Cliff liked his village for the quietness, the peacefulness, and the absence of passing traffic, but mostly he liked the blank brick walls and fences in the main street and the little lanes. Some of the walls had been painted over and over again — they were the best, he always thought, they provided the canvas he loved for his swirling paint cans, and the best place for him to draw the designs that grew in his head for a long time before he put them out there in public. He would check these walls out time and again, walking past with his jacket hood over his head and surreptitiously glancing to the side so as not to raise suspicions by showing too much interest.
He wasn’t sure quite how his obsession started, but somewhere in his youth he found out that he could draw — a ‘little weirdly at times’, his teacher reported to his parents at one end of year students’ review. She went on to suggest that he should have some ‘psychological assessment’, which would be offered by the school; it would be free of charge, she said, but they would have to wait six months for an appointment. This never happened: his ‘little problem’ got lost in the mire of other family stuff; another baby and another mouth to feed; dad lost his job at the council; mum couldn’t cope; grandma died. These events affected everyone in his family one way or another but for Cliff they were a gift — no one focused on him, no one asked him what he was doing or where he was going, and he just got on with doing the thing he liked to do. He drew. He drew anything, anywhere — at first in notebooks he found in the dusty attic at home, then on computer paper that he took from school, packed quickly into his bag as he passed the general office on his way home.
Cliff liked the feeling of starting a drawing on a clean unlined and unused surface; he liked the way his shapes sometimes merged, but mostly he liked the way he could round out a design in fat comic letters, like connected sausages, spelling out his secret name with big sweeps of his pencil and filling in the middle with shading. He worked quickly, getting quicker and quicker with each passing day and at night he would prop his drawings against his bedside lamp, stand back and check out his work — and he was well pleased.
He was content just drawing for a while, but then the desire to do his designs on something bigger began to occupy his thoughts day and night. He took to the street: any street, any fence, any wall became his target. He saved his money from his after-school job in the corner milk-bar and purchased small pots of paint and searched for spay-cans and paint cans in curbside rubbish every day and hid his findings away in his bedroom cupboard.
He wouldn’t touch anyone else’s work as a rule — and never touched good wall-murals — although once he got really cross at the message of ‘hope and peace’ that someone had painted over the work he had done the week before, and Cliff painted boldly right over it the next night. He was stealthy in the dark and worked speedily, waiting for a train to pass, passing car-lights to fade, house-lights to go out. And this was the thrill; sitting in the dark behind the side of a house he felt an excitement he couldn’t name and he couldn’t wait for the next opportunity — the next time he could sneak out of the house into the dark while everyone slept.
And then he was caught out. He had become careless because he didn’t seem to be visible to anyone and he assumed he wasn’t. His mother found his hidden bag of paints. That night his father was waiting for him when he came home, his eyes glinting in the filtered light from the street lamp as he watched Cliff creep in quietly. His father wasn’t angry, but what he said, with his head down and his shoulders hunched in his chair, affected Cliff in a way he hadn’t felt for a long time. He felt remorse. His father told him about the effect that irresponsible painting on private property had on the homeowner, how they worried and worked with scrubbing brushes and buckets to clean up after it happened, how they felt about their community buildings being painted on and defiled. Most of all, his father said, people feel very sad when it happens.
For the first time in a long time, Cliff felt noticed, and understood, and cared about, and his life changed. He might no longer have the thrill of illicit graffiti outings, the pleasurable gut feeling of knowing he might be caught out at any moment, but that night he knew he would burn his tag name and start talking to his family again.