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Bugger-me Jill makes her way down through the newly painted ruins of her life into the crowded cafe of her mind that sits tired on a corner down a dimly lit lane that's frequented by faceless men who are loved by flat-chested, cow-eyed women who never speak except to say thank you and who carry long handled, shortbladed knives and despise all smooth skinned teenage boys that are prettier than them.

She orders a flat white with froth and sprinkled on top with chocolate. She won't call it a cappuccino. She hates Italians. A brother she never had, but dreamed up in a story she created as a child, a long time ago, while waiting in the car, while parked in the car-park of a club, while her parents were inside drinking and playing the pokies for hours and hours, from early afternoon till late in the night, her brother, the brother she created, that she nurtured like a mother from infancy to early adult hood, all in less than half a day, was killed when, late at night, the headlight of the Ducati motorcycle he was riding failed and he went over a cliff and went through the roof of a house and landed on a woman that was bathing her Great Dane in the bath. The woman and the Great Dane, who looked remarkably like her parents, survived.

Bugger-me Jill sinks down into the soft cushions of hours that are piled high around the edges of the cafe in unruly heaps of incomprehensible chatter. The hours squish with her weight, hours upon hours, the hours of her life, ooze out about her and waft up, entangled and distorted, and mix with the aroma of her coffee, and lift her into memories that have shed the skin of their time and become not what was, but what should've been. She looks out the dust-streaked, moisture-glazed windows that are her eyes and sees a mother, a small baby held tightly to her breast, dart through traffic to the other side of the road. 'If only I could have a baby' thinks Bugger-me Jill. 'Then I would be able to shrink and grow away from myself. Dedicate myself to someone who is not me, but is of me. Someone who may deny me, but will never escape the me inside them. I want to feel the pain of birth, to scream new life into existence. I want to feel, to fear for someone else, to feel the hand of a better me stroke my brow as my atoms mingle with a new beginning that neither remembers nor knows me, but does need me.'

Bugger-me Jill puts down her coffee and leaves her cafe and takes her mobile phone from her handbag, rings Jingo Bill and asks: 'watta you doing?'

Last night Jingo Bill was in someone else's dream, and in that dream he met a stranger from a very strange land where nobody did much of anything except refuse to be led and file smooth all things that had a point, because points always end up being a pain in some poor bastard's arse. And, in a tyre recycling plant that turned tyres into rubber trees, that stranger explained to Jingo Bill why some people have ear lobes and others don't. It's because in the womb, he said, the unborn that pull down on the bottom of their ears create ear lobes, while the unborn, who pull up from the top of their ears create points. People without earlobes, but with points, aren't welcome in the stranger's land. And when Jingo Bill asked what happens to those with points. The stranger said, don't you listen? They get filed smooth. Jingo Bill said, that must hurt. The stranger then said, that's the point. Then the stranger left the dream that wasn't Jingo Bill's. And Jingo Bill didn't leave the dream, but was evicted when the person who's dream it was woke up. The person is Sustainable Teddy. And he wrote down on a piece of paper: Jingo Bill owes me one night's rent of a dream. And then he put that piece of paper in a draw full of other pieces of paper that had the names of others who had inhabited his dreams without paying rent. Sustainable Teddy isn't against sharing his dreams; he's against freeloaders. Freeloaders are unsustainable. Sustainable Teddy hates freeloaders. And he also hates those who vote for whoever's leading in the polls because they want to be on the winning side. Jingo Bill puts on his pants, whiffs the fart the girl in his bed let off in her sleep, and wonders whose dream she's in, and why interesting people like the stranger are never in his dreams. Today, Jingo Bill thinks, I will form my own political party and stand against points.

