out and about

Boisterous boy’s father stands waiting at the edge of the cafe, wearing a backpack and a jersey of broad, horizontal blue and white stripes with the number 2. A second bag and a sombrero hang from his hand.

The boy comes running from the far end of the cafe, fresh from another urgent confab with another smiling waitress.

The boisterous boy has dropped his paper napkin over the rail, and watches in horror as it flutters down among the book-browsing public.

“Dummy!” says his dad with a scowl.

The boy races down the aisle, round the corner and onto the escalator to retrieve his treasure from the ground floor. Drawing near, he looks up at the surrounding grown-ups with a face beseeching them to share his excitement, his dread, his amazement in this moment of catastrophe, but they walk right past the napkin on the carpet.

He snatches it up and runs.

An angry sentry scans the front line, gripping the rail and running his eyes back and forth along the tables as he waits, just barely, to be served.

A boisterous little boy is having lunch with his dad at Dymocks cafe. He leaps up suddenly and rushes the waitress, who’s about to address the people next in line. She smiles, excuses herself past him and returns moments later to hear his plea. Nodding, still smiling, she hands him a paper napkin.

He carries it back in triumph to his dad.

A woman sits with her late teen daughter in Dymocks cafe. The mother wears glasses and a wicked smile as she reads out excerpts from Spare, by Harry. The girl is nose-deep in her own book: The Cheat Sheet, by Sarah Adams.

Dymocks cafe. Two women talk at a nearby table, in a language I can’t make out. One says “etta” a lot.

Two opposites are having lunch together. Man with russet hair and beard, black shorts, beige t-shirt. Woman in smart, coordinated colours. They open their laptops back to back and focus on the screens. They have mice.

Later when I look across, she has her laptop closed and her elbows resting on it, hands clasped to her mouth. She nibbles a nail. She gazes into the distance.

He taps on his phone.

An unbelievably loud shout from across the mezzanine at Dymocks cafe, where a tall woman, orange and pear-shaped to the waist then black and vertical, slouches against one side of a booth and glares a lazy challenge to the world. Her head is small, covered in corn rows leading to a bun.

Trapped inside the booth is a fussy blonde woman with salon hair and a nervous, twitching energy. She wears sunglasses on top of her head, and a green dress. A teenage girl sits facing her but is also locked in, guarded by a standing, leaning woman in white.

A release is finally negotiated. Fussy and the teenager stand outside the booth, and everyone hugs the woman in white. Three of them leave together, with the woman in white despatched in the opposite direction.

She has to pay.

Two girls on skateboards, hand in hand, wobble down the ramp at Collaroy pool. People everywhere. “Through here,” says the lead girl, pointing to a narrow gap and darting through, but her companion hits release and stops. Lead girl looks back with a grin conveying understanding, encouragement, and friendship’s joy.

A Butcher Bird sings unseen in the tropical heat of Dee Why. But is does appear, from behind, flying above the pedestrian path and crossing Pacific Parade with a friend.

A small boy walks down Howard Avenue with his dad. He squeals loudly into the carpark entrance and savours the returning sound. His dad echoes him.

A man slumps forward on a wall in Dee Why, eating a burger without enthusiasm. Two baby magpies wait politely at his feet, and when he breaks off part of a bun and flicks it, they walk together quietly to share it. The birds are on their best behaviour, having sensed their benefactor’s mood.

Superheated concrete on Pittwater Road displays the grubby marks of tyres.

A passing sign says CROLL in large letters. Mr Croll was our high school counsellor, feared by all for his readiness with the cane. He would chain-smoke Craven-A’s at assembly.

“Oh, beautiful green eyes,” says unmarried daughter to twisted mother’s photo of a grandchild painted blue.

Twisted mother shows endless grandchild photos to unmarried daughter.

A cerulean super-hero walks his son into MacDonalds, shouldered pullover flapping like a cape.

Mysterious forces have snatched Makeup-Woman from the bus. Her seat is empty. Did anyone see it happen?

An old woman pushes her walking frame to its limits, pursued by two others with a walking stick.

A woman crosses Pittwater Road in Dee Why. Her evening gown is lifeless in the heat, but the wind whips it into a frenzy.

Makeup-woman’s mother, still reversed in her seat, is interrogating her daughter’s intended, who answers in a voice that penetrates all the other bus sounds: “Yaah. Yaah … Yaah.” Now and then, for variety, he says “Yeah.”

A baby girl stands on her father’s lap at the front of the bus. She has a dummy in her mouth, blonde curls and a hot, red face, and holds a little pointer up as if to say: “One moment, Father.”

A woman is turned right round on the bus, talking to her daughter in the seat behind. She doesn’t even blink as the daughter hands her a phone and leans in to do her makeup in the selfie cam.

Six dormer windows gaze down upon the Warringah Freeway.

A hoist stands elevated beside the Cahill Expressway, with nobody in it and no one about. A Cherry-Picker to Heaven.