But the film is a saddening bore
'Cause I wrote it
Ten times or more
It's about to be writ again
As I ask you to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
- David Bowie, 'Life On Mars?'
The mill was decrepit and wilting back into the ground, its wooden grain gnarled and shrivelling beyond life and stability, receding to the earth as though it were a plant confiding its last words in transient nature, whispering softly, weak, shrinking alone outwith the city. It was a bit of a shit hole.
The building might as well have been an olive tree, shrivelling by some Ancient Roman ruins. But the stone of the structure remained, just as tourist remains remained; standing stable enough to hold a gift shop. The city view wasn't as enthralling as the view of Pompeii from Mount Vesuvius, but it still filled Jean with some kind of horror. Although that was probably bias influence from his feet, hobbling around in converse, on ragged stone hills higher than the Art and English buildings stacked one atop the other. He wasn't the hiking type. He wasn't the outdoors type. He wasn't even at an age where loitering in the weird chill could be considered remotely appealing.
He considered asking himself why he was there. But the answers were right in front of him, Connie's head batting the moonlight around on its surface like a pinball, Sasha's throwing a tangled ponytail around as she hopped from stone to stone. Jean also would have asked himself how Sasha was able bound on the roots and rocks like she was in a bouncy house, but the answer to that one had been on Sasha's feet and in Jean's line of vision as soon as she'd opened the door to him barely an hour ago. It became apparent that Connie and Sasha had been blessed with a far greater idea for the night than watching Jean roll his eyes at two hour long Hugh Grant epics. They'd heavily contemplated it, clearly. Jean wouldn't have followed them into the outer city wilderness of dodgy plants and glass bottles if they hadn't already had their hiking boots on, or had their hands up, pushing him back out the door. He supposed Connie considered this greater revenge for his bald comments earlier. After over ten years he still never got away with them.
Jean would have consoled himself with the weather factor: "it's lovely warm out tonight"; like every auntie at every BBQ in world history; or, in Jean's case, every care worker trying to distract themselves from the fact that, yes, that was child sick on their trainers and, yes, this was what they did for a living. But it was the slightly sticky sort of warm that Jean's sweaty neck could do without, and whenever a breeze puffed by it racked his body with the reminder: "yes, this is still Britain".
So, really, Jean didn't say anything at all. All his thoughts were drawn in circles, and erased themselves. Null and void. Connie and Sasha made up for his panting silence, and Jean was happy to let them do so.
They started on the final incline in the path, roots and stones worming into and around their shoes. People said nature could be welcoming, but at night it was unnecessarily so; one root never wanted Jean to leave.
He recalled the first time the three of them had come this way, in their first year of high school.
Generally in first year all places and people felt foreign to Jean, just as Jean was foreign to them. That was when it became "cool" for him, being the French boy. All the students ever asked about was his accent, and the teachers, from Languages to Lit, asked about the culture, the country, theweather – "because me and the husband are going on holiday there end of term and we're very curious to hear" – "you say something fancy!" – "likej'adore, my sister has that on her gym top" – "can you chat her up in French?" – "as if! You don't sound French at all, he's probably kidding us on" – "he's too miserable to kid" – "on? Do you have an on button? Do you have a voice? Do you talk? Do you" – "even speak English?" – "he's obviously French he's got that snooty, long-face thing going" – "on a trip to France next Summer. Maybe you can give us some phrases to use? The little books never seem to be enough" – "have you? Have you had enough?"
Blinking up, even in the cold light of his phone screen the branches in the trees spidered down red into Jean's vision. Red as the blood on his knees, fallen, after he'd run away from the boys shouting after him, pushing him, kicking him; fallen, the way he felt after every school day when he had to go back to a house where he tried and tried to attain some pathetic superpower; where he hoped to turn invisible.
Turned out the root of someone's being's a novelty. Jean's foreignness grew too familiar, and with his clamped lips and angered scowls he didn't have much else to offer anyone. But he remembered very vividly the yellow hand that had reached down to him in art class that year.
