Free Living As a Moon by Owen Marshall

a deep, rear doorway in a commercial building where the vagrants gathered to drink and shout at one another. ‘Useless, noisy fuckers.’ Matthew never got used to them.
    ‘Language,’ said Felicity.
    ‘You’re not doing a hell of a lot yourself,’ said Ramon.
    Here we call them street people, or the homeless, don’t we. It’s more PC, and collective terms somehow seem less invidious, more suggestive of society’s neglect rather than personal failure. We knew of the alley dwellers because of the noise they made and the openness of their lives to others’ gaze: they knew nothing of our closed community on level four. We were aware of them, while knowing next to nothing of the people who shared the building with us — like those who sold insurance from level two, the dental practice and insurance brokerage that shared our floor, Acme Investments, Catalogue Empowerment, Scientific Aromatherapy, level three, and the legal firm of Ramage, Browne, Poole on level six. The Icarus Private Academy of the Performing Arts, always deathly quiet above us. Each day an army of people came through the same street-level main door, nodded perhaps, and went to their own stations. For the life of me I wouldn’t have been able to pick out Messrs Ramage, Browne, Poole or Icarus, in a police line-up.
    I knew Sex Slut from the alley: not her face so much because of the bird’s-eye view, although I had passed her in the street, but the fall of her lank, brown hair, or the green beanie in winter, and the shouts and shrieks of her name. And she would shriek foully back, or laugh, which was a shriek too. Alcoholics and druggies need to be loud from the fug of their addiction, or maybe it’s some unconscious defiance of everything around them. The street people were loudest at the end of the day, when they gathered in the doorway and bushes by the steps after their meanderings. Maybe noise was the only way they could impinge on the world. If I was working till half six, I would have a window open to the limited extent the mechanism allowed — was it feared we would cast ourselves to death? — and listen to the ravings below.
    Sex Slut had a shrill voice that carried well, but I learnt to identify others as well: Puli the Pacific boy, Jimmy in the grey overcoat who owned the dog, I think, the thin man with a bald top and yet long hair down his back that he sometimes wore in a pony-tail. When they shouted his name it sounded like Saucer, but must have been something else. Mostly they were guys. Mostly they seemed to hate each other: fierce abuse, dramatic collapse into sobs, savage group persecution of each member in turn, especially Sex Slut, who would retreat down the alley to scream back at them, sometimes wander quite away, but usually rejoin the others in time. Abuse could turn to laughter within one phase of the distant traffic lights, and sometimes they went into a huddle like a basketball ball team to share some dirty secret, or some substance to put coloured stars into their firmament. Late at night they must have slept there in the deep doorway and the bushes fashioned into bivvies with scraps.
    Our own community was so much more civilised and fortunate, yet so similar in disillusion. Matthew, Ramon, Felicity, Becky and me in the main office, and Mr Cusip in the glassed-off alcove by the photocopier, the fax machine, the hiccuping water dispenser, the yellowed Zip and the notice board that bore no tidings. After Mr Cusip, Matthew was senior by virtue of long service and institutional knowledge, but he was denied any formal title to recognise that status, and received bugger all more money. Matthew was a model study in thwarted ambition. He would often come and put one half of his substantial arse on my desk, and talk in an undertone of how his loyalty and talent were insufficiently recognised. He wasn’t a great one for cultural sensitivity. ‘If I chose to toss it in here,’ he’d say, ‘old Cusip would be in the shit, for