Twice I have spent a goodly stretch of bright redolent days in Australia, and both times I stayed in the same little friendly unpretentious hotel on Brunswick St, Fitzroy, and both times I wandered widely around the neighbourhood, ambling through the spacious Carlton Gardens, and avoiding the roaring tumultuous pubs after dark, and finding lovely little cafes and music shops and bookstores.
It was at a little bookstore on Gertrude St, during my first trip, that I met a tall craggy man who told me a story that has niggled at me ever since, for its mysterious meaning; so I tell it to you, and maybe between us we can figure it out.
The tall man worked in the neighbourhood as an agent against poverty, as he said; his employer was a group called the Brotherhood of Saint Laurence, which had been founded by a priest in the 1930s. The Brotherhood had lost its religious affiliation over the years, but it remained devoted to doing whatever it could to ameliorate and assuage poverty and poverty's endless attendant ills.
The tall man had worked for the Brotherhood for years, and he long ago had lost any illusions about the overarching nobility of people who were hammered and lost and helpless against addictions and diseases and crisis and tragedy.
While I have met many wonderful and gracious people in the course of my work, he said, people who were so kind and brave under duress that they remain lodestars for me, I have also met hundreds of people, mostly men but a lot of women also, who would snatch any advantage possible, and steal you blind, and lie and cheat and prevaricate, and beat up children, and do everything to advance themselves and nothing whatsoever to assist anyone else.
This is just a fact and anyone who says it isn't a fact is a fool or a liar. But on you go, if you believe that all people have dignity and holiness somehow somewhere within them, which I believe, hard as it is sometimes. Hard as it often is.
I asked him about the most wonderful people he'd met in his work, and he told me some amazing stories, and then I asked him about the worst, and he told me some horrifying stories, and then his face twisted and he told me about the worst of the worst, as he said.
I will call him Mokee, he said, which