After leaving Tamworth, I spent a few months in Bathurst. I was there long enough to be on the electoral roll, and event vote in a state election. A few of the crew from the wargames club had moved down there as well, so on the first night I was there, it was like a homecoming. We had created our own little enclave and for a while, it was good.
The place where I was living at (Crown Street) was an old terrace house
divided into two, with an upstairs and a downstairs unit. When I first
moved there, I was sleeping on the couch, until one of the gents moved
out to live with his girlfriend and then I got his room.
I learnt quite a few things about life when I was living
there, especially about how quickly people's attitudes can change. One
of the gents whom I shared the place with revealed his true colours a
couple of months later. One morning I woke to discover a used condom
floating in the toilet, something that is not very pleasant to see at
any time of the day. He tried to recruit me into Amway, which failed,
and on another night he decided to call me a few choice names as well,
out of some frustration that the old group was shunning him for some
reason. (And most of them were, seeing he transformed into a pig after
a couple of drinks and when he was with this particular girlfriend,
well, he really did come over very high and mighty.)
The
other flatmate was okay, and we got along well (and still do) despite
times where he would let the dishes pile up in the sink and be late
with the rent. We had a pub just up the road, the East Sydney Hotel,
where we would drink quite often with his girlfriend at the time.
My escapes during the day, when I wasn't making some sort of attempt to find work, was to the movies, or having lunch with Eric,
who was working for Mercantile Mutual in the city at the time. I even
tried to find another gaming group, and briefly joined one at this
games shop in the middle of the city. The people I met there were even
weirder than me, so I decided it was best to stay away.
A
lot of things happened during the time that I was there. The Eastern
distributor was being built half a block from the house, there was a
terrific (yet frightening) hailstorm which left golf ball size stones
in the yard, an illegal backpacker hostel was set up next door with a
legal one built across the road and a homeless guy was murdered
barely thirty metres away from our front door. At the time it was
believed that he was the third victim of a serial killer that was
killing off homeless people, seeing the circumstances in each crime
were quite similar.
By that time, my sanity had
deteriorated (again) to a point where I just couldn't face life. I
tried to seek help, but the mental health counsellor I spoke to up at
Darlinghurst didn't really care, and in the end I was just put on
anti-depressants and left to fend for myself.
When the lease finally ran out, and it was painfully obvious that we couldn't live there any more, I packed my bags, and with some help from Eric and his wife, moved up to the Central Coast and into a converted garage on Winifred Avenue in Umina.