The hushed sound of movement over the cedar needles carpeting the ground around them lifted Bede’s head in the pre-dawn darkness.  From the heart of the expiring fire a figure lifted a blackened branch and brought it with her, weaving a slow path through the bodies strewn about them.  Bede watched her white legs moving beneath the carnivore print of her stolen dress; ignoring all but William’s sleeping form, she stood so closely by him that her hooked toes almost brushed his careless arm.  Slowly, she lifted the branch in both hands.  

“Rana...” murmured Bede, keeping his gaze deferential as he addressed her. “Il’jiit Sachiin il’avai’ia shai’la.”

She looked down on the object of her foray with eyes that streamed unceasingly, conceding nothing of her intent, and for an airless moment he believed his petition had failed.  But with the charred limb in her hands the creature turned instead toward the pale face of the house standing beyond the unmown veldt.



Edward’s sedan stood at the edge of the grove, front doors splayed and headlights dimly-coloured by the dying battery.  Susan had lain with her head under her pillow against both the music that had issued from its system and various arrivals and departures; the ordeal greatly reduced her compunction at hauling a garbage bag of bottles and cans amongst the fallen.  The bollchu vat lay on its side like the body of an abandoned spacecraft, the French contingent scattered as though by a percussive blast around the hearth and amid the clean bones of the spit roast, vodka bottles and discarded clothing.  One of them groaned, feet lying in the beer-doused charcoal, and pulled his shirt over his head.  Susan plucked up the packet of Continental cigarettes beside him and lit one for herself.  The body she took to be William’s lay on its face in a bed of needles, hands upturned by its sides.  She lifted the clattering rubbish and dropped it beside his head.

“Answerphone.” he murmured without moving, the word muffled by his posture. 

“Mr Lamb, I just wanted you to know I used the kitchen tongs to pick up a used condom, so you'll have to buy some new ones.  Tongs, I mean.  I couldn’t find a shovel.”

“In the car.”

“What is?”

​“The shovel.  In the boot.  Check the... no, wait...”  With a deep breath and supreme effort William rolled over and sat up.  “Don’t."  Beneath his open shirt pine needles had stuck to the demonic features drawn in several shades of lipstick over his chest and stomach; a long tongue descended from the pictograph's chin to the region still marginally concealed by the deranged buttons of his fly.  The same colours were smeared around his mouth, over his ears and on each side of his neck.  She stared at the strange imperviousness of his smooth features to the abuse accorded them, handing him the cigarettes.  He placed one between his lips.  “And er... don’t turn around.” he added, flagging the sound of someone struggling with their jeans and urinating in the trees behind her.  

"I still have South African techno stuck in my head."

“Sorry... alujha DJs." he sighed, unaware of the minor indiscretion.  "I'm so sorry about this... it’s all that fucking texting nowdays... fucking... médias social... all OMG, GTFO, LOL... every petite boum you put on gets out of hand.” William explained.  He held out his hand to her and she relented, hauling him to his feet, from which he kicked an automatic pistol beneath the legs of its faineant owner before it could attract her attention.  “B’s still here, I think... we’ll get it sorted.  Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried.  I'm the housekeeper... you're the groundskeeper.” she assured him, dropping her cigarette onto the remains of the fire and walking after him to his brother’s car.  He sat down in the front seat, staring blankly at his reflection in the mirror and using his shirt to wipe the colour from his face.  “I do need to talk to you about something, though, if you’re up to it.”  

“I know it was loud, and I will make it up to you... in fact, have some time off... go crazy til Ed gets back.  I’ll get Luc and Étienne some aprons.” he sighed.  “They’ve probably got their own.”

​“Mr Lamb...”  He closed his eyes at the sound of it and she smiled briefly to herself.  “I was in my room last night and... I saw something.”  There was a note of hesitancy in her voice and he looked up from making an attempt to start the car.  Someone had stowed a shopping bag stuffed with the gigantic terminal buds of two dozen marijuana plants on the back seat, filling the interior with their thick olive smell.  “I think it’s probably better if I just show you.” she concluded.

