30 Days in Sydney Read Online Free PDF Page B

sweet and painful like a Monet Haystack, arguing, in the moment of its greatest beauty, the shortness of our lives. There the black snake had lived beside the sandstone steps. There had lived and died an ancient Vietnamese palm. There were the remains of the water tank in which another snake had died, and there, still, was the careful terracing which the original builder, the director of a mental institution, had his inmates construct, free of charge, on his weekends.
    With the red glow of fires all about them, Sheridan and Jack had stayed there one last night. They cooked a final meal, and at half past four in the morning, as the fire jumped the last break and spread in a great whoosh across the crowns of eucalypt, they boarded Jack's rowing boat, pulled off into the bay, and watched the houses burn.
    Damn, said Sheridan. Fuck it. Damn.

CHAPTER FIVE
    OF ALL THE WINDS that define this city, it is only the westerly that I hate. It is a bullying blustering wind and it blows for all of August and often for October too. In 1984 a westerly wind came down the Parramatta River at 100 miles an hour and lifted the roof off my bedroom on Louisa Road. I was not there to witness the bookshelves fall or the sliding glass doors crash and break into murderous daggers on my bed but my neighbour, the shipwright Arthur Griffiths, saw the roof sail across the street with its frilly Victorian lampshade still hanging from the centre of its ceiling. He saw it bounce off the house across the way and land in the waters of Snails Bay.
    Years later Jack Ledoux rebuilt that bedroom. He devised a system of shutters so we could batten down against the brutal westerly but, being a follower of de Selby, he also worked to remove any barrier between the room and the world outside. The shutters and the windows all slid back and tucked away as if they were not there. The railing slid down too, so when the building inspector had left and when young Sam Carey was safely tucked in bed, there was no physical or visual separation between inside and outside.
    What about mosquitoes? Even as I asked it I wondered if Jack really understood. He had always calmly coexisted with mosquitoes, ticks, leeches. (Fifteen years later, by the lantern light out on his deck, I would see Jack and Brigit's four year old bravely attack his own foreskin with a pair of tweezers.)
    Well, said Jack, it would be criminal to put flywire over that.
    Jack, I'm not paying all this money for mozzie bites.
    Well, he said, why don't you talk to Brigit?
    These days Brigit has a very successful practice but in those years she was Jack's former student, shockingly young, very pretty, and I thought her rather fey. But now she addressed 'the mosquito issue' and revealed the very practical aspect to her character. She made a stunning curtain. It was very fine royal-blue silk, Velcro'd on the sides, weighted at the bottom, and when I think of Louisa Road I remember, not that rude blustering bad-tempered westerly, but the sweet nor'-easter as Alison and I lay in bed and looked through the jacaranda to the water while Brigit's gossamer curtain just . . . breathed.
    The room was a civilised abstraction of Jack's camp on Pittwater where, once the tick had been safely removed from the foreskin, we sat feasting on the crabs he and the kids had brought in from their trap.
    You always hated the westerly, Jack laughed. So you tell the story of the lamp flying across the street, I'll tell you the story of the southerly, and we'll be square. But I think we should do it in the boat and I also think you should know what it's like to catch a kingfish. No book about Sydney is complete without a kingfish.
    I slept with the tape recorder beneath my pillow, and when Jack shook me awake before dawn I tucked it in my trousers. It was dark and cold and we had drunk too much wine the night before and I followed Jack down the slippery dew-wet path to the mooring where he kept the skiff that had nearly killed him. It was slim