Leviathan (47 page)

For me, however, the image of ruin was closer and more intimate. I did not have to contemplate the corruption of public officials or the systemic subversion of liberal institutions to appreciate what lay in wait for a city which seemed to embrace its most dangerous and charismatic criminals so fondly. I had been to enough funerals. And on my last night in the Cross for
Rolling Stone
I got to look the Beast in the eye. I had been on the street for about a week or so and was starting to be accepted by all as a hopeless derelict. Late one night I was standing at the corner of Elizabeth Bay Road having a sandwich and a cup of tea when this fucked-up, ratty-looking guy suddenly beamed down beside me to ask if I wanted to buy some coke. His nose was all smashed in, and dark dried smears of blood caked his unwashed face and clotted his thin, struggling beard.

‘It's good shit, man,' he babbled. ‘Peruvian flake.'

I figured he had been into his own wares, it being considered very poor form amongst your professional dope pedlars to front complete strangers in the middle of the street and commence retailing. He assured me in his weird warp-speed babble that he would not rip me off, I could ask anyone on the strip. He was a good bloke, a great bloke, and his shit was the best. ‘So whattaya reckon?' he said. ‘You wanna buy some a this?' I tried to walk away but he followed me, spruiking his stuff the whole time, his frying eyeballs darting about randomly, not really looking for anything, just lost. It was getting sort of tiresome when some other dealers I had met in a pub across the road came by. The bigger one, whom I knew as Ian, asked what I was doing. When I told him about my ratty little friend he laughed a big generous laugh and told me, somewhat redundantly, that I was on the point of being ripped off. ‘Don't buy it off this useless little prick,' he said. ‘Buy it off me.'

Ian couldn't understand that I didn't really want his coke, icing sugar or baby powder either, and we fell into an argument there on the street. Who was buying what, from whom, for how much. We all had very different ideas on the matter, and our full and frank exchange of views might have gone on for hours if a young Aboriginal boy had not staggered into our magic circle. I recognised him. He was a standout piece of human wreckage in a place where the debris piled up very quickly. I had given him fifty cents a little earlier and he had somehow gathered enough money for a small cap of heroin which he held out to us along with his fit and a ruined arm. He wobbled about on thin scabrous legs which should have folded ten times or more but which always managed to stay locked underneath him. His speech was thick but the insistent arm he pushed forward made his words unnecessary. ‘Do my arm,' he mumbled. Ian and his friend simply ignored him. The psychotic coke dealer wasn't taking any messages on that frequency and so after a while everyone looked at me. I could say I refused because I didn't want to help the boy kill himself, but that would be bullshit. I just didn't want to go near his suppurating wounds or dirty needle.

‘Go and see the girls across the road,' I said. He didn't want to but none of us would stick him and he eventually left. The broken-nose guy quickly returned to the business at hand, but Ian was giving me his stone face. Drug paranoia had locked in and he was away. ‘You're a narc. You're a fucking cop, aren't you? I can't believe I done this. Shit, I made a real mistake talking to you. I can't fucking believe it.'

Well, something had to be said, and I finally settled for ‘Get fucked,' and took off. Things were a bit confused but I remember tearing along for a minute before looking back to find Ian and his mate following me. Then the other idiot popped up again and grabbed my arm. ‘They think you're a cop,' he muttered frantically. I told him it was bullshit, I didn't need it and I was going.

‘Yeah, yeah,' he gibbered, ‘I know you're not a cop, you're the grouse, mate. So … what d'you reckon, you wanna buy some coke off me?'

