Shouted conversations go quiet when the bus stops. Somebody might hear.

The dinosaur is jack-hammering somewhere inside the youth hostel. It begins with a sound like rolling thunder and continues in short bursts of destruction. From time to time, the room trembles around me.

A grey-clad woman in Brookvale carries a baby in front of her in a pouch, but the baby has sunk to the bottom and pulled everything taut. In consequence, the woman resembles a mudslide.

The woman across the aisle has black hair and lashes, black top, black jeans and black, thick-soled boots. Her jeans are ripped at the knees and torn across the outer thigh. She sits in stillness, one leg crossed over the other, and stares at a phone she holds in landscape mode. A complex, elegant tatto extends from wrist to elbow, and the lace of her top creates the appearance of other tattoos covering her shoulders.

Decamping at Dee Why, she wears a cautious expression.

Two yellow-vests drift down through the silent worksite. One slips through the gate with a twist but the second must widen the gap. He’s a mountain. With a gentle touch, he slides the gate back in place.

At Warringah Mall, an Espresso machine is piled high with shoes and boots. But no, I’m mistaken. There’s no coffee, and the kiosk is called Shoe Express.

Monday.

Boy Engineer and Long-Trousers seem pleased to be doing something practical. They’ve carried the metal frames that arrived this morning into the garage and have used them to build something. They back up to contemplate their work, then Boy Engineer moves in again and pounds with a hammer. He moves in a circle, following something that turns as he beats it, while Long-Trousers and a trusted orange-vest observe.

Finally, with a virtual back pat, all three swagger jauntily round a wall of bricks and vanish into the ruins.

Foreman supervises the opening of the gate and turns to make some of his favourite gestures across the forecourt, arm straight and palm open.

Boy Engineer walks over and gestures in the same direction. Foreman gestures again. Boy Engineer responds.

The gate-opener joins in and Homer, walking past on the footpath, turns in at the last moment and lifts his arm to point. For a moment, no one has the upper hand; then Boy Engineer performs a snappy double chopping movement with his right arm, and nobody has a answer for that. Not even Foreman.

So Boy Engineer wins.

A new construction rises in the garage doorway, standing three frames high on little feet. Long-Trousers emerges from the far depths of the garage with a small sledge-hammer in his hand. He’s been banging. I’ve heard him. He mounts the rubble slope and does not appear on the other side. More banging follows.

Boy Engineer stands framed in the double glass doors of the middle level, banging fasteners into place on another stretch of not-quite-scaffolding. He creates these pieces in concert with Long-Trousers, the other engineer.

Their structure is like a virus, spreading everywhere inside the flats.

Three storeys above Pittwater Road, the penthouse-dwellers bring in the washing.

The rebar spotter ducks just in time, and rods of rusty metal swing through the space where his shoulders would have been.

The rebar spotter freezes, one foot in the air and the other wobbling on a chunk of concrete, as Elsie’s jaws plough through the step he was about to take.

Elsie trawls the broken bricks and rubble, turning them again and again as the pile grows. Inches from her jaws, teetering on shifting ground, a young man pounces on spikes of rebar and tosses them down into the car park.

Two gangly young blokes walk through the food hall, with all their hair focused at the middle and the front. They grin at someone ahead and join two others near the wall. One is just like them, but the other is not; his width is almost as great as his height, and his height is far less than that of his friends. He wears a white t-shirt and black pants, and tapers from the waist in both directions, up and down.

Bro-hugs all round, and they stand together as equals.

A small boy strides along the top of a wall that surrounds the play area. His mother shadows him but doesn’t interfere.

It shows.

A woman leans to murmur in the man’s ear next to her. His lack of interest is solid.

He stood there for twenty minutes without moving, front paws in the rock pool, back paws on the rock behind him, peering into the water and waiting for something to move. 🐶