“Are your parents home?”
Julian Sainter, six years old, wearing an A-Team t-shirt and underpants, looked up from the scorching pavement at the man who had appeared.  Appeared?  No, he’d just been quiet.  Very.  There was the rumble of big trucks on the highway and trumpeting horns and white birds wheeling in the sky and crying out and a dog barking somewhere over the rooftops – all of this was distant, but the man was close.  He was tall and dark.  Not dark like a black person; dark like a shadow.  Julian rubbed his eyes.  “Hello?” he said, squinting. 
“Your parents,” the man said.  “Are they home?” 
Julian had to think about this.  He looked back at the driveway.  White car, red car.  “Yep,” he said, turning back to the man.
There was a silence.  The man gazed down the street.  He did not smile.  Julian lived on a hill and there was water on the road at the bottom of the hill.  Julian knew this was not really water.
“Why you wearing gloves… pardon me?” the boy said.
The man said nothing.
“It’s hot, you know,” Julian said.
The man said nothing.
“Is your hands cold?”
“No.”
Another silence. 
“What’s in there?” Julian said, pointing at a black bag at the man’s feet.  It looked like what a doctor has, two handles meeting in the centre with a clasp – it would open like a mouth.  Its skin was scarred. 
“Tools,” the man said.
“Tools,” Julian whispered to himself.  He didn’t know whether to ask any more about the tools.  He glanced up at the man but the man said nothing more about the bag.
“What is your name?” said the man, the dark man, the shadow on the street in the bright white hot sun. 
“Julian Sainter.”
“That is an interesting name.”
Julian wondered about this – was his name really that interesting?  He was named after someone from the old days, but he’d forgotten who.
“What is your name… pardon me?” Julian said.
A pause.   The man swallowed, then said: “Mr. Hickathrift.”  His voice was lower, like he was telling a great secret.
“Hit-a-thriff,” Julian murmured.  It was a familiar name, somehow. 
A crow cawed somewhere, a black sound in the glare.  The dark man looked up in its direction.
“See my horsey?” Julian said.  He picked the horse up off the hot pavement and held it up to show the man.  It was a plastic horse, hot and soft in the sun.  There was a matchbox car on its side, and a shiny robot, and before the man had appeared the robot had been repairing the car’s motor while the horse neighed directions.  The horse was Julian’s favourite.  It was a brown one with a white star on its head and down its nose, and it was running flat-out into the wind.
The man nodded, but didn’t answer.  He picked up his black bag.  It creaked.  It looked heavy.
“If you wait here I’ll give you a dollar, Julian.  Would you like that?”  He looked sad now, and Julian wondered why.
“I don’t know,” Julian said.
“Can you wait here for me?”
“Okay.”  Julian thought about the dollar.  It was a lot of money but he didn’t know if he should take it for free from the man. 
The man looked at him a moment longer, then went into the house.
Julian moved onto the grass under the tree.  The fantasy of the car, horse, and robot continued deep into the afternoon.  He could smell the tree and hear it rustling and the sun was bright beyond the shade and the asphalt of the road bled at the edges and a fire engine wailed out across the suburbs and ants crawled in a line up the tree and Julian thought he heard his mother from the house and there were some thudding sounds but Julian was in his world in the shade under the tree and everything outside that was not real. 
When the man came out of the house Julian didn’t notice him until he was at the letter box and his shadow fell on the pavement.  He was still wearing his gloves, and his bag was closed.  A cut on his cheek had clotted to a dry red jag.  Julian stared at the cut but didn’t ask about it.  The man didn’t put his bag down.  It bulged.  And there was a smell about him now: lavender, like the soap Julian’s mum kept in the bathroom… but below this was a deeper smell, like hot copper.  The man had different clothes.  Julian couldn’t remember what he was wearing before, only that it was different to now.  He looked thinner because he had peeled off the old clothes, like a snake.  His boots were wet. 
The man fished in his pocket and withdrew a shiny dollar and gave it to the boy.  Julian looked at the dollar in his palm.  
“Goodbye Julian,” the man said.
“Bye-bye.”
He vanished around a corner and Julian did not see him again for twenty years.
The boy played long into the afternoon.  When he went inside, the mailbox was casting a shadow across the road and everything was red and orange. Parked cars shone like gems.  Cicadas thrummed.  The house was a sleeping thing.   