Sasha hadn't ever taken any claim to genius in visual arts, and even at the age of twelve finger painting was the brightest, most colourful idea she could conjure for decorating her class folder, she'd said, just as "the girl who sits next to me". The yellow-painted pads of her fingers and palm didn't reach him all the way. But as the boys across the table began barking, and Eren started on the issue of Jean's head length (because "baguette boy" was really inventive and hurtful), Sasha's paw had swept towards his flinching, red face and halted over his eyes. Jean remembered the smell of chocolate and poster paint settling over his face from her fingers, he remembered an aching, embarrassed feeling, feeling very warm, and he remembered her words:
'He can't see you.'
And while, in his people-fearing manner, he'd only been looking up to offer the mongrels hateful glances anyway, the words had set that unsettled warmth in him – like clay heated and glazed into something solid, something secure. He couldn't see them, not even when she took her hand away and slapped the yellow down on the shitty, thin paper. He just saw her smile as she did so.
Once the bell went that day, Sasha'd accompanied Jean out the building, across the grounds, to where Connie waited at the gates. Connie had felt her warmth immediately too, but more in the objective sense of her having slapped her yellow hands to his face and smooched him right then and there. It's not what happened, as they left school together. It was more a matter of Sasha's fingers splitting in the Star Fleet salute by way of greeting. Yet, the gross, dorky crush was immediately apparent all over the bald kid's face.
In terms of support, Connie'd never had Sasha's intuition. Maths teachers liked to exclaim that they were both incredibly dumb in their own ways, but both "failed tests all the same". Jean would always scowl at this, no matter how deeply he scowled when he looked over his shoulder at the desk behind and found the dynamic duo drawing body parts on each other's jotters, ones which were probably supposed to look like other body parts, but unfortunately lacked any non-abstract distinctions.
Sasha had this weird way of sniffing out people's troubles and putting them to rest without entirely addressing them. In fact, her approach on issues was so obscure Jean had often wondered if she knew she was doing it. But whenever she did it – they were moments of genius, sheer clairvoyance. Jean even remembered envisioning Sasha's ponytail as an antenna of sorts, picking up on emotional responses, analysing just the right thing to say. He'd soon later doodled a cyber-Sasha in his notebook.
Connie had his own genius. This was apparent from the first morning he awoke as the new kid at the foster home. He had the paper boy's schedule down to the second. He could be the first to follow the weird cartoons, first to fill the crossword up with the right words, wrong spelling, just the way Dok hated, first to tear out page three and leave cut-outs of topless girls rained over the breakfast table, and he'd still have time to catch the paper boy on his bike on his way back past the house. He'd follow him with a catapult and a tube of Smarties and count how many of the sweets broke when they pinged off his helmet. Though he may not have been the greatest when it came to the cooler emotions, like Jean's shivers and shakes, Connie knew people in the sense of what not only made them tick, but made them implode catastrophically. He could achieve explosion of the greatest rage-filled bombs with the slightest of hands.
Both Connie and Sasha were entirely confident in their status as "people" people. Yet when he was around them Jean didn't feel like he had anything to prove, any equal level to push himself up to; he was the red handprints cooled blue with something cowering and wide-eyed, on the paper right next to the yellow pair, and the mischievous orange of Connie's. Jean had found something as a teenager that he could never have predicted as a kid, having spent primary school with Connie's arms hooked under his, holding him back from Eren, kicking, breathing heavy andred. Now, however, they were entirely predictable.
Jean knew every step through the rundown gift shop. He knew the faded postcards in the rack, the dusty landscape of the counters, the cookie-cutter shapes in the dust where ornaments in the display case had been nicked through the skin-cutter glass by greedy, laughter-filled hands. He knew the jars on the shelves, the mould in the jars, the bacteria in the mould. He knew the moss on the far wall, the smell of damp, fouler in the heat than the cool. He most definitely knew the stairwell through the narrow door at the back. And he knew Connie was going to tug the door out of the space before his arms had even left his sides. He sat it against the wall, where panelled tracks in the grey fluff and dirt on the floor had already been formed from previous ventures. The claustrophobia of climbing the stairs was the same, but the creak of them was far worse than Jean remembered. The place felt forgotten, but wasn't at all. They climbed up past the granary, then another floor, Sasha's bubbly titters close to ears yet loud and light, carrying them up, following them behind. And when they broke from the narrow stairwell, the first thing Jean saw was the sky.
