Won't you miss me, she whined...

"Won't you miss me?" she whined, screwing out some indication of affection from him. His thoughts were getting ruder by the day. Shut your fucking face, for Christ's sake, just shut the fuck up. "Of course I will," he said, his mind skating. Who was bringing who down here?

An old woman in black watched them from the other side of the road, holding her grand-daughter, fiddling with the hose, preparing, despite the worst drought in living memory and repeated warnings on the news, to wash down the concrete in front of their house. Most of the neighbourhood women completed the same ritual each morning, just as their ancestors had done in the remote white-washed villages of their birth. He didn't knokw her name. She was Tony's mother, recently arrived from her village on the other side of the world. She didn't speak a word of English. Tony, tubby, plain, trapped by an even plainer wife, driving an old, once flashy, metal tank of a car, was his favourite neighbour. He was the only one who would lend him money when things got bad.

Bound by an industrial estate, an airport, a highway and the most polluted river rin the country, this part of Tempe was a pocket of late nineteenth-century working cottages whose charm had been totally desecrated by the Macedonian and Yugoslav emigres squeezed there by property prices. Brick cladding and concrete drives were symbols of success in a new country. He and Anna had bought what they regarded as the best house in Tempe, an 1880s wooden cottage farm house. They had sanded the floors, added a verandah, planted dozens of trees all round. His neighbours came to commiserate. They had been young once, and hadn't been able to afford cladding either.

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