The living room fan was nodding its head from side to side, but even so there was a smell in here.  The kitchen clock ticked.  Two blowflies buzzed like burnt things at the glass door.  A chair was on its side on the floor; with some effort Julian righted it and slid it under the table.  He screwed up his A-Team t-shirt in his hands as he went into the kitchen. 
It was dark in the kitchen.  There was a mess in the sink and something on the floor, but it was too dark to see.   
And something was dripping.
The fridge had been there as long as Julian could remember.  It was a mammoth, a side-by-side refrigerator and freezer, covered in stickers and brownish glue: Julian had scraped most of the stickers away when he was bored.  The fridge hummed like an old man in deep thought. A piece of ice clattered to the floor somewhere inside the freezer.  There was a stickiness on the floor, a pool of something that had dried – it made a peeling-sucking sound under his bare feet. 
He reached for the refrigerator door. 

The woman is watching him.  His chest pounds and the train wheels clatter and clunk and a child is blubbering and the carriages are squeaking like accordions and somebody is talking about superannuation and a crossing is clanging like a bell in fog.  The carriage is rank with people escaped from the rain like birds.  When he glances back she’s gazing out the window into the grey.  She’s alone.
His car doesn’t start this morning.  He considers calling in sick, decides against it, then walks to the station as the clouds gather and the temperature drops.  There are ticket machines at the station.  He doesn’t know how to use them because he has not taken a train in ten years.  A schoolgirl helps him.  Her three friends are laughing at her and laughing at the man who is embarrassed at being shown how to use the machine.
“And that’s it,” she says.  “Easy huh?”
“Yes,” he says.  “Thank you.”  He’s unsure whether to put the ticket away or hold onto it.  His hand is halfway to his pocket and it stays there.
“You put it in that machine when you go through,” the girl says.
Another machine.
“Oh, thank you.”
“Sorry about my friends.  They’re jerks.”  She says the last word loud and her friends roll their eyes.
“It’s okay.”
“Bye mister.”
“Bye.”
He doesn’t move.  He watches the girls go.  He can hear them.
“You bitches.”
“See him checking you out?”
“He was not.”
“Maybe he’s retarded… oh, shit, he’s still there.”
They glance back then scoot away red-faced.
Now he’s on the train, and the woman is there, two rows away.  When she boarded goosebumps prickled along his arms.  Now he feels sick, sick with what he knows, and with what he knows he must do. 
She is tall.  This is what he notices first.  Not tall enough to be unusual, but never short.  She has a strong jaw.  He can see a muscle working in her cheek.  Their jaws are strong and square – the men and the women.  It is easier to spot the women.
He takes a newspaper from his briefcase and pretends to read it, holding it in his lap, his hands pressed against his thighs so nobody will notice how his hands shake.  The carriage groans.  Monoliths pass through the grey outside: they are moving, the carriage is still.  A wet black skeleton sails by and the carriage takes on a new sound as it coasts over emptiness; the river is a dream unrolling into the distance.  Like dreams, the bridge and the river pass.                            
Does she know what she is?  Sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes they never find out: the instinct isn’t strong enough.  Instead, they have horrific nightmares.  Oh, but the way she looks about, how her eyes linger on that child near the doors, the child who clings to the pants-leg of its father.  Her arms are bare and her nails are long and red and her hands are dirty.  Something turns in his stomach.
The careful ones wear clothing with horizontal stripes.  Vertical stripes make one appear taller.  They wear tinted glasses or contacts.  Keeping concealed is simple.  This woman has blue eyes.  Blue eyes are not unusual, but it is one more piece of evidence that stacks up.  Pale blue, always.  And the women never show their legs.  It’s a hot day but this woman wears jeans. 
She looks back at him and he stops breathing.  What is she thinking?  Her eyes are oh so pale, and her jaw works back and forth.  She is young, and he knows that men would be reluctant to be with her, that if asked they’d shrug and say that they don’t find her attractive.  Dogs would growl at her, babies cry. 
Feeling her eyes on him he looks down at his newspaper.  Somehow this is worse.
The train is slowing.  From the corner of his eye he sees her stand and move to the door.  The child is at the woman’s feet now, gazing up.  She looks down at it and smiles.  Her teeth seem yellowish and long.  The child does not smile back.
He leaves his seat, folds the newspaper and tucks it under his arm, then moves to the doors as the train lurches to a stop.  The doors hiss open.  On the platform he scans the sea of heads for the tall blonde.  There.
Down the platform and through the gates, checking his wristwatch: 8:45am. 
Some dark door inside him is swinging open.