1.

I used to go home after my shift. I do not go home now. I sleep in the plant room, underneath the hydrangears. Nobody enters the plant room. It is my job to water the plants. We all have a job to do here and this is my job. I talk to the plants. They do not talk back. They are not my friends but I like them. You could say that they like me too; they accept my gifts of water. But that is not friendship, merely accepting water. If that were friendship then the waterboard would be Mr. Popular, in fact it is no Mr. at all. No. The ocean would win in a popularity contest, hands down, if the ocean had hands, but I had better watch out else the clouds will get jealous and there is nothing worse than a cloud with a chip on its shoulder. When I used to go home my wife would say to me: What are you doing home? And I would say to her: I have finished work, it is 9am. I have come home to go to sleep. And she would say to me: Sleep? You can sleep when you are dead. Get back to work. And I would say to her: I will sleep now, not when I am dead, when I am dead I will travel and see the world, but now is time for sleep. And with that last word heavy on my lip I would march up the stairs to curl up next to whichever man there was in my bed wearing my pjamas and with a sigh I would undress and put on a matching pair of pjamas and crawl under the covers next to my new bedfellow and sink into a cosy lethargy. Then one morning I came home and found that there were two men in my bed. Two! And with no more pjamas and no more room to sleep I took my wife's advice. She helpfully repeated it from the doorstep as I closed the front gate behind me: Go back to work, and don't come back. Well that is old news. No. It is not news, it is simply fact and most facts are as un-newsworthy as a slap on the back, or a punch in the mug, or a kick in the knackers, but that depends on who you are. If someone tickled the pope with a feather, for example, it would be headline news, whilst if you took your average anonomous joe, to take another example, who happend to be carved up into tiny chunks by his average anonomous foe then this would hardly cause a stir of interest, whilst that ticklish pope would go down in history and probably from thence adopt the moniker of Pope Tickle. No, there is no room for poor Square Joe on that front page popping with scandle and intreague. You have to yawn at it sometimes. A yawn is as good as a laugh, even better, often even better; good exercise for the forehead, though not as good as frowning, of which I do sixty times a day, at least, but no more than two hundred. No. It can't be more than that, else I wouldn't have time to do anything else, but my days are full of activities other than frowning. The best place that I have found to frown is in the mirror. My favourite spot currently is the full length mirror in the disabled toilet thankfully only two doors away from the plant room. Vespasian they call it. All of the rooms have names here. My plant room is called Pompadour. I must remember to call it that. Before that I had a little pocket mirror but I had to give that up because every time I frowned into it I sneezed. It may have been the powder compacted into a little compartment under the mirror, but I think not; the mirror must have been too small to distribute the power of my frown and reflecting it instantly back, multiplied by however many times intensity, it made me sneeze. This is why I now only use reflectors on the grand scale. They disperse the negative energy and leave me unscathed, in fact relieved. My wife came in today. She knocked on the plant room door. It was a great surprise. Not a nice one but a great one. She: They told me you were here. They sent me a letter. There have been complaints. I: Oh have there? And they wrote to you to take me back? Is there room in my bed again? And she: No, there is no room and I am not taking you back. They wrote to me to bring you your pjamas. There were complaints because you sleep with no clothes on and the security guards have to watch the CCTV of you all day with no clothes on and they are sick of it, sick of it. I have brought your pjamas so that those security guards no longer have to get sick. And I: So they know that I am here? She: Of course they do, there are cameras everywhere. Look. And she pointed out a camera above the door that I had not noticed. I: Do they have sound? She: How do I know, and what do you mean? I: Do they record the sound as well as the image? And she: You will have to ask them. And I: Will you ask them for me? And she: No. I have things to do. And she slamms the door shut. I have to unslamm the door and shout down the corridor: My pajamas! There is no response but I find them outside Pompadour when I leave to go to Vespasian a few hours later.


2.

