‘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 for centuries we’ve known that the sun hasn’t moved at all.
Me, I liked calculating things. The only subjects at school I ever liked were maths and science. I liked them because they came easy to me - even though I hated our teacher and the way he, in turn, hated the students and his mediocre job. One day we were given a long and protracted formula for calculating the surface area of complex shapes - I think the idea was to put us off the subject forever. I spent the class reinterpreting the given formula, simplifying it to something streamlined and beautiful - even if it only worked for particular types of shapes. That little misdemeanour cost me four enthusiastic lashes across the palm with Carter’s yard of hardened leather. And so I learned an important lesson: what is deemed correct by authority should not be tampered with.
But it never dulled my interest in calculation. When we lived at the Daco I worked out there were 5210 bricks in the end wall, allowing for the double brick, the windows and the taper to the ceiling, and that the total weight was something near 24 tons - each brick approximately 7 pounds multiplied by the total and including the mortar which has a calculable length and thickness but is slightly less dense than the bricks themselves.
Why do I do it, you might ask? Well, a wall is just a wall, a starry sky is just a starry sky - until you start to investigate its essence, and then it becomes nothing short of a miracle. I found my miracles by calculation, Milo found his by pondering the big questions. But Milo didn’t want answers, he just wanted to dwell on the mysteries and meaning of life rather than the mundane, rather than the hack of ambition which he said had ambushed all those people rushing about outside.
We never talked about the people who might have worked in the Daco - beyond speculating on what the letters in that name stood for: Daft Accountants Company; Dead Animal Collection Office. And sometimes we sat for hours in the silence of that big old Daco building just thinking about things and watching fine dust float in the light. There was no forgotten past lingering in that massive old factory. Some people think that the spirit of all that’s happened is still somehow embedded in the brickwork or emanating off the old dusty desks pushed against the wall. But we lived there for a year and I can tell you it’s no more than a big hollow chamber. You occupy that chamber like a crab inside a seashell until one day it starts to feel like a part of you.
Just had a visit from the doctor. I never called for him and I don’t have any more ailments than usual but there he was just the same. I think he was visiting the old geriatric next door and just looked in on me in passing. Of course right behind him I had a very large nurse looking on - as if it’s got the slightest to do with her!
‘Could you stand up for me?’ the doc says.
‘No,’ I reply, ‘I don’t think I’m quite up to that yet.’