[Dash] Character backstory, part II
The fence had bought time, nothing more. Around the corner, neglected in the dark coffee stain hive of alleys that bordered the Mile, he knew of an abandoned building that he could hole up in and while away an hour. It would afford a chance to catch his breath while the two officers searched Spitalfields for signs of his passing, no doubt scouring with the usual police mix of blind luck and Brownian motion. He could do with an hour to collect his thoughts. Eat it, bitch. What did that even mean? He flicked through the indexed thoughts of his memory, looking for juicy retorts to dance from his tongue at their next encounter.
The hulking warehouse, a monstrous shell bonded together with the stale beige daub of grime-stained concrete and capped with broken skylights and rusting corrugated iron, was easy enough to find. He reached into his wallet, appraising the Yale lock with little more than distain, and retrieved his student card. For a moment he stared at his own expression from behind the frozen ice of the laminate, before he flexed the card to his purpose and deftly picked the lock. It didn’t matter if the card broke; he wasn’t going to need it anymore.
Slamming the door shut, he unsaddled his rucksack and surrendered to introspection. He seethed at his own misjudgment. He could hear the usual voices in his head, pounding a symphony of oppressive, claustrophobic demands in the attainment of perfection. His father always led the voices. That never failed to surprise him. He didn’t know what his father even sounded like.
It was the usual deluge of prickled barbs, a tirade that penetrated every action, bringing up questions and accusations and endless demands. It was a circle of raised voices, rising up to soaring cacophony until the challenges that he no good, no use to anybody and, worst of all, had no talent pressurised his ears and made him want to scream. Then he felt the prick of the shards. He had crushed the student card in his palm as he banished the thoughts from his mind.
He could take almost any insult with a grin. He had done, had suffered for it, and had kept coming back with a larger grin and a better remark. It was the Newham way; you were caught in the vice of endless deprivation. The pressure mounted and the heat soared. You either imploded in on yourself, gave up and gave in, surrendered and joined the downtrodden who spent their lives scraping by and pretending they were satisfied, or you fought back. Dash fought. He fought with every synaptic cackle of inspiration that fuelled his Art, every scraped knuckle that drew blood and every stencil he used to adorn the walls of the East End with curling calligraphic commentary.
Nothing could impugn his Art. It was his link to the sublime and subtle, to the creative and the exploratory, and he knew it. It was never the hobby his social worker had dismissed it as; it was his passion. Each colour resonated with his soul. Every stroke felt natural, as though something higher was seizing his hand, guiding him, freeing his imagination and expressing beauty with a graphite line. Each delicate stroke to fulfil a concept was a soft kiss that heightened his infatuation. He’d tried to explain that to the judges: that his Art wasn’t some idle vandalism but a mirror to society. No, not just a mirror; it was a mirror of liquid inspiration that rippled with every percussive trace made by mortal existence. He was just enhancing the ripple, beating out with concentric passion to resonate with something deeper and truer, so that his ripple could affect others, until the frequencies could align and the mirror could shatter. Art wasn’t just emotive expression. It was the way to break free.
He’d worked constantly. At twelve, while everyone else in his neighbourhood was busy experimenting with alcoholic highs and nicotinic lows, he explored his imagination with spray cans, airbrushes and acrylic. By sixteen he’d mastered them all and had garnered a reputation. It hadn’t taken him long to realise that graffiti meant far more than the personal satisfaction it gave him. It gave him respect. It gave him protection. It gave him purpose.
His mother had supported him. She was the reason he’d finished his GCSEs and even tried college before he found it too stifling and mundane. She’d arranged for pirate cable so that he could sit in his room for hours, watching History and Discovery and Biography, soaking up all the dross so often dismissed that had served him so well. She’d bought him books on classical mythology and Wicca, so that he could memorise the symbols and meanings of the visual feast he wished to create and assign the different gods, heroes and demons their places at the banquet. She had given him the tools to follow in the brush strokes of Raphael, Caravaggio, Michelangelo and Poussin. And she’d comforted him through the trials, formal questions and ASBOs. She was supportive of him, despite the counts of affray, breaking and entering and antisocial behaviour. And he knew one day he would pay her back a hundred fold.
