Life as an assistant at Manly Books in Sydney had been close to perfect. An even climate, beaches, the harbour, the excitement of the big city. Even in midwinter, a jog around Tania Park, just up from her “granny flat” in Balgowlah Heights, was no hardship at all. A t-shirt and sweatshirt, Bella bounding along at her heels, a navy ship heading out into the Tasman Sea if she cared to look to her left – and she did – the air clean and salty, other runners nodding greetings.

Here in Canberra, Tuesday’s dawn was still a way off, it was below zero, the grass was frosted and her breath was mist in the crisp air. It took everything she had to start off up Monash Drive. Heading up the hill. Work. Get the body warm.

The Grateful Dead helped. Truckin’ on the iPod.

Moving to Canberra had been a lifestyle change. An inheritance had paid for the shop, the stock and a small townhouse in the Harry Seidler units where Monash Drive crossed Blamey Crescent. The alternative was back to California, where she had been born and grown up, but after nearly twenty years in Australia, she preferred it here.

Perhaps she’d grown too used to comfort, too used to staying inside on a cold morning or evening. She was so out of condition!

Breathing deep on the freezing air, the cold like knives in her throat, the rising incline picking out muscles unused for months. She’d feel it tomorrow, but that was the best time to make progress. This morning was only a beginning.

Up she went, passing the duplexes, entering the territory of the big houses. Big houses, huge front gardens. Some of them were listed in architectural registers, tall blocky piles that must have seemed like something out of science fiction in the early Sixties.

At last the houses were behind her, and she was on the verge of Fairbairn Avenue, turning left, the slope easing, levelling out and falling towards the west. Different leg muscles made their complaints now, but it was easier going, and her breathing settled into a better rhythmn.

A small mob of kangaroos, startled by her approach, bounded across the road, heading back into the bushland of Mount Ainslie through the lawns of the War Memorial.

Left again and the broad axis of Anzac Parade opened out. This was the view the tourists paused for, the ceremonial parade route between lines of eucalypts and memorials, its line continuing across Lake Burley Griffin, through the smile of Commonwealth Place, on past the white wedding cake of Old Parliament House, and up to the boomerang lawns, stepped walls and pyramid flagpole of the new Parliament House topping Capital Hill.

It was a prospect in the dawn’s level light that never failed to move her. Here was the heart of Australia, the heroes and common people represented and remembered. In summer there were concerts, waving flags and television singers celebrating Christmas, Australia Day, Canberra Day. Firework displays at night, coloured reflections on the lake’s dark water. National Library, High Court and National Gallery floodlit in splendour.

Canberra was a city like no other in the world. Maybe the Mall in Washington DC or the Champs Elysees in Paris could provide a similar vista, but Canberra went on and on, wide avenues and motorways passing through parkland and garden suburbs, the streets in elegant symmetry or swirling mandalas.

At Constitution Avenue she turned left again, but here the parkland came to an end halfway along. The site of the ASIO building had been enclosed in chainlink fencing, shrouded in blue plastic, and hung with “DANGER KEEP OUT” signs.

Ann slowed to a walk. She was about done in now. She was perspiring under her sweatshirt, her body warm and glowing, burning fat. The remaining distance home would cool her down for a shower and breakfast. A light, healthy breakfast.

Almost all the trees on the ASIO site had gone now. Earth movement had begun, yellow-painted digging equipment grouped in a muddy circle. Magpies and currawongs warbled from vantage points of fenceposts, rubble piles and backhoe roofs. They stalked on the fresh earth, searching worms and grubs. They were everywhere, black and white feathers against the brown earth and green grass.

Then it hit her. The birds had always been there, guarding their territories, but hidden in the trees. Magpies didn’t flock, yet here they were, twenty or thirty at once.

Their trees were gone, and with them their shelter. There would be no nests this season, yet the birds were locked into their old territories, unable to displace the existing avian residents of backyards and street trees.

Ann walked sternly on, turning the corner into Monash Drive. There was a figure visible in the upstairs corner flat. Quint’s flat. She waved to him, but he didn’t react.

The street tilted uphill and Ann jogged for a hundred metres or so, before giving it away entirely. She’d be doing the whole course at a run within a week, best not to strain anything on the first day.

Her shower was bliss, the hot water warming her chilled extremes, washing away the sweat, and encouraging her to linger longer.

Grace the cat demanded breakfast before Ann could sit down herself.

Cup of tea and a bowl of cereal – just one bowl today, Ann! – and she clicked the laptop on to check her mail.

Nothing from Tom, though he’d updated his Facebook page to show a location of American Samoa. Ann sighed.

An email from BookCrossing.com – one of her books had been found!

