Street Corner

A Quiet Time Ahead

2008-08-03T01:52:00.000-07:00

There is intent, and then there is clear intent.

The intent to return is as clear as it might ever be.

Pablo and Addie are going to enjoy some time off before their fate is decided back at the depot. Those interludes weren't for nothing.

Consider this the end of the first series.

James Bond will return, but frankly that's none of our business.

A Drabble (For Lazy People)

2008-07-27T03:19:00.000-07:00

There was a diversion before they got back to the depot.

It was one Pablo was less than interested in.

But Addie preferred it to not going, and she insisted.

What she insisted they do, as Pablo knew, they did.

Only later was Pablo pleased that he had gone along with the diversion. Eventually, it made sense that he had. Not only because he was Addie’s workmate and friend.

This thing was something he really needed to do. She knew it, that’s why she insisted. It was going to square his head.

Maybe it was going to save their bacon.

Second Interlude

2008-07-20T05:28:00.001-07:00

Photographing the twilight.

Beating down on the hideous heart.

He copies music to a more portable format. Ready to listen to it later, conveniently, whiling away the dreary drudgery of the endless hours of work.

Still photographing the twilight, someone does.

While cheating again. Ever cheating.

Watching the time tick away. Listening to what he can while the time ticks away. Minutes. Milliseconds. All the same as aeons.

Quietly, now. Not speaking, not any longer. Only always.

Setting his story aside, only to tell another. One to be told first, the other later. And more. And more.

Not all his to be told. Others held significance. Hold significance.

Indicators are somewhere. They just don’t indicate a lot.

Episode 8

2008-07-13T01:15:00.000-07:00

Everybody wants to rule the world. Tears for Fears had it almost right when they put it so succinctly. But not everyone wants to the rule the world. Some people’s focus is a lot narrower. When they’re determined, when they’re single-minded.

When they persuade their mother to insist you wade through a bin until your overalls are doused in Chicken Korma and leftover potting mix. When they, like the seven-year-old they clearly are, obsess over reclaiming a possession that is in all likelihood utterly replaceable, whose absence will almost certainly make nary a blip of a mark on their awareness in the minutes to come (never mind those endless, anguished years whose promise is open to nought but adult concerns, and highly materialistic, Gucci-and-DKNY-and-Versace-and-Prada ones at that), whose very essence as a sample of stuff will doubtless carry on through the ages as a symbol of the indestructibility of twenty-first century manufactured goods anyway.

When they’re after a bloody Frisbee with a bloody empty bloody herb jar super-glued to its underside.

Pablo left it at that. He didn’t fume, he didn’t stare coldly and cruelly and deeply into the mother’s eyes, through the mother’s eyes, his penetrating gaze searing deep into her skull, cooking her brain with its intensely radiating rage. He wouldn’t dare wrap his coarse, thick-set fingers around the slightly-built woman’s petite, elongated, snobbish, tendon-ridged throat and squeeze, ever so gently, just that little bit, applying enough pressure and no more to compress the skin against the tender flesh beneath, constricting the flow of blood through the carotid artery until her body failed to oxygenate adequately, stemming the flow of life-giving nutriment through to her vital organs, then collapsing in on the pharynx, blocking entirely the passage of oxygen to the lungs. Reducing the entire cardiopulmonary process to the status of an unfunny joke. As her face turned slowly purple, then a wan green. As her eyes rolled back into their sockets, their pale milky whites all that remained visible. As she lost her footing and tumbled, her jaw cracking against the bone in those firmly held hands of his. As her head twisted awkwardly, one vertebra scratching against its neighbour, the silly putty of her spinal cord catching sandwich-like in the midst of the collision, tearing apart under the strain of the impact. As everything below those clenched hands went suddenly lifeless and shook in the breeze like wafting streamers, ready to tumble awkwardly across the overturned rubbish bin without a thing felt.

He didn’t do any of that. Pablo just left. Marched straight for the truck, heaved the door open, pushed the air out of his seat cushion, turned the key in the ignition, enabled a combustion reaction to take place in the engine housing, and encouraged that vehicle to trundle along to the next house, where he was more than ready to resume the process of collecting the neighbourhood’s rubbish.

‘They’ll do us for this,’ Addie, his conscience, naggingly reminded him. She was speaking of their employers, of course. Their superiors. Those who wielded the power of life and death and a weekly pay cheque over their heads. ‘You’ve left it a mess,’ she added, indicating the refuse strewn across that once pristine lawn.

The truck chugged as Pablo forced it into second gear. Evidently, it didn’t appreciate his sharp forcefulness. But he was in no mind to coax it gently into a higher gear – the transmission could go to hell for all he cared. Particularly if it underlined the point he wished Addie to be clear on. That he was in no mood to clean up his mess.

Because, as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t his mess to clean up. He hadn’t chosen to make it. Hadn’t felt the need to present that household with such a pointless gift.

It was a good, clear message to everyone else on the street, at any rate. That the kerbside bin isn’t the end of the line for all the junk that goes in it on a weekly basis.

He’d visited Melbourne a couple of years earlier. A holiday, but one always takes one’s work with oneself on holiday. Even if it’s only a thought process. Even if it’s only as a specific point of departure for the rest of one’s adventures. In his case, it had been the former.

They had tiny kerbside bins there. Those earmarked for recyclables were still the regular monsters he’d become so familiar with, the sort he could climb into if pressed into the service of a whining seven-year-old.

But those intended for ordinary refuse… They were microscopic by comparison! Clearly, some sort of program of education was in place to encourage locals to think very carefully about their waste, and probably without bemoaning the absence of larger receptacles.

Hurrah! Now there was a place to live and work!

