Clementine and Rudy Read online

  “So, what’s new, baby girl?” she asks, sitting down opposite me.

  “Not much really. In art yesterday we had to draw an apple.”

  “An apple?” She raises one of her perfectly sculpted eyebrows.

  “Yeah. I asked if I could paint a zombie maggot coming out of it but my teacher said no.”

  Mum lets rip with one of her belly laughs and pats me on the shoulder. “Oh, Rudy, I don’t know where you get your dark sense of humour.”

  There’s a beat of silence – a beat too long, as we both think of the most likely suspect: my dad. Walking out on us on my first day of reception class certainly took a warped sense of humour. As if I hadn’t been traumatized enough, left alone in a classroom full of noisy kids for the day, coming home to find my dad gone definitely made it a day to remember. Maybe that’s why I’ve always had a problem with school. Maybe deep in my subconscious it’s forever linked to parents going missing.

  “Is everything else OK?” Mum asks.

  “Sure.” And for once, I almost mean it. Everything isn’t OK but it feels as if maybe it could be. I think of what Tyler said last night, about me finally living my dream. That’s how it felt to me too. Even though I’m such a newbie when it comes to my street art, and even though I’m still making rookie errors because of my nerves, like not hanging my pictures straight and spraying over the edge of the stencil, at least I’m on the right track, at least I’ve started. I only wish Tyler could find a way to get properly started on his sound-design dreams too.

  “That’s great.” Mum taps her diamanté-studded nails on the table and I realize there’s something she wants to tell me. Something she’s too nervous to. This does not usually bode well.

  “Is everything OK with you?” I raise myself from my slump and study her face.

  “Yes, yes, everything’s fine!” she exclaims, a little too brightly.

  “Cool.”

  The kettle stops boiling and Mum leaps up. “I was wondering…” she says, with her back to me.

  “Yes…?”

  “How would you feel if Dave moved in?” She stands motionless, waiting for my response.

  But my brain seems to have frozen too. I can’t think of a single thing to say to this very worst of all questions.

  “We’ve been together almost six months now, it feels like the right time, the right thing to do.” Mum remains facing the kettle.

  My brain kicks back into life with a flurry of “but”s. But you and I have been together fifteen years… But he’s an idiot and he’s bound to leave you.

  “And it would really help us out financially.” Finally, Mum turns to look at me.

  “I can work more shifts at the café if we need more money.”

  “No!” Mum frowns. “I don’t want you working any more than you already do. You’ve got your GCSEs to think about.”

  “I don’t care about them.” I shrug.

  Mum comes over to the table. “Well, you should. Don’t you understand, Rudy? Those exams are your ticket out of here. If you pass them you can do your A levels and then you can go to university.” She says all this like it’s a good thing. She has no clue that what she’s just described sounds like a death sentence to me.

  “I want to be an artist,” I tell her.

  Mum sighs. “You’ll never make a living as an artist.”

  “Why not? Loads of people do. Look at Banksy.”

  “What, Banksy the street artist?”

  “Yes. His artwork goes for millions.”

  Mum puts her hands on her hips. “And how many other artists do you know who are making that kind of money? Rudy, honey, you need to start living in the real world.”

  “You think I’m not living in the real world?” I clench my hands into fists beneath the table. The countdown to one of Mum and my almighty arguments has begun.

  Ten … nine … eight …

  “Not if you think you’re going to make a living from some kind of pipe dream.”

  Seven … six … five …

  “It’s not a pipe dream!” I’m yelling now but I can’t help it. It’s like Mum’s saying everything that’s guaranteed to make me freak out.

  “OK, OK, honey. I’m sorry.” She sits down. “But at least if you got an art degree you’d be able to teach.”

  I have a horrific flash-forward to myself trudging around a dreary classroom placing an assortment of fruit on tables and droning on to my students about the importance of light and shade. “I don’t want to teach.”

  “Oh, really?” Mum purses her lips.

  Four … three …

  “Yes, really.”

  Two … one…

  “I think you need a bit of a reality check, Missy.” Mum marches over to the fridge-freezer and pulls a bundle of brown envelopes down from the top. “See these?”

  I nod.

  “They’re all bills. Bills I have to pay. And because I thought I knew it all when I was your age, I don’t have a single qualification to my name, so I have to work my butt off every night in that crappy casino.”

  “I thought you liked your job…”

  “Yeah, well, you thought wrong.”

  If Mum and I were playing chess she’d have just got me in checkmate. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry too.” Mum puts her arm round my shoulders. “It would just really help if Dave lived here. It would cut my outgoings in half.”

  “But…” I want to ask her if she’d still want Dave to live with us if she had a million pounds in the bank; if she wants to live with him because she loves him … but she’s looking at me so hopefully I don’t have the heart to. “OK.”

  “Really?” Her face lights up.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  As Mum goes back over to the kettle all of my earlier excitement dims. Everything is nowhere near OK. Same as it’s always been.

