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in their daily lives a specific remoteness, a behaviour verging on abstraction. Et cetera, et cetera. Oh, yes.

9
    INSTEAD OF learning the fine art of wool-classing, Wesley had thought he might try something entirely different, such as science or languages at one of the universities. His father had other ideas. A push, which is eventually necessary between father and son, turned into a full-blown shove, and Wesley watched as his father, still reading the riot act, tripped and fell on his knees, kicking up a puff of dust. A scuffle near the veranda steps, Lindsey in a short skirt looking on. This was at the beginning of 1978.
    By ten o’clock, not-so-young Wesley was on the train to Sydney, where he camped in his mother’s apartment at the Astor. He soon realised he couldn’t stay there. It was the powdered humidity, mirrors wherever you turned, the bathroom with its array of milky jars, bottles in the shape of hearts, tweezers and pencils, the miniature soaps from the south of France, little things, potpourri, the embroidered foot-stools – and his mother, the docile tea-drinker, long-fingered, a woman of taste, interested and yet not really – enough to have him step out after less than a week and find somewhere else.
    The first apartment he saw was good enough. Typical of the buildings around Kings Cross it had a chrome-plated bolt of lightning decorating the glass doors, and a maroon carpet of floral pattern which darkened the foyer and continued into the lift. It was strange living in a tall building where so many other people lived – all those nearby lives, attended by the water and gas pipes and the electrical wires. Wesley’s apartment on the fourth floor faced Macleay Street. A thin man with out-of-control black eyebrows, which gave him an untidy bachelor look, claimed to be the oldest resident, and made it his job to latch onto any new tenant, to help them ‘acclimatise’, as he put it. He was known as Joseph. No abbreviation was possible. With Wesley he went around and pointed out the fuse boxes and the location of the rubbish bins; along the way he kept noticing things which reminded him of certain tenants and their exasperating behaviour, and he went on complaining, shaking his head and so on, as he led Wesley onto the roof to show him the clothes line, raising his voice as he stepped over a young woman in a bikini lying on a towel.
    People in the building came and went at all hours, and looking down from his window Wesley could see figures moving along Macleay Street, stopping now and then to talk. Where he came from, in the country, there was no movement after dark – nothing. By eight fifteen, everybody was asleep and loudly snoring. In the city, people couldn’t sleep; and they talked more. Always someone, somewhere. Much of the talk was in the realm of small courtesies, although a man could often be seen arguing on the footpath to convince another to his line of thinking.
    As for his own talkability, the endless paddocks and the creaking tin roofs had passed through him and left behind a teeth-sucking way of speaking/smiling. It suggested some sort of face-in-shadow reserve; but soon enough he joined in giving the standard nod and ‘Good Morning!’ to people in the building. Straw blonde about fifty-plus applied lipstick in the lift. She was the one who always asked him the time, yet didn’t appear interested in the answer. Most mornings he had bacon and eggs at a café next to the Sicilian barber’s. It was one of the side streets that form the misshapen asterisk, Kings Cross. He bought his cigarettes at a place that sold complicated mechanical ashtrays, the genuine Havana corona. He was twenty-two. Of course he liked the idea of smoking and looking thoughtful. Along the streets were spaces into which were fitted cramped enterprises, where figures bent over needle and thread, while others nearby did their best to resurrect wrinkled tan shoes,