poised in that plum-coloured moment

Louise walks into the hotel foyer which is opulently-silent with its deep crimson carpet and brightly-polished brass lights; and the reception desk staffed by a man in a suit and a young woman; both as motionless as mannequins; the man holding a white phone to his left ear, the chord twirling downwards, the woman looking ceaselessly, mindlessly, at her computer screen; not like people at all, but modern artworks, made of plastic. Incredibly real but real people would not be so frozen, so still.
She walks up to the desk, goes behind it, searches the pigeon holes and collects a few keys. She touches the cloth of the man’s suit, feeling its warmth. She touches the woman’s skin, on the side of her face; it is warm, soft, the flesh of someone alive but without volition; these strange, sad, unmoving people of the frozen past.
She heads to the elevator and presses the button for floor nineteen. She rides the elevator in total silence and when it reaches the floor the doors ‘ding’ and open.
She steps out into the carpeted hallway. On the floor outside the room directly opposite are the remains of someone’s meal on a tray: empty coffee cups, an empty glass, plates, knife and fork, a metal teapot, a half-finished croissant. Nothing decayed or changed despite it having been there for months.
She finds a room to one of the keys. She opens the door. Inside the lights are off and a man stands naked at the window, looking down, illuminated by moonlight. His pale-fleshed nakedness, the thighs and buttocks, the line of his spine, are like a marble statue. She admires him briefly, then closes the door. She finds another one. It is empty and made-up.
She goes in and closes the door behind her. She goes to the bar fridge and takes out a small bottle of gin. She pours it into a glass, opens a bottle of tonic water and fills the glass; adds ice cubes, then, ice chinking against the glass, she kicks off her shoes and lies down on the bed, sipping her drink.
There are no sounds. No cars, no people, no birds. Nothing. Just her own breathing and the sound of ice on glass.


On a roof, a couple of young teenagers lie looking up at the night sky.
- How long since we saw the day? the boy, Peter, asks.
- Over a year, Alice replies.
- No sun, no clouds, just darkness and stars.
- Yeah. Stars.
- Why!? Why!? he asks exasperated.
- You keep asking that question.
- I know. But why us?
- And that one, she says in a slightly irritated tone.
He turns to look at her.
- Shut up. You don’t ask yourself?
She shrugs.
- Of course. But there are never any answers, so why bother?
Silence.
- Do you think we’ll find someone else? he asks.
- We found each other.
He looks at her wonderingly.
- But could we be the only ones?
- keep asking questions I don’t know the answers to, she says irritably.
- The world doesn’t just come to a stop without a reason, but how do you fathom the reason?
- Do you believe in God? she asks, spinning their conversation around with her question.
- No. I don’t think so, he answers doubtfully.
- But God could do a thing like this.
- Why would He do it though?
She thinks for a quiet moment but can come up with no answer.
- You think it’s us? she suggests, just us and not the rest of the world? Everything else is normal and people are rushing around everywhere but there’s something wrong with us and we can’t connect with that world?
- Now you’re asking a question we can’t answer.


In her hotel room, Louise finishes her drink, then heads down to the kitchens. Women and men stand frozen over pans, sinks, cupboards. A fork hovers in mid-air, fallen from a tray. She touches the fork with the tip of her finger and it falls with a hard, metallic ring to the floor.
She looks at the plates sitting ready for collection. She chooses one and takes it into the restaurant. She finds an empty table and eats the dish, still hot, looking at the people around her. She takes a bottle of wine from a nearby table and pours some into an empty glass. She drinks it. It is over a year-old, this opened wine, but it is fresh and good.
Afterwards, she goes into the bar and finds a bottle of whisky. She takes it to a booth and sits down. She lifts the bottle to her mouth and drinks.
Time can’t have stopped, otherwise how could she drink? This whisky, it flows, yet the clocks remain forever at 7.46; the people remain as motionless as dummies; cars, with their lights on, stand still on the dark roads. The world as it was at 7.46, thirteen months ago, preserved and mummified by some unimaginable force which only she escapes.
Only she.
She drinks more whisky, wiping her mouth.
She remembers that first night, wandering around in a daze, looking at the motionless population. She had held someone’s hand, felt its warmth and softness, yet the man hadn’t moved and his eyes were like glass. There was another man she saw at a bus stop weeks later, so beautiful, so angelic; she had kissed his soft lips, her heart beating faster at the touching of their mouths, but he just stood there, his lips wet from her touch, like a waxwork-dummy, agonisingly lovely and serenely unattainable.
She remembers the tram, stopped in the middle of a crossroads, like a becalmed metal whale. She had walked beside it, her fingers tracing a cold line along its curved frame. She had looked up and a young boy was looking out; and their eyes met. She had started, thinking that he was looking at her. But she had shifted sideways, to the left, and his still-eyes had remained looking ahead. It was a moment of quiet heartbreak; one of many in those first few months alone.
And, she remembers the moth. After so much stillness and silence, the sound of it flittering under a lamp had astonished her. She had stood looking at it, grey and tormented, crashing into the bright heat of the lamp, until it fell, helpless and burned. It lay in the gutter, dazed, flapping. She had put it in her hands and felt its tiny wings, as thin as paper, tickle her palm. Her whole body had felt the thrill of that movement. Tender, gentle life.
For days she wandered aimlessly, calling out, hoping for an answer, but the city was asleep and only she was awake.
She takes the bottle outside the bar. She heads up to the swimming pool on the roof. The night is deathly silent. If she shouted, her voice would echo over the city and possess it. The swimming pool is illuminated from within. She kicks off her shoes and steps into the shallow end, wades out, fully-clothed, until the water laps around her waist. She drinks from the whisky bottle. She turns slowly, the water slapping gently. She causes ripples. Ripples which sing like bells.


Alice and Peter walk through the streets, hand-in-hand. He drinks from a bottle of lemonade, she eats an apple.
They know there are lapses in this madness. A wind sometimes blows, lifting leaves and dust; a fountain in a plaza miraculously flows and astounds them; a mouse skitters across the road in front of them, like a dusty ghost. Once there was bird; a single, fawn sparrow hopping about among the motionless pigeons and sparrows on the pavement beside it. They had raided a shop and broken up a loaf of bread for it and had watched her eat all afternoon.
These brief and strangely-wonderful moments give them momentary hope. Somewhere there must be someone else like them. They can’t be the last people on Earth still living and moving, can they?
Once, in a hotel, they had heard a splash. They had run to the swimming pool and it was lit with blue light. The pillars were mosaic tiles of aqua and azure blue. The water rippled. They dared to hope that there was someone swimming under the surface but it was empty; water reflecting and breaking up light as it swayed.
At the edge of the pool, was a woman in a red swimsuit, mouth open, in the middle of removing a white robe. Peter went up to her and put a hand on one of her shoulders, which was warm and soft. The woman stared across the pool, not moving.
They both stood, looking down at the rippling water, wondering what had caused the loud splash, watching its wake as the still pool swelled gently, mysteriously. They had held each other for comfort.
They find a shop that sells cakes. They look at all of the multi-coloured confectionary, laid out like soft jewels. He chooses a cake with lemon-coloured icing and glace cherries, she a tart with glazed strawberries on custard and a bottle of sparkling water. They eat as they walk, savouring the indulgent sweetness. When they finish, they hold hands again, their fingers sticky.
- Do you think it’s the Americans? she asks.
- Why would it be the Americans?
- Well, I read somewhere they were experimenting with a Quantum Bomb.
- What’s a Quantum Bomb?
- I don’t know. Something to do with disrupting time. Stopping time in a selected area so the troops can go in.
- That’s just comic book stuff, he says derisively.
- No. It was real.
- If they were doing that kind of thing, they’d hardly let it into the papers would they?
- It was in a magazine.
- Same difference. It’s just someone’s imagination.
She looks around her.
-This isn’t imagination is it? she says vehemently.
She is angry with him, but she holds his hand even tighter because she is sometimes afraid of losing him. They walk past a woman sitting on the front step of a shop, a bottle of beer poised against her mouth, glass touching dark red skin, the liquid poised like an amber globule inside a spirit level.
- Maybe it’s the Americans, he concedes, but I don’t know. Probably a force of nature.
- What kind of force? she asks curiously.
- How do I know?
Ahead of them, a building is on fire, the flames frozen, like sheet-metal, bright and reflective. A woman is petrified in mid-run, her clothes on fire. They rush up to her. They douse the flames with their drinks. They hiss and disappear. The flames have melted away but the woman remains transfixed to the spot, her clothes burned, flesh exposed and red raw.
- Let’s go back to the roof, he suggests.
- Why?
- I like being near the sky.

