Sardines and sprats – that’s what they liked. The smell was irresistible. They’d approach and retreat. Eventually, one would pad in, too hungry for sense. Even then, once they were lured, it didn’t snap shut. They had to walk right through and put their full weight on the plate.

Arthur’s mother spent most of her days waiting near the dark bathtub. The basement flat was always in shadows, even with its small windows at the ceiling that met the footpath outside. All evening she listened to the traffic and watched feet streaking past the windows, and with every car horn she thought of Arthur.

Maddy was in the third trimester of her first pregnancy when she had a strange dream: a vast desert, umber and red, with patches of scrubby vegetation. It was a place she had never been and yet which her dreaming self instantly recognised. Her chest felt open and wide, as if her ribcage contained this dusty expanse.

Walking around Cabramatta today, you could be forgiven for not believing its history.

The day before Eleanor died she had spent the afternoon drinking cocktails with her friends.

At night-time, the river sounds like a dozen lanes of blackest highway bitumen.

The academic formerly known as Cedric Pinkwattle sat with one leg crossed over the other, a position of repose typically favoured by women, libertines and intellectuals that he found pleasantly conducive to thought – in spite of the pressure his scissored thighs placed upon his testicles, creating a sensation that, if he paused to think about it, he would have to define as painful ...

In Nepal my friend Cliff is trying to keep the wind away. A tiny disease has taken his face. Nothing that won’t repair, he assures me, that a month on the farm won’t fix. But it hurts to be alive. This makes me want to scribe something long-winded and a little brutal to the diplomatic corps.

A week after he killed himself, Dane Johnson came to visit Toby at the service station.

The sun was high, relentless in the clear sky as he slammed the door behind him and turned out of his gate. As he stepped from the shade of the house onto the footpath he was stunned motionless for a moment – Christ almighty! – by the white brilliance of the heat. He stood shielding his eyes with his hand – he would have to go back for a hat – when Nerida from up the road called out to him. He hesitated, looking down towards the Centro. He wished he could pretend he hadn’t seen her, but he was caught.

1st. Your shoes don’t fit. They’re either too big, or too small; either way, even if you wore them once, you will wear them no more. What kind of protagonist outgrows their own feet? 2nd. You’re stuck in a rut. Every day, through a camera lens, appears the same routine: you get up, shower, eat two eggs, skim a whole paper. Drive to a generic government high-rise building, park, sign-in, disappear. Here’s the rub: you don’t remember how you got this job or what it is you do. You do remember you despise eggs.

Kalgoorlie 1916 Not many eleven-year-olds are enamoured with death. Mary Agapitos is. She likes to hang out in the Kalgoorlie graveyard, exulting in the rust-coloured earth that still reigns around the tombs, the bauxite rocks lying about like oversized gravel and the tufts of colourless grass protruding beneath the occasional eucalypt. In particular, she enjoys the Orthodox section where she reads and pats headstones of people she once knew. Old Greek surnames that comfort her like her mother’s embrace.

I’m driving from Bairnsdale to Melbourne, off to the AC/DC concert and singing along to one of their CDs: You think it’s easy doin’ one-night stands, try playin’ in a rock and roll band! Bon lets rip with his bagpipe solo, I turn it up until my ears sting and, just for fun, I toot the Monaro’s horn. Magpies fly off a fence and I give them another toot for their journey.

Drunk, you say? I’m sober enough to iron your fucking shirts, shithead. What? What’s that you say? You want to take me to the recycling bin to count the empties? Yeah? Well how about I take you to the fucking ironing basket to count your shirts? I notice you can add up the empty wine bottles but not the empty detergent bottles, dickhead.

They call me Aunty and I pretend to these young things that I mind. ‘I’m not your Aunty,’ I say crossly. Cheeky mites. But those words, that name, they are medicine to these tired bones. ‘Outside with you, you little buggers. Don’t get under my feet.’

What’s the story? No, really. Here we are, eating pizza, drinking Heineken, watching The Matrix. Adam with that look on his face. That look is the reason I don’t bother to talk much any more.