The sky was the first thing to brace him their first time up those stairs. They'd been dragged along by Eren and Armin in some typical dare scenario. The uncertain pinch between Armin's eyebrows had reflected Jean's own feelings exactly upon meeting the tall, rickety attraction. The only reason they were there was because Eren had a lot of energy, and the majority of it tended to apply itself to stubbornness and a vile smirk which probably endeared others but filled Jean's face with the feeling of nails scraping through flesh. He never knew what it was about Jaeger that wound him up so much. They butted heads once when Jean was first enrolled into the foster system, and their heads never stopped cracking off one another, no matter how much damage it caused them both. It was a battle of the stubborn boiled eggs, war of the scowls.
Jean had to be the first to go upstairs, of course. If he'd challenged Eren to take his place he would have appeared weak, he would have cracked. The place hadn't been so dusty then. It'd been just long enough since the mill had been closed as a tourist attraction for the council to stop caring for it altogether, which had been long enough for multiple breakages to add character in half-hearted lootings, and it'd been long enough since then for the police to stop searching around for underage drinkers.
They weren't there to add to the dragon bed of bottles out on the rocks and dry grass. Jean just had to climb up some stairs.
He'd been thankful for the confidence anger gave him. He could bite back the quakes of winter cold, of all dark and dank, of spiders watching from corners, or the ones he wasn't entirely sure he'd thought up, dangling down to meet his slick neck. He'd stilled himself and climbed the wonky Jenga tower with marching steps which, upon rethinking, probably weren't wise. And, for once, Jean completely forgot to taunt Eren's green eyes shrouded in the stairwell. He was too busy looking up through the broken roof.
Even now the sky and city stood alert, facing one another as Jean peered out from between rafters, bricks, and blades. The wooden beams framed the sight he'd hoped for upon leaving the studio. The murky city ceiling had crystallised and steeled and it reached out to him from this new height as a mirror reflecting the stars above with the lights below. The buildings reached up, and the lights in the sky infinitely distanced themselves with no limit to their climb. It made Jean feel small, but in a way his twiddling, limited hands could appreciate.
He did not appreciate the hot breath on his neck.
'You've got to be kidding me!' Jean flinched away from the eerie sensation and away from the gaps in the front wall. They looked ready to vacuum him up into the sky.
Sasha's hands flapped a little as she tried not to look too pleased with herself. 'Sorry, you were having a moment. I couldn't resist,' she excused, biting her fist and then toddling back to the centre of the dusty, wooden floor.
Connie sat in his usual place there, back to one of the millstones, a newspaper in his hands.
Murmuring to himself, he flicked through the pages, carbon on his fingertips, and gave a satisfied, 'ay,' when he reached gridded pages. Jean wandered over to the two nattering on the floor just as Connie started spreading out sheets like a twister mat.
Jean sighed, 'Well this seems entirely unnecessary.'
Connie was quick to snap and point fingers: 'This is entirely necessary.' Jean could only nod at his wide eyes. 'This is as close as we get to Stark technology. No transparent touch screens, projections – none of that weird shit. Just this week's Guardian. A lot of waffle, and,' the broken glow of the moon shifted on his head as he squinted down at one of the pages, 'adverts for Fairy Liquid.'
'Wow,' Jean smiled. Even in sarcasm, it destroyed his face.
Sasha pulled her phone from Connie's pocket and turned its flash on, scoping out the map below. Jean watched her circle around like a helicopter while Connie declared they "begin" and started listing company names.
'Roy's Plumbing and Engineering Services, Ailman's DIY, T.I Insurance – oh,' Connie gasped. 'They want me to be a phone representative.'
'There is no way you're being given phone numbers for everyone in the city,' Jean refused, closing his eyes tight, with Sasha's light on his face.
Connie pulled a pen from his bottomless jean pocket. He whispered, 'so much power.'
'Not a chance.' Jean batted his hands around and tugged the page away before any damage could be done, but with his lack of sight he wasn't entirely successful. There was a definite tearing sound. Then he felt the tickle of paper and heard Connie snicker.
When his eyelids faded from luminous orange to a rusty red he opened them to sight of Connie circling the job ad on his remaining corner of the page.
Through her grin, Sasha dismissed, 'he's not going to need it anyway.'
'I wouldn't be surprised if he took the apprenticeship and the job,' Jean countered, with a tone of dread he didn't entirely feel.
