Vince Reynolds was someone I’d met through Steve. Once we were all happy couples—Vince and Judy, Claudia and Steve. We’d go out for dinner, play pool, maybe go to the movies. I’d seen Vince once or twice since he and Judy split up but not recently. Steve and Vince had known each other for years, they used to go abseiling and caving with the university Speleological Society. But I hadn’t called him up to discuss outdoor pursuits. At the time I met him he worked at the Youth Crisis Centre at Kings Cross. He knew as much about runaway children as anybody. We were meeting near the El Alamein Fountain in the heart of the Cross. There were places we could sit and talk and it was about five minutes walk from the Crisis Centre itself.
I got there first. I was up early anyway. I’d been to see Sofia Theodourou at the morgue and now had a small Bandaid over the place near the crook of my elbow where she’d taken blood. I didn’t mind the short wait, in Kings Cross there was always plenty to look at. In the daytime all kinds of people hung out at the Cross, from film makers to street people. But they didn’t hang out together. Unless one was using the other as their subject. Each group seemed to have their own map of the area. One group’s main thoroughfares were the other group’s back alleys.
I saw Vince walking towards me. White T-shirt with big sleeves, blue jeans, shiny, shoulder-length hair. He looked so clean he almost glowed. He broke into a broad grin when he saw me. ‘How’re you doing?’ he greeted me.
‘Great. Couldn’t be better,’ I lied. ‘See that guy over there, the one all the others are listening to? It’s Bruce Malone, isn’t it?’
Vince turned to see where I was looking. ‘Yeah. I’ve seen him round here before.’
Bruce Malone was one of the high fliers of the eighties, one that managed to avoid going to jail. Old developers never die, they just go quiet for a while then turn up somewhere else. Not that Malone was old. In fact, he looked in pretty good shape. He was surrounded by a bevy of male beauties. Too casually but carefully dressed to be real estate agents, no suits so they weren’t businessmen, a little too healthy to be drug dealers.
‘How’s life in the education system?’ Vince had done his time at the Youth Crisis Centre in the Cross and was now working three days a week as a school counsellor.
‘Calmer. Flatter,’ he said after a while. ‘More successes but less rewarding, if you know what I mean.’
‘Who do you reckon those blokes are?’ I said. One of the male beauties was now standing out in the middle of the street holding a mobile phone up to his ear as if it were a comforter. The thumb of the other hand was casually hooked into the pocket of his pleated trousers. Must get better reception that way. Not that I have anything against mobile phones, I have one myself. But at least I turn mine off when I’m out in company.
‘They don’t look like social workers,’ commented Vince. ‘Film Industry?’
‘Not enough beards. Well, not for feature films. Maybe it’s Advertising.’
A big pink Thunderbird convertible came shimmering down the street. The driver had long blond hair, a headband and wrap-around sunglasses. He stopped in front of the group and let off a guy in a billowing white shirt, slim black trousers and with a video camera. In the end we were both right. They were in Advertising and they were making a video.
Further down the street was a tall brown-skinned girl who couldn’t have been much more than fifteen, the same age as Madalena. Her face was still plump and smooth. A recent arrival.
I told Vince that I had a case involving a runaway girl and that I wanted to pick his brain.
‘What exactly do you want to know?’ he asked.
‘Nothing exactly. Everything in general. Give me an idea of the terrain.’
‘First of all, is it a runaway or a throwaway?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Runaways are the kids whose parents—one or both—want them back. Throwaways, the parents don’t want them. Mum and Dad split up, Mum gets a new boyfriend. She’s spending time with the new man, she doesn’t want the kid hanging round. Or the new man doesn’t want the kid around. Kid feels insecure, gets a bit difficult, things get rough and it just snowballs.’
A man was standing in front of the girl now. A man wearing jeans and a windcheater. He asked her something, she answered. But she didn’t look at him.
Vince continued, ‘I had a client at the Centre, a guy fifteen or sixteen. He had a few problems but not radical. He comes home from school one day and all the locks are changed. He can’t get into his own house. So that night he sleeps in the park. The next day he rings his mother at work and tells her about the locks. The mother says, “So?” The kid says, “I’m going to commit suicide if you don’t let me come home.” “Do it,” says the mother, and hangs up. So he came to the Crisis Centre.’
The girl got up and walked down the street with the man.
‘He did. They don’t all do that straightaway. The Crisis Centre is just that. We deal with crises, not the long term. It’s temporary accommodation only. Three nights maximum while we try to find them somewhere else—long or medium term refuges in the suburbs. Some kids come to us as the last resort, they can’t take life on the streets anymore, they want to come back in.’