Pablo wagered they didn’t have crazy parents with even crazier kids down there either. Ugly old women with torn leggings, maybe, but he could enjoy watching them literally freeze their backsides off in winter.

(There’s an upside to most everything if you know where to look. Or where to live.)

Actually, Pablo was perfectly willing to accede to one thing: as clinically insane as the ugly old woman doubtless was, at least she’d never insisted he rummage through her bin in the hope of reclaiming, of all things, a do-it-yourself herb-carrying Frisbee!

What was it even supposed to be? A makeshift flying saucer? Some absurd toy for the socially impaired? The entire episode beggared belief, and the conclusion did little to assuage Pablo’s thoroughly disturbed awareness of his immediate environment.

‘Don’t make me clean it up,’ he insisted, reinforcing the point he wished very clearly to make to Addie. ‘I’m not going to clean it up.’

She gave him one of those looks. The kind that says, ‘I’m not your mother, but you know I’m worse. Do it now or you’re for it.’

No dice. He wasn’t budging on this one.

She added, ‘Fine. Haul me over the coals with you.’

‘Sure.’

What was that? ‘Sure’? That was no kind of answer, no kind at all. Addie did the staring thing again.

‘I’m not looking,’ Pablo informed her plainly, and it was true, he wasn’t. The man kept his eyes firmly on the road ahead, on the task at hand. The next bin was looming, and he needed to pull up beside it just so, else the automated lifting mechanism wouldn’t catch it and they’d have a second mess on their hands, the bin’s guts spilled like some poor kid in the middle of a war zone who’d fallen on a hand grenade. ‘I refuse to look. Because I know you’re giving me that look. And I’m not interested. I won’t be moved by it. I’m moving on, leaving it all behind, forging ahead towards the next bin and the next and the next, letting the wind of destiny carry me where it will, denying my past the power to dictate my future. Just doing my job, quite frankly.’

Not that he actually said any of that. But he’d have liked to. It definitely sounded good. All Kerouac and no substance, just like a life ought to be.

What he did say was, ‘I’ll take the heat.’ Those four short words sounded just as sweet, just as cool. A cop in a Michael Mann picture, Cameron Fry in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the guy who rides it for the rest of the team because he knows it’s what he’s gotta do.

But they were scary. Really, really scary. Because what they meant, when everything boiled down to a single inelastic globule of hardened, blackened grit, was that he was taking the heat.

Was that she wasn’t going to bail him out.

Because for Addie to bail him out, she’d have to take at least some of the heat. Heat he wasn’t sharing. He he unequivocally refused to part with any of.

So Pablo wondered all of a sudden if there were any jobs going in Melbourne.

Episode 7

2008-07-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

Marching orders.

That’s what she was being given. Pure and simple. It was there, subtly, in her mother’s eyes. A level of infuriation unparalleled in the annals of mother-daughter relationships and parental responsibility. Isabella was going to be for it. Not immediately, certainly not that day, but at some point in her future. She might be ostracised from the bond she expected one day to form as she grew up and her mum grew old – a close tie brought on by a truer understanding of the fleeting nature of mortal life. Ties may well be severed in some other way: a breaking off from an inheritance; no more invitations to family weddings; becoming some sort of unmentionable pariah, an outcast, an untouchable, forgotten by her family and never to be spoken of again.

Or she might just get short-changed in whatever pocket money she stood to receive as she grew into her teenage years. Really, it was hard to say.

None of that particularly mattered. Here and now, Isabella was in charge, belting out her authority plainly and unquestionably.

She watched (and screamed) and the stupid man with the stupid bald head trampled her mother’s lawn. She watched (and screamed) as the stupid man with the stupid bald head sighed despairingly in the direction of the big smelly truck he’d come out of, where he found no comfort in the cold, steely glare of the slight woman sitting in there waiting for him. She watched (and screamed) as the stupid man with the stupid bald head actually climbed into the bin on her mother’s now trampled lawn, as he waded his way through a week’s worth of stinking detritus.

And she watched (and screamed) as he grew ever more frustrated with the whole endeavour and ended up tipping the stinking contents of the stinking bin all over her mother’s freshly trampled lawn. She laughed as he tried to make it look like an accident, as though he’d stumbled and fallen out of the bin, taking it with him. Inside, she laughed. Outside, she kept screaming, that shrill, piercing tone driving everybody around her berserk.

She also watched (and continued to scream) as her mother started thumping the stupid man across his stupid bald head with a rolled up department store catalogue.

Bet he’s even got a thing about junk mail, she thought. Whether or not the irony was true, Isabella didn’t care. She was just going to enjoy this. Bet he’s got a thing about junk mail now.

The stupid man’s stupid bald head was turning a stupid bright red. He tried to glare menacingly, but it just looked clownish.

His way of avoiding her mum’s battering was to duck, right into the muck, and to keep sifting through it.

Which he did, his irritation rising. He scooped up every little thing that might be what Isabella’s mother wanted him to look for. None of them were.

None of them.

Until, somewhere between the leftovers from last Saturday’s Indian takeaway and Sunday’s grass clippings, it emerged.

Unscathed. Intact. But for the Chicken Korma, immaculate.

And that was when the screaming stopped.

Episode 6

2008-06-29T01:00:00.000-07:00

Screaming.

It hurt her throat. Really hurt her throat. Severely. This sort of endless, pervasive, overbearing, overwhelming discomfort that she knew wouldn’t let up for hours to come, that would make her voice hoarse for the rest of the day, that would twinge and tickle and pinch and stab with every utterance she dared make, that would set her head spinning from the sheer bloody-minded intensity of the effort and push her almost to the point of total collapse.

It didn’t matter to her that it was entirely voluntary. She had to get her point across, sell the angle, convey with absolute clarity her position when it came to this particular issue.

