It was just after midnight as Heather watched the man stagger out of the club, through the small side door that led out into the alley; the one which was used for deliveries and taking out the empties and garbage. He had been leaning against the bar for the past two hours, drinking and smoking steadily. Talking to no one, and apparently lost in his own world of demons and pain. She took one more pull on her cigarette, dropping it into the empty bourbon tumbler on the stained table in front of her, then she stood and picked up her handbag.

The man sitting with her looked up, "Hey, where are you going?" he said. Then ran his hand across his thinning hair, which he kept oiled and combed over the barren crown of his wide, pale head, in unhappy denial of his advancing baldness.

"I've got to head off now," Heather said, as she looked down at him. He appeared to be in his late forties. His oversized knee length shorts would have looked ok on a man half his age, and the Hawaiian shirt belonged in an advertisement for Gold Coast condominiums. When he approached Heather a couple of hours earlier asking if he could buy her a drink, she had agreed reluctantly, then immediately regretted it as he launched into a diatribe of conceited drivel. She had hardly said a word.

"Wait up. I've been buying you drinks half the night and now you up and leave without a kiss my ass? What the fuck is that about?"

"Here," Heather said as she reached into her bag and dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the table, "have one on me Elvis." She walked away without as much as a backward glance. She knew this guy was not the sort to cause a fuss. He was out on the sly, leaving his wife at home with the kids, and an assurance that he was out with some mates, shooting pool and having a few beers. The last thing he wanted was trouble. She walked away leaving the poor schnook complaining to nobody in particular about what a bitch she was.
Heather walked out of the front door, turned right and walked quickly toward the alley. She turned and looked back down the street in case Hawaiian shirt had followed her out. He hadn't, he was already making a move on one of the pole dancers who had just finished her shift.


Sam stopped and looked around, trying to remember where he was, what he was doing here, where he had been going to if anywhere. The bare light bulb over the steel-clad door, cast a dim yellow glow in an intimate circle around him, lighting him up like a broken down performer on the stage of failed lives. He squinted down the dark alley towards the bright and noisy street, where people passed by oblivious of his presence. Then he turned his gaze back at the door trying to remember in what direction he was heading. He pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his jeans pocket and tried to light one. As he concentrated on uniting the small blurred flame with the end of the cigarette, he lost his balance and fell sideways into the empty crates stacked against the wall by the door. He tried twice to get back up on his feet, but only managed to fall hard against the rough brick wall that smelled of stale beer and piss. The ground around him glittered with tiny shards of broken bottle and crushed vials; the detritus of countless broken lives and unlived dreams.

It was one of those alleys you can find in any large city, anywhere in the world. It doesn't matter what country you're in, what language is spoken, they all look the same, all smell the same, and they all have that feeling of universal human degradation and hopelessness that transcends language and race. It is where the homeless try to sleep, where the desperate junkie comes to shoot up, where a two-bit whore will give a blow job or a quick fuck against the foetid wall, and where Sam has stumbled and fallen face down, breathing in the rank air of the gutter.

"What the fuck..." His words incoherent and spoken to the night, to the evidence of human frailty that lay mocking him from all sides, and to the memory of who he used to be. He was coming undone, but felt powerless to stop the downward spiral he was riding. He could have been anything, many people had told him so, but he had ended up as nothing. Just one more piece of garbage laying in an alley amongst the crushed vials and used rubbers.


Heather looked down at him, her eyes held a mixture of empathy and scorn. She had only come out to warn him of the dangers of getting so pissed in areas like this. To tell him that there were vultures waiting in the wings to roll drunks, to relieve them of their wallet, watch and anything else they could liquidate on the street before drifting back into the shadows.
Now here he was face down on the bloody ground, and why did she give a shit anyway. She hesitated, wondering if she should just leave him there, mind her own business and go on her way. She looked down at him again and kicked his leg. Nothing. She kicked him again a couple of times, harder this time.

"Hey. Hey, wake up." When he didn't respond, she turned and walked away, her arms folded tightly across her chest, head tipped downward, her mouth a firm red cut.

As she stepped back into the street, a group of a half dozen rowdy young men were passing, causing her to take a couple of steps back to avoid them, and end up in the alleyway again. One of them, the one wearing a red football shirt and baggy shorts, slowed and looked at her.

"Looking for business are you?" he shouted above the noise of the street.

"Piss off," she hissed, folding he arms tighter still.

"C'mon Kev, she's older than ya fucking mother," laughed another, pulling red-shirt along by the sleeve.

Heather stood and watched them go, then turned and looked back down the alley at Sam. He was still on the ground. She heaved a resigned sigh, looked out at the street again, then back again at Sam. She groaned inwardly as she walked back into the darkness. Bending down beside him, she shook him by the shoulder, and said quietly, "Been raising hell again mate?"

