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(he’s made a break in the storm cloud for me), has me smiling. Oh, look at his hair (why can’t I be like this all the time? Half the time’d do), it’s blowing in the breeze, how important the little tike feels he is. (That’s one of the secrets, ain’t it, Sharns? How important you feel in the world.) The kid’s not old enough for school (yet he feels like he owns the universe. And so he does. He owns the universe, Sharns. Whilst you own the darkness all through it).
    â€™Magine that, growing up on a farm, with animals, rides with your dad on the three-wheeler, the tractor, walk around (on his strong back, clasped by strong loving arms), tending to the sheep — whatever the hell they do to them other than shear — fences to fix, a mother’s good cooking to come home to. (A husband — a man — whose hands are dirty with honest toil and his mouth never shaped foul words, hurtful words, words that cut a woman to the bone and take another bite out of her soul, hands that never hurt you. I’d look after someone like you, honey, give you all the loving sex you wanted and make it good. I would.
    Would cook for you, too, get recipes out of a newspaper — when I can be bothered to read one. But I’ve seen recipes in them, tore ’em out of fishand chip wrapping and went home to cook ’em. Once picked up a page blown in some city breeze on one of my lost walks, sat down and read it like there was a message for me saying: Go thataway, Sharneeta, follow the dots to your salvation. (Yeah, sure.) Memorised the recipe on home-made tomato sauce, went home and made it myself. Best sauce I ever tasted, yet did I make it again? Don’t think so.)
    Got to slow up for a mob of sheep going the same way, gives me time to wonder what I’m doing here. Except it’s too hard, too damn hurtful to think that deep. (You mean it’s scary, and scary don’t have to be — don’t want it to be — deep.) I’m just driving somewhere different for a change, if that’s okay by you, voice in my head that doesn’t know when to shut its mouth. Leave me the eff alone.
    I don’t know anyone who farms, or even works on one. Alistair, my flatmate, you can’t count
him
as one, just the son-of. So why’m I out here? ’Nless I’m driving to another town on automatic, without knowing yet knowing only too well: I’m looking for fellow lowlife soul (less) brothers and sisters. I’m the lost sheep looking for its own kind. And it ain’t hard.
    The lost, they got the same glazed eye, and sly-eyed, mouth-hoping twitch, poised eyebrows ready to swoop, same as me. That’s how we recognise each other, ain’t hard. Or they got the sadness in their eyes that makes ’em look all funny, all tight of face, or so loose you think muscle relaxant’s been injected, ’cos they’re trying to fight it. Swimming upstream all the time. Don’t know how to go with the flow, unless it’s because (we) they don’t want to?
    Nah, surely I don’t have to come this far, possibly to another town, to find other lowlifes? Man, they’re everywhere in the street I live, the places I go, every step of the way ya can’t avoid ’em. Listen, voice, I’m just out driving, trying somewhere else, not different. (Is that okay?)
    Sometimes it’s okay by voice. Sometimes it isn’t.
    Kayla, the other flatmate, Alistair’s girlfriend, she’s not a lowlife. Just in that mixed-up stage, only twenty-one. Her man, Alistair, he can be nice but I can see something darker below the handsome surface. Unless it’s my problem, got the miseries. Only thing I trust is he loves his mum so much, drives us nuts bringing her up, reminded of something she does: My mum does that. Oh, you remind me of what Mum does. (Maybe I’m jealous I ain’t got a mum I’m proud of.)
    Roll down the window, have a smoke