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"Well, what are we doing?" somebody asked as the motley-looking group of about a dozen or so people assembled on the pavement outside the housing office.
"Just go in and take the place over, i suppose." somebody else said.
"Yeah, there's enough of us to intimidate them a bit!"
The receptionist looked really shocked as the mob piled out of the lift into the sterile, airconditioned, fluoro-lit office. They all crowded round the reception desk and Pilar said: "We want to see Robert DeMarik."
"You can't, i'm afraid, he's busy..." The receptionist replied nervously. "If you tell me what it's all about, i'll make you an appointment."
"No. That's no good. We've got to see him now. It won't wait."
"Well i'm sorry, you can't!"
"He's got to be here somewhere." somebody else said. "Let's just wait till he comes this way."
"You can't wait here, i'm afraid." The receptionist was really getting flustered now. "I'll have to call security and get you thrown out."
This is a public office, isn't it?" Pilar said indignantly.
"Yes."
"Well we're the public! And we're not going until we see Robert DeMarik. If we have to wait all day!"
"I'll give him a ring and see when he'll be free. Please sit down on the seats over there."
Pilar looked around the room. At the edges of the public area there were glass partitions with smaller offices behind them. From these offices people were staring at them with surprise and curiosity. She notice one man pick up his phone as the receptionist dialled a number and it became clear that this was DeMarik, the regional manager, who she only knew by name. Well now she knew him by sight too - that was lucky!
"I'm sorry," the receptionist called to her, after putting the phone down. "Mr DeMarik's in a meeting and won't be free all day. But i can make an appointment for him to see you, if you tell me what it's about." She smiled, trying to regain her confidence but not quite succeeding.
"No thanks. We know all about the tricks you get up to in this department. It should be called the 'Department of Homelessness' instead of the housing department! If we tell him why we want to see him, he'll never see us." She looked round to the others who were sitting with her. "Let's make our own appointment!" she said quietly. "Come on, we'll go and see him now."
They all stood up together and followed her into the office she'd identified as DeMarik's.
"I'd like to talk to you for a couple of minutes." she said as they all crowded into his glass office.
"Get out of my office!" he yelled, pointing at the door and going bright red.
"It won't take long." Pilar smiled. "And we're not moving till you do."
"Well i'm not talking till you move!" he shouted, picking up his phone. "I'll call the police and get you thrown out if you don't go now!"
"Come on, there's no need for that." Pilar said, trying to sound friendly and co-operative. "This lot can wait outside while you talk to me. But i wouldn't call the police, the press should be here any minute now." She turned to the others and gestured for them to go out of the office. When they were back outside in the reception area, she sat down in front of the desk and started to talk.
"I wonder what she's saying." Anton said quietly as they watched the conversation through the window. DeMarik was waving his hands about a bit at first, but he calmed down slowly.
After a few minutes, DeMarik picked up the phone and Pilar stood up and walked to the door. It was impossible to tell from either of them what the outcome was.
"We did it!" she said, sitting down with the rest of the group. "He said we can stay till they want to knock it down." At this, everyone cheered and DeMarik looked around to see what was going on. He had a frown on his face, but he didn't look nearly as aggressive as he had earlier on.
She's really got as talent for dealing with these wankers! Anton thought as he looked at Pilar's smiling face. "What now then?" Muz asked. "He's just getting a letter typed up to say we're allowed to be there in case the police come round or anything. And he's said we can stay a minimum of three months and they'll give us a week's notice when they want us out."
After a while, the receptionist handed Pilar a letter.
"Thank you!" she said, and the receptionist gave her a halfhearted smile. She obviously didn't approve of that type of people and their tactics for ovecoming the usually impenetrable wall of protection the housing department's bureaucracy puts round its inhman administration. But Pilar didn't care. All she was interested in was keeping her home and not letting houses just stand empty and rotting while there were a hundred thousand people homeless in Sydney alone. They all stood up and filed into the lift, leaving a shaken, but relieved housing department behind them.
*-*-*
"Anything interesting happening?"
