Emotional, He Gasped

The past kept coming back, the nightmare against green, but these things weren't happening now. There were very entertaining nights to be had, there in the slipstream. He said something witty and they laughed, or pretended to laugh, there in the park. There were people who appeared and disappeared and he was uncertain whether they were watching him or not. The group was fast. They laughed. Went and saw Brokeback again. The first time was 10.15am and there were aging gay couples, bald; or one old queen with his Thai boyfriend. The next time I went it was 1.15pm and most girls, straight girls, some with boyfriends in tow.

The week was full of death, a 53 year old taxi driver bashed to death by two 14 year olds. Everyone expressed shock; but people have been writing about the disintegration of the under class for years. There's no more manufacturing, no local shop, no local church, mostly. There's always a Centrelink office and a bottle shop. Everyone said what a lonely man he was, what a miserable life he lived, after the breakdown of his marriage. He worked 12 hour days. Visitors rarely if ever came to the granny flat at the back of the red brick house. A man with a fetid breath relayed how he felt sorry for him. The taxi drivers on the Arthur Street rank at Cabramatta all expressed concern for their own safety; sadness at the man's demise. He had been robbed several times, he had just gone back to work after a stroke, he had lost the use of one arm, he had been through a marriage breakup. He shouldn't have been driving, one man said. It's the department's fault for letting him.

We were so taudry in the slipstream, in corners piled high, wasted; the launch of a thousand pleasures. Their faces told of everything, the Red Bull and Vodka drinks; well kissy kissy. There were other deaths. A 22 month old child was mauled by her family's dingo cross pet; which had come into the house. Animal behaviourists said the baby was probably crying, and this provoked a predatory response in the animal. Her father found her at 4am. It is impossible to imagine; these appalling, private tragedies, linked through the threads of words and work. And there was the arrest of a man in Nelson, New Zealand, on the Janelle Patton case; the frenzied stabbing attack which had rivetted Australia and torn the remote Island of Norfolk apart with suspicion and paranoia. He looked almost normal, twitching in the winds; Norfolk Island was the worst of all the Australian penal colonies; founded in pain and blood and misery and complete brutality. The man is facing extradition proceedings back to Norfolk, where he will be the first person tried for murder on the island in more than a hundred years.