Tag Archives: homeless

Sightings I and II

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I. Banana

Rushing for a train, racing down the steps to the underground avenues beneath Flinders Street Station, commuters plunge past the blue sleeping bag with scarcely a glance. There is much to distract the train-intent from the form that fills the sleeping bag; the endless tiled passage below the busy city streets speaks of public secrets; at once a passage and a place, its architectural style archaic. When drained of all footfalls save those of a solitary traveller its hollow emptiness evokes nervous ripples, small tremors. On the walls contemporary agitprop, messages to promote rail safety, sexual safety, philanthropy. Alongside these colourful eyecatchers, ancient stencilling in grey warns the traveller: SPITTING ON WALLS AND FLOORS IS FORBIDDEN.
The traveller of yesteryear would have to lie on the tiles on his back – the spitter would certainly be male – and spit upwards to the ceiling.

Racing for my own train I found my eyes drawn sideways by the bright blue of the bag. A warm downy sort of bag, not apparently a cheap one. Nearly tumbling down the stairs I pulled up short of a placard placed in front of the recumbent form. I could not see a head or any body part that would prove a human presence. No sign of life. But on this coldest winter morning in thirty years all in the station have covered up, torso and head alike.

In my skeltering I had no chance to read the text on the placard. I guessed it announced an autobiography along the lines of:

I AM HOMELESS AND SICK. CAN YOU SPARE ANY CHANGE?
In front of the placard a scatter of coins. And a banana.
Some benevolent passer-by, I surmised, judged food more nourishing than currency.
Two hours later, rush hour well past, I returned. No sign of sleeping bag, no sign of sleeper, placard or money. The banana alone remained.

II. Homeless on the Surface

Surfacing from the cryptic passages I hurried across Collins Street. Seated before the inviting premises of the chocolatier a man in his forties, draped with blankets, his bearded face rubicund, leaned towards the passer by who did not pass by. She, a fashionably dressed woman in her mid-thirties, warm in a long camel coat, bent over the seated man, speaking. The man’s face broke into a wide smile, the only smile I sighted on that broad and thronging street. The woman stroked the man’s face lightly. She straightened and walked off up Collins Street, half turning to wave.

Melatonin and the Meaning of Five Lives

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Melatonin and the Meaning of Five Lives

– written in the high season of jetlag

Why would I wake after only four hours of sleep? Here I am, sleepless in Pittsburgh. It is 2.00am and for five days now I have slept too little. There is nothing to stop me sleeping: the house is quiet, snow falling outside hushes the world. Sleep is an ambition unrealised.

My mind has nothing useful to do other than to keep me from sleep. My mind visits my home in Diamond Creek. The date is December 7, 1974. I see it all in the dark from my bedroom upstairs in the house of friends in Pittsburgh.

Around 7.00 am

I am first to waken. I wash my hands and a noisy clanking in the pipes threatens the precious sleep of the children. Steam emerges when I turn on the hot tap. I turn it off. I pay no heed to the meaning of noises in the plumbing, to steam from the tap. These are practical concerns; I wash my hands of practical concerns. I remove my wedding ring to recite my morning prayers and go to my work, leaving the children unkissed, leaving the ring on the dresser, leaving Annette as she prepares for the day.

Around 8.15 am

The receptionist says: ‘Mrs. West is on the line. She says it’s an emergency.’ I take the call. Lynne says, ‘Howard. I think you’d better come home, straight away. There’s been an explosion at your house.’ I don’t come home straight away; Lynne West is an excitable person and I have a patient sitting before me. More patients wait in the waiting room. I see these patients and I drive to my house.

Around 8.10 am

The house exploded.

Around 9.15 am

I do not witness the explosion but Lynne is eager to regale me: ‘I heard a loud boom from your house and I looked over and a huge cloud of smoke came out of the roof. And the walls fell down.’

But before encountering Lynne and her tale of smoke and thunder I turn from the unmade road into our dirt driveway at 36 Deering Street. Lying flat on the ground to my left are the brick walls of my home. Before me the driveway leads to an empty carport. ‘Empty, ergo Annette is not at home, the children are not at home. Ergo I have lost nothing but bricks and mortar.’ And, as I will discover later, a wedding ring.

Until I married I disdained rings on men. Worse than effeminate, in my regard they were affected. A judgement made before I married. This ring was different: slender, of unostentatious white gold, engraved on the inner surface with words of love from Annette, words for my eyes only.

