Slow severe contortions

Since I was in a hurry and a sauntering figure was impeding my way through the building site tunnel on Broadway -- one of those people who must know they are impeding the way of those who take their schedules far too seriously -- I soon forgot the sight of the dying insect on the Wattle Street corner, whose slow severe contortions had occupied my mind entirely while I was waiting at the lights.

The wide stare

All yesterday I was wondering how to write about the young girl on the train who was signalling what might have been disgust to her even younger sister when a thick set boy shoved back one of the seats near them and then flung his body onto the vinyl in a way that might have expressed how he just does things and doesn't complain -- just as, in company, he will nod to his friends as if to agree to something risky even as his thoughts are taken up with the wide stare of several nearly teenage kids who might be watching from a window on the other side of the street. It was not easy, I was thinking, because the girls were soon looking at something in a plastic casing that the older one had taken from her bag.

Your skin shivers painfully

When the evening has that cooled down once hot feeling, as when your skin shivers painfully on a beach, you might see an enormous woman in pink tease her toddler with a dummy she keeps withdrawing, and you might pass a man who looks like a white-haired, stuffed-thick version of someone you might have known from one of those blurring days in a city that you have lived in now for so many decades that you know how these kinds of evenings run.

What I do on this program

She told me that it wasn't so much his sheer hypocrisy that she minded -- that this execrable character, as she called him, kept using the word vile to describe the supposed attacks on him and then went on to describe himself as a patient, fearless person whose eyes had clear heroic shine -- but it was the expression 'what I do on this program' that got to her -- this way of using the simple word do as if he were an artist and what he made every day on his Breakfast Show was either some careful, ironic construction or the spontaneous expression of his sincerely rigorous, vulnerable soul.

Just a prank

Nearly the whole time we were waiting to see the doctor in Casualty, two girls, who were waiting for the results of spinal x-rays after a car accident, kept moving around the room, retelling the details of the accident in a myriad of telephone calls too complex to follow as a homeless woman groaned her soliloquy on a chair in the corridor and a one-eyed elderly woman with arthritic hands sat through the emptying of two bags of fluid into what might have been her daughter -- until soon, all that stuff about the car accident, we were hearing, was just a prank, and the friends they were talking to should call back their mothers and just say the earlier calls were full of lies. They were to say, we all heard, that the girls had fallen out of a tree or walked into a car or a wall or something because otherwise their mothers would go ballistic. Even when their doctor arrived and asked them to accompany her into a room, they stayed on the phone, negotiating the exact wording of the calls to the mothers that their friends had to make as soon as they could.

The mysteries of life

She told us that, in fact, the Grand Lodge for the Rosicrucian Order of Australia, Asia and New Zealand was just around the corner from where we were sitting, in one of those business parks that are nothing like parks and are bereft of all business. For all she knew, the Grand Lodge was palatial inside. It didn't look like much from the front: just the usual concrete walls, dust-choked plants and angled parking spaces that bake in the sun. Very occasionally the Grand Masters, as she thinks they are called, come into the cafe but they rarely buy anything more than a camomile tea. Her boss has been curious about them since his father left his mother and moved back to Rende in Calabria, where he hadn't lived for close on fifty years. Her boss had said that if it wasn't for the fact that all the Rosicrucians he'd met talked unbearably slowly, he might have signed up for their series of weekly monographs that promise to help you unfold the mysteries of life.

Lacuna

You notice that your hand, which is either blistered or swollen from a cut, is hurting but, since you are unable to determine whether your hand has been blistered or cut, the last of the event which must have caused it -- and which might at least have called from you an in-drawn breath -- now escapes with no audible sound.