Blanket coverage of homeless ends up with a quilt of indifference

Ethan Switch - Friday, 13 May, 2005 - 19:47:09 - print it raw

Platforms on midnight trains in the Sydney CBD fill up with pools of people looking to head home. Their apparent disgust with themselves only showing up as bile and vitriol targeted to all around their own little worlds. "Why can't we figure out the inadequacies?" they ponder to themselves as sweat trickles down their noses at an aggravating pace.

Two bohemians of a gothic nature tease out the humanity from the their own coursing veins. Filled with jet black scorn and vegetarian pizza with garlic sauce to breathe, they walk blindly over shiny tiles, newly waxed for another night. On one corner of the street into the platform, there sleeps a beard attached to a man.

The man has no home, address or care as to why the Federal Opposition Leader even thinks he has a chance at turning down the freshly squeezed Federal Budget, excised from the grimacing loins of Treasurer Peter Costello. None.

As they laugh at each other for no real reason other than for company, they drag a thick brown blanket across the man's person. He catches a loose thread with the scab covering, or possibly being, his right ear. It does not hold. Yet he does not awaken from the slumber of the streets.

Collapsing over themselves in sheer joy, the couple drop the brown blanket a mere metre away, careful not to disturb his finely constructed blanket and bed sheets made from the morning's broadsheets.

No one cares if he is cold. No one cares if he is dead.

There is a free blanket for the next homeless person.

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