Susan helped him to his feet once more and together they traversed the lawn; the golden pheasants had been joined by the young peacock gifted by a guest and the jewelled quartet clucked contentedly by the pool where they picked winged ants from the sandstone.  She led him into the shade beside the house, walking backwards from it and peering up into the lime-green canopy to point out a limb some six metres from the ground.  

“I’d dozed off and then realised I’d forgotten to close the curtains, so I sat up, and there was someone sitting there.  The light shines into the tree, so I saw it really clearly... they were looking right at me.”  She frowned back at him, surprised to see that he required no persuasion.  He walked to the trunk while she continued.  “On that branch there... the one that comes out toward the window."

William emptied his pockets onto the ground and caught the lowest limb, swinging upward and climbing into the elm.  Susan located his feet amongst the dappled, glowing foliage.

"Right there, where you are." she called.  He sat against the trunk and saw the silvery bloom had been rubbed from the bark before him, supporting her claim.  From his position he could see directly into the garret, the paisley of her quilt and the lax drape of the clothing hanging from the bedside chair all perfectly apparent. 

“If I had to tap a pervert it would be Luc, but his victims are usually more than willing... and I don't think he was climbing anything after Cay was done.” he replied.
“If he was the one inside with you, it wasn’t him...”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes... it was a woman.”

Descending, he hung for a moment and allowed his grip to slide from the bark as he digested her remark.  Though it was only faintly-limned, she did not enjoy the way his unease correlated with her own.  

“Dark hair, some sort of dress, definitely female.” she added, folding her arms.  “I don’t mean to be a princess or anything, but my rooms are private... maybe you could let people know that next time you have a... thing?  Anyway... I just wanted to tell you.”  William frowned as she lifted his black record bag from the grass.   "Um... is this yours?"  He accepted it from her, shaking the dew from it.  "You said something about me having the day off..."

He shrugged absently.

"Pas de probléme."

​"I wouldn’t mind a swim later.  Let me know when everyone’s gone.” she called, pausing in the sun by the corner of the building to shed her apron and pull the pins from her hair, the prospect of a providential afternoon lighting her grin.  William murmured a distracted reply, then looked back across the lawn to Bede, who stood alone before the grove.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

Geese, Back Beach / Black Swans, Sawyers Bay / Bathing Gull, Back Beach

BELOW  This year we are especially privileged to host a trio of native Bellbird (Anthornis melanura) chicks fledged in a nest across the road (edit- there has been a second brood since this first one).  This is the first time we've seen successful breeding of this once-beleaguered species in our urban-ish area and hope it is a sign of things to come.  

​Birds might not seem like a big deal, but to us this is like having tigers raising cubs in your yard.

Sicario (2015, Denis Villeneuve)
I was crossing all the toes and fingers in anticipation of this one.  Sadly, Sicario isn’t as good as you’ve probably heard, which gives me no pleasure.  If it had preserved the clean procedural tension of the opening half hour we would have been fine, but from the moment the camera started to linger on an overkill number of corpses decomposing behind drywall a cheesy, manipulative flavour kicked in and it was a downhill drag from there.  Sigh.  Emily Blunt is Kate, FBI SWAT boss battling southern-state drug cartel activity sucked into a murky, border-busting Special Ops initiative by Josh Brolin's CIA spook, who is in turn facilitating the mysterious Alejandro (Benico Del Toro) in some sort of personalised revenge trajectory wherein their interests more or less align.  

If the utterly depraved dynamics of the continental American drug war are really news to you, Sicario might possess more of the galvanic momentum it was obviously striving for.  In lieu of that shock value we both felt it offered little in the way of novel perspective or characterisation to relieve that sense of no-shit-sherlock redundancy.  It stumbles from the moment it veers away from impersonal momentum into the organisms involved, defying logic and resorting to laboured misogynistic diminution to make its feeble point.