Sasha's giggles were cut off by a sharp shush.
'We're not saying the "A" word, remember.' Connie's eyes scoured the other job ads. Jean could see the glowing text decoding behind his eyes, and the frantic speed of it was familiar, yet scarily unfamiliar in Connie.
'What's making you feel so weird about it?'
Jean regretted the words even as he said them. Not because of Connie's reaction, which was to simply shrug and continue searching. More because the tight worry in his friend's face was ever present in his own, and that weird feeling followed him always, halting him at turns, keeping him from embracing hope of another step, making the stars appear closer when he looked up, pressing, waiting for something Jean couldn't give. And it wasn't something he could explain without feeling stupid. So he didn't know why he asked it of someone else. It just felt right to be actively interested – or nosy, even – He should have asked about the interview earlier. In the terms and conditions for friendship, being annoying was apparently a recurring factor, whether you're attentive or not.
When the stars began to blur into lines of pale, pale, crystalline colours, Jean's eyelids evaporated staring thoughts. He felt like time had lapsed when he blinked around the silvery mill. Sasha was split into five points, gawking up through the roof at her brethren above and Connie was speaking.
'– it just didn't sit right with me.' Connie's voice was low and his eyes on Jean were dark and contemplative. Direct eye contact. Jean wished he wasn't so self involved. 'I wasn't focussed on saying all the things we're told companies are looking for. Words barfed out my mouth, and I know they were fine, but... not as fine as they could have been.'
For a second Connie's frown drooped as low as Jean could feel his own. Then his thumb took to picking at his lip and he started reshuffling pages. 'The handshake,' he added, 'the way they looked at me on the way out. I can't feel sure about it.'
Connie could probably feel Sasha's wondering eyes on him, as he focussed on skimming the page in front of him.
Jean wasn't entirely sure of what to say. He thought Connie was brilliant – had every quality the stars, the world, asked of anybody and everybody and never actually got from Jean himself. Even as he felt concerned eyes on him, he didn't fidget or waver, just focused. He pushed on; bringing the paper out here; bringing Jean and Sasha out here after a few long months of settling into a new year of courses; bringing his true self out every day, and letting him say what he needed to say even in these moments which felt so fragile in their intensity, full of potential for awkward wrong answers. Connie's eyes looked up, light. He smiled. His leg didn't shake.
It only took one upturned quirk of Jean's mouth in return to have him wondering when he's going to stop feeling sorry for himself.
He pulled the nearest unmarked sheet towards his legs. 'It'll be a weird couple' weeks,' Jean mumbled. 'Then it'll just be.'
Connie sighed as Sasha rolled onto her side and rested her head on his thigh, bent with his legs' crossed sitting. He smiled when she popped the tip of her finger to his nose, then went swiftly back to muttering company names and laughing at weirdly cryptic supermarket vouchers.
The light of Sasha's phone fell over the floor and it created a harsh contrast with the musty dark of the room that never seemed to fade languidly. The light and dark mixed like oil and water and Jean squinted down at the ads in his lap.
Each one his narrowed eyes fell on made them want to roll up into his head with an overwhelming sense of boredom he'd somehow known to carry with him all the way from the age of seven to twenty just for this moment. The world was a mess of grand responses. The stars and the city beyond the remaining beams, hoists and spindles made Jean's chest tight with the type of awe that made a person want to be better. The city, when it's around him, made his chest tight, body slimy in physicality and in its grip on his sensitivity. It scared him, and his weakness scared him, and his inability to keep within reach of the two friends sitting right by him, near the sky, terrified him. Same elements, different reactions, exact same intensity.
And then there were the things which weren't so spectacular, but were put out there with the same grandeur. Like the ad for an "executive travel attendant" with British Railways. That'd be the poor old sausage who had to dodder around the carriages handing tepid drinks to grumpy, dislodged mouths. He remembered the old man he hadn't wanted to stare at too long the first time he'd been on a train. He'd been on his way over from France – a human parcel, delivered by the ghosts of motherly hands he barely remembered, into the withholding arms of people who didn't get to pawn him off as a present for ten tedious years. People could do something as simple as walk and fill others with desire, admiration, trepidation. And people could try to dress up something so simple as the job position of the empty face you buy juice from on a train, and it turned out dull after the reveal.
