The Girl On The Factory Wall

"Cool as."
Stepping back out into the road for a moment, Marg Cornell surveyed her handiwork critically, then shook the silver spray can and moved back in to continue. The high wall surrounding the chemical plant was scarred and pitted, loose bricks and crumbling mortar struggling to support the weight of two decades worth of graffitti. Most of the earliest examples had long since been painted over but some were still visible, tucked into corners too difficult to reach, too small to be worth the extra effort for the average tagger. Others seemed to survive the years through sheer artistry; The word Lovecraft had filled the archway above the main gates for at least fifteen years, outlasting the band it commemorated by more than a decade. There was something perversely beautiful in the way the letters were slowly being torn apart by the grasping tentacles of a faceless, eldritch horror and no subsequent artist had felt confident enough in their own work to paint over it. Elsewhere, less successful tags were covered by fresh paint on an almost weekly basis, regardless of the longevity of the bands they paid tribute to. Floyd's prismatic beams were bisected by a scrawled Never Mind The Bollocks, a poor rendition of Jim Morrison had been partially covered by Marley's Lion and the current crop of Madchester bands were well represented in dayglo bubble-lettering, just waiting for the next big thing to come along and obliterate them. Like the strips of compressed Earth in a geological sample, the layers of paint could be tied to distinct time frames, with rocky spurs and outcroppings breaking the surface of the present.
The wall had become a living history book, with each generation making its own mark, wiping the past from sight, believing that all that mattered was now. Their music, their art, their time. But Marg knew that this was rarely true, that painting on the wall was like writing in the sand, that only the wall and the factory would remain. She was painting for a different reason.
For one thing, her painting had nothing to do with music, at least not on the surface. She loved the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays and Northside, but she saw beyond them, back into the rich history her mother had taught her since before she could crawl. She could pick out any band in the scrawled mass of tags and sing their best known songs - Even Lovecraft - and could probably sing several lesser known ones too. She knew the meandering paths which lead from Hawkwind to Doctor And The Medics, from The Velvet Underground to Primal Scream. The warp and woof of the aural tapestry was all laid out before her as her mother struggled to make sense of the world in the only way she could.
Throughout her childhood, Marg's mother had slowly drifted further and further away from her, her illness dismantling the sweet young woman and leaving only a shell in her place, a worn out husk full of brittle glass and rusty nails that squealed and scraped as it fought to stay alive. But at those times when her moods stripped her of speech, when the slightest touch from her daughter would send her into spasms of rage or enfold her in icy fear, she could still find the tune to express her innermost thoughts. Locked out of her mother's room, Marg still found a way into her world through the muffled music playing on her battered old portable record player. At ten years old, when an elderly relative had brought her a cassette player of her own for Christmas, she had sat on the landing outside her mother's room and played the first track from an album of Christmas songs, the only tape she owned. She had hoped simply to involve her, to bring her within earshot of a normal family Christmas, but as the song ended, another started up from behind th locked door. As each carol ended, another would fill the silence, alternating back and forth between mother and daughter; In many ways, it was the first true conversation they ever held together.
In the six years since, their secret shared vocabulary had deepened and expanded to the point where the opening bars of a song could stand as shorthand for a feeling or sensation, and the overall mood of an album chosen over another could indicate the tone of an entire day. Even when the drugs were working and her mother resembled a mostly functioning human being, they still fell back into the musical dialect they were most comfortable with, neither one speaking but filling the silence with song after song. The advent of compact discs meant they could skip straight to any track that expressed their mood and miss out any that threatened to shatter it. With her weekend job in Woollies, Marg earned enough to bring home two or three new albums every week, and she often had to fight the urge to run all the way home, just to hear them a few minutes sooner. Sometimes, if her mother was still at the clinic when she got back, she would lie on the living room floor, her head between the stereo speakers, listening to each one from beginning to end. She was looking for the hook which would bring the whole album alive for her mother, the one song or phrase or note which would snare them both. Sometimes, it never appeared, and the disc was taken to the Simms Cross junk shop to be traded in for another half dozen scratchy old 45s. Other times, she would chance across a gleaming jewel in the heart of an album, a track which meant so many things to them both that they could use it to bridge a week of awkward silences. She wondered if that meant she was as bad as her mother, that a song which prevented them from speaking for days on end was seen as a good thing must be some measure of their shared psychosis. But mostly she just accepted that this was the way her life was going; this was her mother, this was her world, same as it ever was.
For now. Exhausting her spray can, she wiped a stray strand of hair from her eyes and stepped back to view her progress. The figure was well proportioned, clearly defined and highlighted by the silver haze which shimmered around it. The silhouette was a blank space on the wall where she had painstakingly painted over the accumulated graffitti with layer after layer of natural brick red until not even the barest trace bled through. With a fine brush she had drawn in the lines of soft grey mortar, until the final effect was achieved. In the midst of the chaotic jumble of tags and countertags stood a void. Shaped like a sixteen year old girl in baggy jeans and an Inspiral Carpets tee-shirt, it was an absence of artwork, as if she had stood there for forty years while several generations of artists had drawn around and across her. Now she had stepped away from the wall, revealing the bare brick beneath for the first time in decades. Lighting a cigarette, she took up a can of white paint and quickly gave it a title, the first thing to enter her mind. Pleased, she slipped the cans back into her satchel and checked her watch. Almost half past twelve; time to go.
As she turned the corner at the end of the street she passed a couple of guys she knew vaguely from school and nodded in greeting. They nodded back and continued on towards the factory.
"The horse in her bedroom was Shadowfax." said one, "I went back and read the description and it was spot on."
"I haven't got a clue what's going on," admitted his comrade, dripping tippex thinner onto the cuff of his jacket and taking a deep breath. "It's fucking great."
They paused for a moment, looking at the freshly painted words beside the figure of the missing girl, reading it aloud, giving voice to the question the whole town would soon be asking;
"Where is Marg?"
But neither they nor anyone else had an answer, and the girl on the factory wall was surrounded by music and saying nothing.

Notes