‘I’m not bored.’
‘But you’re boring.’
‘Fuck off. If I’m so boring, go and hang out with someone else.’
‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot.’
‘Okay. So what are we going to do then?’
‘I want to do some spraying!’
‘Spraying?’
‘Graffiti.’
‘What?’
‘My cousin Peter and his mates have been tagging the neighbourhood. Let’s go with them.’
‘We’ll get into trouble.’
‘Come on, don’t be such a wuss. You can be too much of a fucking goody-goody, Jo, and you’ll have plenty of time for that when you’re old and have kids and a house, and have to spend every night sitting in front of the TV, wiping snot off your kids’ noses and worrying where you are going to get the money to pay the bills…’ Ash kept at it until Jo felt her life was already over, and if she didn’t do something soon she would get old overnight.
It took Ash ages to convince Peter and then it took him time to convince his mates. In the end they said yes because they were all worried Ash would tell Peter’s mum about the graffiti. They agreed to meet at midnight in the goods yard at the back of Yarraville Station.
Sneaking out wasn’t difficult. Mandy slept at the back of the house and Jo slept at the front, and there were several rooms in between. At eleven, Jo made a hot chocolate and went to bed. She listened to Mandy turn off all the lights and lock the front door. She listened to her walk down the hallway to her room. Then she waited until her mother was asleep and, with her shoes in her hand, she tiptoed down the hall, making sure to avoid the creaky floorboards and close the door carefully as she left.
Once she was outside, she started to worry. At the gate, she hesitated, considered turning around and going back to bed, but she didn’t want to let Ash down. Across the road, the tanks shone under the lights, and the traffic across the West Gate was a series of speeding fireflies.
Jo ran all the way down Hyde Street, across and into Francis Street, down Stephen Street into Schild, and then Anderson past the shops, down Ballarat and Murray and into the goods yard. When she arrived, the others were waiting. There were four boys and Ash. Two of the boys were carrying backpacks.
‘Now,’ Peter said, ‘if I say run, then you run as fast as you can straight home and don’t stop, and if you get caught you don’t fucking know us, never seen us before, don’t know our names.’ Peter was a pimply-faced teenager a year or so older than Jo and Ash. He’d been kept down at school so they were in several classes with him.
The boys led the way. They stopped under the Somerville Road overpass, where the council workers had recently painted over the last lot of graffiti with grey paint, leaving them a large blank canvas. The boys took out their spray cans and started tagging. Ash joined them. ‘Come on,’ she said to Jo.
‘What will I tag?’
The boys laughed. ‘Fucking amateurs,’ Peter said. ‘Your tag is your ID. You put it everywhere, as many places as possible. For fuck’s sake.’ He shoved a spray can in her hand. ‘Here, hold it straight. And then write your tag.’
Jo’s heart thumped and she thought she might throw up. But she was excited too. Alive. Full of energy. She wanted to tag. She pushed the nozzle down and wrote Jojo. The letters were fuzzy, only just readable.
‘You’re a fucking toy,’ Peter said.
‘Give her a break,’ Rico, one of the other boys, said.
Peter thumped the boy on the arm, hard. ‘What, you got the hots for her?’
Rico thumped him back and they began wrestling. Until they heard a car coming — then they all ran and hid in the shadows, behind trees, under the steps of the overpass. When one of the cars turned out to be a police patrol car, Jo thought she might wet herself. Adrenaline. Heart racing.
‘Wasn’t that great,’ Ash said when the cop car had driven away and they came back to look at their tags. Ash insisted they all walk Jo home, and she was grateful. Along the way, Peter and Rico and the others stopped to graffiti fences and walls, and Jo and Ash giggled and laughed. But Jo was still trembling when she climbed into bed.
Were some people more alive than others? Was loneliness a kind of death?
Sometimes Jo had been lonely, even with Ash as a friend.
One of the things Jo admired about Ash was her willingness to reveal details about all aspects of her life. Until recently, Jo thought that this meant Ash didn’t have secrets. She’d told Jo all about sex with Kevin, all of the intimate details. How it hadn’t gone well the first time, stage fright, he was a virgin. She told Jo about her arguments with her parents and her sister. About the arguments her parents had, about her mother’s affair with a teacher at school that almost ended up with her parents divorcing — family secrets no one was supposed to know. About an old neighbour who lured Ash into his house once when she was eight and showed her his penis. She described the penis and told Jo it wasn’t the first one she’d seen because her father sometimes walked around the house naked, and so it hadn’t been the sight of the penis that made her cry — it was a small, shrivelled thing. She cried because he wanted her to touch it. She screamed and ran, her neighbour giving chase, but she’d made it out of the house and told her parents and then watched out of the window as the police dragged him away.
Ash told Jo things that, if they had happened to Jo, she wouldn’t have told anyone, not even Ash. She didn’t tell Ash about the girls at primary school who said she was too fat to play with them. Neither Mandy nor Ash knew about her trip to Fitzroy, when she stood outside Ian’s house. She hadn’t told either of them about the anxiety, about the doubt, about the voices in her head telling her over and over that no one wanted to be her friend.
‘Are some people’s lives worth more than others?’ Ian Williams had asked their Geography class once, during a lengthy discussion about poverty in India. He’d given them an article to read about a train accident in the rural south of the continent — hundreds had died, yet only the three white tourists were named. They talked about the way accidents or disasters overseas only seemed to matter if Australians were killed. Of course, they all agreed every life should be equal, but the world was unjust. Anyone weighing up her life and Ash’s life, measuring their worth against each other, would agree they weren’t equal.
Jo had been back for a week when Sarah rang to tell her the date for the hearing had been confirmed for 15 June, a week after Jo’s twentieth birthday. ‘Seems a long way off, but you need to prepare yourself,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s not going to be easy.’
‘No,’ Jo responded. Listening to Sarah’s advice — prepare yourself, you might get as much as five years — Jo didn’t say much. It will be no picnic. Sarah actually said picnic; Jo almost laughed. She’d seen many films and TV shows in which prisoners were harassed, bashed, raped. Even if prison weren’t as bad as that, it would be bad, in ways she couldn’t yet imagine. Otherwise, what was the point of it?
For the next four or five years, her life wouldn’t be her own. She would live in the confines of an institution with strict rules and no way out. Her life would be in the hands of other people, and they’d decide what she would be allowed to do or not do. For the last five or so years, she’d been resisting and resenting her mother’s desire to exercise authority. She hated her mother’s rules. She hated being confined in the house. Some people chose to be secluded. To be alone. To work in jobs where someone else made all the decisions. Could she be one of those people? Would confinement and the loss of freedom be a relief? Would it stop the endless and relentless voices in her head? Would she be able to give her life over?