Play by Luke Palmer

Author:Luke Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Firefly Press
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

MATT

17

Mark won’t talk to me.

I don’t know what I’ve done or haven’t done. For some reason, I’m always looking at it as something I’ve done. Why is that? It’s him, after all, that’s not answering my messages. Maybe I’m just annoying him?

Whatever it is, he’s barely come near me since I got back from holiday: an uneventful two weeks camping in Devon, lots of galleries, lots of drawing. Drawings of Mark, mostly.

But he won’t look at me when we’re up on the heath or on the school field in the evenings. If he’s even there, that is. He doesn’t always turn up now. Johnny says he’d been hanging around with his sister and her friends or something, chilling out at pool parties or whatever it is they do at the big houses out in the villages, but he wasn’t doing that anymore, either. Johnny says Mark’s abandoned us for greener pastures, that he’s moving up in the world. I think Johnny knows more than he’s letting on.

Then suddenly it’s the last week of the holidays, and there’s Mark, just across the road from me, walking along with those huge headphones on – another one of his recent purchases – and the backpack he never takes off.

I’m out with Dad when I spot him. He persuaded me to join one of his ‘plein air’ expeditions this morning where he wanders around with his sketchbook until ‘the muse descends’ and he does a quick sketch of something that’s ‘inspired’ him. It can’t be any worse than pining at home, I think, and I take my sketchbook. Maybe it’ll be good to get out of my own head for a bit, see what other muses there might be out there for me. A sketchbook filled with page after page of a boy who’s ignoring you is pretty tragic, right? Best to break it up a bit, for appearances’ sake.

When I’m not drawing Mark, I like drawing ‘ephemera’, which is a word I learnt last year for things that are ‘transient and temporary’. In particular, I like drawing the stuff that winds up at the roadside, or under hedges. Plastic bottles, old tennis balls, anything thrown away, or broken. Or that’s lost its purpose.

If something’s lost its purpose, should it still have the same name as when it was useful? Is a broken umbrella still an umbrella? Or, if a crisp packet no longer holds crisps, is it still a crisp packet? No one in their right mind would try and use an old crisp packet to put crisps back into, right? So the fact that we still call it a crisp packet, makes you think it’s useless and no longer has a function. So it becomes rubbish. Used up. Junk.

But I don’t think that’s true.

Johnny used to do this thing with old crisp packets, making shiny origami triangles out of them. We all started doing it, keeping them in the front pocket of our backpacks. Between us, we had hundreds of crisp packet triangles.

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