‘What will you do today?’ I ask. And she says, ‘We’ll ride the train to the dried-up river. Like we do every day.’

And every time she says it, I remember how we met. Sailing on a make-believe liner around a make-believe world.

They will make flowers, then go to the bridge.

And while I stand there, white-faced, in the beating heat of concrete, my arms rattling in their sockets with the work, I will imagine them. My Naiads washed up.

I will hear, through the roar of the work, the snip of their scissors.

I will imagine them filling the city with blooms. Dancing over the streets. Planting flowers in the cracks of the kerbs.

BUTTERFLIES

Ruth steps into the pool of warmth ebbing off the tarmac between the beautiful ornate old gates and the high fence that blocks the park from view.

Already, the sounds of the city seem muffled. Stripped of urgency and flattened.

She has a little flush of nerves when she fears she might have left the ticket in her coat back at the staff room in the hospital. But no. It’s there. An old-fashioned paper slip, a thank you from a patient’s family.

The original railings – tipped like arrowheads, all around the grounds – are finished with black paint. She can’t help but think the paint is somehow melted in the sun. It looks still wet and makes her want to touch it. Recalls the hard liquorice she used to covet from her father as a child, small diamonds sticky in her mouth; the way she and her brother Leo used to see which of them could keep one longest on their tongue.

~

There’s a booth with an actual person, wearing a name badge. So surprising it makes her childish. But then, there’s a warm nervousness just beneath her skin right now. Ever since she lied to Colin. Told him she would be on a late shift and said yes to tonight.

There’s been nothing recently. And every time she thinks about it, she recognises just how long she means when she says ‘recently’.

His mind is always somewhere else. Always with the same excuse, ‘It’s work.’

This business with the Ice Dock. He’s certain there’s some big scandal to uncover. But when is he not? Certain this is his chance to write his breakthrough story. Always, she thinks, something is the chance to write his breakthrough story.

He’s sure other journalists are safe in someone’s pocket.

This piece. The cycling. His love of antique letter openers. He has obsessions. Colin.

She’s realised that’s all she was to him, and that for a few years now, she’s been little more than furniture.

That for a long, long time, every time she goes home, she hopes he will be different. Will have lifted from his bubble.