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Glynis woke early but did not want to open her eyes. Last night’s conversation had gone on till late and was still heavy on her eyelids. She could hear the kettle whistling in the kitchen and small clinks and clatters of morning activity and some muffled conversation. Margoritt and Eleri were also up early.

“They can’t do that!” Eleri was saying angrily when Glynis walked into the room. She shook a piece of paper accusingly in Glynis’s direction. “They say we’ve got a week to vacate the cottage before they begin the demolition. A week!” She crumpled the letter and flung it on the table.

“I know,” said Glynis. “Margoritt showed me the letter last night.”

“Morning, Glynis,” said Margoritt. “Pomegranate tea?”

“Yes, thanks.” Glynis sat down opposite Eleri and picked up the letter. She smoothed it out, thoughtful.

“Well?” Eleri persisted. “They can’t do this. Forcing Margoritt out of her home.”

Margoritt placed a cup of steaming pomegranate tea in front of Glynis and sat down. Glynis noticed she had used the dainty floral tea set which was kept for “best”.

“I had an idea in the night,” said Glynis. “It might be crazy but it might just buy us some time.”

The others looked at her enquiringly. “We are all ears,” encouraged Eleri.

“I used to make an invisibility potion which would render a person invisible for a time. I think it might be possible to make a stronger brew and cloak the whole cottage. I would need to adjust the spell and we would need huge quantities of the potion but I think it might just work. It might buy us some time till the others get back. They can’t pull down what they can’t find!”

The memories of the strange vision had faded away. Only the feeling of awe was lingering in his heart.

Fox was walking in the forest near Margoritt’s cottage. The smell of humid soil was everywhere. Despite it being mostly decomposing leaves and insects, Fox found it quite pleasant. It carried within it childhood memories of running outside after the rain whild Master Gibbon was trying to teach him cleanliness. It had been a game for many years to roll into the mud and play with the malleable forest ground to make shapes of foxes and other animals to make a public to Gibbon’s teachings.

Fox had been walking around listening to the sucking sound made by his steps to help him focus back on reality. He was trying to catch sunlight patches with his bare feet, the sensations were cold and exquisite. The noise of the heavy rain had been replaced by the random dripping of the drops falling from the canopy as the trees were letting go of the excess of water they received.

It was not long before he found Gorrash. The dwarf was back in his statue state, he was face down, deep in the mud. Fox crouched down and gripped his friend where he could. He tried to release him from the ground but the mud was stronger, sucking, full of water.

“You can leave him there and wait the soil to dry. You can’t fight with water”, said Margorrit. “And I think that when it’s dry, we’ll have a nice half-mold to make a copy of your friend.”

Fox laughed. “You have so many strange ideas”, he told the old woman.

“Well, it has been my strength and my weakness, I have two hands and a strong mind, and they have always functioned together. I only think properly when I use my hands. And my thoughts always lead me to make use of my hands.”

Fox looked at Margoritt’s wrinkled hands, they were a bit deformed by arthritis but he could feel the experience they contained.

“Breakfast’s ready”, she said. “I’ve made some honey cookies with what was left of the the flour. And Glynis has prepared some interesting juices. I like her, she has a gift with colours.”

They left the dwarf to dry in the sun and walked back to the house where the others had already put everything on the table. Fox looked at everyone for a moment, maybe to take in that moment of grace and unlikely reunion of so many different people. He stopped at Rukshan who had a look of concern on his face. Then he started when Eleri talked right behind him. He hadn’t hear her come.

“I think I lost him”, she said. “What’s for breakfast? I’m always starving after shrooms.”

Yorath was still trying to explain the nature of forests, the rekindled understanding of the woodland habitats, the memory storing capacity of the vegetation in a vast network of twining tendrils and roots and so on, when Lobbocks burst into the room. Leroway had been finding himself unable to detach the workings of his mind from the contraptions he could assemble himself to control the natural states, and welcomed the interruption. If only Yorath would get to the point, he’d thought impatiently, then I could prepare to devise a solution ~ thereby entirely missing the point, although he didn’t realize it.

