out and about

A brown sausage dog called Milo crosses the street, pulled sideways by gravity or inclination, then gallops into the gelato shop with a greeting for everyone.

The 199 stops at the lights beside Mole Hill, as we used to call it, opposite Warringah Road. Harbord Road veers off to the left, stretching into the distance, and in that distance a figure is running hard towards us through clusters of freshly-released high school students. The lights hold, the bus waits and the running figure powers closer, resolving into a white-shirted, black-skirted schoolgirl with bouncing backpack and a bottomless reserve of determination.

She crosses the narrow lane with a glance to the right and stands beside us, champing, forced by the very same lights to wait when she needs to run. Then the bus is off again and so is she, running and running, glancing quickly as the bus draws level and pulls away. The stop is only just ahead and the driver must slow down and let her on but he doesn’t. He accelerates. The stop flashes past and we don’t even get a final glimpse of the running girl, or witness her reaction.

What does it mean for her, missing this bus?

A woman stands on the corner with a thicket of curly hair blown backwards by the wind.

A little girl and a littler boy, with freshly painted faces, are about to pass by with their mother and grandmother when the little girl spots the gelato shop. She wheels around, bringing everyone to a halt, and makes her tragic pitch to the Supreme Authority.

‘Hungry?’ the mother replies as the grandmother turns away and laughs. ‘You can’t possibly be hungry. You had all that food an hour ago."

They continue on, away from the gelato shop, and the little girl stamps her spotless white sandals on the footpath.

Three primary school girls and a smaller, younger schoolboy wait to cross from Many Wharf to the Corso. The middle girl leans forward on a post, as if beginning a ritual. The boy stands on tip-toes to whisper in her left ear, and stands back. A dark-haired girl leans in to whisper in her right ear, and she stands back. The boy starts walking, but returns because the lights haven’t changed.

We’ll never know what was said.

Tall is the new black.

A young woman on the bus attends to her phone. She has long, brown, silky hair, a burgundy dress and pointy nails the colour of coagulating blood. Her screen slowly unfurls four things that ‘men shouldn’t be allowed to have’:

lowercase letters
blankets
silverware
running water

With this undigested the phone moves on, demanding to know whether Tana Mongeau and Jeff Wittek are dating, but there’s just no easy answer to that: I don’t know who they are.

The all-stops bus. A grandmother frocked in green formality, hands in lap and handbag beneath them, feet together on the floor, glowers sidelong through slitty, disapproving eyes at a child who bounces, squeaks and shrills on the maternal lap.

Many stops later it’s the child who looks sullen, holding one aggrieved hand to her drooping forehead and leaning on her grandmother for support.

Scowling beneath her black helmet on Spit Road, shaking her head, a lump of grumpy old woman tilts her motor scooter round the tail of a dithering people-mover.

At Manly Wharf, the distant ends of jetties remain the lawless preserve of little boys, and sometimes bigger boys and girls, who hurl themselves into the shark-infested harbour. Today it’s the little boys in their long black gym pants that look like board shorts, but they’re mostly preoccupied with a huge decking plank that just won’t make the leap. They’ve pushed it off the edge as far as they can but the weight of it has the final section wedged beneath the railing. They stand on it, see-sawing up and down but all to no avail; the ancient slab hangs in space, angled to the water and fated never to enter.

A man stomps across a shopfront awning in Mosman, peering into the sun as a yellow-clad body leans down from the roof.

A white haired woman is playing solitaire on her phone, tapping tiny cards with her middle finger. Her nails are long without being talons, manicured but unpainted. She wears a crisp blouse of blue and white stripes, and a smooth black vest that may be part of a suit. She glances up at the Stop signal button, her lashes heavy with mascara, and is ready long before we reach her destination on the outskirts of Dee Why.

In the hottest part of the day a man is weeding his balcony boxes. They run right along the front of his penthouse. His right forearm is covered by a cast or bandage, and his head by a wide-brimmed hat that needs reseating now and then. He wears a dark grey t-shirt. With his left hand he uproots big weed clumps and drops them at his side, and I imagine someone unseen, in the cool depths of the penthouse, who will not be pleased with the mess. Perhaps that’s the point.

Three women and a dog approach my bus stop. Suddenly they all pause, and dog woman goes down into a half-squat, rubbing a palm over her thighs and yapping. They resume their walk, and though the dog is very friendly when they reach me, the women are distant, absent really, and preoccupied with dog woman’s tale. ‘My whole leg went numb,’ she says.

