Quint set down his mugs, sliding one across the counter to Ann. She was looking at him, looking at his cheek. “I got..” he began. “I was… Ah… I hurt myself.”

“So I see,” Ann replied. “Sorry to hear it. And Harley here cut himself shaving, maybe.”

Quint considered the other man in the shop. A taxidriver he’d used previously, bearing a bandaid on his cheek and a mug of coffee in his hand. Odd. He’d left Heartbake just before Quint, carrying two mugs. Where was the other one?

The other man extended his hand. “Harley. Cabbie. Booklover. Careless shaver.”

Quint shook hands briefly. “Am I interrupting anything? You wanted coffee, Ann.”

“Thanks, William. You’re a sweetie. Harley was just telling me about BookCrossing.”

BookCrossing. Giving away perfectly good books to strangers. Quint couldn’t understand it at all, but Ann took a strange amount of fun from the disease, often closing the shop for weeks at a time while she travelled to conventions where fellow-sufferers gathered to discuss their symptoms.

“Not my cup of tea, Ann. You tried to sign me up, remember?”

“You either get it or you don’t.”

Quint nodded. “Like a cold.”

“I caught it off Ann,” Harley said. “Anyway, I was on the airport rank yesterday, and I had a couple of spare seconds, so I whipped out and released a book against one of the pillars. This book.”

He held out a book. Quint took it. A hand-scrawled note stuck onto the dustjacket, the endpapers defaced with numbers and another sticker, more marks on the fore-edge. He winced at the wilful destruction.

“That makes a Very Good book into Fair. Might have been worth maybe three dollars originally, but now you couldn’t give it away.”

“Yeah. Tell me about it. Anyway, last night I got pulled over by the cops, and they asked me about this book, and told me to come in to the main cop shop this morning. Which I did, on top of everything else.”

“They arrested you for littering,” Quint guessed. He didn’t like litterbugs,

“Cops don’t care. I was awake all night worrying about it. And other things. So when I gave my name at the counter, and they took me into a room full of blokes in suits, I was shitting myself.

“They all stood up and had a go at me. They took turns. First cab off the rank was the police commissioner. In full uniform. He said that I was responsible for closing down the airport for two hours, and did I have any idea of the trouble I’d caused?

“Then there was the airport manager, and he really laid into me. He was spraying spit at the end, and he looked like he was going to punch me. Trouble is, everyone else was egging him on. You could see it.

“Anyway, he sat down, and the Qantas bloke stood up and asked if I knew how much it had cost to divert flights. Then the Virgin manager said exactly the same thing. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was going to get a bill from them. Then another policeman from bomb disposal blew me up. Said I was putting the lives of his best men at risk. The Urban Services Minister was there too, and he had the hide to tell me I was an idiot. I started to give him a serve about his useless bloody roadworks but the Ambulance manager sat me down again.

“The army guy got up and looked at me and asked if I knew how much it cost to put a helicopter in the air and would I like to apologise to the SAS guys yanked away from their training on a wild goose chase. But I lost it when the construction company boss asked if I knew how much it cost to pull his road crew off.”

“Uh-oh,” Ann groaned. “What did you do?”

“I told him I could arrange a group booking. Then the police chief made this weird noise, told me not to do it again, and to get the hell out of his sight.”

Ann snorted.

“Yeah. Like that except lower.”

Quint wasn’t sure if he liked this taxi driver. But he could see that Ann had made up her mind. And she’d been drinking his coffee, after sending Quint out for a mug.

“All that for you?” she said. “Poor Harley!”

“They were having a security conference,” Quint said. He’d read it in the paper. The airport terminal was being upgraded and it was going to have the most comprehensive security in Australia.

“They didn’t tell me that,” Harley groaned. “I thought it was just for me, and I’d never get out of jail long enough to pay out the fine.”

“How did they know it was you?” Quint asked.

