He felt the rifle calculate for distance, calculate for force.

‘. . . seconds,’ lost in the thickening noise. The bullet’s path, a dream burst into flame and char, disintegrate to ash. The train some crashing wave.

It would happen with no more effort than it took to pick away a hangnail.

‘Clearing sector,’ Branner said.

It’s all you have now. Duty.

PAPER FLOWERS

The electric passenger trains hiss along the nearby tracks and it sounds like I remember wind does, moving through wide forests. A rhythm to it, a pulse almost, as if the city’s breathing.

There is only early morning light. Then the Water Train passes. Different. A weight of sound. The sound of a great waterfall crashing into a pool. It has the power church bells must used to have.

I have seen it pass above the houses on its lifted steel tracks and felt the shake it brings to the floor. Seen its hoses and pipes. The heavy protection.

It is meant to look magnificent, impregnable, but it looks uncertain, like a person others have decided to make into their hero.

It’s always about the image of a thing, in most minds.

It thunders by. And after it has passed, all the sounds seem to drop from the air for a moment. As if it leaves a vacuum.

I hear the soilmen then come for the soilets, clattering in the street below. Nita moves gently, next to me in the bed, the faint acidity of alcowash and the covering scent in her hair, and I am certain the noise they make will wake her.

There is something daring about the way they make such noise. As if to provoke you to complain, so they can say ‘Is this a job you’d like to do? Is this a job you’d like us not to do?’ The games we make of our jobs.

But she stays asleep.

Hillie though, her daughter, wakes. I hear her get up from her mattress and quietly play behind the sheet they modestly hang across the bedsit when I come here. ‘Happy in her own skin.’ A phrase I learnt from Nita when we met. Like an object she gave me to keep.

I hear the little one say ‘pooh’ and ‘yuk’, the stink now as they empty the chute bins out into the truck. Lie there, listening to the soilmen move along the buildings, the throb of the pipe sucking, chugging up the fibre and muck until they are too far down the street to hear; but the smell lingers. Treacly. Or perhaps just seems so, because my mouth is sticky and dry. The cement dust gets everywhere.

That first time I saw them, they were sitting together with their legs through the railings, looking out over the edge of the embankment, above the drained riverbed, pretending to be on a ship. They were pretending the city was a great old-fashioned ocean liner sailing through the sea.