Louise wakes. She has no idea what time it is. She laughs in the darkness. Of course: it is 7.46. She turns on the light. She undresses and showers. How can water flow when everything is still? It is something to do with her touch? Perhaps. She touches things and they come alive? But then, why don’t people come alive when she touches them? Nothing makes sense.
She stands under the water, soaping herself, then washes off the soap.
She dries herself then dresses. She goes downstairs to the café and makes herself a black coffee. She makes toast. See, the miracle of time in a timeless world where everything is frozen but here, in this café, when she touches the toaster, the toaster heats and turns bread into toast, hot to the touch and smelling of burned wheat.
She butters it, spreads on marmalade. The coffee is good.
Beside her, at an adjacent table, sits a man reading a book. He has an espresso cup lifted to his lips and a glass of port on the table beside him.
It is morning to her but, in reality, 7.46 at night; the day forever poised in that plum-coloured moment between late afternoon and night.
There were days, at the beginning, when she had left money for the things she had taken on the counter, but now she takes coins from the tills, using them in vending machines and coin-operated doors. Why bother worrying about stealing from those who can not use the metalled artefacts of a lost world? She could steal all the money she could carry and it would be mostly useless now.
She goes to the fridge and takes out a grapefruit. A young woman in a mauve dress stands beside the counter. She cuts the grapefruit into quarters and then halves the quarters. She stands by the counter, biting into the sharp-sweet flesh, sucking, chewing, until she is left with eight yellow and white rinds which she drops carelessly at the young woman’s feet.
She goes out into the silent, still street. She has long-since given up trying to find a word to adequately describe this silence; this terrible, night-loneliness; this empty space of madness.
She walks among the motionless world. She weaves in between cars and buses. Pedestrians are obstacles for her to meander through.
If only the world turned. If only the night changed into day. If only she could see the remembered-sun.
She sees her own reflection in the window of a shop. It moves. It makes her laugh, as if such movement in this world is a comic surprise.
Behind the glass are teddy bears and dolls. They look out with bead eyes, dull and hard.


- What do you want me to do? Alice asks.
- Nothing.
- You don’t want me to do anything?
- I said so, didn’t I?
- But I’m cold.
- Well hold me.
- Can’t we go back inside?
- I want to look at the night and the stars, he says distantly and the distance scares her.
- It’s not going away, she says, Ever. And we could be in beds with cotton sheets and woollen blankets.
- Well go downstairs, he says coldly.
- I don’t want to be alone, she says in a quiet, childlike voice.
He turns his head, regretting his indifference.
- I’ll be up here when you wake, he promises.
- How do I know?
He looks at her.
- I won’t ever leave you.
- How do I know?
- Why would I?
- I don’t know.
He walks up to her. He holds her, wrapping her up in his arms.
- No-one’s ever been as married as us. Not in the whole history of time. We’re the only people in the history of the human race who can never let go of each other because we’re the only people we’ve got. Just us. No-one else. Forever.
She touches his face, stroking it. He smiles.
- Go downstairs. I’ll be up here waiting, he says gently.
She nods. She goes down into warmth and the gentleness of cotton.


Louise finds a cinema. She helps herself to popcorn and soda. The woman behind the counter is smiling, her mouth parted slightly, like a piece of art, imitating reality.
She goes into a darkened cinema. A few people sit in chairs around her. The movie has frozen on one frame: a woman, looking to her right, with blonde hair down to her shoulders.
She sits sipping her drink, looking at the woman on the screen. Her eyes are brown, lit up. Her face glows with some distant light, perhaps a fire? She has a tiny mole under her left nostril. Her mouth is open, as if she is about to say something or perhaps let out a gasp?
The movie mirrors the world; a frozen moment in time, a piece of unfinished choreography waiting for the moment of its completion.
She eats her popcorn and drinks her soda, watching the screen and the face of the woman, which is as big as the side of a house. The cinema is lit by a pale blue glow and the people around her are in shadows, as still as statues.


In an office somewhere, on the twentieth floor, a woman sits at her desk. Her colleagues are gone and the sole occupant, aside from her, is a cleaner, frozen in the moment of picking up a bin.
She has returned to this place time and time again and again, though she has no idea why. She has spent the last year surrounded by silent, unmoving people, alone and lost.
Each time she returns to her old office, she looks at the cleaner, bent over to lift the mesh bin. She remembers speaking with her many months ago. She sometimes speaks to her still, like you might speak to a gravestone in memory of a loved one.
She stands at the window looking out at a city which exists always in night. Surely there must be other people like her, still aware and walking through lonely streets? She can’t be the only one.
She walks across the room and sits at her desk. She reaches for the phone directory. She lifts the phone from its hook.
She will be like a holy person, performing some long, hopeful ritual. Measuring the death of time with her fingers.
She opens the directory to the first page. The ‘A’s. The first name is Aab, a name she has never encountered before. She puts the phone against her left ear, listens to the dial tone, then punches in the number. Somewhere, in the suburbs or city, a phone rings. Loudness in the midst of silence. She lets it ring and ring. She gives it time. There are millions of names in this book. She will spend her days ringing every number. If there is someone else out there, they will answer. One day the phone won’t just ring and ring but will be answered by a human voice.
She hangs up, runs her fingers down to the next person, and punches in the number.


When Alice wakes from her cotton-warm sleep, she wonders how long she has been asleep. There is no way of measuring time anymore. No clocks or watches, no movement of the sun; just the ever-present moon, hanging like a lamp in the velvet sky. She still finds herself looking at the clock. The illuminated dial says 7.46. It is always the same and always a shock.
She climbs out of bed. She goes up to the roof.
He is not there.
She looks out on the eerily silent city and wonders, in a moment of panic, if he has betrayed her, though she can fathom no good reason for him doing so.
She sits, cross-legged, on the hard roof. She waits. He will come to her. Please let him come to me.
She thinks of her parents, still sitting in front of the TV. She wished she hadn’t left them but there was no point in remaining; touching them, feeling their warm flesh, the hardness of the bones underneath; looking into bright, glassy eyes. It was heartbreaking; they were there, within the realm of her touch, but gone; gone.
So she had wandered, alone, for months, before she had found him; the shock and wonder of another human being like her.
They shared their bewilderment and loss. They walked strangely among people who might as well be corpses. They both wondered.
He comes to her after a while. She is aware of him without seeing him. The sound of his footsteps and breath. She is ridiculously relieved.
- Have you eaten? she asks.
- I was waiting.
- Let’s go down.
- Did you sleep?
- A long time.
They ride the elevator down to the foyer, past the frozen reception clerks. They go outside.
- It doesn’t have to be God, he says.
- What?
- I was thinking. Last night. It doesn’t have to be God or Americans.
- Okay
- It could easily be nature. I mean, I remember at school they told us that every now and then the magnetic field of the Earth changes.
- It does?
Well, something like that. You know, the way the water goes when you pull out a plug? Anticlockwise or the other way?
- Clockwise.
- Yeah. And every so often it changes. Reverses.
- Okay.
- So, what if, every now and then, Time changes?
- But it hasn’t before, has it?
- How would we know? What if it changes every million years? We haven’t been around that long have we?
- But what about us? Why has everything else stopped but not us?
- I don’t know that bit. I mean, it doesn’t fit, does it?
She smiles.
- Let’s eat. What do you fancy?
- Pancakes, he grins.
She laughs and they run down the street, holding hands, heading towards a kitchen that has good pancakes and which they know has a plate piled high, just waiting for them.


