Dell stiffens up immediately. She seems to be better than some of the others, one of the youngest nurses here - actually they aren’t officially nurses at all, more like nurse’s aides - but like all the others, she doesn’t want to give out too much information.
‘Not necessarily,’ she replies.
‘Oh, so you mean the numbers are growing?’
‘Heavens no! There aren’t enough beds as it is.’
As not a single soul ever escapes this place on foot, I can only assume they leave in a box. So what are the odds of getting through a fortnight without someone in here dropping dead? Well, as anyone can see they are zero. How many people can boast living arrangements where every two weeks at least one person dies under their own roof ? Yesterday they rolled out another poor soul, right past my door. I tried to close the door quickly in case her spirit came floating in and took up residence right here in the corner of my room. Now it’s midnight and I can’t sleep for thinking about it.
We were at the Daco about three months when we woke one night to hear faint scratching in the outside alcove. The next morning we saw an old bloke walking away and he got out under the fence at the same spot we used. Next evening he was back again. One night it stormed like no tomorrow and the wind rattled the windows. We heard a new sound coming from outside and I looked through a crack in the door and saw the same old bloke sitting on the concrete and he was crying. It was freezing out there and he was wet through. Silhouetted against the city lights you could see the steam coming off his woollen coat. He sat hunched over, his broad back shaking with the sobs.
But that’s not why we let him in. We could see he wasn’t going to go away and eventually the cops would catch on and come and investigate. That meant they’d find out about us as well. So one night when he arrived he found me sitting in his alcove. He just stood there staring. He wasn’t very tall but his big coat, patchy beard and hair tied back in a ponytail made him look dangerous. I was only sixteen after all and I was as nervous as hell.
He just looked at me and said, ‘I stay here.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘and if you keep staying here they’re going catch you for being on private property. The sign says Keep Out.’
He just kept staring and I could hear rattling in his chest.
‘What about you? S’pose you must be above the bloody law then?’
‘I’m not intending to stay here exposed to the world until they come and march me somewhere else.’
‘Well what if I don’t give a fuck about that. You think I care? What are they going to do, take every bloody penny I got? They give you a cup of bloody tea and a bowl of soup and you’re on your bloody way.’ He stuck one of his knobby forefingers under his nose and pushed it roughly from side to side.
I said, ‘You got any friends?’ He just stared. ‘Street friends,’ I added.
‘Street friends? Yeah, Henry Bolte is a good street friend of mine and H. R. Petty is my best pal.’
I’d heard of Bolte, our Premier - I’d seen him on TV.
‘Who’s H. R. Petty?’ I said.
‘Christ you bloody kids are a waste.’ He looked right through me.
‘I live in here,’ I said thumbing over my shoulder. The guy stared at the big wooden door padlocked shut.
‘Me and someone else. We can get you in if you don’t fuck up our living arrangements.’ I said the ‘f ‘ word because he did, and I thought it might suggest some sort of solidarity. He looked up at the building as though seeing it for the first time.
I didn’t look at him.
‘You want to sleep in there or not?’
‘I’m not getting mixed up with no thieves and bloody pickpockets,’ he said at last. I stood up and he followed me around to the cellar door. He waited for me to get in first. Behind me he said, ‘Horace Petty is our Minister for Housing - Petty by name, petty by nature.’
I told him we were Jack and Kitty and the old guy said his name was Dr Milo.
‘Doctor? You mean like helping people …’
‘I mean like PhD. You know what that is? Course not. It’s a qualification; the idea is you think of a topic, study it real hard, write a hell of a lot of stuff down, pass it across the desk of some bloody faculty or other and then you get to join them. They give you a framed bloody certificate, a new title at the front of your name and some letters on the back and away you go.’
I stared at him. ‘You did that?’
He looked around the big empty space and his voice echoed. ‘Don’t believe every bloody thing you hear son, OK?’
He said Milo was a nickname and it made me think maybe we should have changed our names as well but it was too late once we’d introduced ourselves. He also said to drop the ‘doctor’ - if we were going to share a house, it should be on a first-name basis. Then Milo stayed on and we began to look forward to our times together. He never came up to our room and we never went into his but sometimes late into the night we’d all sit down on the floor in our ‘Office’ and just talk. The Office was an area near the main entrance, sectioned off by a glass partition and a low wall of wooden hutches. Those hutches each had a label on them, things like pending, returns and hp&l and we would take it in turns thinking up explana-tions for those words. pending was the sound biros make when they hit the polished floor.
Like us, Milo was good at telling stories. One night we sat in the dim light of the street and Milo told us about an astronomer who spent his life in a government observatory monitoring sunspots and events on the surface of the sun. By night he studied the stars. Immediately it took me back to Preston and my planets poster - up until my sixteenth birthday I felt I’d been doing the same thing in the confines of my own bedroom. Milo said the astronomer knew the stars and planets better than he knew people and places on earth. Then one day the government closed the observatory and reopened it as a tourist attraction. The astronomer was out of a job and suddenly realised he had the same bewildering relationship to the world that ordinary people had to the cosmos.
‘That astronomer disappeared right up his own pipe of prisms and lenses,’ he said.
It was so dark in the ‘Office’ that night we could hardly see each other.
‘You were the astronomer,’ Kitty said.
‘Well, who bloody knows?’ he replied, his usual gruff voice almost a whisper. ‘Who can say what any of us are. Sometimes we’re one thing, sometimes we’re another.’
Kitty stared at his dark form wide-eyed. ‘Couldn’t … couldn’t the astronomer get another job?’
‘Who wants an old astronomer? Who wants an old anything? Once you hit fifty there’s a shitload of people the same age as your own children ready to take over all the positions. Anyway, what’s it matter? Freedom to make your own decisions - that’s what we need - and to ponder the big questions.’
Milo often pondered the big questions. Like why we say ‘the sun is going down’ when
