The man who loved maps lies sleeping, and his eyelids do not flutter. His room is narrow, high-roofed, and cold, his mattress worn, his blankets ancient, but he does not care. He goes to sleep each night with the satisfaction of a job well done, and the silence of Mrs. Menzies' boarding-house is never disturbed by his dreams.

He wakes, rises, and pulls back the curtains on fine weather. It is too early for breakfast downstairs, but he has food in his room: bread, jam, and butter, the spoils of last night's expedition to the supermarket carpark. He eats his breakfast and watches the sun rise.

Time for work. He tugs his gray pullover over the T-shirts he wears to bed, pulls on the brown trousers his former landlady, in some rare moment of charity, once patched for him. He searches his room again for the maps he no longer has, picks up the duffel bag he purchased from the St Vincent de Paul Society some years ago, then leaves to catch the bus. When it arrives, he goes to the back seat, sits in the left-hand corner, looks out the window until it is time to get off. He is part-way through tracing the streets of St Kilda. It's easy work here on the flat, and he sets to with a will. He walks to the furthest point he reached yesterday, then begins, striding past the small, neat houses with their frosty lawns.

And the locals look at him and think: what's he doing in our neighborhood? You expect crazies in the middle of town, walking around with their strange grins and their collapsing footwear, sitting down beside you on buses when they know you can't escape, scurrying from rubbish tin to rubbish tin with plastic bags full of the day's treasures. They sleep in the Salvation Army shelter at night, and come out in the daytime, pleased as Punch. Well, that's bad enough in town, without coming across them in St Kilda! Put them all back in Cherry Farm, say the locals, twitching at their curtains.

The man who loved maps takes no notice, for he has his method. He picks a point to start from and keeps turning left at each corner, until he is about to re-cross his path, at which point he turns right and doubles back. That way, in the end, he will trace both sides of every street in the city. He has worked his way from the top of Pine Hill in the north to the middle of St Kilda in the south, and in another few weeks he will have walked all the streets of Dunedin. Next, he will start on the roads and tracks of the surrounding hills, until he has covered every one, and then he will receive what his maps have promised him.

Soon it's lunchtime. He pulls what's left of his sickness benefit out of the duffel bag. Maybe he could catch a bus back into town and go to the Mission, where they have cups of coffee for 50c and rolls for a dollar, and people leave you alone, and it's right next to the Octagon, handy for the buses. But he hasn't got much money left, and he still has some bread in his bag. Save the Mission for another day. Besides, there's a park at the end of this street, and it's still sunny, though the clouds are beginning to roll in from the south. Early morning, that's the best time in Dunedin.

The park benches have almost dried out from the frost, and he sits in the left hand corner, tearing hunks off his bread and stuffing them in his belly. Two kids are playing on the swings while their mothers sit and talk in the sunshine. One woman looks up, sees him, points him out to the other. They sweep up their protesting children and leave. The park is deserted. If he still had his maps, it would be safe to bring them out now.

#

He had kept his maps in three rolls, one for the city, one for the country, one for the world. Each roll was secured by two rubber bands. In his old room at Mrs. Loney's, he would spend hours unpacking them, smoothing each one in turn, looking at the legends and the straight and wavy lines. He would trace the paths of tracks and highways and railroads, and at night, while he lay waiting for sleep, he would recite the names of maps in his deep, soft voice. "Tutoko", that was in Fiordland, a welter of bush and mountains. "Dutch East Indies": ink-blue sea, and islands, and towns with names he liked to roll around on his tongue. "Dunedin". He had collected several maps of Dunedin: the street map he looked at every day, old valuation maps done out in lots, maps that showed the city as a cluster of black squares and white lines amid the tangled hills. Topographical, cadastral, political, relief: he had them all in those three rolls, and each night they watched over his sleep from the top of the wardrobe. And if he had one wish, it was to be the Surveyor General, in whose authority so many maps were made.

When the Department of Lands and Survey became DOSLI, the price of maps went up. Previously, he had been able to buy a new map each day his benefit came through; now he had to save up, and choose carefully. So, when he saw in Mrs. Loney's big Saturday paper that the Geography Department at the University was giving away surplus and outdated maps, starting on Monday morning, he was so excited he told the others when he went down for dinner. When he returned from his Sunday walk, his room had been cleaned, as usual, but his maps had been taken from their place of refuge, where no-one but he had ever touched them.

He burst into Mrs. Loney's sitting-room while she was Entertaining Guests and demanded to know where she had put his maps. She refused to talk with him, and he refused to leave, so that eventually she was forced to come out into the corridor and tell him that she had no idea what he was talking about, that she hadn't seen any maps, that she would have taken no notice of them if she had, and that if he was going to take that attitude he could pack his bags - "or, in your case, bag" - and be gone come 10am Monday. He searched his room again, and again; he searched the rubbish bins by the back gate; at dinner-time, he stood up and asked who had taken them.

When met with silence, he accused his fellow boarders of plotting against him. They replied with blank looks, averted faces, and old Norrie babbling in the corner; but old Norrie always babbled in the corner. He left that night, after piling up the rubbish in the hallway and setting a match to it. The policemen caught up with him at the Salvation Army shelter, and by the time he was before the judge, the Geography Department had given all their maps away. The judge said he was lucky no-one was killed or seriously injured, and asked him if he had anything to say for himself. "I want my maps," he said.

Prison was darkness. He sat in the darkness and ran over his maps in his mind till the roads and houses and rivers were engraved on his forebrain, and he no longer needed paper. When he got out, they put him in Mrs. Menzies' boarding house and told her to keep an eye on him. He knew what that meant, and never bought a map again.

#

A dark blot untouched by the sun, the man who loved maps sits in the park and eats his stale bread. Around him, trees grow and birds sing, but he does not see them. His work is calling. He flings his crust on the grass and rises abruptly, setting off around the park, turning left then left again. He will walk until the sun goes down and then a little longer, striding silently past the workers returning home and the children being called in for dinner. Then he will make his way to the nearest bus-stop, and ride back to Mrs. Menzies' for supper, and sleep a dreamless sleep, until the sun rises and he returns to his task. He will walk all the streets of St Kilda, then start on St Clair, all gracious houses and locked gates. Up the hill, past the golf course, out to the motorway, heading south. Out to Mosgiel; that could be tricky with the buses, but he'll manage somehow. As the weather gets warmer, he will move to the Peninsula, turning left past albatross and penguin. By autumn, he will have walked both sides of every street on the map.

And then the earth will be ready to receive him. His legs will stretch to lie beneath the northern suburbs; students will stroll to their lectures across his belly; Hanover St and St Andrew St will be his ribs, so that the sharp heels of businesswomen and the wheels of skateboarders will scrape the flesh from his bones. Stuart St will trace the line between his shoulders, and the traffic will roar down his neck to the Exchange, where his head will echo to the footsteps of the newly redundant as they trudge from Social Welfare to Employment Service and back again. And his hair will fan out and spread along every street of the city, so that he will feel every step that falls there, and every wheel that rolls. The land will groan beneath him, but he will stop up his ears and be satisfied, until the sea rolls in to wash all maps away.

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