A Small Free Kiss in the Dark Read online

  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.

  4

  Red and black

  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 s
omewhere 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.

  I tried to outrun the planes. My throat was raw. Every breath burnt like a blowtorch. When I got to the Queen’s Elbows only the front wall was standing. Behind it was a pile of rubble big enough to fill thousands of skips. I bit my teeth together, hard, so there was no space for that flapping bird to get in. Billy’s room was in the basement. I got down on my knees and shovelled away the rubbish with my hands until I found the grate where they used to roll beer barrels down to the cellar. I pulled a pitchfork off the fence and belted the rusty catch until it fell apart. Clinging to the edges, I lowered myself into the cellar until my freezing fingers gave way and I dropped down into the darkness. It felt like my leg bones had rammed through my shoulders. I lay on my back, hugging my legs, trying to stop the pain. Through the hole in the footpath I counted the planes – seven dark arrows against the gingerbread sky – and I wondered how much longer it would be until morning. But I couldn’t wait until then; I had to find Billy.

  I imagined Bradley Clark hiding with his potato peeler, thinking I was the devil. I shivered, but sweat or blood, or both, dripped off my face. I had to find Billy’s room. I stuck my hands out like a sleepwalker, feeling my way. My foot clipped something – a ladder, and it clattered to the floor. I froze. No one came. I felt my way to a door and tried the handle. It was locked, so I hurled myself against it like the police do, but the middle was already busted and I fell through into the corridor.

  ‘Billy!’ I was past caring who else might be there. ‘Billy!’ My voice bounced back like it couldn’t escape. I crept forward.

  A corridor is meant to be straight and narrow; that’s how I visualised it. I didn’t know that the chimney from the ground floor had fallen through to the basement and blocked the corridor. Luckily I was going so slow I didn’t fall over, but there was nothing I could do except sit down and wait until morning.

  Then it was easy: I climbed up and over the bricks, calling Billy’s name. He’d showed me his room the day he moved in. It was the first on the left. The two beds against the wall, where Shorty Long and Irish Kelly usually slept, were empty. A massive steel beam had collapsed. There was plaster and concrete everywhere but I saw a space underneath it; a cave just big enough for a bed to fit; Billy’s bed. Since Shorty and Irish were gone, I guessed Billy would have made it out too but I had to be sure. I crawled in on my hands and knees. Waterfalls of sand and plaster trickled between the cracks. Everything was covered in white, like it had been snowing. There was just enough light to show Billy’s coat and the still shape of a body underneath. I couldn’t see his head on the pillow, only blood and the fallen beam.

  I crouched in the corner crying and sleeping. Time had no meaning. I only got up because there was something I wanted to do before it got too dark. I took Shorty’s blanket and cleared dust away from around Billy’s bed. Then I drew yellow flowers because yellow is the colour of happiness and that’s what Billy made me feel. It’s also the colour of kindness, and Billy was kind even though he pretended not to be. Next I did a white cross at the bottom and wrote ‘RIP Billy’. Last, I drew a dog on the wall because Billy told me he used to have a dog once. It was a sausage dog called Pablo, after Picasso. Picasso painted a picture of a sausage dog on a plate. The dog’s name was Lump. Lump and Picasso both died in 1973. Sometimes, if two people really love each other and one of them dies, the other one does too. I wonder if it’s the same for dogs. I’d like to have a dog. I drew books for Billy, too, and a pair of glasses so he could read them when he got to wherever he was going. The books made me think of the State Library and Michaela and the smashed columns that looked like the ruins of ancient Rome.

  It was hard to see inside the room by the time I finished drawing. I felt bad leaving Billy there by himself but I didn’t think I could stay all night next to a dead person. I climbed back over the hill of bricks and into the storeroom where I could look out without being seen. I shifted the ladder underneath the hole in the footpath and stepped up a few rungs. The sky was still a dirty orange, as if earth had got stuck somewhere between day and night. Sirens howled like wild dogs, swarms of planes swooped, fast and low, and bullets bombarded anything left standing. The ladder started vibrating so I jumped down and watched from the shadows as twelve pairs of boots marched past. I was still trying to decide if it would be safer to stay where I was or go somewhere else when a dark figure crouched beside the hole and I thought I heard my name, whispered like a question.

