Intaglio: The Snake and the Coins (8 page)

Cole didn’t
care. 

His entire
attention was on her warm arms reaching around his chest, wrapped tight as the
bike swayed and wove its way along the narrow roads.  Ava hadn’t said
exactly where she was taking him yet… but Cole had a sense of what was about to
transpire.  It left him smiling that she trusted him enough to take him
along.

They got to a
branch in the road and Ava leaned over his shoulder, gesturing up ahead to a
gravelled road.  Once there, he slowed and then turned off the bike. 
He placed the two helmets onto the back, and then walked the motorcycle the
rest of the way.  Cole was now perfectly aware of her intentions. 
They weren’t just going for a show and tell of her colourful past… she intended
to do work.  To paint.  To break the law.

He wasn’t sure
how that made him feel.  But he was here.

In minutes,
they’d reached the chain-link fence with the no trespassing sign; the “NO”
obscured by obscene smears of graffiti.  Ava tossed her jacket atop the
exposed metal spikes of the top of the fence, then climbed up and over with the
ease of practise.  Cole clambered up behind her, his muscled frame slower
than hers, trying to quell the pounding of his heart.   Ava was
beaming at him, and she grabbed his hand, dragging him along.

“If I tell you
to run,” she warned, her cheeks flushed, “just drop the cans and run. 
Don’t ask me any questions and don’t look back.  I’ll catch up with
you.  Okay?”

Cole nodded,
watching her face for clues.

“The guys from
the yards are older and slower,” Ava continued.  “You give ‘em a good run
for their money and they’ll probably just ignore you after a bit, and let you
go.”  She paused, her lip caught between her teeth.  “The police now…
that’s a different story.  They’ve got dogs.”

Cole frowned,
his attention on the heat of her palm against his.

“You were
caught,” he said quietly.

She gave him a
wink.

 “It was
worth it, though.”

: : : : : : : :
: :

A few minutes later
and they stood under one of the train-bridge overpasses, staring up at a huge
expanse of wall.  It was illuminated by a series of streetlights that
shone down at intervals.  Though designed to light the tracks above, they
conveniently provided plenty of light for night-time painting. Part of the wall
was still pristine and clean, but thirty or forty feet of the bottom – as high
as a person with no ladder could reach – was covered with swirls and splashes
of colour.  Oscillating shapes, half-finished renderings and beautifully
created script. 

The first
portion was dark and grey, abstract and multifaceted. To Cole, it looked almost
like the paintings of ancient cities he’d seen in Wilkins' class; cobblestone
streets with recesses, buildings listing perilously overhead.  Shadowy
shapes emerged from the base.  Horrible images of death and destruction;
people starving and dying.  Cole recoiled, but the painting wasn’t
static.  A few feet in and colour began to seep into the shapes and words,
transforming them into swirls and shimmering splotches of colour and darkness –
blues and greens and gold – reminding him of the sun shimmering brightly on
water.  The abstract eddies of colour told some story he could almost
understand. 

‘The sea spray
tasted of salt on my tongue...’
Cole’s mind whispered,
‘the land
receding until it was only a dark line on the horizon, then nothing at
all...’ 
Eyes swirling with the colour, the unexpected thought got no
further. 

The furthest –
and newest – section was painted brighter than the others, the darkness of
night sky and stars exploding with light.  There were fields of wild
grasses, trees and rolling hills.  Cole stumbled as his eyes dragged
across it, his mind trying to put it into clean boxes of meaning.  The old
and the new blended together in Ava’s painting.  Sea and shore, night sky
and brilliant day, fighting for precedence.  He stepped up to the wall,
struggling to understand the abstraction blurring with hints of reality to make
something even more meaningful.  Across the mural, words and phrases
appeared over the pictures, layering the image with intention. The tag ‘Booker’
was proudly displayed in extended text at the bottom.  Cole paused, his
hand atop the curve on the ‘r’.

“Is that you?”
Cole asked reverently, tracing the
tag.           

