sleep, leaving my muscles and ligaments surrounding the small circular scar tight and rigid. I went into the bathroom and ran the water a while before stepping into the shower to begin my daily routine of exercises. After several minutes and a series of stretches, movement became easier and I was able to wash myself properly.
I shaved and dressed, then downed some toast and took a glass of orange juice to the lounge window. Even before I opened the door to the balcony, I could feel the sun burning through the glass. When I did open it, the heat hit me like a furnace. It radiated off the bitumen, off the concrete walls of the nearby warehouse, and off the metallic snakes of cars traversing three storeys below. Some of the cars were caked in dirt and road grime, courtesy of water restrictions. Today would be another total fire ban, the fifth consecutive day in a row, and the city was feeling it. Immediately my eyes began to water and a familiar itch worked its way through my sinuses. I sneezed loudly, took a tissue from my pocket and blew my nose. How long before a cool change would come?
‘Got a cold, mate?’ The voice came from the balcony on the left. It was my neighbour, Edgar Burns, leaning on his walking stick, emptying water from a bucket into a pot plant. No doubt the water came from his shower, a water-saving practice Edgar employed religiously.
‘Not a cold, Ed. Just hayfever. Driving me nuts this season. Too hot and dry.’
‘The weather, my arse,’ Edgar said, slopping water over the edge. ‘Bloody pollution, that’s what it is. Look at all these cars, for God’s sake, smoking up the place. When I was a boy we all took the tram wherever we wanted to go. These days everyone needs a car just to go to the bloody milk bar. Lazy as a lizard drinkin’.’
I’d known Edgar for as long as I’d lived in the apartment block and somehow he always managed to give me an opinion.
‘Not too many milk bars around here, Ed. Rare as rockin’ horse shit.’
‘You know what I mean. Look at that over there.’
He pointed towards the city skyscrapers, enveloped in a thick brown layer of smoke that had blown down from bushfires in central Victoria.
‘You could be right. Pollution.’
‘Too right. Won’t catch me out here on days like this. It’s about as dry as a nun’s nasty. No wonder you’re sick.’
As Edgar waved goodbye and hobbled back into his apartment, I decided to make more of an effort with him this year, maybe take him to the footy when the season began. We’d watched the Poms go down 7 for 311, chasing a total of 407, at the previous year’s Boxing Day test. Vaughan had managed 144 from just 12 overs but the batting order fell over after he was dismissed and in the end they were no match for the Aussies. Edgar had damn near copped a heart attack when Ponting put three in the crowd off one over. We’d had a right old time.
With the heat getting more oppressive, I got down on my haunches and checked the soil in the rose pot next to the door and decided it was damp enough to survive another day. There were a few thrips I was able to kill with my fingers, but I knew from experience this wouldn’t get them all. My mother had given me the Silver Jubilee as a cutting and it had taken well. Even in full sun it seemed to be the only plant around surviving the heat. I repositioned it and tried not to think about the day Mum had given it to me. Instead I stood up and looked out over the edge of my balcony, my eyes taking in the palm trees of Albert Park, the glittering lake and the territory all the way towards St Kilda. Edgar often described it as a million-dollar view. On a figurative level at least, he was dead right. It was what had sold me on the place all those years ago. Today, though, it also reminded me about the dead kid, Dallas Boyd. By now his family would have been notified, word would have hit the street, and the obligatory bunches of flowers would have turned up and begun to wilt and die in the loading bay. Just like the kid.
After almost twenty years in the job – five in the former Drug