A Woman Sphinx

in one tree
one stick
who makes the sound of cracking
cracking wood?
in one tree
one stick
who makes the sound of cracking
cracking wood?
there in the flower world
the tree world
you do not have my
long grey body
in one tree
one stick
who makes the sound of cracking
cracking wood?

Bryn took a deep breath, let it out again like a fern releasing spores, and went upstairs.

�Hey,� he said. �Sorry. I thought you got on the train. In some ways, our spy commuting is kinda irresponsible. Yeah, uh, yeah. This chick�s here, um, her name�s Adelaide, and she�s kinda my girlfriend. Since when you were away. And, yeah, um, she wants to apologise to you.�

Feng had never really had a girlfriend in a way that many people have girlfriends. There were just chicks who came and went, and female friends, but not really girlfriends. It was like Feng was this guy who did butt rock with his band, and got his mother and his sister to pick up his crap off the floor, and he�d occasionally hook up, but he�d just be hanging on the couch with a chick, no questions asked, no answers given. It was just chillin�. But now, Feng was bashful and flustered. He�d never said an actual feeling to Bryn in their zillions of years of living in each other�s pockets. Bryn realised that the ums meant verbs and adjectives that he couldn�t bring himself to say.

Bryn was suddenly incredibly jealous. Hi heart was sad, and it was getting jabbed by this thought. He thought it wasn�t fair. Bryn himself had had a perfectly good girlfriend for a few weeks there who had always tucked him in no matter where on the floor he ended up, and now only faceless people and talking cacti were the ones to do it. Marcelle was unreachable and being present in text form on the internet meant nothing. And nevermore would there be anything ever to live for again. Hmph.

They shook hands solemnly, because they had no choice to do so after such a formal introduction. Bryn felt that Feng had even gone to lengths of consideration such that he introduced the person he had known the longest first, like you�d do if you�d actually read a book about manners or something. I myself had the Muppet Book of Manners. Still do too, man. It was a good read. The pictures lured me in.

Adelaide�s hand was cold. When they finished their handshake, he was left with a papery residue on his hand. Maybe that was because now there was literally a piece of paper in his hand, thin and tissuey. It was confusing.

He raised it to the late afternoon sun, just above the tops of the dark, churning trees over the other side of the road, in a reserve he had never been to.

If he had been apologised to in the conventional way, maybe he would have worked out what it was all about. But when you get handed an extremely thin piece of paper with invisible old-fashioned cursive on it by a mysterious new girlfriend of your housemate, it can make you lose your way in the map of your mind. Trust me on this one.

Adelaide sucked in her bottom lip. �I was the cactus at he party,� she said.

�Woah. Shit,� said Bryn, looking down, running his finger across the edge of the dirty glass and steel table. This just got more uncomfortable.

�Yes, and I�m so, so sorry about everything. It was just that Feng and I wanted to be matching with our costumes in some way, and he was a daisy, and I wanted to be a cactus, and I think I kind of explained that on the night, and that I didn�t know your fear, but I don�t exactly remember what happened and what didn�t happen that night. Some things I think happened don�t feel real.�

�Me too,� said Bryn, and he continued to feel unbearably uncomfortable. He thought about they way he�d fallen over in his undies, and how she�d told him to think about coloured blobs in the dark, and how Feng suddenly had a girlfriend which he seemed so awkward about. He wanted to leap out of his skin, over the balcony. Basically, all the three people participating in this conversation were just spurring each other on to more and more uncomfortable heights, never captured before on camera.

Not that they were being filmed now. I�ve just been watching a nature documentary, so I was thinking about capturing things on camera.

�OK, well, that�s all over now. Why don�t we sit down and relax and have a proper, normal chat or something,� said Feng.

�Yeah,� said both Bryn and Adelaide, at exactly the same time and in exactly the same �gosh, I�m glad all that nonsense is over and now we can relax� sort of a way, resulting in the levels of uncomfortableness returning, full force.

�Um, I�ll just get myself a beer, yeah? Anyone else want one?� asked Bryn, busting to get into the house and be by himself just for a few seconds so he could get his shit together mentally.

�Mm-hmm, mm-hmm,� said Adelaide, and both of them looked at each other like a band-aid had been ripped off.

