A lie very obviously

As the girl got into the train at Macdonaldtown station I heard her saying into her phone that the train had been really slow and in fact it had been sitting for a while between Macdonaldtown and Redfern – a lie very obviously, as the train had still yet to go to Redfern station – but so used are we to hearing such lies that none of us said anything. No one even looked up.

Someone is thinking of swine flu

So far I’ve seen three people wearing surgical masks: a young couple in Chinatown and an older man crossing that part near Newtown station where the blue wheelie bins, too full, are disgorging their contents onto the street.

He wasn't rich here

He told us that in China, when he worked for China Shipping, he worked from eight in the morning to midnight, and since the company owned the hospital next door, all the employees had free beds to sleep there. In the middle of the night – at four in the morning, say – he would have to wake himself out of his hospital bed to make a call to check on a ship which was just at that moment due to arrive in a foreign harbour. It was like being in jail, he said. He never saw the sun. He never wanted to work in an office again. At midnight the elevator doors would open and those elevators were full. Everyone worked late.

In Australia he was intending to buy a restaurant, but when we said that he would be working long hours in a restaurant – even working all day and long into the night – he just smiled as if he didn’t understand.

Someone said he would have been rich in China. He said: yes, in China, but he wasn’t rich here.

The detail of the sandals

My friend told us all how she had been attacked by this woman in a supermarket car park. Because of the whiplash from the time, less than a fortnight before, when a car had rammed into the back of her – because she still had the whiplash, she said, she’d had to wind down the window of the car she’d borrowed from the garage, leaning out of the unfamiliar car as she backed into the space, and so that was how she heard the slam of the door – a slam so loud in itself that she pulled in her head and wound up the window. It was just as well that she did this, she said, as the woman would have gone for her, hitting her, scratching, but instead had only slapped at the glass, bent the mirrors in, wrenched the wipers back and forth on the windscreen, and all the time this woman had been swearing at her, screaming at her, for taking so long to park – taking your bloody time, you fucking cow. If she’d had a weapon she would have used it, my friend said, she was that much out of control.

When my friend pulled out her phone to call the police the woman had then left in high dudgeon, as if in the right, but my friend had been able to describe the woman to the police. She’d had the rego of the car and could describe the car make, but to her surprise and satisfaction she’d been able to describe what the woman had been wearing, from her grey linen suit to the spangles on her sandals. It was the detail of the sandals that had been the greatest surprise.

Pandemic II

A matter of days after she told her kids about the so called Swine Flu and explained what a pandemic was and could be, my colleague told me that she had noticed her kids had already found an online game called Pandemic II, which her kids were now playing instead of their usual preferences for Sims or Call of Duty.

Free at last to transform her life

When I asked him how business had been in the last several months, my physiotherapist said that, since the economic down turn, he had been seeing a predominance of two kinds of clients: the first the worker who knows she is in danger of losing her job, who puts hours and hours in at the office, working long into the night and into weekends at the computer so that she might not be fired, and the second, the one who has already been fired who, free at last to transform her life and so finally to become that fit, slim, healthy person she has always dreamed of being, begins to develop the sort of injuries that hitherto he has only seen in the professional athlete who, keen to win at all costs, trains too hard and for far too long.

Window of porn

All the time the teacher was talking to her as she sat at the computer in the class there was a video going of a full on sex scene close up, he told us afterwards in the canteen. You couldn’t see the faces, only the genitals, he said. The man was black and the woman white – or should he say the male bits of body were black and the woman bits white. Anyone would have been able to see it as the student was talking to the teacher, he said, only nobody else was looking for some reason. The teacher, who had pulled up a chair to sit alongside the student, kept talking to the student and the whole time behind the shoulder of this student, unbeknownst to either of them (or so it seemed), the genitals were going.

It was strange that this student could get porn when so many sites had been blocked at the college, he then said. If he wanted to go on YouTube he couldn’t. Even his hotmail was blocked on some days, and once or twice Google. In the end the teacher had got up and walked away without saying a thing and the student had then turned to the screen and closed the window of porn before opening up Word to make a start on the acquisitions report, he had to assume, that they’d been told they had to finish by the end of the week.