Louise leaves the cinema, with the other people still sitting in their seats and the face of the woman still on the screen. She throws the empty popcorn box and soda cup into a bin.
The thing to do, she has decided, is to act as normally as possible; to live her days as if this is the every-day world. Days? Even the most fundamental thoughts are mocked by the world around her.
She passes a newsagent’s stand. She has read every single newspaper, with its news about a long-lost world. The man inside looks out, his jaw still in the same state of unshaven-ness. She picks up a magazine. She leafs through it but is only half-interested. She sees faces of famous people, more animated than the people around her.
She has a sudden desire to visit the train station, though she has no idea why.
She looks into the faces of the people she walks by. She has begun to think of them as Dolls, though they are real people. Perhaps it is she who is a ghost in their world? It is one of the possible permutations which have run through her mind over the months.
She finds the stairs to a nearby station. She heads lower, under the earth.
People wait, looking at newspapers, sitting, standing, craning their necks to see down the tunnel. There is a light from within. She stands on the edge of the platform. She jumps.
She lands on the tracks. She suddenly gasps, and thinks she is going to die. In the tunnel is a train, its lights pouring over her but, of course, it doesn’t move. She has commited suicide but only in the world which moves. In this world she can walk slowly up to the train; put her hands against its warm, metal frame; look up at the driver who stares blindly out of the window.
If the world were to become suddenly alive, she would be dead. She has thought of this often as she walks among stationary cars. This doesn’t stop her from walking beside the train, in the gap between its carriages and the curved wall of the tunnel, looking up at the windows lit from within and the lifeless passengers, reading newspapers, listening to silent iPods, talking, sleeping. Perhaps the sleeping have the best deal?
She climbs back onto the platform. She has ruined her cardigan with grease.
She walks past a young man, with his bling and tracksuit pants and cap back-to-front. She takes off his hat and flings it across the platform, across the rails, to the other side. She has no idea why.
She passes a man collecting for charity. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a handful of clattering coins and forces them into the box, pressing them in with gluttonous determination. A meaningless gesture.
She sees a man in a suit standing beside a young woman, his eyes preserved in a moment of leering at her cleavage. She finds his wallet and opens it. She peels out hundred dollar bills. She slips them into the girl’s jacket pocket and throws his wallet onto the tracks. She turns him so that he is leering at a drunk sleeping with his back to white tiles.


The two of them enter the fair ground. They are holding hands again. They wander through the stationery crowds; children, like them, with toffee apples and candy floss; adults, laughing, shouting, eating, drinking; a couple locked together in an eternal kiss in the corner of an alley.
- Have you ever been here before?
- When I was younger.
- It’s like we’re living in Madam Taussards.
She looks at a girl like her with red lips and bright blue eyes, beautiful and creepy at the same time, erotically-strange in her unbreathing loveliness. She looks away. Sometimes it is hard to look at these people, who might easily be dead or asleep or in a world between existences.
Look at the people on the roller-coaster. Those people screaming silently. They’ve been going down like that curve for over a year.
- Only to us.
- What?
- To them it’s probably not even a second. If this thing ever stops. I mean, if time ever gets back to normal I bet it will be the blink of an eye to them.
- Do you think it will?
- What?
- Get back to normal?
She looks at a woman standing beside her, wiping her glasses clean with a cotton cloth.
- How would I know? It might stay like this forever.
- Just you and me.
- Unless we find someone else.
- What are the odds of that?
- We can’t be the only ones.
- Have you ever thought it might be us and not the others?
- What do you mean? Like you said before?
- Yeah. That the rest of the world has left us behind? That everything else has moved on and it’s us who’ve fallen out of step with Time?
- But how?
He shrugs.
- Maybe this happens sometimes? People slip through and get trapped in a moment?
- So my parents, they’re somewhere in the future? They’ve left me behind?
- They wouldn’t have had any choice. It just would have happened. They went on as normal but we didn’t.
She looks at the crowd around her. Will they live here among the silent citizens of a becalmed world for the rest of their lives?
- Will we grow old? she asks wonderingly.
- I suppose we will.
- What if we don’t? Maybe we’ll stay young forever?
- Maybe?
He looks down at the ground. It is littered with papers; old tickets, scraps, sweet papers. Perhaps in sixty years from now they will come back to his place and he will remember this moment? The world will still be spellbound and nothing will have changed? The people on the roller-coaster will still be on their downward plunge, their mouths open in silent screams? But what will have become of them?
- Let’s do something silly, he says suddenly.
- What?
- Imagine if things get back to normal…
As he says this, he walks up to a red-headed man wearing black pants. He undoes them and tugs them down. He is wearing white underwear with a rose print on them.
- Do her, he says, gesturing with his head.
She looks at the woman standing beside her.
- Imagine time starts again, he says with a laugh, and they all have their trousers around their ankles. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?
She smiles. Feeling a little shy, she pulls the woman’s pants down. They both laugh merrily. They wander the crowds, removing trousers and skirts until they are surrounded by dozens of people with pink-skinned, bare legs, clothes puddled around their ankles, like a scene from a silent movie. They sit in the saw dust, holding each other, laughing. She rests her head against his shoulder and he pulls her close into him, stroking her gently, hot tears rolling down his sobbing face.


Louise finds a wine bar and goes into the kitchen. She takes a sandwich and a bottle of white wine to a table by the window. She finds a CD-player and puts on a CD. Bach Cello Suites. The mournful music fills the café.
She eats. She looks at the people on the street. It has been thirteen months since she has spoken with a fellow human being; thirteen months since she heard a human voice. Sometimes she will go up to one of the mannequin-like people and touch them; stroking their faces, holding their hands, smelling their clothes, just to remind herself that they are real people, not painted dolls.
Once, a few weeks ago, seeing a beautiful man standing at the edge of a street, she had longed for the touch of another human being. She had looked into his blue eyes. He was handsome. She could imagine sharing a meal with him, going home, making love. She had unbuttoned her cardigan and had lifted the man’s heavy arm, placing his hand on her left breast. She had closed her eyes, feeling his warm fingers against her skin, yearning for tenderness.
She had cried. She had stood on the edge of the street and cried with this stranger’s hand held up against her chest.
He is still standing on the edge of the street. She knows with absolutely certainty that, if she were to walk back there, he would still be standing in the same position, still looking out across the street, with his mouth slightly parted, a sad reminder of hollow, manufactured intimacy.
She drinks her wine from the bottle. She finishes her sandwich.
Where will this end? she wonders. Will it stretch out into years? The rest of her life? An entire life lived without human contact or companionship?
She goes outside. She enters a hotel foyer. She rides the elevator to the top floor. She finds the steps to the roof. She goes up onto the roof and stands looking at the lights of the city. But for the absolute silence, it could a normal city, alive and thriving.
She drinks from the bottle, contemplating the endless darkness. It, too, has its effect on her. She is locked away from the day and sunlight forever. She drinks more wine, wiping her mouth.
She walks to the very edge of the building. The tips of her pink shoes are over the edge. She holds out her arms. She need only topple forward to drop twenty storeys to the street below.
That would end all of this.
Surely it would?
She takes a deep breath, tasting the city on her tongue.
To freefall to her death. It is a thought.
The neck of the bottle slips through her fingers and falls. It is a little time before she hears it, but the city is so silent, hear it she does, crashing below.
She laughs at the absurdity of it all.
She steps back.
- Damn you! she shouts defiantly, then heads back downstairs, where she will drink more wine, not yet ready to die.
Not only wine. Whisky, vodka, absinth, brandy, beer and champagne until, drunk, she finds a room and falls asleep in her clothes, with the clock beside her telling her it is still 7.46.