Two high school girls share a seat on the bus, and a phone screen. One giggles through her nose, in short bursts linked by smiling pauses. Her final thought is pretty much a whinny.

In a yard only partly shielded from the traffic, a woman stands on one foot, contemplating her vines.

A girl spots something on the other side of Pittwater Road that makes her smile, and moves towards it. She wears dark clothes, sunglasses and boots. With a glance at the oncoming traffic she bolts out into the road as two school-uniformed girls appear. They hug in the middle lane, laughing, then scatter to safety in opposite directions.

Meanwhile, back on the 199 …

A German cockroach scurries across the back of a seat.

A man comes aboard at Warringah Mall with black hair tattooed on the top of his head: hard-edged, hardcore, high gloss.

Two Year Seven boys, seizing a seat together, immediately set about being noisy.

A middle-aged man glares reproachfully at a woman taking half his space.

A high school boy says “This is outrageous,” in a tone just mildly conversational.

A man fails to link his phone to the Opal reader in the doorway. He lowers his bag to the floor and takes off his sunglasses, frowning at the screen. A youth squeezes past with a grin but scores a fail on his Opal card; he shrugs and continues down the bus.

A small girl dressed completely in pink crosses the road with her mother, but frees her hand as they reach the footpath. She shades her eyes and points at right-angles to the direction her mother wants to go. A discussion ensues. The girl peers up, pulling sunglasses from her forehead and replacing them many times, and quickly. Finally she changes hands, and points in the opposite direction to her first choice.

They could be there a while.

On Sydney’s hottest day in two years, the 199 from Manly has no air-conditioning. The windows are sealed. The emergency exit hatch that must never be opened is open.

A red-faced mother with sunburn mimes ‘Oh it’s hot!’ to the contents of a pram, fanning her face, puffing her lips out and smiling. She has blonde hair topped with sunglasses, and pale blue eyes.

Another woman leans conversationally over the barrier to the cross-seats, and the mother replies with an American accent:

‘Ya. Hottest day of the year. I’m just …’ She pauses and drags her palms down sweaty cheeks … ‘We don’t have far to go.’ She’s out of conversation, and lifts accusing eyes as new boarders squeeze in - schoolboys with white shirts, black bags and no sense of personal space, or of anything much.

As the bus grinds on she makes constant maintenance probes and water bottle offerings inside the pram. Her face grows redder, her eyes more tired. No smiles for the baby now, just a silent, red and sweaty frown of concern. She yawns suddenly. Uncertain whether to roll her eyes or close them, she does both.

Many stops later she escapes, backing the pram down onto a sun-blasted footpath, and an older woman follows with a shake of the head. They stand together, close associates of some kind but not friendly. Or perhaps the 199 has leached them of the will to try.

Two parents join their little boy on a train ride at the Mall, circling slowly in a moment of peace without dignity.

A woman’s face in red looks down on Liverpool Road. Her hair flows along the lane, framing huge block letters that say ‘Art B.C. Jewellery’, and smaller capitals underneath saying ‘Exclusive Designers of Handcrafted Jewellery’. Blue sky glares above, shadows clutter the lane below, and a streetlight becomes an eye-liner touching her brow.

On the main road of Ashfield stands a tiny cottage with brick walls and a slate roof, with terra cotta ornaments all along its crown and the crowning glory right at the very front. The roof’s front slope stops short of the peak, leaving a neat little triangle of timber slats to circulate air beneath the tiles. There’s a chimney, too, that widens all around in four stepped courses underpinning a columned chimney pot, like a tiny Japanese shrine, with a pinnacle of its own.

From the garden, steps lead up to a small verandah with a low brick wall, timber uprights and a curved roof of corrugated iron trimmed with elaborate, pressed metal seams. The corrugated iron is holed in the middle and rusted to a deep reddish brown. The garden is full of long, dead, long-dead grass, and the little house, trapped within the same industrial fence that protects the countless-storey building site next door, is doomed.

A young father’s eyes are everywhere, intense and challenging, hard to meet. He pushes one of those vehicles that’s more than a stroller and less than a pram, which faces backwards so you can only see in once it’s gone past. It does this, and the cargo is a clutch of shopping bags.

On the 199, three dark-haired, dark-eyed, olive-complexioned women are talking. One sits and the others stand in front of her, clinging to pieces of the bus and jostled by fellow-travellers. When space opens up on the cross-seats the three friends claim their together-space, and the young one hands out Ferrero Rochers.