He stirred as she reached and took the crumpled cigarette pack from his hand. She withdrew two cigarettes, lit them both, put one between his lips and drew heavily on the other. He squinted, trying to focus on her face, not knowing who she was through the alcoholic mists of his fragmented mind. He pushed himself up on one elbow, then took the cigarette from his lips, looked at it quizzically, then looked back up, staring at Marie's calm and loving face which was smiling down at him. Her lips were moving but he could not hear her words. The cigarette dropped from his fingers as he raised his hand to touch her face, to brush once more the cheek that he had kissed so tenderly so long ago. As he reached out to her, her face withdrew, getting more and more distant as he fell back, finding at last the deep oblivion he had been seeking.

"Ok, let's get you home," Heather said, and then left him laying there face down amongst the broken glass and cigarette butts while she walked back up to the street to hail a cab.

"Give me a hand to get him into the back."

"He'd better not chunder in my cab lady. If he does it's another twenty five for the clean."

"Yeah, whatever."

"Never mind yeah, I'm serious. He spews it's another twenty five bucks for the clean."

"Alright alright, just give me a fucking hand to lift him," arsehole.

"That's more than he'll be giving you tonight," the cabbie laughed.

Fucking smart-arsed wop, thought Heather, but she outwardly ignored him as they dragged and bundled the comatose Sam into the back seat of the ageing white Mercedes. It already smelled as if somebody had puked in it, but she didn't say anything. She regretted not calling her regular cab company that had clean silver cars and smartly dressed drivers. Then she regretted getting involved at all.

"Camera Bay," she said as the driver climbed in and started the engine. He pulled out into the late night traffic without looking. The car that he cut in front of sounded its horn and the cab driver responded with a finger in the air and a quick 'fuck you!' shouted into the clammy night air.

"Make that Mosman. Two twenty two Bridge Street," Heather said, as she realised that she was not even sure if he did live at the marina in Camera Bay. Even if he did, she would never be able to get him down the flight of steps in this state.

"Sure honey," the cabbie responded, exposing his yellow grey teeth in the rear view mirror.

Heather looked up at the licence hanging from the tatty, stained sun visor. It identified the driver as Marco Bagliatelli.

Just like I thought, a fucking wop who thinks he is God's gift to all women. Tosser.

The cab waited at the lights to turn into William Street, which then leads down to the Harbour Bridge, which will then take them across to the north shore and on into Mosman.
Heather looked out at a couple of skinny hookers working the corner. One of them, a kid of no more than sixteen or seventeen, was dressed in a tight fitting halter top, a tiny denim mini skirt, a pink g-string, and knee high white, patent leather boots. Whenever a car slowed near her, she would bend over exposing her arse, in an effort to draw a trick from one of the grubs that crawled those kerbs in the small hours before dawn.
She thought back to a time when her dress and behaviour was just like this kid. A time when she would do whatever it took to make enough money to get a fix. In and out of cars half the night, driving to industrial estates or blind alleys, where she would bring the guy off as fast as she could, so she could get back to the corner and on to the next one. New cars that still smelled new even if the John didn't. Old cars littered with trash that told her about the character of the guy she was about to suck off. Then there were the panel vans fitted out just for screwing whores. They were at least comfortable, even if the owners were weird, with their black satin sheets and Barry White CDs. What did she care? She just laid back and opened her legs, and detached her mind from what was happening to her body. She thought only about the money, and the fix it would soon bring her.
In those days, drugs were the centre of her world, her whole world, as they were for most of the girls working the streets around The Cross. She had started using when she was just fifteen. By the age of sixteen, she was hooked, and like so many others turned to working those same streets where she scored her drugs as the way to pay for them. It didn't seem wrong to her then, and even now, she saw nothing fundamentally wrong with sex as a tradable commodity. A guy needs pussy, a girl needs a fifty. It was straight commerce in her mind. It was the bastards that made money from pimping and protection that she loathed. Those that pushed drugs to young kids barely in their teens, creating a market for their evil dope, meth or crack. It had been that way for her as it had for her sister Carol, and many of their schoolmates. Taking drugs seemed cool to some, an escape from troubled reality for others. She had seen so many young kids take to the streets recently, and she felt like shaking them, telling them to 'wake the fuck up' before you end up dead. Just another stat, or like any one of the hundred burnouts that lurked waxen faced around the streets of The Cross, begging for change, and who can say which is worse. She'd lost count of the number of girls she had known that ended up dead, accidental overdoses, suicide when it all becomes too much to bear, beaten to death by dealers they can no longer pay, the unrelenting living-death of AIDS, or like her sister Carol, by coke cut with poison. She would avenge that one day.

The lights changed, the cab pulled away and she was jolted back into the present.

I need a new life!