Phew. Bryn went inside, fumbled around, and didn�t really get his direction back. He came out with beers anyway and passed then around

�So, uh, Feng tells me you�re an accountant as well,� said Adelaide. �Is that fun?�

�Sort of. I really like adding and subtracting, and we do get to do a lot of that at work. I also like stationery, and our industry is pretty heavily stationery based. So, I guess you could say it�s fun,� said Bryn.

God, he sounded like a tool. So, in the time-old conversational method of being like a person trying to dig themselves out of a hole, he continued.

�Well, I mean, it�s good with all the maths and the stationery and stuff, but sometimes it�s boring. Often, I like to change my desktop picture on the computer several times a day, because that�s all I can do in terms of creativity in my job, really,� he said then literally slapped his own forehead in disappointment with what he had just presented verbally. It was not good. Not good at all.

He had a theory that he wanted to say something about being creative because Adelaide had the shoes of someone in a creative field. Bryn just had long black scuffed shoes. The shoes of an accountant.

After the forehead slap, Bryn�s hand segued seamlessly into a full palm-down-the-face pulling so hard that the insides of the lower eyelids are revealed sequence and then went into a grab-the-stubbie-firmly-until-you-get-white-knuckles manoeuvre.

�Huh?� grunted Bryn like someone over the other side of the office said something really boring in a mumbly tone and Bryn had no real interest in hearing what they actually were trying to say. Except, in this case, he meant the exact opposite.

�Yeah, a close-up magician,� said Feng. �It�s really cool. She does magic on a stage, and she also does it on the street and stuff, and at one particular really posh restaurant, where she goes up to people at their tables and does old-fashioned card tricks and things. That�s what close-up magicians do, really.�

�Yeah, and sometimes she goes and performs magic at famous people�s birthday parties and everything,� said Feng like a proud parent �One time, she made Molly Meldrum disappear into a magical refrigerator.�

�Yeah, but I had to bring him back again, though, or I wouldn�t get paid,� added Adelaide.

Then, they had the uncomfortable silence that was bound to happen, nay � just about scheduled to happen in pen at some point in the conversation.

Bryn glanced over at Adelaide�s face, hoping to god they wouldn�t catch each other�s eyes. She was looking out at the reserve across the road.

Bryn had never noticed before, but the trees looked like evil trees and the ivy growing on the brick wall at the back was crying out and holding dead branches hostage.

Adelaide turned back and blinked slowly, like she was trying to get rid of the image of the reserve by imagining curtains going down on the scene. Bryn wondered whether she could tell what the plants were thinking, too. Or maybe she was trying to erase the memory of the conversation up until this point.

Feng sipped his beer very, very loudly, and then blew over the top to do that bottleneck whistly thing. It was an act of desperation.

Suddenly, Adelaide perked up. �Hey, want to see a magic trick?� she said, enthusiastically.

�Hooray! Oh, hooray!� yelled Feng, triumphantly. They�d found a way out of the silence.

�Cool, OK. Now, let me think for a second,� she said. She brought her fingers up to her temples, and massaged them a little bit, looking as I she was entering some kind of meditative mode. A lot of magic is about the vibe you give off, I�ve heard. Adelaide had vibe in spades.

�OK, OK. I�ve got it,� she said. �Got a couple of different coins?� she asked Bryn keenly.

Yep, he had a couple. As he brought out a wide selection from his pocket, the tissue paper Sorry came out too by accident and caught on the little breeze that came from the sea.

All three of them watched it float away like a transparent petal until it cancelled itself out in the sky.

�Don�t worry, man,� said Adelaide. �As long as you felt my apology in your hand originally, that�s all that matters.�

She came up with some very unusual things to say, that put Bryn in an uneasy state of mind. He could not exactly describe how. Maybe it was just because she had been the cactus.

She began rifling through the coins to find the right ones. �Anyway, cool. I�ve got my first victims.� They were a twenty-cent coin and a ten cent coin.

�OK. So, I�m going to do a very, very simple trick. Maybe it will give you enough of a taste for you to want to see something a bit more impressive at a magic show I�m doing on the weekend or something. Feng�s coming, aren�t you?�

�So, I need this wine glass here, which we can say is pretty much empty, or I�ll just actually throw the last dregs out over the side, there we go, and I�ll put the ten-cent coin in first. See that? Yes? OK, and now I�ll carefully pop in the twenty-cent coin on top of that. There we go. And now, if I just blow softy, the coins will reverse themselves��. see?�

And then, somehow, when she turned the glass over onto the table with a blurry flip, the twenty-cent coin was still on top.

