The Greenwich Apartments

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The building that went by the name of the Greenwich Apartments was a small block of flats, six two-bedroomers on three storeys, in behind a lively section of Bayswater Road, Kings Cross. To get to the flats I’d passed a brasserie and a restaurant and a wine bar. It was 9 p.m. and all three places were full. Someone had told me once which was the most trendy and hardest to get a table at, which was the next most desirable and which finished third, but I couldn’t remember the sequence. Beside the entrances to the building that weren’t places to eat and drink at, there were a couple of medicos’ nameplates, discreet neon signs advertising massage, and even a plaque for a fellow practitioner-Terry Stafford, Private Inquiries. Never heard of him.

The traffic was heavy and the area was parked solid. There were cars in ‘No Standing’ zones and across driveways. It was as if everybody in Sydney wanted to pack into this couple of acres. I walked up a lane into a bricked courtyard in front of the flats. Light-coloured brick with dark trim around the windows; decent-sized balconies on the second and third levels. Ivy or something like it crawled up the front of the building and had got a grip on a couple of the balconies. It snaked up a drainpipe towards the roof. No graffiti, no broken windows. A nice place.

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