A Woman Sphinx

This is it. This is the end of my novel, my young son. After this, back to regular programming.

where are you standing
in the wind
dead grasses
grey & shaking in the wind
dead grasses
where are you standing
in the wind dead grasses
grey & shaking in the wind
dead grasses
there in the wilderness
the flower world
a pale blue cloud
will be grey water
at its peak
the mist will reach
will rain down
on the flower ground
& shining
reaching bottom
where you are
where you are only
standing in the wind
dead grasses
grey & shaking in the wind
dead grasses

As the ambulance was coming, at an estimated time of twenty minutes, Bryn laid the completely and disturbingly floppy Adelaide out on the brick ground on her back, which was probably what you were suppose to do. He popped his jumper under her head. Yeah, that looked right. And then he put his ear up to her mouth, which was slightly open.

Yep, she was still breathing. Phew. They were quite deep breaths, like she was asleep. Hopefully Feng over there was doing the same thing, however call him old-fashioned, but Bryn wasn�t particularly into going over to investigate his beer breath.

Her breath was like a posh perfume you get sprayed on your wrists against your will in Myer if you�re a chick and you�re trying to get through the cosmetics department to get to whatever else overpriced thing you actually need inside. However, sometimes, there are some good bargains in there. I don�t wont to be dismissing the whole of Myer right now.

Then, he padded her down to see if she had any special epipens or �in case of� instructional bracelets whatever on her person. This felt kind of wrong, like he was cheating on Feng or something. Not that it was remotely like cheating in real life. It was more like padding someone down to see if they have an epipen or an instructional bracelet or something.

However the thing was, just before she fell into herself over on the edge of the garden bed, he thought they�d had a moment, despite the whole night. And then, while he was crouching over her unconscious body, he�d thought that maybe before then, they�d had other moments. The cactus in the room; the incredible increasing and diminishing soccer ball coincidence; the dream she had about him, the blooming branch that held the Sorry. All that stuff. There was something that said to him, �Our destinies are tied together.� Or, maybe, �She is the catalyst for my destiny.� Or maybe even, �She is my destiny.�

I thought I should just let you know, though. I�m trying to be responsible here.

There was nothing at all that could help Bryn out. All she was wearing were her clothes. Nothing in the black pockets; nothing at all. Not even magical accoutrements.

So, bravely, against his wishes just about, he ran into the band room and onto the stage, rustling around madly. Maybe she had a handbag or whatever chicks have behind the stage with some medicine and some make-up or whatever. But, there was nothing. Nothing of that sort. Just the shells of magic tricks, set up for a trick that would never be carried out. The stage was like a ghost town of illusionism.

The Magic Stand-Uppable Casket was standing there, still in the middle of the stage, still standing up. The house lights were all on so that everyone could see where they were going because of the whole unconscious female in the beer garden situation.

The thing didn�t look like it had during the magic show. I mean, it still had the crescent moon, and the stars on it and all that, but the casket was open and it was hollow. There wasn�t a back on it. At all. All there was was a thick, black velvety curtain that had been pulled aside so that you could see right through the box.

There were no spiky things on the stage. No rotting twigs, flowers or leaves. He must have imagined that whole thing with the feeling of being trapped in there, with spines closing in and things tickling his nose menacingly. It had felt like they wanted to get into his nostrils and his earholes and his mouth to set up shop inside of him, or to get to his tummy where he knew there was something of its own mind growing in there. He was aware of its feelings now.

Anyway, nor was there anything of any help in this dire and definitely real situation at all. No epipens; no instructional bracelets; nothing. Again.

Every now and then, someone from the bar would come out and check to see if anything had changed. Nothing ever did. But, finally, one of the bar staff came out with a couple of guys in dark jumpsuits and big bags and a stretcher.

Oh, yeah. Feng was still there, on his jaunty angle, looking kind of alarming to those who didn�t know of his drunk sleeping style. He�d be OK. He�d probably wake up soon, and then throw up, and then feel fine. He had an ability to recover after a bunch of drinking that had always eluded Bryn, even when they were eighteen.