  CLEMENTINE

  As my feet pound the path along the seafront the aching in my legs starts to ease a little and I find my rhythm. The sky is that unforgiving shade of milk-white you only get in February and the sea is so dark it’s almost black. Everyone moans about this time of year but I quite like it, or at least I will when I’m living my dream. I add a large antique fireplace to my mental vision board of my flat in Brighton. I picture myself lying in front of a roaring fire on a furry rug, my nose stuck inside a book of poetry taken from one of the many teetering piles of books on the floor all around me because my dream flat will not be governed by Mum’s obsession with perfect symmetry. As I run past the skeletal remains of the old pier, I picture myself running away from the tension at home, literally and metaphorically, and excitement rolls in like a tide to replace it. I can’t believe the artist contacted me!

  When I get to Palace Pier music is already pounding from the speakers outside but the weather is so bleak even the flashing light bulbs in the sign look mournful and dowdy. The road that runs parallel to the front is filling with the first of the rush-hour traffic. I wait at the crossing for the lights to change and catch my breath. Then I head over to the side street where I think Fierce’s new art might be. My excitement fades. The only urban art I can see is a faded paste-up of a cartoon dog and some graffiti. I take my phone from my pocket and check the photo for clues. Maybe it’s in the next street along. I spot a narrow alleyway between two of the buildings and cut through. I’m reaching the end when a man comes stumbling towards me. His hair is tangled and greasy and his clothes are grimy.

  “All right, love. Don’t suppose you’ve got any change?” He smiles, showing dark gaps between his teeth.

  I shake my head. “No, I’m sorry, I don’t have any on me.” Seeing his thin face and threadbare clothes really makes me wish that I did.

  “No worries, love. You have a good day.”

  “You too.”

  I emerge onto the street and glance up and down. A splash of red on the wall opposite pierces the gloom, sending a bolt of recognition through me. It’s the piece by Dynamite. And there, next to
it, is the picture Fierce Urban sent me. I hurry across to it. Now that there’s no one obscuring it I can see that the girl in the picture is tied to a chair as well as having her mouth sealed by a cross of black tape. As before, it’s a mixed-media piece. The girl has been drawn but the chair is a black and white photograph and all around the picture are lightning bolts in silver and gold. I stand still and drink it all in. There’s so much pain on her face. Not just the black tear on her cheek but her tortured expression. The rumble of a delivery van making its way up the narrow street breaks me from my daze. I quickly take some photos of the picture, trying to get the best angle and making sure I get the FIERCE tag in.

  “I saw them doing it, you know.” I turn and see the man from the alleyway standing behind me.

  “Sorry?”

  “The picture. I saw them doing it. Last night. I was kipping in that doorway.” He nods to a restaurant doorway across the street. An old duvet is heaped on top of a flattened cardboard box in the corner.

  “Oh, I see. Did you say ‘them’?”

  He nods. “There was two of them. One of them put it up and did the painting. The other one took photos, like you.”

  “What did they look like? The one who put it up?”

  He shrugs. “Hard to tell, really. It was dark, you know, and she was wrapped up well.”

  “She? It was a woman?”

  “Yeah – well, a girl, really. ’Bout your age, I’d say.”

  My excitement builds. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  “No problem.” He shuffles back over to the restaurant doorway and picks up the old duvet.

  Sorrow slices through my excitement at the thought of him having to sleep out in the icy cold on the street.

  As I jog back along the seafront, I process this latest development. @FierceUrban is the artist – or at least they were with the artist. I should have asked the man about the other person, the one taking the photos. But the main thing is, the artist did a new picture and messaged me immediately, saying, Over to you… They must want me to write another poem. The girl bound to the chair is kind of like the girl in the other picture, the one with the distorted reflection. Both of them are trapped but in different ways. I start mulling over ideas as I run. I think about what I’d say to the girl in the picture if I was standing in front of her. I’d want to tell her to break free. To stand up. No, to rise up. To speak up. To… I glance down at the beach and see a sight that makes my thoughts come screeching to a halt. Vincent in his shiny new tracksuit, standing outside one of the cafés, talking and laughing into his phone. Through the sudden silence caused by a gap in the traffic a few of his words drift up to me. “Miss you too, darling…”

  RUDY

  I’m so angry about the whole Idiot Dave Moving In thing that I make an executive decision to pull a sickie. The truth is, I genuinely am sick – sick of adults ruining everything. As soon as I’ve faked a call from Mum telling the school office that “My Rudy’s got a stomach bug…” I decide to go and check out my art, and get some photos of it. It’s funny how different the street looks in the daylight, and how much more chilled it feels when I’m not about to do something illegal. There’s no sign of the homeless man from the night before, or his duvet in the restaurant doorway. I guess he has to move on before the staff show up for work.

  As soon as I see my picture my disappointment at what happened this morning with Mum is replaced with defiance. It looks OK. Better than OK. Even next to Dynamite’s amazing piece it seems to fit in. The tortured expression on the girl’s face is powerful and the lightning bolts around her glimmer in the pale morning sunshine. Mum was wrong. I can be an artist. I am an artist. Yeah, but how are you going to make any money? a voice in my head says. A voice that sounds annoyingly like Mum’s. And then a load of other crappy thoughts start crowding in. You’re going to be living with Dave. The only way to escape will be to go to university and stay in education for an eternity. You’re never going to be free. I look back at my self-portrait. I should have added shouty thought bubbles above my head, full of my fears. I wonder if other urban artists ever feel like this – like, as soon as their work is up on the wall, they can see about a million different ways to improve on it.

