Cattle

They gather by watering holes like buffalo. Heavy set and broad-shouldered, clopping strides on well-dressed hooves; Thick-necked and blonde-tipped and manicured. They drag gazelles out into the night, into back seats, into alleys, into cabs. Staggering together down backstreets, almost comical: Her, paper-thin, all legs, dress-lines and straight hair; Him, broad, all thick joints and trimmed epidermis, clumsily leaning on her glass frame like it can hold all the weight in the world.

Disinterested ethnic men, neither big nor intimidating but with the store-bought demeanour of what Hank Rollins calls 'Command Presence', mill about shepherding this mismatched herd away from the docile night-walkers and the stream of tarmac. They wait uneasily.

I watch, but not from afar. In five or six strides I could be the nature-documentary stock impala-cum-spring-roll example of the food chain, but I know I won't be. The herd faces inwards, watching two young bucks exchange syllables in the staccato, thoughtless rhythm of the inebriated. Flashes of half-finished tribal sleeve tattoos. A misaligned crescendo that ripples backwards through the amassed but reaches me all at once as violence is averted. Disinterested ethnic men bounce on their heels.

Another vertiginous couple peels off from the herd and out of view, counting back the minutes until their arrival at the chosen den or nest to be the scene of the pre-somnia coitus ritual, conducted de riguer in accordance with weekly tradition.

I love Fremantle at night.