I sit in the courtyard and the temperature is exactly the colour of those orange walls. The wind brings ash to float down like grey confetti.

Emio Greco at the Opera House

I open the door but outside the air is the same temperature. No possibility of interchange. I lean on the wooden ledge with the bowl in both hands and can see it dropping on to the street below, just like I imagined throwing red wine on the artworks. I see myself doing more interesting things, things with consequences.

And earlier, I was captivated.

There's talk of him not being precise. It's the bull. He is the bull, non? But he's Italian. And the bullfight is Spanish. These are the conversations in my head. Or a tantrum. Not me. Him. Between the white lines of the runway. A tantrum played out on the tarquet. The music is Bolero but it's played at a distance at first, in the back room of a milk bar around the corner and across the park, at first. Faint. At first. I feel cheated and disinterested. But he is the bull like I want him to be. He's wearing a sheer dress, Signor Greco. The music is faint and the moves agressive, but controlled.

He prances like a pony and I think more of Lisa Torrance than of Kenny Drummond. He is a bull. Beautiful Kenny Drummond. Out of form to imagine that he could prance like a pony. What did he do? He sat in the well-designed chairs in the lounge room and drank beer as the sun came up.

And still the prancing evokes a picture of a Scottish girl telling a story of a boy named Kenny prancing like a pony behind a bar in Glasgow.

By the end the dress is plastered with sweat to his back in sculptural folds. Plastered in sculptural folds to his back with sweat? Plastered with sweat in sculptural folds to his back?

The music stops and there’s the buzz of some kind of cicada hitting its head against the glass. It’s less frenetic than last week’s example tossed around by a bird in the late afternoon on a street by an Erskineville railway line. A girl stops her converse shoes to say “wow”. Perhaps the bird considers her competition because the game is suddenly up and the cicada swallowed whole.

The sky makes it summer, bright and trending lavender. I sit at the table for a moment dazzled by the shimmering green against this sky through the cinemascope slash, the post box of the kitchen window.

I remember other times of leisure, between jobs, on holidays when I wondered how people filled their days, suspected that they might have to schedule things as mundane as exercise to make it seem worthwhile. I’m walking along Prospect Street in the mid morning with a coffee in my hand, paying attention to the random debris stashed in the tiny front porches of these houses on the street – the front bench seat from a car, peeling camel vinyl reveals foam the same colour and I just know that at one touch it becomes sticky powder; a washing machine caked in dust – and everything seems worthwhile.

At the café a girl tells her curly headed companion that she always spells tonight with an ight rather than an ite, even when texting, because it’s important to her to maintain standards. He nods in agreement and his rat brown hair bobs. “Does it annoy you when I spell it ite?” he asks. She says not, but adds that she always writes you are instead of you’re.

I swear that the girl serving my coffee is Sarah Scott except that I guess Sarah Scott is at home with her children. Still, I like to think of people who look alike having the same characteristics. A certain kind of freckles – generally a light smattering – in my experience equals goodness.

I don’t want to know this city so well. I want to listen to the hum outside the silent core of Church Street and I want to wonder, to marvel at the possibilities that exist in that hum. Instead I lie on my bed and the afternoon breeze comes in, first touching the underside of my toes. It’s five and I like to think that I’m noticing the hum now because it’s the sound of the whole city heading home. Soon I’ve been worn down by the relentless history of the shetl and everything is not illuminated, everything is darkened as I slip into sleep. Voices rise above the hum and I’m back to focusing on this community rather than the whole city, and Europe and the Ukraine and the universe in which people have done atrocious deeds.

Yesterday the shuffling man arrived at the Fish Shop Café without his dog. I want to believe that the dog is just unable to travel with him on the motorized chair. The man is sitting on the footpath and the waitress hands him a coffee through the window. He takes it but seems unable to move once he’s holding it, like the weight of the coffee is completely too much for him .The waitress has to run around to the outside, take it from him and place it on his table. He’s shaking by the time he gets there.

My days are lazy and sunny and without shoes for most of the time.

Today, waking back from King Street, I noticed an ambulance across from the park and realised that I could hear a chopper. Two women stood at the entrance watching a helicopter hover just feet above the grass. Me: “What’s going on?” Them: shrugs. The woman from the church, watching too, pulled her dog out of the way of the supplementary ambulance man on a motor bike.

The painter rang the doorbell twice. We affixed the doorknob. We chatted. About the opening night. The free drinks. The leak. His paintings. I didn’t tell him any secrets. He got no secrets from me. I have no secrets.

Now there is space and time. I can pay attention and know things outside the things I need to know. I can even ask questions. Real questions. Without having to know the answer. Keating calls it the game too. He means politics, public life, but really we understand. Just life. Only a game. His life: politics and public life. As long as you win.

What do I know? I know that Bono reads reviews, that he calls reviewers in to discuss the set list. Perhaps he's just living his new positioning as Mr Attention-To-Detail a la his note to Armani. Hang on. I know too much. Please can I listen to Achtung Baby now? I want to remember something pure. I want to remember the first and fifth times I listened to it. I want to remember it as the soundtrack to standing on a verandah on a rise overlooking the New England town. A storm. Grey sky but yellow light. Extended family inside and core on the verandah, crying because they are so far apart, but not coming any closer. Disconnection. I remember short (wooden or brick?) pylons with tin over the top to stop the white ants. 21. Christmas turkey cooked in a shop when the home gas ran out.

We'd been to church that morning, though. And what do I know of that? I know heat, blowflies having seemingly no sense, tapping like a finger against stained glass windows, again and again. I know a man with grey hair and khaki pants shiny with ironing shuffing out of his pew: "old age is a curse and don't let anyone tell you any different."

I know too much. I know that on Sunday a car coming around the corner clipped a car parked across the street. I know that we threw a piece of paper to the driver of that car. I know that the paper was good quality drawing paper from a notebook I'd purchased to do sketches in preparation for my Archibald Prize entry. I know that instead of leaving a note on the damaged car the driver polished the point of impact and decided it was imperceptable. I know that I didn't ever do the sketches, or the Archibald Prize entry.

We're transfixed by the parade, until we know them and we have to look away: John, the yoga teacher; Deb's brother, carrying a string bag with a Pide inside and a pith helmet in the other hand. Gina says her mum used to wear a pith helmet on Terrigal Beach in the 70s.

Then, when we're spent from Newtown Festival and have given our dirty feet permission to lie on the couch, there's rhythm right there outside the window. Rhythm that you can't deny. We marvel at the way the garbage bins give the same beat: "but one's for garbage and one's recycling." Red and yellow. They sound the same.

Tonight clouds hold in, amplify, the aircraft noise. Until I realise it's not thunder, I'm excited. I've become used to the yellow moon in my eyeline as I lie in bed.

And on the walls are secrets. Secrets made vivid. Does he have any friends now? Historically, I guess painters are less maligned for appropriating. That's the domain of writers. But the paintings are like film. Surely a disincentive for friendship, or exchange. Juxtaposition of cosy interior and sexual tension.

The book is about India, the part near Kalimpong and the Himalayas. The images are of mist and killing ticks pulled off a dog called Mutt. It feels strange, though, like I'm still partway through last night's book with those different images in my head. And those images are not from a book but from the film I've created in my head based on the songs of Bernard Fanning. I listen and wonder if I should be imagining a cobbled Barcelona lane or Rick's in the Valley. Still, the alternative images are powerful.

Ultimately, Mutt is abducted. It's the great tragedy. If you measure the world by what you leave behind. If you're a dog, what you leave behind is not measurable.

If you measure a novel by the number of pages with the corner turned down. Kiran Desai = 4.