But here was Lobbocks, announcing a problem that required a solution, which was much more in line with Leroway’s thinking. As he listened to the tale of the stone statue now animated and angry, he immediately started to plan a device to capture, restrain and subdue it, to keep it from harming any of the citizenry.

Eleri, however, revealing herself from her eavesdropping position behind the door, had other ideas.

“I must speak to him!” she said. “I must know how he animated himself, without the aid of any of my ingredients.”

“Not to mention his vengeful attitude,” added Yorath. “Imagine if this happens again, to other stone statues and creatures.”

“Indeed we do, Yorath! I had considered the animation, purely from a physical capacity for movement standpoint, but I had not given much thought to the emotional condition in a reanimation process after a prolonged inanimate state. Oh hello, Leroway,” she added, noticing his look of surprise.

“Should I get a posse together to follow him then,” interjected Lobbocks, as Leroway and Eleri exchanged banal pleasantries about how long it had been since they’d met, “Because I think he’s looking for your workshop in the valley.”

Eleri ignored Leroway’s suggestion that she stay in the village while he conducted the mission to capture the statue, stating that she was leaving for home immediately, gratefully accepting Yorath’s announcement that he would accompany her. She went back up to attic to fetch her things, and stood at the window for a moment, looking up at the castle walls.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just walk in the other direction, and not look back? The temptation hovered, almost as tangible as the scent of orange blossom in the air. What was it that was keeping her here all these years? She was a wanderer by nature, or at least she had been. Were those days really gone? While everyone around her had been lightening their loads, ridding themselves of unnecessary baggage, loosening their ties, she’d done the opposite.

Sighing, she picked up her bag. She would return home.

The cry startled Lobbocks, who had been enjoying the long peaceful walk home through the forest, and instinctively he dived behind an uprooted tree stump. Peering between the fungi sprouting on the rotting limbs, he felt a moments disorientation as he identified the clumsy giant of a man as the statue of Hasamelis that stood opposite the town clock.

For a moment he felt mildly irritated at the interruption. Lobbocks always found solitary walks soothing and beneficial, despite his sociable personality, and was by no means averse to chance encounters and surprises. But this felt a bit different, even before Lobbocks had identified the intruder into his forest space. Whatever part of the woodland paths he was on, he considered his forest space. He didn’t tend to think much about the rest of the forest, just the space he was in. But usually the surprises and encounters glided in, or flew in, to his space ~ this one had dive bombed in, somehow. And who was the lad with him? The lad seemed to have glided in, but the statue crash landed.

For reasons he couldn’t fathom, although he didn’t wonder why at the time, he remained hidden. It simply didn’t occur to him to announce himself cordially, and simply ask a few questions of the fellow travelers, in an attempt to deduce the meaning of a statue relocating ~ and animating ~ in the middle of the forest.

Lobbocks breathed a sigh of relief as they lumbered off back down the hill, in the opposite direction to his journey home to the mountain village. The last thing he heard before they moved out of earshot was: “That woman who turned me to stone, she was down by a river, down in the valley….”

Aghast, Lobbocks started to understand why Hasamelis had felt so repellent. He was on a rampage of revenge and he blamed Eleri.

Should he follow them, try to over take them somehow, and warn Eleri? Or go back to the village and confer with the others. Lobbocks didn’t know a thing about magic, but some of the others did. And this might be one of those kind of things. Not like intercepting Leroway, back in the old days, so Eleri could slip away….

Lobbocks quickened his pace. Someone in the village would know what to do.

Eleri shivered. The cold had descended quickly once the rain had stopped. If only the rain had stopped a little sooner, she could have made her way back home, but as it was, Eleri had allowed Jolly to persuade her to spend the night in Trustinghampton.

Pulling the goat wool blankets closer, Eleri gazed at the nearly full moon framed in the attic window, the crumbling castle ramparts faintly visible in the silver light. The scene reminded her of another moonlit night many years ago, not long after she had first arrived here with Alexandria and Lobbocks.

It had been a summer night, and long before Leroway had improvised a cooling system with ventilation shafts constructed with old drainage pipes, a particularly molten sweltering night, and Eleri had risen from her crumpled sweaty bed to find a breath of cooler air. Quietly she slipped through the door willing it not to creak too much and awaken anyone. The cobblestones felt deliciously cool on her bare feet and she climbed the winding street towards the castle, her senses swathed in the scents of night flowering dama de noche. Lady of the Night, she whispered. Perhaps there would be a breeze up there.

