Man on a bicycle

My friend told me that last week, while crossing the street where she knew David Malouf to be living, a man on a bicycle passed her – a late middle aged man with tanned calves, a white helmet and a small white moustache under a recognisable nose – a man who could even have been David Malouf himself, if I wanted to believe it, but she knew couldn’t have been.

Not only was he far too wiry and peddling far too fast, this man on a bicycle was not the sort of image that occurs in any of his books, she said.