“They have a security camera on the taxi rank. They make sure we pay our two dollars to get through the boomgate out of the cabyard. So they knew it was my cab. And then they put the numberplate into the police computer. They have this high tech camera that looks at numberplates, and if it’s a stolen car or you haven’t paid your rego, they flag you down.”

Quint liked this. Good system.

“At least they gave you the book back,” Ann pointed out. “They could have blown it up”

“I’m going to leave it at the train station next.”

“Train drivers can’t read,” Ann twinkled back. “Not timetables. No way!”

“You could put it on your Official BookCrossing Zone shelf.” Harley said.

“Would you be a sweetie and do that for me?”

“I’m at your command, Ms Ounce!” Harley drained his mug, gave a mock salute and marched out.

Ann gazed after him. Quint set his cup down and pulled over the spreadsheet listing the books he’d bought from Violet Campbell. He had to be careful here.

“I need to talk to that old lady with the books. Have you collected yours yet?”

Ann sighed. “I’ve got a friend with a van. She helped me load them last night. Is there a problem?”

“You might want to check through them for personal items. Bookmarks, photographs. I found a few things last night she might want back.”

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay

Quint needed a new thinking place. And some serious thinking time. The world was always strange and sometimes hard to sort out, but lately it was impossible. If the sun rose in the west and set in the east it would be easier to understand.

He’d have to think about this.

First things first. He wriggled back under the fence, ignoring the shouts and noise. He’d left things behind, he was sure of it, but he wasn’t going back to retrieve his trowel, not if people were trying to kill him for it.

He hurt, too. Somehow he’d collected a smear of blood on his hand, and he wasn’t sure where it came from. Something caught on the wire and tore as he pulled free. Quint fumed inside. This was not a good day.

He limped across Constitution Avenue, back home to his familiar boxy flatblock. At least here everything was in order. His key fit the front door, there was a hook for his jacket, his beanie, space for his shoes.

Shoe. He only had one. Somewhere out there lay the other one. What good was half a pair of shoes? Good comfortable shoes. Shoe.

If Quint was the swearing type, he’d be saying a few rude words now. But if Quint was the swearing type, most of the words of his life would be rude, and people would step around him on the street.

Quint set down his bag. He’d look through that later, but for now he had to find out where he was leaking blood from. Somewhere on his head, most likely, because it wasn’t gushing out of anywhere visible. Unless it was on his back. Quint suffered badly from his back. There were parts he couldn’t reach, and they itched.

The face in Quint’s bathroom mirror was scratched. He looked like someone people would walk around on the street now. Hair full of mud and rotten oak leaves, eyes full of emotion, cheek covered in dried blood. Hands dirty and fingernails badly needing a scrub.

He tended himself as best he could, but there were parts of him that a shower and a bandaid wouldn’t cover. There was a vacancy on the shoe rack and a hole in the laundry tool rack.

And a fence around his thinking place.

He made himself a special coffee in the moka pot, doused the lights in his bedroom, and stood at the window sipping his coffee, looking out over the site. He turned on the camera, set it for night exposures and attempted to gain some control, to record the moments. People with torches, shouts and commands, a car pulling up. Police and flashing lights next, no doubt.

Quint was rather proud of his ability to take photographs at night. Some embarrassing first attempts of dark blurred shapes had become either dark or blurred and then, when he had mastered extremes of exposure and aperture, photographs of some particular beauty. The final touch had been setting a two second timer delay, so the vibration of his finger on the shutter release died away before the exposure began.

Quint remained still until the shutter clicked to signal the end of each exposure. Even with a tripod, the weight of his body shifting on the creaking wooden floor could blur a time exposure slightly.

Zoom photographs needed even greater care. When a car paused for the gate to open, Quint zoomed in, and hardly dared breathe. The gate area was well-lit, but at extreme optical zoom just a breath of wind through the open window could spoil a shot.

