Fallow squints into the dusty rubble-strewn street two-hundred feet below and raises the binoculars, pressing his sockets into the cool rubber.
‘The crows are inquisitive today,’ he says to Vincent, who squats among the cabbage rows on the other side of the roof.
Fallow lowers the binoculars and looks at Vincent. The gardener’s hands are huge and thickly veined and the colour of the earth they tend. He turns for a moment and in the sun his face is handsome and flat and, Fallow often thinks although he will never say it aloud, like fine leather stretched taut over stone carved only in the vague likeness of a man.
‘There’s one in his rib cage.’ Through the lenses Fallow watches the crow peck the sternum as a cockatiel nubs its own reflection. Offering beakfuls of seed to its own framed beauty. ‘Did you say he was from the city? Vincent?’
‘Who?’
‘Him down there.’
Vincent probes the soil with his fingers. Pressing it flat. Brushing the cabbage leaves with his thumb. ‘Where else?’
‘I thought maybe a wanderer.’
The gardener stands and sighs and dabs his dripping face with a rag.
Behind them the roof door wails open on its rusted hinges and Griffin steps into the sunlight. He smirks through his dark beard. Holds up a plastic pouch with white tablets bunched in one corner, like a cannibal displaying the teeth of his enemy. Fallow thinks he looks like Bluto, although he won’t say it aloud. Griffin would throw him from the roof.
Vincent stares at the bag and at Griffin’s broad flat face wreathed in its mane-like beard. He wipes his hands on his thighs. ‘Where?’
‘Apartment twenty-eight. Must’ve missed it last time.’
Vincent nods. Grins. ‘Dear oh dear,’ he says.