In the amusement park, they marvel at the rides, stopped in mid-swing or swirl. They laugh at a boy stopped in mid-run, being chased by a man waving a stick. They take sweets from stalls and munch on them as they wander the sawdust aisles. He picks out some flowers from a bunch and pulls out the yellow petals, dancing backwards before her, scattering them at her feet, as if she is a princess or goddess. She laughs gleefully.
He goes behind a hotdog stand and makes them hotdogs with bright-yellow mustard and relish.
They drink Coca Cola and search through show-bags to eat Violet Crumbles and Jaffas.
At a shooting gallery he shows off by putting a rifle to his shoulder, shooting at a metal duck, which he misses seven times, which makes her laugh loudly.
They walk past a band, their instruments still to their mouths, cheeks puffed. She bangs the drum and it falls out of the drummer’s still hand, clattering to the floor.
They stand under the Ferris wheel. People sit in carriages, waiting to ride. There is a queue. He tells her to get in.
She climbs into an empty seat, then he presses the button and it starts moving. He jumps in beside her and they ride slowly to the top, looking out at the bright lights of the sleeping city, holding hands while they circle around and around.
On the third revolution, they hear a phone ring.
They look at each other.
They are on the rise so have to wait until it ends its spin then jump out but, by this time, the ringing has finished.
The memory of the rings echo around them.
- No! he shouts, running around, trying to find the phone but, eventually, he falls to his knees in the sawdust. She falls gently beside him and lays an arm over his shoulder.
- They’ll ring again.
- What if they don’t?
- There’s someone else out there! We’re not alone.
He looks up at her.
- But what if they don’t ring again?
- It doesn’t matter, does it? There’s someone else out there, looking. One day. One day, we’ll find each other.
He looks at her and nods. He is crying. She wipes away the tears from his cheeks with her fingers. They kiss for the first time. Three quick, soft kisses. They hold each other tightly, lovingly. Above them, the Ferris wheel turns and turns and turns.


Louise wakes. She has no idea how long she has been sleeping. Instinctively she turns to look at the clock.
7.47.
She sits up and stares at it in disbelief.
7.47
She puts a hand to her mouth, gasping.
7.47!
Time has moved! A single minute. It has taken Time thirteen months to move a single minute. She slides off the bed. At this rate it will take, what? Fourteen or fifteen years to complete the hour. Time is moving infinitesimally slowly, but it is moving. This changes things, but she is not sure how. For the first time in a long time, she feels hope, though it is like the thinnest sliver of light in a dark room.
She walks to the window. From up here she can see the west of the city. The lights of cars not moving. The shopping precinct. The amusement park.
Something catches her eye.
The Ferris wheel is moving! She can see its multicoloured lights revolving in a pattern of red, yellow, white and green.
Is the world slowly awakening or is the changing of the minute on the clock and the slow revolution of the wheel a coincidence?
Last night she had wanted to kill herself but here she is, looking at some magical hope, some possibility of change. She watches the wheel turn beautifully, mesmerised, trying to fathom its meaning, wondering if she dare dream of salvation.
She goes downstairs, riding the elevator in a rush of impatient excitement. She steps out into the street. She walks past people standing in various poses. She wanders through the lines of cars. She doesn’t recognise this part of town. She wonders if she is heading in the right direction and, for a moment, panics. But, as she turns a corner, she comes across a street which heads downwards and there, not so far away, is the slowly turning Ferris wheel, brightly-lit, like a beacon.
She heads in its direction, having no idea what she might find there, but thinking that it might be some sort of beginning. It is a hope she tries to hold down but it flutters upwards like a bird.
As she heads closer she can smell sawdust and sweetness, the musty smell of horses and other animals. The wheel is magnificent, turning, turning, making the air sing, its gleaming lights lending it the quality of something sacred and ceremonial.
As she enters the front gates, she thinks she can hear voices. They are too far away for her to be sure, too quiet, but she begins to run. The lights wash the air with beautiful colours and the hurdy-gurdy music of the Wheel is making the world giddy and strange.
She feels like she is falling now; falling forwards into the vortex of the Wheel, like a leaf being drawn into a whirlpool. She prepares herself for astonishment or, perhaps – please no! - disappointment?
Above her, the stars, whose ancient light has taken hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years to arrive here, pierce the night sky with their astonishing brightness.

sorrow valley

PC Emily French started her day much the same as most days. There was nothing about the morning to suggest it would be any different from any other run-of-the-mill day. She had breakfast, showered, caught the bus to work, changed into her uniform. She attended the morning’s briefing, was assigned duties with PC Lancashire. There was always a certain awkwardness between them. He had once confided that he had a bit of a crush on her. That had been at last year’s Christmas party. He had drunkenly told her she had pretty ears. He had apologised the next day and she’d told him to forget it, but it remained an issue between them. any more.
They drove down the main street. They attended a drunken argument between two customers outside a 7-11. They cautioned someone whose right brake light was broken.
Then they got a call about a delirious man at Sorrow Alley. They attended. He was a young man, wearing a crumpled suit. It looked like he hadn’t washed for days, but he didn’t look like your normal down and out.
She climbed out of the car. She approached.
“Okay, sir. How are we doing?”
He looked up, surprised, as if confused about his whereabouts.
“What?”
“What seems to be the trouble?”
He laughed bitterly.
“Trouble? Oh, you don’t know the half of it.”
“Have you been drinking, sir?”
He shook his head.
“Taken any illicit drugs?”
He shook his head again. He was pale and shaking.
“Do you have anywhere we can take you? Someone we can call?”
He tried to work out what she was saying, then said:
“Fuck off! Just leave me alone!”
“I can’t do that, sir. You’re causing a disturbance. If you don’t have somewhere to go, we may have to take you in.”
He looked up, panicked, then started running down the alley way. She looked at her colleague and rolled her eyes.
“Leave him,” he said.
“There’s something not right with him.”
She started running down the alley after him. He wasn’t running very fast.
“Stay where you are!”
They ran past rubbish bins, the back doors of restaurant kitchens. God this alleyway stank. There was smoke. The man disappeared into it. Was there a fire somewhere? She ran ahead, covering her eyes, choking.
On the other side of the smoke, she stopped. She was still in the alley, but something felt different. It was colder. Yes, there was definitely an icy chill about the place. And there was some kind of sweet smell in the air. What was it? It reminded of her childhood. Marzipan. Yes , that was it. Marzipan.
She walked ahead slowly. She pulled out her baton. A rat ran across the puddled path in front of her.
“Where the hell is he?”
She kept walking. The alleyway seemed to go on forever. Surely it wasn’t this long?
Then she saw something on the ground up ahead. A body? She ran up to it. It was the man. But something about him had changed. He was cleaner somehow. He looked recently-washed. He was smiling, with his eyes closed. She knelt down beside him.
“Are you all right? ”
He opened his eyes. He looked at her.
“Yes, I’m perfectly fine,” he said, in a calm, quiet voice, “sorry, I was just resting.”
She helped him up.
“What’s going on?” she asked, feeling a little disturbed about the way he had cleaned himself up so quickly.
“Nothing’s going on. You’re so beautiful!”
“All right. That’s enough. Are you coming back with me?”
“What have I done?”
“Disturbing the peace.”
“I’ll be okay now, I promise you. I’m happy now. I won’t be going back. Just leave me and I’ll be perfectly, perfectly okay.”
She considered him carefully.
“Have you got somewhere to go?”
“Yes. My house is just around the corner.”
“What… what happened back there?”
“What? Oh. I had a turn that’s all. It happens sometimes. I’m okay now. I promise.”
He looked calm enough. She nodded.
“All right. But be careful. We’ll be watching out for you.”
“You won’t see me ever again. I assure you.”
He smiled and she looked at him a little suspiciously, but then turned to go.
“Oh, officer!” he shouted after her.
She turned to look at him. He had a posy of violets in his hand, which he offered her.
“You’re very beautiful, you know.”
He smiled, then headed off and she laughed, shaking her head.