The thing was in the bin, she didn’t want it in the bin, it had better bleeding well come out of the bin already, and if it wasn’t about to come out of the bin of its own accord then someone was going to have to go in after it, weren’t they?

Her tonsils tickled, then burned, then throbbed like they were themselves crying out to be put to rest, euthanised, relieved of their continued misery. It made her voice waver just slightly, quiver as the sounds pushed from her larynx and out through her mouth, the air pumping in great bursts from her over-inflated lungs.

She wasn’t emitting the piercing noise in a single, sustained burst; it emerged piecemeal, in regular pulses, each punctuated by a sharp intake of breath. How the air was being inhaled was a mystery even to her, because she could feel the tiniest percentage of the noise rushing out through her nose, her nostrils flaring as it gushed through, the architecture of her nasal cavity generating the merest whistling, as though a kettle were boiling to attention several kilometres away on a clear, sunny day when all else was quiet.

Through her ears? Maybe it went in through her ears.

She remembered all that fuss about her name, the distraction that had come so easily at a time when she should have been focussed. That level of concern startled her, that repetition, the cyclic nature of the argument. A thing she’d fussed over for years, and would surely continue to do for many more, that came and went when it least needed it to, that knew how to turn her mood sour when it was already far from sweet, that just gave her another reason to loathe her mother.

Was that an explanation? Her mother was arguing with the big bald dude in the grotty blue overalls but getting nowhere. She was being ineffectual again. (She should’ve tried the little bald woman still sitting in the truck.) She was making a token effort to display loving gestures towards her only daughter but failing. Just like the name that was supposed to be so pretty, that was the belle of the ball, that was exotic but not mysterious, that was continental but easy to pronounce.

That sucked.

So Isabella kept screaming. Until something happened.

Episode 5

2008-06-22T01:36:00.000-07:00

The slick, neutral, uniform polish of a rubbish bin’s exterior convinces nobody of the foul, rancourous terrors set poised to explode from within at the slightest indication of a break in the rudimentary seal formed by the weight of the firm plastic lid against the crumbling, perishing, morning-sun-beaten body of the beast.

There exudes from it a darkness, a pure malevolence that overwhelms any who might foolhardily venture beyond that swing-top barrier. It is an evil that rightfully belongs only in another dimension, a dark place where tortured spirits find no rest, and where the olfactory sense is regularly pulverised by way of some perverse, hideous punishment against any damned souls willing to transgress only in the most unspeakable ways.

An impression, then, exists of some tremendous degree of unfairness that liveable communities can generate such by-products of their existence and in such overwhelming concentration. That the effluent and detritus of a society be confined to such compact pockets, only to be all but hermetically sealed and expelled from the sacred homestead, left almost literally in the gutter, awaiting some final end that only few come to know with familiarity.

Indeed, even those enlightened few are protected, shielded from this toxic output. Lids remain firmly in place when bins are full; giant mechanical arms are in this day and age tasked with drawing near to the offending containers and emptying their contents into enormous, impenetrable chambers, their operators controlling the affair from within their shielded chariots.

(Consider the behemoths that accept pure waste and the sort from which new resources can be fashioned: here, in these so-called ‘split trucks’, the borders between compartments are even more rigidly patrolled.)

What level-headed, intelligent culture would willingly allow itself to become so blinded to the fate of its materially dispossessed? It is advantageous to be familiar with one’s impact on one’s surrounds, particularly if one intends to enjoy those surrounds for some time to come. There is a school of thought which suggests that the overriding impression people have of where their rubbish goes is that it somehow vanishes from existence, only to be replaced by some allegedly ever-renewable source of raw materials that shall forevermore be replenished to its original state of fullness entirely on demand.

The above statement should be readily clarified. There are, of course, entire vast communities whose awareness of the fate of their waste products is all too apparent: on a daily basis, they are reminded of the pervasiveness of such matter, for it stays with them, festering and rotting until little of it remains recognisable, perpetually remaining within view, a constant warning that to reduce consumption reduces the great mound of steaming, disgusting refuse under the tree at the other end of the clearing.

Not that it smells anywhere near as much. By not being compartmentalised, it is allowed to interact with fresh air. The flow of bacteria is significantly greater, and the stench of rotting biological matter is more easily overlooked in passing.

Whose misfortune is it to be dealt the card that reads ‘direct contact required’? What poor wretches are forced to wade their way through such nauseating odours as to be found elsewhere only in the seedy toilet cubicles of even seedier night clubs at four in the morning, the night’s revels having led almost to the dawn’s hangovers and violently emptied stomachs?

Pablo, that’s who. Poor bastard.

Because some stupid kid decided she wanted to have a rummage around in there. Seems she’d only gone and lost something precious, something of significant value to her and her alone out of all the sentient beings in the cosmos.

‘Fine. She wants to rummage around, she can do it herself. I’ll chuck her in and all.’ It was all under his breath, all barely heard. Thoughts are thoughts, deeds and deeds and lawsuits for threatening intimations are most assiduously to be avoided.

To be utterly fair, though, it was hardly the girl’s fault. Kids are allowed their possessiveness, their strange attachment to even stranger and seemingly insignificant little trinkets. (Why not, if altogether too many adults are.) It was the mother who’d insisted.

Pablo wanted desperately to explain that once something’s in the bin, it’s gone. Hadn’t this woman sussed to the whole ‘it’s shut away in a plastic receptacle, you’ve put it out on the kerb and it’s bin day for crying out loud’ thing?

(Evidently not.)

Was she the kind of person who took her bin rights for granted, took the entire system of refuse collection for granted? Did she think all the crap in there was going out on loan, headed for storage, ready to be reclaimed at a moment’s notice?