More magic could be performed in the computer after uploading the images from the camera chip. Just click on the “Autocorrect” control, and dim images became visible. Nothing much could be done to fix unfocussed or blurred shots, however.

After a while, the lights and the noise died down. Other vehicles and people showed up, but even Quint lost interest after a while. He took one last careful panorama and went back downstairs.

His bag of treasures, carefully laid out on the kitchen bench, hardly deserved the description. One piece of gold: a dollar coin dated 1988. Like the copper penny, this had the monarch on the obverse and kangaroos on the reverse. Quintessentially Australian, though how much relevance the British queen had to the modern Australian culture was a matter for debate.

A doll. Clothes long gone, but a china head on a wooden frame had survived life under the ground. Vanished threads had held the toy together, but when Quint laid the pieces out, a hand and leg were missing. Nevertheless, she smiled bravely up at him, blue eyes twinkling over red cheeks.

Some pieces of glass and china. A handful of small bones. Some larger pieces of bone, curved too sharply to come from any human. A kangaroo maybe, or a sheep.

And that was it. There had certainly been more to be found if he’d had more time, but Quint ruled a mental line under his thinking place. The grove was gone, the stones scattered, the place guarded by killers. No more.

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay

Quint looked from his window at the afternoon activity on the site. He held the copper penny, polishing it again and again as he thought of a girl and her merry companions having adventures there in the days when the city was young. Picnics in the afternoon, campfires at night, telling tales as the rabbits hopped in the shifting moonshadows.

He needed his thinking place, now more than ever. The trees had gone, felled three days since, chopped and chipped. The growing excavations had not yet reached out to engulf the fire circle.

There was still time, if he dared.

For the time being, his view was expanded, glimpses of the lake revealed through the remaining trees. The aisles of oaks were to stay, signs declaring “Tree Protection Area” hanging from the fence. The limbs were still bare, but in a month or so the fresh green of spring’s growth would close in his prospect again.

Quint worked on, listing the books from the morning’s purchase, entering the details onto a spreadsheet. He looked up the titles on sites such as ABE or Biblioquest to see what similar copies were going for, and for each one he found he made a private note. Of course he couldn’t get those prices himself, not without going into business, and fussing around with postage and invoices and customers, but he liked to check against what Ann and other book dealers paid him.

There were some pristine first editions from the Sixties. Probably read once or twice and then filed away on the shelves. He had to be careful. Book club editions pretended that they were first editions, but of course they weren’t, and the price difference could be huge.

Some history books and biographies that might have a specialist market. You developed a feel for these things after a while, but every now and then you got your fingers burnt. Quint remembered a detailed study on fishing methods in Welsh rivers that had seemed just the thing to attract niche buyers. Coracles and fishtraps. But the few copies on the net were way down in price. Five dollars or so.

This was no good. Quint put aside the books, unscrewed his camera, slipped it into his pocket, put on his walking boots and a jacket.

Outside there was a hint of drizzle in the air. Misty textures off against Red Hill. Quint pulled a cap from a peg from the door.

Rightaways at the fence, photographing a length every twenty-five paces. There was one point which seemed promising, the line dipping down to follow a swale.

Higher views as he climbed up onto the side of Parkes Way. Here he could see right over the top of the fence, the whole site exposed to the fleeting gaze of passing motorists.

He counted his paces all along the side of the motorway. It was a main traffic artery, part of the freeway-boom of the Seventies, when the central suburbs were linked to the growing satellite town centres. Woden and Belconnen to begin with, Tuggeranong and Weston Creek to follow. By the time Gungahlin had begun building, the tide had changed, and something in local government hated motor cars.

Around the corner through the Defence parking. ASIO was a continuation of a trend, erecting offices on carkarks. The original open spaces vanished, replaced by underground areas protected by boom gates and access cards, but never enough to cater for the added workers.

And the final corner, where the main gate area took a bite out of the Blamey Cresent intersection. Here a yellow-jacketed guard stood foursquare beside the gate. Quint took a photograph of the area, but he had no hopes in this direction. A guardhouse was manned around the clock and it was floodlit at night.

