CECE, DISRESPECTFULLY | ✓

56: JUVENILE THRILLS

            Our trainers sink into the mud of the road that leads us through sparse woods. Though the motorway is less than twenty metres behind us, the whoosh of cars is stifled by conifers.

Everything is asleep in here. On occasion, a bird bursts off a branch and leaves the bough swinging for a moment, then stillness returns. Not the threatening kind; peaceful.

Diwa might disagree with that assessment. Her eyes bounce from my footprints to the trees and the building peeking through them. When I said I wanted to paint somewhere special, she probably expected me to take her anywhere but an abandoned workshop by a motorway.

'If you see a copper,' I say, 'leg it. It's every head for themselves then.'

Immediately recognising my farce, she smacks my arm. 'This better be worth it. My boots are getting all manky.'

She yanks one from the mud to find at least an inch of the pastel pink platform heel covered in grime.

I feel no sympathy. I'm currently in my Vans which means my socks have about ten percent probability of getting through this dry.

'You do know shoes are made to get dirty?'

'Don't mean you have to intentionally walk into a swamp,' Diwa argues. 'Cece, seriously what are we doing here?'

I keep my line of sight on where I put my feet to avoid the worst puddles. 'I came to Wigan at fourteen. Didn't end up staying long. I've always been difficult but it got a lot worse around then. I'd have these... episodes. My foster parents thought I were possessed. Weren't the nicest people I've lived with.'

I force a laugh. It rattles in my sternum like a gust through a frozen wind chime.

'The things I'd draw definitely didn't help.'

We reach the front of the four-story block of a building. Still wet from the morning rain, the cement glows blue.

'I learnt to spend as little time in the house as possible. I can feel it build up, know when to get out of sight. So I'd come here. To scream and to break things.'

Diwa don't say owt. Standing beside me so that the spikes on my jacket prod her, she studies the shitty graffiti plastered to the stone walls and the shattered triple-glazed windows.

'That's not all me, for the record.'

I weren't the first to find this place and certainly won't be the last.

'Here.' Scraping off as much mud as I can with my trainer, I pry a rock from my feet and hold it out to her.

Diwa stares at it.

'Go on. Try it.'

'Like...?' She glances at the windows.'You sure we won't get done for this?'

I stare at all the vandalised parts of the building and say slowly, 'Do it look like we will?'

Uncertainly, she plucks the rock from my palm, lip curling as the dirt that gets on her fingers. She holds it up by her head, hesitates, and throws.

It hits a windowpane on the first storey. Without commenting on her aim, I hand her another. This one crashes right through two layers of glass and hits the floor inside with an echo.

Diwa giggles and bounces on her feet.

'Good, innit?'

'Yeah.'

I pry two more out of the ground, throw one at a window on the top floor where it shatters the outmost layer of glass and rebounds back to the ground, and hand her the other. She hurls it through the remnants of the window right ahead of us and picks another herself.

My chest swells with bubbles and I beam. Not a grin or a smirk, but a wide smile that makes my cheeks ache.

Diwa don't tie her hair up even when the tresses dip into the grime each time she digs out a new rock from the crust, nor does she pick out the dirt that gets under her fingernails. We spend fifteen minutes throwing rocks at windows before I guide her inside.

Either destruction of property is a better trust-building exercise than I expected or Diwa's got plenty of adrenaline pumping in her veins because she don't comment once about trespassing when I instruct her to wedge through the gap I wrestle between the padlocked doors. Her confidence does glitch at the staircase. It's so narrow both my shoulders graze the wall and so rotten each step has a fifty-fifty chance of death. But we make it up two flights without fatal accidents.

Shards of glass grouse under our shoes. Damp clings to walls decked in spray paint; mostly cocks and caricatures of classmates or teachers detested enough to be immortalised with devil horns or exaggerated glasses and buck teeth.

I stride directly to the centre of the wall adjacent to the broken windows. 'Hopefully, it's not been covered.'

Protecting my palms with the sleeves of my shirt, I grab a slab of plywood someone, by the looks of it, has used for knife-throwing practice. I heave it out of the way with a clatter of flattened beer cans and butane lighters.

The painting is still there, albeit sun-bleached and dusty. A wasp attacking a butterfly. A spaceship outline is drawn over one of the butterfly's torn wings.

'This were my first ever graffiti.'

I trace the flimsy outline, noticeably done by a shaking hand. I'd never held a spray can before and it's much more difficult to paint with one than it looks. I had no knowledge of how to use distance and angles, nor had I ever heard of a graffiti cap.

'Thought I'd recreate it. You know, to "get back to my roots" or "complete the circle" or whatever.'

I glance over my shoulder to find Diwa watching me with an expression I can't identify. Tenderness with an edge, not quite pity nor mockery but it makes me look away.

This might be the last day of our friendship. But Diwa deserves to know... everything.

Notes

Get done: Get into trouble.