid so I give in and ride and he runs and gets on the bike after only two tries. ‘That was much easier,’ I say.

‘You run next time. We’ll compare definitions of easy.’

Mum says be careful of boys who never take anything seriously. Dad says a boy needs a good sense of humour to get through his love life. Jazz says my dad must need a sense of humour to get through his love life, if he’s living in the shed.

‘So who else’s nose have you broken since mine?’ Ed asks.

I make like I’m counting. I don’t want to tell him that I’ve had exactly no dates since him. I’ve spent my time looking for Shadow. Which could, to some people, Jazz says, look a little pathetic.

‘That many, huh?’ Ed asks.

‘Okay, well, David Graham asked me on a date. I said yes but I backed out after I heard him say in Art that anyone could paint the shit he saw at the Picasso exhibition. Anyone who thinks that is stupid.’

‘That is stupid. Woman with a Crow. Not everyone could paint that.’

The night wheels past us, lights and roads and trees. ‘You like that painting?’ I ask. ‘You know that painting?’

‘Don’t sound so surprised.’

‘I’m not, I just thought . . .’

‘That art’s a secret club only you and Shadow get to be in?’ Ed finishes my sentence.

‘No.’ Maybe. I don’t know. I am surprised. If he really liked art so much, how come he didn’t say something on our date? How come he quit school in the middle of our Jeffrey Smart assignment and left me to finish the work by myself? ‘Did you go to the exhibition?’ I ask.

‘Bert and me went to see that painting. Bert liked how it looks as if the woman in the painting is in love with a bad bird. “In love with the bad times,” he said.’

‘Who’s Bert?’

‘My old boss at the paint store. He died two months ago. Heart attack in aisle three.’

‘That’s awful.’

‘Better than a heart attack in aisle four, which is where they keep the floral wallpaper. Bert hated that aisle but it was the money-spinner. He died looking at the deep reds.’

‘I guess if you have to go it’s best to see something beautiful on the way out.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Do you miss him?’

‘He was a good guy. Paid me more than he could afford but I didn’t know that till after the funeral. He taught me stuff. And he drew the coolest things. Stop for a second.’

‘If I stop pedalling you’ll have to run again.’

‘I know, stop for a second.’

I do and he gets off and pulls a book out of his pocket. The pages are bent and it’s dirty around the edges. We lean on someone’s fence and he moves in close. ‘Look.’ He flicks the pages and a little guy does a couple of kicks in the air.

‘That is the coolest thing.’

Ed flicks through all these animations. Two guys drinking beer. A dog rolling over and playing dead. A guy at a counter serving a woman. A man on his knees proposing. ‘That’s Bert asking Valerie to marry him,’ Ed says, and I like the little smile he gets when he says it. I like the way he holds the book. Like all those drawings add up to something more than money.

The last one is of a guy in a car waving and driving away. Ed hesitates over it. ‘He drew this one the day he died. That’s me. With my driver’s licence.’

‘How do you know it’s you?’

Ed holds the tiny picture next to his face. There is quite a likeness. Something about the eyebrows. ‘Plus,’ Ed says, ‘Bert was quizzing me so I’d pass my driving test.’ He flicks the pages and a guy smiles and waves a licence out of a car window. ‘I failed once but Bert was already making plans for me to take the test again so I could drive the delivery van.’

‘Everyone fails at least once.’

‘That’s what I hear,’ he says, and we look through the book again. He stops at the one of Bert drinking beer in the sun and flicks the pages to make him raise his glass a few times. ‘What do you think is on the other side?’ he asks.

‘I’m not sure. Jazz says we come back and get a second chance at things.’

Ed looks around him. ‘Hope I don’t come back to this place.’

‘You don’t like living here?’

‘You do?’ he asks.

‘I like how the place looks at night. I like the bridge, all those car lights moving in the dark. Mum and Dad and I used to drive over it because Dad likes the view.’

‘That’s a little strange,’ Ed says.

I nod. And that’s not the weirdest thing about us. We haven’t driven over the bridge together for a while. Dad and I still go sometimes. He took me over to get an ice-cream in South Melbourne after I found him nailing a number on the shed. ‘132a?’ I said. ‘We’re all 132.’ I pointed at the house.

‘Yeah, but the pizza delivery guy keeps getting confused. Don’t frown like that, Luce,’ he said, and we went for a drive over the bridge, and the world that was dirty during the day spread speckled and polished beneath us.

‘When are you moving back in?’ I asked.

‘Soon,’ he said.

‘Jazz says you’re getting a divorce.’

‘Well, Jazz is wrong. I’d tell Jazz if we were getting a divorce. Would I be living on the property and spending time with your mother every day if we were getting a divorce?’

‘No,’ I said as we drove past billboard signs that were disappearing too quickly to read.

I had Dad drop me at Al’s that night and I started the fourth ship in my memory fleet. I built it out of toothpicks and matches. I crushed glass into black putty to make it look like lights in the night. I bought a toy car and made three tiny people to put inside. That bottle took me the longest time. Al couldn’t believe it when I’d finished. ‘It’s as if you’ve shrunk the world and glassed it in.’

Ed closes the book and we watch the street. ‘Do you ever hear from your dad?’ I ask.

‘Uh-uh. Mum said they had the biggest fight before he left. She was sixteen and telling him about me and he left a dad-shaped hole in the wall.’

I laugh and then stop. ‘That’s not really funny.’

‘Doesn’t seem to bother Mum. She says she expected it.’

‘It’d bother me if I loved a guy enough to sleep with him and then he left when I was pregnant.’

‘You don’t have to love someone to have sex with them.’