The journal entry cheered her up. It was always nice when somebody found a book and went to the website to make a comment. This person had even joined the site and their profile page promised that they would get further involved. A paragraph about the book – a murder mystery – and a few words apparently aimed at her:

A loose book from a generous person. What will she give away next?

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay

Not to mention a superior rock cake. Their pies had won prizes too.

“Flat white, please. Hot. Big.” His hands sketched out a shape approximately the size of a beer keg. “And a stone-cold rock cake.”

The barista, an altogether too handsome young man, smiled politely behind his mirror-gleaming machine. He’d seen Harley’s comedy routine far too many times. He wished he had a dollar for every time he’d heard the same jokes.

Harley paid and took his coffee and cake outside. Cold in July, but he could keep an eye on the cab. One other hardy soul sat at a table, his chair angled to catch the sun, steam curling gently from a mug. Eighty years old, at a guess.

Harley glanced at him, sensing a kindred spirit. The signs were there for those who knew the code.

“Where’d yer do yer laggin’?”

The elderly gent looked up, a trail of blue tattooed tears faintly visible dropping from the corner of one eye.

“All over,” he replied. “You?”

“Goulburn, in the main.”

“Did me first laggin’ there. Evil place, that.”

“Not going back.” Harley stuck out his hand. “Harley Barnardo.”

“Sharkey, they call me.”

They shook. Harley set his coffee down on the table and turned to face the sun.

“It doesn’t get much better than this, eh?”

“I should be on the Gold Coast with the bikini birds,” Sharkey said. “Not stuck in this cold old hole.”

Harley raised his cup. “Let’s both bust out, hey?”

Sharkey shook his head. “They only let me out of Humane last month. Gotta stay in the Territory for a year. Gave me a room in that place.”

Harley glanced over at Erstwhile Garden Retirement Village, a grey slab with windows. “Looks like X-Block without the bars.”

They chatted on, a shared brotherhood of crime. Sharkey told of the old days in Goulburn, when as a teenager he had been assigned a cell with one of the last bushrangers, a man who had ridden with the Governor gang in his youth. The nation had been founded on other peoples’ convictions, unbroken chains of sentences and cant stretching back to the old lags on the First Fleet.

A woman within a sniff of thirty came out of the grocery, pushing a stroller with a couple of infants. Her arms were laden with plastic bags full of disposables, and the children were barely visible noses poking out of hooded garments, eyes gleaming in their caverns. Her own face was grim.

“Ever get married, Harley?”

“I run too fast,” Harley grinned, taking a bite of rock cake.

“Three times for me,” Sharkey sighed. “and me girl’s inside watching telly.”

“She should be making you coffee.”

“She only does instant. Instant everything. Microwave crap and boiling water. Not like the old days.”

“Never is nowadays.” Harley took another bit of rock cake, working his way around the cherry in the centre. “My Mum could make a rock cake so hard you’d be spitting out fillings for a week after.”

“Sounds like me first missus. Scones of Stone, I used to call ‘em.”

The door of Ounce Books opened and a woman emerged with an armload of books. One look at her and you could tell that a life of books, cats and chocolate was a comfortable one. She was smiling, and her t-shirt had a bust of Mark Twain on the front.

“Nice set of buns right there.”

“Nice all over,” Harley agreed. “She gives out free books. Can you credit that? Runs a bookshop and hands them out for nothing!”

“Oh yeah? I could do with a bit of that. Don’t mind a good murder, meself.”

“She fills up a shelf in the bakery. Up the back it is. Only catch is that you have to go on the internet and make a note or something.”

“Bloody computers and internet. It’s just another way of ripping off the little guy,” Sharkey said. “Me girl’s always chatting away to her mates. Twittering, she says.”

Harley took another mouthful of rock cake. The sultanas slipped under his teeth. As a kid, he’d pulled them out and set them aside, worried that a blowfly might have found its way into the mix. One Christmas, he’d spent ten minutes working on a pudding so full of dates and prunes and currants and cherries that all that he could get out of it were tiny shreds of duff. After that he hadn’t bothered.

Life was too short to worry about the little things. So what if a nut got into his cab? He’d be out again in a few minutes, and Harley could drive on in the sunshine. Canberra was a good place to be a cabbie. The roads were wide, the traffic flowed smoothly, the passengers were well-behaved.

And so what if they were putting up an ugly building at the end of the street? There’d be work coming out of it. Engineers and architects needing cab rides while it was going up, and public servants when it was in business. The more passengers in his taxi, the more money in his pocket.

He drained the last of his coffee. Life was good and the future was better. It would be spring soon. He popped the last fragments of rock cake into his mouth, feeling the preserved cherry slide under his teeth, sweet and delicious. That was the best part.

Sharkey was looking at him, smiling.

“Got to get back on the road, mate. Make a quid.” Harley said, putting his coffee mug down firmly. “Good to meet you!”