(Evidently so.)

The mum’s attitude was: what the kid wants, the kid gets. Which meant one of two things. That he’d guessed right on the money with all those absurd suggestions about what was floating around in that strange excuse for a mind she was flaunting, or that her ability to comprehend matters of fundamental common sense was impaired in some other way that resulted in pretty well the exact same end.

It didn’t matter. She wanted him to fish around in her bin for some piece of junk that the kid probably would’ve forgotten all about given half an hour and a walk through a toy shop anyway.

Whatever it was, the mother wanted it fished out because she’s not about to go out and pay good money for something that’s still fine as it is.

Irony of ironies, it took Pablo about three seconds to find a cosmetic pack that was all of about 5% used up, sitting amid enough food scraps to feed a small Rwandan armed regiment. (And always with loads of spaghetti, for some reason – if people despise it so much, why do they keep cooking it in such phenomenal quantities?) The kit was protected by a cardboard box, and was thus totally uncontaminated by all but the stench that had slammed into Pablo’s face like a football when he’d first opened Pandora’s Box. This was all that stuff in the Old Testament that the vengeful Lord had kept doing really nasty things in response to, multiplied by about fifteen thousand, and tapped for its essential oils before being bottled and thrown like a Molotov cocktail against the inner walls of the bin.

Pablo backtracked. A cardboard box. Itself nearly intact. In the regular bin. Cheeky cow hadn’t even bothered to separate her recyclables! No wonder she only ever wheeled out the one bin every week!

Hypocrisy on top of hypocrisy. She was a charlatan, this woman, but a desperately vulnerable one. As the girl, who had long since returned from the creek, fully confident that her plight had been well and truly observed by everyone within a three-kilometre radius of her home, steadfastly refused to stop screaming until the picosecond she clapped eyes on that stupid whatever-it-was of hers, her mother grew ever wearier. There were beads of sweat pumping out of the pores on her brow, the liquid coursing over her temples on a straight-line trajectory for her cheeks. Neighbours were beginning to emerge from their domiciles, defying all belief by ignoring the creepy woman with the torn leggings and focussing solely on the girl.

This mother needed an out. Beneath her staid composure, she was screaming for a hand up.

It was just Pablo’s bad luck that his was the nearest hand.

There was a certain justification in his having to be the one to swim through that bin. In a way, as the guy who dealt with everyone’s rubbish, it was his job. Had he hesitated another moment, Pablo was sure he’d have been catching an earful of nonsense about workplace health and safety. That the rubbish, once set upon the kerb, was fair game, was under his jurisdiction and no longer the property of the household.

Which was justification enough to do what he pleased with the contents of the bin, so why should he have to fish for something that was now officially the joint property of the city council and the firm contracted to manage all the refuse disposal?. But Addie knew he was thinking this: he knew she knew it. Those eyes didn’t lie, and the glare she cast from the passenger seat of the truck was more than enough to tell him so. ‘Don’t complain,’ the eyes whispered hoarsely. ‘Complain and your job’s for it.’

Clever eyes.

Thanking his lucky stars that he was a tall man and consequently didn’t have to physically climb into the faded black plastic portal to the underworld, Pablo found himself wondering just where the blasted thing was. Or what it was, really. The mother had been awfully vague, and the girl hadn’t said a bloody thing.

But she kept screaming. And the neighbours kept glaring. And nobody was being helpful.

A clue, just a clue.

Until he got one, Pablo started sucking up the whiff. Somehow, it just seemed preferable.

Isabella

2008-06-15T04:45:00.000-07:00

Her name was Isabella. She wasn’t Spanish, at least no one had told her she was. But her name was Isabella.

Bella for short, sometimes even Belle. Belle to her grandmother, definitely. Must’ve been something about names in those days, back when her grandmother had been young. That was about all that made sense. Belle: the name grandmothers like. Belle of the ball, that sort of thing, she supposed.

Given the choice, she definitely preferred Bella. It was what all her friends called her, and it was less of a mouthful than Isabella. Half as many syllables, even if it wasn’t a lot less on the page.

And of course, Isabella was just too Spanish for someone who, so far as she knew, wasn’t.

She wanted to make her way to the bottom of the street, but there wasn't the time. Not yet.

Episode 4

2008-06-07T23:39:00.000-07:00

A gentle tickle. Light, fluttering.

Most sensations were of this type. The key was in differentiating them from one another. It took a very keen familiarity with the subtly different vibrations to achieve this.

The pressure of the air indicated a figure of middling size, relatively speaking. Not one of the tiny scurrying creatures below, nor indeed a being as towering as the stationary life forms in the vicinity.

Best guess would be that the figure belonged to the more distant group – the one that visited this way so infrequently. It was a group that kept to itself, giving off only the faintest vibrations from its elsewhere position. They were all of middling size, too, though most left an impression of being slightly larger in stature than this particular example.

Then another figure approached. This one was more like it: taller, broader, heavier. It shifted a far greater number of air particles, pushed them more forcefully aside. Its bulk shot shock-waves through the ground, too. Each collision with the earth generated an undeniable pressure than resonated past all the little burrowing creatures and directly towards subterranean sensors trained to detect every little change in the composition of the soil and above.

Each tendril spread out quite some distance, radiating irregularly through varying densities of dirt. Digging in the dirt, never surfacing. A couple of tendrils had once found their way towards some oddly tough substance. It magnified the heat of the sun to an absurd degree. Was it some strain of creature best designed to increase its nutrient absorption by such means? Unexpectedly, despite its firm composition, it vibrated with alarming frequency, each reverberation accompanied by similar disturbances in the air – but those came and went very quickly.