She paused at the castle gate archway and turned to view the sleeping village below. A light glimmered from the window of Leroway’s workshop, but otherwise the village houses were the still dark quiet of the dreaming night.

Eleri wandered through the castle grounds, alternately focused on watching her step, and pausing for a few moments, lost in thoughts. It was good, this community, there was a promising feeling about it. It wasn’t always easy, but the hardships seemed lighter with the spirit of adventure and enthusiasm. And it was much better up here than it had been in the Lowlands, there was no doubt about that.

Her brow furrowed when she recalled her last days down there, when leaving had become the only possible course of action. Don’t dwell on that, she admonished herself silently. She resumed her aimless strolling.

Behind the castle, on the opposite side to the village, the ground fell away in series of small plateaus. At certain times of the years when the rains came, these plateaus were green meadows sprinkled with daisies and grazing goats, but now they were crisply browned and dry underfoot. Striking rock formations loomed in the darkness, looking like gun metal where the moonlight shone on them. One of them was shaped like a chair, a flat stone seat with an upright stone wedged behind it. Eleri sat, appreciating the feel of the cool rock through her thin dress and on her bare legs.

It feels like a throne, she thought, just before slipping into a half sleep. The dreams came immediately, as if they had already started and she only needed to shift her attention away from the hot night in the castle to another world. Her cotton shift became a long heavy coarsely woven gown, and her head was weighed down somehow. She had to move her head very slowly and only from side to side. She knew not to look down because of the weight of the thing on her head.

Looking to her right, she saw him. “Micawber Minn, at your service,” he said with a cheeky grin. “At last, you have returned.”

Eleri awoke with a start. Touching her head, she realized the weighty head dress was gone, although there was a ring of indentation in her hair. Her heavy gown was gone too, although she could still feel the places where the prickly cloth had scratched her.

Suddenly aware of the thin material of her dress, she glanced to her right. He was still there!

Spellbound, Eleri gazed at the magnificent man beside her. Surely she was still dreaming! Such an arresting face, finely chiseled features and penetrating but amused eyes. Broad shoulders, flowing platinum locks, really there was not much to fault. What a stroke of luck to find such a man, and on such a romantic night. And what a perfect setting!

And yet, although she knew she had never met him before, he seemed familiar. Eleri shifted her position on the stone throne and inched closer to him. He leaned towards her, opening his arms. And she fell into the rapture.

View (yes, his name is “View”) exited his building and before he had a chance to see anything else in the world, there in front of him, plopped down in the middle of the street with a piece of paper and charcoal, was a little boy, apparently doing a rubbing of the pavement.

View was immediately curious.

“So, what are you doing, exactly?”

The boy, slightly disgruntled, stopped what he was doing and looked up at View.

“Well that’s an obsurd question. You’d think it was obvious. I’m creating a map.”

“A map?!” View said, “How’s that? I don’t get it.”

The boy turned back to his rubbing, filled the page, set another down right beside it and began rubbing again.

“It’s the greatest map of it’s kind, exquisitely drawn up in perfect 1:1 scale.”

Hilda regretted her decision to fly to the British Isles, now that she was caught up in all the Fuxit brouhaha. The mysterious plague doctor in Chester had turned out to be nothing more than a common madman, looking for a party to crash. The Mexican band with a wheelbarrow full of bricks welcoming the orange toupee’d buffoon from the west had been momentarily amusing, but was nothing more than another common madman looking for a party to crash as far as Hilda could see, and not worth further investigation, but the madness that had enveloped the country over the Fuxit was another matter.

Exit mania had swept the country ~ and not only the country, but the continent as well. Doors were falling off their hinges on buildings across Europe with the rush of people demanding to leave, or trying to keep others out. Irate women were pushing their husbands out of the front door and locking them out, while shop assistants slammed the doors shut on customers, exercising their rights to determine who should be allowed in, and who should leave. “Exit” signs on motorways were set alight and exit ramps barricaded, lighted exit signs in nightclubs were smashed. Herds of dairy cows smashed down gates and roamed the streets, and sheep huddled next to boarded doorways.

