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.