He hoped Connie didn't get stuck with something like that. He wasn't sure he could guarantee himself that comfort.
'There's a painting commission going!'
When Jean blinked dumbly at her, Sasha's big brown eyes peeled bigger. She pressed, 'some Westside council folk are looking for someone to,' she glanced down and read from the lit page, 'design and paint a mural for the kids' park by Rosa Square.'
Jean found Mike's groggy green eyes in his memory from the tragic debriefing earlier in the day, and just about managed to place them over Sasha's, sympathetic as they left their apartment building after hearing about the new course block. 'That's great,' he conceded, nodded, then threw the newspaper page from his lap in a burst of emotion he refused to call a strop. 'Except something like that wouldn't count as volunteering and it wouldn't be the sort of work experience the board's looking for.'
'Yes, blame the board, Jean,' Connie's tongue clicked behind his cheeky grin. 'Mike would never do this to you.'
'You know what, he wouldn't,' Jean agreed, far too seriously. He remembered Mike's begrudging approach on the subject, and the way he backed out the door as though he hadn't just shoved Jean's worst nightmare in his face – as though he could escape Jean's wrath.
Sasha turned onto her stomach and started reviewing the ads again, casually slipping the torn out mural commission over to Jean's feet. Scoffing a little, he glanced at the grainy photograph of the new wall, rebuilt after a long, loud while of early morning construction a block away from Mike's place. He wished he had time. He could do with the money.
When he found himself staring a little too long, he crumpled the extract and shoved it in his pocket, feeling his key nick his knuckles.
He looked up when Connie heaved a sigh and flapped another sheet to the side. When his eyes found Jean, they took to a mischievous glint.
'Are you sure Mike's not cheating on Professor Zoe with the head of board?'
Jean's hand found the pen from the floor and lobbed it at his silver pinball for a head. He wasn't sure if Connie was being annoyingly loud, or if the settled quiet had given his voice the extra boost, but either way Jean didn't fancy hearing it.
Connie yelped and muttered apologies through a grin that wouldn't just die. He sighed again as Sasha started humming something vaguely familiar.
'Seriously though,' he rehashed, 'got any ideas?'
Jean made a discontented noise somewhere between "non" and "none" and flicked his page of useless job ads aside with the others. His eyes flickered from the ceiling-less space above to Sasha's swaying feet, a rising, unsettled feeling returning.
He stared somewhere between the gridded sheen of moonlight on the underside of Sasha's boot and another dimension and muttered, 'Hitch is probably going to her aunt's.'
'The one in Italy?'
Connie's voice sounded a little distant, but Jean forced himself to nod. He must talk about her more than he'd realised.
Jean's eyes started watering from staring. They snapped back to Connie when he slapped his own leg.
Picking up the fallen pen from his lap and circling another job on one of the final two sheets, Connie reassured, 'you'll find something.'
Jean just nodded again. His fingers found the ends of his jumper sleeves, tugged and curled. Then the air suddenly stilled. Sasha had stopped humming and a tear ripped into the belated chill the room tried its hopeless best to protect them from. A soft hand pressed another tear-out ad to his knee. Jean's skin tingled under his jeans. His tangled fingers found the slip for an artist's studio. It was just a regular business advert, nothing mentioned about an open position.
Crawling to her spot and flopping on her back again, Sasha huffed.
The quiet barely had time to sweep overhead before she chirped, 'Remember when we were working on our exam pieces and the class ran out of paints? In fourth year?'
Jean grunted in affirmation, lying back with his head gently meeting the dusty grain. His feet began to tussle with Sasha's.
'You turned into a proper pomp and brought in eggs the next day with all these powder tubs.' Jean could hear the teasing smile in Sasha's voice, and its wavers, when, after some rustling, Connie's feet joined the battle with a strong attack.
'Jesus,' Jean winced when Connie accidentally got him in the shin. 'You know, I do remember, because you called me "oeuf poof" for the rest of the day.'
While Connie giggled like an avid cartoon, Sasha elected to ignore this part of the story.
