‘Oh, just everything,’ he said vaguely. Offhand I could not imagine a better place to incubate a good solid nervous breakdown than the Sudan. And Sister Mary was right to allow Dr Damien this one night of social service which would not involve firearms or blast injuries. Compassion has to go somewhere or it turns into self-pity. As Marcus Aurelius might have said, perhaps.
I loaded myself aboard the bus. Suzanna stowed the bread. Gina, Sister Mary and Dr Damien sat down. Daniel started the bus. The Soup Run aims to cover most of the points where people sleep out in the city of Melbourne. Our route is well known. There are three shifts in a night. People sleeping rough cannot lie still all night in freezing weather or they will die, so most of them try to sleep during the day and walk about all night to stay warm. Melbourne, even at its coldest, will not actually freeze anyone, but some die from lying face down in flooded gutters and some contract that robust viral pneumonia that the medical profession used to call Old Man’s Blessing, because it carried off the aged with almost no pain. Now it carries off the twenty-somethings and Sister Mary will not have it. Nothing depresses an immune system like sleeping in the cold with insufficient food and coverings. We had blankets and soup and advice and we were off to combat the forces of neglect, madness, misery and unconcern which bedevil every city. The bigger it is, the more people will walk past a fallen man on the street, serenely positive that he is someone else’s problem.
Tonight the ‘someone else’ is us.
Sister Mary looked back at me and smiled. Everyone knows that, as one of our clients put it, ‘She in damn big with God.’ She is a devoted, plump nun of some seventy summers, who looks about forty with her rosy, unlined face. She also has the saint’s strength of will which, in St Therese of Avila, made bishops hide under their desks when they saw her coming. By sheer force of personality she has kept the soup bus running despite council objections and residents’ complaints. She knows she is doing God’s work and nothing human is ever going to stop or deflect her. If she wasn’t so funny, she would be very frightening.
First stop. Some people were waiting for us, even though it was just after eleven and the night was — for the homeless — young. Or to put it another way, it was a long, bleak, cruel time until dawn. This group was mainly aged, the old drunks whom I had come to know. They had a totally illegal camp down by the river and some shelter in the old rowing sheds. They hung together in a sort of comradeship. Not that they wouldn’t have beaten each other to death for possession of a bottle. But old Jock pushed even older Ian towards the bus.
‘Ian’s leg’s gorn bad,’ he said to Dr Damien.
Ian was batting feebly at his friend with both hands. ‘Don’t want to go to hospital,’ he moaned. ‘They die there, people die there, go there to die, not goin’, you can’t make me …’
‘Just sit down in here,’ said Dr Damien in a voice so concerned and kind that no one could have resisted it. ‘I won’t take you anywhere, Ian.’
Ian gave up fighting and went to the back of the bus, where Damien had first aid supplies. I looked away from proceedings to supply the outstretched hands with soup and sandwiches. Nourishing thick Scotch broth tonight, with barley and vegetables. Sandwiches of cheese or ham on good bread. Suzanna was handing out tea or coffee and muffins from the other counter. Business was brisk.
The night was very cold. The rain had dried up, the clouds had rolled away, and the stars were twinkling. The sky promised frost. We had a lot of freshly laundered blankets, sleeping bags and even doonas, extorted from the well-to-do and the manufacturers by Sister Mary’s minions. Each one came with a stout canvas bag to carry it in. I had seen a pile of those bags in Arachne. I had not realised that Sister Mary had got to Therese Webb as well. Then again, she had acquaintances everywhere. Hardened criminals and harder police sergeants quailed before the bright lance of her certainty.
She was out among the crowd, distributing blessings and admonitions. Sister Mary is so small that one can only see where she is by the respectful gap which forms around her in a mob of people. I got Daniel to lift up a big catering pack of soup to refill one of my urns and managed to decode the buttons enough to heat it. Gina was explaining a summons to an old man who had last been to the Magistrates’ Court when it was in Russell Street. Dr Damien was assisting Ian down the steps.
‘You come along tomorrow night and the nurse’ll dress it again,’ he said. ‘Here’s a nice new blanket for you in this bag. Now you have a seat and Daniel will get you some soup and a sandwich.’
I supplied Daniel with the old man’s food and gave Dr Damien a hand up into the bus again.
‘What’s wrong with his leg?’ I asked.
