Two people on the bus have big chunky discs in their ears. The blonde girl has black discs, and the man with the linen-white suit has silver. Each disc tapers out from the ear, just barely, ending in a surface that is broad and flat.

I’ve never seen these before.

A tumble-down mansion of a woman leans on the table, filling herself with food.

Two Chinese men wrestle a sheet of plywood onto a driveway. Both men are bald and scrubbed-looking, both neatly dressed in high visibility clothing. One bends to measure the plywood, marking it three times and joining the marks with a ruler and pencil. The other man watches.

A man stands comfortably in Cremorne, resting his arms on a backpack that he wears in front.

Elsie reaches past the broken wall and pulls out lengths of rusty steel, a broken necklace threaded with lumps of concrete.

Two figures sit on the balcony, all but concealed by the mesh that covers the scaffolding. They look like blow-ins, trespassers in light blue hoodies, but then they move and it’s clear they’re dressed in the flimsy over-suits that pass, on this site, for hazardous materials protection. One is an old man in a hard hat. The other is a youngster with blonde tips forming a band across the top of his head. One talks, one listens. They lean back.

Two Chinese kids roll past in a two-seat stroller. The boy in front says Yeah-Yeah-YEAH! Yeah-Yeah-YEAH! over and over again. His eyes are full of laughter.

A delicious blast of cold air draws me back to the Mid City entrance, where a hole-in-the-wall cafe is playing music; it drives me out again.

A man walks on George Street with a look of unease on his face (his biggest feature) and a phone. His shoulders are narrow, his blue suit as trim as his neat brown beard. He’s a garden gnome, reimagined.

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.

A man crosses the demolition site, brandishing a pole with a scythe-shaped metal object on the end.

Death in a hard hat.

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 orange man stands beyond the broken wall, with only his head and shoulders visible. He talks towards the tea area, and nods.

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.

The demolishers are back. Rattling sounds and a reversing beep. Ah. Homer is driving a cherry-picker into the carpark beneath my window. It’s orange, but its tyres and part of the hoist are tan. He locks the gate and walks away up the lane.

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.