Sometimes you know, you just know, that the ice cream in the display case is gonna be so good, so you order it up, a scoop of strawberry in a cone, please, and then you walk along the Woolloomooloo pier with it, and all is smiles and bliss.

Southward, past the airport and its planes overhead, past the deserted beach at Brighton-le-Sands, the blooms of the Illawarra flame trees sparks of red along the road, we drove under greying skies to Fitzroy Falls, where the rainforest valley stretched out below and in front of us all lush and green. In the park, the platypuses were asleep or hiding. (Fact: They are shy.) (Fact: Wombats poo square poos.) (Fact: The Morton National Park is full of facts.) Around us, invisible lyrebirds clicked like Japanese wood spirits.

When you go for a drive on a cool winter day, a good thing to do is to stop for a minted lamb burger with fruit chutney and a package of thick, hot chips, so that is what we did, while the bell birds sang in the trees.

On the way home, low and heavy with water, the clouds seemed to weigh down on my eyelids. I fell asleep to the raindrops on fogged-up windows and the rolling wheels. When I woke, home was just minutes away.

Thanks to CC’s collection of Blockbuster discount coupons and, so helpfully, the Blockbuster just up the street from us, this holiday has been DVD rentals galore. Sometimes I think, Jeez, seeing as how I’m in Sydney and all, I really should be out and about being in Sydney. But the truth is, it’s some kind of luxury to be able to just sit around and watch television and not feel guilty about homework left undone.

There was the night we lay on the sofabed, faces just inches away from the glowing screen, to watch the unexpected doublebill of “Bring it on Again” and “21 Grams.” There was the brilliant “Les enfants du Paradis,” which took two nights to finish. I would have watched it all in one go, but some of us won’t stand for a three-hour black-and-white 1940s French film with swooning women, swarthy caricatures, and a hero who is a mime. There was “The Pirates of the Caribbean,” where the girl grows up to be Keira Knightley and we moaned, “Luckyyyy!” There was “Japanese Story,” and the tension and the gorgeousness and the grief. There was David Bowie in “The Man who Fell to Earth,” which was super weird and good, and confirms again why David Bowie is my husband. There was “Crackerjack” and “Raising Arizona” and half of “Barry McKenzie.” There was “Délicatessen” and “Hebrew Hammer” and the grand stinker “Ned Kelly.” Even with Orlando Bloom reaching out to my peoples and speaking Chinese, “Ned Kelly” was a stinker. There was “Amélie,” which is always good every time I see it, and there was “Annie,” twice, and with singalongs.

I don’t want to go to bed, because when I wake up it will be tomorrow, and in ten tomorrows I leave.

They call this winter, these funny Sydneysiders. Saturday afternoon my sister and I took a walk up Bourke, looking in on the French café on the corner with its baskets of croissants and its little lemon and chocolate tarts in the window, and passing by the Italian place with their menu of homemade pastas satisfyingly scrawled on the chalkboard up front, and breezing past Café Zoe, where just days before we’d had a taste sensation breakfast of ricotta pancakes and sweet berries, and an asparagus-lemon-parmesan omelette, and thick slices of salty, meaty bacon—

Wait. Tangent. The asparagus story is, once Jeff had me over to dinner, and he’d cooked a cheddar-and-tomato pie and a lemon cake, and he’d gotten both recipes from Real Simple magazine, and when I marveled at how tasty everything was, he said: “Thanks, it was real simple.” No, but the asparagus story is, besides the cheddar-and-tomato pie and the lemon cake, he’d also steamed some asparagus for vegetable purposes, and I said, “Oh, but I love asparagus,” and finished the sentence in my head, because the sentence finishes with “and also I love how it makes your pee smell,” and I thought maybe that is the sort of end of sentence one keeps in one’s head when one is in company other than, for example, one’s sister. But then Jeff said, “Me too, and I love how it makes your pee smell.” So of course I said, “Me too,” and he said, “It’s like, it smells like a healthy thing happened in your body,” and I said, “Yes, that is true,” because it was, because that is exactly what it smells like.

But that is a different meal and a different day. Saturday afternoon, in this so-called winter, under clear blue skies and smiling sun warm on my arms and my neck, my sister and I walked up Bourke, tasty treats all along the way, and scoffed at all of them, because we had our eye on the prize, where the prize was fish and chips at Bondi Beach.

(We eventually cracked, but it was the tiniest of cracks, because when we passed the Greek pastry shop, we had to go in, and then it was only for one jam-sandwich biscuit for her, and one coconut macaroon for me, and my coconut macaroon, half-dipped in chocolate, was only the tiniest of sixty-seven-cent, mouth-sized treats.)

