Pete, minimum wage studio hand and secret chart weapon, found it taped to the inside of a rented kick drum. He knew it might be worth something, but sensed that it might be trouble, so he passed it on to Shelley, dispersing two birds with one stone. Shelley, wounded dove, looking for shelter, could not refuse, not Pete, not anyone, which left her unprotected and unsettled, on the move from one suggestion to the next, wearing in her permanently parted lips an implicit request for trust and faith. She carried it for a couple of days until Bob, Bob the dog that would lick your hand then eat your dinner, took it off her hands, out of the back pocket of her jeans, while she slept face down and naked, uncovered, unconscious in Bob’s cold basement flat, blacked out by tiny white pills that did exactly the opposite of what Bob had promised. Daylight down there, afternoon light, was a blue-green undersea light, tinted in transmission by thick glass set in the pavement outside and above the basement. Bob splashed his face and armpits at the basin, muttering, coaxing himself back up from chagrin to mischief, to harmless fun. If a tree falls in the forest no-one will catch the axeman. He kept a steady eye on her as he dressed. A shake of her ankle, a smack on the ass, a tickle where buttock became thigh. Not a stir, not a sound, no interruption in her slow breathing. She can wake up and find her own way out while he is gone. He found his flat cap and closed the door quietly behind.

Bob ran into Hugh at the whiskey bar, three in the afternoon and one was having breakfast, one was having lunch. Bob showed it and sold it to Hugh and for a couple more bank notes, love letters that still smelled of the press, he threw in six of the polaroids he had taken of Shelley, not unconscious, just had her eyes closed, because Hugh, being a man and a collector of such visceral trade, was willing and able to pay. Not really for money, but for the warmth of a Winterman and a double Laphroaig, sharing masculine luxuries, Bob divulged the true provenance of the polaroids and the whereabouts of the model. He knew where such a confession to Hugh might lead but he had no prospects and the scotch, his fourth and fifth consecutively, had relaxed his moral fibres, no harm seen no harm done. Hugh was immediately pulling on his coat, lifting Bob’s elbow, speeding the scotch home and whispering denominations in Bob’s ear, an absolution of sorts.

There is mischief and there is accomplice, there is desire and there is commerce, two kinds of guilt, one kind paid, both need to be confessed. Skipping to keep up, puffing, Bob did not point out to striding Hugh his relief or the figure of Shelley walking in the opposite direction on the opposite side of the street, head down and arms crossed. On their arrival Hugh took out his frustration on the stone jamb of the door with his polished leather shoes while Bob shook his head, feigned regret and stared at his own dirty sneakers. Hugh stepped in and examined the bed, he recognised the sheets and the iron headboard from the pictures, she had been lying just so, one knee pointed to the wall, one to the door, eyes shyly closed. He ran his hand through his hair, took out a fresh cigar and set about buying, bullying, the rest of the pictures from Bob, who was eventually coaxed out of all but four - shots he hid from Hugh out of modesty.

Within the silence of his car, hidden behind tinted windows and breathing around his cigar, Hugh flipped through the polaroids, transferring a select few to the passenger seat. After running through the pile he did so again, twice, before tossing the remainders in the glove box to be revisited when the current selection had become like family rather than like strangers. He dug the thing out of his pocket and sat it on the dashboard, upright against the glass, in front of the speedometer. Maybe Bob had lied. It was not plastic, but during this more studied inspection it resembled no antique ivory he had seen, and Bob was not the most honest of men. The girl clearly had not been in his room - but that was not really a lie, it was an opportunity missed by slow wits. If only Bob had introduced all the facts with all the pictures instead of dribbling them out a few at a time, like a rabbit at its business. A new kind of plastic? If so then the embedded stones would be red glass and Hugh will have lost this hand. Oh well. He would drop it around to the antique shop and measure the pitch of his father’s brow before rounding on Bob.

I sleep with onions and tubers, under the soil. I dream I’ve been planted head first in the ground, up to the shoulders amongst the potatoes. I can see the roots, the dirt and the worms. I don’t feel like I’ve been pushed down into the earth, I feel like I’ve popped my head up into it and I’m wearing the planet as a large novelty hat except I can’t walk around because my legs are waving in the air. I start to think that maybe I am a shrub, with one fat pink root and a few soft pink branches. My feet begin to feel cold and I realise it’s autumn, but I don’t know if I’m deciduous or not and I get frightened and blubber into the soil. The roots of the other plants wriggle over and soak up my tears and continue to follow the trail of moisture into the corners of my eyes and up my nose.