‘Oh, a gangrenous ulcer,’ he said. ‘I could drag him to hospital against his will and they’d have that leg off, but where would he go then? He’s not going to live long. Let him live as he wishes, with his mates.’
‘Too right,’ said a whiskery old man, grabbing for another sandwich. ‘Good grub, this, missus. Ta,’ he added, shoving a further sandwich into his pocket and winking at me.
Trade was falling off. Daniel helped Suzanna refill her tea urn. The old men always preferred tea. With lots of sugar, which kept them warm. We picked up Sister Mary, secured the urns and trundled off to our next destination, Flagstaff. This is a park in the highest part of the city (which is why it had a flagstaff on it in the first place) and is largely inhabited by what, in ordinary society, would be called the middle class. People with children who are sleeping in cars. Lost single women of a certain age. Families in which the children are related to each other in bewildering complexities of uncles and cousins, and no one can recall when they last had a job. People who, whichever way you look at it, have come down in the world. Some have come down so fast they have the societal version of the bends, and believe that they still have the right to be the first in any queue. This can lead to violence. Daniel is always in evidence at Flagstaff.
We stopped the bus at our usual place. A large crowd was waiting under the stark trees, leafless for winter. The people would have surged forward but Daniel was in front of the serving windows, fending them gently back.
‘Plenty for everyone,’ he said. ‘And tonight we have chocolate for the kids. Everyone into line,’ he said. ‘You know the drill. Sir, if you please?’
They knew the drill. Those who didn’t were scolded into place. And the chocolates would be very good tonight, I knew. Sister Mary had put the hard word on Juliette and Vivienne, the sisters who ran Heavenly Pleasures, our neighbouring chocolate shop. They had made two huge trays of milk chocolate animal shapes. With sultanas. I had already reserved a large wombat for myself and another for Daniel.
But for now it was soup and sandwiches for all comers. Some of the hands reaching up were so small they could hardly cradle the cup. My heart was wrung but I did not stop serving. Suzanna stopped at one point and turned her back, and Gina jumped in to hand out the coffee. Dr Damien borrowed Suzanna to undress a wailing baby and I just gave people soup. And sandwiches. Until everything started to blur. I blinked. In front of me was a raddled woman wearing what had once been a ball gown, then several dresses and additional skirts, topped off with a man’s overcoat and one of Sister Mary’s new blankets.
‘Look sharp, dear,’ she said to me, ‘or Sister Mary’ll tell God on yer!’
I laughed, handed over the soup and the sandwich, and went on.
We ran out of customers for the food before Dr Damien had completed his clinic, or Gina had finished her family payments advice, so Daniel and I took a romantic stroll around the park with a romantic garbage bag, picking up rubbish. The Soup Run was already in such bad favour with the local inhabitants that we couldn’t afford to make it worse by littering.
Everywhere our clients were settling down, soothed by warmth and attention. But for the occasional belch or burst of swearing they would have been like birds in their little nests. Flagstaff didn’t have a lot of drunks and they were congregated in one corner over their dreadful bottle of God knew what. By the scent, it was methylated spirits and port. Chocolate-smeared children slumped into the backs of cars or into parental arms and wrappings, augmented by our blankets. Sleep was descending on Flagstaff for a couple of hours, before the cold woke everyone at three am.
When we got back, Sister Mary had handed out the last pack of nappies and it was time to move on. We boarded, Daniel took the driver’s seat and we chuntered on through the night.
It was at the next stop that the crowd, pressing forward eagerly, suddenly quailed and backed away. Some actually ran. I looked out. Was it something I had said? But it was only two patrolling policemen. They approached and who should they be but my old pals, Kane and Reagan. Sister Mary popped up beside me.
‘Cold night,’ I greeted them. ‘Want some coffee and a muffin? You can’t complain about my company tonight.’
‘H’lo, Sister,’ muttered Reagan. I could tell that he had had a Catholic school upbringing. Even the most atheistic of the lapsed feel abashed in the presence of a nun.
‘And hello to you, Reagan, may God amend you,’ snapped Sister Mary. ‘And you too, Kane. What can we do for you? Speak fast, you are scaring our children away.’
‘Some children,’ sneered Kane.
‘God’s children,’ countered Sister Mary. ‘What do you want?’
‘We’ve seen her father,’ said Reagan quickly. ‘At the Sunnies.’
‘Thank you,’ said Sister Mary, who seemed to understand this. ‘Now I am sure that you have criminals to apprehend on this cold night, am I right? Goodnight to you, and may God bless you both.’
They were off before they quite realised what had happened, I am sure. Kane looked back, possibly wondering where the long conversation he’d expected had gone. But they kept walking, which was wise of them. Sister Mary was quite cross and she had divine protection. They might have been struck by lightning. One could hope, at least.
The crowd came back, nervously. They did not like cops. They especially did not like those cops. But they were safely gone and we had food and warmth. This pitch mainly catered to young boys. It was the haunt of paedophiles from all over and even Sister Mary hadn’t anything good to say about them. They weren’t who we fed. We had parked under the streetlight, which was harsh and made every face look either bloated or starved. Soup and sandwiches, muffins and coffee. Advice from Gina. And condoms, needle kits and bandaids from Dr Damien.
Poor boys, I thought. Poor boys. Bad boys, perhaps, but how evil could you be when you were only fourteen? The sad ones and the ones with a sort of juvenile swagger which was heart-rending in its vulnerability. And the loud, obnoxious ones, of course, the bullies, the little bastards. We got them all and Daniel understood all of them. The boys liked the commercial chicken noodle soup more than my homemade Scotch broth, and preferred muffins to sandwiches.
I handed out food, watching Daniel move amongst the mob, patting shoulders, restraining bullies, occasionally doing that thing which Clint Eastwood does: fixing a boy with his stare, which seems to convey some very complex instructions. They hold the stare for some time, then Daniel nods and looks away and the boy immediately goes and does what Daniel wants him to do. Some sort of telepathy, I suppose. It must have evolved in the old days when men went hunting megafauna with megateeth and couldn’t afford to attract attention by speaking or even gesturing. This time I saw the boy jerk his chin to one side and Daniel immediately followed him into the darkness under the railway bridge.
He came back carrying a figure which lolled. He had slung the boy over his shoulder and carried him without effort to the back of the bus, where Dr Damien received him into his arms and laid him on the floor.
‘Not dead?’ said Daniel.
‘No,’ reported Dr Damien. ‘But very ill. I saw a lot of this in the Sudan.’
‘You don’t mean he’s been shot?’ I asked, leaning forward to look at the boy. His face was as white as a sheet, with yellow overtones and black shadows. His hair was perhaps brown, dry as straw. He was wearing black clothes, with no jewellery except the black rubber band doubled around his wrist.
‘No, he’s starving,’ said Damien. ‘You need to call an ambulance, Daniel. If they can get some fluids into him fast they might save him.’
‘Starving?’ exclaimed Sister Mary, horrified. ‘How can anyone starve here? There’s food enough, God knows!’
‘Wait a moment,’ I said. ‘I’m getting the beginnings of an idea.’
‘Are you?’ asked Sister Mary, staring into my face with her bright, birdlike gaze. ‘Good. Tell me when you know, and we shall do things about it. Meanwhile, an ambulance, Daniel dear, and I shall talk to the boy who brought our poor little brother here.’
‘Me,’ said the boy resignedly. I brought him another cup of soup and a muffin to compensate. ‘I knew you’d want to know about him. Only I don’t know much. He’s been here about a week. Longer’n me.’
‘What’s his name?’ asked Sister Mary, toying with the lid of the chocolate box.
‘Toby,’ said the boy. ‘That’s all I know.’
‘And what’s your name?’
‘Jacob.’
‘And was Toby eating anything?’
‘Never touched a crumb while I knew him,’ declared the boy. ‘Said he wasn’t hungry. Doesn’t drink. Or take pills. Just sat under a tree and said prayers. Can I have some chocolate now?’
‘Of course.’ Sister Mary gave him two milk chocolate bunnies. ‘Anyone Gina can call for you? Want to go home, perhaps, now Toby is going to hospital?’
‘Yes,’ said the boy, and crumpled a little. ‘My dad will be mad at me,’ he said.
‘Let’s see,’ said Sister, and led him into the bus, where we had a phone paid for by the church, dedicated to returning the lost and the strayed. Any father who continued to be angry with his son after being talked to by Sister Mary was a man of adamant evil who ought not to have a son — at least that was my view.
I was longing to know what or who the Sunnies were, but this didn’t seem the time to ask Sister Mary. Daniel didn’t know, nor did Gina or Suzanna. Dr Damien was coaxing a little warm water down Toby’s contracted throat. The boy swallowed. A little more water was offered and accepted.