Adrian and Gabriel

Friday 6.00 am



The taxi pulled over on Fitzroy Street around the corner from Park Street where Adrian lived a short walk away with his cousin Peter. Before he left home last night Peter had asked him to buy a few groceries which he remembered only now. He would be in trouble if he went home without them. The deli at the top of Fitzroy Street should have what he wanted. So he alighted from the cab and started walking back to it.

A council truck cleaned up the inner-city party street after the night before. Adrian cupped his ears against the noise. As if the dull rising sun was bright enough to affront his eyesight too he squinted away and walked past the truck.

His strange behavior wasn't lost on the council workers. One of the guys rightly guessed that Adrian had been out all night and was crawling home.

He pointed him out to his co-worker, ‘a tragedy, mate,’ wanting Adrian to hear.

Adrian knew the guy was joking. But he interpreted the comment darkly because it helped justify the chip on his shoulder. He wanted to show he was on top of things and tried smiling but he couldn't smile and, eye-balling the council worker who had ribbed him, conceded that it was a, ‘lovely day.’

His awkwardness prompted the other guy to join in. He said, ‘he didn't even know we were here.’

The first guy, laughing, called to Adrian, ‘almost home, friend, good-n-early. The sun's just going down. Soon you'll be in bed for the night getting some sleep.’

He pointed to the rising sun which had grown larger during the last few moments.

Adrian took the bait, looking east.

The two council workers laughed. The first guy banged a metal lever against the side of the truck signaling the driver to drive on, enjoying the fun at Adrian's expense.

Clouds gathered shoreward even though early morning was already warm and getting hotter.

Two men squatted on the footpath slouched against a shop front. They taunted a female party animal who was wearing a pink party dress, so out of place in the morning light. She tried to hail a cab and go home.

The limited attention span of the men fell on Adrian. They called to him and tried some hey brother shit as he walked past but he was closed to them.

Meanwhile the party girl secured a cab and her escape. As she left the scene she saluted the suburban rockers with an up yours!

Farther along three early morning workers waited in the middle of the road for a tram to work and they gazed at Adrian. Not much else was going on. That prompted a window cleaner who was working on a hotel across the road as well as a half dead drug dealer sitting on a bench outside one of the street's end of the road hotels to look up and ponder him too.

Pleased to arrive at the deli at the top of the street at last he found it open for business. He entered and tripped on the step as another customer exited.

The sun was now white and round and rose hot in the morning sky.

The deli was compact, organized, cluttered and comfortable.

Adrian waited at the newspaper rack biding time until he remembered why he was there. He knew he had to buy something but couldn't remember what. Then he remembered that he promised to buy milk and bread for Peter. So he navigated past the first couple of aisles to the refrigerated section at the back of the shop to find the milk first.

At that moment a young woman stumbled and burst into the shop. She stepped here and there and picked up potato chips from a shelf and Coke from a small soda fridge at the entrance.

She stood across the counter, looked up, and scanned the cigarette section above the cashier's head. Without asking for anything she drawled to herself a few times, ‘thanks mate, thanks mate.’

Adrian heard her foot steps, some forgettable grunts and a few other noises, and the croaky drug induced 'thank yous'. He couldn't see what was going on because the produce aisles blocked his view. But he glanced at the end wall where a convex mirror hung. The reflection gave him an imperfect view of a druggie chick with a true exorbitant crimson mohawk. She had shaved and tattooed her skull and wore a dirty tatty black miniskirt and fishnet stockings.

But Adrian didn't see that, not exactly. Instead, he saw a young woman, pretty if you looked at her face, and hot if you looked at her butt and small shapely legs. She was also sad and beautiful in a poetical sort of way, he thought - expressing the society in which she lived, perpetually confused, perpetually at war with itself.

All the stuff she put on the counter.

‘Thanks, mate.’ She added, ‘and them’, pointing to a packet of cigarettes and leaving the cashier to figure out the right ones.

Then two men not much older than Adrian, probably in their late-twenties or maybe early thirties, entered the store. They walked straight to the drink fridge from which the druggie girl had extracted her Coke a moment ago. They were big clean cut blokes wearing cheap dark suits like they didn't wear them often. Or they didn't enjoy wearing them. They were plainclothes detectives, not undercover cops, but plainclothes Ds working the early morning Fitzroy Street drug beat. They wanted breakfast or something that resembled breakfast.

The druggie girl was uneasy. She needn't have worried. They greeted her by the name Gabriel but they weren't interested in her. A general bulletin required them to ask her a few questions and pass information about her to youth workers who wanted to save junkies from the streets and themselves. But breakfast took priority. At this hour of the day the cops wanted to raise blood sugar levels and didn't want to know about druggie chicks even ones standing in front of them.