'No one had any idea what you were doing,' she remembered instead. 'The teacher was looking at you all knowingly, and when you started mixing the colours with yolks and water it went all quiet and you were blushing – you're doing it again now,' Sasha's eyes peered over a glorious double chin at Jean's pink face, and she cackled when he started pushing her feet back, bending her legs to her chest. Her voice strained, 'it was the billionth time you mentioned the name Mike that week. Before, he was just "the art guy". Then suddenly he was your hairy friend who taught you how to make paint.'
Connie's giggles were continuous, and almost contagious, at this point. His trainers whipped at the heel of Jean's converse, no doubt leaving mud strips. 'He was like the house's new BFG,' he recalled.
At that, Jean laughed. Mike had been there at the foster home one day, showing them his bizarre expressive artworks and getting them to make a colourful mess on a big sheet in the garden. When he noticed Jean blending blurred faces of red and blue amongst the incoherent splatters, his hand had fallen to his shoulder, and he'd told him to "let go". Then he kept coming back.
'What if the house had hired someone else to do crafts that first time, like one of the other university tutors?'
He wasn't sure why he felt the need to delve craters and doubts in something as sure as solid memory. But when it came to life changing meetings in disguise, there were always going to be questions about how life would have been without them.
Sasha's feet flopped back to the floor. 'You probably would have looked it up and brought in the fucking eggs anyway.'
Jean's laughter caught in his nose. 'Probably.'
The cold light in Jean, curled in his leg and waiting to rock back and forth, doubted the surety of that. If he hadn't seen Mike's branching fingers create something so inherently cool in front of his own nerdy, paint-speckled eyes, he perhaps wouldn't have had the confidence to make his own paints in school after fifteen years of stare-fear. But then he remembered the disgruntled look on Eren's face as Jean had finally found something he could be comfortable doing, something which made all the eyes on him blur into a mass of praise. Watching the colours merge into something new, Jean had felt the disdain flee his mind for a few, pure moments.
When Jean's eyes refocused the stars were once again bright and independent, light lines gone, feet on floor.
Connie's shoes waved around a little longer, then hit the floor with a force probably strong enough to break a few of the dry, wooden boards if repeated. Sasha's breathing fluttered out in laughs as she wacked his side.
Then her voice was clear and sure again: 'Point is, you made everything work for you.'
Jean's cheeks moulded and rose with his lips in a smile fonder than he felt he should have been capable of after a day like today. He made a noise reminiscent of "yeah".
He thought of sketching with Mike, above tables, not under, thought of days spent play-fighting on dodgy rocks outside and the floorboards in this room; of hours lingering at the park because being under a grey sky with wind on his hot face and Connie and Sasha flinging themselves to the clouds on the swings was far better than crawling into bed and closing his eyes, ignoring the nagging dread of homework, the nagging dread of dinner with a group of derisive faces, the nagging dread of being asked to speak aloud the next day. He remembered the first time Hitch wondered into his station at the studio, wearing a feather boa and a fake moustache from a big box of party props found in the cupboard, and she demanded he drew her. Jean got lost in faces in the worst ways, but when his hands recreated them he could see sense in their open eyes, hear clarity in their noise.
'He can't see you.' Under his breath, his mind let the thought go, so quietly it might as well have kept it to itself. But he couldn't deny, felt good to say it.
Some people weren't terrible, some changes neither. He supposed he could volunteer or work somewhere for the stupid month-long block, so long as he could physically create himself a distraction. It just took adjusting. And not thinking about irrelevant phthalo canvases, or wasting time on their making.
Connie sighed into the quiet again.
Through the window, cars were loud and traffic lights were still beeping incessantly because people thought they would press the button and then walk the weeknight silence of the roads before safety could catch up to them. Jean wouldn't be surprised if most people were drunk. Maybe they too had spent the day frowzy and frustrated.
The text on his laptop screen turned into a mass of fuzz as he blearily read over the duvet pulled up to his nose. He let out an entirely necessary groan, and it caught and unwound in his throat for a good twenty seconds, at least.
When it was over, he opened a new tab and started local studio searches. His head didn't turn when his door clicked and cried open.
'Sorry,' Mike's voice came quiet and drawn-out, and his feet scuffed along the carpet louder than usual.
Jean glanced away from the loading results on the screen and his eyes landed on the floor. He snorted. 'What the hell are those?'
Mike's eyebrows shot up as though he forgot he was wearing fuzzy unicorn slippers. Instead of answering the obvious, he answered the second most obvious, 'Hange's narwhals.'