The ibis wondered what the tree was thinking, if indeed it thought at all. The ibis wondered what the tree might make of the strange activity that suddenly confronted it.

It was a good tree. No, a superb tree. It brought shade to the entire area, and firmament to the ground, and a source of food and shelter. The ibis valued it tremendously, appreciated its lasting contribution to this quiet little watering hole.

Quiet, that is, until the arrival of these two strange creatures. Strange not because of how they looked – the ibis had seen enough of these brightly decorated bipedal land beings – but because of how they behaved.

The smaller of the two approached first, having made its way down from the patch of smooth, hard, jet black soil just a little farther up from the watering hole. The ibis wondered if the creature wasn’t initiating some sort of complex mating ritual, given its fevered warbling. That would certainly explain the approach of the larger member of the species: it was evident that the songbird was playing hard to get.

Which was a strange thing for an animal on heat to do, wasn’t it? The ibis had heard of birds that did this. There existed a small yellow variety, apparently, whose male made a big deal of strutting his stuff before promptly dashing off at the first indication of a likely partner. But this example of playing hard to get didn’t last for too many moments at a time, else that particular strain of avian would surely be no more by now.

So what was this little male up to? (The ibis caught herself out. ‘Little’? The source of her entertainment was enormous! Not nearly as enormous, however, as the one giving chase.) Perhaps she was being presumptuous as well in designating it a male. Who knew what role reversals were common to some of the more esoteric species?

Actually, that was a thought. Weren’t there some animals who ate each other? Maybe this giant of a biped was driven on by a fevered hunger! The ibis could sympathise. She been feeding on scrawny little insects for days now. The last time she’d had a really good meal was when she’d visited her son’s nest by the big river. There was an enormous colony of these bipeds situated nearby, and the pickings they left after feedings themselves… Small Yellow Sticks were her favourite. That’s what she called them, anyway. These things were much softer than actual sticks, to the point where they all but disintegrated as she held them in her beak. Their texture was fluffy, and they were often warmed by something – probably from sitting out in the sun for so long.

The best part was that they didn’t seem to be made of animal, so they didn’t put up a fight. A starling she’d long ago befriended alleged the Small Yellow Sticks did taste of animal, but not just any kind of animal. It was one whose habitat the starling had often invaded in times gone by. Big creatures, apparently. By all accounts, even bigger than this silent, lumbering biped that was still chasing after the squawker. Of course, how this starling knew the flavour of an animal just by living near a whole herd of its kin was something the ibis had for some time been completely unable to fathom, and continued to so do.

A dragonfly buzzed across the ibis’s field of view, its wings blurring into an infinity of fibrous membrane as it shot past.

In the creature’s final, fleeting moment before being consumed by the hungry and slightly disgruntled ibis, the dragonfly likewise found fascination in the machinations of the two gigantic bipeds.

Because dragonflies have such relatively short life spans – only the passing of about thirty or forty periods of sunlight – they’re able to pack a lot of thinking into a split-second. This dragonfly was no exception to that rule of natural necessity, so much so that it quickly began computing the exact course it would need to take if it held out any hope of avoiding being trampled on or otherwise maimed by these colossal bipedal beings.

Particularly the noisy one, whose flailing secondary appendages looked set to catapult any hapless onlooker from here to The Land Of Far Away. (For such was it known in the annals of invertebrate mythology.)

This, of course, was why the dragonfly entirely failed to observe the carnivorous tendencies of the ibis immediately to its side: the distraction up ahead just proved too distracting.

Yet, in one of those cosmic twists of fate, the ibis didn’t fare a lot better. For it had been so preoccupied in that final instant by the opportunity to consume the dragonfly that it didn’t in any way observe the feet of the smaller biped as they kicked it six ways from Sunday and set it flapping off for dear life.

In all fairness to the offending biped, it too was sufficiently preoccupied by other matters to have noticed either the ibis or the dragonfly. And the tree, being a member of the plant kingdom, didn’t even come into it.

First Interlude

2008-06-01T03:53:00.000-07:00

Someone was cheating.

Really, really, really cheating.

Fundamental obstacles faced by conservationists attempting to stave off the extinction of too, too many species by resorting to captive breeding in zoos.

Dark, quiet repositories of information. Questions.

The history of mathematics.

Faulty televisions. Faulty television.

Speaking. Always speaking.

Costa Rican beans, modestly harvested, delicately brewed. Charred somewhat in the interim. Liquid runoff from one kind of bean dulled by the runoff from another.

A story to be told, but nobody prepared to tell it.

It all sounded so pre-recorded.

She took her troubles to the creek. It flowed gently. Magnified, the sound was tranquil. To the naked ear, insignificant.

The interim, insignificant.

Episode 3

2008-05-25T03:39:00.000-07:00

It was like a heartfelt plea that love be regained, but with a darker, grimmer edge.

That was what Addie thought of the song playing in tinny harmony on the radio. It was a strange way to decipher a melody, associating such complex narrative connections with a piece of music, but it was all she could do. The lyrics didn’t help a jot: this was a losing Eurovision entry, and Addie reckoned she could have about thirty stabs at guessing its country of origin with no joy.

Weren’t the winning entries always supposed to be in English? She’d heard that somewhere, that the broader appeal of singing in a supposedly more universal language was supposed to guarantee more points awarded to the number.

Or not. She couldn’t remember a time Britain had won the perverse contest. Not that she followed it terribly closely, partly because Australia wasn’t exactly known for being a part of Europe but mostly because she didn’t tend to watch that kind of rubbish on TV.

Certainly took her mind off the spectacle before her eyes. Poor Pablo, probably. She couldn’t be sure. The moment had transformed suddenly into one of those vaguely intoxicated dreamlike experiences. Addie knew it was all happening for real, it just didn’t feel a stinking thing like it. She hated this; it was too damn disorientating.

