A woman is watching things. She sits on the side of a shallow decorative pool, on a low sandstone wall. The sun is beating down on her head and the water, which flashes pieces of light across her face and hair. She seems immersed in her own thoughts, with her head slightly bowed, but is watching the reflected lights on her hair. She looks up and follows passers-by with her eyes. She notices the legs of people, different colours, shapes, some with trousers. They move across the patterned paving, the hexagonal flagstones.

In the centre of the pool is a fountain, a simple spout which flings up small portions of water every few seconds. The water in the pool is slimy and a few large orange fish swim around in it, darkly. A man with a plastic sieve on the end of a stick is clearing it of leaves and twigs fallen from a tree growing by the pool. The pool stands in a small courtyard enclosed completely by a two storey building. The sun crosses the courtyard only briefly in the middle of the day, and the ground, the paving, is damp and mossy. On two sides of the courtyard is a colonnade on both levels, white hard-pointed arches. Near a door on one wall is a telephone.

The woman watches two boys playing ping-pong on the upper level. The ball is often hit over into the courtyard and they clatter down a spiral staircase to collect it. A man walks up to her, clasps her arm briefly, says, ‘we must wait’, and walks quickly away again. She remembers a friend saying once that she liked standing in the hallways of institutions because she gradually became more and more aware of the things around her. The man has walked through some double doors into a hallway and as he moves out of sight, the reflections in the glass of the doors seem more apparent than his disappearing shape. She thinks of people walking down aisles of supermarkets grabbing at cellophane packets. She gets up and walks into the shade behind the arches. Through a small window in a door, she can see the bald head of a teacher writing on a blackboard and beyond him, the outside windows opening out over the park. Past the park, is the water, glittering. The man stands in an empty room on the top storey of the building looking down into the courtyard. He watches the woman get up from the side of the pool and walk into the shade, She looks into a classroom and then at the telephone on the wall. She turns around. A boy almost bumps into her as she turns and she lifts her head, looks from side to side, walks to a pillar and leans against it. She is looking into the pool and rubbing one arm with her hand. She walks back into the sun and sits down on a bench in the middle of the courtyard. She sits stiffly for a while with her back to him looking all around her, at the people passing by. After ten minutes her back bends more and she rests her head on her hands. She isn’t watching things now, she seems absorbed in her own thoughts.

The man comes back through the glass doors, walks over and sits on the bench next to the woman. He puts his arm around her and asks her what she’s been doing. Then he retracts his arm and jumps off the bench. He walks quickly ahead of her and waits at the outside door, holding it open.

She smiles at him as she steps onto the footpath outside. He says to her, ‘I can tell from the way you watch me all the time, that you’re getting too involved, I don’t want to get involved.’

There is a strong wind outside, which blows their shirts against their chests. The specific sounds of jackhammers and traffic suddenly detach themselves from the general city hum heard in the courtyard. They walk separately along the street and reach the main road. When the cars pass, the woman begins to walk across. At the centre island, the man takes hold of her arm tightly and shepherds her across the other half. They stand on the footpath on the other side of the road for a while and then walk off in opposite directions. The woman nods, waves and walks on. The man walks off rapidly but turns and stops twice at twenty yard intervals and watches her until she turns down a lane and is out of sight. He whistles slowly and almost under his breath, a tune, La Donna e Mobile.