�Here, here!� yelled Bryn, too loudly, pointing down as Adelaide�s unconscious form. This beer garden was not that big.

�OK. Stand back for the moment, sir,� said the ambulance guy who talked, and they did their thing. The checking the breathing thing, then the pulse thing, the heart thing (but not the CPR thing), and then they got a little torch an opened up and eyelid and shone a bit of light in there.

The more silent ambulance guy realised he�d said that out aloud, and then turned around in his crouch to face Bryn.

�Oh, nothing,� he said. The other ambulance guy caught his eye and shook his head slowly at him.

What the fuck was going on? Was this normal? To go, �woah�, at someone�s unconscious eye?

�OK, we�re going to have to take her to the hospital for sure. She most likely needs to be given some treatment at this stage that�s fairly superficial, and then she�ll need to be kept around for some tests to see what�s the underlying cause. Do you know her medical history?�

�No, not much,� said Bryn. �She�s had these episodes before, she said once, and she also said that she can remember every dream he ever had.�

He realised that sounded really dumb. So he added a bit extra. �I thought that might be a relevant bit of information to help you figure out what illness this was,� he said.

�Not really, but we�re just the ambulance guys,� said one of them. Bryn had already forgotten which one was the talking one, and which was the silent one, especially since both of them had said something by now.

�OK,� said the other one. �It�s time to put her on a stretcher. Sir, are you going to accompany this lady to the hospital? If you were there when she fell unconscious, it might be a good thing to have you there as well when she wakes up.�

�It makes people feel less shocked when they regain consciousness. It gives them a bit of consistency that way,� said the other other one, which was the first one.

Bryn looked over at Feng. He was still looking like he was going to be there for another couple of hours yet. If the bar staff woke him because they waned to pack up, he�d cope. He�d just get a taxi home, and be fully recovered within no time with sketchy knowledge of what had happened. He was able to block out the bad bits of just about any night, unless someone dissed his band. He remembered that kind of tuff forever. He could forgive, but he could not forget.

Bryn couldn�t help it, but he felt a little bit pleased that Feng was too drunk to be a help right now.

Bryn thought to himself that he wanted to be the one in the ambulance because it was a cool experience. But that wasn�t exactly why.

The stretcher wheeled out of the pub squeakily. The backpackers still poring over their map, trying to figure out their way home, and the guys who were not going anywhere until they were kicked out at the end of the night all turned to watch. Some of them raised their pint glasses solemnly.

The ambulance was just outside. The stretcher collapsed its wheels into the back, between the open doors. One of the ambulance guys jumped in the back, too, seatbelting Adelaide in as she lay. The other one jumped in the front.

Bryn knew he had to get in the back. He knew that he should do it straight away, not just for Adelaide�s sake, but so that the ambulance could just get on with it and then go out and help some other person out there who was just clinging to life.

But he just had to feel the night air of the city, just for a sec. The air that had been bouncing off buildings in the alleyways and had been witness to thousands of muggings and had possibly been breathed in by Oliver Cromwell or something. They say that every glass of water you drink has at least a molecule or two of his piss in it, obviously recycled by natural causes, so I guess it�s fair to say the same thing for air as well, since he breathed it in and out every minute of the day until his brutal death, if it was brutal, because I think it was. Or maybe, oh shit. I don�t have time to look this stuff up now. I read a whole book about it once. It was even this year. I forget stuff pretty fast.

Anyway, Bryn took a deep breath of this mixture of stale and fresh air; the air that had been breathed in by a million zillion people and creatures and flora and fauna all over the world since the beginning of life, and then he stepped into the ambulance as well.

The ambulance whizzed along. There was absolutely no traffic. You could tell by the way it was gliding down the road without its siren on.

He looked at Adelaide�s head. It was lolling around on one side as the ambulance made slight changes in direction.

The ambulance guy moved things around and did heart rate checks and blood pressure checks, and continued to look under her right eyelid with a torch, neglecting her left, probably because it was too far away, and saying, �hm,� and �

Bryn gripped the closest thing to him, not that he was being jerked around by the ambulance suddenly at all. What he gripped was a tube thing that came out of the wall. It was a completely futile thing to have grabbed to stay steady, but at least he could hold it in front of his chest as some kind of rubbery, ten percent useful shield.