Yet the moment dragged. Damn it! An inescapable melange of atypical behaviour cross-pollinating before her protesting but transfixed eyes.

Those leggings had been the most painful aspect. It was an image seared against her retinas, flooding through her waking dream state like some sick joke posing as abstract modern art.

The tear. The coarse slice. The flash of too-private flesh peeking its way out of the already indecently tight Lycra. No more than a little goose flesh, a crease that may well have been ageing, unflattering thigh fat but was, Addie dreaded, probably too much more than that. The base of something sagging more than it should have been.

A part of her laughed. Another part, more liberal in dispensing with logic, imagined an old man in a white hat scratching DJ-like the vinyl platter on a vintage gramophone. (Croatian entry, 2008. She couldn’t help being transfixed while flicking between channels the previous weekend.) The part that suppressed the human mind’s ability to overcome adversity by finding the funny side of anything just plain despaired.

Girl. Running. Double damn. What’s she running from? Why isn’t Pablo giving chase? It’d give him an excuse to get away from the mad woman and the… Oh God. There’s that rip again.

Addie closed her eyes, scrambled to concentrate solely on her breathing, or the itch forming on the back of her left hand, or most anything other than what was going on around her.

As far as she was concerned, Pablo was on his own this once. This was something she’d have to deal with another way, another time. She apologised to herself for falling out of the world around her so soon, for succumbing to the succour of an inner complacency with such ruthless efficiency, but she had a great reason.

It just wasn’t her morning. It didn’t look much like Pablo’s either, but really that was his problem more than hers.

Thoughts turned to what might be happening down the street, how that park down there was faring in the moments before the little girl invaded it with her plaintive cries.

People. The morning seemed better without them.

Episode 2

2008-05-18T01:49:00.000-07:00

The wind turned.

Pablo’s mind did as well. From the girl – already away from the mad woman – to something utterly and completely else.

An elderly fellow, hovering over a child at play, his presence felt but rarely acknowledged.

She was six, maybe seven years old, the girl. Not entirely unlike the one making her way so swiftly towards the park, but younger. It was probably that he didn’t really know how children behave, didn’t really understand the difference between those ages in the way they play.

Here he was, so very old, and never once a girl, of that he could be very sure! So it was all alien to him, and probably always had been. Even when he’d been a much younger man, this fellow, when he’d been closer to that age and stood a very greater chance of spotting the difference between a child of seven and one of twelve.

The girl played among rose-coloured wood chips that smelled of tea tree essence. They provided a soft cushion against the ground, spread wide within an ellipsoid boundary. Sprouting forth from the mass of weakly scented chips were the machine-pressed limbs of an assemblage of playground equipment: twin swings kept forever at a respectable distance from each other; a cobweb of thick rope for climbing; parallel bars; and an overgrown hutch out of which flowed a pale yellow slippery slide cast out of brittle, inadequately reinforced plastic.

Yet none of this was of interest to the little girl. Not a single prefabricated construction held her attention quite so well as those fragrant, delicately coloured wood chips.

The elderly fellow smiled, this sign of appreciation for the simpler pleasures life had to offer resonating with him, drawing him inexorably towards thoughts of his own childhood adventures.

Adventures he’d had, in a strange way, not so long ago as one might conceive when encountering this fellow for the first time.

His name, he knew with a tremendous deal of certainty, began with a P. So, he guessed, did the little girl’s. It was only logical that it should. This thought amused him a good deal, particularly as it had long been his favourite letter.

Ever since he’d begun to forget things.

What he knew was important was to cling to memories as best he could. The feeble ones, too. They were a lifeline to his remembering other things. The elderly fellow’s identity was encapsulated in those memories, all those many and varied thoughts accumulated over a lifetime. Without them, what was he? Who was he?

Anything with a P in it tended to help, particularly beginning with the letter. Pasadena. A city he’d heard of on at least one occasion, if not twice. Maybe even somewhere he’d been. Perth, too, was a place. ‘Place’! There was another!

Was the elderly fellow anything at all without his memories? Just a blank slate, a physical presence without a self? He began to consider the possibility (another P word) that the very notion of ‘self’ was, to pardon the pun (two more!), self-defeating.

Perhaps (here they come now, out of the woodwork) his self could be quantified only as a string of P words. A chapter out of a lexicon: not much to offer as an epitaph.

All the other P words began to pale into insignificance. The ones he continued to use, as well. He was too tired to keep counting.

The elderly fellow watched as the other traits he’d thought had defined him drifted apart, pulling his sense of self asunder. Was he to be defined by traits as well? His ethnicity, his sex, his age, even his hair and its annually diminishing returns – these things were aspects in no way unique to him, nor particularly were their exact combination as evidenced in the him he’d always thought himself to be. There wasn’t even an exact combination to speak of; his vanishing follicles were proof enough of that.

‘Proof’. An excellent P word. So little, but it presumes a lot. Evidence, burdens of its own existence, absoluteness. As a notion, it felt so very ironic all of a sudden.

Here, then, the elderly fellow lost himself, because ‘himself’ was something he could no longer be certain he’d ever been. As real, as imagined, as hypothetical. Never mind what kind of someone he was, be it his own autonomous entity or the crazed imagining of somebody else’s crazed imagining, the elderly fellow wouldn’t put money on his being anyone.

The little girl, on the other hand, was probably real. After all, she at least showed signs of interacting physically with her surroundings. She sat among the soft, springy wood chips; she smelled their aroma as it floated on the breeze; she picked things up, threw them around, gave them a moment of life by giving them a fraction of her energy.