Gilbert Iwannabesomebodyelse, with a pair of false ears on his head that blush like hazard lights on a truck when he thinks, parades around his flat, which no one but his mother and his best friend, an Indian who doesn't like cricket, but likes to visit Gilbert in the early hours of the morning, drunk, on his way back from the brothel that offers two Asian girls for the price of one on Tuesday nights, and sits on Gilbert's couch while Gilbert makes him a cup of instant coffee that he has without milk or sugar, which he never drinks, but says thank you for and holds in his lap and tells Gilbert about how lonely he is and how his family back home in India keep asking him for money that he'd prefer to spend on booze and cheap whores, until his coffee is cold, then he goes, after asking Gilbert for fifty dollars, which Gilbert always refuses, Gilbert, alone, alone, but sincerely committed to his beliefs and his politics and his party, parades around his flat, which he does just as often as he can between work and sleep, in his ears and red speedos, singing out the mantra of real action: STOP! STOP! STOP!

Pacific Paddy goes down to the waterfall to feed the falling fish choo-choo bars and spiritual tid-bits that come in pellets the colour of candy--artificial in both flavour and colour. When the fish, flustered and confused, flap themselves onto rocks and babble in a strange language that certainly isn't fish, Pacific Paddy, thinking they are a thankless, godless lot that are trying to make fun of him, he takes himself off deeper into the bush to a spot he had cleared last spring for the arrival of visitors he had in a dream last week. After three hours he forgets about the visitors and starts thinking about the red headed girl he didn't vote for because Gilbert Iwannabesomebodyelse told him she isn't a natural redhead at all. Pacific Paddy, disillusioned and sick and tired of choice, shouts out to the all about, 'Nobody chooses to be born, do they?' The all about is silent.

On the 21st floor, in the limbo room of her flat, which is the room others call the toilet, waiting for the rejected parts of all she ate yesterday to be evacuated from her bowels, sits Bugger-me Jill, looking down, through binoculars, at a turtle-eyed girl, with the neck of a gazelle and the body of a garden skink, in the back yard of next door, (the only stand alone house with a front and back yard left in the entire street, maybe the entire suburb) peg men's clothes to the sagging wires of a lop-sided Hill's hoist.

In her kitchen sits Sustainable Ted picking his nose then, with the same finger, poking about inside his ear, then inside his boxers to scratch his balls then wiping his nose while on its way to rub the sleep from his eyes. Sustainable Ted then flicks the pages of Circus Monthly until he comes to the wanted ads, then, using the same finger he uses for everything else, including sex and pointing out everyday wanders through the window of his car, which, the car that is, is the only reason Bugger-me Jill goes out with him and why she usually comes home with him, he finds F for freaks. There are 14 positions available for freaks. Nine want freaks with more than three years experience; four want freaks with deformities not caused by road accidents, and one for a hermaphrodite that's not in love with itself but doesn't mind pretending it is, for four nights a week, out the back of the big top, behind the shooting gallery, where the lights don't shine, only flicker, in a caravan decorated with painted clouds and marked 'Our Angel in Heaven.' And in smaller print: 'Line up in an orderly fashion to the left of the door. $3.50 to look through the window for a minute and a half. $30 to go inside and ask for forgiveness.' And yes, it says all that in the ad, as well as, 'no experience necessary; but must be clean-shaven.' A phone number, and 'Ask for Betty, the Bearded Lady. Sustainable Ted will apply for them all, but he won't get any, no matter how well he lies, because he's the sort of freak you have to get to know to appreciate his freakiness, but unfortunately first impressions don't inspire anyone to bother. He puts his finger inside the Cheezel packet, spears a cheezel and puts it in his mouth and, crunching it, thinks how self empowering it would be if he could get the bearded lady to suck on his finger and say, 'mmmmmm'.

Bugger-me Jill, with the stink of yesterday's overindulgence wafting up from the bowl between her legs and into her nostrils, sighs a long sigh full of self-pity and the sour taste of unfulfilling love. She stands and puts down the binoculars on the cistern, wipes herself with the luxurious soft paper that always tears and sticks between her cheeks, flushes, looks down again upon the turtle-eyed girl who is now taking her empty basket inside, and wishes she had a man that would make her want to do his washing. And, with the sound of the refilling cistern making her feel optimistic, she thinks of Jingo Bill and that cute way he has of ignoring her when she's too sober to be persuaded to sleep with him.