HE WORE OFF-WHITE trainers with built-up soles. The caved-in line of his jaw told me he had no teeth of his own. The other one, with honey-brown skin, held numerous bags and an ancient boom box. They met outside the bunker-like train station, arms raised in mutual salutation, no Renaissance princes more deferential. How long since they had seen each other? A day? An hour? I watched them asseverate in clown-show while above the sky grew mottled and spat rain. Loss gathered about us like clouds of stone. COVID-19 ground to one of its many temporary halts.

In two hours’ time, Lamb by Jane Bodie would open at the Frankston Arts Centre and become the first Victorian play to set off on an interstate tour in 2021. In this interstitial moment – neither a beginning nor a middle nor an end, but an impenetrable mix of all three temporal states – I sat on a Frankston street corner pondering all I had seen in the weeks gone by. And what it meant.