  The ladder shook as a foot came down on the top step and then another. When a man stepped off the bottom rung and turned around I bolted, up over the hill of bricks and into Billy’s room. I crawled back in next to the broken body on the bed and made myself as small as I could. Torchlight flashed across the walls where I’d drawn Billy’s favourite things, then it fell on the yellow flowers and the white cross, and I felt it on my face, and the inside of my eyelids was dangerous red. Then the man’s arms went around me and I knew he wasn’t a ghost and I knew I wasn’t damaged like my dad.

  ‘It’s Bradley Clark.’ It was Billy’s voice. ‘He had one of his seizures, turned on someone, a new bloke who didn’t know what was going on. He laid Brad out cold. I told them to put him on my bed till he came good. I loaned him my coat and left. I thought I’d bunk in with you for the night but I couldn’t find you, Skip, I thought I’d lost you.’

  Sometimes I can see colour without opening my eyes. I saw that Billy’s heart was no colour and every colour. Like water or diamonds or crystals, it’s pure and reflects the light.

  5

  Weapons of Max

  destruction

  Billy and me took two grey blankets from the Queen’s Elbows. We rolled them up and tied them tight with Bradley Clark’s bootlaces. Then Billy shut his eyes and bowed his head and I saw him touch his fingers to his forehead and to his heart before he took back his overcoat that he had loaned to poor, dead Bradley.

  I wondered what it would feel like to be Bradley Clark when he was alive. My dad told me once that there are worse things than being dead. I wondered if Bradley Clark ever wished he was dead. I rubbed out the ‘Billy’ under ‘RIP’ and wrote ‘Bradley’ instead, but I left the dog there because I heard that dogs are man’s best friends and I don’t think Bradley had any human friends.

  After that, Billy and me climbed to the top of the bricks. The city was a sea below us. Pockets of light pooled in the dark like oil slicks. We were lost sailors with no stars above to guide us. I thought about Chief Seattle who said: ‘The Indian’s night is dark. Not a single star of hope hovers above his horizon.’ And I wondered if Billy and me would ever see the stars again.

  ‘They would have been aiming for Parliament House,’ said Bi
lly. ‘Wars are all about politics.’

  I didn’t know much about war. I only knew I didn’t want to talk about it or even think about it. Up until then I thought war only happened in other countries.

  ‘Where are we going to sleep?’

  Billy looked at me, but didn’t answer.

  ‘Let’s find something to eat,’ he said after a while.

  Even when you haven’t got arthritis in your hip, it’s hard to walk across a heap of broken bricks. It’s like waking up and finding there’s a war on. Nothing’s the way it used to be and it’s difficult to get your balance. That’s why I held Billy’s hand.

  We kept to arcades and alleyways, short-cutting and soft-stepping past intersections like black cats. Tanks crashed through the wreckage like giant armadillos. The city was like a movie set. There were fronts of buildings with nothing behind them. In some places, whole blocks were left standing while others were flattened. Billy warned me to keep away from the ones that were standing in case they fell, but I reckon he meant in case they got bombed. I didn’t like going near the ones that were already down either; that’s where you saw the most bodies and heard the awful moans and cries. I looked at Billy.

  ‘Nothing you or me can do for them poor souls,’ he said.

  I knew he was right, but it still seemed wrong, just walking past. I concentrated on stepping over cracks in the concrete, and repeating words. Hit-and-miss, I said, hit-and-miss. They were poor shots, these soldiers. Hit-and-miss. They’d never hit all the tin ducks at the fun park; they’d never win a giant panda.

  I saw the broken neon sign blinking on and off above the food court and remembered I hadn’t eaten all day.

  ‘Stay here,’ whispered Billy and he limped down the blue, white and green tiled steps.

  I didn’t like him going without me. I stared at the black between the tiles and made my eyes go skinny so I could concentrate on the reverse pattern. A siren screamed close by. Lights smeared across the entry of the arcade: ribbons of dangerous red and ice-cold blue. Voices drifted up from the arcade. I listened for Billy’s, but I couldn’t hear him. Then he was there in the flickering pinkish glow at the bottom of the stairs, signalling for me to come down.