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Faces in the Seasons of a Post-COVID Sydney

Hold on to those unexpected encounters in a city of apathy.

By C CucumberPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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Photo by Kaboompics .com from Pexels

Michael*

“Lovely day, isn’t it?”

I met Michael in the first spring after COVID. Sydney came out of lockdown in June 2020, but its residents did not start to relearn human contact until a couple of months later. I was doing my after-lunch walk in the Royal Botanic Garden, temporarily escaping from a job that made every bone inside my body ache. I stopped to read a text message; that was when Michael greeted me with an ear-to-ear grin. He opened with the most standard one-liner, yet I was still caught off guard — we were in Sydney: People don’t simply pause their day and talk to strangers.

This man was at least in his 70s, and we were in broad daylight. The worst he could do was give me COVID, so I said hi.

Michael was 76, born and raised in Eastern Europe. He boated to Australia from Italy half a century ago, then spent over four decades working at Sydney’s rail network. He fished a silver concession Opal card — part of his employee benefits — out of his wallet as he spoke, and showed it to me like a badge. What a sweet old man, I thought, maybe don’t show your legal name to every random stranger.

The chat went on about nothing but it never had to be about anything. I told him the suburb I lived in and he named the train stations near my home like counting the hens in his backyard. He asked what I did for a living and was glad for me that I still had a job in this economy. Then, like many immigrants that I had met in this country, he told me how much he loved Australia which, in his book, was crowned “the best country in the world.”

I’d often respond with a quiet smile or a meaningless “aw” when people say that, like a dubious housewife fending off a flattering encyclopaedia salesman in the 60s. I love Australia dearly, and part of that is because of how little attention it attracts from the rest of the world and the chaos attached to it. On a general level, it is clean, safe, has the best weather to offer, with plenty of space and tranquillity to contemplate your first-world problems. But once we zoom in on Sydney, especially on the saturated market, the stagnant economy, and the disproportionate house prices, life here feels like driving on a crowded highway that’s only leading to a barn. The people, “Sydneysiders”, are often perceived as self-interested and clicky. Making friends could be a confusing quest even for the extroverts, and an eternal nightmare for their introverted cousins.

As I pondered his statement, Michael had moved on to other topics, from the earlier news on how the Reserve Bank proposed to “end” the recession by bringing the cash rate close to zero, to the impressive scale of Australia’s wool exports. We stood and talked for half an hour, in the middle of a weekday when I had no justification for slowing down. Dozens of garden visitors walked past us; some left an indifferent glance and no more.

We said goodbye when we both started to show first-degree sunburn. Halfway through the conversation, the scattered subjects and mild repetition in Michael’s speech made me wonder whether I should be looking for signs of cognitive impairment. Although his mind still seemed sharp, he was, after all, an elderly man. I followed him back to the city from a distance, looking incredibly suspicious, as I wasn’t confident it was a good idea to leave him on his own. He walked in strides and eventually disappeared into the crowd rushing towards Circular Quay, the train station next to the harbour. His silver concession Opal card would take him from there.

I Googled his name and felt some comfort that no missing person alert popped up, so I returned to my office. The natural sunlight I absorbed during that extended lunch break pulled me through the rest of the day.

I visited the Botanic Garden several times after that. We never met again.

One takeaway coming out of that experience is: Even if you are clearly tailing someone down the busiest streets in central CBD, as long as you do it with enough confidence and ostensible justification, nobody will ask any questions.

Photo by Steven Arenas from Pexels

A French taxi driver

My firm had our first post-COVID corporate event at the Museum of Contemporary Art a week before Christmas. From the rooftop of the MCA, the office buildings across the harbour looked more lively than they were supposed to. It rained a little. Those lingering spring chills reminded me of the sloth of this city’s summer.

As the night grew, the conversations became frustratingly hollow. I recalibrated the curve of my “I’m not antisocial” smile as I tried to participate, wondering how much time I had left for this job.

Around the time the city came out of COVID, I found myself knee-deep inside a tunnel of disconnection and burnout, feeling like a tourist stranded at the transit terminal without a ticket for my next leg. But that’s the story for another day.

It was nice to be out in the fresh air, but the socialising was still a lot of work. Plastic sentences pumped with plastic emotions. Every passing second became a second of my life that I was never getting back. I said goodnight when the heavy drinkers had barely rinsed the dinner off their tongues. The streets were empty. The silence was comforting.