Back at the car, PC Lancashire was waiting for her.
“Thanks for the back-up.”
“I didn’t think you needed it. Where’d you get those?”
“That guy gave them to me.”
He looked surprised.
“Where is he?”
“It was kinda weird. I found him on the ground.”
“He fell?”
“I don’t know. But he was different somehow. Calmer. Cleaner.”
“Cleaner?”
“His clothes were crisp, his hair washed. He was normal.”
PC Lancashire laughed.
“You were only gone a few minutes. He washed his hair and changed his suit did he?”
“I told you it was weird.”
He looked at her suspiciously then laughed.
“Right. You let him get away, didn’t you?”
“He was perfectly calm. He gave me these.”
He shook his head and laughed again, convinced she was having him on. She felt an odd wave of anger rush through her. They got into the car. She bristled. She didn’t like being disbelieved. She clenched one of her fists and felt an odd desire to hit him.

Over the next few days, she found herself thinking about the alley. What had happened didn’t make sense. She looked it up in a street map and was surprised to see it was actually quite short, not the seemingly never-ending alley she had walked down.
It bothered her more than it should.

A few days later, they heard a call to a purse snatch over the radio. Sorrow Alley. She said to record them dealing even though they weren’t close. Her partner, PC Johns, said: “There’ll be other units closer.”
“Well put your foot down then.”
At the scene, there was an elderly woman in a pink dress looking distressed. She told them some youth had snatched her bag and it had all of her money inside. She left PC Johns to take the details while she searched the alley.
She felt an odd tingle of excitement as she walked down the alley slowly. The same smells of decay and rubbish. Someone really should clean this place up.
She kept walking. She walked past some crates. The air ahead of her shimmered, like a heatwave.
She walked through it. The air was suddenly icy cold and, there it was again, that smell of marzipan.
She felt as if she were in some weird dream. She walked in slow, deliberate steps. There was something not quite right about this place. She couldn’t see the end of it.
“You’ve been here before?”
A woman opened the door to one of the restaurant kitchens.
“Sorry?”
“I haven’t seen you before, but you must have been here before.”
“Why’s that?”
The woman shrugged. She went back inside and closed the door.
PC French kept walking.
Eventually, she came to a red door that was ajar. She knocked. There was no answer, so she stepped inside. It was a simple room with a large dining table, an open fire, some platters laid out ready for some party. On the platter were all manner of sweets and lollies. A brightly-colourful array of them. White, pink, black, yellow, orange, lime, blue, speckled with red dots, purple-striped. She could smell icing sugar, aniseed, liquorice, musk, peppermint, vanilla… marzipan. The aromas were so enticing, making her mouth water. She couldn’t resist reaching out and picking one up, a small, round one with a red top. She put it in her mouth and it tasted intensely of raspberries and marzipan. It was the tastiest sweet she had ever tasted. It was smooth, creamy, soft, melting in her mouth; something buttery and nutty, berryful. It seemed to communicate its sweetness and fruitiness to her very soul. It was as if someone had condensed something particularly wonderful to its purest essence. She shivered. The hairs on the back of her neck lifted.
She looked around the room, suddenly aware that she was intruding. But the sweet had thrown her off centre. It was as if she had discovered something that she had never known could exist in this world. Something incredible. Some nectar made possible only through sorcery.
She sat down on a chair. She felt overwhelmed by it. She could feel the sweetness rush through her veins. It was like a revelation.
Hearing a noise inside the house, she stood up. She didn’t want to be caught out. She went outside. She debated whether to go off in search of the handbag thief, or whether to go back. She resisted an almost overwhelming urge to go back inside and try another sweet.
She headed back to the street.
“Anything?” PC Johns asked.
She shook her head. The air felt thick and suffocating. She got into the car.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded, not able to speak. She wanted to hold the sweetness inside of her mouth. She was afraid that, if she spoke, the gloriousness of it would float away, leaving her bereft. She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, the tip of it searching for the memory of that honeyed, almond wonder.

The sugar spun through her blood sweetly all day. She felt deliriously happy. After work, she uncharacteristically joined some of them at the pub. She drank vodka and cranberry juice and got very drunk. She played Pulp’s ‘Common People’ on the juke box and danced, holding her arms out, as if crucified in air, spinning around happily.
In the corridor, on the way back from the bathroom, she saw PC Lancashire and suddenly pushed him against the wall, kissing him. He was surprised, but she pressed her mouth hard against his, wanting to taste and smell him, wanting to eat him, until he suddenly yelped and pushed her back.
“What the fuck, Emily?”
He raised his hand to his lips. His bottom lip was swollen and bleeding. She looked at him, surprised as well, but then laughed.
“You sure you still wanna fuck me, Harry?” she asked, brushing his bleeding mouth with her soft fingers.
She licked the blood from her fingertips, winking at him before she headed back to the front bar.

For the next few days, she was somewhat distant from the rest of her colleagues. She was inside of herself for most of the time. But, in the car, at the end of the week, she said;
“Sorry, Harry. I was drunk. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
He looked at her, his lip still a little swollen.
“You were crazy, you know?”
“I know.”
“You were like an animal.”
“I’m saying sorry, mate.”
He nodded and smiled.
“Okay.”

She went back to her normal self. If anything, she was more cheerful than normal. She brought in a large box of chocolates to hand around at morning tea. She took to carrying blocks of chocolate in her jacket: organic dark with chillies and ginger, milk with Early Grey; lavender, basil, cinnamon and nutmeg; vanilla and cherries. She would break pieces off and chew them throughout the day, but seemed oddly frustrated by what she ate, often not finishing it, but throwing it away.
“What’s with you and chocolate?” PC Lancashire asked her.
“Nothing’s with me and chocolate. Just drive, okay?”

