out and about

The storage place at Brookvale has a deep blue field enclosed by thick yellow diagonals, but the rest of the wall is white. At a glance, in the glare of morning, it presents as one big gable.

Two dogs trot past crystal water filled with their reflections.

At Central Station, shimmering colours draw the eye to a figure kneeling with her back to the train. Sunlight has found her thousand glittering sequins.

At Brookvale Depot a woman stumbles across the driveway with a stroller, reaching and bending to catch a small boy running free. A small girl is splayed across the stroller’s front, as if to be drawn and quartered.

Four elderly women sit round a table at the bread shop, their attention given to one knee out of eight that is swathed in bandages.

Maisy’s cafe in Neutral Bay. Two men discuss music and Dominicans, and one breaks mid-sentence into Gregorian song.

When the train doesn’t stop at the places in between, it’s a long trip from Newtown to Ashfield.

A man works on a telegraph pole, his cherry picker hidden by the trees.

The old railway workshops at Redfern, up and down the gables, all the way along, are neatly labelled “Sleaze”.

A woman boards the train dressed as a khaki cuttlefish, hat pulled low and face mask tapering to the middle of her chest.

Two friends cross the road at Spit Junction with the ease and grace that youth has granted them. A weathered old woman hurries past with a shopping trolley.

Five powerful young men in dark blue singlets swagger across Military Road. They go into MacDonalds.

A man walks into a tiny yard on Spit Road, Mosman, mops his face on a towel on the washing line, and goes inside.

Sydney Observatory is a copper green pimple on the casino’s face.

A girl on the bus struggles to disentangle a cord from her hair. Tightening it at last, she flicks rivers of glorious hair into the space behind, where a young man is trying to read a book.

Four people cross Pittwater Road under their own steam. A man tears past them on a mobility scooter.

A girl with friends at the back of the bus: “If I fall asleep tomorrow, can you please not draw on me?”

A woman in a face mask stands waiting to cross at Spit Junction. She turns and looks over her shoulder with that slow, dawning certainty that a zombie horde is coming.

I get that.

A flock of orange shirts has landed near the Warringah Freeway, and clings to the scaffolding. Beyond them, the harbour is blue.

A girl walks between tables in the sun, clenching a strip of biltong in her teeth. She rips it apart.

A couple in their 30s sits in a space they’ve made their own, on the cross-seats at the front of the bus. She wears a straw hat over her blonde hair, and when she takes off her sunglasses her eyes are clear crystals with a hint of green. He wears a cap. They look at her phone together. She smiles at him, as if nothing could ever come between them.

A salt-water crocodile leaps from the footpath as the bus pulls in. Oh. It’s a shopping trolley camouflaged for the tropics. An old woman wrestles it aboard.

The profile of platform shoes appears to be on the rise.

Man at a cafe: “Oh yes. Some of them are all: ‘I’m the organist! Don’t you touch it!'”

A cloud of perfume boards at Dee Why, with black workout pants and a black t-shirt saying “Harry”. The shoes are absolute gym boots from the 60s.