I wake up exhausted and with my sinuses aching. I feel like I am still buried. I try to pull air in through my nose, but, with great effort, succeed only in producing a faint gurgle in some clogged, damp cavity deep in my head. Maybe it’s all the dirt I was inhaling, or the roots. Walking to the bathroom is unpleasant. My head feels too big and heavy for my neck to support, my neck feels too heavy for my shoulders, my shoulders too heavy for my back, and so on down my body in a cascade of weary bearing that ends with the tender soles of my feet stoically shuffling me towards the bathroom.

Surprise, surprise: I look pretty - pretty bad - puffy in the face and grey in complexion. I don’t think the mirror is giving me its best. The sink is holding me up, but the mirror is letting me down. My eyelids are swollen like sausages and the lashes caked with grit the colour of old mustard. What I can see of my eyes is red. I press under my cheekbones, which is foolish because it adds to the pain. I look quite miserable. I comb down my bed hair with my fingers and vague out at my reflection. I feel like I should be ordering a coffee from the tired guy in the window. He needs a shave. My tongue looks like a piece of meat that was left in a drawer over the summer. I wonder if this is illness or self-abuse. I can’t recall.

This is how my washing proceeds: I stand head down directly under the shower with the water hitting the back of my skull and running down over my face and cascading off my chin in a thick stream like I’m caught in a terminal monsoon and I have completely given up. I do that for quite a while, it’s when I do most of my thinking. Then I shampoo, but only once, instructions to repeat the application being a wasteful ruse. I then apply conditioner. While it is working, I soap everything else, although today I don’t make it past my knees because bending over with these sinuses is too much, but I do splash my feet in the foam from the shampoo before it disappears down the drain, which is kind of like washing them. The hairs I find on what was previously bare skin make me grimace like the ape I am slowly becoming. New grey hairs, inexplicably fully grown when discovered, make me think of polar bears and how their skin under all that white fur is black. I rinse the conditioner out of my silky hair and towel off.

This is how my thoughts proceed while I’m under the shower: Perhaps the dream had a message. Maybe I am clogged with sprouts. Maybe they are already sending out roots and trying to push their tiny leaves up into the sunlight, ignorant of their location. Cotyledon rises out of highschool science memories involving high desks and lab equipment. I pause. The name of the science teacher doesn?t make it to the surface. I continue: Perhaps this is an explanation for my exhaustion and sinus pain. Perhaps this is how a garden, how the entire earth, feels under the unrelenting strain of plants sucking nutrients out of the soil. I may have to start gargling herbicides. I wonder if Monsanto produces anything in a nasal spray-pump package. I know it is unlikely, but if I really am sprouting potatoes in my sinuses, and this is how much it hurts, then I am glad I don’t have cactus.

I don’t look much healthier after the shower, even with steam in the air and condensation on the mirror to soften my reflection. I have to shave today because my poor mother complains if I visit unshaven and if I can do any little thing to make my visits with her less of a drama, even the capitulation of shaving, I tend to do it. Today my month old beard sits quite well within the boundaries of my grey face. Whistler would have liked it. Still, I scrape it off, literally, with a disposable razor I can’t bring myself to throw away. The process hurts and I am breathing through my mouth and expelling involuntary guttural ah’s with every stroke of the razor. Ah! Tap-tap. Ah! Tap-tap. Brother! I don’t make this much noise having sex. Or do I? I think about that while I work the moustache region. It has been a while, and you do reach that point where you’re not paying attention and you don’t even know it until suddenly you are back and the room is quiet except for the two of you panting and you feel like you might have missed a gunshot or a car crash. I have never been video-ed, so I can’t be sure. Maybe there’s more noise involved than now. I make a mental note, in the mental sand at a mental low tide, to get hold of a camera the next time I have a willing girlfriend.