She decided to pay a visit to the alley again She was curious. No, she was being dishonest with herself. She craved that experience of utter joy she had felt when she had eaten the single marzipan-laden sweet. Her bedroom and front room was littered with the torn papers and crumpled aluminium foil of abandoned chocolates and sweets which had failed to meet her expectations. She had bought marzipan sweets, had even laboured to make them herself, from a recipe in an old cook book she found in the library, but it just wasn’t the same. She yearned for marzipan that was really marzipan.
She drove there on her lunch break. She walked down the alley with a sense of nervous anxiety and anticipation. She smelled rotting fish, mouldy vegetables. She held a hand to her nose.
Somewhere, a cat meowed. She stepped in a puddle. She looked down and watched reflected light break up in the rippling water.
She felt that familiar sudden coldness that indicated she had stepped into that mysterious place where weird things happened; where there was a rumour of marzipan in the chilly air.
Her skin was goosebumpy and tender to the touch. She walked as if following the pull of a magical spell.
She came to the red door, but it wasn’t ajar this time. She turned the door handle, but it was locked.
“You came back?”
She spun around. It was the woman from the restaurant kitchen the other day.
“I was wondering… the other day… inside this building..?”
“You went inside?”
“Yes. There were… I tasted…”
“You want to taste it again?”
She wondered how the woman knew what she was talking about. She nodded. The woman smiled.
“What did it taste like?”
“Oh! Like nothing I’ve ever tasted before.”
The woman laughed.
“Sweet? Hot? Bitter? Fishy?”
“Sweet. Like marzipan.”
The woman raised her eyebrows.
“Marzipan? Marzipan always reminds me of Christmas. My mother used to make rich fruit cake with marzipan and royal icing.”
“Yes!”
The woman smiled knowingly.
“There’s a shop. You have money? I could show you.”
“Please.”
So she followed this stranger down the wet alley, feeling the coldness of the place seep into her skin. She shivered. It felt oddly as if dozens of eyes were watching her.
“This shop I’m taking you to, the sweets cost a lot of money, but they’re like nothing you’ve ever tasted before.”
“I don’t mind paying,” she said, knowing, suddenly, that she would be prepared to pay anything for one more taste of that glorious marzipan.
She was following a stranger to a sweet shop. Whatever was happening to her? But she felt her tastebuds tingle in anticipation.
The shop was the most wonderful shop she had ever seen. She felt like she had suddenly and inexplicably been thrown back to the days of being a child.
It had a huge bay window and, behind it, were shelves of sweets. Gobstoppers, sherbet lemons, aniseed balls, peppermints, truffles, chocolate drops, gummy bears; handmade confections with flavours printed on little cards: mandarin and coconut; raspberry ripple; nutmeg and custard; vanilla and redcurrant; apple and cinnamon; coffee; pistachio; nougat; brandy and butter; dark chocolate, white chocolate; bitter chocolate; milk chocolate; chocolate with rum; chocolate with vanilla cream; white chocolate with dark chocolate insides…
She nearly fainted with the wonder of it.
They went inside. The aromas were almost too hard to take; they overwhelmed her with their sweet, nutty, chocolaty, spicy luxuriousness.
“This young lass here craves something with marzipan, the woman said to the person behind the counter.
“Marzipan?”
PC French had been looking at a tray of dark chocolate truffles. She looked up.
“The other day, I had a marzipan sweet. With raspberry topping.”
“Ah, the Marzipan Kiss. Yes, that’s one of ours. You like it then?”
“Oh, it was wonderful!”
The woman behind the counter seemed pleased.
“How many would you like?”
“How much do they cost?”
“$50.”
“For how many?”
“Just the one, dear.”
“$50 for one truffle?”
“They take many hours to make. It’s a special recipe. There’s none like it.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course. Okay. I’ll take… well, just the one thank you.”
The woman nodded and headed off. She came back a little while later with a single marzipan sweet wrapped in orange cellophane. PC French handed over the money and took the sweet. She was trembling.
“Thank you,” she said to both women.
She headed out of the shop. She walked back down the alley. She held the sweet in her palm as if it were something precious, something she should be careful not to break.
Eventually, she could carry it no more. She sat down on a step and carefully opened the cellophane. She looked at the tiny sweet, no bigger than a small plum. It looked unremarkable; the kind of sweet many would avoid among the prettier ones. She raised it slowly to her mouth and popped it in, whole. She chewed upon it…
… and was transported to a place of joy. She could feel the glorious flavours seep into her skin, making her face and arms glow. She felt lighter, less troubled by the world. She knew the world could be a good, kind place where incredible beauty flowered.
She closed her eyes, feeling the sugar rush through her veins. Her head spun, as if drunk. She laughed. She sobbed. She sat on the cold, damp step, crying out of the sheer joy of knowing such wonder existed.

She came out of the other side of the alley, stunned and shaken. Her face was sticky with tears. Her uniform was splashed with mud. The memory of the joy lingered, but she was shaking. She walked in a daze. She took the police car and drove home. She undressed. She stood under a hot shower and cried.

The next day, she felt oddly off-centre in the world. It was as if she was at a distance from it; she was in her own, quiet space, dreaming. In the car with PC Lancashire, she said nothing. Every now and then, she closed her eyes, summoning up the memory of marzipan. It was still there, lingering deep inside of her; reminding her of what it was like to experience perfection. Looking around the world as they drove through it, she understood how flawed it was; the cracks in its surface; the blemishes; the aspirations never satisfied. The greatest, most wonderful experience in this imperfect world couldn’t come within an inch of the joy she had felt from eating that single, heavenly sweet.
She wondered if it contained some drug? If she was becoming addicted? But she knew, instinctively, that this wasn’t true. It wasn’t a drug. It was a state of being; it was a revelation of some sort; some kind of new understanding of the world.
“Emily, are you okay?”
“What?”
“You don’t look well.”
“I’m fine.”
“You look ill.”
“I’m not ill. I’ve never been better. Stop by a sweet shop will you? I fancy something sweet.”

She visited the alley whenever she could. She rationed it. She didn’t want to let it get out of control. But she fell the pull of it getting stronger and stronger. And, each time, she bought a single Marzipan Kiss. She was never tempted by any of the other sweets. And, each time, she found she couldn’t wait to eat it and sat somewhere in the alley, chewing on the sweet, never ceasing to be astonished at its marvellousness. She met other people in the alley as well. There was something about them, something different, but she couldn’t put a finger on it. They all smiled at her, as if understanding her and she smiled back.
Whenever she was in the normal world, she unsuccessfully sought out that experience of pure joy she felt in the alley, but it was never there, it existed only as an empty craving.

PC Lancashire visited her one day. She hadn’t turned up to work. He found her looking pale and bleary-eyed. She invited him in, telling him she felt out of sorts.
“What the hell?”
He looked at the room. It was littered with cellophane, aluminium foil, chocolate wrappers, coloured boxes, unfinished chocolate bars.
“Emily, what the hell’s going on?”
“Nothing. Nothing’s going on. I’ve been a little tired, that’s all.”
“But what’s all this?”
She looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time and was embarrassed.
“Yeah. It’s a mess, isn’t it? God, I’m not normally like this.”
“If you keep going like this, you’re going to lose your job.”
“Yeah. You’re right. Okay. I’ll be in tomorrow. I’ll pull myself together.”
“But what is it? What’s happening to you?”
She looked at him. She felt suddenly sorry for him because he would never experience what she experienced; he would never understand. She felt a tear brim in one of her eyes.
“I’m okay. I just needed a day off that’s all. I’ll be in tomorrow. I promise.’
He looked at her sceptically, clearly worried about her, but she didn’t want his concern. Life on this side of the world was tough, but, on the other side, she knew a perfect kind of joy that PC Lancashire would never know.
“I’ll be okay,” she said, “I’ll be okay.”

At night, she curled herself up into an embryo. She imagined herself being born. She would emerge in a perfect world where no-one suffered, no-one yearned for things they could not have.

She pulled herself together. She woke, showered, resisted the urge to seek out confectionary heaven. She walked to work, needing the fresh air.
In the car, PC Lancashire glanced at her every now and then.
“I’m okay,” she said, without looking at him.
As they drove, she looked at the world and it seemed pale and watery, not quite as vivid and strong as the one she had known previously. She still felt distanced from her surroundings, sunk slightly within herself.
She looked at PC Lancashire. She studied his skin, which was the colour of musk lollies. She leaned closer, smelling his flesh.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Stop the car.”
“Why?”
“Just stop.”
Reluctantly, he parked the car.
“What is it?”
“I want to kiss you.”
“What?”
“Let me kiss you.”
“Why?”
“Just let me kiss you,” she laughed.
She put her mouth on his and they kissed. She needed the texture of another human being to feel real.
“You’re not going to bite me again are you?” he asked and she looked at him.
“No. I’m going to lick you.”
“You’re what?”
She began licking his neck, under his ears.
“Emily?”
“I need to taste you. I need to taste the world.”
She licked his mouth; kissing, licking.
He pushed her away.
“Emily!”
“I need to know how everything tastes. To make it real again.”
“You’re mad. Get away!”