A few more lengths along Constitution Avenue and he would be back at the start point.

“Hey!”

The guard, calling him over.

“What are you doing?” he wanted to know. Quint explained about the colours and the lines of the fence under the bare trees, how it made an abstract composition. Quint had a Lyonel Feininger print of an old church hanging at home, and he loved the lines and planes of the painting, the human figures shrunken to a dwarven gathering at the door,

“You want to be careful,” the guard warned, “what you do with those photographs. For personal use, are they?”

“Of course.”

“If you were to put them on the internet, for example, you’d have to be careful of copyright.”

This made sense. “Of course,” Quint agreed. “Copyright retains in the author, and must be assigned specifically.”

“You need to be careful of taking photographs here. This is the Commonwealth New Building Project, and it’s a secure area. You could have your camera seized.”

This was interesting. “What legislation?”

“The Defence Act. You could be called in for an interview.”

“Thank you.”

Privately, Quint wasn’t so sure of the guard’s grip on the law, but this was no time for legal debate.

Once home, he gave his Feininger print a look before adding the pictures to his files, the computer loading them up, giving them sequential file names, and storing information such as date and time, exposure settings and focal length. It was a good, well-thought-out system.

And in a way he couldn’t really explain, the Feininger picture resonated. It wasn’t the real world, but it could be, stripped of details, the essential shapes laid out and colourcoded.

Night time, and he found a torch in the laundry. Flicked it on to test the beam. In the cupboard he kept some gardening implements for his tiny plot. A trowel, kept oiled against the rust of the idle months, but soon he’d be turning over the earth for his spring flowers.

The swale was the place, of course, and with some firm work he could lift up the wire and trowel away some of the earth beneath. The dip in the ground gave him a shadow to crouch in as he worked. When it was large enough, he wriggled through the hole.

His thinking place was scattered stones now, holes where the trees had stood, but the old fireplace could be made out. It resonated with Quint. He sat down for a few minutes, listening to the feel of the night. Dark here, and quiet.

The trowel made small scraping sounds as he dug down into the old ash. Objects came to light, and he put them in his green bag. His torch beam showed up a jagged shape, and he worked at it, freeing it from the soil.

Suddenly another torch flicked on, lighting up the scene, blinding him.

“Don’t move!”

But Quint flung up his arm against the light. Two men, both in uniform, one holding a torch, the other a gun.

This was not good. He picked up the trowel, launched it at the man with the gun, grabbed his bag and ran for his life.

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay

Quint looked up. What was Ann doing here? This wasn’t right. He looked at Mrs Campbell for an explanation.

“This is Miss Ounce, from Ounce Books,” she said. “You know, down at the shops.”

She wasn’t helping.

Ann stepped in. She was regarding him with an odd sort of look. The sort you’d give to a child.

“Sorry, William,” she said. “Mrs Campbell invited me in to give a quote on whatever’s left over after you’ve gone through her library. She didn’t say you hadn’t finished yet.”

That made sense.

“I’ve got the morning off,” she went on. “How about we each do one side of the room, pull out anything that looks interesting, and I’ll be able to make an estimate on what the rest are worth?”

“Oh I didn’t know you two were acquainted!” Mrs Campbell said. “I’ll bring in the tea things, and we can all chat.”

Quint didn’t want to chat. Just get on with the job. Ann shot him a look, and when the old lady left for the kitchen, she explained, “She’s lonely, William. No husband, you see. I’ll talk with her.”

Ann followed Mrs Campbell out of the room, both of them reappearing some minutes later with tea and biscuits on a tray. Quint mechanically took a biscuit, stirred sugar into his tea, and went on sorting through the books, careful to keep them away from any liquid. He listened with half an ear to the women talking, listening for anything that might have a bearing on the books. There were a lot of old books in leather bindings that really needed specialist examination.

