Homeless

The city was always a torrent, of lives turning in and out, the accumulation of grotesque amounts of money. For him, the intoxicated destiny had always been a different one. In the end, there was no one left to appreciate the story. Those he shared his life with had gone. Echoes only, faces at press conferences, old mates turned press secretaries. Do you realise, that was 17 years ago now? asked Alex, now a press secretary for one of the state's leading ministers; referring to a time when we had been strung to the nines and up to no good whatsoever.

I had a dream. again, of being homeless in Sydney, tossed by my own misadventures and own stupidity on to the streets in a city where it was virtually impossible to find comfortable lodgings at reasonable prices. The kids were grown up and gone now but he still worked on at the paper. But somehow, mirroring his own past, he had left the comfortable apartment overlooking the bay, the bridge, the city, and was forced to wander as the cold set in. He walked past the huddle of junkies in the Cross, avoiding this time, not flirting with scoring, not wanting to check out who was ripping off who. He knew he'd be ripped off. The warmth, the purpose, the dereliction, the intoxication that they offered was not for him this time; he needed to save his money for a room.

He walked down the streets that had been so familiar to him as a youth, down Rushcutters Bay, towards a small private hotel he'd picked out the previous day. He decided to take a short cut through a crumbling mansion turned into a boarding house, thought maybe he should be staying here instead, with its brisk white sheets; open doors; old people smells; but instead he cut downstairs through the laundry and out the back; into a strange tropical Ballard world with vines dripping from the trees and steep hills behind. There wasn't any city anymore; the endless stream of traffic on bitjumen, his own sickness and sadness; it was all gone and he was entirely lost. The private hotel was gone, the mansion was gone; the junkies were gone and once again he knew for sure: there was no way out; and no way back; and the fleeting friends he had gained after decades of working in the same place; they too were long gone. He knew he would reach this point. If the currency hadn't collapsed, he could have got on a plane and fled to a more embracing clime.