Anton turned his head sharply at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. He'd been absorbed in the activities of a small group of people and hadn't noticed the man sit down on the bench next to him. "Eh?" he said, looking at the large pupils and the lined face of the person who'd spoken.
"Anything happening?" The man smiled, but it was a strained sort of smile. He was obviously hanging out and not feeling too well.
"Oh... Dunno really. I'm just checking it out myself. I've only just got here."
"I'm John." He held out his hand for Anton to shake.
"Anton."
"You here for the same reason as me?" John asked.
"Probably..." Anton shrugged. He didn't feel too comfortable about discussing what he was doing with someone he didn't know. He also had strong feelings about not having dealings with people with big pupils while he was trying to score. You can much more safely trust a junkie who's stoned than a junkie who's hanging out. But somwhow John had an air about him that made Anton feel more inclined to trust him than he should have felt. He didn't know what it was - just a feeling.
"You know someone down here?" John asked.
"Oh, one geezer we scored some prety good stuff off yesterday. But i haven't seen him around yet today."
"You a pom?"
"Sort of. I'm half australian, but i was born in London."
"Been here long?"
"No, only a few weeks. Hardly any time at all really."
"And you're down here already?" John laughed as he watched the individuals and small groups of people wandering by, or standing around talking. As usual there was a feeling of tension about the place and a fair number of people had an air of being invlolved in serious and important business. Everyone was checking out everyone else as they walked past. And the tourists wandered around, seemingly oblivious to it all.
"I'm looking for someone i know." John continued. "You can get a good deal off her. But i haven't seen her yet. She's here most of the time, but like all of them, when you want them, you can never find them! What are you after?"
Anton hesitated before answering. He preferred to keep this sort of thing to himself until he'd picked out someone who he felt like doing business with. It was all too easy to get led down a dodgy sort of path by someone like John. A path that could easily end up with getting severely ripped off. It was always possible to get out of it at any time, but some people are so persistent it can be hard work and you end up wishing you'd never talked to them in the first place.
"A hundred..." he answered, and regretted it straight away. He knew what was coming next and he didn't feel like dealing with it. Half the money was Muz's and he wished she was there to help him score now. He felt quite lost in this strange place, disorientated and totally lacking confidence in his ability to handle himself. He'd been in situations like this before, but that was on the other side of the world, and somehow it made a difference. Here, it felt much more strange than it really was - probably vecause he was still suffering from culture shock after coming from europe. "But half of it's for someone else." he added hastily, as if this gave him some extra magic protection against getting ripped off.
John just nodded and didn't speak for a while. "I'm just getting fifty." he said eventually. "But i know somewhere you can get really good half weights for a hundred and fifty. Much better than anything you'll get around here."
Here we go...! Anton thought. Next minute he'll say 'just give me your hundred and i'll be back in five minutes.' "Oh yeah?" he, said without much enthusiasm. But he couldn't deny he was faintly interested. It was always true the more you got the better the deals were, and going in with John could be to their benefit. But...
"If you're interested," John continued, "we can drive up there. You can wait in the ute while i go in and get it. It's definitely worth it. You won't be sorry..."
He had something about him that made Anton want to trust him. He didn't know what it was, but he did know from experience that these intuitive feelings in this sort of situation often proved to be right. After a couple of minutes he said "Alright, let's go!" There was always an element of risk in any form of street dealing, but unless you took the risks you never really got anywhere. There was a hundred dollars at stake, but then there was the possibility of getting a good contact - which is something every junkie is on the look out for all the time. They stood up and Anton walked with John to where his ute was parked round the corner.
"Are you a builder?" Anton asked as they drove off. There was a small stack of old windows in the back and a tool bag on the floor under his feet.
"Demolition salvage." John replied. "I get things like doors and windows out of old buildings that are being demolished, and sell them to dealers. There's a fair bit of money in it sometimes. You'd be surprised how much demolition is going on in Sydney at the moment. They're pulling everything down. And there's a big market for second hand stuff, it's almost like antiques in a way."
