The purple chair had been sitting facing the street gathering dust. More an ornament than a useful piece of furniture, its crust of dirt had developed for weeks, months, maybe years. Forlorn, forgotten. Until last night when a man’s arse disturbed it. Now the chair on our front porch has a bottom shape smoothed out of the layers of city grime. The condoms left scattered around it testified to the perpetrator of the chair’s disturbance.

Sitting on the white picket fence opposite are a toothbrush, an empty needle case and vial of sterilised water. Remnants of a life lived on the street, of having to conduct private activities in public, because for a multitude of reasons too complicated to unravel into a straight line, there is no private place to do it.

I hear the night life of St Kilda sometimes. People screaming, fighting, swearing – living loudly. Sometimes I wake up from my sleep at some dark hour and wish they’d piss off. Go to bed. Be quiet. Go somewhere else. Compassion is elusive at three am. In the morning I step over their used condoms and empty fits. The wind blows the refuse of their lives under our gate, into our yard. The broken bottles joining the pile of rubbish, belong to the backpackers, come from afar to make merry, and who far more frequently wake me with the noise of their revelry. It’s complex this neighbourhood, with uniquely flavoured layers that can sometimes be hard to reconcile.

There are committees in this neighbourhood, founded by residents who have come to the end of their tether with being parked next to prostitution, homelessness and drug use. I can see they don’t want their children to see this side of life, that they don’t want the night noise to wake them, grumpy, from the warmth of their beds, or that they don’t want their gardens to become brothels or toilets. They don’t want to be solicited as they walk down their streets or to encounter the steady stream of mugs cruising the workers.

I get it. I do. I’m a resident too. There are so many complexities caught up in the why’s and the what-to-do’s that the solutions are untenable, unrealistic, un-thought-of. I suspect that there are three main layers to the basis of the complaints: hating what the women do (the sex and the drugs), hating the men that solicit sex, and hating that it happens on their doorstep (or on the purple chair as the case may be).

I can’t put myself in the shoes of someone who has to live her private life in public. Someone who has to eat, sleep, inject, screw, dress, shower and piss in public; all in front of a collection of confused onlookers. I know women who do, sure, but I can’t imagine doing it myself, it’s too horrifying. What I can imagine is that having to service a man on the purple chair, instead of the comfort of a bed or privacy of a home, must be desperate and degrading, and far more awful than me having to pick up a few condom wrappers.

But it’s also fear. Drug addicts are unpredictable and scary. I certainly am intimidated by some of the characters I come across and I know many of their names. But do I feel unsafe? Well, yes and no. I had always felt that (once the women took to me) they would defend me if I had any issues. While there is a good dash of every-man-for-himself-ness there is also a very definite sense of being part of a group, when you take the time to get to know the women that stand for hours on end on your street corner.

A threadbare looking man came in to Gatehouse one day and took a disliking to me. As he ranted and screamed at me, I had to ask him to leave with a threat of calling the police. ‘You do nothing for the girls,’ he said and started to threaten me. L., the softest, most quietly spoken woman I know, sat bolt upright in her chair and yelled back at him in my defence. Dan came rushing out from the kitchen and physically pushed him and his foul words out the door.

It was a bit scary. But I felt like I had been accepted. I felt like I was part of this little community, where the lives are strange and the characters stranger. I don’t have a solution for the residents’ fears; it’s too intricate and circumstantial to blanket it with ‘The Answer’. But I do think that taking the time to talk to the women who work, or teaching your kids about why their behaviours are unpredictable might be a sensible step. As for the purple chair? Well, we weren’t using it anyway.