At the cafe: both staff members huddle over a phone in the corner window. The man who won’t serve anyone lifts an eyebrow, and his serious companion rests a hand against the wall.

The tabletop is stainless steel with a van Gogh sun: twin filaments at the heart of an ellipse, and scratches of light spreading out in ever-widening circles.

The corner window frames a girl on the footpath, her back to the traffic, dark eyes considering something overhead. A snapshot. She drops her gaze at last, and enters the wall.

A man on the bus has a precision haircut, ear buds and no restraint. He looks straight ahead, talking at party volume to an unseen phone. Beside him, another young man with headphones turns and stares. He clenches one hand on a pole.

Two young women in a flash of passing side-street. Confrontation.

Down at the Spit, a man stands knee-deep next to a boat that almost touches the sand. Two small children splash beside him, ducking beneath the surface of Middle Harbour.

A girl dressed all in black is running for the bus, with black hair streaming from a scrunchy. Something white is written on her back.

In the garden of a house on Old Pittwater Road stands something like a covered well-head, gabled and dark. Entropy is stong with this one.

Three women jog shoulder to shoulder in Mosman, their shapes encompassing Before, Work in Progress, and After.

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.

Elsie is stuck fast after 24 hours gnawing on the flats. Her teeth are locked in the concrete but no one can help her. They haven’t come to work today.

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”.