“Of course, none of the suburb was here fifty years ago,” Mrs Campbell was saying. “Just open paddocks. They put up that eagle first, and it was all alone for years before the first of the Army offices went in.

“Before that, we used to ride over from Kingston to go to church. St John’s in what is Reid now, but it was just Canberry when we were young.”

“I’ve seen some of the old photographs,” Ann said. “It was farmland here until after the Second World War. I had someone in the shop who was talking about dairy cattle on Red Hill only a few years ago.”

“They used to say Canberra was a good sheep station spoilt,” Mrs Campbell smiled. “And so it was. It was our family’s sheep station, and my parents used to talk about the old days. But oh, the flies!”

“You’ve lived in Canberra all your life, then?”

“Born and bred here. I remember Parliament House being opened. All those men with whiskers! And the soldiers and the bands. There was an aeroplane crashed that day. Terribly exciting. And we ate meat pies for a week afterwards. We had a picnic place here, just we children, with some of the cousins visiting from New Zealand.”

Quint tuned out, working steadily through the shelves. The women chattered on through another pot of tea, until eventually he had worked his way through the room, Ann’s share of the bookshelves included.

He had a sizable pile when he’d finished. What was left wasn’t dross, but would give Ann some headaches in disposing of the lot.

The women were still chatting. Some long-dead friend named Elfie, jolly picnics and horse-races on the flats. Ann occasionally nodding her head and murmuring something.

“Mrs Campbell? I’ve finished now. I’ve got seventy six books I’d like to buy from you. I’ve left the older ones because they may be worth a lot of money and they need to be checked over by a specialist dealer. I’d be cheating you if I took them for what I can afford to pay you.”

He passed over a card on which he had written his offer. It was far less than what the books would fetch on the open market, and a long way short of what he himself hoped to realise by reselling the books to Ann and other dealers, but that was the way the bookscouting business worked.

Mrs Campbell passed the card over to Ann, who glanced at it, looked over at Quint’s stacks and nodded to the old lady. “That’s reasonable. I’ve known William for years, and he’s very particular.”

“Well then, young man. You’ve bought yourself some books.”

“How many books are left, William?” Ann asked.

“There’s two thousand, two hundred and five, though I didn’t count all the romance paperbacks, just estimated those shelves.”

“Two thousand dollars for the lot, Violet?” Ann asked. “I can have someone around to clear them this afternoon.”

“You have yourself a deal, young lady! I must say that this has been far less difficult than I imagined.”

“It’s been a pleasure talking with you! You must come around to my store some time. We can have coffee. Or tea, if you don’t mind teabags.”

“To tell the truth, Ann, I have teabags when I’m by myself. I only bring out the teapot for guests.”

Quint eventually escaped. Some stout shopping bags were produced, his selection loaded in, and he and Ann wobbled out, shoulders bowed under the load.

“A good thing it’s all downhill to your flat, William!” Ann said, pausing a block down Monash Drive to rub some life back into her palms.

Quint looked at her. She was smiling. That was good.

“I could have made two trips. But thank you for your help, Ann.”

“Thank you, William! I’ll make a ton of money on those books. And these, of course. We’re almost partners.”

“I like that,” Quint smiled back. He remembered something. “And hey, I agree about the magpies. There’s an old lady in the next flat gives them bits of bacon. Where are they going to build their nests in spring?”

There was a slice of the ASIO site visible ahead, framed neatly between Quint’s block of flats and one of the office blocks on Constitution Avenue. Ann nodded at it, hoisting the book bags again.

“Violet used to come and camp down there as a girl. They had a tent and horses and pretended they were cowboys. Cowgirls. Burn sausages over a campfire. Make hot chocolate. Bury treasures. Like something out of Swallows and Amazons.”

Swallows and Amazons. A great buy if you could find an early edition with a dustjacket. Children across the British Empire had been raised on it and the sequel novels about children sailing on an English lake all on their own, camping on an island, having adventures. Even the modern re-issues were pricey.