It was chilly like this the year before. 2019. The world was a whole lot different. Last year’s annual dinner venue was near Kings Cross, a place that Sydney natives wouldn’t stop mourning about its glory days. I left when the wine coolers were still half full and hopped on a cab driven by a middle-aged French man.

“This is my last month in Australia.” He told me. “I’m done.”

He went on explaining his plan to return to France in January 2020, followed by a tirade against the “Australian culture” he had stomached during his stay. Full of disappointment. Full of contempt.

Australia is vulgar, he delivered the verdict.

Coming from a French man, that comment almost seemed inevitable. I rolled around laughing in the back seat as he carried on.

The Australia in his description was dry. It was a book that took nothing to finish and offered nothing in return. After years in Sydney, he was finally fed up with all the “graceless people and their laughable attempt on sophistication.” He did not hide his disgust when he mentioned “those young people” who wasted their lives drinking their faces off and getting into fights as if they had absolutely nothing better to spend their time on. His wife went home for a break, and now she never wanted to come back. If you still want the marriage, she said to him, you know where to find me. So he was going after her as this country had given him no reason to stay.

The leather cover of his back seat was meticulously polished, free of mysterious stains. His windows were clear. I rested my head against the glass and smelled the scent of mint filling up that tiny compartment as I watched him shake his head at points of emphasis throughout his statement. To this day, that’s still the cleanest cab I’ve ever taken.

“I’m sorry you had a bad time here.” I said to him before I hopped off.

“Goodnight.” He said.

I have never seen him again. I wouldn’t know whether he has left as he wished or whether anything changed his mind at the last minute. He came to my mind several times in the last 12 months whenever I got caught up in a never-ending conversation about who came from a wealthy family, how so-and-so had married rich so she never had to work again, or whether a thirty-something deserved a five-million beachfront house in Clovelly. A whole year after I got off that French man’s cab, his frustration finally hit home for me.

If he did return to France in early 2020, I could only hope that everyone who was waiting for him is still in his life, and everything that brought him home remains intact.

Photo by slon_dot_pics from Pexels

Jane*

March 2021. Sydney rained for two weeks straight.

Generally, you get two types of rain when autumn arrives — the “pouring” that can wash off all your sins and make you wish you had a helmet on, and the “clinging” that sneaks under your umbrella, wraps around your body and becomes part of your identity. March brought both of them and their baby.

I was waiting for the traffic light to turn green when I saw Jane.* She stood a few feet apart from me, soaking wet, arms wrapped around her torso as if that could keep the rain away. I tilted my umbrella over her head, and that startled her. Then she smiled.

We lived on different corners of the same block, so I walked her home. She told me her name but the words got tangled up in the fabric of her mask. It was “Jane” or “Joan” or something like that. She had an accent that was either American or Canadian. The walk was short and her words were muffled; I didn’t get to pinpoint her on the map.

She worked at the MCA, that place where we had our annual dinner three months ago, and that generated a deceptive sense of familiarity. I visited the MCA quite often, usually on those days when work got on top of me and I needed something that would make even less sense. I told her how much I adored some of the exhibitions they put together, and how I’d never unsee some of the performance videos I stumbled across. I told her about my job, but not the part that I just handed in my resignation earlier that week, and I’d never have to go back again after Easter.

I could’ve walked her to her doorstep but Jane insisted not to trouble me any further, so we parted ways when we got to my street. I tried to remember her eyes and her voice, so I could drop her a knowing grin the next time we met. I moved out of my old place shortly after that, and I haven’t had a chance to go back to the MCA. I hope she still works there, and I hope one day I can get her insight on some artworks that I still believe are mistakes.

Or, she might dissolve into the background, like all the other interesting characters that have found their way into my memory as unfinished portraits.

Sydney is a small town with infinite diverging paths, and there are plenty of people whom I thought I’d definitely bump into and never did. I wish these stories would unfold like fiction, with a reassuring structure and a point. But more likely than not, they come along, grab my attention, leave a mark on my mind, then stop being relevant. Those faces I see in the crowd are like marbles in a jar, holding on to what I remember about a city as I move around the globe. I guess that’s also what I meant to them. I wish that’s what I meant to them.

I wish that one day, as they share the night with their precious ones over a drink or a cosy fireplace, Michael, Jane, or that French driver, would recall the places they stopped by in this city and say:

Oh yeah, Sydney. I lived there for some time. Let me tell you a story.

*Not their real names, obviously.

humanity
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About the Creator

C Cucumber

I write anything that comes to mind.

People watching, movie reviews, and fiction.

Photo credit: Unsplash@nihao911

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