Prologue - Banksy was Right

Banksy was right. That was Nate’s first thought as he jumped the fence onto the railway tracks. It wasn’t the first time he’d done so. But it was the first time he’d almost landed in a pile of shit. So, Banksy was right, tramps really did shit everywhere. Carefully stepping away from the hopefully cold pile of excrement, Nate adjusted his black hoodie and took in a deep breath, sighing happily. It smelled, of course, but it felt like teenage rebellion, like a moment of freedom.

The noises of the city in the background just served to highlight the separation he now felt, being somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. It made him smile. Nate started walking carefully over the tracks, extra vigilant now. Not for other people, though maybe he should’ve been. He just didn’t want to step on something gross or twist his ankle. Trying to drag himself over the fence with a twisted ankle would be a lesson in pain and frustration. One he’d already learned in a previous foray and one he was not keen to revisit. Say what you would about Nate, he tried to learn from his mistakes.

Thankfully, it was a short walk to the train carriage he had in mind. Nate didn’t consider himself a vandal, though he was confident others would disagree. He truly subscribed to Banksy’s line of thinking that graffiti was a rational response to the in-your-face advertising of the modern world. That the billboards and logos and adverts that covered so much of modern infrastructure were forced upon people without their consent and that turning it into something beautiful, or thought provoking, was art. That was how Nate viewed himself, as an artist.

The train carriage loomed in front of him. It was one of the newer models with a giant strip down the middle of what Nate thought was a Tic Tac advert. It was hard to tell as someone had already graffitied over a large portion of it. It wasn’t bad work per se, just overly simple. The only thing interesting about it, what had made Nate decide to work on it, was that it was white on black. They had spray painted a perfectly black circle. Then coloured the edge of the circle white and put a white, upside-down triangle through the middle of it. It was perfect for what Nate wanted.

As he spent a moment putting down his backpack and tools of the trade, he saw himself reflected in the window of the train with the ever-present city lights  shining behind him. Nate liked the way he looked and based on a few of the girls from his school, he wasn’t the only one. Standing at around a hundred and eighty-five centimetres he was fairly tall, sporting a lean build, with shaggy shoulder length blonde hair and dark green eyes. He looked a lot like a surfer, though he’d never tried. Maybe if he lived closer to Sydney’s beaches but he was just a poor kid from Sydney’s southwest.

Smiling at himself, he took a step back to take in the graffiti on the train and go over his plan. He’d spent most of the last three weeks at school refining the image he intended to overlay on top of the existing art. Painstakingly redrawing lines and links to achieve what he wanted. He’d love to have told people that it meant something. That there was a message in the image he intended to create. But there wasn’t. He just thought that it was beautiful, and that beauty was its own reward. It was also a challenge. The lines had to be clean, the image clear. He wanted it to look like it had been printed onto the side of the train, not painted. To that end he’d worked on a bunch of stencils that he was confident would create the image he had in mind. If it worked out, he might even sign this one.

Nate didn’t sign most of his work. Thinking about it like that made it sound like he was prolific in his graffiti. He wasn’t. He only added graffiti where he thought it would be beautiful or thought provoking. That meant that he had maybe ten or so artworks around the city. He thought that was a decent effort for only having been in the game for two years. If he signed this piece, it would be the third that made the cut. Nate was perfectly willing to admit he had pretty high standards for himself. He knew why. He always got pensive before he got started on a new piece. Reminded himself of who he was and why he did what he did. Trying to keep it all in perspective.

Nate was an orphan. There, he said it. You would think that after knowing it for more than half of his life he’d finally be okay with it, but the truth was, even after all this time, it still hurt. An ache in his heart that had gotten less over time but had never left. He didn’t think it ever would. He’d read that somewhere, that when you were emotionally scarred like him, the pain never truly left. That the hurt it caused remained the same for the rest of your life and that you just experienced it less because you thought about it less.

That was how he felt. He’d been raw and in pain after his parents died in a car accident when he was eight. A drunk driver had run a red light and t-boned them. He could still remember their faces, thankfully. He had photos of them, and he’d even worked them into one of his artworks. Small enough that they weren’t the focus, and it was one of the more out of the way pieces, being around his suburb of Punchbowl. You would think that would be risky, to shit where you eat, as they put it. But no one in Punchbowl cared about that sort of thing. His work had ended up defaced a few months later anyway.