Josh Brolin's CIA guy is the self-regarding median douche he always brings to the fucking table, which was annoying.  But it's Emily Blunt who really made me want to kick the screen.  Blunt has never sold me anything; as the Young Victoria she couldn’t even stand there in a fucking dress without pissing me off with that complacent duckface.  She is too static, too leaden, too self-conscious and projects all three deficits here as the FBI agent with an er… heart of naive gold.  Despite her character riding the pointy end into contra-cartel action on the daily, she remains a delicate principled flower, apparently, requiring male protection and supervision at every juncture.  Not since Jason Bourne has someone seemed so utterly fucking baffled by their own trajectory but you know… bitches be crazy.  The story so palpably aches to trail breathlessly after the macho Del Toro, wrong’d, ambiguous antihero, that Blunt’s hapless nark feels as superfluous and derisory to the audience as she does to her fellow protagonists.  Benicio is mmmgood but I wish someone would really twist his arm and make him work all that recessed potential.

I can see why generic male critics creamed their pants over Sicario. ​It’s everything they want movies to be- sneakily androcentric, essentially uncomplicated whilst affecting complexity, technically praiseworthy, vaguely familiar (it rips chunks out of Zero Dark Thirty and even The Usual Suspects with gay abandon) and reductively cynical.  

Everest  (2015, Baltasar Kormákur) 
Even if you're profoundly disinterested in the technical achievement it represents, Everest's fantastically pin-sharp and gin-clear cinematography is the best reason to watch this otherwise pretty standard disaster/survivor yarn dramatising portions of Rob Hall and Scott Fischer's fatal 1996 expeditions.  That, and Jason (Zero Dark Thirty) Clarke, who I had no fucking idea was Australian although that does explain his decent Newzullindish (not sure why our idiom seems to defeat virtually everyone; it's just a flattened affect, off-British variant, ff's.)  He is committed, buyable and engaging as the doomed Hall, as is Jake Gyllenhaal, who always delivers when relieved of the lead.  Then there's Josh Brolin, who always brings the Josh Brolin, no matter what.

Disappointingly, it is the consistently awesome Emily Watson who shits the tonal bed with her cringeworthy accent and overwrought fretting although, to be fair, Keira Knightley really takes the sloppy hysterics cake; thankfully she is relegated to smallish servings.  And that's all there is to Everest, really.  Don't go in expecting Tolstoy and you might find it moderately diverting.  

I'll award a consolation gold star for the eschewal of cheap pain-porn and stupidly villainous characterisations in its handling of a multi-axial tragedy that attracts vituperative revisionism and partisan dick-waving to this day.  Having read a number of opposing narratives, Everest doesn't seem like a particularly outrageous distortion to me, but then I find the whole concept of scrabbling over sacred mountains monstrously egotistical and deeply offensive.  Sorry.

Also: can skinny picayune* hipsters please attend a few leg days before you roll that shit up, and calm the fuck down with the obsessively over-curated tattoo sleeves?  A thousand Tumblr-cribbing hours won't improve your chances of looking like someone carelessly arrayed in the charmingly artisanal mementos of their chaotic personal creativity.  At all.  I see you, bitch.  (* I learned this word a month ago and am honoured to début it in this context.)

We went a bit north from Granity to Gentle Annie beach, at the mouth of the Mokihinui river.  This incredibly beautiful and ecologically important watercourse was earmarked to be dammed by fucking Meridian Energy despite NZ's perennial electricity glut.  Still think New Zealand's clean and green?  100% Pure my shiny arse.  The NZ government was proposing to inundate one of the few remaining areas of unfucked native forest and last-stand habitat that had survived its attentions with a dam that might as well have straddled the Alpine Fault, a massive strike-slip fault line overdue for an epic 8+ earthquake.  So stewardship.  Much conservation.

Hamish: beach snorter.  My mother's bichon x maltese x schnauzer.

