'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.