Strands

This is a picture of Susan in her alcove apartment behind Oxford Street. She's just bought the newsagency building down the street and although she's lived here before is about to become more a part of Redfern again. Her brother is Trevor Davies. I met her at a charity function two or three or four years ago; I with permanent reporter's pad. God knows why we were covering it. The charity had decided this year they would go for domestic violence as a fund raising focus, and there were two enormous women there giving the speil about battered women.

They had a whole retinue of supporters from some centre down south. They must have all travelled up in a bus. They just all seemed enormous. The two on centre stage would have liked to fence all men off into a paddock in central Australia. I wanted to ask the stirrer question, if men are really more violent than women why are lesbians more violent than heterosexuals; just to watch them implode, but instead I walked away from the crowd and the columns of the old buildings and said to the trees, these people do more harm than good and thought about things I'd much rather be doing.

What was that? someone asked, and I thought oh God, I'm in for it now. But that was Susan. She gave me a lift into town in her clapped out old red car. She introduced me to the cafe A Little On The Side, where I sometimes have coffee or breakfast and read the papers. And time passes; the fault in the slip of no account, of no reasoning, of no blame, when nothing connected and there was no sense in the disconnection. Our gang, the lost gang, had been so strung out, all that time ago in London, and now he stood on the other side of the earth. Susan's brother is Trevor Davies, who's what you might call a commissioning editor for the South Sydney Herald; a funded local paper with impeccable left wing credentials.

It was so long ago that decision, to live by the typewriter no matter what, thousands of bylines and thousands of stories ago. And Trevor wasn't paying. Good will only went so far. He did a few stories on things he wanted to air and they had a falling out; repaired but not to the extent of provding copy. There was always a vacuum surrounding some people. He feared not for what lay ahead; he feared only greatness. Thus was the grandiosity of the alcoholic. And in the process good people were left behind. And craven silences ate into the heart of everything.