  “I saw them doing it, you know,” a man’s voice says behind me.

  I turn and see a young guy with dark, matted hair and dirty, over-sized clothes, standing by an alleyway on the other side of the street. “Saw who doing what?”

  “That,” he points to my picture. “They did it last night. You’re the second person this morning to stop and look at it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. The other girl even took a photo of it.”

  “Oh, did she?” Now I’m properly interested.

  “Yeah. She wanted to know all about who did it too.”

  “Oh, did she? What did you tell her?”

  “Don’t suppose you’ve got any spare change, have you?”

  “Sure,” I say as I fumble in my pocket for some money.

  “Bless you.” He gives me a warm smile and I get a brief snapshot of the person he truly is, beneath the grimy mask of homelessness. I file the idea away in my mind as a potential art piece. “Not a lot I could tell her, seeing as it was so dark. I was kipping over there, in that doorway.”

  He’s the homeless guy from last night. Could the girl he’s talking about have been the poet @SpilledInk? Would she really have come down here so soon after accepting my message request on Instagram? “I don’t suppose… Did you see her write anything?”

  “Nah, she just took a couple of pictures and left. She was running.”

  “What?”

  “You know, like out for a run.”

  “Ah, OK. Thank you.” So it could have just been a passing jogger. But why did she ask this guy all the questions? This sounds like a case for my Jedi brother. I say goodbye and start heading up the road to Kale and Hearty.

  CLEMENTINE

  I watch Vincent for a few seconds until my teeth start chattering. Although I’m not able to hear any more of his conversation due to the traffic and the seagulls I can tell from his body language and the way he keeps laughing that he’s definitely on a personal call – but to who? I start jogging back home, my brain knotted in confusion. Should I tell Mum? But what would I say? It’s not a crime for Vincent to make a phone call. And even if I did tell Mum and she confronted him, he’d be bound to come up with some kind of excuse, like he was speaking to a work colleague. I have to play this super vigilantly, look out for other evidence that he might be cheating. Right now, I have the upper hand because he doesn’t know I saw him. As I let myself into the house I feel really uneasy. I head straight for my ensuite bathroom and into the shower, where I turn the water on full force to try and wash away the uncomfortable feelings.

  “Clem, breakfast’s ready,” Mum calls up the stairs as I’m getting dressed.

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” I call back. The thought of having to play happy families over breakfast with Vincent makes me feel sick. I flick through the photos of Fierce’s latest picture on my phone. As soon as I see them I feel slightly better. I have a poem to write. I can focus on that during breakfast as a distraction.

  By the time I get dressed and go downstairs Mum is bustling between the fridge and the hob and Vincent and Damon are both sitting at the table.

  “And that’s why you should never trust a Gooners fan, son,” Vincent is saying to Damon.

  “Hey,” I mutter as I sit down.

  “What about Chelsea fans?” Damon says, neither of them acknowledging me. I feel like I do when I visit Dad and he and Ada start talking in German. Football-speak is a foreign language to me.

  “Nah,” Vincent says, “they’re all plastics.”

  He and Damon start laughing.

  “Do you want a hand, Mum?” I ask, even though it really bugs me that the division of labour in this house is a textbook illustration of the evils of the patriarchy.

  “No, it’s OK,�
� Mum replies in her sing-song voice as she brings a plate of sausage sandwiches over.

  “Cheers, love,” Vincent says, grabbing one and demolishing most of it in a single bite.

  “Sausages!” Damon exclaims.

  “Yes, well, your dad and Clem have both been running. I thought you’d need something filling.”

  “You’ve been running?” Vincent finally acknowledges me.

  “Yes.” I stare back at him.

  “Where did you run to?”

  “Just along the seafront.” I study his face for any sign of a reaction.

  “Oh – er – that’s great.” From the way he’s stammering he definitely seems rattled.

  “You should go together next time,” Mum says.

  My stomach tightens with dread at the prospect but I force myself to grin. “That’s a great idea.” If he is using his morning jogs as a cover to call another woman this will really get to him.

  “Yeah,” he mutters. “Maybe. Any more coffee going?”

  As Mum hurries over to get the coffee I want to scream. Why does she do everything for him? Is that why he’s been putting her on such a guilt trip for not working? So she’ll run around after him like a servant? As Vincent and Damon start talking football again I look at @FierceUrban’s picture on my phone and a line pops, perfectly formed, into my head: When did you forget that you were born to rise?

  It’s a question I want to ask Mum as well as the girl on the chair.

  When did you forget that you were born to rise –

  Born to blaze a trail, like a star across the skies?

  I quickly tap the lines into the notepad on my phone.

  “No phones at the table, Clementine,” Mum says sternly, bringing Vincent’s coffee over.

  “Sorry, I was just writing a note to myself about my homework.”

  “Yeah, right,” Vincent sneers. He turns to Damon and grins. “I bet she’s texting her boyfriend.”