On this particular day, I had parked in the public car park opposite Bondi Beach, about 500 metres from my front door.

I thought, ‘Well done, Paul, you’re a genius – you’re going to have to run across to that car park and, in the process, you’re going to get soaked.’

Lucky for me, there was an old tan bomber jacket hanging on a hook by the building’s front door. It had been there for something like a year. Nobody seemed to own it, and I figured it wouldn’t matter if I borrowed it for a while. It smelled of cigarettes and there was mould growing around the collar but that was okay; I wasn’t planning to wear it. I was planning to throw it over my head while I made a dash for the car.

Once behind the wheel, I turned on the radio. I was hoping to find news of the siege. That wasn’t difficult. All the main stations were carrying it. Through the hammer of the rain on the car roof, I heard one after another say, ‘Shoppers are being warned that there’s a major police operation underway in Bondi. We’re hearing that an armed gunman has stormed through Surf City, and police have had to shut the whole place down.’

I had no way of knowing it at the time but that wasn’t accurate. What actually happened was this:

Shortly after 9.30 am on the day in question – 18 April 2011 – a young man with a pockmarked face had walked into Surf City via the main entrance on Bondi Road.

He was wearing faded denim jeans – so faded they were almost white – and he was wearing them in that way that young people tend to wear their jeans these days, with the waistband hanging low enough to show off the elastic band on his underpants, and the back pockets halfway down the backs of his legs.

Some people have said that he was barefoot but he wasn’t barefoot. He actually had canvas shoes on his feet, brand name Vans. They might once have been white but were now grey. His jeans had frayed along the hems, so he was trailing dirty cotton tendrils across the marble floor. He was also wearing a grey hoodie. He was about to cause havoc.

I’ve heard people say, ‘Why didn’t management stop him?’ But stop him for what? The young man – let’s call him Ali Khan since that’s the name he was given, even if it’s not the name by which everyone knows him – didn’t look any different to anyone else who happened to be walking into Surf City at that hour. It had been raining all morning, so he was hardly alone in having the hood of his hoodie up. There was no hint of what lay ahead – not for him, not for anyone. That’s not the way life works. You don’t get warning of the things that will change you. They come out of left field.