Gunman

We are told that Melbourne is in the grip of a mad gunman, a nineteen-year-old who police say is running around on a shotgun-enabled crime spree. We are told not to go into the city or to the so-called ‘sporting district’ where, we are told, entire sporting teams are sitting around indoors waiting for the danger to pass. We are shown photos of police in body armour wandering Melbourne’s city parks armed with rather large guns. Never having lived in fear of a crazed shooter, I’m really not sure what to expect. Of course it’s possible that nothing will happen at all and this city-wide panic will disappear as quietly as it began. But I guess you never know.

I remember being in the city last February on Black Saturday, when the empty streets felt impossibly surreal. The few people who had ventured outside were being blasted with strong winds and forty-seven degree heat and would duck for cover into any shop open for business as though from a hailstorm. It felt wrong.

But this time you wouldn’t know it. With no idea of the apparently omnipresent danger, I traipsed into the city yesterday to indulge myself in lunch with a friend, and a couple of French macarons from a posh little deli I’d read about in a wanky Melbourne food blog. I don’t usually treat myself to these kinds of things, but I was feeling whatever the opposite of homesick is and remembered drunkenly eating macarons in Nice with Gillian before our trip to Monte Carlo. Tiny, and expensive at $2.50 each, but I guess with a gunman on the loose I might as well splurge.

Advertisement