Nobody Is With Them

I leave the hotel and walk west on Liverpool Street. Green hire bikes stand in a row at the kerb. Rainbow colours run down the front of the building opposite. It is Monday, Labour Day, and I am later in the day than I meant to be.

Then the street tilts and narrows. Terraces step down a slope, cars parked tight along one side. The hills are small, then steep. Old buildings stand beside newer ones built in the same style, and houses sit among businesses with no line between them. Fifteen minutes in, I still cannot say what this place is.

A pale blue bicycle lies folded against a pole in a drift of dry leaves. A figure sits at a table inside a bottle shop, behind the glass. Chalk marks cover the pavement outside. At a corner, a house stands on a base of bare sandstone. The road has been cut out of the rock beside it.

I turn north onto Thomson Street. It ends. I walk back out toward Forbes Street. At a junction a man in a white shirt walks away from me. A scooter crosses behind him. The Rusty Rabbit sits on a corner with its name over the door. Orange chairs stand inside the window. Foot traffic stays thin, and cars line every kerb. The cars say people live here.

Further on, scaffolding wraps the front of a terrace. Two delivery bikes stand below it, one with a bag on the back. Nobody is with them.

Downhill toward the harbour, something shifts. The birds, quiet for most of the walk, are loud now. It is four o'clock. A family comes down the pavement with the evening sun on them.

Behind a brick building on a corner, kegs stand by a back door. A white van is parked beside them. Then the Old Fitzroy Hotel. Striped umbrellas cover the tables on the pavement, and every table is taken. More people sit and stand inside. It is the first crowd of the walk.

I climb Riley Street back toward Liverpool Street. The lower half of a gable wall is painted over in a flat pale colour. A yellow ring and a scrawl sit on the paint. A man walks past it. At the end of a lane, apartment towers rise above the roofs.