Fee was upstairs and had been checking on the boys by looking out of the window now and then. She went to the top of the stairwell and stagewhispered down to me to get the kids in off the street. Her voice had an urgency to it, so i walked out to the deck at the front and called the boys in.
Harris Street was a quiet cul-de-sac, so it wasn’t like we were neglectful parents who let their kids play in the road. For the most part, traffic consisted of people who lived in the street, who knew where they were going and were not in a tearing hurry.
The house faced the entrance to a park and when you stood in the park and looked back at the house, what you saw was reminiscent of a painting by Magritte. It is not one of the paintings with bowler-hatted men raining from the sky. It is just a painting of a house, under a tree at twilight and the glow of one lamp which could be a streetlamp. if there is anything surreal about the painting it is in the
contrast between the lightness of the sky and the darkness of the house.
The boys weren’t annoyed about having been called home. Maybe they had had enough of being in the park. They might have gone upstairs. They still had the little garden at the back to play in. Everything was little. It was a little wooden house in an area of little houses, little gardens and little streets.
‘Did you see him?’
– Who?
‘That man who’s sitting on the road divider’
– You mean the guy in a mac?
‘Yes. Did you get a good look at him?’
-Not really. Is he why you got me to get the boys in?
‘Well, if you had bothered to take look, he was pretty strange and he was talking on one of those mobile phones. that’s just the sort of thing that they use to hook little boys. like that guy at the school who was asking kids if they would help him look for his puppy. If Wendy hadn’t seen him in time and known that he wasn’t Carlos’s dad, we’d all be reading about another missing child in the news.’
– Stranger Danger?
‘Go back out and take another look’

He was still sitting on the low divider. The coat he was wearing was unusual, unusual because people in Sydney do not dress smartly. The weather is too changeable to know what to wear. If it is consistently cold, like it can be in Melbourne, then you can afford to make a fashion statement. In Sydney, you can wear a suit if you go to work in an air-conditioned car and park it in the basement of  the car park of the air-conditioned building where you have an air-conditioned office, but most people wear shorts and t-shirts, clothes that you can throw off and go for a swim when you overheat. The other unusual thing was that he was talking into a mobile phone. More than 20 years ago, a mobile phone was something of a novelty. It was the sort of thing that could get the attention of adults, let alone small boys.

There was something not quite right about him. He was looking at the house next door. My guess was that he was talking someone on the phone about the house. Perhaps he was going to buy it, or had already bought it.

Our neighbour had been Joelle who lived with her son, Job. Job like in the Bible. Pronounced with a big round ‘O’. like JOhb in the Bible. Job borrowed my air pistol and never gave it back. Joelle’s brother had helped her do things to the house. When they had called out for help, we had run in and helped support a beam that he was putting in. If the beam had collapsed, the whole house would have collapsed too. He brother borrowed my books about the Craftsman Builder and the Woodbutcher’s Art and never gave them back.

She put the house up for sale, but it turned out that the new owners were not going to live there.

So while the house was being rented, we were going to be granted a little longer to live there.