A girl with green hair and a nose ring sits with one knee up, texting. As the bus approaches Manly Wharf, she lifts the phone to her ear.

Sunday, Manly, 7.35am. Three teenage girls are crossing from the Corso to the Wharf. One speaks animatedly the whole way, leaving a lone audible remark as she passes: “My dog is, like, fat and bossy.”

A second baked beans tin has appeared in the carpark, and both are becoming submerged in the puddle surrounding the portable toilet. Also new, the shell of a hard-boiled egg lies sprawled on its back.

A woman walks up the hill beyond the demolition, pushing a trolley and nibbling an ice cream. On site, an engineer trots into view but turns, wipes his mouth and skips back out of sight. Nothing moves after that. Everything lies baking in the heat.

Two pigeons walk together down the lane, but one ducks under the temporary fencing and bobbles across the car park. It pecks once at something on the ground, arrives at the broken wall and turns back. At the edge of the puddle it pauses, considering; then it plunges through, ducks beneath the fence again and hurries after its companion.

Foreman is playing with a vast tangle of rusted metal rebar. He’s using Elsie, lifting the knot in her jaws and dropping it, then smashing her face down on top of it.

Ahh, you don’t believe
we’re on the eve
of destruction …

P.F. Sloan, 1964
Performed by Barry McGuire

A big man in funky high-viz leans right down, lifting double-handfuls of water to his mouth. His base colour is orange, but his massive shoulders and sleeves feature bold black stripes that give him a kind of fluororescent zebra look. As he stands and walks out the gate with hulking arms, he displays a tiny, gratuitous patch of horizontal black stripes at his waist.

The vertical bricks that trim the top of the balcony wall have shifted. Light appears between them.

Two men walk past Elsie, directly beneath jagged sheets of metal hanging from the dinosaur’s mouth. One man has a hard hat, the other not. No one calls out, nobody raises the alarm, and neither man looks up.

A man climbs into the back of a dump truck, bends and raises a long, wrapped bundle against the side. He steadies it, then ducks again and lifts, tipping the bundle up until it rests on the edge. With a final push and a guiding hand it slips down over the side and disappears. He climbs out after it.

A middle-aged couple walks past me at the bus stop. He’s paddling, she’s … I’m not sure what, really. Mustering as much dignity as she can, perhaps. Their mouths are a matching pair of disapproving pouts.

He’s dark and swarthy, grizzled and gnarled, pock-marked and battered as a pocket Danny Trejo. Ponytail, big moustache. Large as life and here at Warringah Mall.

Cool.

A young bloke ambles past with a skateboard horizontal in his hands. He flips it over. And over. And over. His head is shaved at the front and sides but a blanket of down covers the back like a fallen blonde toupee.

A woman walks through the food hall, wearing a long navy blue dress with matching handbag. The bag is a rectangle. Her arm is a right-angle. Her forearm traces the top of the bag to a hand that clutches the strap. She wears black high heeled shoes and moves with a kind of stiffness, like a robot inspired by catwalk models. All around her are the noise and daggy Summer outfits of a Northern Beaches shopping centre, a gauntlet that she navigates only out of grim necessity, and with the utmost disdain.