Ann was near exhaustion when they reached Quint’s flat. Books were heavy, one of the drawbacks of the job. She gratefully accepted his invitation to come in, sit down with some fruit juice for a rest.

Quint kept a clean flat. His own books were lined up – in alphabetical order of authors – on a bookshelf. Such a minefield of decisions in arranging books. Samuel Pepys had ordered his library by height, even to the extent of having book cabinets made especially for them. His will had specified that they not be altered, and by some miracle, three hundred years later they were still in order in the same bookcases.

CDs were less trouble. They were all the same size, mostly, in their plastic cases. Quint selected a compilation, one he’d bought at Starbucks when they were still in Canberra, and put it on. Chet Baker singing You Make me Feel so Young. Hard to imagine Mrs Campbell as a schoolgirl, galloping through the trees, firelight on her face, burying pirate treasure.

“Did she say what sort of treasure, Ann?”

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay

Quint looked out through his window, a curious mixture of satisfaction and despair. Sorry beyond words that his pleasant prospect of grass and trees had vanished, but glad that he was able to get a feel for what was happening.

Dawn was a good chance to establish a baseline record. He moved the camera on the tripod head, making a panoramic image of the entire ASIO site. Day by day, he would be able to track changes. Maybe there was some way he could make the composite images into a time-lapse sequence. He’d have to investigate.

An early-morning walker moved across the view. Quint paused, in case she appeared in two or more photographs. That would be confusing.

On his windowsill were two objects. The fireblackened stone from Quint’s now-vanished thinking grove. The metal disc from under the stone.

He picked up the disc, feeling the texture. It was about the size of a twenty-cent piece, but thinner and darker. There were figures on it, but it was blackened, corroded and encrusted.

Kitchen sink. Hot water, detergent and the old toothbrush kept for scrubbing at the shower times. He worked away at it, gently loosening the dirt, careful not to damage the surface.

It was a coin. A 1927 penny.

The currency had changed in 1966, when Quint was still very young, but he had seen examples. King George V’s head on one side, and a bounding kangaroo on the reverse.

The reverse of the reverse was called the obverse. This was one of those words that could be brought out to show people that the world was not as plain as it could be.

There was a significance to the date of the coin. Old Parliament House had been opened in 1927 by King George V’s son, Prince Albert, the Duke of York, who eventually became King George VI, father of the present Queen. Canberra had been a sheep station then, with a parliament house, a couple of hotels, a tiny village and a church in the paddocks, just up from the slow-moving Molonglo River. And dozens of foundation stones for the city to come.

The Depression had delayed construction, and in fact it had not been until the Sixties and Seventies that many of the grander buildings had been constructed. Architecturally, a poor choice of time period, but that was the way it had happened.

Quint kept some metal polish in the laundry cupboard, brought out on Sundays to keep the doorbell and other things gleaming, and with a soft cloth he worked on the coin until it was glowing copper bright. It was scratched and worn down where the green corrosion had bitten in, but it was a beauty in its own right. The kangaroo bounding across the golden reverse said “Australia” in a way nothing else ever could.

He left the patina of smoke and burning on the stone. Unless geology had changed, there was nothing under the black but rock.

Quint had a moka pot for coffee. Two days worth of fire-blackening on the rounded base. It made espresso coffee without the gadgetry and expense – just fill it up with water and coffee, sit it on the gas ring and when the spluttering stopped, turn off the gas and pour.

The time it took to make the coffee fitted precisely the time needed to open the front door, retrieve the morning paper, spread it out on the table and warm the coffee mug. He was running late today, but it was a special day, after sleeping late on Monday and taking a good set of photographs today, not to mention uncovering the secret of the coin.

