Two men on the balcony resemble praying mantises, in their hard hats and pointy face masks with a dot in the middle. But praying mantises wouldn’t pick things up and feed them to a dinosaur.

Working with the mantoids is a hatless, bald-headed old man. Though he lacks a mask, he employs a broom with diligence and quiet dignity.

A woman floats along Pittwater Road, Dee Why, in the middle of a sun frock.

Day’s end. The nut brown man props an orange hard hat on top of a pole. He leans deep over a barrier, moving his head back and forth as a spray of water catches the light. Straightening, he gestures at the scaffold and his beard points sternly, just as it does on that 50 drachma coin. We’ll call him Homer.

Aimless lifts a tangle of PVC and wire, offering an end to a second hard hat who looks, touches, hesitates. Hatless the Foreman arrives to supervise. He gestures. He moves his mouth. He looks, hovers, follows, finds broken things for the hard hats to pick up off the ground. It’s an important job.

It’s quiet on site. Nothing is happening. No machines are working. No trucks are loading. Elsie and the dinosaur are sound asleep, heads down. A hard hat stands alone, bending a piece of metal back and forth until it breaks. He tosses it, lifts both hands to his hips and stands there.

Later, inspired, he picks up a piece wood and flicks it away.

A man in a hard hat sits with Elsie. He scratches his ear. He drops his hand and slumps. He looks around. He leans forward and twists his neck, peering up beneath the windscreen’s edge. He sits back again. He waits.

The dinosaur squeezes its prey against the bricks, drops it and pounces again, shaking it in its jaws, crushing it all over again, over and over. Finally it presses the remains against the bottom of the wall and straightens, lifting its head and reaching deep inside the ruins to emerge with a new mouthful of screeching metal sheets.

A man with short grey hair and a white beard is breaking walls at the top of the flats. He wears shorts and work boots with yellow socks, an orange vest open at the front and nothing on his head. His skin is brown from the sun. The scaffolding makes it hard to reach the wall so he clambers and twists and contorts, reaches and stretches, loosening the bricks with a short-handled sledge and tossing them down in ones and twos.

Five men in high-viz and hard hats crowd around the back of a work lorry, and another stands in the back of the vehicle, which is draped in black plastic that hangs down over the sides and back and reaches the ground. He’s taping the seams, making it airtight, and not sparing the tape. Why do they need an air-tight seal on this load in particular? They’ve closed the gate so no one can see.

“I want to get this finished by …” The site foreman scrambles bare-headed up the slope of fallen bricks, through the crumbling wall to the summit at last, where he turns and heads towards Elsie and the dinosaur. He nearly falls at one point, misjudging his step on the rubble and spreading his arms for balance.

The car park swarms with yellow-shirted scaffolders, ants that have found a vast blue corpse and are moving it piece by piece. Above them, picks and hammers smash the top levels of the flats, and workers dismantle the roof with a crash and tumble of sheet metal. The scaffolders wear no head protection; but then, neither does the site foreman.

Collaroy Beach with Long Reef in the background

A man stands by the stack of bright blue scaffolding poles, lifting one and setting an end on the ground near his feet. Holding it in place, he reaches for a second pole and adds it to the first. He seems to want to continue all day. There’s a ripple beside him as blue poles cascade down but he’s unperturbed, and lines up another pole. When he has five, he tips them onto his shoulder and walks out of sight.

And just for a moment, the silence was deafening …

A girl sits at the bus stop ahead, a silhouette in the glare, except that her hair is very red, very curly, cut short at the sides. Almost a mullet, but it’s fluffy at the front too. Her head bends as she looks at her phone. One leg stretches in front, the other tucks beneath the seat to form a triangle, whose apex is her knees. A white bag nestles beside her.

She stands and emerges into the sunshine, ready to catch her bus. A Goth girl. Short black skirt. Big black boots. Black jacket. Black stockings. Black garter above one knee.

Crossing the road I see her again, sitting upstairs as the bus waits at the lights. A phone appears suddenly. Her eyes flash and amusement lifts one corner of her mouth. She snaps the selfie.

A small girl pursues a beach ball in the surf. Each time she reaches it a wave snatches it away. Finally she throws her arms in the air with a cry of disgust, and her father has to run after the ball.

@jdm On your “About” page, there’s a sentence that doesn’t make sense in the quoted text from Kirkpatrick Sale’s Rebels Against the Future:

‘… in which it was argued that those who controlled capital protected by government and king, without much in the way of laws or ethics or customs to restrain them.’

Could something before the full stop have been omitted accidentally from the original?

A man with his son balanced on his hip stands contemplating a motorbike. The man is in his 30s. The son is in his twos. " … anodised," says the dad with a glance at the son. “Ooh, anodised!” squeaks the son, or a good approximation of it. They both gaze admiringly at the machine.