"How come the demolishers don't sell it?"
"They do sometimes, but mostly they're in too much of a hurry to get the place pulled down, because that's where they really make their money. Some of them charge you for taking the stuff out, and some of them just let you tke it. Others won't let you anywhere near the site - then you just have to do it after dark!"
They parked outside a block of flats and Anton gave John his hundred dollars. He stayed in the car and watched him disappear into the doorway of the block. A feeling of nervousness began to rise from his stomach and he wondered if he would get anything back for the money he'd just handed over.
At least he knew John would have to come back, as this was his car. He'd even left the keys in it, maybe as a gesture of goodwill, so Anton could have driven off with it if he'd wanted to. But Anton was hanging out a bit too, and the worry sort of gelled with the mild sick feeling to form something solid and almost touchable inside his chest. He felt his breathing speed up and become shallower and he could feel his pupils getting larger almost to the point of painfulness. But all he could do was sit there and wait.
It seemed like ages. But it wasn't really much more than five minutes before John reappeared from the doorway of the flats and got back in the car.
"Got any fits?" he asked as he started the motor and began to drive away.
"No."
"Have a look under the seat. There might be a couple of clean ones there."
Anton groped around and finally found a packet with three clean syringes in it. They stopped down the road, by a park, and John took out a silver foil packet. He folded some of the white powder into a scrap of paper and put it into his pocket. Then he mixed up some of the rest in a bottle cap, using mineral water to dissolve it, and gave Anton what was left in the silver packet. He filled two syringes and gave one of them to Anton too. They both hit up in the cab of the ute, with cars and people passing as they did it.
"Where are you going now?" John asked after a while.
"St Peters." Anton answered slowly, still feeling the rush hitting him.
"I'll give you a lift if you want. I'm heading over that way
now." But he just sat there, looking out the window, showing no indication that he had any intention of moving in the near future.
"Are you doing anything this afternoon?" he asked eventually.
"Not really, why?"
"Well if you want to earn a bit of money, i've got some work to do and i could do with a bit of help. It's so hard to get motivated when i'm on my own."
"What sort of work?"
"Just carrying things and putting them on the back of the ute."
"Yeah, why not? But i'[ve still got to go to St Peters first." He thought of Muz being really pissed off if he didn't come back with the smack fairly soon. She'd had to make an urgent trip to the dole office to save herself from getting cut off, and he'd arranged to meet her back at Morna's place after scoring.
"Alright." John still didn't show any sign that he was ready to move. Anton shifted in the seat, put his feet up on the dashboard and closed his eyes.
*-*-*
"Have you done any building work or anything before?" John asked Anton when they finally left Morna's place.
It was getting quite late and it seemed almost too late to be going off to start work, but John hadn't appeared to be in any kind of a hurry to get moving. In fact, Anton had almost had to push him out of the door.
They'd sat down and had a cup of tea, while Muz had her hit. Then they sat around for a couple of hours talking, before all having another hit and finisheing off the deal they'd bought earlier on. After that, they sat around talking a bit more, until Anton had decided it was time to get moving if they were going to get anything done at all.
John was a strange person, Anton had concluded, but there was something about him that he liked. He'd been using smack for about fifteen years and had spent quite a few of those years in prison. Bank robbery had been one of his specialities, but he'd got sick of the pressure and the time in jail and decided to go straight - well nearly straight, anyway. He'd done one last bank job to get himself a ute and some tools, as well as a few weeks comfortably stoned - at the end of which, he'd nearly sold the ute to feed his habit. But instead, with immense effort, he'd begun to work for a living.
He didn't really like working much though, and found it hard to actually do it most of the time. Fortunately, it was a fairly lucrative profession - somewhere in the dodgy area between legitimacy and outright crime - and he didn't usually need to work too hard. Now and then he'd have a break from demolition salvage and get into a bit of drug dealing. And every so often, when the pressure of city living and drug taking got too much for him, he'd go bush and dry out for a couple of months.
"Yeah, i've done a bit of building. That was mainly what i used to do in england. When i worked, that is." Anton replied, getting into the ute.
"Good, because we might have to do a bit of pulling things out, and it's easier if you know how to use the tools."
They drove for about fifteen minutes and stopped in a back lane behind a row of terraced houses. The one they parked behind and half a dozen houses around it were obviously empty and abut to be renovated.
"Here take this." John said, handing Anton the tool bag. "And pass it over the fence to me." He climbed over the mess of corrugated iron and wooden fencing that they were parked up against. Anton gave him the bag and climbed over after him.
"Now don't make too much noise, ok, because the neighbours can get a bit jumpy sometimes and we don't want to have to explain what we're doing to the jacks."
"Yeah, alright."
Anton began to wonder what he was getting himself into. He'd gone through a period in London of doing a few burglries - at the peak of a heroin habit - but had never liked the lifestyle. That was what really got him on the road to giving up. Then Sally came into his life and suddenly it had all been over.
"There's a couple of fireplaces in this one." John said as they walked in the open back door of the house. "And some good doors. The windows aren't up to much, but we might grab a couple of sashes if we've got space on the ute. And next door there's a few doors too. The one next to that's got a couple more fireplaces, but i don't know if we'll have room for much more after that."
They worked for about three hours, removing fireplaces, taking doors off their hinges and pulling window frames apart. Then they carried all the stuff they'd "salvaged" to the back fence and heaved it over and onto the back ot the ute. It was fairly easy work for the most part, but getting everything over the fence was a bit of a struggle and they were both glad to get back in the cab of the ute and drive away.
"Who owns those places?" Anton asked after a few minutes.
"Housing commision." John replied. "They just leave them like that for months. If we don't get the stuff somebody else will. And if nobody does, they'll probably wreck it and throw it away anyway. They've got hundreds of empties sitting everywhere. They'll maybe start work on them, probably wreck them a bit to keep squatters out, and they won't look at them again for months. Years sometimes. Let's stop for a beer, eh?"
"Yeah, i could do with a cold drink. A beer would go down really well."
They drove on for a while and then pulled up outside a pub on a busy main road. As they walked in, they both realized how dirty they were and went straight to the toilet to wash their faces and hands.
"It's good to do a bit of work for a change." Anton said to John, as he wiped the water off his face with a paper towel.
"Yeah, i guess so!" John laughed. "I'm a bit jack of it myself!"
They sat at the bar and drank schooners. Anton amused himself for a couple of minutes, wiping the condensation off the side of the glass with his finger, in long straigh strips.
"You lot prefer to drink it warm, don't you?" John said jokingly.
"What?"
"Your beer. They reckon poms eat cold pies and drink warm beer, don't they?"
"It's not really warm, but they never cool it enough over there." Anton answered, suddenly realising what he was talking about. "I hate warm beer, it's disgusting. At least they serve it a decent temperature in this country. English beer's disgusting anyway. Even cold, it would still be almost undrinkable!"
"Come off it, everyone knows poms like their beer warm, you can't expect me to believe that!"
"Well, i'm half australian, if that's any consolation to you. I wouldn't want to completely shatter your illusions!" He smiled and took a swig of his cold beer.
"Yeah? I'm half pom, so that makes two of us! What did you come to this arsehole of a country for anyway>"
Anton shrugged. He'd almost begun to wonder that himself at times, recently. As the novelty wore off, it made less and less sense. He'd known why he wanted to leave england when he left. But even that had become less clear now, as time went by and he began to miss some of his friends. There were even things about London he missed - which was surprising. Just vague things, things he could barely put a finger on. But they were there, nevertheless, tucked away in the depths of his consciousness.
He'd spent long periods of time away from britain before, but that was in europe, and he'd always been going to return eventually. Now, he was an incredible distance from europe and he'd come here without any plans to go back - maybe not ever. It seemed like a bigger jump now than it had before he left.
"I've always wanted to go overseas." John said thoughtfully. "But i've fucked that one up eh? I'll never get a visa for another country now, not with convictions for armed robbery and possession of heroin..." The thought seemed to depress him.
