(diaryland) December 03, 2010 - 10:13 p.m.

Chapter Eleven � Magnetic Warrior

They had dinner and all that. Whatever. Some people got Mary to try and talk. She hardly did, as usual. Then, Bryn and Feng lay on the couch, their toes inadvertently touching, watching yesterday�s episode of Spooks on the giant TV. Good episode.

They were clean and full. Normalcy reigned again, especially when the first empty Big M of the season appeared on the floor of the TV pit.

Bryn till did not dream that night. The sprout grew two millimetres while the sun was down.

The next day, work. Stupid, boring work. Stapling, and hiding Trevor�s stuff from the world. Bryn was working on this thing for some widget company that made stuff he didn�t understand for the jumper industry. By 2PM, it was a killer. He went on wikipedia and looked up something innocuous because he was pretty sure that the computer people knew what you looked at. He fidgeted in his chair a lot. He felt a very faint urge to taste dirt. There�s a name for that urge, but I can�t look it up on wikpedia because I�m not connected to the net right now.

And since there was nothing better to do, he did. Went and found some dirt to taste, I mean.

At 2:15, he snuck off to the smoker�s balcony thing. They had a special one on Level 30. It was where the badasses and the accountancy equivalent of rockstars hung out, along with forty-five year old ladies who were turning into little grey prunes.

He really should have just gone down to ground level and nabbed a bit of dirt from the big planters down there, because the dirt in them was only partially soaked in cigarette butts. Or he could have stuck his finger in the maidenhair fern pot on the top floor lobby. That would have been the dirt equivalent of taste-testing a lab-grown mountain stream. He did think of that one, but it would have been a real hassle. Marg who worked at the desk there would have been all like, �WTF?� and he didn�t need that. Nobody hung around in that lobby, so it would have been pretty darn difficult to have been inconspicuous.

So, yes. He went with the most revolting choice possible; catching the lift up to the smokers� balcony (running up the stairs to a smokers� balcony would have aroused suspicion), zooming outside, plunging his finger deeply into the pot with the straggly cordyline and the cigarette butts and the chewing gum for twenty seconds, amazed that nobody noticed as they were too busy staring at their cigarettes and talking about different brands of tyres and/or educational toys, then rushing off to the toilets with his precious finger, getting himself ensconced in a cubicle, and licking.

Good thing he was in the cubicle, because the next thing he did was throw up a little bit.

You see, as soon as he had licked his finger, the spell had been broken. He realised he had just no only tasted dirt, but he had also tasted the discarded, toxic breath of countless humans before he got there. The pebbly finish on the planter made it look like it had been there since the seventies.

The seed was doing that thing that parasites do when they mess with a brain. Like the worm that rewires a mouse�s brain to make it a really big fan of the smell of cat piss, so the mouse goes and seek it out, an eventually the mouse gets eaten, and the worm can move on into a bigger and better host.

It was the first time Bryn had thrown up in days, ever since he got back from the holiday. But this was also the first time he�d done it fully consciously, and as a result of eating dirt instead of being irresponsibly drunk. Good for him, in a way.

For now, the seed was sated.

Maybe we should start calling it a sprout. Yeah. The sprout was sated. For now. Yeah.

Bryn spent the rest of the working day wondering why he had gone on the journey to the thirtieth floor balcony to taste a very small amount of terrible quality dirt. Spending the last couple of hours wondering about that was infinitely more interesting than trying to work out projections on jumper widgets, but Bryn did manage to move around bits of paper symbolically whenever somebody went past.

At 5:05, standing around outside his work, waiting for Feng to walk past suspiciously, Bryn glanced at the planter box he probably should have gone for instead. Damn. He never thought he�d be thinking that one planter box would be more appetising than another planter box.

It�s not his fault. I myself have never rated the possible taste qualities of the dirt contained just under the surface of planter boxes before either. Some of us just traipse through life unprepared like that.

A minute or two later, Feng went past. This was pretty normal. He did not look over at Bryn. He did not acknowledge Bryn. That was all very normal, and was done especially earnestly because a new season of Spooks had just begun and they had been taking lots of mental notes last night about new and improved techniques of looking completely unimportant and not raising suspicion. Feng was even carrying a small, dark brown exceptionally boring looking leather satchel that probably had contained chewing gum and possibly an energy drink that morning, but contained nothing else.

Nice touch, thought Bryn. Nice touch.

But then, something began to worry him. He could not start to follow Feng in the customary way, four metes behind, because there was someone in the way. There was someone following Feng from four metres behind. He could tell, straight off. He was an expert at stalking housemates like spies from the TV.

