I have been circling slowly into an ivory-towered isolation, my friendships retracting to my ring of intimates. Which is pleasant, but that road leads to stagnation.

Now, however, I find myself leaning on the Wall of Yachts, red wine devoured, talking to the guy in red jeans about his scissor paper rock opera. A faunlike man with an eyepatch whirls past. Eventually, Renee and Brad get here, but for now I am alone and know no one. New Blood flows, and I am flatteringly mistaken for Dylan Moran.

I Turn to face the yachts. The most beautiful wallpaper in the world. Annotated diagrams of Yachts, in french. The worlds’ tallest waiter mistakes my interest in his novel as a romantic overture, (I had not yet realised pretty much the entire party is gay) but fortunately I’m not his type.

A costumed delegation arrives, en route to another party, they are dressed as British, and for a time I talk to the mad cow, the punk rocker and the Ab Fab Patsy, who I know from various places.

Hayley and Liam come by canoe, and we dance with the oars. Further nautical endeavours include naked- and hedge-swimming, but the main point of the story is the Yachts, and the new blood.

I am rescued by an old friend. Jane’s car door opens and saves me from the heat. Thirty-nine degrees, but at least it’s not humid anymore. I am blissfully chauffered to uni, where I dart to the next air conditioned oasis.

And so begins the saturday of this honours student. I spend the afternoon listening to music, drilling holes in petri dishes and spawning (my little bryozoans get off off light, both easy and poetic). It’s cool, I have a drill, so I feel like a man, but I have petri dishes, so I feel educated and urbane. Lofty and down to earth, the Ivory Tower’s handyman.

I don’t go home straight away, but go for a walk. I haven’t visited Vlad in a while. He has no ferry to exorcise any more, so I sit under him in the fading light to keep him company. I cool my head on the copper statue of the Russian saint. 

There’s a Trumpet playing somewhere, but the direction keeps shifting. One moment it’s accross the river, another it’s down the road, over the field, behind me. Will-o-wisp music, leading me to ruin. It reminds me though, of the flier I got handed on market day, for free food at the uni theatre group’s opening party (we have a uni theatre group?) under the abandoned cinema.

I come down the stairs to a twinkling room. Upon a concrete platform sits the corpse of a piano, innards revealed. Several people swan about, overdressed (Scarves? Fedoras?). At first I think them posers, pretentious, but then two women start to sing, faux-french, faux-lesbian and melodromatic, but nonetheless skilled. The people titter in amusement. A guy scuttles around, mimic to a starving parisian artist, begging for scraps. These people are in costumes, not full of themselves. A woman reads tarot cards.

I stay a while, make some friends. Then wander off, take the wrong staircase to a room full of every kind of chair, then remedy my error and leave into the quiet night.

Three people are standing by themselves in the great court, conversing easily. Then all of a sudden they drop to the earth in reverence. Wow, prayers to Mecca. I proceed politely.

The bus stop is busier than it should be, especially seeing as I have missed the last bus home. I turn around and am surrounded by the people of Saudi Arabia. A huge poster flaps from a building “Annual Saudi conference”. A fleet of Taxis arrive, and I briefly consider asking one of the conferencees to split one. But no, one does not wish to impose, I undo a button of my shirt and walk home through the summer night.

Punch drunk, from thinking too hard, I sit in the living room, staring blankly into space. I have read too many journal articles today, and should be reading more, but brad hands me a beer, and music starts playing, and it feels right.

My brain drifts off again, but pleasantly. There is a bubble in the neck of my bottle. The music hits a crescendo, and it bursts. Perspective returns.

I stare at a patch of peeling paint on the ceiling, it looks like a dancing woman. A woman with childbearing hips.

At one point, the trumpeteers leapt down into the crowd, and led a merry chase. And they sang songs from Budapest. There were fucking mandolins. And women with violins. From my vantage point I caught one glimpse, through a crack, to the green room, of two women waltzing.

For an encore, however, the band remained departed, and just the singer returned. On the inside of his left wrist was a tattoo of a french horn. He played upon a ukulele, Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah. He forgot the words, and we helped him out. Yet there was something strangely poetic about a lone man on a stage, trying to remember the words to Hallelujah. 

I give my last dollar to the taxi man, for my partial ride home. I express lament that he could not take me to Budapest, and continue on foot. Proud as I am of the proportion of my income I have been directing to cultural pursuits, eating tomorrow may arise as an issue. But who really cares.

And I have become that figure you sometimes see, walking home at night, singing quietly to himself.

Australia had been split in two, one half was the aboriginal world, before white settlement, the other the cities of the present day. It wasn’t a geographical split, but more like parallel universes, or fairy kingdoms. Each was aware of the other, but no one I spoke to knew the ways to cross the invisible barriers that separated them.

