city boy

My first train ride to the big city as someone who works there. It feels different: I tote a small laptop bag and an armful of MM stuff. I rock up to a swish business-house at 440 Collins Street and catch a lift to level 5. ESA houses the PAI staff and MM is a PAI program. I am a PAI employee: my first pay slaked my thirsty bank account the previous evening.

I ask the woman at reception for Viv or Sabrina and sign the visitors’ register while she consults her staff list. She can’t find either on the list. I inform her that I am in fact a new member of the MM team. I might as well be telling her I’m a dummy-half for the South Sydney Rabbitohs. She’s a temp.

I go stand by the window looking down Market Street. Viv and Sabrina and two others come down the white spiral staircase from a level above. I join them and we amble down Collins to another plush office tower between Elizabeth and Swanston. We ascend to the thirteenth floor where the our quarterly reference group meeting is to be in the boardroom of the Australian Psychological Society.

The glass wall overlooks the cathedral, Fed Square and Flinders Street. The Arts Centre spire pokes out of the background. It’s a far cry from the dingy offices of St Luke’s. Fifteen assorted educational officers assemble: the Catholics, the independents and the government schools are here. Most of the meeting is boring but I need to know these people to do my job.

Jill, the national MM manager, summons Viv and me to lunch. She’s keen to formulate strategic plans with us and we brandish diaries and wave dates at each other over roasted vegies, focaccia and spanakopita with green salad. It’s a working lunch and it’s on Jill.

At two o’clock I step back into the street, trying to decide which station is closest. A tram glides up to the corner and I leap on. It wheezes its way up the hill to Spring Street and I am escalatored into the bowels of Parliament Station. I hop on a Belgrave train, alight at Nunawading, then continue on a Lilydale.

My pants are too long, my shirt too thick for the humid late March weather. I open the front door and scramble out of everything. Sweat drips off my nakedness as I unlock the back door and usher the JRT inside. I’m not cut out for the CBD.

The lovely Nik of St Luke’s calls me City Boy now. And today I am.  

Rock on.