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Say two quotes arrive for the same suburban lawn. One is $100 a visit and says green waste included. The other is $85 a visit and says green waste extra. Fifteen dollars separates them on the page, which reads as $390 across a year of 26 fortnightly visits. The gap does not stay that size. […]
Picture a clinic on a suburban shopping strip, wedged between a bakery and a real estate agent. The window carries a name, the opening hours and a phone number, and very little else. No prices, no photos, no product names. Modesty has nothing to do with it: Australia’s advertising rules for prescription-only medicines keep that […]
It’s the middle of June, and you’ve just remembered the extras on your health cover. There’s a limit on massage you haven’t touched all year, and you’ve a feeling it starts again with the new financial year. So you book a ninety-minute session at a place in the shopping centre with a sign in the […]
The waiting room is in an old terrace in inner Brisbane, the kind with pressed-metal ceilings and a fiddle-leaf fig that someone clearly waters with care. She is in her thirties, sitting on a timber bench with two pieces of paper on her knee. One is a quote from this practice for clear aligners, and […]
There is a second-hand keyboard in the lounge room, and for three weeks the same song has been coming out of it, the same eight bars, over and over, with the same wrong note in bar six. It is a good sign. A child who will not stop playing one song is a child who […]
It’s the week before the formal, and your daughter is standing at the bedroom mirror with her phone in one hand, scrolling through photos of the look she wants. The dress is hanging on the wardrobe door. The shoes are sorted. And the makeup artist she’s had her heart set on has been booked out […]
The letter from the solicitor arrives on a Tuesday. It is about an estate, it is mostly about forms, and somewhere on the second page there is a number that is larger than anything you have had to make a decision about before. A week later a friend hands you a business card at a […]
The quotes are stuck to the fridge in a 1970s brick house in Wollongong, three sheets under three magnets, curling a little at the corners from a week of being taken down, read over breakfast and put back. The kitchen they describe is the one the fridge stands in: a galley with a window over […]
The first session is often free. You turn up a little nervous, do some squats and a few minutes on the rower, and it feels good to have finally started. Then, as you’re catching your breath, the conversation turns to packages: ten sessions, twenty, a direct debit that starts on Monday. It’s easy to say […]
The repair counter sits between a bakery and a shop that sells phone cases, in the kind of shopping strip every regional town has, where the car park is always half full and someone is always waiting for a lift. On the counter is a laminated card, a little curled at the corners, with three […]