for example a despicably criminal act in a beautiful garden. long-tongued topiary dragons guard the entry, three metres tall, and then there are many rows of new year citrus, each shrub trimmed into roundness, & each coming into their fullest colour now. and then, further beyond, many more rows of squat animals - frogs, bears, rabbits, all carved out of leaves.


at some point in the garden - beyond the sheltered rows - the animals lose their shape. she's taking her mother to see - her mother with the saddled waist and the ruined hips, who rolls along on her walking sticks, huffing, complaining - it isn't a lack of fitness, she says, I'm simply more tired than you know.


over here, mother, you see the pots are sinking into the ground, they've let the grass seed in the pots and they're getting all overgrown.


it's true. plainly no one comes to these rows to trim the grass around the pots, or even to ensure the pots can be lifted from the ground. some are sunk so deep that just the ruined rims surface here and there, roots cracking their sanctity and ploughing into the unbound earth beyond.


you should just tell me what you want me to see, says the mother. I'm not interested in walking further and there's a bench just here. she sits  - a painful bending at the knees followed by a quick, heavy collapse onto the stone bench. the daughter stays standing, picking bark from a scarred trunk. it seems the argument for evening air, for a stretching of the legs, will take them no further.


There's this kid. There's a man who lives in a shed, and a really old pergola, and there's this kid. I came and I looked from behind the pergola and saw the kid - she was standing with her arms out, holding two cans of paint out like this - and she stood there for as long as I did, with her arms trembling and sweat running down. the man was crouching under the pergola, transplanting these seedlings and - not watching her exactly, just now and then looking up.


The mother is breathing heavily, has been since she sat down. Well, she says, people live here. They always have. I never thought it was necessary to send them away. And I can't control what people do. You like to meddle. You think everyone should be like you, walk if you like to walk, no matter if they are tired or not. But it's evening now. The air's damp. It was after four when we left.


The daughter brought her mother a clementine to refresh her and they began to walk home.  That night, the daughter dreamed. There was the young girl holding the paint cans out, perpendicular to her body, and paint was spilling over their edges in a steady stream, as though the cans were filling and filling from within. The liquid had no colour, it was an emptiness, but it reflected the shapes and the dark green of the trees in the night as it pooled around her feet. Where was the man, the father? Laurel could not see him anywhere around the girl, under the pergola or in the shed, and yet the young girl held the paint cans out, just as though his eyes were only inches away from hers.

A wind was blowing up. The tops of the palms swayed giddily, so bare and far away, while in the mass of lower trees even thick branches shuddered. Creepers were picked up and held parallel to the earth, just like the child’s arms. The pergola groaned, and soon in a gust a spattering of heavy fruit fell. Laurel, on the verge of speaking, woke up.