The ambulance guy in the back had dissolved into a mass of spider plant flowers and tiny moths. That was all he was now. Not even a shred of uniform.

He held the rubber tube thing in front of his face and flicked at the moths with it. They were all frantically flying around in the claustrophobic space, and getting all up in his face. Adelaide as coated in the fallen puff of spider plants flowers; all tiny, spindly off-white things with tiny yellow dots on them.

Forget wiping them off her unconscious body. Forget that. The fact was, the ambulance was now swerving all over the place. Obviously, a pretty similar fate had happened to the guy in the front.

It felt like the tyres underneath had burst, and that the vehicle was scraping along on metal. Maybe the tyres had turned into goddamn orchids or something. Whatever.

Despite all these disastrous and discombobulating goings on, Bryn had a moment to himself, with the incredible volume of moths and the incredibly violent swerving of the ambulance constantly making his face wince. He thought, this might work out OK. As long as the ambulance turns itself into a soft landing.

And, within the next thirty seconds, it happened. The whole ambulance, or what was left of it, just went into a big, muffled explosion of colour.

If you could have taken a photo just as the moment occurred, it would have been spectacular. In fact, you�d have to have taken a great many photos, because every single molecular combination exploded at a different point in an infinitesimally tiny space of time. The tube in Bryn�s hand changed into filaments of Spanish moss, the clipboards and the pockets they were in turned into variegated coleus leaves mixed with a touch of forget-me-not, Adelaide�s belts holding her on changed spontaneously into black pansies, and the ides and the top of the ambulance turned into light pink petals an bits of lavender and the windows turned into dried translucent seed pods of the money plant, and the last thing to go was the chassis of the ambulance itself, billowing into a rather convenient pillow of purple, ornamental cabbages.

Thank Christ they were still left there with their clothes on. Now that could have been embarrassing if it had gone the other way. Not that Adelaide Herrmann was suddenly conscious or anything.

ah brother
they want us to kill
this beaver
they want us to kill
ah brother
this beaver
this beaver
ah brother
they want us to kill
with a bow & arrow
they want us to kill it
ah brother
with hair standing up
they were waiting
& ran from us
broke down their doors to get in
now they want us
to kill it
ah brother
with a bow & arrow
ah brother
they want us to kill it

Look, Bryn really should have gone and gotten that X-ray like he was supposed to yesterday. Or, actually the day before that, now looking at my watch. It would have made everything so, so much easier. He would have found out that he had a cactus somehow in his tummy, like he�d swallowed it some time when he wasn�t fully in charge of his faculties on holiday, and that it was a particular, never-before-seen cactus which had the unparalleled ability to stay whole in the tummy without being broken down at all by the well-known-to-be-pretty-brutal stomach juices. Well, at least, that�s what the four or five doctors who had all been summoned to the X-ray room at the bulk bill place across the highway would have said.

And then they would have operated and all that, and it would have been OK-ish, but he would have been the one who would have been driven to the hospital, but it would have been Friday afternoon, and it would have been by his brother Rhys, with Cedric in the back making nearly formed words, and it wouldn�t have involved a crazy crash into the Flower World. In fact, the whole Flower World thing would have gone away with the removal of the cactus from the tummy and being chucked straight into the incinerator, I�m thinking. I mean, I�m not sure, but it seems like that�s what would have happened. And he would not have gone to the magic show, and Feng would have been a bit pissed off that Bryn had chosen to recover from the stomach operation where he�d gotten twenty dissolvable stitches on his outside and god knows what on the inside instead of rocking up to The Majesty of Footscray�s support act gig, but would have decided that it was probably for the best anyway because Bryn seemed to win at embarrassing himself in front of his girlfriend every single time, plus he never cheered at the end of The Majesty of Footscray�s songs properly; he always said �yay,� in a deep voice that didn�t carry in a loud room properly, and everyone knew that you were meant to cheer in a high pitched voice, everybody else in the whole freaking world did, but, whatevs. No great loss.

