From the kitchen window, looking back in the direction of the golf course, Michael can see out over the vacant paddock next door. Like all the paddocks on the street it is covered with Scotch thistle and long grass. The peach glow has left the sky. The stars are sparkling like the cut-glass bowls in the lounge room. Michael walks toward the open back door of the house and steps out into the yard. To his right the comet, high in the western part of the sky, is slowly passing over the railway lines, over the cutting that leads into the station, having taken the whole summer to get there from the flour mills.
The dark silhouettes of the schoolyard pines loom before him in the next street. He’s climbed the tallest of those pines and knows the view from the top. He has charted his suburb in the map of his mind and knows its streets and houses and landmarks. He can see it all clearly even now, as if he were still perched at the top of the tallest of those pines and the suburb were spread out beneath him.
From the yard Michael can see through the back door into the kitchen and the lounge room adjoining it. There is music coming from the record player, and as the house fills, the talk and the laughter becomes louder. Inside, he can see the families from the street, the Millers, the Bruchners, the Youngers, Mr Van Rijn, the Barlows, the Bedsers and all their friends that he’s never met and will probably never see again. And if he can’t see the faces of his neighbours, he can hear their familiar voices, their familiar bursts of laughter or their expressions of surprise. Just as when he hears a certain phrase, a saying called out or shrieked above the usual volume of conversation, he will know that Mr or Mrs so-and-so has arrived, because of the way they speak. Like the way Mrs Barlow turns to her husband in mid-conversation, with everybody standing and watching, and says don’t be stupid Desmond. He can hear and see them all. All of them. The whole street.
The vacant paddocks either side of the house are swaying in the darkness, and a light breeze passes through its well-lit windows and open doors. The mills have melted into the night, darkness has descended over the schoolyard cricket pitch where one day Michael will bowl the perfect ball, the factory is silent, the factory owner’s Bentley is parked at the end of his long gravel driveway, Skinner’s cows have bedded down. In the distance is the faint rattle of the Saturday night city train.