out and about

The bus door opens and a woman tilts her stroller to wheel it aboard. Immediately, a child’s voice wails, ‘No no no bus! No bus!’ The ‘No’ has an ‘o’ as in ‘off’ and ‘bus’ has a ‘u’ as in ‘pussycat’.

She steers into the aisle and it’s a boy in the stroller, distraught now, red-faced and teary, thrashing around and crying ‘No bus! No bus!’ over and over. His panic-stricken eyes dart everywhere as the mother parks him facing backwards and crouches down in front of him.

‘Buses are fun!’ she squeaks in an accent, but he’s having none of it and reaches out to scratch her in the face. She pulls her head back.

They remain like this, him wailing and kicking, her crouching and cajoling, for almost their entire journey. Almost. There’s a moment when the boy giggles suddenly and smiles at his mother, eyes twinkling. But it really is just a moment. The protest resumes, and continues all the way to the corner of Lyons Road in Drummoyne, where the howls finally subside as she wheels him off the bus.

Single-decker buses don’t speak. That’s just how the world has evolved. So when the 504 suddenly announces: ‘Next stop, Quirk Street,' it’s a terrible shock. There’s a hole in the universe, and some other reality has broken through.

Succulents reach for the sun like tall green flowers, at the entrance to a block of flats in Mosman.

Greenery like tinsel wraps around two silos near the Anzac Bridge.

When there aren’t any cars on Pittwater Road, the silence is like the end of the world.

A single hiking boot lies abandoned on a bus stop roof.

Top deck of a B1. It’s a whole new world.

“I want to sit on mummy’s la-ap,” moans a boy to his mother on the B1 bus. He climbs on top of her and glances around. “I want to sit next to a window!”

“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen,” says the mother.

An old woman sits in the aisle seat of the bus. The window seat beside her is empty. She’s a big woman in blue jeans, a big black pullover and sunglasses. Her hair is dark brown, in a short bob, with a thin red head band.

Reaching suddenly across the empty seat beside her, she stabs a long finger at the window and speaks.

An old man on the seat in front of her, by the window, turns his head as far as it will go and looks at her in peripheral vision. He has a black cap, a grey cardigan and a messy shirt collar. His face is very red and his mouth is moving.

The woman flicks her hand at him in dismissal, but he’s already turned away.

At Dee Why the woman stands and the man follows her to the front of the bus. She sits in the window seat so there’s room for him beside her. He sits across the aisle.

A block of flats looks down on Sydney Harbour from an otherwise green promontory, and on its roof a radar wing spins round.

The 504 to the city packs in the day’s worn out and weary, their faces angled to avoid each other. The video screen has also had enough. ‘No Signal’, it says.

A little house peeps over a fence, with exactly half a gutter full of brown leaves.

A woman stands on the bus with hectares of hair unleashed in long, dark ringlets, and a Plan B scrunchy on her wrist.

At a building site in Manly Vale, where there used to be a billiard table factory and then a furniture warehouse, the scaffolding gains two levels, and each level has its workers evenly spaced. It’s like the backdrop to an 80s music clip.

The world is suddenly full of triple decker baby movers.

A man in his 60s, neatly turned out, walks briskly past in Aldi. There’s no one with him but he says “Oh!” in loud surprise, and follows up with two more of the same.

A young man’s lumbering run, shoulders dropping one way and rolling back the other, like a jerky metronome.

A young guy pedals dreamily past Collaroy Beach with a piano accordion in his basket.

A serious jogger burns past the wetlands on Pittwater Road, until his big, serious dogs run either side of a light pole.

In the far distance, a colossal pole leans over at the top, weighed down, it seems, by banks of mounted objects. I know the dreary truth of it, but choose to imagine the pole engaged in studying the ground, or that someone very tall has tripped there, knocking everything askew.

Lyons Road, Drummoyne. A little dick in a big truck blows his horn.

A blokey bloke crosses the road in shorts, t-shirt, bare feet, beard and baseball cap. And backpack. With faded pink crocs hanging from a strap.

A man’s dress-shoe stands empty in the road, its pointy toe still aiming for the footpath.

The jungle has conquered a tall brick building from within, and lush green leaves are rioting at the windows.

Pandemic oddities: maskless, a woman stabs the pedestrian button with a naked elbow.

Near the turn-off to Long Reef Beach, a square is cut from the undergrowth and filled with small white cylinders in rows.