The burning crane

We like to sit on the narrow wooden veranda of the cafe and twist around to look at that dark, sand-strewn spot on Broadway, where the burning crane, that morning, failed to fall and so failed to crush dozens of cars, people and dogs.

Clearly impossible

I heard them disagreeing about the woman on the bench who was conversing in a loud drunken voice with a bearded man on a cafe stool: one saying the fact that the woman was without feet or hands and yet still able to smoke and even talk as she was smoking was something that, curiously, heartened her; the other that the continuing existence of this woman, who was also substantially toothless, and whom she saw week after week in a similar spot on the street, not so much depressed her as made her fearful because she often imagined the woman following her as she went up the hill to the station in the mornings and calling out her name -- and then wrestling her to the ground in that blank part of the underpass, which was clearly impossible, and vile.

Curious and interesting facts

My colleague recalled how she had once given offence to a young waitress at a café near one of the more exclusive beaches in the Sydney region when she had observed the 'curious and interesting facts', as they were called, that decorated the menu (and were researched by the owner, the waitress had said, on the internet) reminded her of the trivia that was printed on Libra sanitary pad wax paper strips, but once said, she told me, you couldn't take it back.

No way of knowing

As I walked past a young couple sitting out the front of a cafe in the early evening I heard the girl say, I have Crohn's disease, do you know what that is? and the boy said, yes he did, but I kept on walking and so had no way of knowing how their conversation developed from such a beginning.

Deus Ex Machina

Although we laughed when we heard how she had overheard some people on the bus as they passed the cafe and motorcycle shop on Parramatta Road, Deus Ex Machina -- with one of them saying, what was this thing from China, this thing about eczema from China, and the other saying it was only the name of a website (which was how it was written in fact, the words running together, and the dot com dot au) -- the thought that this was what they made of such a sign, and such a sign outside such a shop, was as bizarre as it was also depressing, as one of us said before standing up to leave. For her the word sex had stood out most of all.

A similar storm

On Wednesday, the day of the dust storm, the woman in the café told us that, after waking to see the city had turned orange, she'd rung her sister to discuss how, fifty years earlier, they had watched red sand pile on the seats and tables outside their house during a similar storm in Palermo – a house which, I imagined, was attached to the back of a café, just as her own place here was attached to the back of a café.

She had her grandchild with her. The child was restless. The day was paler outside now – yellow, opaque – and the child was watching ten minutes of one show and then a few minutes of another on a large television screen at the back of the shop.