At a table nearby sits a bony woman, with black makeup round her eyes and skin like leather. She has salon hair in chestnut with broad, arresting streaks of blonde; short on one side and parted there, swept across to follow the opposite cheek and taper in beneath the chin. Her face is narrow, her nose is long and pointy, her mouth is thin. Grim. Forbidding.

Her companion, easily her equal in bones and leather, has blonde hair in a costly concave bob.

A third woman joins them. Chestnut’s mouth lifts at the corner and she is utterly transformed. Warm. Welcoming. She props one hand against her cheek and listens, eyes moving, looking the newcomer up and down as she speaks. The new woman has frizzy, ratty hair and a smiling face not tortured by the sun, a shapeless dress and eyes that crinkle with laughter. She doesn’t stay long.

When the others depart, they pause to share a hug. Chestnut is so much shorter than her blonde friend and suddenly looks like a child. A lost child. She lifts her withered arms to the embrace and there’s a sense of long-held, deep affection, history shared, and sadness.

Woman in a cafe: I have to buy bleach this week. Right next to my shower, there’s a brown mark where something’s been standing.

Two men in their 50s take a table together. Each has a Daily Telegraph. One man looks at the other with a dubious expression, and the other looks down uncomfortably.

In a barber shop some distance away stand two plastic chairs and the end of a table. Something black is there, just inside the doorway. Maybe it’s a jacket or a hoody, but it can’t just be hanging there attached to nothing. At first glance, and at every subsequent glance, it is a medium sized black dog on its haunches, resting its front paws on the seat of a chair. But it doesn’t move. It’s as still as a statue made of felt.

Big voice of a little boy in the Dee Why Grand: “What?”

Mother, striding ahead: “We’ll go up here.”

Boy, following at a distance: “No we wo-on’t. Mummy! No!”

A slight and slender young woman is cleaning public surfaces in the Dee Why Grand. Her movements are brisk and confident, but her eyes are watchful.

A woman suddenly becomes visible as she stands beyond the cafe’s roped-off area. Lifting her handbag onto a table, she pushes one thing after another deep inside, takes up the handles and strides away.

Now she’s gone. Before, she just wasn’t there.

The view from my window keeps broadening. I can see new rubble piles, new houses on the street beyond, and the perpetrators having tea in their cabana.

Shouts and laughter on the Dee Why Grand’s main drag. A tiny girl sprawls on the floor, flapping in silence like a beached fish. Her mother and a relative look on with grins and chuckles. An old woman, passing by with her husband, leans on a walking stick and smiles. “So cute!” she says.

A doggy disagreement erupts in Dee Why but there’s only one dog - a dachshund, looking furious but satisfied as it moves on with its apologetic human. Left in their wake is a man who’ll know, next time, not to set foot on a sausage dog’s footpath.

The dinosaur drops crashing, banging, rattling loads of aluminium into a dump truck and squashes them down. The cherry-picker bleats in the car-park because Homer, standing on the platform, keeps moving it. Two men work with shovel and broom and the sun beats down.

A butterfly drifts through the concrete clouds, over the dinosaur’s neck, beating its wings till their colours flash in the sky.

A middle-aged man jogs through traffic to the middle of Military Road. His face is calm and full of lies. “I’ve got this,” it says.

The floor is shaking under me. It’s Monday morning, and the demolishers are back.

A bicycle glides among pedestrians on the footpath in Brookvale. On the front of the bike is a basket, and in the basket is a little grey puppy, resting its paws on the basket’s edge.

Four young women stand talking on the other side of Carrington Street, and when a grey Toyota pulls alongside they all climb in. The car drives away with a face at the window.

Two women sit in front of me on the bus. One has a surprisingly deep, clear voice but rarely uses it. The other, barely audible, says more.

A young Asian couple sits on the B1 bench At Wynyard, and as they converse very quietly the girl discards a thong, swinging her naked right foot with desperate energy.

Two pigeons are cleaning Carrington Street at Wynyard, one peck at a time. It’s Council work, and they really should be wearing high-vis.

On Saturday afternoon a man sits in the bus shelter at Wynyard, waiting for the B1. He wears a blue suit and brown, polished shoes, and has one leg crossed over the other. Beside him stands a suitcase on wheels with its handle extended. The man types on his phone. He brings a hand to his face. Out of nowhere, his suitcase makes a break for it. His hand snaps out like a bolt of lightning and pulls the suitcase back in line. He types on his phone.

Two girls are at a cafe with family. One sits with her legs crossed, eating demurely. The other stands behind her, equal in height for now, and frantically finger-combs her sister’s hair, top to bottom, hand over hand in rapid fire. Just once, the older girl turns in sharp rebuke, and there’s a pause. Then she resumes her meal, and her sister resumes her work.

Four ravens are in the car park this morning. Two at first, then a third flaps down and another shortly after. They strut about. One approaches the ends of the timber beams still bound by a webbing strap and actually bends down, tilting its head to peer into the shadows underneath.

Today I’ve remembered not to whip the blinds apart, but my phone taps the window and a bird flies up onto the wall. In seconds, less than seconds, all four ravens are gone.

Loud voices board the train at Redfern. They sound like an argument, but I think it’s just Cantonese.

A girl with glasses and a hijab climbs awkwardly over the ticket barrier at Ashfield Station. She turns and grins at another girl wearing shorts and t-shirt, whose hair is dark and shoulder-length and free. The second girl hangs back but finally, looking irritated, taps her Opal card on the reader and passes through.