"The next one then," she insisted. "Stick your head in the next one."
   I lifted the lid and gagged. "It's worse," I groaned.

Bin three proved to be the least malodorous of the options, so I gathered the blanket around my shoulders and peered inside.

   "Put your head in further!" she yelled.
   "No way," I replied. "And hurry up. I can hold my breath for only so long."

It was 7am on a weekday in the inner city and I had become one of Brisbane's dispossessed for as long as it took for my fiancée to take photographs for her little sister's school assignment. I was her model, recruited to pose as a person of no fixed abode, and had already been chided for overdressing. "You don't look scruffy enough," she moaned when I presented myself. "And lose the watch. And take off those shoes. You'll have to go barefoot."

   "But my feet will get cold," I whined.
   "Handle it," she said. "And what's with the mauve satin trim around the edge of the blanket?"
   "It was the only one I could find," I said, clutching my disguise around me.

"Are you finished yet?" I pleaded, expelling my breath and withdrawing my head from the bin. "Any minute now a bus is going to pull up at those traffic lights behind you and I don't particularly want a busload of commuters to see me with my head in a wheelie bin."

"Put it in far enough and they won't see you," she said, before finally declaring she was "finished". As the word left her lips, a council bus rolled up at the stop and a hundred pairs of eyes locked on me as my head appeared from the dark, dank confines of the bin.

I stood there staring back, barefoot in baggy track pants and mismatched top with a blanket draped over my head like a shawl. I didn't know whether to wave or run over and tell them I wasn't really looking for breakfast. It occurred to me that if I did this they might start throwing dollar coins out the window. "Good morning," I said weakly as the lights changed and the bus rumbled off, leaving me wreathed in a cloud of black diesel smoke and a blanket.

My fiancée had stopped laughing by the time I dropped her off at the Queen Street Mall. I changed at the office and walked to my desk.

   "What's that smell?" asked a colleague.
   "Wheelie bin," I said, doing a U-turn and going home to shower.

Saturday dawned a few days later and with it the realisation there was no milk in the fridge. I headed for the supermarket, but what was this? Closed? But they opened at eight o'clock, surely. But the sign said 8:30am and it was only 8:10.

I cast furtive looks at my fellow loiterers and saw that some of them seemed to be professional shopping mall loafers in their uniforms of tracksuits with baggy bums and running shoes that appeared to have been chewed by rats. Then I looked at my own wardrobe - tracksuit with baggy bum and running shoes that, while not sporting any gaping holes, could easily, if charitably, be described as well-worn.

A well-dressed woman looked at me and I'm sure I saw a spark of recognition in her eyes before she sniffed in disapproval and turned her head away. I was left with the uncomfortable feeling she had recognised me as Bin Man, last seen from her bus a few days earlier while checking out the wheelie bin buffet.