The girl in the Indian skirt floated into the health shop, her eyes aglow with organic wheatgerm. A fragrance of mould followed her along the immaculate shelves. At the ginseng shelf I was reaching for the last tin.

‘Oh.’

‘I’m sorry. Ladies first.’

‘Please.’ She breathed a radiance of expensive teeth, ‘No sexism,’ and swiped the tin.

My eyes roamed her svelte outline. An Indian sage grinned at me from her breast. I pointed. ‘Isn’t that . . . er . .?’

‘Yes. Excuse me.’ She paid for a bag of mixed vitamins. I loitered outside as she was mounting her bicycle.

‘Um, weren’t we in the same tutorial last year?’

She glanced serenely in my general direction. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘Hey, yeah, I’m sure.’

In the sunlight, her face was slightly translucent. A spot of yellow paint adorned her forehead, like a bird’s dropping.

‘Maybe.’ She leant on the pedal.

I put my foot under the front tyre. ‘Er. My name is Ern.’

She smiled sweetly, ‘How do you do, Ern?’ and wheeled over my foot and away.

I followed her to the corner, yapping like a puppy at her conversational heel. Finally she turned.

‘Please go away! I find you very bourgeois.’

‘Ah, you speak French.’

‘Eh?’

I pointed to a handy restaurant. ‘Look. It’s lunchtime. Let me shout you lunch in there.’

She appeared hot, and strands of hair hung down like streamers from a ceiling. ‘Is this a con?’

‘I hope not. It isn’t working.’

A distant smile twitched over her muscular face. ‘OK. But I’ll pay for my own.’

The vegetarian restaurant had an air of studied poverty. Carefully torn curtains and antique laminex tables. it was the kind of place that, had a thief broken in, he would have left a donation. We sat.

I scanned the menu hoping to find a hamburger. ‘Are you a carnivore?’ I asked.

Her nostrils winced. ‘No. Animals have evil vibrations.’

‘It’s bad luck to be superstitious, you know.’

Her lips crumpled like a rubber band.

I glanced about. Some of the diners looked as if they only fed on the table flowers. Below the gargle-gargle of conversation, piped blues chugged along.

The waitress arrived in an old T-shirt.

‘Ahh. I think I’ll have bean shoots and rice, thanks.’

‘The usual for me, Devina.’ The two women smiled secretively.

‘Do you come here often?’

‘It’s important who touches your food.’ She pointed to her head. ‘Their energies have to be right.’

‘Ahh.’ I nodded. She was into food. ‘Did you know it was possible to live entirely on lentils?’

‘I know,’ she said, reaching into her bag of vitamins. She swallowed a pill.

‘You shouldn’t be on pills.’

She drew her finger on me. ‘Look man, don’t play the chauvinist with me! It’s men who’ve screwed up the ecosystem so incredibly that we need to supplement our food. The whole organic flow has been blocked by men. So don’t lay that trip on me!’

I apologized for men, and we lapsed into silence. At the next table, two men with long hair bullied back into pony-tails talked earnestly. Words like ‘consciousness’, ‘amazing’, and ‘energy level’ were being flashed about like credentials. The two women with them sat quietly. The one facing me wore a blouse like a sackful of mammary flab. A child of uncertain sex played at her feet.

‘The trouble with modern food is that it has no vibration.’ The idea seemed to have lodged in her brain. I dug myself into the far edge of my chair. ‘You call it food?’ She laughed, making a sound like water glubbing down a drain. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

‘I’ve no intention.’

She glared. ‘Is that a put-down?’

Our beans and rice arrived, quivering with the speed at which they had been rushed to us. ‘Ahh!. . . er . . . food.’

She prodded some air at me. ‘And why do you have to act the male role all the time?’ Her eyebrows arched like two church rooves.

‘Why do you?’

A neat O appeared in her face. ‘You know, I feel really stupid talking to you. You’re like a cardboard cutout propped in a chair.’

We chewed in silence, our mouths making the sound of footsteps running away. The food tasted like wood shavings mixed with crab grass.

‘Do you like books?’ I said at last.

‘Yes,’ she told the plate.

‘Which ones?’

She chewed vigorously on the question for a moment. ‘Oh, books on brown paper that feel sort of grainy, you know.’

‘Mmm.’ I watched her eat, her lips opening and closing like a kind of sea creature. Her skin was pale and well-scrubbed. The red lips like an embarrassing wound.

‘Are you married?’ I asked.

She dropped the fork onto the plate. ‘Ms.’

‘Never mind; not everyone gets married.’

‘That’s not very mature, don’t you think?’

‘Sorry,’ I simpered. ‘I find you strangely attractive.’

She stared for a moment like a beached fish. Her face gradually pinked over. ‘Yeah? Why don’t you cut the crap and say what you REALLY mean?!’

I cut it. ‘Well, I suppose deep down I’d like to sleep with you.’

‘Wow!’ Her eyes flicked upwards. ‘You really gross me out, man. Always sex!’

‘Not always.’

She stood up, scraping her chair. People looked over; maybe they were expecting lunchtime theatre. ‘I’m sorry man, that’s not my path!’ A fine shower of food particles descended on me. She nodded pityingly. ‘You’re incredible.’

I watched her stamp away, until sunlight consumed her through the doorway. The open door let in a growl of traffic. I stared at the next table until they looked away. She’d left her vitamins. I took some out of the bag and began arranging them in the sugar bowl. They resembled the Japanese sand garden at Ryoanji. Each rock perfect and untouchable. And not a blade of grass to disturb the pattern.

‘… an amazing lifestyle,’ someone was saying.

(WA Sesquicentennial Literary Comp. Co-winner  –judge Peter Cowan)