There's a nicely-laid out camping ground on the other side of the river mouth.  I commend Gentle Annie to the fiscally challenged, spawn-encumbered traveller and that's a disinterested recommendation; as someone who spent half their childhood in the wilds of northern Australia, I do not camp unless someone burns my fucking house down.

Bovidae: something else that I could photograph all day.  This is the first crop of calves my sister has raised for sale.  

Cows are strange, mercurial beasts, gifted with the sort of prudence most hominids can only dream of (someone should put them in charge of the banking sector) and yet hostage to an insatiable and perverse curiosity (alright so maybe the finance thing was a bad idea).  We have tremendous respect and affection for them though we occasionally eat of their flesh; they are one of the more fortunate species in the New Zealand farming system, being almost exclusively free-range and mostly grass fed.  So don't let anti-meat hysterics tar your perception with accounts of American-style feedlot/cornfed/hormone horrors.  Most beef cows here spend their lives fairly peacefully in decent conditions and that, to me, forms the basis of the equity that should underpin all domestic husbandry.  Dairy cows are perhaps not as fortunate and that is why we drink organic milk where humanly possible- their co ops tend to prioritise animal welfare as well as minimising their wider environmental impacts.

Across the road from my sister's place is the steep haul up to dozy, depopulated Millerton and the foredoomed Stockton coal mine, where her partner and much of the surrounding region is still tenuously employed.  It is scheduled for sale/closure due to the collapse of Solid Energy, the government's coal concern, lately run into the ground by crackhead overcapitalisation and a staggeringly moronic inability to accept fossil fuel's inevitable relegation.  This is the view north from the top of the hill, one of two I couldn't decide between so you're getting both.  

It was a stinking hot day, I had a cold, we couldn't find the path to the local alleged spectacular waterfall and the tar from the abandoned roads we were slogging up and down was sticking to my two-sizes too small borrowed Crocs, which should have been punishment enough in themselves.

The New Zealand bush is noted for its disorientating and somewhat nightmarish qualities.  It tends to be opaque, remote, inedible, damp, trackless, endlessly river-y and either too hot or too cold for comfort.  I know I bang on about it, but the number of visiting and even local trampers who end up as either galaxid or nothofagus food is a bit disturbing.  Even to a dedicated misanthropist?  We have to pay for your search and rescue fuckery.  There, fixed it.

Next time: We walk the Charming Creek track end to end, which is fantastic.

​That feels better.

When I recommend SC to warmer babes, that's not to say you need to be orange all over to give it a good home.  I'm the opposite of tanned myself; even though I still look like a fucking glow worm at the height of summer, there is enough yellow in my eyes and freckles to overcome any other potentially cockblocking undertones.  It's one of the few oranges to give full and importantly lasting coverage to my strongly pigmented lips, which answers the prayers of people who can't usually wear the shade for this reason.  So Chaud does makes my unbleached teeth look slightly more yellow than they are, and if you have epic staining issues I'd avoid it, but oh well- who smiles in public anyway? 

* These are unflashed and taken in a range of outdoor afternoon light.  Camera sensors (and computer screens) tend to have trouble rendering the differences between orange and red.  Photographer's trick- stare at one of the reds at either end of the swatches, then at So Chaud- your eyes should become more sensitive to the contrast.

Below Left: So Chaud, MAC Ruffian Red (LE)  Not a bad shot, colour-wise.  You can see how the intensity and brightness of the orange is buildable in this squiggle.  Ruffian Red is a definite red with warm and orange undertones.   

​Rabbit slippers, the plastic eyes of their animal faces scuffed to the appearance of blindness, hushed Susan's progress through an alluring window of license.  Wandering outside her uniform and working hours was a sapid novelty expanded by solitude; she peered out at the night from the gallery before attending to the objects standing at its far end.  A punching bag of oxblood leather hung on a chain in the eastern corner like some alien drupe, a dozen others stacked against the wall.  To its left three easels stood draped in drop-cloths.  Reaching into her pocket, she dragged out a blue jelly snake and put its head between her teeth, lifting the corner of the longest cowl.

