Stephen had never liked to admit how soothed he was to walk the streets of Longley Point, how velveted by silence he was, how the moneyed suburb’s gentility allowed his body to soften and forget itself. It was only in Fiona’s suburb that he realised how physically alert he was to violence in his own. Even the air was cooler here. He was grateful, this of all afternoons, for the great corridors of shade created by the arching of the plane tree limbs across the streets. His socks were sweaty rags, his shoulders ached from the weight of his backpack. In Longley Point the houses were large and hardly visible but for glimpses of glass and steel and timber, set back from the road behind freshly rendered brick fences and high, well-maintained hedges. The streets were wide and quiet. No sub-woofer hip-hop thuds emanated from cars; they glided by, black Saabs and four-wheel drives, silver Lexuses and Mercs. At the busy Vietnamese restaurant nearest Stephen’s house in Norton the owners had a hairy little dog named Lexus, and at the end of the evenings when enough customers had gone they let it tear through the restaurant, leaping from chair to chair.
