The house of his dreams

He explained to us that in the house of his dreams he is always alone -- the place is empty, desolate, disintegrating and filled with ugly, worn, disintegrating furniture; he is always alone in the sense that he has been abandoned by wife and daughters and nobody visits and the days pass by without anything happening, only eating and shitting and the sunlight travelling in long yellow shafts of dust along dark, warped floorboards he no longer bothers to vacuum.

He loves this term: the house of your dreams. His wife has the same dream, he has discovered, and these days they are powerless to avoid dreaming this dream unless they could stop themselves falling asleep or could force it so that they could sleep for a good six hours and never remember their dreams, whether they have them or not.

In the pose of a David

On the way to the shops this evening, not wanting the man in the upstairs room without curtains to notice that I'd seen him from across the road, standing in the pose of a David (one hip up, one down) -- which these days connotes less an expensive threat to a neighbouring city state than an artist contemplating a canvas on an easel that he might have to change or destroy -- I only turned to look properly a couple of steps on, and so saw the flat screen television he was fixed in studying, and behind, in the Vermeer yellow light further back in the room, a small installation of sideboard, mugs, some cords and the oily black shine of some rock band poster on the wall.

A way of containing

As he told me about how he had been called from class that day to drive into the city to find the brother of the nephew who, as the police were still surmising, had just murdered his girlfriend and step-son and then killed himself -- so he might tell the brother before a brutal and sensationalised version of the news could get to him through friends or even just the internet updates on his phone -- while he was telling me about the body which had now been flown into Sydney for the funeral and all the relatives who were coming to their house to drink tea and to mourn at all hours of the day -- he wore the same shy, even half embarrassed smile that, less than a month earlier, after the graduation of his son from Sydney University, seemed then only to be his way of containing an immensity of joy he was too shy of inflicting on anybody else.

A section of Japanese garden

It was, as he described it, on ledge sticking out from the pedestrian bridge at Redfern station: years of southerlies blowing dust from Botany Bay had left enough soil for a section of a Japanese garden, with bright, lush moss and a Bonsai tree with yellow flowers, but it is rare that anyone looks at it because going up those stairs it's hard not to step on the heels of the person in front.

Not in the city but in the suburbs

We laughed when we heard her say how it was impossible not to judge the figure of the overweight woman reading an article with the headline 'Fat and Fame Obsessed' in that free afternoon paper, MX, as she was walking along ahead of her the other evening, home from the station. She said she never read this paper as her work wasn't in the city but in the suburbs.

The lid

All through the time she had been telling me what I had done wrong -- which dishes, containers and utensils I should have put in which configuration on the dish rack and how I shouldn't have said something particular (a something in particular which I always regret the moment I say it) -- all the time that I was listening to what she was saying and yet continuing with what must have seemed a dumb, persistent, even stubborn disregard for what should have been a self-evident washing up logic, I had been looking every now and then at an upturned lid that was stained with olive oil and the black, viscous remains of balsamic vinegar (which I was intending to avoid trying to wash in this load), and so when, the next day, I was looking for this lid to make a new dressing, I remembered the monologue about my illogical system -- the lid becoming a sign of this illogical system -- and so when it eventually turned up, I shouldn't have been surprised that it was even filthier than I remembered and had to be soaked.

Leaning from a window

She told us during the break that she didn't usually remember her dreams -- and in fact this one seemed less of a dream than the experience of leaning from a window in a tower and looking down where, far below, her husband and the elder of her sons were running on the stone-paved quay by the steep undulations of a dark grey ocean, and chasing a turtle that was moving faster, she remembered thinking, than she ever expected a turtle to move. It was a very specific visual scene, with a minimum of elements, even a minimum of colours. There was nothing at all vague or elusive about it: just a leaning from a window and seeing them running and presumably then pulling her herself back to sit somewhere inside.