The hidden work proved to be a line drawing of a blackbird's stiffly-plicated corpse.  She frowned, twisting the snake around a finger while it occurred to her that the image, so clean of ghosting corrections, was a print; bending at the knee, she touched a finger to the paper, gathering a smear of graphite that sent her sharply backward, looking downward for the feathered body she half-expected at her feet.  Such ex nihilo virtuosity cauterized her interest and drove her quickly from the studio.

The floorboards provided a record of the building’s fortunes, scarred with circles of raised grain where windows had admitted rain, holed through and crumbling along the skirting in episodes of rot.  The half-moon was bright enough to stand in for the artificial lighting wholly absent from large sections of the upper story.  On the wall before the stairs the goat head remained silkily hirsute and haughtily dissociative.  The blond intruder’s attempt to access William’s suite gave Susan cause to question the dignity of the enterprise, armed even as she was with an invitation.  It was more difficult than she imagined to try the handles; they proved unlocked, and sliding past, she stood a foot inside without progressing any further, whelmed by the shadow-stroked array before her.

The rooms were served by the second of the balconies to the rear of the house, and the moon gazed through its glassed doors onto a gigantic tester bed standing at the centre of the flamboyant chaos, its frame sending its spiraling elephantine pillars toward the ceiling.  The undulant mattress wore hand-sewn ticking striped with bright mint green and leaked white feathers onto the floor.  Two copper lanterns, their sturdy candles half-expended, stood on a coffer of crimson-stained timber at the end of the bed, its grain ticked as though with flecks of gold.  Serpent-headed orobouros had been carved into the face of each compartment.  

Along one side of the bed sat a battalion of smaller boxes and miniature chests of brass-bound fruitwood, mottled quill and mink-black lacquer with lids ajar, ravished by a careless inventory.  Some held little bales of yellowed linen while their neighbours plainly displayed the fierce, primary gleam of artisan jewels, Turkoman carnelian, thick Swat and Berber silver and limpid Indian enamels.  Other chests had been pushed back against the persimmon walls to leave a generous aisle on either side of the frame, though these ways were compromised by spidery crates of wine and a mound of clothing dumped on the ground beside the french doors.  Her slippers were slowed by the delicious thickness of the lambswool tulu lying underfoot, their tousled motifs starkly blocked in walnut brown and scarlet.  Two small anterooms lay to either side, one revealing a glimpse of a pedestal basin and aged white tiles, the other lying in darkness.  The bizarre and diffuse luxury seemed to follow, in handmade abstracts, the principles of an organic wilderness, the bed posts forest stalwarts, the chests like outcrops between plains of shaggy carpet, their crazed geometry and drunken flowers wearing the kilterless flourishes of some vast nomadic domain.  A narrow space at the head of the bed offered her a place to marshal her thoughts and Susan sank down, lifting a paper scroll she had briefly flattened with her leg.  

It unraveled in her lap, exposing its contents to the light over her shoulder.  A progression of Japanese images painted in masterful outline and delicate colour began with a courtesan greeting a prospect on a blossom-veiled bridge.  It progressed swiftly into the unflinching depiction of her entire repertoire, as requested by the client who seemed as inexhaustible as his purse.  The end of the scroll lapsed down her legs while she followed the heroine’s explicit adventures, through the bohemian sector of Edo, a forest infested with amorous trolls, a colony of long-deprived scholars and a rustic fishing port, before she was returned with perfect sang-froid to her quarters in the Floating World.  Susan exclaimed softly to herself and lifted her gaze toward the door glass where a face reflected dimly behind her own sent the scroll coiling down her shins, William’s unnerving smile greeting her beneath the hood of his sweatshirt.  He knelt on the far side of the bed and reached for something underneath it.

“Wow, I was looking for that shunga everywhere.” he grinned, crossing the mattress on all fours and sitting beside her to peruse the abandoned erotica.  “I love the en levrette... his face is priceless.  Utamaro knew posh girls like the back of his hairy hand but no one rocks a horny troll party like Hokusai.  Have you seen a bag in here?  Black record bag, sort of falling to pieces?”