Whereas he simply hovered. Quite literally, hovered. Touching nothing, feeling nothing.

Except the emptiness in the soul he may not even have had.

And the breeze. The breeze touched him, only a little, only in that instant. Reminding him of the changing wind.

Reminding him of Pablo.

The twelve-year-old was off and running. To Pablo’s right, she continued to scream. To his left, the mad woman ignored everyone else’s pre-occupations and continued on her raging warpath. Sitting in the truck, Addie watched and laughed, the girl’s anguish still a half-second away from registering in her conscious mind.

Pablo was outflanked. He took the briefest of moments to weigh his options.

Absolute surrender looked awfully promising.

Episode 1

2008-05-11T00:29:00.000-07:00

Pablo didn’t much like the work on Tuesdays. It got him too near Chrysanthemum Crescent (official candidate for Most Pointlessly Overcooked Street Name In History), too near her.

Pain in the backside, she was. He had no idea how Addie managed to put up with her, that was for sure. There was degrees of annoying, yes, but surely you reach a point where even the most coldly phlegmatic person just can’t take it any more.

What would the Dalai Lama have made of her? he wondered. A man of endless patience and forgiveness, a man who saw the good side of everyone, a man who loved even his enemies.

A man who clearly hadn’t explored the entertainment potential of full-contact Rugby.

Not that it mattered. Pablo wasn’t the Dalai Lama, so how that man reacted to this woman wouldn’t have made a shade of difference. Particularly as Addie seemed fine with her.

That was the strangest part. Addie had to interact with this crazed excuse for a human being as much as Pablo, yet the impression he had was that she barely even registered the woman’s existence, let alone the specific cause of Pablo’s irritation.

The truck chugged uncomfortably round the corner. Pablo was pushing it forward in a gear so low it would’ve complained less had it been forced to limbo dance. Every cog and every gear vibrated, none of them at the same frequency. The axles spun like the double-bladed paddle of a canoeist whose left arm was a full five inches shorter than his right.

It might’ve been time for the company to invest in a new truck – or a tune-up at the very least – but Pablo knew it was entirely his doing that was causing Addie to turn three shades of green from motion sickness.

‘Don’t you think they ought to be able to make trucks that drive smoothly by now?’ he queried, hoping he might just manage to take her mind off blaming him for her misfortune. ‘If they can fly a man to the moon…’

Addie refused to let the dirty look she was giving him fade. ‘Try going faster. You don’t even have to change gear.’

Hesitantly, Pablo complied with his partner’s request. It didn’t help. He’d taken the corner, and Chrysanthemum Crescent went squarely uphill before snaking its way back around to another part of the longer street it was clamped to. The truck was just going to have to keep moaning about being forced to chug along at ridiculously low speeds.

‘Why do you do this to me?’

Pablo shrugged his shoulders. ‘Hill,’ he said, pointing ahead of him in the hope it would make sense of his cryptic reply. It seemed as good a reason to give as any.

Addie rolled her eyes. ‘But always this hill.’

He tried shifting gear, but the truck was still trundling too slowly. The box screeched in agony, iron grinding against iron in ways never considered by metallurgists to be physically possible. Pablo eased off, taking the hint. He hit the accelerator to compensate, watching as the incline entirely failed to ease off.

‘You going to stop to get any bins?’ Addie asked, watching as several domestic rubbish bins bobbed past her window. That’s three houses you’ve gone by already.

Grumbling, Pablo let his teeth grind. It probably wasn’t a good idea: one sharp jolt from the truck’s suspension and he was liable to crack a jaw.

Somehow, the thought was more appealing than biting his tongue instead.

He indulged in some more of his patented waving about of his arms, hoping to signify something or other through his awkward body language. ‘I’ll come back,’ he offered after the fact, hoping it might clarify things. ‘On the downhill stretch.’

Addie sighed. ‘The downhill stretch is the second half of the crescent. You planning on doing two loops or something?’

What a strange creature she was. Petite, pale, a shock of bright red hair cropped almost to the scalp as if to restrain itself from overwhelming her other features. The glassy green eyes made sure that wasn’t about the happen, except on such occasions when her skin came close to matching their hue.

She almost seemed to shrink to nothingness in those overalls, the smallest the company could rustle up. Yet Addie was not a woman to be messed with. Completely at ease with Pablo’s enormous stature (and startlingly more enormous beer belly), she took his occasional petty stupidity on without flinching. Made him wonder why he didn’t let bad habits die, but it was admirable.

Addie didn’t really muck about in the job at all. She knew what they were there to do, and she did it willingly and without complaint. She also did it more efficiently than anyone he’d seen.

Thinking about it like that, Pablo finally realised why the woman on the crescent hadn’t been a bother to Addie: Addie didn’t let it happen.

So Pablo explained himself. And Addie hit him.

‘We’re going to start this street over again. The residents aren’t going to like it, but that’s not my problem. We do this properly or not at all. And I don’t reckon you’ll want to pay it that way.’

She was right. He didn’t. Not if he wanted to keep his job. Which, given that he lived in a free market society where bills were the norm, was something he wanted very much to do.

Come the second pass, Pablo was still uneasy. Probably more than ever, given he’d had an extra couple of minutes to let his anxieties splash his stomach acid liberally around his throat – as well as any ulcers that may have been in the early stages of forming.

There was the additional concern of having other residents suddenly take to spontaneously hating him for driving a sizeably noisy motor vehicle very slowly along their enclosed street at eight o’clock in the morning not once but twice, with a good couple of minutes of downtime in between to lull them into a false sense of security regarding its potential return.

Never mind that he had to do it with frequent stops the second time.

