Montreal

More maple leaves will fall as the first frost closes in; at present many of the trees lining Montreal’s one-way rues and avenues are half green, half red. The sun is out but high and cold. Looking upwards I see ducks flocking to the enormous park near her apartment – there the lake’s foamy spillway is clogged with leaves and goldfish swim in the shallows. By the time the shedding is complete, when they cake the footpaths like a daub of paint, the leaves themselves will be caked in snow.

Charming blocks of apartments all have staircases on the outside so every front door can be reached independently, undisturbed. It gets me thinking about why Australian apartment blocks rarely afford their residents this luxury. Too big I guess; these are three or four levels at most, the kind you might swan past in a more elegant area of Paris. Old women sit in rocking chairs on numerous balconies, obese, silent, staring. And from afar their chairs rock with a barely detectable rhythm, so slightly that you must stare back in order to see them move.

We enter the park at a pedestrian crossing. Fortunate that we do, since I am yet to grasp the idea of reversed driving directions and goad beeping motorists by looking right first, always right. There is a soccer pitch, a baseball diamond, a petanque square full of white-haired men. Bands of musicians play, eyes fixed on their counterparts for signs of a change in the jam. An adult learning centre made of old grey stone; cryptically the coat of arms above its entrance depicts a woman hitting a tennis backhand. I ask after its meaning but she can’t tell me. “Once there was a dead body in the lake though,” she says, as if pressed into supplying me with a substitute piece of trivia. Smatterings of people in meditation pose on rocks by the water and shaded grassy hillsides. I gush at all the squirrels and she shakes her head but listens as I explain their significance; the park in Windsor when I was ten years old, illumined by fireflies, my father shrinking to a ball on the tanbark, crying for reasons I could not understand then, grandpa. Grandpa who I’ll visit in ten days, by total coincidence the day of his eighty-eighth birthday.

Commotion up ahead; a man is screaming. People look around with concern but discover only the barks of a huge black fitness trainer, practically towing his pupil along in a slipstream of berating motivational jibes. Most of the women I see are beautiful.