She reached over to Bryn�s left ear, slowly, thoughtfully, and reached behind it in the classic magician�s way. Sure, this was an archetypical move, but it was fascinating.

He felt a little rustle on the soft part of his skin. He closed his eyes for a sec.

She opened it up in front of his eyes. Inside was a tiny, crinkly fresh pink blossom flower, like you see in Chinese paintings, but the pink was so intense that Bryn felt like he couldn�t look at it for too long.

And like that time he needed to taste dirt, he suddenly had an overwhelming urge.

Her hand was still outstretched. Bryn pt his nose up to the little flower, but then ended up just going the whole hog and buried his nose into her hand. The smell was fucking fantastic. He�d never really liked flowers, or perfume or anything, but this one didn�t even smell like a smell that you cold find in normal time and space. It was more like if you could smell an expression, or an idea. A really good one.

�Whoops,� he said. �Sorry about putting my nose totally in your hand. But the further I got to it, the more subtleties appeared.�

�That�s OK,� she said, taking her hand away and putting the flower on the table. In a second, it was gone and the ten-cent coin was there, in its place.

�Excuse me. I really have to go to the toilet,� said Adelaide, and made a swift exit.

Bryn and Feng sat there, motionless, until they heard the toilet door shut. Then, Feng suddenly got very animated.

�What? God,� said Bryn, fed up at being disapproved at all the time. Feng was no socially adept angel, either. �Stop getting up my butt at everything, man. I�m still a bit sensitive about the whole cactus fiasco, you have to understand?�

�And I just wanted to smell the magic flower. I mean, what�s wrong with that? It was little, so I plunged my nose into her hand. Yeah, maybe retrospectively I plunged in a bit too far, but, as I said, it was a wee little flower, so I sort of had to, basically.�

It wasn�t a question, per se. It was three separate sentences, one word each. What. Magic. Flower.

�You know, the magic flower! The one in her hand! That�s we�re talking about! The one I sniffed too hard and all that!�

�There was no flower,� said Feng. �That was a coin. You were smelling the ten-cent coin.�

�Yes. It was a fucking coin. I saw it. In her hand. It smelt like metal. Presumably.�

The expanse of Bryn�s face below his ears, all the way down his neck and his chest went bright red and felt prickly.

He couldn�t even bring a small sound to the top of his throat as a response. Not even a �huh.�

Bryn did not want to think about this too much. He wanted to move on, but he suspected that Feng was possibly right.

Bryn decided to make a quick exit. It would be merciful on everyone. The next day, Feng would be all bouncy again, as he always did after getting grumpy with Bryn, and everything would be OK again. Yeah. That�s how it worked.

He decided on his escape plan. In fact, he decided on three escape plans, all at once.

�I�m pretty hungry. I think I�ll go pick up some greasy food from somewhere, or maybe go visit my brother or something,� said Bryn, standing up, then squeaking the chair he�d been sitting on under the table.

�Nice to meet you, Bryn,� said Adelaide, obviously trying to make up for Feng�s mood and she held out her hand again for a handshake.

Bryn did not take it. It was rude, but it was better than the alternative. He turned on his heels, and left the house swiftly.

Then, after he�d gone fifty metres down the street, he was forced to go all the way back to the apartment and tiptoe in like he thought he could sweep in and sweep out again undetected. He couldn�t.

�Uh, yeah, just forgot to grab my mobile,� he said hoarsely as Feng and Adelaide, still sitting on the terrace, watched him continue to tiptoe around the lounge, lifting up things softly. �Ah, fuck. Where is it?�

Bryn looked over. �Oh. Great, thanks!� he whispered loudly, and tiptoed over there. He picked up his stupid mobile, and his keys which thank God were right next to his phone. It would have been just the pits to have to come back again. The Pits.

�OK, bye again,� he said in an inside voice and he slunk away clumsily. His shoes squeaked.

God, he was such a dumbass. He shook his head all the way down the street and called his brother at the same time. It made for a very bumpy and indecipherable conversation.

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