I blessed his drug-addled greed and told him I would buy his coke if he went back and set the others straight, which he did and got into a fight, while I took off in the opposite direction. I did not return to the Cross for a long time after that. I moved on to Penrith, hanging out with a couple of street kids who were so pleased that someone was taking an interest in their story they offered to pull a few break and enters for me. When they discovered I didn't drive they suggested stealing a car so I could learn. And when a fence accused me of being a narc in the beer garden of their local hotel, they jumped all over him with some fairly credible death threats. This sense of solidarity was one of few positive memories I took away from that story. I was continually meeting winos who would share their last spit-flecked cup of McWilliams port, hookers who were always ready with a spare cigarette or a bite of their Mars Bar, and feral kids who would roll a suit for a couple of hunded dollars and shout all of their friends to a massive blow-out at McDonalds. I was surprised to find such depth of fellow feeling amongst such miserable castaways, but I was not surprised that it never extended to the well-fed, and of course it evaporated at the precise moment you added smack to the equation.

The black kid who needed help to stick himself probably found it. But chances are he was ripped off on the deal. If another junkie volunteered to shoot him up, it would have likely been on the basis of a taste for the shooter, and if they were hanging out as badly as he was, they would have sucked up as much shit from the spoon as they could get away with. I never saw the kid again, unlike Ian who was still spooking around two years later, although he looked cadaverous and used up. I doubt the kid made it through another two weeks, let alone two years. His story, like Helen's, was only ever going to end in one place and on a bright morning in November I followed them there.

 

The main autopsy room of the Glebe morgue runs to sixteen tables but the observation studio where this woman lay contained only one, behind glass, through which the procedure could be observed from viewing tiers. The autopsy room had a blue floor, greyish walls and was dominated by the large stainless steel table around the edge of which ran a moat. A trolley with gloves, towels, brushes, a squeegee and a soup ladle stood ready, near two wheelie bins, one red and one black. The woman, who was aged about fifty according to the staff, caused some initial confusion. It transpired that she had once been a man and had taken the chop. The surgeons had done their jobs well and the unexpected discovery had led to a short delay while the forensic assistants stood around scratching their heads.

A few hurried inquiries established that the woman may have been an IV drug user and possibly a sex worker, which opened up the possibility of Hep C or HIV-AIDS infection. The most likely cause of death, at that point, was an overdose. The doctor decided not to take off the top of her head, as is normal at the start of an autopsy, commencing instead with a long, vertical incision in the abdomen. A few of the other observers – law students on a supervised visit – groaned at this point. One of them, a young woman, eventually apologised and hurried from the room. She was quickly joined by a pale-faced lecturer. The students had not been exposed cold to the obscene intimacy of the cutting room, having had four hours of lectures accompanied by an increasingly bloody and grotesque slide show. The systematic desensitisation was not effective in all cases unfortunately, and the corridor outside the viewing room was soon populated by the more tender or imaginative of the group. I had seen enough dead junkies lying around Darlinghurst over the years to cope with the spectre of the waxy, somewhat unreal figure being progressively dismantled in front of us, but it required an effort of will not to make the intuitive leap to images of dead friends on the same table. A colleague from a magazine had recently overdosed and while the sight of a forensic assistant using a giant pair of pliers to cut through the ribs of Jane Doe was moderately confronting, it was much less disturbing than the unbidden visions which suddenly assailed me of my friend being similarly violated.

I had been shocked by her death, not realising she had been on the gear and never really understanding the attraction in the first place. One friend, another writer, had sneered at my naivety, saying I couldn't possibly take a position unless, like him, I had slipped the spike into my own arm. Others, who had fought and won their own wars with the dragon, still spoke affectionately of its warming balm, its sweet, soft passage through their veins. And of course it was hip. The coolest magazines in the world had conspired with the hottest photographers and models to foist the pornographic charade of heroin chic upon the clueless masses. Sadly though, its incredible Zen cool never did make it off the pages of
Juice
or
The Face
to comfort the dying Aboriginal stick insect who offered me his bruised, ulcerated arm. And search as I might I could find no chic in the green tinge which lay over the skin of Jane Doe, or the rigor mortis which bunched and pointed her toes to the ceiling like the tip of a rhino's horn. It was nowhere to be seen in the heavy, glistening organ block which the morgue staff wrestled from the vast wound in her stomach. It was absent from the hairless, wrinkled slit of her counterfeit vagina which, slightly open, gaped at a roomful of gawking strangers. And the soup ladle with which a nurse scooped the last pools of contaminated blood from her abdominal cavity did not emerge with even the smallest measure of savoir faire dripping from its plastic cup.