Vince was talking in the present tense, as if he was still there. ‘You never really left, did you?’ I said softly.
He’d been doing it without realising it. ‘You see stuff there you never forget,’ he explained. ‘There are kids that I …’ his voice trailed off. ‘Your whole value system changes, the way you measure success. You might think that you have succeeded when the child is restored to her family and they’re all living happily ever after. No. Up here success is when you get them to practise safe sex, to use the needle exchange.’
She was back, the girl on the street. Licking an Icy Pole, getting the bad taste out of her mouth.
Vince was launched now, talking animatedly. ‘Think of it as a holiday camp. Friendships are formed but they’re transient. The kids get close to each other quickly because for many of them, they only have each other. They’ve been abused by parents, uncles, figures of authority. They don’t trust adults. We’d get guys coming in there, middle-aged men. Well dressed, respectable. They’d say they’d seen a kid on the street, that they could provide a good home. Their motives are far from philanthropic. But sometimes the kid chooses that option. Shacks up with the older man for three or four months. Sex for shelter. At least it’s with the devil you know. Then the kid loses his fresh-faced look, his innocence, and the man chucks him out and looks for sweeter meat.
‘The kids make friends with each other because in one way or another they share the same predicament. Then the person you thought was your best buddy vanishes into thin air. They get busted, they go missing. Even from the streets.’
The girl on the street could have been Madalena. She could have been my own daughter. ‘It couldn’t happen to any kid, could it?’ I asked. ‘I mean, if the kid is resourceful, strong; it couldn’t happen.’
‘At the Crisis Centre we’d get kids from all different backgrounds, from the North Shore, from Blacktown, different ethnic backgrounds. There’d usually be some disruption in the family, abuse of some kind. The kids have low self-esteem, the people who should love them the most abuse them, the people who should be their strength are unreliable. They’re like baby birds pushed out of the nest before they can fly. So they flounder around on the streets. They have no skills, the girls go into prostitution to get the money to survive and it’s so unbearable, they take drugs to dull the pain-marijuana, pills. Heroin eventually. Then they’re caught in the vicious circle. They need the money from prostitution to buy the drugs to make the prostitution bearable. Sometimes the payment for sex is in drugs.’
The girl on the street had disappeared again. In my mind I was making up a life for her. She wouldn’t get caught in that vicious cycle, despite the faraway look in her eyes. She was dreaming of the country from where she came, of Lismore, Moree. She was only down here temporarily. She was writing home every week telling her folks she’d be home soon. She had a really good job. And she’d be home soon.
I looked further down the street, to a girl sitting with her head bent, eyelashes black in her stark white face. She was wearing shorts, socks and Doc Martens, bruises on the legs. Everything on the outside of her shouted, I’m here for the taking. Everything on the inside of her shouted desperation. But the shouts coming from the insides of a person are rarely heard.
‘The street kids are easy prey. Low self-esteem, abuse. They become victims, if they’re not victims already. It’s not just sexual abuse. When kids go missing, sometimes they’re found alive, sometimes they’re found dead. And sometimes they’re never found.’
There were young girls, and boys, on the street who were prostitutes—drug users, many of them with only a few years left to live. There were old men lying in the park too drunk to brush away the flies settling on their weeping sores. There were ex-property developers producing corporate videos. There were people meeting each other for coffee in the trendy cafes, going shopping, doing deals. Sunny Sydney, most beautiful harbour in the world.
Nothing that Rosa had told me led me to believe that Madalena was an abused child. There’d been a fight with her father and she’d left. She wasn’t on the streets, she was living in shared accommodation. Kerry told me she was smart enough not to hitch. If she was anything like Kerry she’d walk confidently around these streets.
But even a streetwise kid like Kerry had been attacked. And Madalena had disappeared. It was one thing that she was missing as far as her parents were concerned. It was another matter entirely that now even her friends didn’t know where she was. One day she simply didn’t come home. If a runaway child suspects someone’s on her trail she runs even further. But it was different now. ‘I think it’s time we visited the Crisis Centre,’ I said to Vince.
We walked. There was a dero sitting on a milk crate at the corner of the street, the best place in the world to watch the comings and goings of the street. He had a can of beer in one hand and an empty on the ground in front of him.
‘G’day, mate. ‘Ow’re ya gain’?’ he said to Vince. ‘’Aven’t seen you around for a while.’
‘How are you, Marius?’ Vince took the hand that Marius offered.
‘Can’t complain, mate, can’t complain.’ They talked on. The words weren’t always comprehensible, but you didn’t need to hear every word to have a conversation.
‘This is my mate Claudia,’ Vince introduced me.
