Ideally positioned for lifestyle

runs the description of a house for auction in the labyrinthine backstreets of Newtown, where a car has sat with a smashed windscreen for over a week and jacaranda petals make a soft, purple-brown carpet over everything in a five metre radius from the trunk of the tree.

Man on a bicycle

My friend told me that last week, while crossing the street where she knew David Malouf to be living, a man on a bicycle passed her – a late middle aged man with tanned calves, a white helmet and a small white moustache under a recognisable nose – a man who could even have been David Malouf himself, if I wanted to believe it, but she knew couldn’t have been.

Not only was he far too wiry and peddling far too fast, this man on a bicycle was not the sort of image that occurs in any of his books, she said.

Missed observing

Walking along the street only minutes before half past twelve in the middle of the day, I realised that I had avoided being in a public place for eleven o’clock and had therefore missed observing the one minute’s silence in remembrance of the end of the First World War.

In the same way, almost exactly one week earlier, I had missed observing the Melbourne Cup.

Now, no one could control

He told us how Pierre Boulez had the habit, every couple of years, of declaring one or other young conductor the greatest conductor alive, after which, with very few exceptions, the young conductor would begin an exhilarating career of dizzying disaster that was fuelled by the hubris that, now, no one could control.

Whatever it was

At about the point on the tarmac when the plane we were in was beginning to lift, I noticed a largish pond within the airport grounds that was entirely covered in black netting. A pelican was circling above, no doubt drawn there by whatever it was that the staff at the airport were careful to keep to themselves.

In case of an emergency

Just before the plane began to taxi out to the runway, I heard one of the flight attendants telling the people near the exit doors that they would be the ones responsible for evacuating the plane in case of an emergency. At the signal, ‘evacuate, evacuate, evacuate’, these people near the exits should be prepared to open the doors as she’d instructed them. Of course, she added, they would have to use their discretion as to whether it would be safer inside or out.

Had I not heard the later, more standard announcement, with the attendants miming the seatbelt, lifejacket and crash position procedures that a digital voice was putting through the speakers, I would have begun to believe that an emergency was more likely to happen during this flight than any other that I had ever been on, and that I would have to rely on the discretion of the several people now seated at the doors, whose ordinary shirts and hair had, for no rational reason, failed to inspire my confidence.

Difficult to explain

It was difficult to explain, my friend told me, why she was so affected by seeing the famous Dutch conductor on one of the main streets of the city the next morning.

All he was doing, she said, was walking up to a rubbish bin to put out his cigarette and then, turning, heading to the newspaper stall on the corner, near the station, his hand already in his pocket ready to buy something.

It was these simple actions in the street that affected her, she said – she hadn’t felt the same when she saw him with his friends in the artists’ bar not long before the concert. In the artists’ bar, even though she knew who he was the moment she saw him, he had seemed just to be one of the many artists and friends of artists that are always sitting around in that place during the festival.

It was only in the street the next day that she could sense what it might mean to be interested only in music, to talk only of music, as someone had once told her when describing the conductor. She said that it had almost broken her heart to see him in the street the next morning, but she was still at a loss to explain why that was.