On Oxford, we missed the bus, then waited for the next one, then rode to Bondi, the spirit of the Beach Boys growing stronger the closer we got to the coast. Then, truly, at Bondi, there was fish to be had, and chips, and potato cakes, all of it fried up on order, then doused in vinegar and rained on with salt, then wrapped up in large sheets of paper held closed with a rubberband crisply snapped. The fat white package was warm with promises.



We sat in the shade and watched the sea in Bondi Bay and wolfed. The seagulls collected and stood in front of us, facing away but watching us the whole time out of the corners of their beady little eyes. Where kookaburras are lovely and furry and squat, and sing while perched on a power line, seagulls look mean, like they would club you in a dark alley if they thought you had a cold, greasy chip hidden in your pocket.

While we ate:

1. A surfer watched the surf, his board under his arm.
2. A man adjusted his Speedo in the carpark. It was the kind of small where he was trying to make it cover his bum.
3. A girl with pants rolled up and stripey socks walked down to the sand.
4. A black dog came racing, from some distance and with some speed, to a passing mutt, to sniff its bottom.
5. Little kids chased littler seagulls, runningrunningrunning.

When we could eat no more, CC caused a feeding frenzy hurling the leftover chips to the gulls. She was possessed, her eyes wide, her throwing arm unstoppable. I kneeled on the bench in front of her to take an action shot with my camera and she flung a chip over my head. The gulls shrieked behind me. Later, after she’d calmed down, she said: “I was drunk with power.”

We walked south along the coast to Tamarama Beach. Sometimes we sang “Best of My Love.” Sometimes we sang “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody.” Sometimes we sang “Tom, Dick or Harry.” We didn’t know all the words, so sometimes there was humming, and sometimes the lyrics were “something-something-something.” Sometimes we talked. Sometimes we didn’t say anything. Sometimes we laughed. Mostly we laughed. Sometimes we laughed so hard we had to hold on to a railing. When there was no railing, sometimes we might lean against a rock.

A red boat bobbed on the water. Surfers in their black wetsuits bobbed on the water. The horizon was the horizon. The sun was setting.

Walking further south, we reached Bronte Beach. I took off my shoes to walk on the soft sand. We taunted the waves, and I let the cool water wash up on my feet. I stepped on smooth, mossy stone in a clear rock pool. The moon was a smile in the pale blue.

At the bus stop, the wrong bus was idling. The driver said the right bus home wouldn’t be long. And then, it wasn’t.

In the rainy chill on Castlereagh Street, I boarded the 303 bus headed for Sans Souci.

I was reading this (thank you, I., for the link) (and I swear I am gonna e-mail you back really, really soon) and it reminded me of that one insanely hot day last summer in Singapore, when Matthew and CC and I went to the local public swimming hole for a chill-out, and, because it was insanely hot and because it was the weekend, there were parents and kids everywhere, and I was swimming from one end of the pool to the other when I noticed a goodly sized brown lump on the white-tiled bottom, so I freestyled back to Matthew and CC and said, “I think there’s some poo over there,” I swear this is a true story, and Matthew swam over in that direction, then came back and said: “I fanned around it to see, and waves of brown emanated from it and came toward me, so, yes, I think it’s poo,” so of course we screamed and screamed and then very quickly swam to the farthest away end of the pool, where we hung out, shuddering, and laughing nervously. Still, it never occurred to us that we should get out.

Oh, yuck, and now I remember that just, like, three hours ago CC was preparing dinner and she peeled off the outer leaf of the head of cabbage to reveal two brown slugs hanging out all quiet-like. Really, I’m not generally queasy about bugs—although I am not about to crush a cockroach with my shoe the way my mum will—but when one of the slugs began to move about, and then when his little antenna things sluggily retracted into his little sluggy head, I started clawing at the wall. Then CC made me carry the slugs, on the leaf, to the patch of earth in the flowerbox outside. I cleared a straight path to the door and then—my arm stretched out as far as possible—hopped across the living room, emitting yeeps: “Yeep. Yeep. Yeep.”

Later, from across the room, I looked out the glass panels into the rain and the dark, and thought I saw the slug at the door, now grown human-sized, wearing sunglasses and boardshorts. He wanted in.

Slowly but steadily, it has been raining since I woke up in the dim just before seven. I wrapped my hands round a mug of hot coffee. I had a warm chocolate-and-cinnamon babka with strawberries and chocolate sauce. Pink pyjamas. Salsa. The rain drip-droppily on the skylight.

