Down Under by Bill Bryson

history to die in the bush in the middle of a city, you poor, sad schlubb.’ All the rest was icy terror.
    And so I trotted along, wretched and whimpering, until I rounded a bend and found, with another small and disbelieving wail, that the path abruptly terminated. Before me stood nothing but impenetrable tangle – a wall of it. I looked around, astounded and appalled. In my panic – doubtless while I was scraping the cobwebs from my brow with the aid of lumps of granite – I had evidently taken a wrong turn. In any case, there was no way forward and nothing behind but a narrow path leading back in the direction of two surging streaks of malice. Glancing around in desperation, I saw with unconfined joy, at the top of a twenty-foot rise, a corner of rotary clothesline. There was a home up there! I had reached the edge of the park, albeit from an unconventional direction. No matter. There was a civilized world up there. Safety! I scrambled up the hill as fast as my plump little pins would carry me – the dogs were very close now – snagging myself on thorns, inhaling cobwebs, straining with every molecule of my being not to become a headline that said: ‘Police find writer’s torso; head still missing.’
    At the top of the hill stood a brick wall perhaps six feet high. Grunting extravagantly, I hauled myself on to its flat summit and dropped down on the other side. The transformation was immediate, the relief sublime. I was back in the known world, in someone’s much-loved back garden. There was a set of old swings that didn’t look as if they had been used in some years, flower beds, a lawn leading to a patio. The garden appeared to be fully enclosed by brick wall on three sides and a big comfortable-looking house on the fourth, which I hadn’t quite anticipated. I was trespassing, of course, but there wasn’t any way I was going back into those woods. Part of the view was obscured by a shed or summerhouse. With luck there would be a gate beyond and I could let myself out and slip back into the world undetected. My most immediate concern was that there might be a big mean dog in here as well. Wouldn’t that be richly ironic? With this in mind, I crept cautiously forward.

    Now let us change the point of view just for a moment. Forgive me for getting you up, but I need to put you at the window beside the kitchen sink of this tranquil suburban home. You are a pleasant middle-aged homemaker going about your daily business – at this particular moment filling a vase with water to hold some peonies you have just cut from the bed by the drawing-room windows – and you see a man drop over your back wall and begin to move in a low crouch across your back garden. Frozen with fear and a peculiar detached fascination, you are unable to move, but just stand watching as he advances stealthily across the property in a commando posture, with short, frenzied dashes between covering objects, until he is crouched beside a concrete urn at the edge of your patioonly about ten feet away. It is then that he notices you staring at him.
    ‘Oh, hello!’ says the man cheerfully, straightening up and smiling in a way that he thinks looks sincere and ingratiating, but in fact merely suggests someone who has failed to take his medication. Almost at once your thoughts go to a police mugshot you saw in the evening paper earlier in the week pertaining, if you recall, to a breakout at an institution for the criminally insane at Wollongong. ‘Sorry to crash in on you like this,’ the man is saying, ‘but I was desperate. Did you hear all the racket? I thought they were going to kill me.’
    He beams foolishly and waits for you to reply, but you say nothing because you are powerless to speak. Your eyes slide over to the open back door. If you both moved for it now, you would arrive together. All kinds of thoughts start to run through your head.
    ‘I didn’t actually see them,’ the man goes on in a judicious but oddly pumped-up tone,