The house crouched twisted under the January sun. Around it the grass, bamboo, hydrangeas and fishbone fern sprouted almost audibly and filled the steaming air with the rich, bitter fragrance of their eager growth. There was no straight piece of wood in the house. Every step bowed and every floor sloped. Cracks webbed the blue-green tiles of the shaded front porch and the greeny-white paint on the window frames. The facing boards showed egg-sized white and grey mottles of blistered paint and weathered wood. Adrienne wrenched at the hot bronze key stuck in the brown lock and pushed at the front door. Her thumbnail split on the lock as black dust smeared the neat white cotton over her shoulder. She jerked back on the key three times and twisted round as it came out with an uneven "zip". She swiped at her grimy shoulder with sweaty metallic hand and clinked through the bunch of keys until she found one that crunched into the deadlock, below the first one, and wrenched it clockwise, anticlockwise, and in and out until she felt something inside the pitted brown cylinder move. Adrienne shoved the door again grunting not so loudly that she could not hear the top lock click shut again.

Aaron called from behind her, quavering:

“Can we go now?”

“Do we have the box, Aaron?”

“No- but”

“Then we’re not going. Come around the back”

“No. it stinks and my feet hurt”

“Well tough. I told you to get shoes and you were slow again. Come round the back."

“No”

“Do as you’re told Aaron. If you stay on the street by yourself a robber will stuff you in the boot of his car and boil your head for dinner. Then you will cry like a baby, and no-one will ever find you.”

“No-oo”

“Then come round the back”

Aaron began to follow her. His little heart thumped. The world seemed too bright and silent. He heard cicadas very loud and sharp and rustles of corduroy between his legs and he knew not what in the garden. Aaron shrank from the garden. In the garden strange plants thrust spiny spikes above his head. The colours of the leaves were deep and dull, dirty and indistinct. Aaron formed the opinion that colours like that should not exist. Aaron heard the little plants growing engrossing, dying and drying below the crackling stiff fronds of a failing palm. Aaron’s world was clean and gentle and didn’t change except round the edges. He didn’t want to smell a thousand lives thrusting and twisting to the light as they fed on the corpses of their neighbours.

The plants scored Adrienne’s round legs as she led him around the back of the house. None of the plants touched the house. There were no cobwebs on the eaves and no wasp nests in the cracks. Aaron turned his head from side to side as he hurried down the side of the house. To one side he smelt ripe wet death and growth and on the other side sharp dry dust. A screen on the outside of the back door cracked down in a dry tangle when she tried the handle. Her head and one shoulder stuck through it. She started and brushed cobwebs out of her hair as the screen broke corner to corner laying crumbling splinters under her nails. Many coats of white now cracked and dusty sat on the back door. Adrienne pushed on it and lifted. The door grunted and swung in. Adrienne swiped at the grime on her sweaty arms and moved under the lintel.

The car whined, strained, tilted and squealed, but it stayed on the road. For hundreds of hours in the past eight months he had driven cars with his thumbs. The road never got away from the car anymore. He had computer games about cars and computer games about magic, and eight months ago he put the magical games on top of his high wardrobe and stopped looking up. Daniel’s little brother Aaron looked up and felt puzzled and disappointed. When Daniel got the new version of “final fantasy” for his fourteenth birthday he threw it in the bin, half unwrapped. Aaron dug the game out and played it when nobody seemed to be looking.

“Daniel”

“Yes Mum”

“Did Aaron get back when I was asleep?”

“No”

“Adrienne should have brought him back by now”

“Where’d they go?”

“They went to look for something in the Evan’s old place up the hill”

The car flipped over and spun off a wall.

Daniel ran downhill around the back of his house, squatted in the weeds under the back veranda, and looked at the dust sticking between his toes.

His underarms itched. Daniel had not been using deodorant for long and he often forgot. He scratched and then dug around the mulch for his lizard trap. Mum knew about the lizard trap. Daniel was a licensed lizard collector and he passed this bit irrigation pipe off as something to leave in the bush behind his house for small reptiles to crawl into. Daniel’s mum did not know that the pipe was used for ejecting, not receiving. Daniel would go well into the bush, pack an under-ripe lemon up the back of the pipe, spray deodorant in behind it, block the pipe, and light the result thorough a hole. He used his little bazooka to knock branches off trees, and for the smell. Burnt deodorant and squashed lemon said freedom and excitement to him. Also risk. Once, he had tried using engine-starting oil instead of deodorant. He told Mum the burn inside his elbow was from the stove, and bought a new pipe.

Daniel liked catching lizards and blowing stuff up. But he only went into the bush to pass the time when the computer was not free. Daniel put a lot of effort into stopping life from pinning him down. But now it had, and he was left with an awful near-certainty, a homemade cannon, and a very sick feeling.

Eight months earlier something in the back of a very dirty Citroen DX rustled so that Daniel heard it and started. Daniel saw that there were no people in the car but there was a big rough cloth bag in the back that moved. Daniel watched the bag move until he was sure that there was a goanna in there. He wanted the goanna. The goanna would make him somebody. Surely no one would argue with a boy who owned a reptile able to take all the skin off your arm in a moment. Still he left the car before the owner saw him and made his short way home. He knew the car stayed outside an ugly red block of flats around the corner from his own house but he couldn’t work out a way of getting closer to the lizard. He took to circling the streets around the flats on his bike, hoping the lizard would get away.

One evening about two weeks after he had heard a rustle in the back of a Citroen Daniel looked out his bedroom window and observed the owner of that vehicle walking down the road. Daniel watched with interest because route of the thin bent man in a purple shirt meant that he was almost certainly going to one of about a dozen houses further down the road.

The next morning before school Daniel went down to the bottom of the valley to look for frogs. On his way home he saw goanna-guy (as he called him) come out of an old house with a very overgrown garden and trudge wearily homeward.

The next Saturday night Daniel was lying in bed, looking through the open blinds into the street below when he saw a bent figure with an oddly shaped bundle on its back pass under a streetlight. He pulled a hoody on over his pyjamas and scurried over the wet grass in pursuit, staying carefully out of the streetlights despite frequent sudden pains in his bare feet. He looked at the bag on the man’s back and saw it move by itself just as its bearer turned into the old house with the aggro garden. Daniel stopped in the street. He was anxious for his feet and also feared that Aaron would wake up and find him missing but started to move through the garden then stopped again as a great crash from inside startled him. He hurried up to a window and looked in. He couldn’t see anything but an overturned sink and three desiccated top hats, silhouetted dimly in the moonlight, so he moved along to another window, a French one, and dropped his jaw at what he saw, or would have if he had been able to see it properly.

Some of the inside walls of the little house had been broken down and replaced with crooked beams to make a big room. Goanna guy was crouched down, moving around the big room backwards and holding something long pointed and twitching to the board floor. Daniel shook the French window, very gently, to see if it would open, and wondered why of all the things he could do with a lizard the man had chosen to draw a circle on the floor with its tail.

Daniel and the lizard- circle writer within had little enough in common, but shared a failure to realise in time that some things are better left alone.

By Samuel Barnes