I used to like the smell of petrol when I was a kid. I remembered that when I was setting fire to the music block. I guess I like the smell as an adult too. I filled an old jerry-can with the stuff. Walked right into a petrol station, filled it up and walked out again thank you very much.
I’m not a nutter.
I got a job. I work in the hardware store around the corner form my apartment. Don’s Tools, it’s called. Don doesn’t exist.
Sometimes I tell people I’m Don when they ask about it: ‘Where’s Don,’ they say. ‘You’re talking to him.’
There’s a reason I set the fire. That’s what makes me such an upstanding citizen.
I fingered my first girlfriend behind the music block. That’s a fact, not the reason I set it on fire. I said it so you’ll know I didn’t have anything personal against the building. I was doing the community a service.
Ricky was the one who told me about the rats. Real big ones, whole generations of them, building a city inside the music block walls. Ricky goes to St Augustine’s, that’s how he knows. He’s in grade twelve and works part time at Don’s Tools.
He was working the checkout in the shop. I was sweeping the floor near the doors, and he called me over to tell me about them.
‘You seen them?’ I asked.
‘Hard not to see em,’ he said. ‘You can hear em too. Big fuckers, chewin on shit all day long.’
‘Make sure you don’t touch anything they been on,’ I said.
‘I don’t touch nothing in music. Only took it coz of the easy marks.’
I got a thing with rats. That’s why Ricky told me about em. He knows because we got rat poison at the shop and I’m always tryin to sell it to people. I’d give it away if I could.
I got sick when I was a kid, is the reason. Doctor told me there were little spiral bugs that got into my blood. They made my lungs wet, the doctor said. Wet and red. The spirals got into me because of rat pee.
Mum was real mad when she found out. People’d think we were dirty is the reason. We weren’t dirty though. I just liked art is all.
When I went to St Augustine’s I did art class. There weren’t any rats at school then, and there weren’t any under my bed either. This was before the spirals got into me.
One of the things we learned about was materials. You could use anything to make art, Mr Fish said. He had a real funny name but I believed what he said about art.
I made a sculpture and Mr Fish said it wasn’t really art on account of it was chicken bones tied together on a bit of cardboard.
I told him it was a forest, that it was a representation, which it was, and how that was a great idea for a sculpture. He said I should have used match sticks.
If Mum worked at a match stick factory, instead of the deli, and brought home boxes of matches instead of cooked chooks, maybe I would have.
I hid the bone forest in my room because Mr Fish said sometimes good art is hidden for a long time because of war or people not understanding its importance. Only I didn’t clean the bones good enough. That’s how the rats got under my bed.
I don’t like parades because of the noise. That’s why I didn’t tell anyone it was me who burned the music block down. Upstanding citizens don’t need parades. I did have to make up a little white lie, though.
Petrol is real tricky to work with when you’re making fire. It spreads and it jumps.
It jumped right onto my hand.
I told the doctor I burnt it making art.
‘What kind?’ the doctor asked. But he said it like he didn’t believe me. He was all squinty.
‘The important kind,’ I said. ‘It started out as just some old bones. But it became a forest, and then a forest fire.’
He told me my answer was real strange.
I told him he better check me for spirals.
–Art by Mustafa Dedeoğlu
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