“Yeah, you too, cobber. Look, I might have something you can help me with.”

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay

“Where are we off to?” asked the cabbie, looking at Quint looking at the map screen.

“2A Monash Drive, Campbell 2612.”

“Ohhhh-kay!” The driver put the car in gear, pulling away from the taxi rank into the maze of roadworks surrounding the airport. This was jarring, as the road surfaces were uneven, speed bumps mingled with potholes and abrupt changes in level as the cab sped past construction barriers and signs.

“You know the way?” Quint asked, quite lost already.

“I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve driven along here!” the cabbie said. He paused. “Oddly enough, that’s how it works out.”

Quint guessed there might be a joke somewhere in that, but he decided that it meant the cabbie knew how to find his home.

The interior of the taxi was cluttered with keypads, screens, mysterious gadgets and notices, and it took time to look at them all. The map screen was canted in two directions, he saw, but he kept his hands in his lap. Soon the jumble of the airport roadworks was behind, they had passed the guns mounted either side of the entrance to the Royal Military College, and Quint saw the name of Monash Drive come up on the tilted screen. He angled his head to read it.

He liked seeing streets and landmarks labelled and presented for his view. Like a living, moving map. From the air, although everything was laid out, especially when the plane was taking off or landing, there were no labels, and you had to guess what things were.

The cab turned into Monash Drive, and the cabbie, looking at the house numbers, said a rude word. But Quint knew where they were. The high end of his street had the high numbers and it was easy to remember. The cabbie couldn’t have been driving around Canberra long.

Here the houses were grand, on big blocks, with views out over the rest of the suburb, across the lake and onto Parliament House. The house price numbers were also high.

As they descended, the houses became smaller and closer together. Grouped around a central oval were the retirement home, school and shops. Newsagent, a small supermarket, restaurant, bakery and bookshop. A cluster of flats formed a red brick block between Monash Drive and Blamey Crescent.

Then a small hill, right in the middle of Campbell, and after that they were going down again, through the ex-government houses. Many of the cheaper sort, the “monocrete” fibro houses, had made way for more modern homes, usually with flat slab sides in pastel colours of mauve and green.

Sometimes the developers had managed to squeeze in two or even three small houses on a single block. The wide lawns and roomy yards replaced by a few square metres of pebbles.

Quint looked at a block enclosed by mesh fencing. Just a tangle of rubble where a home had been. A couple of bare fruit trees forlorn to one side.

The bottom of Monash Drive, where it hit Constitution Avenue, was home. Quint’s block of flats stood four and square on the corner. They were ugly but practical, and they suited him. A companion block on the Blamey Crescent corner had been modernised, and the tall panes of glass, angled like the prows of a fleet of ships, made them look most un-flatlike. Flats should be flat, Quint thought, not tricked out to look like an airport terminal or sports stadium.

The cabbie stopped in the centre of the row of flats. Quint looked at him sharply.

“Number 2A, please. Look, there it is. The number’s on the door.”

The cab moved forward five metres and the meter ticked over five cents to $16.20.

“That’s eighteen-twenty with the two dollar parking fee they stick us with,” the cabbie rattled, indicating a slip of paper. “Ah, just make it eighteen dollars, thanks.”

That seemed very high.

“Have the taxi fares gone up?” he asked.

“Not since the last time.”

Quint looked in his wallet. He had a twenty, two tens and a five. He pulled out the twenty, considered that the cabbie might not have any change, put it back and after some thought, handed over a ten and a five.

“I’ve got the rest in coins. Is that okay?”

“Fine, fine,” the cabbie said, watching Quint count out a fifty-cent piece, eight twenties, four tens and a series of five cent coins.

Quint wasn’t sure he’d gotten it right, and began laying out the coins on the centre console, but the driver scooped them up and jangled them into a bag. There might have been five cents extra, he thought, trying to remember how they had looked on the black vinyl. That wasn’t right.

But it could be a tip if it was extra. He smiled. “Thank you!”

The driver said something, but his words were lost in a great rending sound. Quint looked out to see one of the trees in the parkland across the street crash to the ground. There were men in orange vests with tools and helmets, vehicles with flashing lights, signs and barriers.

“That’s the new ASIO building going up,” the driver said, seeing Quint’s blank face. “Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation. The spy mob. Going to be a huge building. Five stories high.”

“Five stories?” Quint tried to imagine an office block stretching along Constitution Avenue, rising above the oak trees.

“Of course, those five stories will be underground. Security, you see. Just a grassy knoll on top.”

That didn’t sound so bad.

“Mind you,” the driver went on, “it’s going to be chaos here for the next couple of years.”

Chaos opposite Quint’s home. This was not good. He reached out and straightened the driver’s map screen.

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay