Earthly Delights (13 page)

‘At least look at the prospectus,’ he said, thrusting it into my hand.

‘I certainly will. We must do this again sometime. Good night, James,’ I said, and walked out with a large glossy folder which I intended to place neatly in the next bin I passed.
James must be losing his grip. The idea that a smaller company can do anything but weep silently as a larger company has its way with its assets is ridiculous. And hadn’t James learned that if a smaller player—like Australia—buys into, say, a big English insurance company, the person who is going to be taking in washing by New Year is not going to be the big English company. Asymmetric information. They know more about you than you know about them. The legal term, I believe, is ‘screwed’.

I found that I had walked home still holding the prospectus so I dumped it on my table as I greeted the cats, changed my clothes, rang Meroe and reported all safe, and sat down to wait for Daniel.

Poor Holliday! What a terrible thing. I resolved to go and at least say hello to him tomorrow. To have a child die was bad, but to have her disappear—that must be appalling. I was very sorry for him. I didn’t even know his first name.

Somewhere in the back of my mind was a line of poetry which went with something Daniel had said. ‘I’ll come to you at midnight.’ I rummaged in the books until I found it. A worn poetry book from school. ‘I love Duran Duran’ on the cover. I flipped through it until I found the poem. I had loved it as an adolescent, for its black, romantic tragedy.

‘The Highwayman’ by Alfred Noyes. ‘Look for me at midnight, I’ll come to you at midnight, though Hell should bar the way’ said the highwayman to his lover, and when it all went wrong and Bess had warned him with her death, they ‘shot him down on the highway, down like a dog on the highway, and he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.’

Unexpected tears burned the back of my throat. Something was happening to me. I had felt more, and more mixed emotions in the last few days than I had in years.

I closed the book and put it away. I thought I could feel—Meroe would be able to tell me how—the raised level of tension in the building. One man mourning a lost daughter. Meroe and
me worried about a madman. The usual troubles of young women from Kylie and Goss. I wondered how they were getting on with seducing Jon. Was that Kylie’s project? I couldn’t recall. I hoped Daniel was going to turn up soon, because I was falling asleep. I wasn’t used to being awake at this hour.

He buzzed exactly at midnight and I went down, carrying the sack of bread. I had reverted to overseas travelling style and was wearing my keys and my money in a money-belt—so much easier than a purse and nothing to snatch. And it is always useful to have both hands free.

Daniel hugged me. I would never get used to this. I gave him the sack and he led me down the lane to where a bus was parked. It was larger than an ice-cream van, though it had the same sort of servery window, and seemed to contain a lot of people. Several of them were cutting up bread so I joined in. We appeared to be making good thick cheese sandwiches. The woman with the cheese smiled at me. She was wearing a blue uniform and had on a blue veil. A nun.

‘I’m Sister Mary,’ she said. ‘Nice to meet you. Your first time?’ she asked, sliding a pile of perfectly sliced cheese over to me.

I slapped the sandwiches together. I had made a lot of sandwiches in my time. I admitted it was my first mission.

‘Everyone gets soup and a sandwich,’ she said. ‘Anyone who wants to talk to the lawyer, that’s Phil.’ A young man in a
NOT IN MY NAME
t-shirt grinned at me. ‘The nurse tonight is Mrs Palmer.’ A stout old lady gave me an assessing look. She was wearing a nurse’s uniform as though she had been born in it. Upside-down watch and all. I would put my diagnosis in her hands any day. She was the sort of nurse that young doctors pray for, rely on and, if they have any gratitude, buy chocolates for. She radiated certainty.

‘Our social worker and miracle worker is Jen,’ continued Sister Mary. ‘She can wedge a client into a lodging house with pure force of character. And the grace of God, of course. You and I are the hander-outers. Finished with the cheese? I’ve a whole plate of corned beef over there. Don’t forget the pickles. Oh! You must be the baker!’ she took my hand in both of hers. ‘You make very good bread,’ she told me. ‘And to feed the poor is one of the corporeal works of mercy. God is watching and will reward your charity,’ she added, and picked up a long ladle to stir the soup.

Jen was packing sandwiches into greaseproof paper and then into paper bags. She smiled sideways at me.

‘If God is watching, so is the city council,’ she told me. ‘We have to be very careful where we stop and for how long. Keep Melbourne Clean would love to put us off the road. They’ve already tried to deregister the bus, claiming illegal modifications. That didn’t work. Then they letterboxed all the businesses on our route trying to make them ban us from stopping. Then Phil told them that this was a public thoroughfare and therefore they couldn’t stop us.’