And they would have laughed about that time when Bryn got a cactus removed from his tummy, and the successful magic show, and how incredibly unrehearsed The Majesty of Footscray had sounded that night, and how Jonathan forgot to put his drum stool back in the van (it would have happened in either alternative ending to this novel; I know that for sure), and all that kind of stuff, but it wasn�t to happen, because Bryn did not go to the doctor for his X-ray like he was supposed to.

Oh, how they would have sat around on the apartment terrace, laughing like at the end of Full House or some similar show, and people would have learned one new fact about themselves, and they would have all been friends forever ad all that. And one day, deep into the future, a Majesty of Footscray demo that ended up in an Op Shop would have been picked up by some likely lad and duplicated and spread throughout the world and small retirement territories on Mars by whatever the 2040 version of hipsters are going to be and they would have gotten back together (except for TJ who had decided to become a very high-ranking monk and had to be replaced by his sister on guitar), and they would have been festival favourites for a while and you know, it would have all been good.

But it wasn�t to be. Stupid Bryn and his forgetting appointments. Once you decide to take a bunch of sick days off in a row, the whole tenuous grip on a structured life goes out the window. Or at least, it happens to me.

The cactus in Bryn�s tummy wanted out. Did I mention that it had spines on it now? Little tiny ones, still new and very flexible, I have to admit, but still.

I�m just saying I would not have liked to have been Bryn Mossman right now. Especially considering where he was. He was no longer in the world we operate in. He was in a parallel world; a very different world, with an unconscious chick.

He could feel the cactus climbing inside of him. It was horrible. It felt like acid reflux of the most indescribably uncomfortable kind. Of indigestion and heartburn. It nearly feels like a cactus is climbing up inside of me, he thought to himself.

While the whole ambulance turning into a selection of florist�s delights didn�t seem to have any effect at all on Adelaide, Bryn�s hellish-sounding retching did.

She did a weak moan that was barely discernible from beneath the pile of flowers. Bryn didn�t notice it. He was trying to vomit up the fucking thing that was busting to get out.

He punched his tummy to try and help things along. It had the pretty much opposite effect of the cactus losing its grip and tumbling down to the bottom of his tummy again. But he could live with that. It just floated there so that Bryn could hardly feel it.

The moon was out, and it was full. At least that hadn�t been turned into plant.

Bryn couldn�t be stuffed trying to put the pieces together of what had gone on. It was too much. He needed sleep. He nestled himself into the bed of petals and shut his eyes.

He woke up. The sun was beaming down, just like it was supposed to. He was still in the tangled mass of Spanish moss and lavender and black pansies and whatever else.

Adelaide should have then asked, �Where are we?� Or, maybe, �What the fuck happened last night?� Or just something like that.

�Well, you know how there was the torrent of flowers, last night, and how you fell out of my magic trick because you forgot to count to twenty and step backwards, and that you were in the toilets for ages, and then you came out and saw me, and then I had an episode, and then we were in the ambulance, and then everything dissolved? That�s how I knew you�d be in this pile somewhere.�

�Wait, a, sec,� said Bryn, one word at a time. Usually people speak one word at a time, however, this was more one word at a time than usual. �How did you know all that?�

�Oh, forget about it,� she said. �I just knew.� She shrugged. �I just know.�

That knowing was twofold. One thing was pretending to be in a coma or something presumably in order to get a free ride to the hospital, unless she�d really been out of it and had astrally projected, which Bryn didn�t put past her at all at this point. But seriously, how did she know that he had forgotten to count to twenty and all that in the Magic Stand-Uppable Casket?

He did. The petals rolled off him, mostly. He stood up, and stretched, facing the sun. He could feel the light reacting with himself, cleaning dankness away or something.

�Uh, is this Melbourne?� he asked. He couldn�t really see any evidence of this being Melbourne; he just had a gut feeling about it. In fact, there were no discerning characteristics whatsoever.

