As the colourless crowd
shuffles towards the barriers and their blithering card-readers I reflect that
I promised myself I would never do this: commute to the city, lab-rat my way
through the maze, park my arse on cold steel benches and wait, wait, wait.
Few newspapers unfurl in the
train; tablets rule the day. Fingers flick the digital pages of news items.
Phones are for games and movies and loud private conversations. Books are as
common on e-readers as on paper and every ear has a white bud in it.
My inbound train ride is
relaxed. Croydon is the third station on the line; seats are available; I’m
awake, breakfasted, reading, books—hard copy, regular page-turning. Seats are
rare outbound in the late afternoon. People congregate around the doors; I push
through into the aisle, no reading here. If I score a seat, I nod off quickly.
The 86 tram is different. The
clientele is down-market, as likely to be rendezvousing for a dope deal as
heading off to work. Caucasians, sub-continentals and Asians ride the train;
Africans, down-and-outs and the occasional bunch of Aborigines ride the tram
along Gertrude Street through Fitzroy into Collingwood.
From the corner of Smith and
Gertrude Streets I walk on down Gertrude toward Wellington past an engineering
workshop. Living places that don’t look like residences hide between the old
factories and warehouse; some are old factories and warehouses. Designer
clothing labels lurk between the workshops, the lanes and the boutique art
galleries.
It’s a million miles from the
two-block journey to work in Bendigo, a seven-minute stroll up Napier Street
and Pall Mall, a 90-second ride on the Red Rocket. If I ride to work now it
takes 90 minutes.
Today is the year’s shortest
day: I leave home and arrive home in darkness, rain falling. It continues into
the night.
Rock on.
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