‘The old Queen’s High Road argument,’ said Phil. He seemed very young to be a lawyer. ‘As long as we are keeping the peace and not causing a public nuisance we’re in the clear.’

‘The key to that being “public nuisance”,’ put in Sister Mary. ‘Our clients are, by nature, people with problems, and they do tend to drop litter and make noise. So we have taken to the back streets and we always go around with a garbage bag and clean up before we move on. So far, we’ve survived.’

‘All ready?’ asked Daniel at the wheel.

‘All secure,’ Sister Mary sang out. I wondered how old she was. It was always hard to tell with nuns. She was plump and rosy and clear skinned. Forty, perhaps?

The bus moved cautiously out of the lane and made a quiet
left-hand turn. Apart from steadying the soup urns, everyone just sat still. Eyes were closed. Everyone was gathering their strength. It was like watching soldiers being transported into battle, without the CNN commentary. Daniel drove very nicely for someone trained to drive by an army.

We stopped in a byway just behind Swanston Street and there were already people waiting for us.

What shocked me most was how normal they looked. I expected homeless people to look like—well, Jase, thin and dazed. I handed out my first cup of soup and a sandwich to a man in a flannel shirt who said, ‘Ta, love,’ in a strong English accent and who could have lived next door in any suburb where people garden or repair their own cars. The next was a thin girl on teetering heels followed by a sullen teenager with bad skin and blue hair. A young man took two sandwiches and two cups of soup and then the bundle on his back stirred and cried and I realised it was a baby.

Then they became a blur. Just hands; thin hands, pale hands, dark hands, old hands. I supplied them all. Some sat down in the little square to eat and drink and come back for a refill. Some walked off quickly, away from the crowd. One boy in a hat made of kitchen foil talked, all the time, to someone I couldn’t see, begging to be allowed to eat. ‘Come on, just a bit of soup, just a bite of sandwich?’ he pleaded. ‘I’m so hungry,’ he said. I looked at Sister Mary.

‘Poor boy,’ she said. ‘He’s schizophrenic and the voices won’t let him eat.’

‘Why isn’t he in hospital?’ I asked.

‘No room,’ said Sister Mary. ‘Most of them have been closed down and the land sold for apartments. The last government said that the mentally ill would be cared for by the community. Well, dear, this is how the community does it.’

‘What about his parents?’

‘He’s big and strong and violent and they’re afraid of him,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘He’s all right if he takes his medications but they make him feel slow and stupid so he doesn’t take them and then he gets into this state. We’ll see if Mrs Palmer can help. She knows him.’

Mrs Palmer called from the van: ‘Kane?’ and the boy in the shiny hat came to her as though drawn by a string. Mrs Palmer looked at him severely through her glasses.

‘Your medications?’

The boy fumbled in his pocket. Mrs Palmer took the bottle and shook out several tablets. She held them on the palm of her hand as I had once held sugar for a nervous horse.

‘Take them,’ she ordered. ‘Now. And your soup. Eat your sandwich. Then there will be chocolate.’

The voices, it appeared, liked chocolate. The boy gulped the tablets, drank the soup and ate his sandwich. Then Mrs Palmer gave him a lump of honeycomb chocolate. He did not thank her but wandered away. She shrugged a shoulder.

‘Sometimes it works,’ she said. ‘If they have had a stern authority figure in childhood. If I can catch him for the next few days we can stabilise him. The chocolate is a very useful gift. Donated from the manufacturers. So kind.’

‘And tax-deductible,’ I said. Once an accountant, always an accountant. Mrs Palmer patted my shoulder. ‘You’re going to fit right in,’ she told me.

Several people were waiting to talk to Mrs Palmer and three wanted legal advice from Phil. In this street lighting, he looked about fifteen. I must be getting old. I made myself useful, going around with the garbage bag and collecting litter. We wouldn’t want Keep Melbourne Clean to cavil at the mess we made feeding the homeless, would we? I didn’t like them already.

The young man with the baby was talking to Sister Mary. A young woman was slumped against him. Her eyes were unfocused. ‘We’ve been on the emergency list seven months,’ he said. ‘She’s getting worse.’