There was nothing around. No roads, no cars, no places, nothing. Just the voids. You could see where the roads had been, and where the dirt had been dug out and tossed away for them. Where there had been basement carparks, and footings, and fenceposts.

Byn started to breathe really, really fast. He bent down and frantically started to dig in the pile of stuff he had woken up in. To see if there was a whole in the earth there. If there were stairs there that could get him out. A wormhole; fuck, whatever. Now was not the time to be choosy.

�Oh, my God. We�re stuck,� he said, waving his left hand around frantically by his side without knowing it.

The worst thing wasn�t that, though. The worst thing, and he was trying to fight it because he�d seen enough movies like Labyrinth of the lure of these netherworlds, was that he was happy.

Yep, there was no way of ignoring it. He was happy. Motherfucking happy. He could hear sticks over the other side of the crevasse which was presumably a road chatting around a tree. He could feel like he could map out the bee colony in the big gum in the hollow over to the left, and know all of its empires. He and Adelaide were the only ones there, and that was for sure. And that was even better.

�It is Melbourne,� said Adelaide. �It�s just a place where people can�t find you anymore.�

�We�re both lost to the world we knew,� she said. Then she paused for a while. The wind went past and sounded chimey. Then, she said, �Is that good?�

�Um, I have work on Monday. The jumper widget account needs whatever it needs doing to it.�

The truth was, he did want to, in this world or the other one, or the next world.

The light from the sun was strange. It was brighter, but in a way that made all the jungle and the clearings around seem shiny.

The light shone through Adelaide�s hair, and the wind tossed it about a bit, like in a shampoo commercial, but more naturalistic.

A tiny art of his brain panicked at what he had just said. A very small, teeny-tiny portion. An ever-diminishing portion. The portion that wondered whether there was anything hidden in this world, and how he was ever going to eat meat again, and that his tummy was sore, and that his brother and his housemate and his parents were all on the unfindable side of the mirror, and that this was all just plain worryingly wrong.

Horses galloped by with greasy manes, and leapt into huge ditches, and moths landed on rotten tree trunks and all that kind of shit.

Like in the normal world, there was grot under the surface of everything. You just had to look at it from out the corner of your eye and you would catch it here.

Adelaide started to wander over to the edge of the ghost of the street and jumped up onto the kerb, which was now a thin ribbon of flat grass.

Bryn shielded his eyes from the infinitely pleasant shininess and watched her. It was impossible to see any grot when he looked at her. He felt his throat tighten.

She turned to face him and held out a hand to help him up. �Bryn, what do you want to do now?�

She had phrased it like it was a question of whether they should crack open the red wine or the white wine if they were going to watch a Traffaut movie.

Adelaide looked at him seriously, from above, with the sun behind her head. It always seemed to be located behind her head, like she was a god of light.

�Is that just a question about what this place is like on its edges or if there�s a doorway that you can peek through, or is it a question about actually wanting to go back?�

He winced. He clung to his better judgement. This was no mean feat, as had hardly ever used it before.

All he wanted to do was lie down, his head touching Adelaide�s head, and be grown over. Hard to explain, that one. Just go with me on it. Some shenanigans to do with the Flower World.

Bryn got a glimpse of what was happening under Adelaide�s fa�ade for the first time. He got the feeling that she was also fighting a part of herself. He was absolutely busting to find out the part in the centre.

He went up to the edge of the ditch that separated himself and her. He looked up at her face, and a tear came out of her left eye and plopped onto his cheek. I�m not telling you which cheek. You can make that bit up yourself.

The tear fucking stung. It was like acid on the thin skin under his eye. He didn�t know what that meant. But he felt like it was a message.

Another tear came out of her eye. The same one. He flinched as it landed on his eyelid.

The little cactus in his tummy climbed higher, gaining momentum like a tumbleweed through a ghost town. He tarted to gag again. He involuntarily curled over, his muscles straining.

Adelaide didn�t do anything. Except make another tear come out of her eye and another, and another.

For all I know, she�s still there, in the Flower World, standing on the edge of the same ditch, making the same tears, one by one, each one searing the same patch of dirt below.

