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— Arrives.
    “Yah!” she begins, and from there, there is no stopping her. She spits her Russian swearing right in my face and gives me a barrage with her fists. Her tiny ferocious hands try to lift me by my clothes to throw me from the seat.
    “I’m sorry!” I wail, but this old lady is like furyified, sending flurries all over me.
    Later, I’m sitting down in the aisle, with the seat of my pants still stuck on the seat. A middle-aged man who speaks English tells me, “Shouldn’t offend the lady, old boy.”
    “No kidding,” I agree, trying to keep my bare skin off the frozen floor.
    The old lady smiles down at me, with disgust.

CHAPTER 5
     
    This is an important chapter.
     
    I think so, anyway.
    The bruises on my face healed pretty quickly and I spent the next while of my life just hanging around. A happening was looming. It was out there somewhere beyond the regular enclosed life that I had been living. It was out there, not waiting, but existing. Being. Perhaps it was only slightly wondering if I would come to it.
    Maybe I’m just talking stupid.
    Anyway.
    The happening that happened was that I met this girl when I was working with Dad on a Saturday.
    She was something, I promise you.
    I’d spent the whole morning digging a trench under the house at this job in a district maybe five kilometers away from ours, and I was dead. Dead by lunch.
    There was dirt all over me and my neck was straightened and stiffened from bending over and digging. When I came out from underneath, she was there. She was there with her mother and father and she was so real I nearly choked on the nothingness in my mouth. My height, she was, and calm and real in the face. She smiled at me with real lips and her real voice said “Hi” when we met.
    I wiped my right hand on my pants and shook all their hands. Mother. Father. Girl.
    “My son, Cameron,” my dad told them when I crawled out, shaking the dirt from my hair. He even sounded like he remotely liked having me around.
    “G’day,” I said when I faced up to them, and Dad kind of took the parents on a tour of what we’d done on their property. They were having pretty massive extensions done, which were cramping up the yard a little. It was a nice house, though.
    The girl.
    “Rebecca,” her mother had told me. When Dad was doing the grand tour I was alone with her.
    What was I meant to do?
    Talk?
    Wait?
    Sit down?
    All up, all we did was stand there a while and then sit on these deck chair sort of things. I looked away and looked at her and looked away again
    What an animal.
    I sure had a way with the ladies, didn’t I?
    Finally, when it was almost too late and the old fellas were coming back, I said to her in this crazed quiet voice, “I like workin’ here,” and after the silence, we both laughed a bit and I thought,
What a weird thing to say.
I like working here. I like working here. I Like. Working here. I. Like working here.
    As I repeated it over in my head I wondered if she knew what it really meant.
    I think she did.
    Rebecca.
    It was a nice name, and while I liked the calmness in her face, I liked her voice better. I remembered it and let it chant across me. Just that “Hi.” Pathetic, I know, but when your experience with women is as minimal as mine, you take whatever you can get.
    All afternoon, it lasted. There was even very little pain in the work I did because I had Rebecca now. I had her voice and the realness of it to numb everything. It numbed the blisters forming at the base of my fingers and blunted the blade seeking my spine.
    “Hi,” she’d said. “Hi,” and she’d laughed with me when I said something stupid. I’d been laughed at before by girls, but it was rare for me to laugh
with
one. It was rare to feel okay with a city over my shoulder and a girl’s face so close to mine. She had breath and sight and she was real. That was the best thing. She was realer than the dental nurse because she wasn’t behind a counter being paid to be