The Peach and Decay

There is a valley between the freeway and the train line. A choked and filthy little creek struggles down the concrete path we made for it. The trucks that rumble past overhead would mask any sound the creek made anyway - but even in the wee hours of the morning the creek doesn't bubble nor does it flow. As you walk along the path up to the train station the air itself is stagnant, stale.

Just beyond the freeway, three beige coloured low income high rises stand like sentinels over all this, a pauper's kingdom. Rats thrive here, and among the Sudanese women who barely speak any English, there is already a fierce whisper about a baby borne away in the night by a giant, monstrous rat. They forbid their children from chasing after miskicked soccer balls in the valley, but this being a free country they wait for their mothers to turn away and then they take it in turns to be Burke and Wills.

Screaming in on the blustery wind smog and dust disembodied conversations in the form of micro waves of radiation from the mobile phone tower nearby. The woman with the tumour swears she gets snippets of conversation in her head - she plans to sue an Indian call centre for 'constant harrassment', even though she doesn't own a phone.

If she were to trek into the valley she'd find, amongst all the other debris, many broken and unbroken phones, discarded by jilted lovers or cornered thieves from the bridge up above.

And beyond the phones, amongst the hardy weeds which have flowered into trees, she might find a human ear. Where did it come from, this ear? And what does it now hear? What has it heard?

Perhaps, on your way to the station you stop and looking at the valley properly for the first time you imagine it blooming, into a real valley. You imagine a real creek, that bubbles along and perhaps you trade the high rises for some mountains. And then the sickness sets in as the squalor seeps into you and you think you're going to be sick. That's when you run down to the creek - hypothetically speaking, of course - but once there you see the severed human ear and you forget about all your sickness and the valley and all that instead you look around for the owner of the severed ear but there is no one else around and yes you half expected to see Peter and Jesus and the servant clutching his head but it's just you and the ear and then picking up the ear you

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Watching their children play with the strange oval shaped ball, the Sudanese women whisper to each other about the young peach tree supposedly sprouting in the decaying valley. They whisper very quietly that there might have been a human ear at that very same spot but now there is a peach tree. And then one whispers so quietly that the others have to lean in to hear, forgetting about their children she whispers that when you eat a peach from this tree you hear the confessions of every tortured soul that wandered down to that filthy creek.

And at that very moment, their children are biting the juicy fruit and in each of their little heads a different monologue begins, "I...I don't understand..."