Death beneath the Viaduct ...

In which John finds it pays not to be homeless in a heat wave

Tuesday I suggested to Victor that he take a cold shower.

The next day he was dead.

I had seen him splayed out like a fish in his elegant cardboard home under the Custom Street Viaduct, wilting in the 26 degree summer heat. Victor wasn't designed for this kind of weather—he invariably wore thick grey tracksuit bottoms and a jumper—but on this occasion his shirt was pulled up around his armpits, revealing his pallid white stomach, something I had not seen in ten years.

I had taken him some mixed nuts from the shop in the Tepid Baths opposite his home. One small bag for me and one for him. Our pact. He was outside his little cardboard corral, splayed on his back, hoping to catch the breeze that was coming up Sturdee Street from the Waitematā Harbour.

Victor, by John Crawford

He was panting.

‘Victor, you’re not looking so great.’

He nodded and grunted.

'Pretty hot, huh?’

He nodded again and rolled his eyes. This was new, and not good.

‘Why don’t you go over to the Teps. Get yourself a cold shower?’

He mouthed a ‘No’, a favourite verbal tic.

It was a futile gambit. In the depths of winter I had suggested the same strategy—this time a hot shower—when I found him huddled in his pile of blankets trying to ward off the freezing westerly coming down Custom Street.

I gave him the nuts and tried again. ‘A shower would cool you down.’

He nodded faintly.

‘Ok, well you look after yourself,’ I said hesitantly, and walked away.

Friday, I found his shelter—a cocoon of blankets, cardboard, and plastic boxes of food from the City Mission—had gone. I stared at the huge viaduct pylon with disbelief. The shelter had been there for ten years. There was a scattering of flowers and a cardboard sheet inscribed with black felt-tip pen messages.

“R.I.P bro. Hope you in a betta place.”

I crossed the road to the Teps.

‘What happened to Victor?’

‘He died on Wednesday,’ said the girl behind the desk.

‘Of what?’

‘Natural causes.’

I muttered something about taking him nuts. I’d bought them from her. One bag for me. One for him. Did she remember this small transaction? I was trying to find some human connection in this moment of shock.

‘I told him to come in here to cool down.’

She looked at me, confused. ‘It could have been prevented,’ she said.

‘Well, you know what Victor’s like.’

I blundered through the swing doors of the Teps, my eyes blurred. I had been visiting Victor for many years, taking him small gifts of food, asking him how the Sudoku was going. Checking in on him through winters, springs, autumns, summers. The Sudoku book was invariably open at the same page, with a few pen scrawlings that never seemed to change.

Later, as I stood in a small vigil at the shrine of flowers, a young guy in a corporate suit, sunglasses and a beard came up.

‘What’s happened to him?’

‘He died Wednesday night.’

There was a long silence.

‘I used to take him bananas,’ he said.

‘Yeah. I took him nuts.’

We stood there, looking at the marker-written messages on the cardboard and the bunches of flowers, most of them plastic. There was a business card on the ground. Patrick Suluape. Outreach Keyworker. Auckland City Mission.

I placed my own business card down beside Patrick’s:

John Cranna, Director, The Creative Hub.

I had no idea what I was doing. Trying to reach Victor, perhaps, across the infinite gulf of death. I wanted to apologise to him for failing to force him to take that cold shower. What the hell.

“Hope you in a betta place, bro.”

Victor's shrine

A friend of mine, a doctor, spoke to me once about his many dead patients. ‘Where do they all go, John?’ I had no answer to that.

In a previous life, I had worked with the destitute, the marginal, the psychologically devastated, the addicted. For ten years. I knew how thin the membrane was. Theft, illness, bad timing—any of these could tilt a life off its axis. Once you’re out there, the day becomes a grind of small survivals: food, safety, a place to lie down.

Victor had found his equilibrium under the viaduct. Ten years in the same spot. A fragile geometry of cardboard, blankets, plastic boxes from the City Mission. A routine. A territory. A kind of order.

Often, driving the central Auckland motorways, I catch myself looking under the bridges. You could live there, I think.

What I knew, and what I chose not to press on Victor, was that many of the people sleeping rough had already fallen through other systems long before they reached the street. Whatever had shaped him—mental illness, bad luck, some earlier fracture—had settled into that quiet, opaque presence I encountered each week. A man who said little, who nodded, who returned always to the same page of his Sudoku.

In the days that followed, I found myself avoiding my twice-weekly trip to the Teps. When I resumed, after a couple of weeks, I took another route to the entrance. I didn’t want to cross Sturdee Street and see the bare patch of ground, eerily free of Victor’s home.

I never asked about his early life. There was something in his manner that discouraged questions beyond simple enquiries about his health on that particular day. I rang Patrick Suluape, using the number on his business card at the shrine, and got no reply. I rang again and left a message. He didn’t ring back.

Victor had disappeared into the anonymity of the homeless dead.

When we die, we hope that the vividness of our lives will render us memorable to those who come after. That the contours of our stories will live on in the histories of our whānau, our tribe, our descendants. What troubled me was that Victor left no story I could tell—no sequence of events I could shape into a life.

Only the memory of a man, unchanged over the years, in a small cardboard home under an impersonal concrete viaduct.