In the end my face isn’t smooth like a boy’s, but it looks shaved, except around my chin where the whiskers are the sturdiest and the skin has been left looking raw, like I might have serviced the area with a grater. At least you can tell I have made an effort, and did so recently. I reach for the aftershave, but hesitate when it is in my hand. Haven’t I suffered enough this morning? I squeeze a blue puddle of it into the palm of my hand and study it. In a quick motion I have put the bottle down, rubbed my hands together and wiped them over my face. In the mirror I glimpse a momentary look of betrayal before the squinting starts as my cheeks sting and my wounded chin is set alight.
The toothbrush, longtime companion of the disposable razor, is abrasively useless. The bristles formed a permanent middle part during the brief season that style returned to fashion, but I still use it to give my teeth and gums a cudgeling. I tend to rely on mouthwash. I take a big swig of the stuff, swish it around and give my foetid tongue a soak before starting the gargle. I’m starting to run out of air, but I try and gargle it as far back in my throat as I can, hoping that it might loosen my sinuses, kill off some seedlings and purge the top of my esophagus of germs that cause bad breath. Everyone knows that to gargle you have to continuously expel just enough air to stop the liquid from running down into your lungs, but to get a really deep gargle happening you have to stop expirating momentarily so the mouthwash will fall just a little further down the throat, and then start expirating again before it enters the lungs. I’m really good at this. I spit and feel so minty fresh my eyes would water if the fumes could reach them.

You might think I’m a bit crazy on the detail, but I’m not. I hate the detail, it’s devilish. It is just that this morning I have zero autopilot, so I have to supervise every little thing I do and since you’re listening, you get to hear it. Thankfully, getting dressed isn’t so detail oriented. T-shirt, jeans, sneakers. Urban standard, except the t-shirt, which is pretty special. Let me tell you about it. It?s the sort of t-shirt that if you were waiting for a cab and there was a guy next to you wearing this t-shirt you would go “Hey man, that’s a cool shirt, where did you get it?” and he would say “Thanks man, it’s my own design. I’ve got a few more, do you want one?” and you would have to say “How much?” and the guy would shake his head as he pulls one out of a bag and says “Don’t worry about it. Just promise me you aren’t going to make any copies of it. You’re the first one that’s seen it. I’m going to Italy for a couple of weeks and I’m going to print more up when I get back.” You think that’s cool so you promise and he hands it over, you shake hands and you let him take the first cab because he has an international flight to catch. You put the t-shirt on. It’s so cool strangers come up to you to tell you its cool. You get invited to a party because of the t-shirt and coked-up rich people want to buy it off you and drunken famous people want to get their photo taken with you. You end up in the social pages next to a starlet and some jerk sees the picture and starts churning out copies of the t-shirt from his back-alley sweatshop and within three days everyone is wearing one, which sucks because it completely ruins your coolness and you’re back being no one amongst the nobodies. Weeks later you run into the guy who gave you the shirt and he recognises you, grabs you and shouts that you promised not to copy it and you try to tell him you didn’t but he shouts bullshit and pushes you over in front of a bunch of people, so you’re then “Fuck you!” and you buy a bunch of the pirate t-shirts that you’re going to hand out on the street to ugly homeless people, but none of them want one.

Having said that, I’m not so hot on the t-shirt anymore, but I’ve got a box of them so on most days I’m wearing one.

I find a sheet of cold and flu tablets in the junk that fills the top drawer of the dresser. They are a year out of date but I figure the active ingredients won’t have been de-activated yet and wash two of them down with the glass of stale water on the nightstand and pocket the rest. I push the curtains into their corners and open the balcony doors. My car shines in the driveway, the cul de sac is quiet, only Madeleine next door is outside, feeding her plants from a mixing bowl. I go downstairs, collect wallet, keys and phone and leave the house.

As I unlock the car Madeleine comes over to say hello, cradling the bowl in the crook of an arm while she strips off her gloves.

“Why Jack, you look positively awful,” she says. “What have you been doing?”

“Not sure, I woke up like this,” I tell her.

“Listen to you! You sound like you’re drowning.”

“Very kind of you, Madeleine. What’s in the bowl? Betty Crocker making fertiliser?”

She tilts the bowl and I see what looks like raw meatballs flecked with blue.

“Bait. Mincemeat and rat poison. Some dog got into my back garden and dug a big hole in the middle of it. I aim to poison it.”

“I don’t think that’s legal, poisoning dogs without a licence, not to mention children.”

She tucks a straying curl of grey hair behind her ear and laughs.

“Ha. Children won’t eat raw meat, that’s why we have Halloween. And it’s my yard. If I want to put out bait in my yard, that’s my right. Come and I’ll show you what they did.” She takes my wrist in her small iron hand and pulls me into her yard, only to change direction and release me. “Be a man and grab my garbage cans will you, Jack,” she waves towards the street. “I asked Henry to take them around back, but he seems to have forgotten.”

I fetch the garbage cans from the curb and follow Madeleine into her backyard. I place the cans along the fence, back on the two circles of yellow grass where they live.

