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out from a wash as laundry lint. The journal crisis had precipitated the present need to buy earlier than my wont.
    And yet again, I wished they sold these in 'dust'. Or, in inner-city Sydney, 'grime' would have been the right colour.
    By the time we caught the bus, there was only an hour of downtown late-night shopping left.
    I had only asked Brett along because the words spewed out of my mouth. Now I regretted the decision. He wasn't Gordon. The guy sitting in the seat behind me in the standing-room-only 431 Bettawong Point to City was the Prince of Darkness, only a.k.a.'d 'Brett' at his amusement, and he was bound to do ... what? I could not face the thought, so decided that the only way to deal with it, was not to.
    But he accompanied me in my grim mission to find, buy, get out, like a labrador on a lead—quiet, compliant, observant, dull.
    'Have you eaten?' I asked when we were on the bus home, my sheets the only purchase.
    His answer was a cross between 'uehh' and a groan. I looked him in the face for the first time since morning. The skin on his cheeks glowed with a celadon translucence, the sheen of a cold sweat—like the underbelly of a tree frog.
    'You're sick!' I told him, as if he didn't know. 'Do you get car sick?' I asked. Did he know what car sickness was? When precisely was his last holiday?
    'Uarghh,' he said, and put his head between his knees.
    'Burp,' I instructed. 'All the bus drivers are the same. Start, jerk, stop. Want to walk?'
    He wagged his head, which I took for 'Yes'.
    We got out at the next stop. The air was typical for November—warm and sticky as an armpit, and thick with inner-city early-summer fug: two-thirds emissions and one third frangipani and jasmine flowers. We were a half-hour stroll from home, slightly less to my neighbourhood haunts.
    'What kind of food do you eat?' I asked, as we stopped at a light. It hadn't occurred to me that he would eat, until I saw him with the bowl of Weet-Bix and soy milk (though, upon reflection, I could imagine them being served in hell).
    'I'm not hungry,' he said.
    The light was stuck, so we ran across—or rather, I ran, he plodded, and a cabbie nearly hit him.
    He barely made it up the kerb, and leaned right over. I thought he was going to sprawl. Instead, he let me lead him to the nearest closed shop, where we sat on its windowsill.
    He looked pitiful. 'What's wrong,' I asked. 'You can tell me.'
    'I ate what I was given this morning,' he said, his head hanging. 'But your kitchen doesn't agree with me. And neither do any of the eating establishments in your neighbourhood.
    Insufferable snob!
    If I were a dog, my ruff would have stood. 'I live,' I informed him, 'and you are holidaying, in Bettawong! Sydney's intellectual cum artistic cum ... and I quote, best eats Mecca.'
    My lips had drawn back, tasting blood and flesh and fight, when I came to my senses.
    'What do you require?' I asked with a solicitude I felt not an iota.
    'No garlic?' he asked in a voice so soft.
    A host of black-and-white movies swarmed my brain, all streaked by lightning and scented by the reek of antiseptic garlic purifying the world of fiends. 'I thought garlic was an old wives tale.'
    He laughed. It was a low laugh sounding like distant thunder, so it was probably coincidence that I heard glass shattering somewhere near.
    He put his hand on my shoulder and turned himself so that we faced each other squarely. 'Angela,' he said. 'One old wife is worth a thousand preachers in the harm old wives have done to me. And garlic does hurt.'
    We left our windowsill perch and walked together in silence.
    I observed him out of the corner of my eye. He still looked ghastly, but over the worst of his attack. Had he eaten any garlic? Was it just the smell? How did the house affect him? Was he around during lunch? Or did Victor, Kate's dog,  whose favourite place was under the kitchen table, breathe on him?
    But the Devil wasn't born yesterday, nor was he fiendish in only one part of the