The gorge of the darkened kitchen

Isn't it always when walking along a street in the dark that you pass close by a lit up window where a white Maltese terrier has climbed onto the back of a sofa to touch its tongue to the glass whereupon you recall, suddenly, that for at least half an hour that morning you were convinced that you were going to be hospitalised with a disease as corrosively gruesome as osteomyelitis -- the lit up window with the laughing dog and the gorge of the darkened kitchen behind it making you feel as if the light at the front of that house was turned on you?

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.

Enjoying it properly

She said that while she loved the animals, and particularly the shellac-tongued wolves who were hurling themselves against a sheet of nothing in Cai Guo-Qiang's Falling Back to Earth exhibition in Brisbane -- the whole experience of walking among all those oddly kiddy animation figures in empty spaces -- of seeming the only alive and impatient thing in a frozen room so long as the other tourists didn't move too quickly (and in the room with the jelly-like pool, her incomprehension that the white-mottled blue should actually be liquid: that the drop falling from the beam above was falling into something that ran rather than shivered) -- while she loved all this, as soon as she noticed the imperfections in the meetings of animal feet and floor or sand -- the gaps all over the place -- these apparently trivial imperfections stopped her from enjoying it properly since all she could think about now was how the thick splayed legs of stiffened fur were hollow. The Story Bridge, however, with its frequent signs that addressed imminent suicides was something she didn't expect at all: these signs and the bridge's continual groaning -- as well as its raised view of the red scraped cliffs under the place called Fortitude Valley.

No earthly use to them if we stopped

As soon as we saw the little red car with its hood up and three figures around it by the side of the Bylong Valley Way I thought, the poor suckers, and all the more poor suckers since Vance and I, as we've often said, would be no earthly use to them if we stopped -- we couldn't even ring anyone since there had been no mobile coverage for hours -- perhaps we could offer them water -- just perhaps we could squeeze a person behind (to take them where exactly? Vance was asking) -- but as I slowed a bit (there were ruts in the road) I could see that the figures I thought were worried about the oil or a broken pump were in fact just leaning towards each other over the engine to compose a selfie that they were sending, I had to assume, into a future that might include a show-off moment -- a joke at a party, a funny post -- about the time they broke down or appeared to break down on the Bylong Valley Way.

Bucket

On the day that the police were going to ring me about my fifteen-year-old son, I was still thinking about what he had called out to me – at least what I could remember of it, which was only the single word ‘bucket’ – just before he left the house for school – thinking about this odd word ‘bucket’ even when I arrived at the top of the stairs at Erskineville station where, seeing that there was a man who looked as if he were reluctant to descend and another already descending the last of the stairs to the platform, I made the rapid interpretation that there was something wrong with the man who was nearly on the platform and that the man at the top of the stairs could see this and preferred to keep himself safe. On a weekday, I’d noticed, and particularly when I left the house this late, platform two was usually mostly empty, so my decision to keep going down the stairs, past the reluctant man, towards the other man, who didn’t yet seem particularly strange, even though I knew he was, and who was the only other person on the platform – this decision must have looked to the reluctant man like a lapse of caution. After all, I was thinking, surely a beefy, serious-looking, knowing man would stand a much better chance against what looked to be a lither, younger, but worse-dressed man than a smallish woman of my sort. After all, if a man such as the man at the top of the stairs was reluctant to go down to the platform where the younger man, as I saw, was already weaving as he walked, now hunched with his hands to his face, as if lighting a joint, and not far enough from the steps for me to stop short of him without drawing attention – if such a serious-looking man was so reluctant to descend the stairs onto the platform, then wasn’t my decision to go down the stairs all the same the most stupid decision that a woman of my sort could make?

Of course, once I got going, it seemed far more ridiculous to stop short at the bottom of the stairs, so I passed the badly-dressed man, who had turned (no joint) and was now in mid soliloquy about the fucking smoke (from a passing train) and the fucking signs, and just at the moment when I was most quietly proud of my decision to defy the better-dressed man who was probably still watching from the stairs, I was asked by the badly-dressed man if the trains on this platform went west and my answer, which was yes, at least I hope so, could not have been more provocative, I realised even as I said it, because his answering you hope so, you hope so, went high and loud, reaching out to the Woolworths sign on the fence. I have got this far, I was thinking then. Now that I have passed the man and responded to his question, I should go to the farthest end of the platform. The people on platform one across the lines will then be able to see if I am attacked by the badly-dressed man who might now have been stirred into an unstoppable mania by my words at least I hope so. They might watch the assault and do nothing, but at least they might watch it. Even the man at the top of the stairs might watch what happens.

Not knowing, yet, about what my son was doing with his friends on another loop of the lines – the Inner West Line – when he should have been at school – his participation, as it was put, in the incident involving the death of a young man and the defacement of railway property – in fact not knowing yet what I should have known if I’d given my mind to it, which was that my son had been giving me clues all year about what he’d been doing with his friends, but that I had not picked up on a single one of these clues – that I had always thought I had to respect him and that I had always respected him, that I had always treated my son as I continued to imagine he would like to be treated – not knowing any of this, by the time I got on the train when it pulled alongside the platform, I was feeling so elated by my near miss, as I had fashioned it in my head, and my bravery, in particular, for daring to descend the stairs towards what could even have turned out to be a maniac or a rapist, that I turned to look out the window when I sat down and was entranced, soon, by the spooling outwards of the streets and of my ebbing, bright tipped energy, of my thrumming, quiet connection with the world about me.

Everything that has leached from you

I realised today that what always makes me surprised to see cockatoos flying towards the radiata pines in the neighbouring land is that, once they get there, it will have seemed as if white short-limbed monkeys had been sailing the backyard air; a red wattlebird, though, will stare at you, dinosaur-like, from any branch that scratches the house, and when it dives at you to snap near your ear, it won't have been you that it wants but one of the myriad insects that, drawn to the colour yellow, hover near your lobe, or one of the flies that, having pulled the sounds of bleached paddocks with them over the sandstone cliffs, have grown so tired that they will drown in your tea but, first, need to crawl all over your face to taste everything that has leached from you and that you have leached from everything else.

Kurtz's mouldy house

I've been noticing everywhere in the city, but mainly in the strangest, hottest places -- where the footpath takes you, for example, across the out-breathing mouths of underground parking stations, opposite fenced, greyish tropical gardens (Kurtz's mouldy house that the city has grown around) -- young adult Europeans with their middle-aged parents in shorts and thongs who seem to be listening, keenly, to their offsprings' account of the way a humid Christmas in Sydney needs artificial snow and plastic holly, and how coffee must be taken seriously, and how they have learned hundreds of lazy practices in their year of being crowded in share rooms and picking deformed fruit in dust-rimmed towns.