“You can’t spell rubbish without bush,” said the sergeant. He was wearing milk on his lapels, put there by an earlier over-expressive exposition about the evils of the white juice. Passion and a full glass didn’t mix.

“What?” said Pud, sitting across from him. Their table was mahogany, raw cut straight from the pines of a forest. The wood didn’t catch the light no matter what angle you looked at it, the designers had made a bold decision to starve it of varnish.

“Eh? Rubbish. Bush. Can’t have one without the other. Like grapefruit and a grapefruit spoon.” the sergeant’s face was so that one eye was above the table, one eye was under it in an attempt to lug a challenge at his visual cortex. He discovered that the table didn’t catch the lamp light, that someone had forgotten to varnish it.

“Do you mean rub-bush.” emphasized Pud. He then spelled out ‘bush’ with his mouth to the eye of the sergeant’s that was above the table. Pud was regretting having slapped the table when they came in, he was still picking splinters from his hand. He wondered if anyone had bothered to varnish the thing.

The two gentlemen were occupying Gurty’s Moist Munchies, a hole-in-the-wall hole in the wall. Someone had quite literally drilled a hole into the side of a wall, right at one end of an aqueduct where the brick met the side of the valley that held it. Forty someones that is, hired by the city council to build a tunnel that went from the city centre to the edge of the river the aqueduct stopped over.

The river, which elbowed like a ten-jointed giraffe leg, cut through the marsh and, with the trees being naked for winter, made the whole backdrop rather sharp. With a disposition for geometrics, the city council had unanimously agreed that nothing smelt more like a booming tourist industry than a thoroughfare straight to the most beautiful lookout point within one-hundred miles of the city, right to the edge of the sharp river.

To the tune of forty-million dollars, they achieved one-hundred feet of tunnel.

Not to pass on an opportunity for extravagant political peacocking, the city council members gathered their garments, readied their ribbons, and shook each other’s hands firmly, with a good turnout of the public to legitimize the gathering, readying, and shaking. The “Nickety Nook” is what they called it, everyone else called it the “Sneaky Crook.” Spending the hard earned wages of the townsfolk on one-hundred foot nooks of dirt wasn’t in popular opinion it would seem.

With the foresight for profit, an eye for business, and another eye missing, Walt Emerzfield introduced himself at the post-procession banquet celebrating the opening of the nook. Mangrove a la pain was on the menu that evening, among a selection of large cheese wheels that no one had the knife to cut, and endless reels of salad components that tasted as if someone had spilt the tape of a movie about the crunchiest, blandest green things money can buy and a cult that grew to impose the ritual of enjoying such bland products of the Earth.

The city, Walt Emerzfield’s city, where he grew up working on his father’s mangrove farm, had funded the banquet by profits made from digging their one-hundred foot nook. A rare species of underground caterpillar had been discovered and, for a splinter of a moment, the city became a zoologist sinkhole. Once all the caterpillar’s were sold to those who liked to write about caterpillars and take photos of their hairs and sharp claws, the council unanimously voted that the excess funds would be but towards a celebration, and, yes, they would dig deep (they weren’t short on puns, clearly) and order Mangrove a la pain for everyone.

That’s how, with a mouth half full of mangrove and the other half full of pain, Walt Emerzfield introduced himself to three members of the four-member city council. All four members had the same birthmark on their left wrist, in the shape of Zanzibar. All four members were brothers and sisters.

“Call me Walt,” said Walt Emerzfield, the mangrove and the pain swapping halves in his mouth.

“From one mangrovian to the next, a pleasure. Call me Kelt.” Kelt bowed with his neck, the rest of his spine cancelled the command to disperse the bend from head to boot, there was general concern that deposits around Kelt’s belly meant a high-risk factor for a tumble.

“That’s a big hole,” said Walt pointing directly at Laura’s crotch. Laura and Kelt were sister and brother.

“The general attitude towards incestual relationships forbids me to comment on that,” said Kelt. “But from personal experience, variety in holes is the quality of a healthy, non-incestual, population.”

“No,” Walt guffawed, Laura wasn’t Walt’s type. He made an arching gesture with his finger, to indicate that Kelt was supposed to look beyond his sister’s crotch. “That hole,” meaning the one-hundred foot deep hole in the cliff behind them.

“Nook.” corrected Laura. “Laura, Chief Major of Dundooley city, first, only, and last.” A hand was offered in a handshake, but purposefully kept just out of reach so that Walt looked foolish reaching for it.

“Call me Walt,” said Walt, reaching for, and missing, the hand. He’d swallowed the last Mangrove a la pain he would have that night. At the entrance, each guest was given one blue ticket that said “Admit One.” The ticket was traded for admittance to eat one Mangrove a la pain.

“Holes, nooks, whatever you want to call them, they’re my business, and, though I break a hundred rules of conduct by being so brash, may I say that the hole you present before me is as sweet as four cubes of sugar in a drop of tea.” Walt winked.

Laura had opened with a power play, but the sharp character – pointy broaches, pointy trimmings on her jackets, pointy ruby earrings, pointy hair crisped by hairspray – fell away and smoothed at Walt’s words. “Why, I…” a rosy colour hummed at the surface of her face like someone had rubbed a tomato on her cheeks.

“Not you, you loose lemon,” Kelt cut in embarrassed. “Walt here – apologies for my sister’s uncouthness – is talking about Nickety Nook.”

Continuing where he left off, “And with holes so sweet as yours, I see a cacophony of opportunity.” At the last word, Walt waved his hands like a rainbow to show that opportunity was as multifaceted as all the colours in a rainbow. You can’t count the colours in a rainbow, you can’t count the number of opportunities that Walt saw.

“Five...” said Walt, hanging his hand like butler stripped of their decorative napkin.

“Five?” Kelt sent quizzical glances with his eyebrows, pinged undecipherable Morse code back at Walt.

“...thousand.”

“Five!” And Kelt met the skin of Walt’s palm with the skin of his palm and let the contact carry through like a wreaking ball. “High-five, yessir, you can take ol’ Nickety right off our hands.”