‘Book her in for a detox,’ said Sister Mary gently. ‘You can’t keep sleeping in a car. It isn’t good for the baby. What happened to the last money you saved for a deposit on a flat?’

The young man didn’t reply. Sister Mary went into the van and handed over a big packet of nappies and a shirt. ‘Wear the shirt to see the housing office,’ she said. ‘Better let Nurse look at the baby. See you next time, dear.’

‘It’s outrageous that he can’t get somewhere to live,’ I exploded. Sister Mary grabbed me and drew me aside.

‘Not as easy as that,’ she said. ‘God help them. The wife is a heroin addict and will do anything for the man. He also uses drugs. Every time they get close to having enough money for a deposit, one or other of them spends it on a binge. If he books her into hospital to detox, he’ll lose the money he gets from her prostitution. And if the welfare authorities notice that both of them are addicts and sleeping in a car, they’ll take the baby into care, and the baby is the only thing—apart from drugs—that they care about.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ I said. My righteous indignation vanished and I felt as if I had missed a step.

‘Don’t make hasty judgments,’ she said severely. ‘Take one case at a time, and never lose faith.’

‘Yes, Sister,’ I said meekly, quite out of my depth. I picked up more papers and we set off again. Some of the people waved. Most of them didn’t. I didn’t know what to feel so I sliced more bread and made more sandwiches as we chugged gently up the hill to the next stop, the Treasury Gardens. Home of the Big Day Out.

This was a Bad Night In. Someone was lying on the grass. Several people were gathered around him. Mrs Palmer moved with that deceptive speed that nurses learn in their first year. They aren’t actually running but they’d pass Cathy Freeman on the flat. I saw her shake her head.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Cold. Anyone know him?’ she asked the crowd, who were melting away fast. Some were even running for the trees.

‘Move the van around to the other side of the gardens, Daniel, or we’ll lose all our clients,’ said Sister Mary. ‘I’ll stay here and call an ambulance.’ She hopped down, alone in the middle of the night, with perfect confidence.

‘Would you like me to stay with you?’ I offered.

She turned her blithe face to me. ‘No need, dear. Nothing will harm me. And perhaps I can get in a few prayers before the ambulance arrives.’

When I looked back I saw her, kneeling down beside the dead man, folding her hands in prayer. What a woman. Jen shook her head.

‘She’s amazing, especially when you consider that she’s nearly seventy,’ she said. ‘Here we go. I’ll help with the soup. Quite a crowd tonight,’ she said. ‘They’ll all be hyped because of the death. Stay calm,’ she advised.

We were mobbed. People were yelling and someone was screaming. The bus actually rocked on its wheels. Daniel got out of the van and walked along until he was exactly in the middle of the crowd.

Then he slapped his hand on the side of the bus, so hard that there was an echo, and silence fell.

‘We’ve got soup and sandwiches,’ he said, loudly and slowly. ‘And we’ve got advice. We’d love to help. But we can’t hear you when you yell and there’s always another place we
can be. You are not the only hungry mouths in Melbourne tonight.’

The silence held. I handed out food and soup as fast as I could and Daniel marshalled the fed away from the hungry. An old man brought his sandwich back.

‘It’s got pickles,’ he said. ‘I can’t eat pickles, they give me wind.’

‘Cheese?’ I asked.

‘It gives me gripes,’ he said.

‘Sorry. It’s cheese or corned beef, or just bread.’

‘Gimme some cheese,’ he grumbled.

My next client felt he had to apologise. ‘Don’t worry about him, Miss, he’s always going crook,’ said a middle-aged man. ‘He was a doctor before the grog got him, they say. Ta,’ he added, and took his food away.

It was horrible and fascinating and after a while it did begin to blur. Was it Flagstaff where I saw the two children, wrapped in the one blanket, asleep beside the doting father who had kidnapped them? Or maybe Treasury. A garden, certainly, which also had a camp of men brawling around an illegal fire, drinking something out of a can which reeked of methylated spirits. And why were so many of the homeless so young? Didn’t they have homes to go to? What had happened to their parents? Didn’t they care where that skinny trio, boys who could not have been over thirteen, spent their nights? Where did they spend their nights? And could I cope with the answer to that question?

And all the time I was watching Daniel as he moved among the lost and strayed, talking, comforting, giving out chocolate and hugs. The skinny girls loved him and would fall into his embrace as though he was the teddy bear which they should still have had. In three hours I was worn out, body and
soul, when the van drove back into the side street to meet the next shift.