At its base runs a thin greenish thread of never-drying slime, but high on its walls are brown stains testifying to where water has gushed through the drain shoulder-high to torrent out into the creek which trips past the pipe’s outlet. On all sides of this creek there is wasteland, a long verdant tail-end of ground that cannot be built on because of the waterway. It’s an unlovely, ramshackle place, thrumming with insects, thorny with blackberry and thistle. Rubbish collects here as if called, the trees that slope over the water decorated with debris swept into their branches when the creek rises biblically during storms. Syd, when he comes here, keeps an eye out for a body lodged amid the rocks and scrub. It is his greatest goal, the discovery of a corpse. The drain is well suited to this gone-to-seed landscape, the way a headstone matches the graveyard that surrounds it. Most of the pipe is buried, only its wide mouth gulping at the air; a few footsteps down its throat carry an explorer away from the heat and light of the sun, into a darkness so dense and cool it’s like being inside the body of a gigantic leech.
