My next stop was the Sydney Police museum which, due to Sydney’s perverse practice of changing the names of streets for a while, and then changing them back, was hard to find. I finally located it just off McQuarie street, an old police station, a sandstone cottage among all the sandstone mammoths, with the cut out of a unhappy cartoon convict in one window. I paid my $10 and was handed a small map of the museum, with instructions not to go into a couple of rooms that were being renovated.

There was a room of police uniforms, then and now. A room that seemed devoted to past heroics of the Sydney Police, with some tut-tutting over past excesses involving aborigines. A room where the walls were lined with various horrifying weaponry confiscated from suspects over the past 150 years, everything from makeshift machetes to a tiny, almost jewel-like 19th century revolver. Death masks of various baddies after execution, all looking pretty unhappy. And of course, almost an entire room dedicated to the Pajama Girl, the Jane Doe in Chinese pajamas who went unidentified for a few years and was kept in a formaldehyde bath in one of the police stations until they figured out who she was.

All of this has, naturally enough, a sort of cumulative effect that sneaks up on you. I was in the pajama girl room, reading a hanging sign that included pictures of her in life sitting moodily on a beach alongside a photo of what she looked like after they found her when the hanging sign began to sway. I don’t mean it moved a little. I mean it swayed from side to side for no reason I could discern. I reached up and stopped it, waited a moment, then continued reading. It started swaying again. I stopped it. Then I very calmly moved on to a smaller section of the room dedicated to a grisly kidnapping/murder.

The lobby had a shelf of Australian-based true crime that included books I suspected would be hard to find in the United States. After a long, pleasurable browse, I chose The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House, by Kate Summerscale, which I later discovered was not about an Australian murder at all. It was about the Constance Kent case, one of of the most English of English murders.

This entry appears to be out of sequence. Apologies for that.

This morning Darlinghurst Road was quieter. There were a few people out before dawn and the food stands were open, but it wasn’t the same carnival. At sunrise, the Bada Bing Night Spot closed. Several thin, attractive-but-tired looking girls in jeans and flat shoes emerged and stopped to talk to the bouncers. One of the girls told an apparently funny story that involved a lot of arm-waving. She briefly mimed someone swinging drunkenly on a pole. Everyone laughed, a taxi pulled up, and the girls climbed in. The Bada Bing’s doors were closed and the bouncers gone. The sun was out, the week had begun, and Darlinghurst Road had on its innocent face.

***

As we left on our walk to Paddington I saw yet another girl on the street, very lovely in a long flowing lavender dress and loose dark hair. She was standing barefoot on the curb, hailing a taxi with one hand and in the other holding to her chest a pair of hideous high heeled shoes. It occurred to me that the girl we saw the day before from the back, walking barefoot, was probably also carrying hideous high heeled shoes against her front.

***

I’m afraid I didn’t find Paddington that interesting. It just seemed to be a long line of clothing boutiques, with an occasional empty storefront, retail versions of the terraced houses. It was before 9:00 am and nothing was open yet.

The number of empty, boarded up stores was, in fact a bit striking, and we found one public bulletin board plastered with anguished flyers. “Why am I still VACANT?” one asked, in a letter addressed to local landlords, “Is that what you are asking yourself?” Petitions were up about a clearway that many seemed to be blaming, a few of them half torn off as though someone had tried, unsuccessfully, to remove them.

We walked all the way to where the street ended at another, larger cross street, then walked back on the other side of the street, which, because it had cafes and a school, was a bit more lively. As we approached Paddington Public School, a massive old building connected to a massive old church, we heard children’s voices laughing, yelling, occasionally screaming, the sound of running feet. Then we heard someone ringing a large hand bell, and the voices began to die down. (It sounded exactly like Sister Boniface ringing the bell at Our Lady of Lourdes.) By the time we passed, the noise shouts had died down to a bubbling murmur and we glimpsed clots of uniformed schoolchildren trying to form themselves into something approximating lines.

As we walked on, we encountered several stragglers, a little boy walking almost at a trot and trying to look blasé as he adjusted his backpack, his tie slightly askew, a little girl being led demurely by her mother, and, in the garden area just beyond the Paddington Grind Cafe, a boy discreetly urinating into the bushes while his father stood nearby checking text messages on his Iphone. (I could imagine the conversation immediately preceding that. “Now, for Christ’s sake? We’re already late!”)