The Canberra Times was an aberration. A daily broadsheet in a city of 350 000, it also had high standards of journalism, quite up with those set by the bigger cities of Melbourne and Sydney with populations in the millions, and well ahead of similarly sized cities such as Newcastle or Wollongong. Canberrans liked to think that the quality of the paper reflected the quality of the readership.

Today was special in another way. Normally Quint skipped over the Editorial page, with its cartoon and letters, because he found the diverse and contradictory views expressed there unsettling. But for the past few days he had been compiling a file of cuttings from the paper related to the ASIO building.

Very few correspondents had a good word for the thing. Quint found this entirely understandable. It was a monster, and it was destroying his life.

Know your opponent. That was one of the basic rules of war, of law, of life. There was a lot to find out about this building, and the information was beginning to flood in. Much of it was opinion, or misleading, or just plain wrong. But, like trial research and cross-examination, the inconsistencies could be identified, the truth exposed and the matter tidied away with a good verdict.

The jury of popular opinion, as expressed in Letters to the Editor, was on Quint’s side. But these people were powerless. Their verdict had no effect.

Quint wasn’t sure if there was any way to change the verdict already delivered in the dimmer recesses of government and bureaucracy. But maybe the monster had bent the rules somewhere in some office of planning and procedure. Just how had it escaped the normal stages of consultation and comment? Maybe there was an Achilles heel to be found and exploited.

It wasn’t as if it could not be done. There was history. Local history. Ewart Smith, a retired public servant, had been woken in the Campbell dawn by carolling magpies, and, unable to return to slumber, had bent his mind to a draconian identity card system on the verge of being introduced by the federal government. He had discovered a loophole in the legislation, and despite the bill having been the subject of a double dissolution election specifically held to ensure the its passage, a few words referring to regulations had been enough to kill it dead.

Maybe there was something. Maybe the monster could be slain by a quiet man with a well-aimed arrow.

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay

Quint spent Saturday researching digital cameras on the net. He constructed a spreadsheet cross-listing models, features and prices, read a slew of reviews containing acronyms and arcane terms, aiming for something that he thought he could afford, would be easy to operate, and have the features he wanted. He was mainly looking for good zoom capacity, large in-camera storage and as much sharp detail as he could get in a picture. He hated fuzzy.

What would do the job best of all would be a digital SLR with a telephoto lens. These ran to thousands of dollars. Quint added spreadsheet columns showing the price per megapixel, per zoom ratio, per gram weight. These calculations made digital SLRs unattractive. This was good, because he didn’t want to spend too much on a camera.

This had the effect of making the cameras at the bottom of the price range seem ridiculously excellent value. However, once he had sorted out the exact difference between optical zoom and digital zoom and focal length, he was able to rule these out as well, setting bottom ranges for zoom and sharpness, as rated by the reviewers.

The remaining mid-range cameras were ranked in order, Quint hit the print button, and armed with a detailed list, he went into Civic on Sunday. Work on the ASIO site had ceased for the weekend, and he crossed Constitution Avenue, walking citywards between the lines of oaks, remnant acorns amongst the drear fallen leaves under his feet.

Sometimes people collected the autumn acorns, gathering them up into buckets. He had heard that they were good pig food. Oak trees were imported into Australia early in the European colonisation, but the animals that fed on acorns, like squirrels, were not. Native animals didn’t eat them, so the acorns from the oaks lining both sides of Constitution Avenue lay where they fell until swept up on the road, were cracked beneath heels of pedestrians on the footpath, or rotted under the trees.

Urban Services would hunt down any saplings in spring, when they revealed themselves in fresh green for destruction. The double avenue of oak trees remained pristine, a grand sight in the summer. And in winter, well, they added to the cold feel of Canberra, so many bare limbs against the clear sky.

Quint swung his arms briskly. He soon crossed Anzac Parade, an admiring glance up and down the grand symmetrical ceremonial avenue. The two huge office buildings on either side – mirror images of each other – were vacant and had been for years. If ASIO wanted a new building, why not simply move into these?