Bryn didn�t know what else to do except follow this lady, in turn, four metres behind her.

His face started to go red with panic. He tried to look at the edge of Feng�s face to see if he knew, but it was just about impossible with an inconspicuous lady in the way plus the throng of post-5PM escape from the CBD, all occurring in the eight metre space between himself and his housemate. If only Feng could turn around, Bryn cold do something. He thought of writing a text on is mobile, but by the time he pulled his phone out of his bag full of crap they�d already hit the subway steps.

Down they went into the ground. Feng, then the lady, then Bryn, and thousands of others. Yep, this was for reals.

First, Feng went through the ticket thing with a flourish of a metcard. Then the lady. She just beeped through without even doing anything. Then Bryn with his stupid bumbling myki, putting it on the sensor thing, nothing happening, trying again, people lining up behind him, Feng and the mysterious lady disappearing down the escalators spaced exactly four metres apart forever, then finally, bursting through those infernal, smug yellow gates.

Ah.

Bryn blustered down the escalators, all elbows, hurting people�s knees. This was a collapse down the escalator of desperate proportions, and the escalators at Parliament Station are not conducive to safe chasing.

He arrived at the platform too late. Feng got on, then the lady. He saw that, but from too far away.

What the fuck, man? Thought Bryn. Forget the lady for a second. Feng just got on the train and didn�t wait for him. There was no way that he could have thought that the person four metres behind him, stalking him, was Bryn. Bryn had never been the person in front, so he couldn�t say for 100% certain, but if this pretending to be spies thing was now being taken so seriously that Bryn had to wait for the next bloody train, this was getting silly.

Oh, yeah, and the lady. What was that all about?

As far as Bryn knew, Feng had done many, many things which could be investigated, most often of which was gross trespassing. The most recent naughty thing he had done was on Saturday night when he played a gig in his apartment that was louder than a jet taking off next to your ear, after his housemate had fallen unconscious. Bryn did not know if you could put together a class action to sue people for loss of hearing, but it could possibly happen, he thought.

Feng was pretty likely not to be involved in treason. He did have a hell of a lot of paper cluttering up his room, but you could tell they weren�t secret blueprints. They were just water-damaged colouring-in exercises and accounting assignments.

So, who the hell was this lady?

The wind in the tunnel swept past in a cylinder and ruffled Bryn�s hair. It was like the breath of the dead. The next train was in eight minutes.

He leaned against the bright blue wall, and wondered.

She walked with purpose like everybody else in the city, but didn�t look like an accountant. She had grey jeans, grey jacket, and crazy sneakers on; the kind you�d wear only if you were mad into early 80s rap or something. You�d have to surf eBay like a motherfucker and spend like landed gentry to get those sneakers. As for the front of her, he didn�t find out what was happening there. He never had a chance.

The back of her head was brown, due to the strong presence of hair of the same colour. He didn�t know whether the front of her head was brown.

She seemed to be knowing.

The whole thing was spooky and baffling.

Finally, the next train arrived. Bryn minded the gap and got on alone with thirty other people. This one was packed.

He suddenly had a vision of Feng�s funeral, his coffin covered in a huge swathe of cloying lilies. Shit, he was thinking crazy thoughts.

He couldn�t say for sure that lady wasn�t going to carry out a hit on Feng, though.

The train thundered out of the loop. The sun whacked him on the face as he was looking outside the door, and the landscape shuddered by.

He couldn�t get off the train fast enough. At the station, he sprinted down the steps. Feng would already be home. Maybe he�d just left the door open for him and the lady had just wandered in. Maybe it was all over, and there was nothing Bryn could do to change the outcome. Fuck. His heart started to pound like it was trying to escape.

He walked towards the house, exponentially slower and slower. He did not feel like coming into the house and finding Feng motionless on the couch with the big telly on, a tiny, futuristic bullet exit wound right in the middle of his forehead.

Due to the nature of the lady�s shoes, Bryn estimated that she would probably only use futuristic bullets.

Anyway, Bryn had slowed to a halt on the other side of the road to the apartment block. Hey, maybe the whole lady tracking Feng was something to do with what he did, in Arizona, while he was out of it, like barfing into a World Heritage Site, she�d mistakenly followed poor innocent Feng to his doom.

Nah, he thought. They study your photo first before they hunt you down, yeah?

He still didn�t want to go in, until.

Until.

He looked up. You could see the terrace from there. Feng and the lady were out there, sitting on the balcony, doing cheers with wine glasses, laughing heartily with their shoulders like they were on an ad for a winery. Then, they kissed each other.

This was an interesting development.