Two distinct advantages

I listened with interest as the large middle-aged man sitting at the very front of the bus began a conversation with the elderly man next to him.

This man began by asking his neighbour where he was planning to get off and then, leaning back against the window and turning to face him, the larger man declared that the best seats in the bus were at the front and at the very back of the bus. The seats at the front and the back of the bus were far less likely to be taken, he was saying. There wasn’t much between them, although the seats at the back of the bus had two distinct advantages: first, you usually had the whole seat to yourself and second, you didn’t have to give up your seat to frail or less mobile people.

Since I got out of the bus at the same stop that the elderly neighbour did, I had the chance to wonder whether the man’s unsteady but rapid strides in his impeccably clean pale blue jeans had been influenced in any way by the observations of the middle-aged man he had left behind.

Decked with plastic fruit

Abercrombie Street is decked with plastic fruit, I told them. You know how you see sports shoes with their laces tied together flung over electricity wires – whether as a way of bullying some kid (look at your shoes now – try getting them down), or marking a territory, a sculptural tag – pairs of plastic fruit tied to string hang over the road two minutes west from Redfern Station: plastic oranges, apples, grapes, bananas, kiwi fruit, lychee, mangoes, watermelons, guava…

Photos

Yes, I agreed, I said: you don’t take photos of your Rwandan student standing under her umbrella decorated with fat white Renaissance-style cherubs. You might write about it, but not take photos.

Coming loose

It was the kind of thing I might come up with one day, I was thinking when he asked, in all seriousness, whether we realised how dangerous modern buildings had become, with whole sheets of glass coming loose and falling, narrowly missing pedestrians on the footpath below.

One winter's morning a traveller saw

In a deciduous tree in Newtown: soft toys (all sizes), not yet rained on.

In an evergreen in Stanmore: a red vinyl chair with rusted, chrome-plated legs.

The army protect

Notwithstanding the fact, as I heard, that she had survived the massacre in Tiananmen Square through the luck of a cousin – a farmer – being allowed to fetch her from Beijing – and that she had huddled for months at her aunt’s place, unable to talk or to work for the memories of the blood pooling black at the head of one of her classmates – she believed without question the government reports about Uighur aggression on the fifth of July. So many Chinese killed, she said. The army protect.

He'd only just arrived

As it was Christmas not long after he’d arrived in the country, he told us, being a Catholic and, what’s more, a Catholic from China, he thought he might follow the suggestion of a friend and take his family along to one of the special Australian Christmas masses at the local church.

It was wonderful day. After mass they were invited into a hall and sat down to a huge, delicious lunch. There had been so much food he hadn’t been able to finish his serve.

When he and his family got up to leave they joined a queue at the door, and at the end of it, people were handing out presents. One of them was dressed up as Father Christmas. His daughter was delighted. He took lots of photographs and video footage: his daughter with Father Christmas, his daughter in front of the tinsel covered tree on the porch, holding a box wrapped in green and silver foil. But the people giving the presents weren’t happy, he said. They gave his daughter presents – even his wife and himself a huge bundle of presents, but the people on the porch weren’t at all happy.

It was only an hour or so later, when he’d got home and caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror, that he realised that he hadn’t been dressed like anybody else at the Christmas lunch. He’d worn a new white suit, he said, because in China you always wore your best suit to church, but nobody else at the lunch in the hall had been dressed like that. It was only then that he realised that everyone else had been poor, as he called it.

Perhaps right at the beginning the people in the church or in the hall might have said something to him. They might have given him a hint or asked a few questions – he didn’t remember – but his English hadn’t been good in those early weeks then. He wouldn’t have understood. He’d only just arrived.