They drove in silence. She felt angry. She had liked the salty taste of his skin. She had wanted more. She looked at the washed-out, insipid city and felt angry at it for lacking the vibrancy she craved.
She sank lower in her seat, sulking. She petulantly wanted to disappear from this world; evaporate into nothingness; melt into pure flavour and aroma. She smiled at the thought.
“You’ve got to pull yourself together,” PC Lancashire said.
She tuned out his words.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with you.”
“It’s none of your fucking business.”
“It is my business, Emily.”
She looked at him.
“No. You don’t understand. You will never understand. You don’t even have the capacity to understand. I’ve been to a place where you will never go. I feel sorry for you.”
“Emily, you’re not well.”
“Stop the car.”
“Why?”
“Stop the car.”
But a call came over the radio about a petty theft nearby and so she went silent and they called in.
They found the thief not far away and he saw them, running off. She jumped out of the car and ran after him.
“Stop where you fucking are!” she shouted.
She pulled out her baton. She felt a rush of adrenalin spur her on. This was living! The rush, the thrill, the joy of it! They were headed for Sorrow Alley. She felt a sense of proprietorial fury at the thought of this scumbag encroaching on her beloved territory. As he ran into the alley, she put on a burst of speed and caught up, swiping him around the back of the head. He fell. She hit him again. Again. She swung her baton back and forth, left and right; until the fury subsided in sobbing gasps.
PC Lancashire caught up with her.
“Jesus Christ.”
She looked down at her blood-splattered shirt. She was trembling. A trickle of splashed blood ran down her face.
“Emily? What have you done?”
She knelt down. She looked at the bloody head of the man on the ground. She touched his head, feeling its heat and stickiness. She looked at her bloody fingers. Stunned, she lifted her fingers to her mouth, sucking on them, tasting the thing she had done.

While PC Lancashire radioed in, she walked down the alley. She tossed her baton on the ground. This wasn’t how she wanted her ecstasy to end up. She hadn’t meant to do that.
She pulled off her radio and tossed that to the ground as well. She walked slowly, almost unaware of her surroundings, sensing cold bricks and doorways only at the margins of her reality. She thought she heard a voice calling after her but it was far away and quiet.
She walked into coldness. She shivered.
Her mouth was filled with saltiness.
Her veins felt like ice.
She headed slowly towards the sweet shop. She thought of the man who had first led her here. She remembered his lost expression outside and his sense of peaceful, well-being this side of the alley. She understood now. It wasn’t possible to live on the other side of the world once you had tasted this one.
Inside the shop, she bought dozens of sweets: marzipan, caramels, liquorice, white chocolate truffles, Pontefract cakes, coconut creams, lavender buds, cherry blossoms.
She took her sugary haul to a small doorway not far away. Bloodied, pale, she sat on the cold step, swallowing them down, filling her mouth with bursts of intense flavour; feeling the sugary, soft, creaminess of the combined flavours explode within her head like a constellation of bright stars.
The pain left her, bite by bite. She swallowed her salvation in small pieces. Her own hot blood returned to her and the world was no longer cold. Her lips tingled with fruitiness. Whatever she had done, she would be redeemed with vanilla softness. She looked up at the grey sky and felt lilac and lemon flavours surge through her like some citrus-tinged divine light. Grace fell upon her in a pastel, peppermint halo. She knew that would live here forever now; she would live here in happiness and scented, caramel bliss. Sweet, hot tears rolled down her cheeks. Her tears tasted of almonds and sugar.

rachel didn't like peaches

We always used to say: "How is it possible for someone to not like peaches?" It seemed an impossible thing, like not wanting to breathe, but Rachel refused to eat the ones we had stolen that day because she said they were too furry.
Lily was the one who had stolen them. She had sneaked them into her schoolbag while the greengrocer had been serving another customer. She had spent a few cents on a single red apple just to seem legitimate, but she had walked out of the shop with four ripe, juicy peaches hidden at the bottom of her bag.
We ate them in the secret place we had discovered in the attic above the art class. It was used to store tins of powdered paint and boxes of coloured paper and it had a window which overlooked the oval and the boys' change-rooms.
We called it our Look-out and we'd sneak up there after school to watch the boys play football and share stories, drinking sometimes from wine bottles one of us had stolen from the local bottle-o; or to tell jokes about the teachers we didn't like and the girls we thought were stupid.
That day we heard some shouts and we looked down below to see Billy Jones running out of the boys' change-rooms with Paul Lang's clothes. Paul was cursing as he chased Billy, coming out of the change-rooms completely naked. We laughed. We watched as he ran after his clothes with a red-faced expression, swearing loudly.
Paul Lang was a bit of a nerd who didn't really have any friends and we should have felt sorry for him, but we laughed, delighting in his embarrassment. And he looked so funny, naked, with his ever-so-pale skin.
It was a funny thing to see.
And then, when the fun was over, we sat down and ate our peaches, our mouths glistening with juice. Rachel stayed at the window and said:
"He shouldn't really have done that."
"Do you fancy him then?" asked Claire.
"Wrack off," Rachel said and we all laughed.
The peaches were the best peaches we had ever tasted. It was as if the juices from every peach we had ever had in our short lives had been concentrated into their pale flesh so that they were bursting with unbelievable, impossible flavour.

We called ourselves the Fearless Four. Lily, Claire, Rachel and me. Up in our secret Look-out, we thought we were the Queens of the school. We thought we were goddesses looking down on the small world below us.
The world wasn't our exactly oyster waiting to be shucked, but it was definitely our plaything, ready to be explored. Individually, we may have had our own private hopes and fears but, together, we were invincible and the world owed us, and whatever we took from it belonged to us. Peaches were the least of it.
Many, many years later, when Rachel sat on her porch, swallowing her medication, her mouth still scarred from the thorns, she told me that she wished she had eaten her peach that day. She longed, now, for its furry sweetness. But it hadn't been like that back then.

Secretly, I was in love with Rachel of course. There was something special about her that fascinated me. She told stories about herself that most people thought were crazy, and most of the school thought she was just an oddball, but she was accepted in our group and I thought her stories made her all the more lovely.
The thing about Rachel was that she was always somehow detached from the rest of us. It wasn't that she wasn't part of the group – she joined in the pranks and larks as enthusiastically as anyone and could be trusted with the deepest and darkest of secrets – it was just that there was a sense of distant loneliness about her, as if part of her, at least, was watching the world from the outside.
I watched her that day when we ate the peaches. When she thought no-one was looking she leaned forward and kissed the glass of the window. She was looking at something below and her lips met the hardness of glass with softness and longing. It was just a brief moment and she quickly looked around to see if someone was looking, so I averted my eyes, but I wondered who had been the object of her desire.
Many days later, in a private moment, I plucked up the courage to ask her and she was a little surprised that I had witnessed her glassy kiss.
"Oh, I was just practising," she said after a while.
"Who for?"
"No-one in particular."
I wasn't sure I believed her. I think she saw my disbelief, for she added:
"I always smell of roses. Did you know that?"
I didn't know what to say and she smiled a little at my confusion. She reached out and pulled my head closer, her hand on the back of my head, pressing it ever so softly into her neck.
"See?'
Sure enough, the skin of her neck was heavy with the heady aroma of pink roses. It astonished me. I looked at her and she had a serious expression, the look of someone sharing a terrible secret.
"Kiss me," she said.
"What?"
I was shocked. I had always wanted to kiss her, but…
"Just because," she said.
My heart beating a little faster, I leaned across and kissed her on the mouth, our lips barely touching, so that it almost wasn't a kiss at all. But I gasped. Her mouth tasted, incredibly, of rose petals.
"See," she said when I looked at her, "I am cursed, cursed by flowers."

