The man who collected feathers

I got a few pages into the “Innocent Agent” chapter in The Survivors: True Stories of Death and Desperation by Steve Braunias when I realised it was a portrait of someone I knew. I was a neighbour of Stephen Ewart for a number of years at Rustic Ave in Mt Roskill. In fact, I was responsible for moving him out of that flat, but to which he would eventually return to die, “a man on fire”, as described in The Survivors. Every time I went past that flat I used to wonder how he was doing. I don’t need to wonder any longer. 
He was just as he was described him in the book, lonely and vulnerable. It was hard to get close to him. He was “strong willed”. In many ways he was a mysterious character. It was like he dwelled in the shadows. I remember wondering what he did all day and how he survived financially. In the winter months I would regularly go down to the local club to watch a game of football at Keith Hay Park. He would sidle up during games and I would try and make him feel welcome. He couldn’t really carry out a conversation. It tended to be repetitive and narrowly focused.
During the summer I would see him camped up in the shade with a group of cricketers looking like he was one of the team. He could do that for the whole day. That must have been heaven for him. He was harmless so I suspect everyone just tolerated him. “I thought he was with you. What? I thought he was with you. Who is he with?”
My wife reminds me that when we moved out of our Rustic Ave flat, Stephen joined our crew of family and friends to “help”. He didn’t do anything of course, but I could see him relishing in the human contact. At the end of the day, we bought food and beers for everyone. We laughed at the way he mimicked the social actions of the others. It was like watching a two-year-old following the lead of adults.
We had moved out of our flat in Rustic Ave just before he had to move out. I offered to help him move because he looked so helpless and it seemed the right thing to do. It was the only time I went to his flat and until that point I had no idea how unwell he was.
The day I turned up in a rental truck to help move his stuff I realised what I had got myself into. His two-bedroom flat was a hoarder’s paradise. I recall seeing cracks in the ceiling and people he described as flatmates were hanging around. I didn’t join the dots and it’s only now reading The Survivors that I learned people were sleeping in his ceiling. I could not have imagined the extent to which he was being used. His “friend” Nikki Ahlawat, later jailed for sending him to burn down the flat where he set himself on fire and died, was nowhere to be seen or heard of during all this (or during any of my social interactions with him).
The one item in his hoarding that has stayed in my memory the most was his collection of feathers. I recall wondering how long it had taken him to collect so many. There were also piles of advertising circulars. He had a delivery job but he seemed to be stashing them under his house rather than delivering them.
We spent the day moving his stuff but it soon became apparent that we were never going to move it all. Very little of it was of any use in his new flat anyway. In the end I left him at the doorstep and told him that we had moved everything. I still recall his look. He knew I was lying.
He ditched me after that. I had let him down. For a while we would see him walking through Keith Hay Park, between the two flats, with a plastic shopping bag in each hand, trying valiantly to move a mountain of stuff to the new flat. Two shopping bags at a time. That was the last time I saw or heard about him. 
The Survivors: True Stories of Death and Disappearance by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins, $37) is available as an ideal Xmas present in bookstores nationwide.