“One and only,”
Ava answered with a smirk.  She dropped her bag to the ground and picked
up two colours.  “C’mon,” she shouted at Cole, walking over to the open,
unpainted space.  “You’re going to help me with my mural.”

He frowned.

“I don’t...” he
paused.  For a moment he was still, weighing something inside him. 
Swallowing hard, he made his decision. 

He selected blue
and black from the spray cans and walked over to the wall.

“I’ve never done
this,” Cole said earnestly.  “I don’t know the right way to do it.” 
He looked at her apprehensively
.

Ava laughed,
leaning in and dropping her voice.

“You’re breaking
the fucking
law,
Cole… there is no
right way
to do this.”

He shook his
head, following Ava to the area she was working on, her movements fast and
steady.  Great arcs of colour spread up and across the dull grey of the
cement like splashes of blood and ochre.  There was something about the
way she was looking over at him as she worked – little glances now and then –
as if this was a test that he had to pass.  That made him nervous. 
He found himself trying to read the challenge hidden in her eyes.

Cole dropped to
a crouch and began sketching in a cube with short bursts of paint.  He was
about to start shading when Ava looked down at him.  Cole swore he could
feel
her rolling her eyes before she walked up, hands at her hips.

“Bigger,” she
growled in exasperation.  “Just… let yourself go.  Be bold,
Cole!  Stop trying to
plan
everything.”

He chuckled
sheepishly and shook his head, standing beside her and following her
patterns.  Matching the same lines one hands-breadth under hers, like a
shadow of her work. Cole liked how that felt.  For a long time, he worked
beside her, feeling that same shift he sometimes got just as things started
flowing in a sculpture.

“Copying me, I
see...” Ava chided, interrupting his thoughts. 

Cole glanced
over at her, concerned, but she was smirking, so he put on a falsely cultured
voice to answer.

“Learning from a
professional; the
whole apprenticeship plan in action.
  You know
that’s been going on for centuries… Professor Wilkins could tell you ALL about
it.”

Ava giggled,
moving back into his personal space, when her face abruptly flickered. 
She glanced to the side, humour disappearing like a light flicked off.

“Shit,” she
hissed, face wary.  Cole hadn’t heard or seen anything, but he could tell
that she had.

She grabbed the
cans out of his hands.

“Run!” she
barked.

Without
questioning, Cole turned and headed back the way they’d come.  Fear
rocketed through him, making every minute stretch out.  The distant fence
seemed further away than he remembered it. It was completely dark in the hours
before dawn, and he kept stumbling as he ran.  Cole glanced over his
shoulder.  Not seeing Ava, he slowed slightly, then he remembered his
promise to her. He pushed onward, his mind suddenly chattering away in panic.

‘C’mon Ava… come
ON!… Hurry up, damnit!’

His feet
stumbled to a stop the second he heard sirens. 

With a horrified
gasp, Cole turned, sprinting back the way he’d just come. He’d hardly gone
fifty feet when he ran directly into Ava coming at a dead-run in the dark,
deflecting from plowing into her at the last second.

“I said fucking
RUN!”
she roared.

Without a word,
he spun and followed her, the sounds of dogs baying now mixing with the
sirens.  Cole’s heart thudded painfully in his chest.  His lungs were
on fire.  He pushed forward, the fight/flight instinct surging, giving him
wings.  They reached the fence just as he started hearing shouts.  It
was clear that the police didn’t know which direction they’d gone…
but they
had dogs. 
They were looking for the two of them.

Ava threw the
pack over the chain-link barrier, launching up and down the other side so fast
it seemed comical.  Cole was nowhere near as graceful and he felt the
sharp tug as spikes grabbed his pant leg; one tine broke through his jeans and
bit into Cole’s upper thigh.  He didn’t care. He could hear the police
approaching, the dogs’ barking getting louder and Ava snarling ‘
hurry the
hell up!’

He stumbled down
the other side, hitting the ground roughly, his knees aching with the
aftershock.  Ava was already at the motorcycle and she threw the helmet to
him as he arrived, leaving him gasping.  Cole tossed his leg over the
bike, feeling her body wrap around him, her fingers gripping his chest, as he
kicked hard and the machine growled to life.

