Between random relatives

Travelling with a sister in a city that neither of us lives in -- a city which draws in me long ropes of memory, happiness, mystery -- a city which means nothing to this sister, since when we were children here, on our regular visits, we were always being dragged around, as she tells me, between random relatives -- this sister who is continually being taken for my twin.

Kurtz's mouldy house

I've been noticing everywhere in the city, but mainly in the strangest, hottest places -- where the footpath takes you, for example, across the out-breathing mouths of underground parking stations, opposite fenced, greyish tropical gardens (Kurtz's mouldy house that the city has grown around) -- young adult Europeans with their middle-aged parents in shorts and thongs who seem to be listening, keenly, to their offsprings' account of the way a humid Christmas in Sydney needs artificial snow and plastic holly, and how coffee must be taken seriously, and how they have learned hundreds of lazy practices in their year of being crowded in share rooms and picking deformed fruit in dust-rimmed towns.

Your skin shivers painfully

When the evening has that cooled down once hot feeling, as when your skin shivers painfully on a beach, you might see an enormous woman in pink tease her toddler with a dummy she keeps withdrawing, and you might pass a man who looks like a white-haired, stuffed-thick version of someone you might have known from one of those blurring days in a city that you have lived in now for so many decades that you know how these kinds of evenings run.

That waited for the years that were certain to come

My accountant told me how, in her holidays as a child, she and her brothers had been made by their grandmother to tie the small lengths of string left over from the paper bag bundles in their shop -- tying these hand-length pieces of twine to each other and then rolling them into balls that waited for the years that were certain to come, when the mirage of this life in a benevolent city had come to its end and, instead of laying reeds in the soil for the necessary months to make home-made twine, they might spool their way out from the labyrinth of poverty with the long, knotted string that once, in their childhoods, they had very nearly chucked as the Anglo children did.