So, he was an orphan. Where had that left him? With his aunt, of course. A singularly selfish woman who had taken him in but never failed to remind him of all the sacrifices she was making to have him sleeping under her roof. All the while she was collecting extra welfare money from the government, which he supposed at least some of went towards feeding and clothing him. He’d heard worse horror stories from others in the government housing he lived in. At least his aunt didn’t beat him. Just berated him till he made himself scarce. So, he’d gotten used to being out late from an early age, just to avoid the verbal abuse.

Nate rolled his shoulders. That was enough of that. He’d had his moment running his mind over old wounds. Enough about the past. It was time for the present. Nate had long since learned that you couldn’t dwell only on the negative. Yes, his past had been painful. But his now, well his now was alright. He thought about the day he’d had. His two best friends, Michael and Jung, had made plans to catch up tomorrow at Michael’s place. It was always Michael’s place, just because he had the most room.

Michael and Nate had been friends ever since Michael first stood up to the bullies at school for Nate. They’d left him alone ever since. Michael was larger than life. Jung on the other hand was the smallest of the three. But he made up for his lack of physical size in sheer personality. If Michael was the muscle of their trio and Jung was the comedy, Nate was the brains. Art was his passion, but Nate had never had any issues with school. Maths, physics, chemistry, english, whatever the topic, it came to Nate easily and he’d always been willing to help his two friends with their own schoolwork.

Life had been tough for Nate. But these days, life was pretty good. He would finish High School in a couple more months and after that the world was whatever he wanted to make of it. Maybe an art scholarship.

Smirking at the thought, Nate opened his backpack and started pulling out his stencils before carefully unrolling them. Next came the masking tape and then his cans of spray paint. Four in total, two white and two black. He doubted he’d need all of them, but he didn’t want to run out before he was done and be left with a half-finished artwork. He wouldn’t get a chance to come back and fix it. Finally, he grabbed out his Swiss Army knife and put it in the pocket of his hoodie. He mostly used it for cutting the masking tape but on a couple of occasions he’d used it to make last minute changes to his stencils.

All prepared he took in a deep breath and got to work, taping his stencils over the existing graffiti. It took him almost three hours of prep work to get it just right. All the stencils in the exact right spot. Double and triple checked. That was something most people didn’t seem to realise about a lot of art. Like everything else worth doing, you spent a lot of time planning and preparing so that when you finally got around to doing it, you did it right. That was how Nate felt as he started shaking the spray paint cans. He’d done this right.

It ended up taking him another hour to finish. He’d been careful to not apply too much paint as he didn’t want it to run, and he had waited to let it dry a bit before carefully removing the stencils. Remove the tape too soon and you ran the risk of the paint running, pull too late, when the paint has fully dried, and you risked it tearing off some of the paint. Like a lot of things in life it was all about timing. But now that it was done, he stood with a proud smile in front of his artwork. It was exactly what he had imagined. He’d changed it from a single white circle with an upside-down triangle inside, to six concentric circles, with the two outer circles being close together and that same pattern mirrored as the circles got smaller. The final two circles had roughly one tenth of the diameter of the outer circles, making it look like a distorted bullseye. The upside-down triangle remained in the third circle from the outermost ring, and he’d overlaid that entire section with a hexagon. Then in the gaps between the outer and middle circles he’d drawn some little icons he’d found online. With a few semi circles added and a six spoke cross within the hexagon the entire artwork looked arcane. He loved it.

Nate pulled his phone out of his pocket to take a few pictures. Watching his artwork through his phone his eyes narrowed. He could swear it looked brighter than it should. The white on black stood out clearly and he didn’t think there was enough light from the moon above or the city lights behind him for it to be that clear. He walked closer to the finished artwork to get a closer look. As he did so he felt it. The night was warm, as they tended to be during Spring in Sydney. But he could literally feel the temperature differential as he approached the train carriage. Had it been that hot today and the metal was still cooling?

But, no, he’d felt the train himself while putting on the stencils and while not cold he was absolutely certain it hadn’t been hot. Staring at the artwork, he could swear it was getting brighter. As if that wasn’t weird enough on its own, it wasn’t getting brighter evenly. Some of the runes and geometric shapes were glowing brighter than others making his artwork look almost three dimensional. His sense of danger spiked and just as he was about to step back the whole image melted away. Not like he’d seen in online videos of hot metal being poured like a liquid. No, the whole image just rippled like it was water before vanishing.

In its place a yawning circle of perfect black was left. Nate turned to run but he could already feel the hole in space where his artwork had been pulling him toward it. With one last desperate leap he tried to throw himself toward his backpack and the train rails they were sitting beside. As he got horizontal the pull from the black hole increased and he felt himself drawn into it. As he vanished into its shadowy depths his last words were, “Oh shit!”