Adelaide did not move. She did not cradle his head, or put a jumper under it like he had done to her in the beer garden. She kept standing there, more and more like a crying cr�che figure; like painted wood.

He curled into a foetal position, coughing and spitting and thrashing. This was much worse than when that bloody helpful French guy and that tour guide Darren, or whatever his name was guy with the terrible knees had brought him out of the bus and let him lie there on the desert floor, all vulnerable to the cactus on the hill that wavered in the stinking hot air, and had let him breath in that seed, that bloody cactus seed that shouldn�t have gotten through quarantine. It occurred to him very slightly, as his brain was mostly taken up by the fact that he wanted to stay here forever, and the fact that he felt like he was in his death throes, that this situation was a lot like that earlier time. Here he was, helpless and in pain in a place he didn�t belong, in the shadow of a girl. But this was much, much worse. The pain, I mean. And there was no tour bus involved. Or a guy with terrible knees, thank god.

This was the worst. This was the single most searing thing that had ever, ever happened to him.

Adelaide stayed over him, crying acidic tears, one by one, forever and ever, the Flower World continuing to grow up around her and covering her with vines watered by her eyes until she was like a lost Mayan city, but never, ever found again. Amen.

The cactus had climbed through his throat. Bryn�s eyes were popping out as his whole body pulsed with rejection. He couldn�t breathe. He couldn�t live. This was going to fucking kill him. The little spines tore at his throat.

He tried to look up at her for the last time but it was completely impossible. He knew what he would see anyway. The shadow of a head in front of the sun.

He dematerialised. He choked and then went blue. He wasn�t in the Flower World anymore.

She was still there. Tear after tear, and without end. A wooden statue, a drip irrigation system for the plants.

That was how the part of his brain that had always been on his side reacted when it found out that it was still alive.

The whole entire length of his oesophagus was ripped the fuck up. And he was still in the foetal position, and kind of cold.

And he had the simultaneous feeling that he�d supposed to have gone to the doctor on Friday, and also that he didn�t need to go and get that X-ray anymore.

A wave of regret went through him. This wasn�t the reaction he was supposed to have.

He weighed like a zillion tonnes. Probably because his whole body had just been involved in a mass cactus ejection situation. It was like way too strong electrodes had been applied to his body in a ghastly medical experiment that didn�t have the desired results.

It was then that he perceived that he had his mobile phone in the pocket of his pants. He wondered whether it had been there the whole entire time. His clothes had been.

Wow, imagine if I�d tried to ring Rhys from the other world, he thought. He would have known how to rescue me.

With the little strength he had, and using the rare not completely shot muscles he could find, he used his shoulder to fling the appropriately adjoining arm over his body so that his hand could attempt to make contact with the inconveniently positioned mobile phone pocket, which was between himself and the ground.

He was hoping that he would not from now on compare absolutely anything and everything with the Flower World, or anyone and everyone with Adelaide Hermann.

It probably took about eighteen to twenty minutes to fish his mobile out of the pocket that angled the completely wrong way for these types of inert foetal positions on hard round types of situations, but time wasn�t an issue today.

Today being Sunday, he hoped. Unless it was sixty years from now, which under the circumstances wouldn�t have surprised him, but it would have bummed him the hell out. He had had that weird time in the reserve before, when it had talked to him.

But when he�d fished the phone out of his pants, and he rang his brother after a real hassling time trying to get his phone off lock with the bare minimum of strength (not even enough to say an ounce), and yelled hoarsely into the phone when it was answered demanding to know what year it was, and who the president was, if any, and that he was assured by the familiar and reasonable voice of his brother on the other end that it was the right year; he year he had been in since the start of it, and that asking who the president was a very America-centric thing to ask, Bryn Mossman calmed down a hell of a lot.

Then, when the blood started to flow properly through his veins again, he asked, �Can you come and take me home?�

There was a fairly long pause, but not to take anything away from the saintliness of his brother � still on the right side of politeness when it comes to pauses, Rhys Mossman sighed just like their Dad did, and said, �OK.�

Bryn waited there, chilled, and on his side, and decided that it must be late afternoon. He wondered whether Feng had made it home alright. Surely he�d be at home by now.