Around 10.05 am

I run Annette to ground at her sister’s house. She has dropped our firstborn at kindergarten early, as she always does. Earlier Annette sat in the armchair, breastfeeding the newborn while the older two watched Sesame Street on a couch in the same room. I ring Annette and tell her she is homeless. That we have been so since shortly after

8.05 am

Annette and the children left home for kindergarten. Punctual as always. Not only early, but early for early, as I was prone to point out irritably, in Annette’s overturning of my native tardiness.

11.00 am

Annette joins me at the wrecked house. We find two goldfish still alive, lying in the few milimetres of water on the surface of the kitchen table. That flimsy table is one of the few sticks of furniture that still stands. Paintings hang at angles from the walls, canvas gashed by flying debris. The dining table lies in heavy fractions, its geometry denuded. Ancestral bedroom furniture has collapsed. Of the wedding ring no trace.

My mind is fixed on the hot water service that exploded. Emplaced on the slope beneath the house, the hot water service – that ticking bomb – stood directly beneath the armchair where Annette sustained our baby with her milk; one metre removed from the suckling pair were the Sesame Street watchers, sitting in pleasant terror of Cookie Monster. Lynne West’s ‘smoke’ was the steam released by that bomb.

Annette is upset: unlike me she never held in her imagination the thought that arrested me for one second or perhaps two: that my loved ones are lost. Annette is a mother of children and she knows, as I will continue to refuse to know, that a family lacking a home is a frail thing, that we have lost our anchor upon this earth.

Our son, aged two and a half, knows something. Prior to December 7 he is a highly verbal person. From that time, for the next six months, Raphael will not speak.

I lie in the dark, useless to myself, tossing in all this unusable time. But unwelcome consciousness wastes nothing. It takes me back thirty-nine years in time. There were questions that Annette faced in those first few seconds, questions that my son asked in his mutism.

In the simplicity of 1976 I asked nothing. Now the darkness asks me:

What does it mean?

Why has this happened – this loss?

Why has this happened – this being spared from loss?

What, as our lives were spared, are our lives for?

What will you do with, how will you use this time?

A novel experience, this guilt, this sense of time debt, the debt unserviced, accruing, unpaid. The infant at the breast, her elder brother, their big sister, each of them has employed the time, each has grown and grown, grown and learned, grown and created a family. Throughout all Annette has been their home.

What have I not attended to?

I must listen to the pipes. When the pipes, the pipes are calling I must listen. I must not wash my hands of practical matters. The practical reality was shrapnel of exploding wine bottles stacked next to the suckling chair, next to the Sesame watchers. Those jagged fragments were flung with force from floor through the ceiling into the roof space. Grenades of glass shattered the room of milk and sesame and soft infant flesh.

I must learn from the steam. Steam, as Lynne might put it, is smoke – and where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The steam warned me: get your loved ones to safety, far from the fire.

Why live? Why us? These teasing whys tease. Abstruse abstractions, they distract from the concrete, the practical.

And Annette? Annette is where truth is writ plain and practical. The truth lies with Annette.

These musings are, as I suggested at the beginning, the children of the muse melatonin. I am in foreign territory here, lost, perhaps even found, somewhere between memory and regret.

As if to answer the questions of the dark, questions I never spoke aloud, my host passes me ‘The Descent’, a poem of William Carlos Williams:


No defeat is made up entirely of defeat –

Since the world it opens up is always a place

Formerly unsuspected.

A world lost, a world unsuspected

Beckons to new places

And no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory

Of whiteness.

Riding Home to a Wardrobe Full of Shoes

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2330 hours. Riding the pushbike home from the hospital for sick children on a Sunday night, racing dreamy trams through the Central Business District, through the drowsing city as it winds itself down from weekend revels. The streets drain visitors to their dormitory suburbs; those on foot, inner city dwellers, are mostly students, mostly Asian.

The bike affords a view at street level. On every city block there is one figure seen seated on the footpath, male, his back supported by a shopfront, before him a placard, his testament of poverty, of need. Before him an upturned cap solicits alms. Peering from the bike across the emptying asphalt, between unclad legs, I see the bearded face of the seated man, mute, impassive, staying put.

The unclad legs are of groups of Asian girls who wear spring frocks shorter than the precipice high heels dictated by fashion. The legs pass; the beard, the placard, the face remain. No alms fall into the money hat.

On the next block the same slow tableau.

Red lights arrest me at the third block. I can hear the girls’ soft laughter as they pass. The face of this man is not seen: his head slumped, he sleeps, sleeps on the cooling street, sleeps before the hat. No-one comes near.

The green light releases me from indecision. Riding now, racing trams once more, leaving behind me undischarged my impulse of munificence, I ride hard, ride towards my home where warmth, a shower await, where I have a wardrobe full of shoes. Those high heeled extravagances speak to my own blessed feet as they depress the pedals. How many are your shoes? I count them as I ride.