Still she wanted to get out of there. She told the cashier to forget about the cigarettes and threw a few dollars in coins onto the counter and took her Coke and chips and left.

Only Adrian noticed that she left behind a screwed up piece of paper and a small plastic film canister. He leapt to call out to her, touch her on the shoulder, and tell her about the things she had forgotten but he registered that he wasn't part of that scene. He had seen it from a distance through a convex mirror. After wasting another night of his life he lacked enough spatial acuity to get even simple things right. And only eight hours of sleep was going to right him.

The cops bought Coke and chips, the same breakfast food as purchased by the junkie girl Gabriel, and left the store.

Adrian collected a carton of low-fat milk and thickly sliced white bread and navigated back around the produce aisles to the counter where he placed his items in front of the cashier.

As he pulled money from his pocket he maneuvered himself so that he could get a better look at the screwed up paper and film canister lying within reach of his left hand.

The cashier bagged the milk and bread and waited for money.

Adrian wanted the druggie girl's items - he planned giving them back to her - but guessed he couldn't have them by asking the cashier. So he hoped that she hadn't noticed them though he guessed she had.

He smiled and said, ‘I'll take a paper too.’

He turned to his right and collected a copy of a newspaper from a shelf.

The cashier put that in the bag also and waited for money.

Silence fell.

Then thought and words came together and Adrian asked for a packet of cigarettes. While her back was turned he loaded the canister and crumpled paper into the plastic shopping bag. The cashier wasn't stupid, though, and knew what went on but remained quiet and expressionless and just blushed.

Adrian paid and left. The hard day's night had left him moronic and uncoordinated and he tripped on the steps while leaving the deli. But the queer activity at the store counter enlivened him in a sick way.

Once outside on the footpath, under the white light of an early summer day, he felt cheerier and even purposeful. All men need purpose.

He surveyed the street for the druggie girl, intending to tap her shoulder and return her items. He couldn't see her. He waited a couple minutes searching, trying to register events with his sleepless pained mind. Nothing.

Where could she have gone? But nothing.

He hadn't energy enough to continue the search. So he walked back down Fitzroy Street on his way home.

Then twenty meters along the druggie girl stepped from a fish and chip shop entrance which was recessed and had concealed her.

‘Lover, you're under arrest,’ she said to herself, stoned. She hadn’t seen Adrian; she dragged on a cigarette while fiddling with the opened bag of chips. ‘Chip mate, go on have one.’ She drew on her cigarette and talked to herself, stoned. ‘Go on, it's been a long time, have one.’

Adrian halted amazed. The druggie girl's large dark eyes amazed him most. They weren't druggie eyes, not the way he saw them, but intelligent perceptive eyes. Pretty eyes; they were almost silky. He could swim in them if she invited.

His nerves jarred as a car door opened behind him. Turning he saw one of the plainclothes detectives peering out from the car. Intense looking guy that he was he appeared soft and large and squished in the new model Camry. He glared at the druggie girl. She withdrew back into the recessed entrance.

Adrian wanted to challenge the intruding cops as part of his new thing about wanting to rage against the machine because he sensed that they were cops. But aware that sleep deprived semi psychosis could only fail him he kept walking.

The cop changed his attitude. Instead of glaring directly at the druggie girl he glared worriedly at her like he wanted to avoid something about her. He experienced some personal let down that only he knew about. He tucked his soft large frame and large ears back inside the car and closed the car door.

Now he and his partner focused on the young guy wearing a mood t-shirt and blazer.

They didn't know him or suspect him of any wrong doing. He didn’t look the drug dealer type. Very few people fit the drug dealer type when they hit this street. But a percentage of them become addicts and some of them become pushers and then before you know it they were a problem for everyone. Cops have a way of persuading young guys who don’t fit the type from fitting the type.

They followed Adrian in the car.

Anyway why was he interested in a druggie chick at this time of the day?

As for Adrian he had no idea they followed. He had no idea how Fitzroy Street played cops and robbers. When he looked at the Street he saw a tree-lined boulevard with a light rail track running down the middle. Two and three star private hotels, nightclubs, spaghetti and wine bars, pubs, an arcade supermarket, fish and chip shops and delis garnished the broad strip. During the week life was quiet and on hot weekends especially the street thronged with suburban seaside tourists. He knew drug deals went down but they didn't affect him. So he walked and whistled this morning as he would have at any other time of day or night or would have whistled if the song wasn't asleep in his heart.

Also he thought only about how to return the items to the druggie girl.

Gabriel the druggie girl knew that the cops followed him though. And she knew that he had her things because she had seen sticking out the corner of the plastic shopping bag as he walked away. And she decided she had to get back her very important things.

She crossed the road to the Fenwick, a no-star private hotel, where she bunked rent free in a room with ten others, and thought about what she could tell Lees.