rack of my ass, coursing
down my legs. I press my face to the cool painted cinderblock walls, one cheek
and then the other, and continue on.

When I finally open the door that leads out onto the pebbled roof, the dawn cool
is balm. Fingers of light are hauling the sunrise up over the horizon. I step
onto the roof and feel the pebbles dig into the soft soles of my feet, cool as
the bottom of the riverbed whence they'd been dredged. The door starts to swing
shut heavily behind me, and I whirl and catch it just in time, getting my
fingers mashed against the jamb for my trouble. I haul it back open again
against its pneumatic closure mechanism.

Using the side of my foot as a bulldozer, I scrape up a cairn of pebbles as high
as the door's bottom edge, twice as high. I fall into the rhythm of the work,
making the cairn higher and wider until I can't close the door no matter how I
push against it. The last thing I want is to get stuck on the goddamn roof.

There's detritus mixed in with the pebbles: cigarette butts, burnt out matches,
a condom wrapper and a bright yellow Eberhard pencil with a point as sharp as a
spear, the eraser as pink and softly resilient as a nipple.

I pick up the pencil and twiddle it between forefinger and thumb, tap a nervous
rattle against the roof's edge as I dangle my feet over the bottomless plummet
until the sun is high and warm on my skin.

The hamsters get going again once the sun is high and the cars start pulling
into the parking lot below, rattling and chittering and whispering, yes o yes,
put the pencil in your nose, wouldn't you rather be happy than smart?

11.

Art and Linda in Linda's miniscule joke of a flat. She's two months into a
six-month house-swap with some friends of friends who have a fourth-storey
walkup in Kensington with a partial (i.e. fictional) view of the park. The
lights are on timers and you need to race them to her flat's door, otherwise
there's no way you'll fit the archaic key into the battered keyhole -- the
windows in the stairwell are so grimed as to provide more of a suggestion of
light than light itself.

Art's ass aches and he paces the flat's three wee rooms and drinks
hormone-enhanced high-energy liquid breakfast from the half-fridge in the
efficiency kitchen. Linda's taken dibs on the first shower, which is fine by
Art, who can't get the hang of the goddamned-English-plumbing, which delivers an
energy-efficient, eat-your-vegetables-and-save-the-planet