Itinerant builders were in high demand to fix broken hinges on gates and doors, and the memes about the population becoming unhinged quickly ceased to amuse in the utter mayhem.

Hilda decided to get a flight back to Iceland as soon as possible. As an investigative reporter, she knew she should stay, but justified leaving on the grounds that a wider picture was imperative. And frankly, she’s seen enough!

But leaving the beleaguered nation was not going to be easy. The airline websites had been closed, and the doors on the travel agents had either been boarded up or had been removed altogether, and nobody was staffing the premises. The motorway exit ramp to the airport had been barricaded. Not to be deterred, Hilda left her hire car on the side of the road, and dragged her flight bag across the waste ground towards the airport building. The place was deserted: the doors on all the aircraft had been removed, and emergency exit signs lay smashed on the tarmac.

“Then I have no other option,” Hilda said, “But to teleport.”

The woman sitting next to me on the plane never stopped talking, she must have told me her whole life story, Aunt Idle wrote in her diary. It was a long flight from Australia to Iceland, I’m not complaining ~ it was quite an entertaining story. She said she came from Blue Lagoon campsite in the Adirondacks originally, although that was many moons ago, as she put it. Then she joined the army, but she didn’t tell me much about that, only that she’d been posted to Kenya and had taken to the place, always meant to go back and never did. She’s been married twice, once to a northerner called Bert Wagstaff, but that didn’t last long ~ nice enough guy, she said, but a bit boring. No kids. Then to Trudell. That was another story she said, but didn’t elaborate.

She said something about investigating fungus but the drinks trolley appeared. She asked for Blue Sapphire gin but they only had Gordon’s, and then she started going on about when she was in India. She had a book in her hands the whole flight, although she didn’t stop talking long enough to read much, it was The Rabbit, by Peter Day, with a picture of an upright man with a rabbit head on the cover, all in white, rather surreal.

“You’re lucky it wasn’t your hands,” said Tina. She had visited Quentin after Connie had left. Strange reporter that one. Kind of short sized with big eyes that never blinked. Tina snorted and dismissed the memory with a roll of her eyes, then looked at Quentin straight in the eyes, awaiting for his answer.

“What do you mean ?” asked Quentin. Tina didn’t expected the answer to be a question. She rolled her eyes as if Quentin had missed the obvious.

“The giant gouda ball, you’re lucky it didn’t roll on your hands.”

Quentin looked at Tina with a bit of concern in his eyes. She had been acting weird lately and making odd random connections between events and comments. He looked at his friend more closely. She had a bird nest on her head. With two eggs. It was a fake nest. He certainly hoped the eggs were too. He had no idea

“Anyway,” Tina said, “I won a trip to some island of the hidden people from the http://travellerofworlds.tp website. Wanna come with me, Quentin?”
He thought of his options. The most obvious response would be that he had no idea what a hidden people could be. If it was hidden it could very well be that it was hiddeous and needed to be hidden. On the other hand… Quentin looked at his other hand. It was empty.

“They say it’s on the rim of the realm,” added Tina as if she had read Quentin’s thought and need for a motive.
Now, he thought, the rim of the realm, that sounded quite an interesting unexplored territory to discover.
“When do we leave ? I need to ask Yannosh to pack my suitcase.”

Ever since she had read H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine” when she was 12, Sophie had been obsessed by the future. Now being a sweet old lady of 86, you would think she had used her share of the future and for most people her age it would be true. The trend would reverse and they would end up obsessed with the past.

But for sweet old Sophie, who was living in Eastend London, her interest in life was mostly fed by news of the future. She didn’t know how it was possible, but she certainly believed it was. And who better than a time traveller could send news from the future ?

She had been interested recently by an article about the telebeamer. They wanted to make you believe that in 2035 it was still impossible to transport yourself instantly from one place to another. She didn’t believe it of course. If time travel was possible, beaming yourself should be child’s play.

Sweet Sophie was not good at math when she was young, but she was good at puzzles. She had a knack with patterns and immediately see where the pieces fit together or not. The articles on that website were like puzzle pieces. All she had to do was sort out the facts from fiction and find her map to the time machine.