He looked up and out to the terrace. He�d seen Adelaide up there once, with her fancy shoes on.

He saw a Big M of unclear flavour shoot out of the side of the apartment and land on the terrace table outside. Well, that was a new thing. And more than welcome, considering.

�Ah,� he said out loud, though it killed, and waited for his brother to drive up and cover him with a blanket. Then, he would be found.

Forever and ever and ever. The pooled acid of the tears never tore the fabric of the Flower World and gushed into the other world where everybody lived most of the time. It would have been impossible anyway; the Flower World was underneath. It was a derivative of the normal world. It was one less degree, like from cubed to squared. Where one dimension less made the world more pure. You know, like in Maths Methods in school.

Bryn wished that they had a fireplace in the apartment so that he could recover properly like really, really sick people who in reality just need a whole lot of soup and lying around to get better, but Rhys and Feng had put a whole bunch of blankets on him to get the same, �Woah, I�m way, way too warm now,� kind of a feel.

It worked. He had lots of ice cream with Choc Magic on it, and got to watch whatever he wanted on the big telly. It was a vintage episode of Donahue, downloaded off the computer.

They did not talk about what had happened that weekend, or what had happened the week before. Feng was never the sort to actually talk about things properly. Bryn would never know what Feng had concluded about what had gone on. Feng was generally hard to read; he had no idea if Feng had even been that serious about Adelaide. Well, as Bryn saw it, he did Feng a favour.

The worst was over. He knew now that whatever happened, time would turn it all into a vague, fuzzy thing. Or he fuckin� hoped so. Fuckin�.

It would do the same for Feng, and for Trevor, who came back to work the next week quite gaunt and to find the good stapler, and all the coloured paperclips, and pretty much everything cool about office stationery, gone. Except for the paperwork he didn�t want to tackle; that was intensely still there, but that was Trevor�s job. Shrug.

Speaking of jobs, so too, would the jumper widget account be waiting for Bryn when he returned. Bryn would finally see the butt end of that job; the job he hated; the job he thought would never end. But it did. He couldn�t even remember what the widgets did anymore after a few months, and neither do I.

now the cloud
will break
the cloud will break
& now
the cloud will break
the cloud
will break
& now the cloud
will break
the cloud will break
there in the flower world
under the dawn
this pale blue cloud
will be grey water
at its peak
the mist will reach
will rain down
shining
& reaching bottom
now the cloud
will break
the cloud will break
& now
the cloud will break
the cloud
will break

But before all that; in fact that evening, when the sun went down and the birds sang their last songs of the day, and Feng and Bryn were both on the couch, and Bryn had finally tossed off some of the blankets and lay there with red cheeks, and Feng took the discarded blankets and rugged up to be matching, and they were watching some crap about UFOs on the telly, the nicest thing happened.

So I may have lied a bit about Bryn Mossman�s graph when I was talking about it in the prologue. In fact, the graph went up from here, not down like I said. I didn�t get it upside down or anything.

�Yeah, but I had to feed you ice cream all afternoon and now my door opening arm is tired,� said Feng.

Bryn climbed out from under the blankets, and in the slow, injured shuffle to the door, he wondered who the fuck it could be. Not a salesman at this time of night. No way. They were all in bed by now. Not Mormons. Their knock was more, religious or something.

His heart started to pound quite loudly in his chest, and it wasn�t because he�d tripped over a Big M carcass.

He opened the door, hesitantly, just a crack at first, relishing the unknowing. Then, he opened it wide.

Bryn could not help the ultra-disappointed and quite insulting-sounding motherfucker of a sigh that escaped the depths of his chest.

�Don�t worry,� said Rhys. �You do that a lot when you answer the door and it�s me.�

�Anyway, there was something I forgot to give to you. It arrived at my house for some reason. Maybe it�s because your name isn�t in the phone book.�

It said, �Greetings from Tacoma� on it, and it had leafy, leafy plants and a lake on it.

Bryn turned it over. His eyes raced each other to see who could find out who it was from first.

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