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had. I got out of bed fully dressed, I didn’t have anything left to put on so I stayed in the same clothes and wandered out to the lounge room. It was as dark and dusty as ever and the two of them were up, or had never left their chairs, but I guessed by the way they had on different frayed kaftans that they had gotten up and already had enough of the day. They were snoring in their chairs, their feet up and a pot of cold coffee on the table. I wandered past to the kitchen.
    It was a similarly strange room. A brand new fridge with one of those ice water dispensers—how they got it there I couldn’t imagine—a broken-door stove with some sort of rodent nest inside, and a brand new gas cooktop above it. The bench had a shiny new microwave, a few pots, pans and plates, most of them local pottery, and the most expensive retro coffee machine I had ever seen. It was brass and resembled a time machine, which was actually appropriate. I tried to figure it out but it was in Italian so after a few useless button pushes I gave up and went out the back door into a courtyard and an extinct garden.
    The courtyard was square and had what appeared to be horse stables on the back side, while the house wrapped around the other three sides. It could have been beautiful and still was, in a faded nursing home kind of way, a bit like the pictures I’d seen of Pompeii. It was an enormous house, probably ten or so rooms and a few entertaining rooms as well, but the guys had clearly ignored any part of it they didn’t need, so a few stable doors and window frames were hanging loose and chinks of stucco weremissing in a sort of chequered pattern around the place. The garden was long dry grass with a couple of spinifex stuck in it, like burrs on a shaggy dog, everything was that dry green-grey colour except… I hadn’t seen him before but there he was. Adolf was performing some hybrid of prayer, meditation and yoga, but fortunately for my sanity he wasn’t as naked as the night before. I say ‘as naked’ cos I wouldn’t really call him clothed either, in the scrap of fabric he had tied around his waist like a skirt or a loincloth. He looked all glistening and golden in the early sun, which was still hot enough to fry steak, and he reminded me of a slave boy in some politically incorrect epic about Egypt or Rome, or even more like the Greek god Hermes who had winged feet and all the goddesses used him to send messages. He was bowing to the ground and chanting under his breath, and I thought I might like to introduce him to my Baptist Aunt Thomasina, who would have set him straight on what was Christianity and what was tainted with the stain of Eastern mysticism. And then, when he got all the way down to the ground, I realisedhe wasn’t wearing anything underneath that skirt, and I blushed so red that the big old Mexican sun had nothing but admiration for the fullness of my colour, and I turned quickly to get out of there and ran straight into Carousel, nearly tumbling the two of us backwards into a Boojum that had sprung up between the tiles on the floor. I caught him and he grabbed my arms and we ended up standing face to face, so close it was the strangest moment I think I’ve had—and that includes the back-end view of the bowing Greek god. I suddenly saw through all the wrinkles and sun spots and grey eyebrows to the man whose soul I had read so much of. It wasn’t a Lolita thing or anything, just a realisation that age is just a change of outfit and, if you look carefully, the energy underneath is the same. I think he saw it too, because he did that downcast, sideways grin and squeezed my shoulder as he whispered, ‘I don’t care if he’s Jesus Christ himself—there are some parts of him I don’t fucking need to see!’
    I finally laughed and realised the truth, I was seeing Adolf’s perfect skin but not throughit to the fact that he was a nut case and it was