As he pushed back his hood Susan vacated the bed and stumbled backward over a crate of wine. 

“I er... I was just over this way, and I... didn’t think you were... um, home...”

He smiled again.

“It's not like I'm clutching any pearls, Christabel... it's my porn." he laughed.  "Bede... you haven’t seen Bede here, have you?  My height, looks like me, pony hair?”  He patted his pockets in a cloud of distraction.

“Sorry, no.  I’ll um, go...” she offered, hoping to duck past him.

“No no no... you need a drink after that lot.”

“I can’t.  The agency has a fit if they find out you drink at work.”

​“If Opal La Rue told me I couldn't drink, I'd chug a magnum in her lap and piss my damn pants.  What does your agency say about rifling through porn or...”  He leant forward with one brow raised, peering downward.  “Pocket snakes?"

She scowled, holding to the sentiment, then laughing, tugging the packet of jellies from her cardigan and offering him one.  He pulled it free and sucked its length into his mouth, chewing briefly before ejecting it into his hand.

"You didn't even know what that was, did you?" she chuckled, to which he shook his head, wide-eyed.  "Did your mother never tell you about putting strange things in your mouth?"

​"I know what you're saying.  It might not be a lolly next time."

Susan looked back down at the scroll.

“I thought it was artistic.” she insisted, watching him drag an oak tray from under the bed and blow the dust from its row of crystal tumblers.  Another manual foray produced a box of lizard-skinned fruit and a bottle half full of grass-green liquid that roiled with an active content barely contained by solution.  Accepting a glass from him, she looked around for a place to sit, not daring to resume her seat on the bed and eventually composing herself upon a rug beside it; William followed her lead, setting the bottle in the midst of his folded legs.  She watched him sip his drink and peel the skin from one of the nameless fruits, lapsing from discursive verve into that other of his native states, a perfected and halcyon placidity that settled like leaves and stilled his face and hands, the striping on his sweatshirt at once feline and felonious.  “What is this?” she exclaimed, holding her glass to the candle light.

"Bollchu.  Friends make it at home, and they’re usually pretty f..."  He consulted her expression and she nodded earnest encouragement.

"Please say fuck... if I don't hear someone swear in the next twenty four hours I'll probably throw myself off the roof."

"Well, as I meant to say, they're usually pretty fucked up when they cook, so sometimes it’s baby water, sometimes it’s devil piss.  Cul sec." 

She demurred, still eyeing the liquor doubtfully.

"It's just that bollchu sounds like a sneeze, and it's... green."
"Everything good is bad, in some way."  Whilst his smile did not convince her, she she took a mouthful and almost choked on it, the virulent potion scorching her throat and leaping into her sinuses like plumes of flame.  Her watering eyes returned to the scroll once more.
"Can you read Japanese?"

He reached back for it and smoothed it out over his legs, contemplating the shunga's commentary and glancing at her expectant smile, though after some ponderous reckoning William suppressed one of his own.

"No." he confessed, gaze falling to the newsprint hanging from a crate of wine.  "But ah, attends en peu...recherche de la météo d'une ville en France ou dans le monde... pluie, brouillard... frais..."  As he read she drifted back against an uncertain assortment of cushions, watching the understated vowels fall from his lips as though they were shapes in a parade of purring and vaporous curlicues that encircled her slowly, given soft wings by his voice.  Though she did not notice William reached out and pushed the cardboard box toward her without taking his eyes from the page or breaking his analgesic narrative.  She sat in a diaphanous contentment that dropped to a slight frown at its conclusion, her blush returning.