Now that she had found this invaluable source of information, she could plan her next move.

I dreamt about Mater last night. She was her old self, brilliant and snappily dangerous.

It’s been the first dream I’ve been able to remember in weeks. I don’t know why I expected the great beyond space to be less… claustrophobic, but there’s no escaping the confinement.
I was telling her I was missing home, the air, the smell of eucalyptus trees, the rains before winter. I think I even became sentimental about my sisters. Hardly a news from them these days, but how could I blame them. They are always busy on some down-to-earth cause, and I know better than to criticize those on the ground actually doing something to change the wrongdoings of the world.
When I started to cry uncontrollably, Mater told me I was a baby, and that I should man up. Typical Mater. Dido would have called her names under her breath, I think that was her way to express her love for her. People are silly.

In the dream, I stopped crying but the tears had swollen into a river, and I was starting to drown, things became hellish and I could barely breathe, but somehow I could still feel Mater’s presence, like a beacon. I made it out of the torrents onto an island. There were many refugees. The doctors had the strangest blue eyes, and Mater’s voice told me to trust the process but not the doctors. Then I felt all the blue eyes looking at me, and I woke up in a sweat.

Hans is still deep in a peaceful sleep, so I went out of the bedroom to get some water and check on the piggy and her litter. They are always sleeping blissfully too. It’s a wonder when you think of it, that I thought it was just getting fatter when it actually was pregnant from before we left Earth. Now they’re mostly an open secret, as everyone finds them so cute.

The most difficult was to conceal them from the reality TV show’s cameras. The hysterical fans are always scrutinizing every move we all make, and keeping some privacy is tricky, but apart from the external prying eyes, pretty much everyone here know about them and it’s like a game of hide and seek. I like how it fuels the speculations and paranoia of the Mars bunker debunking association, who think we’re all part of a mass cover-up. I’ve spent some time on their website when I couldn’t sleep the first weeks when we arrived. I would probably have never known about it, but I just searched for myself on the web, and found this thread about the new conspirators. I had to laugh at the beginning, but they raise reasonable doubts in the middle of their rants. By now, I know better than to raise the topic, especially after all the religious nonsense. Seems there are some people that get really annoyed when I asked naive questions about it, like Maya.

Like I said. People are silly.

Aunt Idle:

Bert came with me. Usually one of us always stayed home to keep an eye on Mater and the kids, but now we had that capable girl, Finly, to keep an eye on things.

It was good to get away from the place for a few hours, and head off on a different route to the usual shopping and errand trips. The nearest sizable town was in the opposite direction; it was years since I’d been to Ninetown. I asked Bert about the place on the other side of the river, what was it that intrigued him so. I’ll be honest, I wondered if he was losing his marbles when he said it was the medieval ruins over there.

“Don’t be daft, Bert, how can there be medieval ruins over there?” I asked.

“I didn’t say they were medieval, Idle, I said that’s what they looked like,” he replied.

“But …but history, Bert! There’s no history here of medieval towns! Who could have built it?”

“That’s why I found it so fucking interesting, but if it doesn’t fit the picture, nobody wants to hear anything about it!”

“Well I’m interested Bert. Yes, yes, I know I wasn’t interested before, but I am now.”

Bert grunted and lit a cigarette.

We stopped at a roadside restaurant just outside Ninetown for lunch. The midday heat was enervating, but inside the restaurant was a pleasant few degrees cooler. Bert wasn’t one for small talk, so I picked up a local paper to peruse while I ate my sandwich and Bert tucked into a greasy heap of chips and meat. I flicked through it without much interest in the mundane goings on of the town, that is, until I saw those names: Tattler, Trout and Trueman.

It was an article about a ghost town on the other side of Ninetown that had been bought up by a consortium of doctors. Apparently they’d acquired it for pennies as it had been completely deserted for decades, with the intention of developing it into an exclusive clinic.

“There’s something fishy about that!” I exclaimed, a bit too loudly. Several of the locals turned to look at me. I lowered my voice, not wanting to attract any more attention while I tried to make sense of it.

“Read this!” I passed the paper over the Bert.

“So what?” he asked. “Who cares?”

