Get Thee To A Nunnery

The train arrives in Melbourne just after six, and having retrieved my luggage from the platform where it has been left in a pile, I decide to walk to the hostel on the other side of the central business district.
I was last here some six years ago, and then I was only here for around two weeks, but the city is immediately familiar to me. Another grid system, but with wider boulevards to make way for the trams, and its long sprawling streets with their competing pavement cafes, the city has a more continental feel than Sydney did.
I find Nicholson Street easily, and upon it I find The Nunnery hostel where I am booked for a couple of nights. On the registration card, there is the usual question asking ‘Where did you hear of this hostel’. I skip the usual options (Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, Premonition…) and write "I walked past it six years ago and liked the look of it.". The card is processed without comment and a key is handed to me.
"Just behind you." Says the woman behind the desk.

The building is – as its name suggests – a converted nunnery. A newer, bigger, convent exists just up the road, which might suggest that in Melbourne, the ecclesiastical life is a popular one if they need to move to bigger premises. There are six beds in room five, in three pairs of metal bunks, but only one seems to be occupied and no-one seems to be about.
Thanks to my experiences in Darwin, I pick one of the spare top bunks, and dump the rest of my belongings in a neat-ish stack on the bedside table unit situated against the wall near the beds.
As usual when I move into a new dormitory, I try to imagine whom I might be sharing with from a glance at the detritus they leave lying about. The disordered bed provides no clues at all, but the evidence lain strewn around it seems ambiguous regarding the gender of my fellow tenant. Clothes seem to consist mainly of jeans and t-shirts, both looking skinny enough to belong to either a male or a female. A copy of I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith perhaps indicates a woman, but the Gillette Mach 3 razor in the bathroom suggests otherwise.
A set of communal shelves across the far end of the room are crammed with left over toiletries and paperbacks abandoned (presumably) by previous tenants. These too provide no clue.
I shower and change (only twelve hours on the train from Adelaide. Only twelve.) And then I set off to explore the surrounding area.

The Nunnery is located in Fitzroy, a self-styled arts and cafe district just outside the main city drags. Brunswick Street in particular (where Cate used to live) is wall-to-wall cafes, interspersed with the occasional second hand bookshop of florist.
It being Friday night, the place is heaving when I arrive. I amble up and down the street, peering into cafes as I go. All are full: groups of people gathered around tables talking busily over the sounds of the stereos blaring out bland indie rock at a high enough volume to be mistaken for interesting
I venture back towards the hostel, then cut across Carlton Gardens to Lygon Street, the Italian Quarter (Melbourne has, as it might have been gathered, more Quarters than is mathematically acceptable) a long, broad and handsome street tightly squeezed with Italian restaurants. It is also home to a good bookshop and – praise the lord! – a nine-screen cinema complex showing world cinema and arthouse movies.
I promptly purchase a ticket for a film called Factotum and snuggle up in the comfortable cinema seats for it to start.
Once done (a very entertaining film with Matt Dillon playing a slightly-too-pretty version of Charles Bukowski) I return to the hostel to find the room is still empty. This is not the case for long, as I hear someone trying to open the door from the outside.
I open it from the inside and the woman standing there with a keycard in her outstretched hand looks startled.
"Oh," she says. "I didn’t think anyone was in there."
She speaks with one of those slightly constricted American accents which make every word sound like a half-hearted protest.
Her name is Nicole and she wanted to use the room to practice her guitar.
"Sam works late." She explains indicating the slept-in bunk. That she conspicuously avoids any pronouns while discussing Sam, means that I remain none the wiser as to his or her gender.
"Are you going to bed?" she asks, cracking open the guitar case and plumping herself down on the untouched bunk.
"I’m going to lie down." I say, "But that’s not quite the same thing. Had a long train journey. Twelve hours."
She’s not listening, she is tuning her guitar instead as thought I am not there any more.
At the end of the bunks, the bedhead of the lower bed forms a ladder to the top. I clamber up and pull myself under the covers.
Nicole strums and warbles a series of reasonably competent cover versions of tracks from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack album. The Dusty Springfield track appears to appeal to her particularly. She plays it through at least five times.
When she is done, she packs up noisily and leaves the light on. It is two o’clock.