‘I know that,’ I say, and my face goes nuclear like the stars. ‘It’d be nice, though. If it happened that way. If people stayed together.’

‘Go visit Leo’s parents. Nothing nice about them staying together.’

‘Daisy said he lived with his gran.’

‘You guys did a lot of talking about us while you were in the toilet.’

‘Like you didn’t talk about us when you were in the toilet.’

‘We talked about the dangers of hanging out with you,’ he says, and it actually has a ring of truth about it.

‘That’s pretty much what we talked about,’ I say, which has a ring of truth about it, too. ‘Daisy said Leo had maybe been in trouble with the police once.’

‘No charges were laid. Leo’s a good guy.’

‘But his parents aren’t good?’

‘They drank too much, I think. He hasn’t lived with them in years.’ End of story, Ed means, and that’s fair enough. I might think my parents are weird but I get to see Dad every day. I want to see him every day. Sure, I had to read him the health regulations so he stopped using the lawn as his early morning bathroom, but it was a fairly minor fault.

Ed’s quiet for a while and then his laugh breezes over me.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I was just thinking. You hit me because you wanted Mr Darcy and I wasn’t him.’

‘You know who Mr Darcy is?’

‘I exist therefore I know who Mr Darcy is. Beth studied the book in Lit this year. She made me watch the film with her over and over. She knew it back to front, that and all her other texts.’

‘She sounds smart.’ I try to make that comment seem casual but weirdly, anything I say about Beth comes out of my mouth dressed in a full-length ball gown.

Ed looks across at me and I can tell he’s heard the weirdness in my voice, but he’s not sure why it’s there either. ‘She is smart.’ He flicks through the book again, speeding up people and slowing them down. ‘Smarter than me, that’s for sure.’

I watch his flicking hands. ‘You’re smart.’

He gives me a little eyebrow action again. ‘How would you know that?’

I think about it. I know he is, I’m just not exactly sure how I know.

‘See,’ he says before I can answer. ‘You don’t know.’

‘You’re funny, which you can’t be if you’re not smart. Dad says it’s harder to make someone laugh than it is to make them cry.’

‘Because you can always punch someone to make them cry.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So would I have seen your dad’s comedy act?’ he asks.

‘Nope. I mean, not unless you hang out at late-night clubs where they have open-mike nights.’ I look at Ed with his old jeans and steel-capped boots and think about him skipping class with the sheddies. ‘You probably do hang out at late-night clubs.’

‘I told you – I go to bed early. I have to open the shop at seven-thirty in time for the trade guys and to get deliveries. Bert didn’t get there till eight-thirty so I always had to be on time.’ Ed’s hands tap on the book. ‘I was never late,’ he says, and I get the feeling he’s not talking to me so I don’t interrupt. We lean on the fence and watch the street. ‘What’s the time?’ Ed asks.

‘Twelve-thirty.’ The night’s thinning out like he described before. There are a few people waiting for the last tram, some taxis moving past. Ed and me. ‘Don’t Beth’s parents care that you’re meeting her so late? Or early, I guess.’

‘I don’t knock on the front door,’ he says. ‘We have this place, down the back of her garden. There’s a huge tree that blocks the view from the house. I get in over the back fence and meet her behind it.’

‘Romantic.’

‘Till her dad catches me. I got my escape route all worked out, though, so no one’s getting hurt.’

‘Except Beth,’ I say. ‘Sure you get over the back fence, but you leave her standing there.’

‘Beth can take care of herself.’

Thinking about him jumping the back fence makes me think about him leaving, and that makes me wonder how long we can stand here till we run out of things to say and it gets awkward. I shuffle around so he knows I’m okay with him going if that’s what he feels like doing.

‘You flick that band on your wrist a lot,’ he says. ‘Some guy give it to you?’

‘Yep. Some guy.’ I flick it. ‘It’s my dad’s lucky band. Lucky things happen to anyone wearing this band.’

‘So how’s his luck since he gave it to you?’

I think of him sitting on the deckchair outside the shed. ‘His luck’s okay. You know, you can leave. If you want.’

‘That’s twice you’ve told me that,’ he says. ‘What if I don’t want to go?’

The heat rising from the takeaway place nearby makes the air look like satin, like I could touch it if I wanted, and I concentrate on that instead of looking at Ed. ‘Where do you think Shadow is right now?’ I ask, because I can’t make my mouth say that it’s okay if Ed doesn’t want to leave.

‘Waiting for you to come and do it with him,’ Ed says, and I don’t have to look to know that he’s grinning again.

‘It’s not like I’m searching for the tooth fairy or something.’ I get on the bike. ‘Shadow exists. And I don’t know that he’ll like me but I just want to meet one guy, one guy, who thinks art is cool. Am I asking too much to meet someone who can talk and who paints and who has a brain?’

He gives me his standard eyebrow action.

‘What?’

‘He’ll only be all those things until you meet him. Then he’ll be like every other guy. And for your information, a lot of guys have brains.’

‘Get ready, mister. I have a feeling you’re going to need a run-up.’

‘Uh-uh. I’m not running after you anymore.’ He balances on the back of my bike and pushes off with one foot to give us momentum. ‘Pedal now. Now. We’ve been doing it all wrong,’ he says.

We take off along the side streets and Ed puts his hands on my shoulders and I get a zing and a tingle and the small circle of bike light pearls the road ahead. I think of those Bill Henson photographs Mrs J showed us, of teenagers in the night. When I looked at them I felt like someone got it, like someone saw what it was like to be bare skin shining in darkness.

‘By the way,’ Ed says as we ride, ‘I think art is cool.’