“Hold on tight,”
Cole muttered – more to himself than to her.

His hands were
shaking hard; his body flooded with adrenaline.  She was with him as he released
the throttle and the wheel sprayed a shower of gravel up behind them. They flew
back into the night.  The road and the flashing red and blue lights and
the barking dogs all disappeared, swallowed by a sea of darkness.  His
heart was still pounding, but Cole was grinning now, his body pulsing with an
incredible rush.  Again, the sensation came to him of being on a boat at
night, skimming over the surface of the water.  Fast… faster… almost one
with the wind.

Behind him, Ava
was humming, her face pressed to his shoulder, arms tight around his chest, her
thighs warm on either side of his.  That feeling was back.  The one
that left him aching with the perfection of this single moment in time. 

They were safe.

The two of them buzzed
together across the open roads, wind burning their cheeks.  Ava smiled,
her chin tucked against Cole’s shoulder, feeling her body relax into the
motion. 
Happy.
  She hadn’t been sure how he was going to
react to spray-painting, but Cole Thomas had surpassed her expectations…
surprising her yet again.

‘He keeps doing
that,’
 
her mind added.  Ava’s smile widened, realizing the truth of it.

She hadn’t been
out painting –
really painting –
since her Dad had left on tour with the
orchestra earlier that summer.  The paintings she did in her studio were
great… but they didn’t give her the scope she needed to express herself. 
She missed the vast arenas of unpainted cement.  The visceral charge she
got from changing a public space. 

Tonight’s chase
reminded her of the first time she’d been caught… and her reasons for getting
involved in graffiti in the first place.  Behind Ava’s closed lids, her
mother appeared, her voice raised in anger.  Shay Brooks had never been a
great mother; her dark personal history – an abuser shaped by her own
experiences of abuse  –  making her more volatile than Ava’s father
ever had been.   The dynamic was always thrown out of balance
whenever Oliver was on tour with the philharmonic. 
That had been when
things had gotten really bad.
  Ava grimaced, tightening her grip
around Cole’s chest, trying ineffectively to push the images away. 

‘Don’t want to
remember...’
 
her mind whimpered, but it was too late.

She was five
when her father went on tour in Europe.   Ava’s mother lost her minimum
wage job mere days after Ollie left, and Ava became the sole target of her
mother’s anger.  Small punishments and hard-edged routines degraded into
neglect punctuated by rough-handling.  Ava was locked in the empty
apartment for hours. 

Darkness
.

Ava’s
kindergarten teacher was the first to notice the change in her behaviour, the
once outgoing child who’d become silent and withdrawn.  On the Monday
morning Mrs. Doucette had seen the blue fingerprints ringing Ava’s thin arms,
she’d contacted the authorities.  Tuesday evening they’d sent a social
worker to investigate.  (As usual, Ava was home alone.)  By Wednesday
night, the social worker located Oliver’s agent, and called to Germany to relay
the situation to Ava's father.  Thursday morning, Oliver had broken his
contract – leaving mid-tour and forfeiting half his wages – to come home. 
By Saturday morning, he was home again and Shay was gone.

He hadn’t toured
again for the next ten years.

Ava smiled,
remembering how his arrival had marked two things for her: the end of his
marriage to her mother, and the start of what Ava considered her
real
childhood.  She felt the bike slow as they reached the main roads. Her
eyes fluttered open and she squinted at the approaching lights of the city
.

Oliver, her
father, was a hippie and a dreamer.  He was a Buddhist in most things,
though he considered any and all philosophies and approaches to life, as long
as they focused on the positive. His favourite quote was one by Beethoven:
“Music
is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.” 
He was a
classical composer by trade, though he also listened to rock music.  He’d
always been a favourite adult among Ava’s friends, and there had been numerous
nights when Marcus and her Dad had started arguing like old friends over
revolutionary tactics and guerrilla warfare.