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Sydney’s West is alive and dying. A twelve-year-old boy starts from a frayed and worn mattress, his head throbbing from an erratic rest, his mother’s entertaining finally reaching its inevitable conclusion in the early hours. Like a bushranger unflinchingly bears any number of flies crawling his face and neck, he has long since realised the futility of itching the many and varied skin irritations blighted him by the biting bull ants and the scuttling roaches that pervade his bedding. A simmering discordance has teetered on a year now that he and his mother be presented to her ever-changing company as a single, all-inclusive package, in whatever possible sense that these men might (and more often than not, have) take it upon themselves to avail. “You don’t want me to be alone, do ya J?” 50ks away in the city proper, a black cat slinks down a Climbing Hydrangea and slips unnoticed through an opened window of a small and cluttered basement flat. The dim room is lit by eight or nine