No earthly use to them if we stopped

As soon as we saw the little red car with its hood up and three figures around it by the side of the Bylong Valley Way I thought, the poor suckers, and all the more poor suckers since Vance and I, as we've often said, would be no earthly use to them if we stopped -- we couldn't even ring anyone since there had been no mobile coverage for hours -- perhaps we could offer them water -- just perhaps we could squeeze a person behind (to take them where exactly? Vance was asking) -- but as I slowed a bit (there were ruts in the road) I could see that the figures I thought were worried about the oil or a broken pump were in fact just leaning towards each other over the engine to compose a selfie that they were sending, I had to assume, into a future that might include a show-off moment -- a joke at a party, a funny post -- about the time they broke down or appeared to break down on the Bylong Valley Way.

Bucket

On the day that the police were going to ring me about my fifteen-year-old son, I was still thinking about what he had called out to me – at least what I could remember of it, which was only the single word ‘bucket’ – just before he left the house for school – thinking about this odd word ‘bucket’ even when I arrived at the top of the stairs at Erskineville station where, seeing that there was a man who looked as if he were reluctant to descend and another already descending the last of the stairs to the platform, I made the rapid interpretation that there was something wrong with the man who was nearly on the platform and that the man at the top of the stairs could see this and preferred to keep himself safe. On a weekday, I’d noticed, and particularly when I left the house this late, platform two was usually mostly empty, so my decision to keep going down the stairs, past the reluctant man, towards the other man, who didn’t yet seem particularly strange, even though I knew he was, and who was the only other person on the platform – this decision must have looked to the reluctant man like a lapse of caution. After all, I was thinking, surely a beefy, serious-looking, knowing man would stand a much better chance against what looked to be a lither, younger, but worse-dressed man than a smallish woman of my sort. After all, if a man such as the man at the top of the stairs was reluctant to go down to the platform where the younger man, as I saw, was already weaving as he walked, now hunched with his hands to his face, as if lighting a joint, and not far enough from the steps for me to stop short of him without drawing attention – if such a serious-looking man was so reluctant to descend the stairs onto the platform, then wasn’t my decision to go down the stairs all the same the most stupid decision that a woman of my sort could make?

Of course, once I got going, it seemed far more ridiculous to stop short at the bottom of the stairs, so I passed the badly-dressed man, who had turned (no joint) and was now in mid soliloquy about the fucking smoke (from a passing train) and the fucking signs, and just at the moment when I was most quietly proud of my decision to defy the better-dressed man who was probably still watching from the stairs, I was asked by the badly-dressed man if the trains on this platform went west and my answer, which was yes, at least I hope so, could not have been more provocative, I realised even as I said it, because his answering you hope so, you hope so, went high and loud, reaching out to the Woolworths sign on the fence. I have got this far, I was thinking then. Now that I have passed the man and responded to his question, I should go to the farthest end of the platform. The people on platform one across the lines will then be able to see if I am attacked by the badly-dressed man who might now have been stirred into an unstoppable mania by my words at least I hope so. They might watch the assault and do nothing, but at least they might watch it. Even the man at the top of the stairs might watch what happens.

Not knowing, yet, about what my son was doing with his friends on another loop of the lines – the Inner West Line – when he should have been at school – his participation, as it was put, in the incident involving the death of a young man and the defacement of railway property – in fact not knowing yet what I should have known if I’d given my mind to it, which was that my son had been giving me clues all year about what he’d been doing with his friends, but that I had not picked up on a single one of these clues – that I had always thought I had to respect him and that I had always respected him, that I had always treated my son as I continued to imagine he would like to be treated – not knowing any of this, by the time I got on the train when it pulled alongside the platform, I was feeling so elated by my near miss, as I had fashioned it in my head, and my bravery, in particular, for daring to descend the stairs towards what could even have turned out to be a maniac or a rapist, that I turned to look out the window when I sat down and was entranced, soon, by the spooling outwards of the streets and of my ebbing, bright tipped energy, of my thrumming, quiet connection with the world about me.

