His name isn’t really Marbles, people call him that because he’s lost them a few times. But, he introduces himself as Marbles to strangers “so no one knows who he really is”. Friends just call him Dave.
Dave stays with me when he’s between residences. He sleeps on the balcony with his head inside the open door and feet outside.
Dave is half indigenous, he says, adopted as a child and swears he’d murder his real parents if he met them.
Dave acts like a lunatic so the morons leave him alone, he says. He steals clothes from neighbourhood washing lines and maintains a daily routine, he jogs in the mornings, gets the paper early and reads it through the day. Except when he’s had a “hard night on the piss” when he wakes and showers before wandering off to the pub again.
Dave has never paid for public transport and has been everywhere, even Canberra. When he lands in a new town, at the first pub he finds, he asks locals “where do the druggies drink?” and promptly heads straight there.
He calls his main friend Silly Jilly and she calls him “Schemer”. An ex-sex worker, Jill has cirrhosis of the liver and says she’s “scared of blowing up in a phone booth” one day.
Dave died by suicide and I just found out. RIP Marbles.