"What was that?"
"Weather for the Paris metropolitan area, nineteen forty nine."  He leant forward and picked her right hand from her knee, turning it over.  “Hmmm... firstborn... alone... sweet tooth... something about twins.” he added, frowning at the lines crossing her palm.
“I’m a Gemini... how did you know that?”
“I read resumés.”  He took more fruit from the box and set it in her hand.  "Longan.  They look like eyeballs but please don't let that stop you."  Knocking back the liquid in her glass, Susan took a deep breath while it went down, attempting to peel the leathery drupe and grimacing at the sight of the gelatinous flesh beneath.  "Better than rubber snakes." he promised.  He was correct, the webbed grey pulp melting in a fragrant jellybean savour.  She spat out the staring black seed and accepted another.

"I might have the wrong end of the stick, but... there was a blonde woman, with a lot of Dolce and Gabbana... I caught her trying to break into your room.”  
"Kali ni'ah... the Rachel.  What did she say?” 
“I don’t remember much, but she wasn’t very happy.”  Susan glanced at his reaction.  While not obviously immodest or ill-fitting, there was something in the way he wore clothing that was persistently suggestive, his body so resistant to containment that it reminded her of colonial portraiture, of indigénes standing in the stiff, alien garments foisted on them by studio photographers.  The curious quality was so pronounced that she was almost relieved when he dragged the pullover from his head and discarded it, though the aging T-shirt beneath, skewed sideways across his shoulders, revealed a white stripe of skin over the low waist of his jeans.  Her gaze wandered toward to it as he spoke.

​“No one believes this, but Rachel is really, really not my fault.  My brother says I should hit it with the big gauge, but that’s his answer to everything... if a bus full of crippled kids was parked across the drive, he’d yoink the fucking handbrake so he wouldn’t lose his reservation."  His phone began to flash again.
"Is she really that bad?"
"She's hell on donk rims."
"But you're still... together?"

He sagged visibly, pouring himself another deep shot of the green liquor.

"No... I've tried escaping, but I just... I fail.  Behind all this er, masculinité formidable, I'm a big dumb chickenshit."  William confessed.  "It's just... I don't know... too easy to be cruel.”  She watched him fumble with the telephone.  “Now you’re wishing I only drank alone.  Don’t worry, I’m totally notorious for my overfamiliarity, it’s not anything you’ve done in a previous life.  Putain!  I hate this fucking thing!”

Susan shrugged at his struggle with the appliance in question.

"Turn it off."

He looked to her again, uncertain.

​"I don't know how.  I just leave where I can't hear it."
"Yes, I know."  Leaning over her lap, she took it from him and flicked through its menu until its lights died.  "There you go.  She did seem a bit mental... that Rachel."  She frowned and plucked a piece of longan skin from her teeth.  “When someone’s nutty, you're not helping them by letting them go on, though.  All you can do is say no to them and mean it... if you're serious about wanting them to go away.”  She looked back at him pointedly, and he rolled his eyes at his own acedia.  “Nutters are like everyone else, really.  They might be crazy, but they’re not stupid.  If there’s nothing in it for them, then they’ll give up eventually.”

The warm smell of her skin was somewhat diluted by the liquor and incense that hung about the chamber, though it had begun to disturb his ease and made him want to stare at her in spite of her perspicacity.  Her hair was contained in a small tail and she wore an rust-coloured dress beneath a emerald cardigan, the elemental hues intensifying one another, recalling to him the fluttering finery of Ayubid mujahidîn and the courtyard gardens of Bactrian merchants, their sunbaked walls pinning back the scouring wastes.  Her gifts did not amount to the passive, expectant beauty that had so long defeated his esteem; the bright pneuma of something greater moved within her, humbling the liberties he was so accustomed to taking.

​“I actually spoke to him the other day... your brother.” Susan confessed.  William laughed as he rolled a longan between his teeth.  “It’s not funny!" she scolded.  "I didn't know if he was going to fire me or eat my liver.” 
“Don't worry, it’s not you.  He pink slips me every day of the year, in his mind... he’d fire the entire fucking population for breathing too loudly if he thought he was just head of human resources and not the fucking boss of everything.”
“He's not always like that, is he?”

