That cold day in the mall.

Coffee tastes better outside, I thought. Could be the fresh air. I was sitting in the pale sun of late winter with a coffee, a book, and that eternal latter-day yoke, a phone. The wind was skittering the chairs and tables, like dried leaves, and lifting the fine-beaded foam on my coffee, the colour of a palomino’s mane.

The mall was a rectangle of concrete broken up by large whorls of broken bluestone, like cross-sections of giant fossil snails, or had that been somewhere else? Cafes, a smoke shop, and a post office looked out from under their eaves on six or eight tall thin eucalypts that gave too little shade in summer and too much against the scant sun in winter. 

In the past the strip was greengrocers and barber shops and continental butchers and an Italian cobbler and salami shops crowded with young mothers; and suddenly appearing among the ant-like busyness to talk and enquire solicitously after their husbands was the priest who strode black-cassocked five hundred yards from the double-storey presbytery set back behind the red-brick church where the road to Sydney does a sudden double twitch. 

Now the old Italians were here on the ghost-ground of their memories, before they die, with their cigarettes and their short blacks and their Il Globos; together with the old Greeks - who linger over their espressos longer than anyone - and the old Lebanese, all hanging on through winter as if it didn’t matter. The hand-made shoe shop run by the grey-coated cobbler’s son disappeared a few years ago, but the old men wear Kmart shoes now, anyway. 

Farther along, outside the Nepalese and middle eastern cafes, the new breed of students, just like the old breed of students, conferred over Cairo kebabs and conspiracies. Sometimes the showers lashed them under cover. The shop eaves were just generous enough, while some of the tables sheltered under market umbrellas, good for overhead rain, but here the rain slants in the wind.

In spring, families appear, like flowers.