A laugh scuffled through Jean's teeth when he noticed half the man's feet were hanging off the back of the slippers. When he continued to smirk at the tutor, the man defended, 'they were by the door and my feet were cold.'
'I'm sure your toes are really toasty now,' Jean mocked, with very little venom and even less enthusiasm.
Mike held his hands up, just like he had when he'd retreated the studio in the afternoon. 'I said I was sorry,' his voice cracked when it reached a little too high. 'But if shoe jabs are all I'm getting, I'll take 'em.'
An indignant gargle sounded in Jean's throat. He countered, 'so do you like watching me suffer, or is Erwin being a dick?'
Batting Jean's knee through the quilt, Mike shook his head. 'It was a unanimous decision between the board and all the tutors alike. We're chasing out any lazy stragglers.' His hands clasped on his knees. When he turned to look at Jean's dully nodding head, his brow was furrowed. 'I thought you were stuck for ideas anyway? This'll be good help.'
This time, Jean's eyebrows shot up. 'Well, I did something today,' he murmured. Canvas and carpet and coffee all returned to mind and he swallowed around the bitterness it left, mixing slightly with thoughts of colourful hands, in art classes, in foster home gardens – warm memories they had no business mixing with.
The last thought had him looking at Mike again. 'You can't see it,' he dismissed, as soon as he saw the expectant glow in his foster father's eyes.
'Fair enough,' he withdrew, forehead smoothing out. 'But just because something you create isn't entirely what you would have wanted, that doesn't mean it won't take interest – lead onto better things.'
Jean pressed his lips, remembering times when Mike said similar things, when Jean wasn't happy with his work at school and deadlines were approaching. Just remembering the pressure brought the feeling back to his chest and gut. It was a shame he couldn't rip up old house memories the same as he could old drawings. He was right, of course, but it didn't release the rebuilding pressure. And the flighty, faint thing that resided in Jean was still set on chucking out the canvas anyway.
Mike tapped Jean's leg again as he stood, and shuffled over to the door (Jean definitely walked like that). With his hand on the handle, he paused for a moment, and Jean pretended he couldn't feel concerned eyes on him as he scrolled through the links in his lap.
Voice low, Mike breathed deep, and Jean could imagine the hairs on his chin wafting like long grass in a pasta sauce-scented breeze. 'I'll keep looking,' he assured, and the door slowly closed.
There were no goodnight wishes when it was midnight and you were an art student still living with your artist carer. In the hours of dark, Jean's bedside lamp made the glare in his glasses known as his reflection watched him from the laptop screen – watched him wonder and wade. They were hours when Jean could feel more confident in his ideas, and in the daylight of bed-based weekends Jean often convinced himself it was night, so his sketches could wander free.
This volunteer work search wasn't something he could get creative with. Or something he could find confidence in. Either way, he was going to need to face new people, new places. New stares to fear and new steps to memorise, so his feet wouldn't betray him, make him stumble, fall, walk in a way others would deem strange. For a fleeting moment, he opened a new browser tab, ready to search the school website for information on the Thailand campus. But then he thought of himself struggling at airports, lugging bags with sweaty hands – disgusting – heaving his panting breath onto strangers because he couldn't help that his throat was closing and their stares weren't getting any lighter – struggling with yet another language after years of getting his head around a second.
He didn't close the tab, but he used it to research the work of artists he'd taken note of studio addresses for. Somewhere between then and three in the morning, Jean had found himself in a sleepless, stomach-tightening cycle of thinking about the very things he didn't want to think about, watching Maury videos on YouTube and glancing at his own shadowy reflection in yet another mug of coffee. The city outside was quieter, but Jean was many ceilings away from open sky. Circles kept drawing and erased themselves. Null and void.
And spaceboy they'll kill me
Before I'm dead and gone
And any way you choose me
It won't be wrong
And anyway you choose me
We won't belong
- Smashing Pumpkins, 'Spaceboy'
A/N:
Cold Wire - Life In Film
Mardy Bum - Arctic Monkeys
Streetlights - The View
Africa - Toto
Spaceboy - Smashing Pumpkins
Life On Mars? - David Bowie
Nicest Thing - Kate Nash
