The scanner’s clogged with shit. A kid’s told his dad he saw a girl being pushed into a car at Cabramatta Station. A guy’s walked into the Albury Hotel with blood on his hands saying he’s just stabbed his boyfriend. A bomb scare at a university, on the day of exams. A Domestic. A Domestic. The airwaves crackle and die. My pen lies still. The scanner coughs. Deceased. The pen is snatched. My body leans. Man washed up near Balmoral. Elderly, naked but for underpants around his neck. Story.

Subs don’t even use it. Too many bodies lately.

‘Just a derro.’

I put my computer to sleep. My body feels thick with tiredness. The train’s late. When I get on it, there’s a white-bread sandwich squashed into the corner of the seat. I walk from the station up a back alley to my Kings Cross flat. Outside my building I sidestep a delirium of pigeons as they peck at the orange vomit in the gutter. Last week a woman in a short skirt walked up the alley ahead of me with blood in dried ribbons down the inside of her legs. It looked like river lines on a map.

I step into the quiet of my foyer, check the empty mailbox, ride the lift to the fifth floor and open the door and stride through the apartment and fling wide the protesting windows to let in the sky. And stop. My arms are folded on the sill and I lean my face outside and stare at the busy blue before me, the high buildings pushing up into it and the steady march of the aeroplanes traversing it. High above the blue is a clot of cloud and I stretch my face to it and think about those who experience versus those who observe and wonder how Antarctica could change me.

A drink’d be nice. I’ve started to drink a lot lately. By myself. In my room. I feel like I’m entering a cliche. I make myself a gin and tonic. It doesn’t hit the spot. I think about my flatmate. Our living arrangement has soured. His smell has soaked into the walls of my apartment like the cold does in winter. He’s accidentally gassed me twice with the oven and he leaves the toilet seat up and he’s in the army reserve and he says negative instead of no and out instead of goodbye. I used to think he was cute until he started sleeping with a schoolmate I invited over for coffee. I haven’t quite made up my mind to kick him out. Who else would I find? It takes a certain type to want to live in this area.

My apartment building’s called The Hopes. What joker thought that one up? I pour myself another drink.