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John did not wish to embarrass or confront Evelyn with her brave attempt to reach out to him using the Milton Pet Shop e-mail address, so he decided to delete the e-mail instead of pressing reply. He also needed time to think of what and how that reply should be conducted. He tried to think of a way to return such a fey approach without scaring her away. When Evelyn arrived for work he greeted her with, ‘And I see you every day too.'

Her quick rejoinder of ‘Except Sundays and Mondays' hadn't left much of an opening. However, he thought on that too and began to form the view that this might be another hint. Perhaps she wanted to see him outside of working hours.

He walked along the fish tanks ostensibly to check that all the water filters were in good working order and to retrieve any floaters. It was at this point that John had wished he had not deleted the poem. He wanted to study it for further clues. He couldn't recall whether ‘dreams' had a rhyme in the poem.

He decided it was now up to him and not Evelyn. She had shown her interest and was waiting for him, the male, to make the next move. The move probably needed to be decisive and somewhat unequivocal. And so, John closed the front of the shop before nine and followed Evelyn out the back to talk to her while she watered the outside aviaries.

He ambled up to Evelyn's cage, where she was watering the budgies, and feigned interest in two birds he had been worrying over for some months. ‘I might breed those two.'

‘Goodness no. Never waste a superior cock on a mediocre hen. Anyway, they're both too old, I think.'

Old. There it was. ‘You're right. I'm being stupid.'

Evelyn came out of the cage and latched it. ‘I'm sure I've seen something in one of the pamphlets you printed out for the customers.'

John had spent some weekends exploring
The Art of Printing
CD-ROM on the computer and come up with a variety of colourful pictures and jaunty fact summaries for potential customers. He'd stopped when the costs of the coloured inks for the printer had outstripped customer interest, but he liked that Evelyn had noticed his creative side.

‘Here.' Evelyn began to read aloud from the pamphlet. ‘While some cocks remain potent and can fertilise eggs over a period of years,
hens quite often become unreliable after their third season. Ageing budgerigars should not be paired with each other but each should be provided with young mates.' Evelyn looked up with a particularly meaningful raise of her eyebrows.

‘So the old cock won't be rejected by the young hen?'

‘Not once they get used to each other.'

John smiled at her, trying to show he understood her message.

Evelyn looked at him oddly, then said, ‘Well, as you always say, these birds aren't going to water themselves.'

John realised that he did say that often. He wondered if he was funny. Women liked funny. Evelyn went about her watering as she did most mornings, but for the first time, John found himself looking at the way her small bum moved in her tight skirt.

Adam tried to concentrate on his work. He reminded himself of the promise of the humble postage stamp and how that little sticky square represented not only the Queen but also the interconnected apparatus that was the postal service and its web of other postal services across the whole world as it had done for hundreds of years. He was part of a giant net thrown across every human on earth. He thought of the ships, sails unfurled, decks awash, carrying the mail across the oceans. He recalled the tales of men on horses pursued by Indians, trying to get those satchels of letters through. He imagined a pith-helmeted postman in Afghanistan, leading camels up rocky trails evading bandits. He saw snow and sleet and rain and nameless trudging sack-bearing posties. He saw one swim a swollen river – only the river became the river in Mukinbudin, in full flood, frothing as it surged and broiled, tearing Amber-Lee's partly clad body away from him forever.

Adam stood at his desk, panting. He had not delivered Amber-Lee safely. He had not delivered her at all. He looked at the grey concrete wall across the corridor. The lamplight barely illuminated the stains and cracks there. Sometimes Adam imagined mountains and once an eagle, half-stretched. Now Adam thought he saw a wolf's face, eyes blazing, but then it was gone. He needed to get
out of the dark of the Lost Mail Department and find some air and light. He had a couple of letters, the addresses of which he had deciphered that morning. He wrote them into his dispatch book and hurried them up to the bright and noisy mail sorting department full of its ordered clatter and happily shared industry.

Paul crept in through the back door of his parents' house using the key that was kept on a hook behind the camellia bush. He'd been waiting over the road with Jane until they saw his mother leave. His father was at work.

