The air in the middle of London’s Shoreditch High Street did not rip open so much as it curdled.
With a sound like a wet canvas being slapped against concrete, Anthony Lister materialised. He stumbled forward, his boots skidding on the damp British pavement, coughing up a lungful of ozone and digitised static. He dropped his heavy canvas duffel bag – clanking with the comforting, metallic rattle of seventy-odd aerosol cans—and looked around.
“Bloody hell,” Lister muttered, wiping a streak of black charcoal from his forehead, only to replace it with a fresh smudge of neon pink from his fingers. “That wasn’t Brisbane.”
The teleportation device – a finicky, jury-rigged contraption built by a mad-scientist buddy in Melbourne who owed him a favour – was supposed to drop him off at a gallery in New York. Instead, it had deposited him under the perpetually grey, weeping skies of London.
2019-03-14 hk walls lister – hong kong – tsung sau lane e
He wasn’t mad about it. London had better brickwork anyway.
Lister slung the duffel over his shoulder and began to walk, his eyes instantly scanning the urban landscape. To anyone else, Shoreditch was a trendy hub of coffee shops and tech startups. To Lister, it was a giant, unpainted canvas begging for a bit of beautiful chaos. His fingers twitched. The teleportation sickness was fading, replaced by the familiar, electric itch to create.
He stopped in front of a massive, dead-grey concrete wall near an overpass. It was sterile. Boring. A crime against the eyes.
“Perfect,” he whispered.
He didn’t sketch. He didn’t plan. He just dropped his bag, pulled out a fat can of matte black spray paint, and went to work.
The teleportation high had given him a strange, manic energy. His movements were frantic but precise – the classic Lister dichotomy. He attacked the wall with sweeping, gestural strokes, his arm moving like a classical conductor orchestrating a riot. First came the chaotic, dripping outlines of a caped figure. A superhero, but ruined; distorted by the grit of the street, its jawline smudged, its eyes hollowed out into something tragic and hauntingly beautiful.
A small crowd began to form. In London, people usually ignore everything, but watching Lister paint was like watching an action movie in slow motion. He didn’t just spray; he used his bare hands, smearing the wet paint across the brick, scratching into the surface with a piece of charcoal he pulled from his pocket, throwing splashes of dirty white acrylic over the top to create texture.
“Oi! You got a permit for that?” a voice boomed.
Lister didn’t even turn around. He just grabbed a can of high-pressure neon orange, shook it violently—clack-clack-clack—and executed a perfect, dripping halo over the superhero’s head.
A London bobby was marching toward him, looking stern. But as the officer got closer, he slowed down. He looked at the wall. The chaos of the lines was starting to resolve into something breathtaking—a raw, emotional collision of high art and street vandalism.
“You’re… you’re that Australian bloke, aren’t you?” the cop asked, the sternness melting into mild confusion. “The one from the documentary?”
Lister finally turned around, a cheeky, paint-flecked grin breaking across his face. He capped his spray can and extended a hand covered in five different colours.
“Yeah, mate,” Lister said, his thick Aussie accent cutting through the damp London air. “Just arrived. Took a bit of a shortcut.”
The cop looked at the freshly painted masterpiece, then at the empty street behind Lister, wondering where the hell the guy had actually come from. “Right then,” the officer said, clearing his throat. “Just… try not to get any on the sidewalk, yeah?”
Lister winked, grabbed a fresh can of pink, and turned back to the wall. London was gloomy, but he was about to fix that, one dripping superhero at a time.
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