The two tonne removalist truck pulls up outside 11 Escher Street with the chassis groaning and airbrakes hissing. Roger is hunched in the passenger seat with a five day growth, bad acne and doggy breath from tooth decay. He stares up at the house. Three bloody floors.

Roger’s recently divorced and the father of two girls. One of his girls will break out of poverty and find a cure for pancreatic cancer. But with his black shoulder-length oily hair, two weeks shy of his 24^th birthday, Roger has no way of knowing this. No way of divining the future, which is just one day after another of hauling desks, cupboards and pianos, up flights of stairs.

“Is this the place Dog’s Breathe?” says Tim, the driver and an old man at 42. A 20-year tote and carry veteran with bow legs and a spinal disc with a nasty habit of moving sideways. He washes down top shelf pain killers with diet Coke.

Tim’s first mistake was answering a call at 6.00am that morning to do the Escher street job because Hal, the regular driver for Easy and Breezy, was still spewing up last night’s bourbon with bits of stomach lining floating around with the carrots. Tim had recently come off anger management medication. He wasn’t popular with the other workers but he always got the job done.

His second mistake was letting Roger program the GPS, which took them to Echelon Street on the other side of town. Then they got stuck in Monday morning peak-hour traffic.

“Is this the place or isn’t it?”

“Yeah” Roger says staring at Tim’s dead black eyes. He wants to smash his nose in to but thinks better of it. There’s child support to pay next week.

“The owners ain’t home,” Roger says. “Here’s the diagram where they want their stuff put. The key’s in the letter box.”

Tim snatches the diagram, gets the key, walks up the slate footpath and knows he’s got to piss pronto. Prostate issue. He walks in and steadies himself by holding on to an old hat stand. His visual senses reel. His stomach flips.

The house is a medieval villa with a large quadrangle with two staircases leading up to the second and third floors, where they turn to meet doors and alcoves on the vertical plane. It was like living in the centre of a Rubik’s cube and with the twist of a wrist, the walls move at 90 degrees, so floors become walls and vice a versa.

“What’s the go with this shit?” says Roger walking in behind him. “Someone in the office is pulling our dicks.”

Tim studies the diagram. Reckons the lounge room is on the second floor. The bedrooms might run off the second and third floor landings. There’s a balcony on the third floor, built for Juliet. Everything was screwy. The two dimensional map didn’t correspond to the three dimensional floor and walls.

“We ought to ring the office,” Roger says. “Bump it upstairs.”

“That’s exactly what we’re going to do. We’re going to bump this furniture in. Take the truck, go to Coates Hire and get a 10 metre scissor lift. Get one hundred 90-degree metal plates and one hundred 20 mm bolts from Bunnings and no stopping at the pub.”

Tim makes his way up the stairs. There’s a vase of sunflowers rooted to the vertical axis on a patio outside. At the top of the first landing, a door lies horizontally on its hinges, opening to a passageway. He’s had some shit jobs before and this is one of them. Once he had to remove a glass sliding door to hoist a $100,000 grand piano up over a two storey balcony, tilt it 45 degrees and carry it 30 metres in to a penthouse apartment. He did it with old Tony Moribito who just pointed and grunted. A measure twice and cut once man. Dead now. Heart attack at 52.

He pushes the toilet door open, crawls in on his side and with difficulty, pees in little spurts in to the bowl and flushes. There’s a hiss of airbrakes and the yank of a handbrake. Roger steers the scissor lift through the front door.

“Careful of the door frame Fungus Face.”

They lug in the heavy furniture: an oak kitchen table, a large study desk, a three seater rosewood lounge with two matching chairs, and three double bed bases. Tim puts his bag of tools and the diagram on the floor of the scissor lift. Roger reeks of dope.

“Right, here we go,” Tim says. “We’re going to hoist the heavy furniture using the scissor lift, then I’ll use a nail gun and glue to fix it to the walls. Use the plates and bolts where we have to.”

They carry the kitchen table through a ground floor door which lies on its side. Roger mutters ‘this can’t be fucking right’ as Tim drives six inch nails through the table’s wooden legs and in to the parquetry floor. Then nails and glues the chairs to the floor around the table.

“How are they going to have their breakfast on that?” Roger says. “It’s all topsy turvy.”

They lift the three seater lounge and precariously perch the two chairs on top of it and drive the scissor lift over to the east wall. Then they glue and nail both lounge and chairs to the wall below Juliet’s balcony, while Roger holds them on his shoulder.

It was ‘topsy turvy’ that did it for Tim. Who except wankers says ‘topsy turvy’? It’s up there with ‘whoops a daisy’. Not only had Roger made them two hours late, he’s stoned. He has to go.

They put the last of the beds on the scissor life and bolt them to the floor. They’re about to come down when Roger sees a book, ‘A Flag for Sunrise’ by Robert Stone, lying on the staircase.

“What do you reckon ‘A Flag for Sunrise’ means?” Roger asks as he blows his nose in to his hand. “Do you reckon they raise a flag like the police and military do every morning?”

Tim secretly removes the pin from the scissor lift gate.

“Wouldn’t be much of a novel would it?” Tim says. “The story of soldiers who get up every morning at sunrise to watch a flag being raised. I wouldn’t pay $30.00 for that.”

“It doesn’t say anything about soldiers,” Roger says. “It could be a metaphor thing. A celebration of the day, the joy of being alive. That sort of shit.”

“Or it could also be a commemoration for dead soldiers,” Tim says. ”The passing of night and in the morning, we shall remember them.”

“I know what you mean but ‘A Flag for Sunrise’ suggests the flag is actually for Sunrise, for the radiant warmth of life, for nature and our mysterious journey from life to death. It’s a salutation to all that is good and great.”

Tim waits until Roger’s back is turned and then plants his size 12 steel capped boot hard in to Roger’s lower back, propelling him through the scissor lift gate. He falls head first on to the hard concrete floor, breaking his spine. He lies there unconscious with blood coming out of his nose. Tim lowers the lift, puts the gate pin in Roger’s pocket and calls the ambulance. Says there has been a terrible accident and can they come quick, Oh My God, it’s just fucking terrible.

The ambos take a quick look at Roger and know he’ll be on jelly for the rest of his life. They take a long look at the architecture of 11 Escher Street before shaking their heads and heading to the ambulance. Roger died of a massive coronary on the way to hospital.

Tim’s evidence was concise and credible. Roger lost his footing and fell. Roger’s wife sobbed in to a tissue but stopped crying when the Court awarded her $2.4 million dollars in compensation. The end of baked beans and potato chips for tea. She could buy her oldest daughter those books she wanted.