Repeat After Me

Chapter 15

'So your work hasn't been affected too much?' I asked.

'Not yet, touch wood. I do quite a lot of projects for not-for-profits and they're okay at the moment. But I did have to do a book launch on Zoom last week which was disappointing. I'd been working on this project for over a year, and would've loved to have had a proper launch party for it.'

'What was the book?'

'I've got one here, do you want to see?' She reached into her backpack and pulled out a beautiful hardcover book. On the front cover there was a girl sitting cross-legged with reindeer horns on her head.

'This is your work?'

'Yeah. I painted that on the back of a Woolworth's building in Alice Springs. I was working with Aboriginal kids in the Northern Territory. They wrote poetry and short stories and I interpreted them in my paintings. The kids loved the project. They told such heartbreaking stories, though. They've been through so much at such a young age. It's hard to believe we all live in the same country.'

I flicked through the book. Her artworks were amazing; there was something mythological about the boy and girl figures she painted, they had round heads, large eyes and pointed ears. I turned the book over and looked at the back cover.

'An actual publisher published this?'

'Yes. The education department commissioned the project.'

'What? You mean someone will pay you to do this?'

'Of course. Not all street art is illegal. I'm now making a living out of doing commissions and collaborative projects. Sure, it's not as much as I was making in the corporate world, but I can feed myself, yeah? I'm doing meaningful work. This year I've been to the Philippines and Indonesia to do community projects and I've had paid commissions in Hong Kong and Japan. It's taken off in ways I never could've imagined. But I still like doing grassroots stuff like the Abandoned Spaces show ... it takes me back to my old days. You doing it too?'

'Yeah, I'm hoping to. I just need to work out what I want to paint. I've picked out a space. The old bathroom, actually. It's small and contained and I love the idea of people walking in there and it being all my work.'

'I saw that space, it's great. I liked the woodwork above the mirror. You thought about incorporating that?'

Asten returned with a glass of gin and tonic and I sipped on it slowly, savouring this moment, meeting this lady who has decriminalised street art for me.

'Sounds like she's picked the perfect space for the Abandoned Spaces show,' Pigmentation said to Asten.

'It's a bit further away from the rest. But her work will be like a magnet,' he said.

'Oh come on,' I giggled. I liked Asten's friends. At last, I was with people like me. I could talk openly about the things I like, because they liked them too. There was no holding back secrets, pretending to be someone I'm not, because here I could be who I am. It was like being at a family reunion, discovering people with the same blood, descending from the same tree. But we had more in common than family here, we shared the same passion, we walked the same line between excitement and fear, we understood that pleasure could be found in a can of paint and a city wall and getting away with it for a night, that love was in creation and creation was love, that all some people see is crime on the streets, but the only crime is that some people don't understand beauty or altruism. Public-spiritedness is not being the Mayor of the city, it's not in politics, it's not on television, it's a tiny painting on a dirty drain pipe, so small, if you blink, you'll probably miss it.

Afterwards, I let Asten walk me half way home. 'I'm sorry about throwing that brick. It was childish. I get this thing in my brain, every now and again, like a switch goes off, and I just do those things. I'm probably undiagnosed ADHD or something.'

We were walking under the plane trees on St Kilda Road. He was holding my hand. I was so grateful for this small confession of his, this newborn honesty in my ear, that I squeezed his hand tenderly. He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it. Then my hands were around his neck and his hands were on my back and we were kissing on the lips, the portal to our hearts, and the kiss lasted so long I ran out of breath. He whispered in my ear, 'I've got a thing for you'. My thing for him was so massive right then, it reached to the moon and into another universe, it grabbed a shooting star and plunged it into my chest.

This feeling was so new to me. I couldn't talk, I could only feel. It was almost too intense. I held his body against mine. We were two smouldering hearts. A cymbal clashed together. A pilot light relit. We were injury being repaired.

'I have to go,' I managed at last, unplucking my hand from his.

'I'll walk you'

'Please, no. We agreed half way.' He kissed me once more, fresh on the lips, pleasure propagating through my body. Then I was gone, folded into the dark, without looking back, without checking to see if he was still looking at me.

I walked through the night, torn between pleasure and fear. I crept through the laundry window and up to my room. I lay down in bed. Then, at last, I breathed out and let pleasure be the lasting emotion for the night.