He leant forward, urging her to do the same so that their heads almost met in an attitude of conspiracy.  

"Yeah, pretty much.  We just let him clank his chains and chase us off the lawn.” he whispered.  “It’s not that he’s all bad... it’s just that people tend to er, qu'est-ce que c'est... die of exposure looking for the good bits.  It's like the top of Chomolungma... you know it exists, you can even see it sometimes, but you prefer oxygen to glory.”  Her eyes brightened at Edward’s memory, dread diffusing back into circulation.  “It was worse, believe me.  A lot worse.  At least I’ve got him telling me to fuck off.  That’s a step up from just the look.”  William attempted the expression himself and was able to frame the livid shape of it, if not the caustic colour required by an entirely successful projection.  "I'll only say this once... don't put your tongue on him... we're not insured for it."

​"Now I'm going to think that every time I see him.  Should I know why he's like that?"
"There are reasons."  He struggled with the available terms.  "Er... some parts are missing.  Product may differ from photo after assembly..."
"It's private, in other words." she offered.  He nodded, relieved.  "Why live with him, then?"
"Let's just say he needs supervision and I'm independently broke."
"So that's not your BMW in the garage?"

He lay back against the frame, rolling his tongue behind his teeth.

"You've gone right off me now, haven't you?"

Susan chuckled and caught sight of her watch as she leant back with her glass.

​“This’s late for me.” she told him, looking once more around the room.  The skirt of her dress clung to her tights as she stood up, and she dipped quickly to smooth it down.  “See you at work I suppose.  Thanks for the pint.”

William stretched out slowly on the floor with the bottle, his arm cushioning his head and framing his wide smile.

“What are their names?” he called, watching her frown in the doorway.
“Who?”
“The rabbits.”
Smiling down at her slippers, she shook her head and walked on into the hall.
“None of your business.”        


CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce           

My sister's place is an old weatherboard  miner's cottage sitting between this long stand of post-glacial hills and a yard that peters down toward the beach.  She went down the all-white road during its last interior do-over including floors, which pains me.  I do like its déshabillé-ity; she's sort of over it.

I could photograph these hills all day.  The hypnotic density and textures of their cloaking vegetation is sometimes difficult to credit even with the naked eye.  

​Wekas stalk the flax swamp at their feet, crossing the road to raid gardens and get into the rubbish, replacing feral cats which in olden times were possibly some sort of local delicacy.  Lol.  I didn't see any and did not enquire.

Sparkle, the ancient pig dog and Rita, my final niece.  2.5 years and a full dose of ham under her figurative belt.  She likes masks, the same books over and over, picking all the flowers and getting her own way.  Don't we all?

Full moon through the dying cabbage trees in the back yard.  The Tasman Sea is eroding this part of the coast, regularly inundating the rear of these adjacent properties and salting up the water table.  Residents are stuck between spending remedial money they don't really have on houses that might not have a future anyway and someday writing the whole neighbourhood off, which will probably happen in my lifetime.  Local councils are impoverished by the death of coal mining and our national representatives are a pack of depraved arseclowns, so I don't envy their plight.  

The offending beach, to the north and south.  It is so peaceful and benign in its rapacity.

Below right- the West Coast is a geological orgy.  Local rivers and beaches serve up an endless selection of marble, agate, schist, quartz, nephrite, bowenite, pyrite, micaceous shit and other lithic porn for all your pointless stonehoarding requirements.  We never leave without a large bag(s) of tumbled precious.

Cottages; always so cute when you're not the ones shuffling buckets around under the leaks or nailing new bearers to the timber turning to dust under the front room or cussing out the rat nest in the toilet wall or I've made my point.  

​We love fucked-out old hoopty places, will probably always live in one and find new houses generally about as appealing as the refrigerated corpses of strangers dead of unknown causes.  New carpet solvents and windows that form a seal make me anxious.  

​WTF curtains, rotting piles, timber beetles and lumpy walls 4 eva.