“Look!” I said, jabbing my finger on the names Tattler, Trout and Trueman. Bert looked puzzled, understandably enough. “Allow me to explain” I said, and I told him about the business card that Flora had left on the porch table.

“What does Flora have to do with this consortium of doctors? And what the hell is the point in setting up a clinic there, in the middle of nowhere?”

“That,” I replied, “Is the question!”

Mater:

I showed Finly to her room. I have put her in room 10 — opposite Mr What’s-his-name, the guest — which is the nicest guest room in the house and one of the few which Fred got round to doing up before he left.

On the spur of the moment I asked her if she believed in ghosts. She looked at me intently and said “There’s a lot we don’t understand. I can’t say I believe or disbelieve.” And that was it. I didn’t press it further. She is a serious girl but her references were excellent and I think she will be a hard worker. Not one to take nonsense from anyone.

I asked her if she would like the day off tomorrow to settle in and suggested she could start her duties on Wednesday.

“I can see I have my work cut out here,” she said. “The sooner I get started the better.”

And dear God we need some help around here, I thought.

The other day I caught Dido throwing gin all over herself and laughing. I am concerned I will need to call mental health services soon. I didn’t say anything at the time — I don’t think she saw me. I have been annoyed with her in the past for her lackadaisical attitude towards caring for the kids, but when I saw the poor demented thing throwing gin at herself, well, for the first time I felt really sorry for her.

Flora, rising late as was her custom, and feeling the relaxing glow of being on holiday, strolled leisurely out of her bedroom door in search of coffee. As she stepped into the corridor, one of the twins, not watching where she was going, collided with her surprisingly forcefully, knocking her to the ground. She knocked her head on the door frame, felt a rush of noise and the sweet metallic scent of blood before losing consciousness.

“Flora! Miss Fenwick! Oh my god, Flora!” Corrie cried. After getting no reaction from the inert body and seeing the pool of blood spreading alarmingly, she sped off to find Aunt Idle.

As soon as Corrie was out of sight, Prune emerged from the broom cupboard opposite, saw the body on the floor, and ran in the opposite direction in search of Bert.

Bert watched Clove disappear down the hall, and crept out from his hiding place behind the door of the room opposite room 8. He’d positioned himself to get a look at the new guest; something about Prune’s description of him had set of alarm bells in his mind and he wanted to see the new guest for himself.
Silent as a cat, he crept over and pressed his ear to the strangers door. Nothing but the sounds of cutlery scraping plate. Bert waited.
Time limped along but Bert stayed put with his ear pressed to the door. Eventually, he heard it. That humming noise. He remembered it, although he didn’t know what it was, didn’t know what to make of it.
He’d been ten years old when he heard it the first time, ten years old when a dust covered man in a broad brimmed hat had appeared in town. Dang, the guy hadn’t aged in all these years. He was sure it was the same fella, he’d known it the minute he saw him through the crack of the door, but especially now he’d heard that humming.

