A fakery of a fakery of a fakery

I only go this way home, west through the park and up the hill towards The Great Hall when I can't bear to go the other way round -- today walking up the stairway from the pond and the bridge and onto the landing by the entrance to the oldest university in the city behind a group of middle-aged Chinese tourists as if I were one of them only: a middle-aged tourist too.

This is the direction home which always takes me past the spot on the landing where I once saw a woman standing with her feet apart and arms akimbo in front of a bollard. It's no longer there, this bollard, but its absence still reminds me of the way this woman had been looking up towards The Great Hall -- standing with her back to a man who was squatting with one knee on the concrete at the top of the stairs so that he might take a photo of this grand moment -- since, with the afternoon sun on her hair, all of her life seemed to have been ignited by a profound connection to all that is beautiful and old (if fake, since the colonial Gothic is so much a fakery of a fakery of a fakery, as I'm always thinking).

It had seemed to be one of those moments of blissful oblivion that you see everywhere in these kinds of places, I was remembering yet again, and so hence my surprise when, as I went on to pass the woman, I had looked back to see that her face was tight and closed, which made the way that her friend was still kneeling behind her, with his phone held out just a little and forwards -- the phone-cum-camera in the place of some delicate and hopeful offering -- too painful to look at.

Corellas

Kate told me about how they were sitting in the café in the park – or rather sitting in that square of grass between paths that the café had taken over from it – with Geraldine asking after her son as Kate knew she was going to do, it being January and the university placements only recently come out – asking after Eric, Kate reckoned, for the sole purpose of telling Kate about just how well her own son was doing – all very carefully trying to avoid even as she was clearly wanting to and so failing not to mention how brilliantly her son had done at the Higher School Certificate and how, by taking the full year off, he was risking missing out on a university scholarship – how, during all of this, it was just as if a white and flaking branch had been swung at them: how there were some bleating cries, a sudden stink, and what had to be dozens or even hundreds of corellas passed over their heads, landing on the other side of the path from where they were sitting – and straight from this story about her old friend Geraldine from Canada Bay, Kate started to tell me about how much she hated corellas: just the way they heaved their little fat hips over the grass, not caring that their faces were ravaged by yesterday’s tippling, making out that their lives were hard – how they always left the drought-yellow grass thinner and yellower and scattered with their horrible under feathers, and how, in the evenings, the trees in every direction rang with their plaintive, falling calls.