This was the terminal point of the city's heroin trade, the unavoidable denouement of institutional corruption and personal debasement. It was, to borrow from Eugene O'Neill, a long day's journey into night. That it should end here, on the stainless steel tabletop, was fitting in a way, as though the city had one last sick joke to play. For this was the morgue where it was revealed in 1996 that nine of the ten forensic assistants had been routinely stealing from the dead. The theft, known to the morgue workers as ratting the corpses, was a long established practice, possibly originating in the 1970s. Cashing in on the reluctance of police to search badly decomposing remains, the morgue attendants developed techniques for searching a body in front of the cops which would alert them to the presence of money hidden, for example, in the deceased's underwear. Concealing the discovery from their squeamish observers, they would return later to claim the plunder. An investigation by ICAC detailed instances of some workers virtually racing to the freezers to ransack bodies which had been checked in by honest colleagues on previous shifts. And while one senior staffer boasted for many years of nabbing a particularly large rat, worth over $1000 dollars, the small change which jingled from the pockets of the dead onto the mortuary floor was not beneath their attention either, often being scooped up and spent on a beer and a burger at the local pub for lunch. Besides the corpse ratting, ICAC exposed a system of kickbacks from a local funeral parlour, whose director palmed the staffers $150 for each grieving family referred. For a city which considered itself inured to the corrupt excesses of its public officers, the ghoulish behaviour of the morgue staff was an unforeseen and even a perversely refreshing experience. In the end there was, it seemed, no outrage so profane it could not come to pass in Sydney.

 

Laissez-faire liberalism constrained government action in many areas when the minimal city was born in 1842. But crime was not one of them. Established as a sinkhole of criminality, the city provided for a defence against its own populace with a nightwatch as early as August 1789. The camp had suffered many months of poultry theft and vegetable larceny, prompting Phillip to appoint twelve well-behaved convicts to a nightwatch which would roam over four districts: the huts and public farm to the east of the Cove, around the brick kilns up the future path of George Street, on the western side of the Cove up to the female convicts' quarters, and beyond them to the Observatory. As Judge Advocate Collins wrote, it would have been better had the first police force been composed of free citizens rather than ‘a body of men in whose eyes, it could not be denied, the property of individuals had never before been sacred. But there was not any choice'. Phillip was happy with the innovation, reporting to London ‘that for three months not a single robbery was committed in the night'. As so often in early Sydney though, trouble arose when the military objected to civilian authority. The power of the nightwatch to stop and detain wandering soldiers was an insult according to the marines' commandant Major Ross; one they would not stand for ‘while they had bayonets in their hands'. Phillip was obliged to stop his little police force interfering with the late night ramblings of the military, despite the fact they were often the very thieves the nightwatch was supposed to suppress. Six marines had been executed in March that year for systematically robbing the public stores.

The systemic nature of the conflict was confirmed during the administrations of Hunter and King, with Lieutenant Colonel Paterson playing the role of spoiler in place of Ross. Hunter had augmented the nightwatch by grafting the ancient English office of constable onto the local scheme, with the towns' neighbourhoods being allowed to vote for their police officers from 1796. These police were to be controlled by magistrates, but Paterson objected to his officers serving in such positions, causing a headache for both Governors, who did not have many suitable candidates to call on. The inevitable feud ensued, with King removing the corps' officers from the bench after Paterson had written a snakey little missive saying no men under his command would be allowed to do anything which detached them from their military duties. King also replaced his military bodyguard with a mounted troop of ‘provisionally emancipated' convicts, commanded by a disgraced officer, transported from India for killing a man in a duel. The bodyguards wore military uniforms, and were referred to as troopers by King, infuriating Paterson. His anger at this slight on the honour of the corps was further aggravated when his complaints were dismissed with a smirk by King, who pointed out that many members of Paterson's honourable regiment were themselves former convicts.