Northcott

This is the public housing estate of Northcott in Surry Hills, just near where I work. Sometimes I would just go and stare at it, I'm not sure why, like a centrifugal force, misery piled on misery, the heroin deals being conducted at lightning speed at its base while the cop cars cruised the block and the mentally ill stared from their balconies or kitchen windows. Shortly after you would see them, they all looked like they had been out of jail for five minutes, dashing urgently along upstairs corridors; because nothing on earth was more important than getting inside into the privacy of someone's flat.

Northcott, said to be the largest public housing complex in the southern hemisphere, has just made the news again, because a man's body was found inside, in a flat with the door open. It had been there six months, through the stinking heat of a Sydney summer; and nobody had even bothered to check where the smell was coming from or why the door was open 24/7. The 62 year old was from Eastern Europe and police have been unable to locate any living relatives.

Alerted by the Northcott story and the mounting uncollected mail, some postal workers at Umima up north decided to check on the welfare of a 79-year-old woman. The police found her skeleton, and she too had been in her home dead for six months.

While the social workers parrot on about community.

I saw Bruce one day; his hagard, expressive face, pale, sick still, although I hadn't seen him since the late seventies, early eighties. I didn't rush to say hello; I didn't rush at all. I never understood the derelction to which they sank, the grotty rooms, the eternal waiting. Bereft over the departure of the latest boyfriend, overwhelmed by the angst of it all, whatever drove him, Bruce was the bloke who shot up fly spray and was never the same again.

I didn't follow him, not exactly, but I saw him later, outside Northcott, and it all fitted into place. He had that look of someone scuttling from their cave on the housing estates to the Centrelink office and back, desperate to be outside for as short a time as possible; desperate for money when there would never be enough; another life ruined while the politicians congratulated themselves on driving up the price of heroin to a point where people like Bruce resorted to all sorts of cheap pills and concoctions, all sorts of crime and dereliction; all to get a few moment's peace before the withdrawals and the depression set in again.