I was raised on the law, well, to be more precise, under the law, in the basements and the servile passages joining kitchen to chamber to court. On non-session days, when the whole complex was my kingdom and mine alone, except, of course, for my humble steed, this role that Naggy would play the part of with such relish, I would prance around these higher regions, racing through endless corridors, whipping up dust and poking my nose into every grim cranny. There were roses in the gardens; each little garden a square patch of grass outlined by a trim necklace of rose bushes and peered upon by stained glass windows, chequered and effusing what seemed like an endless variety of spectral delights, glittering phantoms that swam across my body accompanied by a dancing warmth that prickled my skin. In each square there was a different colour of rose, so you knew where you were in the otherwise ineffable labyrinth where nameless path intersected nameless path. There were no doors to the gardens, and even if you had managed to get there, there was no way over the bushes standing as haughtily as a royal guard on coronation day. Whether yellow, pink, purple, red, white or black, the roses, in sybaritic opulence, or hushed defiance, protected a patch of grass eternally mown short, perfectly cropped, as perfectly as the rose bushes, neat, orderly; no need for a prim reminder 'no trespassing' or ' do not walk on the lawn' because there was no way of getting to the lawn to walk on it. For my part it was only with the help of a pair of sturdy shoulders that I even chanced a peek. The Trimmer or the Topiarist I never witnessed, so they were left to my imagination, those clandestine correctors. Though my imagination was impeded by inexperience - having only really the underworld of the law courts to refer to and the small radius surrounding the courts where I would be taken out on errands, not to mention the fantastical stories that Naggy recited or read to me, waving her arms around the whole time for effect - I took them to be winged creatures who flew into the sealed gardens from the apex of those turret-like enclosures and with scissor-claws and razor-beaks they pruned to perfection before flapping away with the remainder to wattle and daub thier nests. Through these corridors I skipped, or was pushed in my little wooden buggy by Naggy, from court to chamber to garden, the hollow thunk of uneven wheels - that boyant fibrous and lively titter that danced over the dense judgemental stone. The goliath-high vaults, vaunting their gothic terror delighted my peurile mind; now they were an enchanted fortress, now they were a haunted cathedral, now a towering mountain to be scaled by an intreped explorer, such as myself, if it werent for those pidgeons transformed in my imagination into fiery eyed eagles guarding a golden chest overflowing with bootie, or a sleeping maiden awaiting a knight's kiss, though I had no need for a sleeping maiden at that age, and what would a grown woman want with a toddler anyway, making inappropriate advances toward her maidenhood with the odor of his pupa still clinging to him? These deaf-set walls that seemed unshakable, untoppleable even by the biggest earthquake, yes, even by the end of the world, I thought that the courts would still stand, even if everything else fell. Truly, the courts seemed to be carved out of the very rockbed. Since then I have visited the Treasury at Petra, the Lycian Tombs, the Temples of Cappadocia, the Carpenter's Caves, the Akkanna Madanna Caves of Vijayawada and many more of their kind and though I have come to realise the, lets say, modesty of my Law Courts, even so, none have had the effect, have generated the feeling of awe that the courts of my childhood still do, though in truth they now appear provincial by comparison - a flimsy house of cards - yet, still, in conflict with the facts, they are more impressive. I often ask myself why, even though I know the answer: Because they were mine. I can't imagine a greater place to start a life, a labrynth of fantasy. Why we had to leave I can not say. Perhaps we had been seen one morning galloping on the red carpet still unfurled from the previous days ceremonies, me on Naggy's back, both of us in court QC wigs, she neighing out her judgement: Gghghhghhgghhgghihihihillty! as I tapped the gavel on her rump. Order! Order! Noble steed Naggy, will you now pronounce the punishment: Turhurhurhurnipss! For any one of these indescretions we may have been dismissed, and there were many in that vain. Perhaps all of our little demonstrations had been recorded and locked away until the case for dismissal was indesputable. Was there a toady in our midst? A high riser on low heat? An ex-lover of Naggy's fileng for revenge? Or was there one among us minions who took me for a spy, after all my mother was The Hon Mrs Justice Justice and who wouldn't wonder why her sole heir had been saddled on a two bit horse like Naggy?: Action brought against Naggy and Romboy: Accused of playing the horse and usurping the title of Knight. The result in any case was that we were dismissed from court. I found myself planted, miles from my home, in the house of my parents-to-be; my father-in-waiting a cordwainer, my mother-expectant a fromagère. My new life was calling and I buckled up.