Monday to Friday

He was easily infuriated; it didn’t take much to ignite the fire in his eyes and open the door to let the raging demons run loose. The steel cage that contained his emotions wasn’t steel in fact. It bore no protective outer layer; his spitting ferocity and discontent danced and spiralled between the bars, threatening to lash out at any moment.

He didn’t want to be a part of the Race; he resented his alarm clock and its neon green digits, resented the tailored wool blend suits that filled his wardrobe with dull hues of black and grey; resented the weight of the briefcase that dragged against his fingers, his arm, his heart, leaving them all blistered, raw, exhausted, sapped of life.

He hated rats, considered them vermin.

His facial features formed straight and defined lines – his mouth was small and pursed, eyebrows narrowed, forehead disappearing into a sea of creases that were made more apparent by his meticulously ironed white shirt.

Subconsciously he rehearsed exercises that gave him a discreet advantage in the Race. He gulped down the bitter coffee from the café next to the train station, read over notes once, twice, three times until he mumbled them in his dreams. As his Italian leather shoes pounded the pavements littered with cigarette butts, he saw not the vague city skyline in the distance, but a ladder, with rungs that he had no choice but to climb, to conquer.

He frowned at the girl smiling to herself as she pushed through the ticket barriers at the train station, struggling against the tide of business attire that threatened to crush her. He scowled at her evident energy, her glee at entering the confines of the city streets, her youth, her colour that danced against the wave of black and grey.

Her flippancy made him clench his teeth in anger; he twisted the Metcard between his fingers as he watched a different set of neon numbers tick over, cursing ever second that he was trapped in a nest of squeaking, and squirming, of bright pink eyes and bald tails.

He smelt the damp and decrepit odour of rodents wash away from him as he turned his key in the lock, as he heard the thump of footsteps running along the hallway. The immense public stench of the train was replaced as wafts of dinner cooking tickled his nose; the stuffy warmth that came from too many humans in one place subsided as the cool night air touched his face before he stepped inside the front door.

The lines disappeared; the fury evaporated; the man who thrashed his way through the pack to reach the ladder first no longer existed. He buried his face into her hair, cradled her tiny frame against him, knowing that she would be wiping whatever was on her fingers onto his suit jacket, of which the cost could feed an entire family for a month – but he didn’t care, as he had dropped the weight at the bottom of the stairs, where it was to remain as he helped her cut up her dinner, bathed her, read to her, was there to kiss her goodnight.

'The world would be boring if we were all the same'

It was an artificial and fluorescently lit environment, a perfect feeding ground for daydreams and the brewing of longwinded thoughts and fables. What’s more, a window stretched from floor to ceiling, providing a view of the car park and stretch of main road, where even average behaviour was considered flamboyant.

Suburbia is breeding ground for The Grey (AC, 2009) because it’s this halfway existence between two drastic worlds. Souls get lost on their way to the city or the country, and die halfway in between, coming to a quiet rest on streets with identical footpaths, streetlights, rendered houses with Astroturf-apparent front lawns, a station wagon in the driveway and curtains hemmed by mothers-in-laws. If you walk too slowly through the suburbs (and no city does suburbia like Melbourne) you’ll get lost, and you’ll forget what the moon looks like without an orange ring encircling it.

Suburbia is safe, everything is comfortably within reach and its complete lack of anything unusual or unexpected means it’s an easy place to be a child, raise a family, grow old. But the thought of carrying out an entire life cycle in suburbia (like the cicadas that creak from the median strips, protesting against the council workers mowing down unruly grass) is positively eye-glazing. I feel grateful for the early years spent in salt-encrusted coastal towns, for the childhood past in a place where there was no supermarket because the heritage listing wouldn’t allow it.

I lost something when I was drifting through the middle-class paradise, while the windows lit with golden light, showing silhouettes of families eating dinner, blinked at me. I dropped it into the gutter, where fallen leaves don’t remain for long (we pay hideously expensive council rates for a reason, you know) and it was lost for a while. It reappeared one muggy afternoon when I was crushed against the window of a tram rattling towards Brunswick Road, I felt it drop into my pocket. It had lost its shine and it took me a time to realise how to polish it clean again.