Since I've been gone

Enormous redevelopments swallowed the Inner West. Not the good kind. Dog boxes strung out along King street leaving little room to the imagination or the single fronted workers cottages that used to be there, well built in the 1950s with sound architecture, no asbestos. Definitely no room in the living area for the kitchen table.

The light on King street has been blocked. It’s dark. It’s not happy and it’s not sad, it is nothing. Nothing can get in like germs or cockroaches or bad news but nothing can get out either like the painting of a fruit or a painfully loud song while speeding, homebound along the Western freeway. No creativity left in this town's brain.

The city has been shut down the way his mother would shut their house down on a hot day. Not a ray of sun would peak through those heavy blinds and the air conditioning made my skin feel as uncomfortable as the conversation.

The hotter the better, I secretly thought although the rapidly changing seasons sat next to the currently dormant demon in my frontal lobe, a little further to the forefront and a little more active given my current obsession with the news report.

The hotter the better because there’s something soothing about the 1 pm sun on a cloudless day. The structure of the smooth rock moulding into the architecture of a bony back while the sun rises higher and scorches the skin. The cold river water brushing over, just as it becomes unbearable. And then it starts again. Occasionally, the combination of the hot sun and the cold river can empty a busy mind, if just for a brief minute.

Anyway, back to the city - early 2016. Those hot days in that old weatherboard house in Newtown were some of the best. Yes, in the literal sense, the creaky stairs and the lack of insulation brought in more cockroaches. You could see them scurry away if you turned the bathroom light on downstairs in the middle of the night. Once when I was sleeping, a roach scurried over my body and landed on the wall. I awoke, screaming mother Mary, except there was no blood coming from my eyes, just dust and outrage. Unable to fall back asleep until it faced cold-blooded murder, I began scouring the room, but I knew that the cockroaches of Sydney's Inner West would survive the apocalypse. If the city were to unexpectedly set on fire, if all the buildings in the CBD and the tall towers surrounding Hyde Park and the ancient trees that occupy Clovelly Road in Randwick were to suddenly catch fire and burn into the ground because of some freak accident, leaving nothing but ash and a bad taste behind, the roaches would survive and rebuild their own colony, feasting on the sinking burnt flesh of human.

The cycle from Newtown to Coogee Bay was about 40 minutes if you were lucky with the traffic lights. Even after two years, I hadn’t mastered the quickest route and Tim Clermont had to lead. I was close behind but I was no competition. I lagged, especially when tackling that big hill on Havelock Avenue as you came into Coogee from the West. People say that my sense of direction is shocking. I can get lost on the simplest of routes because I am easily distracted with my surroundings and usually wound up in a conversation. I always wonder why it is that I can remember every lyric to Wyclef's rap version of ‘Perfect Gentleman’ from 9 years ago but I can't remember a relatively straightforward bike route, or sometimes, where I am when I wake up in the morning.