While he’d been waiting at the medical centre he’d worked out that keeping his mouth slightly open helped. He felt like a creep sitting there gaping, but figured it was better than poking himself in the gums every few minutes. Probably. The view out the window onto Parramatta Road might have made him gape anyway. He’d been away less than seven years but everything had changed. Empty shopfronts and graffiti-covered building sites where there used to be bridal shops and bakeries, towers of apartments where there used to be delis and 1940s terraces. A low-rise unit block they’d lived in for a few years when he was at primary school was now a pole dancing studio, the building they moved to after that was gone altogether, a block of dirt and rubble protected by a chain-wire fence and signs warning trespassers there were attack dogs on site.

On Norton Street, the Coles where he and his mates stole Mars Bars and batteries and condoms was still there, but on either side nail salons and massage shops had replaced the Italian cafes and delis. The primary school looked the same as it had when they’d jump the fence at night to lie on the grass, which was softer and cleaner than the grass anywhere else in the suburb. Looked the same but there’d be an alarm system now, for sure, maybe security guards. Boys like they’d been would have to find somewhere else to watch the stars and smoke and talk shit. Were there still boys like that here? It seemed unlikely what with all the Pilates studios and artisan bread shops.

Walking from the bus stop through the back streets of the suburb was like walking back in time, though (except for the top-of-the-range cars parked in front of every second driveway, Stop WestConnex signs on every third lawn, construction racket from every fourth or fifth house). But lilly pilly hedges and redbrick walls still outnumbered security fences, and jacarandas and silky wisteria still dripped onto the footpaths. Still the waft of garlic and roasting tomatoes, the roar of planes overhead. Houses he’d been inside once or twice or dozens of times, yards where he’d smoked his first cigarette, drunk his first bourbon, had his first—first ten or twenty, probably—kisses.

In one street, he passed two houses of now-dead school mates and the turn-off for the street of another. One car crash, one accidental OD and one on purpose. All in this neighbourhood, all before they were sixteen or seventeen. Thanks to the shit show of prison followed by years at a FIFO site that attracted the desperate and reckless he knew other dead young men, too many to say off the top of his head. He’d have to actually run through their names and count, and he wouldn’t be doing that, thanks very much.