Sitting on his chair at his table, his grey stringy hair and his rounded shoulders. A shirt or two on a coat hanger, or two, hanging in the window. Five or six tins of things – milo, tomatoes, coffee, soup – in small stacks in his room. A picture in a frame on the wall. I’d walk past his place most days. I’d see him through his window, in his room, his grey stringy hair, his shoulders rounded, leaning over his table with his pen in his hand. Sometimes just standing, or combing his hair. He’d walk up the street heading home carrying a plastic supermarket bag or two, or three, with supermarket things in it, or them, most days.
Then I didn’t see him for a while. I saw him again a few weeks later when I was walking up Mitchell Street one day. There was a young woman with him who had curly hennaed hair and was wearing black-rimmed glasses. He had a suitcase in either hand and was about to load them into the boot of an old orange Datsun. The back seat was piled with boxes. I walked past his place. I looked through the window. There were no stacks of tins, no table, no chair and a light-coloured rectangle on the wall where his framed picture had been. When I was halfway to the supermarket the orange Datsun drove past me. The curly-haired woman was driving. He was in the passenger seat, his rounded shoulders, his grey stringy hair combed back. The next day, furniture and mattresses and stuff were in the garden of his rooming house. I took a wooden chair with a blue seat home. I saw two people carry a table down the street. The house which was his home, a big old rooming house, in which quite a few people had lived, sold for $2.8m.
Written by Moira Burke