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.