The incident involving Paul Lang troubled me a little. I had enjoyed laughing at him and had told the story over and over about how we had seen him naked, running outside, his thin body with its skin as pale as curdled milk. The girls asked me for details. His chest was bare. His penis wasn't small but it wasn't large either. His nipples were tiny red welts on his pale chest.
When he walked down the corridor, girls looked at him and smiled. They whispered and laughed. Sometimes he cringed. The boys began calling him 'soft-cock' and 'milk chest.' Someone wrote some graffiti in the library suggesting he was impotent.
I felt a little responsible, as if I had had deliberately provided the material for this cruel ribbing. But I didn't say anything to anyone. When people laughed at him, I laughed as well.
One afternoon I came upon him in the corridor. He looked at me resentfully. Normally we ignored each other but he spoke to me that afternoon.
"It was you wasn't it?"
"What was me?"
"You told them about what happened."
I didn't deny it.
"You've changed things."
"How?"
He looked sad.
"People have always laughed at me but now they like being cruel. When I walk down the corridor they pinch me. Did you know that? Not just the bullies. Everybody. Someone put a turd in my locker. And they do things like steal my lunch. Or put drawing pins on my chair."
"You should stand up to them."
"How do you stand up to an entire school?"
"You should try something."
He looked suddenly very angry. I thought he was going to hit me because he came at me but all he did was hold me by my arms and press me against the lockers.
"What should I do?" he asked bitterly, "what should I do to you?"
"Let me go," I said angrily.
But his fingers dug deeper into my skin as he pressed me against the doors of the lockers.
"This is what it's like," he said, "this is what it's like to feel helpless."
He looked me fiercely in the eyes. He just held me there. He was almost trembling. Then he kissed me. He kissed me on the mouth in a clumsy, insistent way. I think he was almost as surprised as me for he looked shocked after he had done it and, before I could say anything, he let me go and, leaving his locker door open, rushed off.
"You're a knob, Paul Lang!" I shouted after him.

I'm sure he thought I'd tell everyone else about what had happened but I kept it to myself. I felt sorry for him and didn't want to add to his woes.
When I say I kept it to myself, I told the rest of the gang, of course. We shared secrets among ourselves like boxes of delicious chocolates.
"What a dickhead," said Lily, "do you think he fancies you?"
"I don't know."
"Was it a good kiss?" asked Claire.
"Bloody awful."
We all laughed.
"We should get him back. Play a trick on him."
"I think he's very unhappy. People bully him all the time."
"Yeah, well he brings it on himself," said Lily, "he's so pathetic. We should send him a love letter. Ask him to meet at some place. Watch from a distance."
"That would be cruel," said Claire.
"I know. That's the point."
"We should just leave him alone," Rachel said out of the blue and we all looked at her.
"Why?" asked Lily with disdain.
"People bully him enough. He's already as unhappy as anyone should be."
I could see Lily getting ready to argue and I knew that meant we'd end up doing something mean so I said:
"Maybe she's right. He's not worth it. I think we should just leave him alone too."
Lily looked annoyed but we had our own kind of democracy in the gang and she could sense that she had lost the argument so she changed the subject and we ended up making plans for a raid on the local church orchard where we'd steal shiny red apples, as many as we could, and persuade Claire's mother to make us sweet apple pies with custard.

Rachel became quieter and more aloof. I thought perhaps she was in love. She missed a few meetings in the attic. Lily said she was going soft but I defended her, saying she was sometimes sick.
One afternoon, we went to the museum and it was here that the first of the rose events happened.
Rachel looked pale and tired and, while we wandered trough the room with cases filled with tiny glistening insects pinned to boards, I asked her if she was all right. She smiled weakly and said she had been feeling odd lately. I reached out and held her hand and she smiled, threading her fingers through mine.
"Sometimes, when I'm with you, I'm just about the happiest I can be," she said.
I think she would have said more, except she started coughing. It was the type of dry cough you have when something is stuck in your throat.
"What is it?" I asked, "what's up? Are you all right?"
But she kept clearing her throat and coughing, until something fell out of her mouth and floated to the floor.
A tiny, pink rose petal.
I thought she was playing a trick, but she looked so scared I knew it was real and she hadn't stopped coughing; and then she opened her mouth, as if vomiting, and a stream of coloured petals began tumbling out of her mouth, fluttering in the air, falling to the floor in a pink, yellow, white and red carpet; thousands and thousands of unbelievable rose petals, spewing from her mouth like confetti; filling the air with their astonishing aroma. Until, at last, she was done and she fell to her knees, gasping, tears rolling down her eyes, a few papery petals still falling and landing on her fingers.

No-one else was in the room and no-one believed us, but they could see that Rachel was sick, so they sent us home. On the bus we held hands again and we didn't say a word, we just sat there, speechless and stunned.
We hugged goodbye and I kissed her on the forehead and I noticed that her skin tasted of roses.
She spent a few days in bed and, when she came back to school, something had changed; she was far more serious, even more withdrawn than before, dwelling in her own thoughts.
At one of our meetings in the attic, where we ate stolen Lamingtons, Lily suddenly turned on her telling her that she was as boring as hell these days. Without a word, Rachel stood up and left. She never came back.
I was afraid I might never see her again. She avoided me most of the time. I still went to the meetings in the attic, but it just wasn't the same. The light-hearted camaraderie had left us and Lily's pranks took on a harder, crueller edge.
Paul was still being teased. Someone stole his bike and threw it in the creek. He started receiving death threats, typewritten on blue paper. At sports he was regularly tripped up or punched when the teachers weren't looking. Even some of the teachers began picking on him. The photography teacher locked him in the dark room as a punishment for poor work and his maths teacher loved humiliating him by getting him to answer difficult maths questions he knew he'd fail.
One afternoon, he opened his locker to find someone had filled it with red paint, covering everything: his books, his spare clothes, his lunch. They had written the word 'blood' on the back of the locker door.
Two days later, Paul Lang committed suicide by hanging himself in his bedroom. We found out at assembly one morning.
No-one said anything, but we knew that the person who had filled his locker was Lily, using paint from the attic.
An eerie quiet fell over the school that day. Virtually everyone had reasons to feel guilty and ashamed about how they had treated Paul.

Rachel and I started talking again. She said she had been freaked out by the rose petal incident, but was feeling better now. We started hanging out in the library and I missed a few meetings in the attic for the sake of her company. The meetings weren't enjoyable any more anyway. Lily denied being the one who filled Paul's locker with red paint and said: "That wasn't what made him kill himself anyway. He killed himself because he was a loser."
Being with Rachel, reading books and newspapers in the library was much nicer than cold afternoons in an attic surrounded by paint tins and paper. Besides, there were too many memories up there, hanging around like unwelcome ghosts.
Rachel and I decided to attend the funeral. Apart from the school Principal, we were the only ones from the school that went. The Principal said a few words, telling the congregation of mourners how Paul was a decent lad who was liked by all.
Rachel headed off suddenly and I followed, thinking she was upset but, when I came upon her, kneeling under a plane tree, she was coughing and I thought it was going to be petals again, but this time something small and dark fell out of her mouth. I thought it was a dead tooth, but then a few more fell out and I realised they were thorns. I watched in astonishment as hundreds and hundreds of dark, sharp rose thorns tumbled out of her mouth, making a little pile on the damp earth.
When she had coughed up the last one, she looked at me, her eyes open in terror. Her mouth was bloody and torn, the blood shining on her pale jaw, trickling down the sides of her mouth. I rushed up to her and held her, wrapping my arms around her as tightly as I could, not worrying about the blood staining my shirt, just letting her shake and sob into my chest until she could sob no more.

Our lives changed after this. The gang fell apart completely. We no longer went to the attic. Rachel and I grew closer and fell in love.
Lily went on to be a politician. You've probably heard of her? Claire went interstate and we never heard from her again. Rachel and I moved in together. Sometimes we visited Paul's grave, not out of obligation, but because we wanted to.
Rachel developed a kind of epilepsy, which had to be treated with medication. She had all sorts of little illnesses with made her lethargic and in need of careful attention. I got a job in a bookshop a few streets down and, in the evenings, cared for her.
One of the side effects of her medication was that she could no longer taste things. Food, for her, was just a series of bland textures. That was why she regretted not eating the peach, back in the days when she was young and could taste the world.
All in all though, we've made a reasonable job of our lives. We still love each other and, for the most part, we are happy.
Rachel is still haunted by roses.