Her garden takes up most of the backyard. She seems to have planted enough to be self-sufficient. Stalks of corn, tomatoes tied to cane, salads and herbs; zucchini, pumpkin and watermelon tangled together, a row of strawberries, feathery carrot tops, the crisp, hollow stalks of onions. Everywhere the red and yellow shapes of ripening vegetables. Dry straw covers the ground. The only lawn is a small stretch a few strides across between the garden and the back deck. Like the garden is not enough, the deck is covered with pots containing most of the decorative, inedible members of the plant kingdom.

Madeleine stands in her garden pointing. “Look at that. Right in the middle of my lovely potatoes. Another couple of weeks and they would have been ready for digging and the beast would have been doing me a favour.” She kicks a loose potato into the hole.

It was a good-sized hole. Soil, shredded plants and immature potatoes were scattered around the hole. I can see roots like twisted grey wires hanging broken from the sides.

“Kipflers,” Madeleine says. She drops a poisoned meatball in the hole. “Excellent for salads.”

She looks up and fixes me with a steady gaze. “Jack,” she pauses, “What kind of animal do you think did this?” I get nervous, a wave of agitation rushes over me. I give a shrug. I try to sniff. No air enters, just the sensation of my eyeballs being pulled into my head.

I feel like she is looking for a sign. She studies my face, I study hers. I still don’t know how old she is, she could be anywhere between 50 and 70. The skin around her mouth isn’t wrinkled. I am sure in her mystery age group she would be considered a catch. I am sure that when she was young she would have been out of my league. It is curious how time and circumstance have made us neighbours in this dinky suburb. We are the neo-suburbanites encroaching on the natives.

I am starting to sweat. I am not sure if it is the sun or whatever is wrong with me. At last she speaks. “It had to be a big dog. I think it was the golden retriever from across the street.”

All I can manage is “yeah”. I look at the hole again. Another wave, a febrile shiver, moves up my spine.

“I have to rush off, Madeleine.”

“Off to play slumlord?” she asks.

“Later. I told my mother I would visit her this morning. It’s been a while and I don’t want to be late.”

She raises an eyebrow. “You are visiting her this morning?” She nods up at the sun. “Darling, it’s two in the afternoon. You are already very late.”

I swear and as I turn to leave Madeleine grabs my arm again, “Wait. Before you go we have to have to put some aloe on your chin. I hate to say it, but it is awful to look at.”

She leaves the bowl and gloves in the garden and leads me to the deck. She snaps a plump limb off an aloe vera, slits it open with a thumbnail, spreads open the flesh and rubs it over my chin.

“So,” I say, “not only will I be ridiculously late, my face will be covered with goo. If only it was Mother’s Day.”

“Stop whining. It will dry and you can wash it off when you get there. I’m done, you can go now. Thank you for carrying the garbage cans.”

As I leave I touch my chin. It?s slippery and it isn’t stinging so much. I thank her and tell her she should get the baits out of the front yard before she gets into trouble and she laughs and waves me off.

The virtually treeless Sherwood Forest is built adjacent to the freeway. The houses a few streets over from mine actually back onto the freeway, separated from the road by a ditch and a line of stunted bushes. Every one of them has had the opportunity to call tow trucks or supply water for radiators, fanbelts, spare tires, telephones, bathrooms and sandwiches. Though I attempt to avoid my neighbours, Madeleine excepted, I have had the opportunity to hear several eyewitness accounts of the pileup that occurred before I moved into the neighbourhood. A heavy fog and dozing tailgaters turned the shoulders and the backyards into a field hospital and gave a strip of homeowners a bloody stick with which to beat their across-the-street neighbours who might live without the constant noise of traffic and the smell of exhaust, but who never have the opportunity to meet the interesting outsiders that wander into their yards, or to participate in evening-newsworthy events like traffic accidents.

Despite the adjacency to the freeway I wish to drive on, I must follow gracefully arcing streets and curving avenues past personalised tract homes, mini-parks (a swing, a bench), a creche, a pre-school, a shopping villa, a funeral home, before I can get to a real, straight road with white lines and traffic lights that leads to the freeway that will take me into the city where people appear unconcerned with car care, lawn care and child care.

The afternoon traffic is light so I am humming along and the tires are tick-ticking the seams in the the road. I am making good time, not that a few minutes will make a difference when you are already a couple of weeks and several hours late. The vagueness in my head is fading and I feel like I am finally reaching a point of clarity that I would call normal. I pause in my thoughts to savour the sensation for a moment, then the flu tablets kick in and sweep me into a state of hyper-acuity. My arms are trembling, my thoughts are racing, but the sinus congestion remains, like an immense woman, impenetrable.