Really, we were just going to go to lunch at Dank Street Depot, and really, we did, and dang that bacon mash and pear-and-rocket salad were tasty, but then because we are also just that sort of magic twinkies, the day became a walk down Bourke Street, and lattes and a black-bottomed cupcake, and then, on Oxford, new shoes, and champagne truffles, and fig and pear jams, and pants that flatter the bottom. Later, in line to pay at Coles, I was (a) sad to read about Reese and Ryan’s marriage being over and (b) happy to read about Kirsten and Jake back together. It started to drizzle as we got home, but that was okay because then we were home, and there were leftovers, and Hebrew Hammer on DVD, and it was warm, and soon the house smelled of fresh, hot rice.

We drove west, past the furniture superstores and the car dealerships, past Parramatta and Katoomba and Leura, to where there were mountains and sky and big space all around, the land dotted with horses and cows and lovely sheep. Bathurst, gorgeous with its old mining-town buildings. Orange, where there was a chicken kebab with tabouleh and sweet chilli sauce for lunch. Mount Canobolas, rain and snow and hail all at once, and black tree silhouettes blurry through the air white with mist. Sofala, all its houses little and wooden, some leaning, one with a sheep keeping guard on the porch. Just past sunset we checked into Room 19 at the Mudgee Motor Inn. Outside our window, a brown horse munched at a grassy dinner.



Sunday morning brought the sun, and a cinnamon doughnut covered with pink icing and sprinkles. We drove through the vineyards, rows and rows of bare, gnarled branches, and the local radio deejay played “Venus.” At the Windamere Dam, a hot tandoori lamb pie and a raspberry cream tart. At the Jenolan Caves, gum trees with stripped bark and the Blue Lake of turquoise sparkle mystery blue.

On the way home, dude in a neighbor car picked his nose through darkened windows not dark enough, then saw me see him.

“Hey, Nellie, umm, hey, Nellie, hey,” she peeped the other morning, and I padded upstairs, and it was the Camels on the radio singing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” so of course there was dancing in our pyjamas.

Yesterday at the Hiscoes gym on Crown, I was trying to figure out when I’d last been in. “Um, I think it was Monday,” I told the desk lady. “Yeah, no, Tues—no, Wednesd—wait, no, oh yeah, yeah, it was Wednesday, for sure, Wednesday.” Which is pretty much how vacation is going these days, which is nice, because the days are blending together in the best possible way, kind of like a chocolate-banana smoothie, or some cauliflower soup. Tasty, and good for you.

Where Singapore was a social whirl of neverending social whirliness, Sydney is hang-out do-nuthin’ sit-around chill-out, laundry on the line, hot tea and honey gingerbread biscuits. Holiday in Sydney is—just off the plane—a first homemade breakfast of scrambled eggs and hot tomatoes on Turkish toast while looking at photographs and unpacking the food box from Mowmy. It is Spiderman 2 on cheap movie day, with a berry freeze and a box of hot, crispy potato wedges, and screaming when James Franco looks over the balcony and a Doc Ock arm comes grabbily up. It is also an excursion to Coogee Bay, where there is the beach, and where sky and sea are blue, blue, blue. It was warm enough that we could walk barefoot on the sand and put our feet in the sparkling water. Just for a moment, it is winter after all. Later, there were gelati while sitting in a sunny spot. On the bus home, the sun and curvy streets lulled into a happy sleepiness.

Holiday in Sydney is also a DVD doublebill over Turkish pizzas on a Thursday night, where the doublebill is Bring It On Again and 21 Grams, and the pizzas are sausage-garlic-egg-spices and pumpkin-onion-tomato-cheese. 21 Grams is amazing, each scene like a photograph, like a piece of the heart.

Holiday in Sydney is, one afternoon, a snacky lunch of a char siew bao—steamed perfectly so that when nimble fingers pry the bun open and the wizard steam curls up from the inside, we yell “Luckkyyyy!!!”—a curry puff, some leftover garlicy hummus, a hunk of blue, and a blushing Corella pear. And then a trip to the city, where we discover Esprit pants on special.

And holiday in Sydney, satisfyingly, belly-fullingly, is a deep, wide bowl of scallop–fish cake–wonton–saté egg-noodle soup from Happy Chef in Chinatown, and then walking home with a scoop of sticky rice ice cream and a scoop of black sesame ice cream on a cone.

Somehow holiday in Sydney is also early nights—because doing not so much tires out a girl?—and long sleeps on CC’s red corduroy pull-out sofa, where boy friends and dead aunts live in loopy dreams.