By giving the truck its usual run-up at the beginning of the crescent, Pablo managed to pull up to the first rubbish bin without stressing the engine to breaking point. Taking off from there would still be difficult, but less so with the motor turning over that little bit faster while idle.

The bin had been set on the kerb awkwardly, so the automated claw that was designed to lift it from the ground and tip it upside down over the catchment compartment couldn’t get a purchase on the cheaply designed plastic container.

Before Pablo could sigh on her behalf, Addie was out the door. Her thick boots bounced softly across the dew-laden lawn, carrying her towards the offending receptacle.

Any thought Pablo may have had that she should be in the driver’s seat while he did the heavy lifting in such emergency situations evaporated as he watched Addie at work through the side mirror. With a heave, she lifted the bin nimbly onto the claw, affording Pablo the opportunity to reactivate the mechanism that would pull it along the remainder of its journey.

The sight was an astonishing one as ever, which was why Pablo found himself questioning Addie’s ability over and again. Most of the bins she could surely slide into with ease, so bulky were they compared to her. Yet there she was, her arms looking for all the world like they were worth nothing, pulling the bin into the air and managing the sanitation expert’s equivalent of microsurgery while it was up there.

There should be an award.

Addie slapped the side of the truck. It was the all-clear, the signal for Pablo to raise the bin without fear of knocking his partner for six.

Having activated the relevant control, Pablo turned his attention to the view through the windscreen. Ahead, he could see the next few houses, before the crescent began to curve away. The last house on the left (so aptly placed, in the opinion of this fan of ropey ‘70s horror films) was hers.

Every house between that first house and her house, every rubbish bin waiting to be emptied, stood as a reminder of the anguish she brought Pablo. As each one receded into his recent past, he felt her zone of negative energy grow stronger.

Even her bin reflected the chaotic influence she had on that which surrounded her. While most had stood proudly to attention, lined evenly against the kerb, their wheels precisely perpendicular to the street, hers was the exact opposite. The owner of Number 1, with his marginally askew garbage receptacle, had nothing on her.

It was as if she didn’t even care to have the thing emptied. The bin sat idly in the early morning sun, tufts of grass gathering at its base, an unkempt square of lawn screaming of the fact that it probably hadn’t shifted from that one spot in years.

As for the spot itself… Not quite near anything of any apparent use, it was just sort of, well, there. Pablo couldn’t find a way to describe it in any other terms. Situated inconveniently between house and kerb, the image was akin to discovering a phone booth in the middle of the Sahara. The front door was ages away, as were the letter box, the driveway, the side gate… Anything at all, really.

Worse from Pablo’s perspective was that there had to be a good three-metre stretch of overgrown lawn between it and the street. Addie didn’t like tall grass. Despised it, as a matter of fact. Left trudging through it to Pablo.

Every time.

Still, at least the blasted woman hadn’t emerged from her den of carelessness yet. Maybe she wouldn’t today. Maybe she was out for the day already. Maybe she had better things to do with her time at long last.

Yeah, and maybe the Earth was shaped like an early 1990s model laptop computer.

Pablo knew it in his gut. He didn’t even need to think. Thinking was what made it painful, thinking was what made the implausible seem plausible for all too brief a second before he came crashing back to reality.

She never came out until her territory had been encroached upon. Never before a single blade of grass on that hideous front lawn of hers made microscopic contact with Pablo’s shoe.

Then all hell typically broke loose.

Which is why it was with all the effort he could exert that Pablo fought tirelessly to encourage Addie to overcome the disdain she felt towards long grass.

It was about as futile as any sincere hope that the mad woman would be out for the day.

Somehow, she just knew. The mad woman, that is. Somehow she could sense the particulate matter of his boot’s vulcanised rubber sole colliding on a subatomic level with the fibrous molecular tendrils of that first blade of grass.

Because, with not a picosecond wasted in the aftermath of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle’s allowing for parts of Pablo’s boot and the grassy tuft to occupy the same space simultaneously, there she was.

There was no mistaking her entrance. The aluminium security grille sitting flush with the front door to her house swung open like a trap at a greyhound race, snapping with a light, hollow crack against the brick wall to its side.

Pablo tried not to look, to just focus on the task at hand and somehow ignore her. But her calls, the sound of a thousand aged cats screaming wearily at each other in a hessian sack, drew in his baser instincts for a good fight.

He sighted his prey, but that proved to be his first mistake. As she emerged from the darkened cavern of her house, the mad woman swung round, evidently keen to shut the security grille behind her. (To keep her contents protected should the worst happen and she not return from this pitched battle?) Bang! Weapon number one was deployed.

A sizeable tear in the old lady’s already obscenely figure-hugging leggings. Where, Pablo was forever too gentlemanly to repeat, but this visual onslaught had him easily overwhelmed for the briefest of moments.

Struggling to keep his partly digested breakfast squarely where it belonged, Pablo returned his focus to the bin. He had to reach it before the mad woman could bring her piercing screeches any nearer to his ear drums. It wouldn’t be an easy task and he knew it: for her slovenly appearance, the hag was unnervingly sprightly.

It was thus with tremendous hesitancy that Pablo pushed ever on. He knew in his heart of hearts that this kind of delay was all she needed to win the day, but his leaden feet could hardly bring themselves to inch ahead.

As it happened, he needn’t have worried. The old bat’s rubbish wasn’t going to be collected that day. Destiny had other plans for the sanitation facilitators whose undying efforts she so expertly failed to appreciate.

It came from Number 17. In the form of a twelve-year-old girl leaping over the fence that surrounded the house, screaming blue murder at a pitch overwhelming even to the mad woman, and running her way down the hill and towards a small park across the street at the end of the crescent.

Concerned as he was for the girl, Pablo couldn’t help but feel relieved by the distraction.