Omar Musa - Here Come the Dogs

As he walks from work

to the bus interchange,

he sees a protest in the centre of the City.

There are signs with Damien Crawford’s

smiling face crossed out.

A handsome Aboriginal man in a suit

is speaking into a megaphone.

Jimmy walks past.

As he leaves the City on his bus,

he sees a man sitting on top of a street sign,

dressed immaculately with a scarf

around the lower part of his face,

watching him.

‘Secca?’ asks Solomon.

‘Yeah, there is one, but he’s a lazy cunt. Only patrols once every two hours, if that. I saw him wanking in the office the other night,’ says Jimmy.

‘I’d do the same if I was him. Boring as,’ says Solomon. ‘Camera?’

‘Haven’t seen one.’

‘Word.’ Solomon nods. ‘If we time this right, it’ll be easy as.’

Jimmy is leaning on the wheel of their mother’s car and Solomon’s sunk deep in the seat, playing with a lighter, smoke filling the car. Jimmy looks up, scoping the spot, moonlight outside turning everything bone-coloured. Trem album on real low, sampled snares cracking.

Solomon thinks to himself for a second that he’s getting a bit over hip hop. Most of what he hears in Australian hip hop is either glowstick-wielding, fast-food pop or purist garbage stuck in the nineties. Jimmy reckons there’s heaps of good stuff out, but Solomon doesn’t have the energy to dig for it anymore. On a night like this, though, doing this, it’s perfect.

Jimmy is rapping along and points to the right. Solomon nods. The grass is thick and nearly as high as the barbed wire. Sick. It’s the fuel depot on the edge of town, a big cylindrical building next to bushland and a set of traffic lights on the highway. They see the spot they want from here — freshly primed concrete, real high up roadside exposure, at the top of some stairs that wind around the building. Holy grail. Every cunt going to work in the morning is gonna see their masterpiece. But that’s not even why they’re doing it. Jimmy lights up another ciggie and they sit listening to Trem’s voice winding up with the smoke.

‘Borrowed time’s got expiry dates/

Vindicated with a choice of either wrought iron or fiery gates.’

Jimmy rolls down the window and flicks the butt out. Heat, insects, the smell of gum trees. The CD changes and the paranoid anthem ‘They’re Watching’ by Ciecmate and Newsense comes on. Jimmy rolls the window up and they drive off.

The next night they’re there again, this time on foot.

‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

They take out T-shirts, pull them over their faces and tie the sleeves at the back of their heads, eyes peeping out their neck holes — instant bally. Gloves on, bag over shoulder. Executioners. Jimmy stays low, so low that the top of the grass is well above him. The secca just patrolled. Should give them a good hour, maybe even two.

Boltcutters out.

Jimmy cuts a big hole in the wire and passes the boltcutters back to Solomon in the tall grass. Jimmy waits quietly and a minute later Solomon appears at the fence on the other side of the compound and cuts a big circle out of it so they have another escape route. A nod, then simultaneously they creep through the tears in space and time.

Their feet crunch on the gravel. Keeping low, creeping towards the stairs, the smell of petrol and steel. A light is flickering in the secca’s office. They climb, trying to stay quiet on the iron stairs. It’s higher than they thought and by the time they get to the top they’re sweating. They stop, look at what’s below: the whole town, the roads, the bush.

Then they unzip the bag, take a can out and mark up first with the dregs of a Matador. Big, block letters:

FREE JAKEL

Jimmy hands Solomon a can — Soviet Red. Concrete like this is porous, soaks up paint. Ironlak is hard to buff, leaves a scar, like Killrust back in the day. Jimmy takes out his can — Pineapple Park Yellow.

‘You do the top fill,’ he whispers.

‘Yep.’ Solomon begins.

Ghost fatcaps on both cans. Used to be so hard to get fatcaps, so you’d stock up on nozzles from out of town. Fatcaps were worth their weight in gold, and Rusto’s were the shit. A writer from Melbourne once told the boys they used to call Rusto’s ‘whistlers’ down there cos of the sound they make. They begin to fill the letters in.

Yellow to red fade.

The ghost cap goes hohhhhhhhhhhhhh, projecting a wide circle of paint.

‘Careful it doesn’t drip,’ Jimmy whispers.

Solomon nods and leans back to get maximum coverage, emptying the can quickly.

The brothers had argued over colours and design for ages. Jimmy sketched a few ideas in his blackbook, which has one of the best photo albums of anyone they know. Solomon was bouncing a tennis ball off the wall with his left hand, smoking a joint with the other. Jimmy sketched the letters first, then the characters — he wanted the piece to be red and yellow, Maco colours, for Aleks. Solomon, always vaguely uneasy about Aleks’ patriotism, agreed only if they put black in it, ‘like an Aboriginal flag,’ even though he knows Aleks isn’t all that fond of Kooris.

Red. Black. Yellow.

Strong colours but difficult to make work in a piece. Back in the nineties they wouldn’t have even tried. A red to yellow fade is really extreme and good reds and yellows were hard to get. Yellow, especially, was watery. Pastels were always better with the paints available. Now that they have access to good, cheaper Ironlak paint they might as well try it. Nothing like a challenge, even though they know that Aleks, the best writer of them all, would warn against the colour scheme. Jimmy then argued that they should rack the paint, like the old days, but Solomon dismissed the idea straight away. ‘And run the risk of doing community service or some shit? Fuck that. Too old for that.’

‘A real writer racks his paint,’ said Jimmy in an imperious tone.

‘Yeah, yeah. And they only paint trains, I know. Who are ya, Jisoe or something? You can afford it now anyway, Jimmy.’

Now, they start the characters.

A skeleton smoking a ciggie.

Bushfire flames and a Vergina Sun.

Then the piece de resistance –

a muzzled greyhound with a patch over

one eye leaning against the ‘L’.

Perfect night for a mission. The Town turns ghost come Sunday night. No cars, the air warm and clear, stars above like grapeshot. Winter time is a bitch to paint in, so they leave that to the Lads and the young writers now. How did they do it all those years, heading out every night for weeks on end in minus-five cold, fingers freezing stiff as the propellant comes out, paint all drippy cos of the temperature. Solomon wonders what it would be like to grow up in Sydney — good weather and a proper trainline.

The outline now –

Montana Black. New York fatcap.

Ssssssssssss.

This is the real shit. The pretty boys can keep their preening for the stage. No MC has ever died holding the mic. Writers are a different breed though — gotta be a bit crazy, a bit wild. People die on train lines everyday around the world, dying for their art. Dying for something that’ll be painted over in a day.

Cutbacks.

Sss. Sss. Sss.

A car pulls up at the intersection. They crouch low in the shadows, hugging close to the stairs. Solomon coughs into his hand. The car sits there for what seems like hours, a house drumline pulsing from it. It’s a done up Vectra, some terrible chameleon paintjob. The light turns green and it drives off. They look down. No sign of a secca.

Background now –

dark purple.

Fumes.

There’s no way they could count how many times they’ve done this. Bus seats to drains to tennis courts to underpasses. The planning, the risk, the art, the pride. Jimmy wishes Aleks was here. He thinks back to when they did a door-to-door full-colour burner. It ran all the way to Sydney Central before it got buffed.