I count ten pairs of shoes in my warm home. I have only two feet. Ten pairs plus all the running shoes, those retired from marathons but still serviceable, and the new pair in lapis blue waiting for a runner whose running days are done.

Twenty eight shoes for my two feet.

We are two bearded men who write our testaments, two of us tired from fetching our daily bread. I ride to my home. Mon frere, mon semblable, sleeps already, on the street.

Beyond these city blocks lie the docks and the silent cold sea. Across the cold waters, homeless, locked from sight, from our hearing, locked away in distant islands of poverty are the thousands who will never, ever – on a government’s solemn vow – come into our comfortable home.

Waiting for the Wrong Bus

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This bus I await
Is not mine
In the dark
On the 91 Line

I took the 91
Missed my stop;
Now look around
Outside a shop –

In a doorway
Two recline
Homeless among
Homed on the 91 Line

Her eyes closed,
His wide
She reposed
His rest denied

Not hunger,
Not dirt
On her face, her shirt;
His face younger

But pinched,
Eyes narrowed,
Jaws clenched,
Looks harrowed –

Ten feet
Just ten
Separate us
From them

Not an iphone
At his cheek
But a fruit ice –
A second peek

In not yet dawn
She wants warm
While he applies ice!
Wondering in gloom

I check my cash
Two large notes
None small; rash
I approach

“Could you use a quid
Or two?” “Mate,
I could.” (A schooled voice.)
Note unnoted, palmed, hid.

“Toothache?” “Mate, agony,
Three days now…”
Pain cries for relief
Not money…

I’ve three green
Gel tabs, ibuprofen:
These given, palmed,
Expose the fifty. Now

He sees, amazed
“O mate!”
And I, running late
Escape on the 91 –
The wrong bus;
The streets
Of London
Separate us –

What Would You Do?

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A few minutes ago a man approached me in a city street. He secured eye contact, moved in close,  closer, a craft securing its mooring.

I’m on the streets.

A lined face, folds of loose dark skin, lightly whiskered, serious. I recognised the approach; he’d be after money. I felt in my pocket for the two dollar coin, a lazy two dollars.

I’m looking for money for a room for the night. I need forty nine dollars.

This was something new. The quantum, specified. It rang true.

We held each other’s gaze. The man neither shrank nor dramatised himself. He added, The room is booked. I need to find the money, and something for a feed, some laundry…

After a pause I asked – unaccountably – How much is the room?

Eighty-nine dollars. I’ve got the rest.

Two dollars felt too lazy. I found a large note, handed it over.

The man looked at the note: God bless you, mate.

The Harmonica Man of Elizabeth Street

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It is lunchtime in Elizabeth Street and the foot traffic is in a
hurry. I am in a hurry, hurrying to my coffee, weaving in and out of
traffic before hurrying back to work. One  pair of legs is stationary
in all this traffic and fret. The legs stand against a shop window,
long legs in shabby grey trousers. My head swivels and my gaze works
upwards past a jacket of crumpled grey to a stubble of stippled beard
on a thin and craggy face.
A hand is raised to the face. It holds a harmonica which is applied to
a toothless mouth. Flabby cheeks inflate and empty, bellows for
music’s fire.
On the footpath at the musician’s feet is an upturned grey flannel
cap. He is a street performer, and as an habitual supporter of the
arts, I reach for a coin, but the tides and eddies of Elizabeth Street
carry me well past the busker before I can contribute.
Next time, I promise myself.
Next time I am in Elizabeth Street, I sight the man in plenty of time
to steer over towards him.  Up close now, I see the same harmonica,
the same hat, the same performance. The hat is empty. So, it seems, is
the harmonica, which is mute despite the musician’s respirations
through it. It appears that his lungs are so wasted away by time and
tobacco that the tides of air pass silently across his instrument. The
man is breathing: that is the totality of his act.
Upon him now, I reach into my pocket for coin, but the fob is empty,
and I have passed.
Next time, I promise myself.
But the next time I am in Elizabeth Street at the busking hour, the
harmonica man is not there. Is he breathing his art elsewhere? Is he
breathing at all?
Weeks pass. The chill of early winter gives way to the deep cold of
the solstice. A wind blows from the Antarctic, driving the coffee
crowd before it in its overcoats and its scarves, into safe cubbies of
caffeine and warmth.
And there, there in the thin grey pants and coat is the mouth
organist, breathing still, breathing inaudibly into his organ of mime.
The winds of winter and the moving feet make the only music in
Elizabeth Street.
On what does he subsist, this insubstantial being? Aged, alone in the
multitude, unfed, barely clad, unheard – where does he go at fall of
night?