They both sat there staring into their beers, stoned and lost in thoughts of other places. Places never now to be seen. Places maybe never to be seen again.
"I'll come round for you in the morning, then. About nine o'clock, eh?" John said as Anton got out of the car at Morna's place. "And we'll go and sell this stuff." He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. "Seventy- thirty split sound fair to you? I've got the ute and the tools, and have to pay the petrol, after all. There should be a few hundred bucks there but."
"Yeah, sounds fine to me." Anton replied, shutting the door. "See you in the morning then."
*-*-*
Anton sat in the kitchen drinking a cup of strong black coffee. He'd never really been into coffee before, but he'd a cquired a taste for it recently. Strong, black and unsweetened. John was already over an hour late and Anton was beginning to wonder if he was going to turn up at all. What a wast of energy, getting up so early! he thought. He could have slept for at least another hour.
As he looked around the kitchen, which was a bit more messy than usual this morning, his thoughts wandered back to kitchens of squats in London. The last place he'd lived there made this one look luxurious. It had been really old and rundown, with a leaking roof and no cooker - only a little plug-in electric one. But the place before that had been a real high class squat. Freshly renovated, it had new paint on the walls, modern work surfaces, plenty of instant hot water and central heating. Not bad for a squat really, and he'd managed to stay there for over a year.
London. The memories began to flood his mind. Ridley Road market on a winter's afternoon - dark and cold, but somehow cheerful too. The local pub where all his friends gathered every evening, to sit round and talk, drink, play pool, take the piss out of each other and keep warm in winter.
The little bits of London that had some special meaning to him for some reason or another. Like the Thames embankment at Waterloo. That spot on the North London Line where you could see the whole city from the train. The bridge across the canal in Camden, where you could look down at the lock. Oxford Street, totally unbearable and impossible to move in in summer, when all the tourists were there. The City of London, around the Bank, quiet and empty and completely dead on a Sunday afternoon. The foot tunnel under the Thames from the Isle of Dogs to Greenwich, with it's startlingly loud echo. And the red double decker buses, which he'd sat upstairs on so many thousands of times, watching the life of the city going on on the streets below as he travelled.
He hadn't been away from it all that long, but it seemed so distant now, almos like it had ceased to exist. He just wanted to hop on a bus and go to Stoke Newington to visit some friends, but it was just as if it wasn't there any more. Or as if he was in another dimension which there was no way back from.
He wasn't too sure he liked that feeling. It wasn't one of the things he'd thought about when he decided to migrate. Somehow the idea of missing any of the things he'd been leaving behind hadn't occurred to him. The excitement of travel and the prospect of going somewhere different - which was also somewhere where one of his parents came from - had been the only things on his mind.
As he finished his coffee, depression began to set in. He began to wonder where his life was going. What it was all about. Why he was here. Why he was using smack again. Why he wasn't with Sally. None of it seemed to have any answer. In fact, thinking about it only left him more confused. And the confusion just added to the depression.
"Jeez. You look miserable!"
"Eh?" He looked up from the bottom of his coffee cup. It was Muz.
She put an arm round him and kissed him a couple of times. "What's up?"
"Oh, i was just thinking about London and it's made me feel depressed."
"Homesick eh?" Muz ran her fingers through his hair. "What's happened to John? Weren't you supposed to be going off early?"
"Fuck knows..." Anton shrugged.
They made another cup of coffee and sat in the kitchen drinking it and talking about Anton's homesickness. Gradually, everyone else in the house woke up and joined them, but there was still no sign of John.
Just after midday, Anton was about to give up on him when there was aknock at the door.
"Sorry i'm a bit late." He said as he walked in. "Let's go, eh?"
Anton wanted to have a go at him, but he couldn't really be bothered when it came to it. John was obviously hanging out and getting a bit agitated, and Anton felt it wasn't fair to attack him under those circumstances.
"Let's get rid of this stuff quick eh? And go and score." John said as they drove off.
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