Instead, he abandoned his pencil for a black Sharpie.
He saw the finished tiger before he’d even started, but when he was drawing on the black stripes, he paused. Realising that instead of the pale ghost in his mind’s eye of the former wild cat – emaciated, feeble, broken – this cat was a prisoner.
A queen of the jungle, condemned to life as a domestic pet.
Forced within a shape that did not fit.
He sat back, reassessed, then got out the scarlet Sharpie and changed the stripes on the cat’s body to red instead of black; in another time and place he would allow the paint to drip, to ooze and travel down the glass. He took out a Molotow marker, thick and heavy, holding the promise of a future spent spraying his pieces rather than confining and shrinking them to fit the confines of his sketchbook. With the marker he added a blood-red stripe across the tiger’s mouth, thick and heavy. He made it drip. Rune kept going until the paint pooled at the base of the page. A tiger tearing at its stripes, gagged by its own torn flesh.
When he had finished, there was an enormous sketch of a tiger. Black stripes turning to red as if they had been ripped off and tagged, counted, like in a prison cell. This tiger was counting with its own stripes. ‘Days of Cat-tivity’ he called it, writing in small capitals on the back of the page.
He tagged the bottom of the page and set the sketchbook up against the desk. He waited. Wanting to see, to really see what he had created. The half-light was not enough, but it was November and the single bare bulb overhead was all he had.
Adrenaline fizzed and bubbled within him; he lit a cigarette. Opening the window so Papa wouldn’t know he’d been smoking in his room, he leaned out, his senses becoming crisp and cold. He tasted burned wood on his tongue as remnants of seasonal fires tinged the air.
He smoked with vacant happiness until his attention snagged on his sketch. From this angle, with the bedroom light ballooning around him, he saw in his mind’s eye the piece as it would be sprayed. One day.
A memory sharp as snapped glass pulled him away from the image in his mind – the tiger’s gaze. He’d made a mistake. The tiger he had drawn was not counting its days in captivity in the hope of being released, it was tearing itself apart.
He screwed his cigarette out on the brickwork and dropped it into the garden below, then turned back to his sketch. But before he could destroy the picture, he heard a knock at the door.
‘Roo? Are you home?’ Lotte asked, coming straight in as he closed the sketchbook. ‘Papa says I’m tubby,’ she said as soon as he looked up.
‘What?’
‘He says I am tubby and I will get fat if I am not doing good eating and walking faster,’ she said in one breath, pinching her stomach to create rolls.
‘You’re not tubby,’ he said seriously, and she wasn’t. She still had a child’s figure, really; her tummy stuck out at times because she didn’t care about how she looked enough to suck it in, as he knew most girls her age did.
‘He won’t let me wear my yellow tutu any more. He says I’m too big for it.’ Tears rolled down her cheeks.
‘He’s wrong.’
Lotte examined his face for a while and measured his serious claim against that of Papa, which Rune was sure would have been cutting. She let go of her stomach and flattened her T-shirt.
‘You’re not tubby,’ Rune said, ‘and if your yellow tutu doesn’t fit, we shall just have to buy a bigger size.’ He wasn’t sure how he’d do that, but he knew he would.
‘Do I not need to do better eating and faster walking?’ she asked.
‘Not unless you want to.’
‘Who would want to do that?’ Lotte laughed, and her laugh made him smile. He lowered his voice conspiratorially.
‘Only crazy people,’ he said. ‘Like Papa.’
‘Shhh,’ Lotte said. ‘He’s downstairs.’
‘I know.’
She squeezed her cheeks to stop herself from grinning.
‘That was not nice,’ she said, ‘but you always get my best smiles. I love you, my big brother.’ And she hugged him tight, pressing her wet face into his T-shirt.
‘Will you take me to school tomorrow?’ she said, sitting at his desk and flipping through his sketchbook. She screwed her face up at the tiger.
‘So long as Papa lets me have some petrol for the car,’ he said, knowing that everything that would allow him a glance at the horizon away from home was strictly rationed and measured. A mile to school meant a mile’s worth of petrol. No more. Money for clothes was the exact amount of marks, not a pfennig more. He had to beg for ‘pocket money’, which was doctored when Papa found cigarettes or if he was late to the ‘job’ Papa had arranged for him.
As a janitor at Lotte’s school, Rune cleaned the floors, wiped the blackboards, unclogged the toilets. All without getting paid. Part of the community action and involvement his application to the police academy had demanded. He need not have bothered; it was all for show. He would follow in Papa’s footsteps or be dragged into them. Community action or not.
The only good thing about the job was his access to sketchbooks and pencils. If they’d paid him a wage, he’d have just bought them, but he didn’t have that freedom so he took what he needed as part of a wage he believed he was due. One room cleaned equalled one Sharpie; one blackboard, some charcoal.
He didn’t want to be a thief.
He sold his sketches to buy cigarettes and to buy paper to draw more, and the more he drew, the more he could sell.
‘Art is not a career,’ Papa said. ‘You only have nine months until you head off to the police academy. Better start acting like you mean it. No son of mine will act like a poof, a layabout – an artist. As a police officer you’ll be a pillar of the community.’ Like him, Rune thought, feeling a thick, oily wave of revulsion lap in his stomach.
‘I see you drawing again, I’m tying your arm behind your back for a week,’ Papa had threatened. Papa’s threats were warnings and he heeded them as such. He started washing his hands carefully to remove any stain of ink or charcoal. He took his sketches to the school and kept them in a vacant locker.
He was trying so hard to find a way out. For him and for Lotte, both.
She was looking at another of his sketches, crown shyness – a collection of trees as seen from the ground, with the branches and leaves spaced to allow the sun to filter down. Lotte ran her finger along the thick veins of the trees, so closely spaced yet still giving each other room, allowing light through, creating a stunning canopy.
‘I like this one,’ she said.
He liked that one too, but its scale was too small, too tight.
There was so little hope. He panicked. No space at all. To think. Or breathe. Time was running short.
He’d just turned twenty; at twenty-one he’d have enrolled in the academy and there’d be nothing he could do about it. No escape.
‘You have serious on your face,’ Lotte said, closing his sketchbook and breaking into his thoughts.
‘Do I?’
‘Why are you not being happy, Roo?’
He felt as though his feet weren’t touching the floor. Although, of course, they were. He forced a smile. ‘Sorry, I’m fine.’
‘If you take me to school tomorrow, can I wear my tutu?’