Jane had stayed with the stolen Holden Commodore VN with the motor running. They had hot-wired it using instructions Jane had found through the computer, and they weren't sure whether they could turn the motor off and restart it using the same method. It was a shame computers weren't portable. Jane had chosen the car model by accessing government reports in which the police stated that the Holden Commodore VN was the most stolen vehicle of 1988. She hoped it might still be the easiest in 1991. She had also used other studies which suggested the statistical clustering of car theft at large suburban shopping centres to select their hunting ground.

Paul stopped at the fridge and found some cold chicken. Then he went to his childhood bedroom and was pleased to see that it remained clean, tidy and with his bed made. It was all as he'd left it a year before. He made his way to his parents' bedroom, comforted that the room still smelled of a very specific combination of his parents' various skin creams, complex yet dominated by vanilla.

At the bottom of his father's side of the built-in robes, he opened one of his father's boxes of bullets and took three out. He had promised Jane three. He hadn't mentioned that there were boxes of bullets. Nor had he mentioned that there was a .22 rifle in the cupboard that used the bullets. He hadn't told her about the shotgun. He wished he'd never said anything about the bullets. Now he was simply trying to minimise the damage. He also knew that he couldn't mention the shotgun because it was used for his father's hunting trips. His father would be criticised. Paul would be implicated. Jane would discover that he
had participated in the duck slaughter, albeit when he was twelve. Paul recalled the smell of cordite and men's sweat. He remembered finding pellets in the flesh of the duck they'd roasted by the water and spitting them with little tinkles into a metal plate for that purpose and the good-humoured teasing laughter of the other hunters. Even now he couldn't manage to feel fully ashamed. He put the three bullets in his pocket, put the chicken bones in the kitchen tidy and washed his hands in the bathroom, locking the back door before returning the key to its secret hook.

Howard was at Adam's desk reading the dispatch journal. Adam stepped back into an alcove where the plumbing pipes went into the floor and watched Howard look from the journal to the shelves. ‘Got you,' he said, straightening with a triumphant smile. Adam edged back further under the darkness of piping as Howard strode past. At his desk, the dispatch book was open under Adam's lamplight. The dispatch book listed the lost mail that the Lost Mail clerk had found. It listed where it had now been correctly sent. The large box which Howard had seen him acting suspiciously around was not listed. And yet it was no longer on the shelf. Howard had indeed got him.

The idea of posting the item to himself, so that he could fix the box at home and then mail it back to the Lost Mail Department, had seemed like a good one at the time. Perhaps he would have been better trying to fix it at work. But Howard kept lurking. And the journal by his predecessor had been quite adamant in warning about telling. Now the explanation of Adam's honourable intentions sounded flimsy even to Adam. Theft? Fraud?

All Adam could think of was running away. Had he done this from the flood-swept car? Had he done this from the ashes of the farm? Would he run from Howard now? Yes. Well no. He would leave work now, early it was true, but it was not to run away. It was to run to. He would go to Evelyn and he would ask her for a date and possibly later marriage and a lifetime of happiness.

At four p.m., exactly one hour early, Adam defiantly crept out of the GPO.

It was four p.m. when Paul's mother came out of the flats carrying the rubbish. Living near the rear of the supermarket had many advantages, one being a biweekly rubbish pick-up. She was pleased to be rid of the prawn shells that she and Paul's father had eaten the night before and had been surprised by the extra tidying needed in Paul's flat. Paul had never been an untidy boy. She emptied the rubbish into the bin for flat one, affixing the metal lid firmly.

The Rover that Paul's father had helped him ‘do up' and ‘get going' was still parked outside, yet Paul wasn't home. He'd probably caught the bus to the university. Someone had snapped off the car's aerial. She went to inspect the car for any other signs of damage. ‘This place is full of vandals, Baby.'

Baby was the name of Mrs McGready's cat. It wound itself around Paul's mother's legs, luxuriating in the self-administered caress and faint aroma of prawns.