Everything that has leached from you

I realised today that what always makes me surprised to see cockatoos flying towards the radiata pines in the neighbouring land is that, once they get there, it will have seemed as if white short-limbed monkeys had been sailing the backyard air; a red wattlebird, though, will stare at you, dinosaur-like, from any branch that scratches the house, and when it dives at you to snap near your ear, it won't have been you that it wants but one of the myriad insects that, drawn to the colour yellow, hover near your lobe, or one of the flies that, having pulled the sounds of bleached paddocks with them over the sandstone cliffs, have grown so tired that they will drown in your tea but, first, need to crawl all over your face to taste everything that has leached from you and that you have leached from everything else.

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.

Otherwise a snail

From the platform at Wolli Creek station the ibises on the wet green lawn beyond the scrub look like Mary Antoinette's sheep; along the cafe strip on Abercrombie Street I see a student look up at a pigeon that has just landed on the sign he's passing under; in the garden I step on something that is already disintegrating: probably a putrefying once-pink Illawarra Flame flower. Otherwise a snail.

What a Mod becomes in the long decades afterwards

In his house in Ryde -- with its view of the trees obscuring the river where, some years ago, a woman and her lover had been found naked and dead on the slippery rocks beside its trickling brown (whose freak poisonous gases, it has since been surmised, had killed them) -- he told me about the way that, as a young man of twenty in the south-east of London in the nineteen-sixties, he'd had to wear suits on the weekend just to get the girls. It was only afterwards, when I was relating this story to someone else, that it was pointed out to me I had actually been talking to a Mod -- or at least to what a Mod becomes in the long decades afterwards. I'd described the way that, as he'd told the whole group of us about how a teacher had once hung him from his collar on a coat hook, he'd raised himself on his toes by the wall of his large open-plan living room: mimicking a hanging of his schoolboy self -- which I'd now dressed in a pale blue sixties suit with wide lapels -- hanging himself on his long white wall among various original artworks whose glass was reflecting the greyish afternoon sky above the trees beyond the deck outside and so what could also be assumed to be the occasional noxious gases of the river.

Highly flammable objects

When we stepped out of the office after lunch to see that the reason the leaves of the trees through the glass had looked such a bright sappy green was that the sun had grown small and shrunken in the sky -- small and shrunken but the colour exactly, as one of us said, of a flame -- and as we googled the whereabouts of these fires that we could smell, which could have been anywhere on any side of the city as the wind from the west was scorched and the cloud in the south, which usually brought any change of weather, and possibly rain, had an underbelly of brown --  Eliza told us about the cicadas she'd seen in Katoomba in the mountains about a month ago: about how in Leura there had not been a single cicada when she'd stayed on the north side of the highway, and yet on the south -- or at least in Katoomba, in the south -- everywhere you went you were bombed by cicadas -- and all down the door jambs on the outside of houses there were shells of cicadas -- and everywhere you put your hand in the garden, even on the stalks of bluebells or the wire of fences: shells -- and there on the footpaths were the eaten out bodies of them, all of them lying prone, exposed -- even the live ones still helpless on the footpaths or crawling, one leg gone, on the roads. As we walked to the cafe we were all thinking about the cicadas, then, even though we continued to relay, one to the other, where the fires were burning according to our phones, and even as the afternoon darkened -- the green of the leaves near the buildings losing their light and the clouds growing purplish orange -- it was hard not to think of the crusts of cicada shells on the houses and the rasp-dry wings on the footpaths in the mountains, and so when got back to our desks with our coffees none of us, probably, had any idea of where the fires actually were -- the places were so numerous and the names unfamiliar -- but the cicadas in Katoomba, we knew: we could see them crawling, and I for one was thinking of them as highly flammable objects -- crawling little incendiary devices for ruining a town.