The next day – having slept through Sam’s arrival in the room during the night and lain in while he or she exited again the following morning – I walk into town to have a look around.
There are those who maintain that Melbourne is not a city to visit, it is a city to live in. Lacking as it does the memorable attractions that Sydney boasts on every postcard. It is true, certainly, that there is nothing to compete with the grandeur of the Harbour Bridge here, or the eccentricity of the Opera House, but the broad, tree lined streets and the rattle and ring of the trams are very easy to fall in love with.
I spend a pleasant day trying to establish my barings. From the foot of Carlton Gardens to Flinders Street Station, the central business district is a regimented grid of streets. Beyond Flinders Street, the Yarra river snakes discretely between the glittering Crown Casino Complex and the vast imposing stadium of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. To the West lies the new docklands complex which I presume would look better without the layer of grey clouds which confirms at a glance every stereotype you might have heard about Melbourne’s weather.
I return to the hostel early in the evening, and once more find the room empty. The lounge too, seems oddly deserted and so again, I set off for a wander around the Northern Suburbs, looking for a cafe which is not too crowded and will not be too shocked by someone asking for a table for one – which seems almost unheard of in these parts.

I return to the hostel after eleven or so and switching off the lights, collapse into bed.
At one o’clock, the lights come back on, and I hear someone dragging something across the floor. Someone is moving in.
Someone is moving in to the bunk beneath mine.
There are four other beds free, two of which are in an unoccupied set of bunks, but this person is moving into the bunk beneath mine. I roll over to make clear my presence in case it has been missed. It is ignored.
Metal bunks – I should point out – are cheap bunks. They move and creak with very little impetus, and so, true to chaos theory, the act of adding bedsheets to a lower bunk cases major earthquakes and tremors on the top. It is not unlike trying to sleep in a hammock in a storm tossed sea.
The person moving in beneath me is not Nicole, but she sounds like her – the same wet note of complaint in her voice - and seems to be best friends with her. As she moves in, Nicole comes in too and helps without discretion or subtlety that it might be expected the late hour would demand. They talk instead using rather loud stage whispers. It turns out that the one moving in, has a crush on Sam.
"He’s so mysterious." She says.
He! Congratulations, it’s a boy!
"Yes," hisses Nicole, "But I worry he knows it. I have to keep telling him to keep his ego in check."
The other sighs. Lovelorn.
"He’s so mysterious." She says again.
I do not say anything of course. There are some conversations you simply do not want to be part of, particularly when they involve insomniac furniture movers with sexual fantasies about gender non-specific invisibles.
The move lasts another three or four hours and it is nearly five in the morning before the lights are finally extinguished. The entire process required a lot of heavy lifting and grunts and groans and had I been more of gentleman, I might have offered to help. However, I am only gentlemanly between the hours of nine in the morning and eleven at night, so she really should have booked in advance or - heaven forbid - moved in at a more sensible time.
Finally, the inhabitant of the bunk beneath mine finally stops tossing and turning, and the subsequent momentum has finally stilled my own bed and I manage to grab a few hours sleep before the morning sunlight bursts through the curtains and people start staggering around the room again.
I wait a bit longer before going for a shower, not trusting myself to be polite should I encounter any of them.

When I finally stir, I lean over the edge of my bunk to see what has become of the room I had not yet become too familiar with.
"What the…?"
The ladder at the end of the bed has been covered up. In fact the entire lower bunk has been transformed into some sort of make-shift four-poster bed. A muslin throw has been stuffed under my mattress (which explains part of the previous nights violations) to form a kind of curtain around the entire bed.
I stumble down the shrouded ladder as best I can – almost tripping up when I plant my foot into a dream-catcher which has been hung across the bed head.
I reach the floor and survey the construction job which kept me awake most of the previous night.
The bed behind the curtain, I can just about make out. It is covered with throw rugs and scatter cushions. Strings of beads have been hung up all around it, a small mobile glints in the morning sun and something tie-dyed winks at me through a gap in the muslin.
The bedside unit upon which I had stacked my belongings has also been transformed.
All my bags have been dumped unceremoniously in a pile in the middle of the room, and the small, square table has been covered instead with a sequined cloth, upon which now stands a pot plant, some scented candles and a cluster of assorted crystals. There is also a beside light, aimed upwards, directed - I could almost swear - at my eye-level.
As I stare at the destruction and construction around me, and check over my bags to make sure that nothing was damaged during the move, the curtain stirs and a pale face peers out at me.
She’s still there. All along, she has been sitting reading a magazine. She does not offer me a greeting, nor an apology for throwing my belongings out of her way.
Instead she says, rather primly:
"There’s another one of your bags under the bed."
She plucks its errant strap - shyly protruding from beneath the bed - with a finger, a distasteful look on her face.
"You might want to move that." She advises.