On these city streets

Today as I stood at work, mind numbingly bored and watching the hour hand crawl past unhurried and completely at ease with itself, a group of 30 loud people dressed in golfing attire and wielding kids golf clubs hurried past, all walking backwards. You know, as you do.


I like working in the city, this small city that dreams of big-city-status. People do crazy things, or perhaps this is just where those crazy people hang. A bright orange monk wanders through my store while a man desperately hugging a well-worn teddy bear the store folds and unfolds his newspaper in his free arm, hmms and harrs nervously and then dashes outside. A domestic disagreement explodes into a hair pulling, scratching tussle on the pavement, the woman dashes into the store, her face dripping from where he had spat on her. She cowers for a time in the back corner until he, substantially calmer, returns, takes her hand and leads her away whispering sweet I’m-so-sorrys. She appears to have whole heartily forgiven him, which is certainly far beyond my understanding.

One spring Saturday morning I sat idly by as the Hare Krishna’s shuffled up the street singing gods praises, the Coffin Cheaters roared back down it, a sudden swarm of skull masks on vicious, ear-splitting engines that were followed closely by their flashy police escort, and a man dressed as Winnie the Pooh wandered obscurely by. A trifector of the not-so-ordinary. Rush forward in time, to any given, otherwise wholly unremarkable day in November. A man runs in, hand to his forehead trying to stem the steady flow of blood. He is followed closely by his assailant, a wild-eyed, screeching woman who comes flinging a hefty chain of swear words and curses and making wild lunges in his direction. They crash together right in front of me and she leaps at him. “OI!” I yell. There is a sudden silence, a moment unfolds as they stop, bewildered, staring at me like naughty schoolchildren. Then the chase goes on, out of the store and howling up the street. Lord knows what that man did, but that woman was going to tear him limb from limb.

Early late autumn, on a billboard at the end of the street a man stands naked as the day he was born and wielding a gun. This I don’t see, but I note the pack of casual afternoon shoppers gathering open-mouthed and excited as the black armoured vehicle and its officers negotiate with the man. (Who it turns out was a refugee with Post Traumatic Stress, though this fact was readily forgotten. Also it wasn’t a real gun, another fact easily forgotten.)

There are the oddballs who return with a regularity to rival clock work. The sweet and gently described as “not-all-there” customers who I find myself tiptoeing around polite conversation with, otherwise I will literally be there all day explaining how much that key rings costs. Which makes me feel some ridiculously bad kind of terrible because they are just being friendly in their delightfully off-colour and time consuming little way. There are others though who I, in my professional opinion, have decided are quite literally insane. For example there is one regular city feature who charges around the city waving the Australian flag, singing Waltzing Matilda and generally being the Patriot. She assumes, since I sell flags, I must innately understand this seething patriotism and dislike of muslims (which I don’t.)

Meanwhile, outside of my store, in the shopping malls and side streets there are kids that sit hunched in doorways behind signs that beg small change for food. There weren’t so many young homeless people that lived so glaringly obvious to the eye on these city streets until recently when they seemed to have materialised out of the pavement. I wonder if they are among the squatters that have taken up residence under the bridge with improvised tables and bits and bobs that seem to proclaim – open your eyes, we are right here. I wonder when the authorities will decide enough is enough and shuffle them onwards, away-wards.

But I’ve been carried away on a tangent here, swept away by the faces in the city, the cities celebrities and passing peculiarities. The humdrum of your average day mixes gleefully with the casual eccentricities and quirks of a few. But for most of the day humanity just repeats itself endlessly before my eyes like a broken record. That sunburnt, balding and unathletic looking English guy looks vaguely familiar but I struggle to place him. Perhaps, I decide, its just that he looks like one hundred other pink, bald and sweaty English tourists. People make the same statements, trip over the same step, buy the same things, crack the same flat jokes. Sometimes the intense repetition amuses me – other times it depresses me unimaginably. My eyes glaze over with boredom, until something extraordinary shocks them open and brings my mind to life again.