A Russian warship was stranded and slowly sinking off the coast. A small group of sailors in strange metal boats drifted towards the shore, seeking help for their comrades.

But horsemen appeared on the beaches, the immigration department. Though aware of the Russian’s plight and the urgency of their situation, they were forced by protocol to brutally arrest them.

But they had arrived in the presettlement world, and no matter how long they rode through the endless forests could never reach the cities to have their story heard by the beauracracy and their friends rescued.

One rider, one of the Russians (unnamed, though with the impression he was an unsavoury character) was thrown from his horse, and as he hit the ground a female movie narrator’s voice said “And thats how he died, just like that”

Cut to a close up of his face and shoulders, beginning to be darkened by raindrops. He is buried in the muddy water of the flood.

We all went to the shop where Michael works, only in the dream it was a restraunt. It was a long narrow room, full of low tables. A small lobby area was packed with people queuing for tables, but we were given one instantly, and served massive piles of chips.

One of the girls at out table was the manager, but then it turned out she was acting, and a blonde woman approached, the true manager, telling us how they had planned the clever ruse.

I was not hungry, so I wandered off exploring, outside of the first room the place was a mansion. Most of the doors had signs on them instructing me not to enter, because there were weddings inside. But there was one room left open, with a great mahogany table, silver cutlery, fine upholstery and views of the grounds. A room of English wealth.

Another room was unadorned apart from a projector screen, like an art gallery video installation. Black and white films were playing. I had a brief walk through the grounds, and found a balcony, where there was another projector screen. Looking through a window I could see another dining room, it was not so lavish as the first, looking like more of a break room at someone’s work. Yet it was decorated with wallpaper embellished with the most beautiful paintings of pheasants I had ever seen.

Through another window I could see a man in his messy office, nose deep in documents. He was the boss of this place. Walking back to where my friends were, I found a room full of cameras, my fingers itched to steal one, but was scared of the boss just down the hall. 

Instead I found a spiral staircase leading down into a completely different world.

The dusty undersides of floorboards stretched away above me to the limits of my vision, because the entire mansion and grounds were built upon stilts, suspended above a bustling Indian shanty town. Bicycles and crying babies and incence and dyes and temples and spices and bollywood. All the beauty and tragedy of Mumbai.

I stood floating on the rickety staircase suspended between two worlds, the silent restraint of the world above, and the colourful sweaty chaos below. 

Slowly, I ascended the stairs, and woke up.

Due to a crippling lack of discipline I have not made the most of this long weekend. With a huge assignment to write and rewrite and practice speaking, I have gone astray. Even beyond this I could have used the time better. I could have been learning guitar, or writing a great novel, or running a marathon. 

But no, I have been unfocused, and now, in a sham of decisiveness, I am doing the dishes. Expelling moths from wineglasses.

When I first moved in the walls and floor were bare, but the air was fertile. The first primitive settlers of this new continent were drawings. I could not afford posters and had little blu tac, but one or two scribbles on paper brightened the walls.

The second wave of colonisers came from far away in a great ship. A trade delegation from my parent’s house, a poster tube with all the posters I’ve collected through uni- the titan gods of old. They reigned supreme, until a strange event changed the course of history.

It was the first mine, a bin filled with old books and papers. Scientific charts and tables. Lists of numbers, references. The yellowing papers bloomed across the great empty spaces untouched by the gods, with their new ways and their new laws.

But the mine ran out. The people were willing, but the economy crumbled, there was only so much in that bin. The authorities sought new avenues, they asked friends for old documents, letters, newspapers, but to no avail. Until some national geographics on an op shop shelf, fifty cents a pop.

And so dawned the age of photography. Soulful pictures of old men, of the women of Andalusia, of cold Estonian days, of Mustafa, who dives beneath the Suez Canal.

But the newcomers caused tensions. The scientific literature, once so tasteful and sepia-toned, now looked ratty beneath the glossy photographs. Purists called for a return to the old ways. The old gods faded in their influence.

But then came the great unifying King. My flatmate leads me to a market stall, a market stall of sheet music. Within days the hymns and refrains, aleggros and serenades, colonise every remaining space, and soothe the warring clans.

And in this many layered edifice we see the rich history and culture of this place. The empires that flourish and ossify, the cities that stood the test of time. I like my room.

Having passed through a room filled with love letters, and a hallway where waltzes played, I now stand staring distantly at the river. Open before me is an ancient book of maps, and in my right hand I hold a globe of the moon. 

I trace my fingers over the sea of Tranquility, and a woman sits down to read microfilm beside me.

Can anyone guess where I am?