The house was worth a fair bit now, but I could never bring myself to move. Inertia? Nostalgia? I wasn’t sure. As I moved around I kept thinking about Cyn and the short time we’d spent here. Were there any traces left of that time? I laughed when I realised that there was at least one – a missing staircase baluster which I’d grabbed on the way down after Cyn had pushed me. Hard. After a while I gave up and went to bed. The last I’d heard Cyn was living with her advertising executive husband in a Wahroonga mansion and I bet there wasn’t a broken baluster in the place.

In the morning I took a good look at myself in the bathroom. I still had all my hair and it was more dark than grey. The cheeks were seamed and the multiple broken nose wasn’t beautiful, but the money I’d spent on my teeth had been worthwhile. Plenty of crows’ feet, but no jowls yet. A bit soft in the middle but not too bad. I knew it was ridiculous, but I shampooed my hair, shaved closely and put on a clean shirt, newly dry-cleaned pants and brushed lint from my well-worn blazer. No tie.

In these pre-Olympic days, when they’re ripping up the city and turning it into a series of holes in the ground and cranes in the air, it makes no sense to take a car into the CBD. The traffic crawls and is diverted into places where you don’t want to go. Parking costs a packet and you never know when you’re going to be a victim of road rage, or a perpetrator. It was Monday, supposedly a light traffic day, but I wasn’t tempted. Some day a politician is going to have to find the guts to ban private cars in the city or institute an odds and evens system. I wasn’t holding my breath. There’s talk of reinstating a ferry from Glebe to Circular Quay and I’m looking forward to it. I caught a bus.

As I sat on the bus I looked at my dollar-twenty ticket. Geoff Towers, my accountant, would insist on me submitting it as an expense even if I wasn’t on the way to see a client or pursuing an investigation.