Quint strode on, past Canberra Institute of Technology, past the Convention Centre, and into Civic. It might be Sunday, but the shops were open and besides the dedicated camera outlets, there were photography departments in many of the larger stores.

He picked the first, for convenience, and after some difficulty, secured a salesman, giving him the name and model of the number one camera on his list.

“We sold out of those a week ago,” the salesman said. “We’ve got the new model coming in soon. About the same price, but more megapixels.”

Quint studied his list in dismay. More megapixels and a different price would throw out the calculations. Nor did he want to wait.

He named the next camera.

“No problems. Plenty in stock. Here they are.”

He pulled one from a display. Quint looked at it with interest, It was black and chunky, had a big lens that somehow unfurled itself when powered up, and an impressive selection of buttons and knobs.

“How much?”

The salesman named a price, and Quint consulted his list, which showed one far lower. He showed the salesman the price, printed on the list in black and white.

“Where’d you get that? Off the net?”

Quint nodded.

“Sorry. This model’s very popular, and we can’t match that. I can knock fifty dollars off for you.”

At this point Quint made the decision to look for another retailer. He couldn’t abandon hours of detailed work.

By ten to four, his head was swimming. Some camera models had been superseded, some were unavailable in some stores, some new models had been introduced, the prices were far higher than those he’d found on the web, and the details of megapixels, zoom ratios, weights, sizes, features and options were blurring in his mind.

It would take a week to sort it all out. And by then everything would have changed. He could feel it.

“We’re closing in ten minutes, sir.”

Quint numbly indicated the camera in his hands. It wasn’t his first selection, but it seemed to do everything he wanted. “I’ll take this one.”

“Certainly, sir. Anything else?”

“I need a big memory card, four gigabytes at least. Oh, and a tripod.”

“I’ll throw in an eight gig card for fifty dollars extra. That okay? And what sort of tripod would you like? Collapsible, pocket-sized, detachable head?”

Quint was beginning to wish his own head was detachable. He indicated a tripod that looked like every other tripod in the shop. “That one there.”

The sun was setting behind him as Quint hurried home, his purchases in a yellow carrier bag, his clothing inadequate against the wind in his face. Canberra might have all the glory of four distinct seasons, but midwinter could be pretty bleak.

He unpacked everything in his bedroom. The tripod was erected by the window, the camera screwed on top, and he drew the curtains back to aim his camera at the building site opposite.

Quite dark by now. Quint pressed the shutter button, but nothing happened. He sighed, reached into the box for the camera manual and began reading at the section titled “Setting up your camera”.

By morning he had everything straight in his head. He had explored every menu option and set date, time, time zone, language, alert sounds, personalisation. He could zoom, he could make a video, he could delete images, he could do a white balance, he could attach the camera to his television and run a slideshow, and he had read every page of the manual. Especially the part about charging the batteries.

And he was fast asleep. The sun rose, work began on the site, and he slumbered on. Eventually a louder crash than usual roused him, and he recalled his duty, to make a detailed photographic record of the construction of the monster on Constitution Avenue.

Chaos it might become, but if he had a handle on the happenings and a record of progress, it might be bearable.

His first photographs showed the remaining trees felled, branches fed into a machine that reduced them to chips, the trunks loaded onto trucks. After another day, the parkland was bare.

Then the surveyors moved in, holding poles, squinting through instruments, knocking in pegs and doing a thousand things that fascinated Quint. At the same time, demountable buildings were erected on a corner of the site. A truck would bring in two at once, they would be lifted off, and before he knew it, there was a small village of blocky little offices, and a community of clerks and engineers and managers in yellow plastic hats.

It was when they began erecting a tall fence around the site that Quint really felt the pain.

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay

The taxidriver’s navigation screen was tilted. Quint noticed it as soon as he sat down in the passenger’s seat. He almost reached to straighten it, but instead buckled his seatbelt and put his hands in his lap, sitting quietly.

“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