Morning light in Sydney has a quality of powdered gold, spilt celestial talcum. It gets up the nose. The streets seem to have nothing to think about other than parking and shopping, violence a concept from another hemisphere. The calm seems deliberate, as if events had been smoothed over by a warm knife on pink frosting. Fragrance sheets the air. Walking through it is like wading through a tidal river in bursts of warm and cold.
When I go to see my mother later in Neutral Bay, I pass along an avenue of jacarandas on McDougall Street, flowering with a violet jolt against the ultramarine harbour. Lilac spills onto the ground underfoot and arches overhead, turning the light from flat blue to luminous purple. Nearby, my mother lies in bed. When Eve complains to me about pain, about her rapid heartbeat, about tiredness that makes her life a struggle, it makes me feel ill.