As he had with Vince, Marius offered me his hand. I took it. The hand was sticky, hopefully only from the beer he was drinking.
‘You pretty much know what goes on around here, don’t you, Marius?’ Marius nodded wisely. ‘You see the kids come and go, you hear the whispers.’ Vince was giving me the opportunity to ask Marius about Madalena. ‘Claudia here, she’s looking for someone.’ He could trust me, I was a mate of Vince’s. I thought of giving him money. I often pay for information in my job, but I had a feeling Marius would be insulted if I offered him money.
I brought out the photo of Madalena and showed it to him. He studied it for a while then shook his head. He hadn’t seen a girl like that. ‘Thanks, mate,’ said Vince.
‘You been here long?’ I asked Marius.
‘Sometimes it feels like I’ve been here all my bloody life,’ he joked. ‘Four, maybe five years. I been lots of places. I like it here. I got mates. Good people.’
I wanted to ask about Guy, but it was too long ago.
The Crisis Centre looked like every other terrace house in the quiet street except it had bars on the windows and the door. They must have seen us walk in the gate because by the time we got to the door there was a woman with a strong handsome face, a big wide smile and perky short black hair opening it for us.
‘Hey, Vince, how’re ya doin’?’ Vince gave her a hug.
There was a long hallway down one wall. The front room had been converted into an office. Half a wall had been knocked out to provide a counter. On the counter were cards and pamphlets explaining what the Crisis Centre did. ‘The purpose of this centre is to provide homeless young people with accommodation, support, information and access to resources that enable them to take control of their lives and make informed decisions about their futures.’ There were other pamphlets with advice on safe sex and needle use, in language kids could relate to.
Vince introduced me to everyone—to Paula, Ed and Michael. Handshakes all round. The general mood of bonhomie was interrupted by the appearance of a young guy about fourteen with blond curly hair flopping down into his face. He looked a little agitated but was doing his best to hold himself together. ‘Ed? Can I see you, Ed?’
‘Sure, mate, what’s the problem?’
Whatever it was, he didn’t want to discuss it in front of everyone. Ed got up and walked down the corridor with the guy. ‘Madonna up in your room again, is she, Troy?’ I heard Ed say as they disappeared up the stairs.
‘Claudia’s looking for someone. I know the drill but this is different,’ Vince explained to the others.
I produced the photo of Madalena and briefly explained the story. ‘If you know this girl, if you know where she is, you don’t have to tell me. Just ask her to ring home.’
Paula studied the photo then passed it on to Michael. Neither of them recognised her. ‘We can make a photocopy and put it on the wall,’ Paula suggested. I looked at the wall. There were photos on the wall already under the general heading ‘Have you seen this person?’ Some of them had details—name, date of birth, last seen etc. Young faces, young hopeful faces in photos taken on birthdays, at graduations, the happy joyous occasions when photos are taken. I looked at the dates these kids were last seen. None of the dates were recent. These kids had been missing for years and none of them had been found. I didn’t want to put Madalena up there on the wall with them.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s OK. Just, now you know what she looks like, if she turns up …’ I gave them my card. ‘Thanks for your help.’
I was just about to move out of the office when Ed returned, having placated whatever monsters Troy was grappling with. It was worth a shot. The three of them probably weren’t all here all of the time. I didn’t hold much hope but I showed Ed the photo anyway.
He studied it thoughtfully. ‘Yeah,’ he said, as if he recognised her.
‘You’ve seen her?’ I asked, wanting to know everything.
‘Not in person. Seen a photo of her, not this photo but I’m almost sure it’s the same girl.’
‘Where did you see the other photo?’
‘Bloke came in sometime last week. Paula, what day was it you and Michael had that meeting with the woman from Youth and Community Services?’
‘Thursday,’ said Paula.
‘Yeah, Thursday. Reckons he was her uncle but I thought he looked a bit suss, eh? Thought maybe he was a pimp looking for one of his girls.’
‘Did he have black curly hair? About thirty years old, reflective sunglasses maybe?’
‘That’s him. Is he really the uncle then?’
‘I doubt it. He didn’t by any chance leave a calling card, did he?’
‘No. He started to back off then, when I asked for a name and address.’
‘Vince, I’ll give you a call. I’m sure you have a lot to catch up on with your buddies. Thanks for your help,’ I said, addressing them all.
I walked back out to the street. Up on the corner Marius was deep in conversation with one of his cronies. It was early afternoon now and the beer cans were piling up. No doubt they were discussing the meaning of life. It was sunny and bright, the kind of day you felt good to be alive. If you were alive to feel it.