The lowering sun turns the walls to gold. Linton stares at the painting he bought at auction two years ago – an original done back in ’83 by a local artist now faded into obscurity. Or dead. The shadow of the venetian blinds rends the wall into shadow-slits. Linton’s sprawled out on his couch with his hands behind his head smoking. Sleepily, he considers the painting then throws his legs over the side and walks over to where it’s hanging. He stands close to it and takes a long draw. His eyes burn holes in it. He takes a step back and reaches both hands out to straighten it. He sighs with satisfaction, then turns to sit back on the couch, silently regarding the space of wall where the painting hangs in the dripping sunset. Linton lifts the cigarette to his lips and wishes the earth would run as straight as that painting. It’s a Friday. Outside, the traffic gently rushes, and Linton musters his weekend plans into some sort of form. It’s not like you’ll be doing this forever. This isn’t forever. But the sun thinks it is, turning his walls yellow. Linton lets out a long afternoon sigh. He feels restless and blank, and his long fingers drum a pattern on the couch while his mind tries to clamber out of this inevitable pit called boredom. Linton remembers that tomorrow he’s got an eye appointment – he fumbles with the details. Could buy my groceries afterwards, make it to that auction in the afternoon up at Glendowrie, got to pay that bill. He continues lying there until the sun gets rusty, and the magpies start their gurgling. He gets up and leaves the house. He doesn’t usually like walking at this time when everyone’s finished work for the day and are exercising their dogs, but he does like what the sun’s doing to the gum trunks and the general aura of outside colour. He passes a man on the phone to his wife.

‘Just get one bottle out, put it in the fridge so it’s cold when they get here… I’ll be home soon…’

The man turns a corner and Linton loses anything else that’s said to distance and concrete.  

He passes a kindly face, not unbeautiful, smoking on the sidewalk; a nose-to-the-ground dog, grey and tattered, but friendly like the rain; parrots flicking colour and hawking above him; the lazy orange sun. And a long weekend – a long life really – ahead of him. He walks with his hands deep in his pockets. He drips along like the tired rain in late winter. He walks for two hours around his neighbourhood because he likes watching people live at this time of day – the people inside their houses watching TV, kids at the table sitting around homework; the dad and his son shooting hoops; the couple arguing behind walls so that the tenseness of it only just reaches the street; the grassy block with glass houses growing weed and who knows what else; the undying afternoon, and an Airbus coming in to land over the heads of these people. Linton turns for home and starts thinking about dinner.

In the morning, he wakes to a sore throat tattering his breath. It’s early dawn but even now, Linton can hear the riffraff begin their daily tramp to work, easing out onto roads and into bus seats, grinding down the laneways. Linton tries to get up, but a throb behind his temples has him sitting on the edge of his bed, waiting, in the blue dawn. He reaches over to check his watch – 5:37am. He groans and curses his fate and rubs his eyes. He gulps half a glass of water and bends himself back under the covers to wait for day.

At 10:07 Linton gets up and tries his best not to cough, to ignore the throat tickle, and to be a man about it all. He really wanted to get to that auction – collectables, antiques, rare pieces from France, work by Debaucy – all that was going to be there, and he wanted to be there too: a poor, but proud and cultured figure, grasping at whatever dignity there was available to him, wearing his coat of grey and fondling the packet of pall mall reds in his pocket. But not today. Today will be walls, books, art, then a little food, a smoke, a peppermint tea every couple of hours. What a waste of a weekend. Linton sits in his pyjamas, waiting, on the cusp of a freshly baked Saturday.     

When he gets back to the shop a week later, he finds the work tedious and liberating, unusually fascinating and sluggish. Linton puts in a good eight hours, then leaves the shop to his boss, who’s working late.

‘Bye, boss.’

‘Yeah cheers, Linton. See ya tomorrow.’

Standing in line at his bus stop, Linton sees the lady with the watch (as he’s begun to call her) standing on the other side of the street, waiting for her bus. She doesn’t see him, but he looks at her hard and long. He can see the thin gold watch on her wrist – it slips out of her sleeve as she reaches up to fling her hair back. She leans out to look down the street for her bus and is not altogether unaware of her towering elegance. Because women like that always know they’re beautiful. Real women, Linton thinks to himself, are the stuff of legends – existing no longer in this world, except…

When the bus pulls up, bulging its big ugly yellow sides and huffing and screaming, Linton catches the glance across the street as it notices him and recognition bounces into the eyes, and then something like embarrassment. Linton sits down where he can see her. Linton’s nothing but apathetic and she’s all warmth and heat and cold. She glances his way once more and tosses her head to look down the street – a stupid, Hollywoodish defilement that makes Linton shudder. He wants, suddenly and urgently, to wink at her but she’s not looking at him and his bus pulls away. He watches the city bustle and thinks about his empty house on the corner of Spelton Avenue and Hackney Street, and Linton gets the sense that nothing will ever change. Because it’s always like this. The beautiful, the ordinary.