When Adam entered Milton's Pet Shop, Evelyn ran up to him. ‘Adam!' she said. ‘Not more birdseed!' Her face was flushed.

‘No, um, I'm good for seed.'

‘Those two birds. Are they getting on?'

‘Yes.'

She blinked a number of times, and smiled eagerly.

Adam said, ‘I want to ask you out on a date.'

‘A date?'

‘Not a date. Terrible word. Um, a meeting. Outing? The movies. Um, Friday and we'd just be watching the same film, sitting next to each other.'

‘Evelyn, can you come here please.' It was Evelyn's boss, standing at the back door.

‘I'm serving a customer, Mr Tagliatelli.'

‘You! What are you always doing here?'

‘This is Adam, Mr Tagliatelli. We're going out. On a date. Tonight. Now.'

Adam said, ‘Now?'

The boss said, ‘You can't go now. It's not even half past four.'

‘I'm leaving early. With Adam. To see a film.' She went around the counter to get her black cardigan.

‘Now,' said Adam, quietly.

Mr Tagliatelli said, ‘But you can't. I was going to do a stocktake. Tonight.'

He had been pursuing Evelyn all day, asking her to feel his muscles when he lifted things needlessly and made weak puns about feather ruffling and counting eggs before they hatched. She'd been trying to evade him all day, but he had only then managed to corner her between cages. He told her about his wife dying and never daring to dream. He panted and tried to push himself against her. But she'd heard someone come into the shop and now she could get away from him.

Mr Tagliatelli said, ‘I was going to get some Chinese takeaway.'

Evelyn took Adam's elbow and steered him out of the shop.

They crossed behind a green Commodore and walked away from the GPO.

‘What film shall we see?' asked Adam as he walked with Evelyn towards where he thought he'd seen a cinema from the bus.

‘Um. I don't know. I don't see many films. They seem to start well and then someone has to spoil things.'

‘Oh, well, we'll see what's on. I'm sure there's something. I hadn't checked, you see. I would have been ready for eight p.m. Friday, but I wasn't thinking about four p.m. on a Thursday. I've only been in the city for four days.' Adam clamped his hand over his mouth to stop himself telling her his life story.

A whoosh of air brakes made Adam turn before he could say more. It was a blue garbage truck. A man jumped down at them. Only it wasn't a man. It was the butch girl with her breasts pushing her singlet. She grabbed up the public litter bin out of its metal cage right by them and hoisted it to a man on the back of the truck. He emptied the papers and crusts and cool drink cans and handed it back down. The girl crashed the bin back into the cage and yelled, ‘Slam dunk!' She looked at Adam and smiled, her teeth bright white in her grime-smudged face. The truck moved off and she turned and chased it yelling, ‘Frank, you bastard. You're a fucking bastard.'

Adam turned to Evelyn who must have been watching too, for she was standing still, breathing shallowly, with her fists up over her ears.

‘Are you okay?' Adam asked.

She opened her eyes. Shook herself. ‘The street. It's so...'

‘There's a park. With a seat.' Across the road was a tiny park of grass between two office towers, stretching from this street to the next. It had a path leading to a bench seat in the middle and another path leading out to the other street.

‘There's pigeons,' she said.

‘We need to run,' said Adam, holding her hand tightly as they stepped onto the city street and ran across a break in the traffic and into the park.

A green Commodore indicated and tried to cross the three lanes of traffic, but car horns beeped and two taxis neatly closed up and blocked the attempt.

The pigeons were milling around the seat.

‘I'm sorry,' Evelyn said brightly, ‘we haven't got anything for you.'

They ignored her, continuing to work on the grass seeds.

‘How are your birds getting on?' she asked as she settled on the bench.

‘I think they're a bit wary of each other.'

Evelyn nodded seriously.

‘So, apart from loving birds, tell me something about you and your life,' Adam said.

She nodded and thought and finally said, ‘Birds can fly. I mean, isn't that so ... exquisite? But that is why they're so delicate. Their feathers are also pretty.'