“How very strange” said Igor, when they eventually reached the waterfall.
“What?” asked Mirabelle, who was paying more attention to the parrot perched on her shoulder. She tickled him under the chin. “Who’s a pretty boy then? muah muah muah pretty parrot, where have you been?”
Igor rolled his eyes at the kissing noises. “Look!” he said, pointing at the waterfall.
“It’s a fucking waterfall, yes, I see it!” snapped Mirabelle. Finding Huhu had distracted her from the discomfort of hunger, thirst and an aching body, but Igor’s questions brought her back to the reality of their situation.
Then it dawned on her. The waterfall plummeted downwards, in a seemingly infinite series of cascades and pools. It was impossible to see the bottom with the spray and mist, especially in the fading daylight.
“But we are still at sea level, Igor! The waterfall should be going up, not down. I mean to say, we should be looking up at the waterfall flowing down. This isn’t making any sense. But look” she said, pointing to the first pool on the right. “There is a little hut there and some people. Fat people.” she added. “I bet they will have some food, let’s go and ask.”
Igor stepped cautiously to the edge and and peered over, looking for a way down. He looked down, then looked back at the little stream they had followed from the sea, and then back down again.
“This water is breaking all the rules!” he cried. “It’s flowing in both directions!”
“Don’t be silly Igor, are you delirious? Everyone knows that water flows downhill towards the sea.”
“See for yourself then, look!” he put a stick in the stream and they watched it flow gently back the way they had come, towards the bay. “Now watch,” he said, as he tossed another stick over the edge of the waterfall. It quickly disappeared from view as it rushed downwards, in the opposite direction.
“Where is the source? Where is the water coming from?”
“Those fat people might know. Have you found a way down yet?”
It appeared that the only way down to the pool of the fat people was via the waterfall itself. There were sheer cliffs of malachite and rose quartz on either side of the waterfall as far as the eye could see.
“I think we will have to go down the waterfall itself, Mirabelle.”
She gasped and took an involuntary step back.
“We will have to steer ourselves towards where we want to go, that’s all.”
“Oh no, not me, if you think I’m going to just throw myself over a waterfall…Oh! Huhu come back!”
The parrot flew down to the pool of the fat people, and settled on a banana tree, watching Mirabelle above looking down at him.
“Fucking parrot,” muttered Mirabelle. “I’ll clip your wings when I catch hold of you, I swear I will. For your own fucking good! Well?” she said, turning to Igor. “Are you coming or what?” and she launched herself over the edge and into the waterfall, with one thought in her mind ~ the bloody parrot.
With a great splash, she landed in the rose coloured pool, bobbing to the surface like a cork. Disgruntled silvery fish leaped out of the water, one of them landing on the barbecue. Mirabelle waded out of the pool, oblivious to the fish, and the looks of amazement on the faces of the fat people, and walked over to the banana tree.
Huhu ripped a banana off a ripe yellow bunch and dropped it, squalking in delight as Mirabelle caught it in her hands. When Huhu saw that she was focused on peeling it and eating it, he fluttered down and perched on her shoulder. She gave the parrot the last bit of banana, and then turned her attention to the fat people and the barbecued fish.

The breeze was brisk and refreshing despite the weighted heat of the sun, and there were windblown plums and oleander flower heads like dried roses scattered over the patio. Lisa turned the pump on to hose down the dog piss, and started in her customary fashion of starting at the bottom of the patio to wet it down to prepare for a smoother flow from the top near the house. A bit like whetting it’s appetite, she thought, for the stream of diluted yellow piss and detritus. When the bottom was lubricated, she dragged the hose to the top and meticulously hosed every leaf and dog hair from every nook and cranny, behind plant pots and chair legs, under the welcome mat, and the surface of it, chasing the debris with a narrow intense focus of water at times, and at other times with a broad spray, depending on which method was more efficacious in the situation. If it was very hot, sometimes she would spray the tree tops, for no reason other than to stand under the false rain and cool down. She avoided doing this in the middle of the day however, for fear of the water droplets becoming magnifying glasses and scorching the leaves. Making jungle showers was best done as the sun was sinking, when the heat of the day shimmered from every thing saturated with dense warmth.
But it was morning, late morning, and not too hot yet as Lisa continued directing the cleansing flow. She realized that she was very meticulous about hosing the patio, minimum twice a day, and always flushed the rubbish from behind each and every obstacle, even though it was not really necessary to do it so often; merely washing away the smell of dog urine would be enough. It was like a ritual, and she noticed for the first time that she was much more conscientious about, and indeed proficient at, manipulating a hose than she ever was with a broom or a duster. In fact, Jack had once said to her that she handled a hose like a Moroccan, and that had she been working on the building site that he was working on at the time, he would have given her the job of hosing. He said not everyone could handle a hose in such an efficient manner. Lisa was not known for being adept with tools at all, preferring to get on her knees to rake leaves with her hands than struggle with a rake. But with a hose, she was good, very good.
Lisa always checked that the bird bath was topped up with fresh water, and the water bowls for the dogs, wasps, and other creatures were replenished.
The levels that Jack had constructed worked marvelously well, and as the hosing continued the various streams gathered speed and joined together for the last slope into the garden, and down the path to pool at the bottom, next to the well from where the water was being pumped to the top from. Back to the source, full circle, impurities filtered through layers and layers of rock until sparkling clear once more, to restore and refresh another day.
Oh go on with you, Lisa giggled to herself, What a load of flowery nonsense.