His father hadn’t been so supportive. Even from Australia, he still occasionally tried to dictate the life of Anthony Callahan. He sent the occasional message, first by letter and then my email, full of stale and steely thoughts about how he should ‘be a man’ and ‘think about the forces’. The scolding bloodlust burned off every page. Each message was carefully constructed to drive martial desire into his brain. Dash had stopped reading them long ago. He didn’t appreciate the mind games.
The worst part was that he was sure the games had succeeded on some dark, unspoken level. He had grown up fighting, recognising everything as a battle, constantly resisting the flowing torrent that demanded violence. He could feel his father’s pen stroke leaving deep grooves in his psyche, drawing scars of class war, age war, any war. When his social worker had signed him up for parkour lessons, the concentration it had demanded had channelled his aggression elsewhere. But the frustration still it lingered. Sometimes it was impossible to control.
“Nice run, traceur,” a voice stated from somewhere, breaking the troubled storm of thoughts. Dash cast furtive glances into the gloom of the warehouse, at once on his feet. The room was empty. He knew it was. He’d been in there five times already, practising his graffiti styles in peace. Nobody ever came in. The building was derelict.
“Hello?” he called out, stepping forward to look around. There was nothing but the thin layer of dust on the floor and the kaleidoscopic pools of oil and water arising from a crack somewhere high above him.
“Behind you.”
Dash spun around, confronted only by a wall displaying one of his weaker pieces. A pastiche of Becky Satchell, a one-time girlfriend now immortalised in a hellish concoction of furore and spite after an acrimonious break up.
“You’re not still out of breath are you? I thought you were into that running crap?”
Dash stared in amazement. The glaring, malevolent anime creation was addressing him. He gawped at it with fascination, watching as the colours blended on the wall in ungainly, disjointed cartoon motion. The wall shifted like molten plastic as the portrait drew breath, tilted its head back, and eyed him with bellicose animosity. “What?” it asked, crossing its arms. “Why are you giving me evils?”
“You’re a flippin’ painting, that’s why!” Dash’s voice was raised to a thin squeak. He was staggering backwards, grasping out with his hands to cling on to some vestige of reality. His body, flushed with running only moments before, was now stone cold in fear and confused terror. His mind was searching for some understanding, clawing desperately for some frame of understanding. There was none outside the realms of fantasy and endlessly repeated Disney spectacles. What do you say to a painting?
Inside, deep inside, he could feel something happening. It hurt, sharp like static, as though a well of briars wanted to explode forth from his being. Sparkling, incandescent thoughts and feelings pumped like a second heart, driving his thoughts on through a turbulent millrace of emotion. He watched with wide eyes as the portrait stared at him. He half expected it to step out of the wall.
“Anthony Dashiell Callahan,” the image said, quite coldly, its contorted smile a mockery of human nature. “Don’t you always say you want your art to be interactive?”
“Not like this!” He searched his mind, wondering if he’d touched something in the alleyway that had gone through his skin. Diffusion… that’s right. It had to be some kind of LSD trip. It was the only explanation.
The Art smiled. Then the prickles inside focused and became a geyser that gushed up and shook him, soaking him through as the world was ripped asunder, losing its fundamental laws and constraints, casting aside the illusions of the mundane and blazing into the palette of a master artist, becoming living paint. The walls were a matt grey, saturated with hints of white as the delicate light from a cracked skylight above played down. His clothes had taken on a glossy, wet look, and he could feel the close tackiness and smell the primer. He glanced at his hand, smearing the greasy oils and fleshy hues with his fingers. And then the world flashed again, more violently, as the geyser became a volcano of thoughts and ideas and expressions and fears and concepts and unrestrained and undenied possibility that thrust his being and pushed upwards, upwards, out of his body and beyond.
And then he was somewhere further and higher that transcended thought and understanding. He felt a convulsive tremble as the radiance burst from every pore, exploding out of his soul in a showering myriad of colour and brilliant light. The world was racing far behind, trying to catch up as his mind careened past the infinite at a blistering, unfathomable velocity. The sound of his own screams filled his ears and overwhelmed his consciousness.
In the silent room, Anthony Callahan's eyes rolled upwards and his body began to walk.