Within days of being left for dead, dust and cobwebs repopulate rooms. Cleaners remove the last traces of bodies that lay alone and unmissed for weeks, months or years. It's odd how long it takes neighbours to notice.
"It's a sad indictment on society," says forensic cleaner Pam Marsden. "It's just so sad that you're only discovered when you smell."
She says big cities see many decomposition, or "decomp", cases. Death doesn't discriminate – Marsden has cleaned decomps from Redfern to Bellevue Hill. One man was dead in an inner-city high-rise for nine months before being discovered. Every surface in the apartment was coated in cobwebs and dust.
"The city can be the loneliest place on earth for some people," she says.
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Christmas is a busy time for such cleaners. The heat fells
many frail people who live alone and hastens decomposition. Sydney
forensic cleaner Gabrielle Simpson says decomp cases are increasing –
she averages one a week. In a recent case, a man's body lay undiscovered
in a surf lifesaving club for four days."People are isolated," Simpson says. "We are living alone and not marrying. We don't have the community spirit we used to have."
For many people in Sydney, Christmas comes with loneliness and social isolation. They are lost in the crowd. "Christmas is a time of deep sadness for lots of people, the forced jollity upsets them," says social researcher Hugh Mackay.
"Christmas is the one day you wake and realise you're on your own. People living alone have told me they wake up on Christmas Day half expecting someone might have put a present for them under the tree. It's sad but Christmas is bound to create that sort of disappointment in people who are isolated."
About one-quarter of Australian households consist of a lone occupant. Mackay also cites rising divorce rates and the spread of online social technology as causes of social isolation. "While it connects us it allows us to remain apart."
A Relationships Australia survey in 2011 found 42 per cent of people who used an average of four methods of technology to communicate – email, SMS, Facebook and Twitter – were lonely, compared with only 11 per cent of those who used one technology only.
Studies have found loneliness is worsening in Australia, fuelled by relationship breakdowns, the death of a loved one or moving house. A Newspoll survey last month found about four in 10 people had not been to any neighbourhood social gatherings in the past six months. Almost 30 per cent had not visited any of their neighbours.
Christmas is a curious confluence of the best and worst of society: people gather to share food and gifts, yet domestic abuse peaks in December and January. Household budgets are stretched, estranged families are forced together.
"Between one to three weeks before Christmas, a gloom starts to set in among certain people," says the Reverend Bill Crews, of the Exodus Foundation. "Christmas is when you realise you're not part of a herd. It's a big family day and those people who haven't got anything traditional to be looking forward to begin to get quite depressed."
Each night, in the shadow of St Mary's Cathedral, Exodus provides meals for about 200 people in need. For Christmas lunch, that number will swell to about 3000. Social isolation conspires to bring them together. Demand is growing but so are the numbers of volunteers, many of whom also suffer loneliness over the summer holidays, Crews says.
Living alone, of course, does not need to mean you are lonely. Some residents are finding ways to remain connected. Barbara Harder, 68, lives with her aged mutt Molly in a Concord housing commission apartment. She once lived in a tower where the woman on the ground floor was dead for three days before anyone missed her.
"She kept to herself. But I feel guilty because I didn't knock on her door," Harder says.
She has an informal social pact with her current neighbour, an elderly Italian woman. Each morning, Harder walks Molly and her neighbour puts her caged budgie outside.
"If we didn't see each other for two days, we would check on each other. A couple of times she has been a bit slow getting the bird out, so I knocked on the door to see she is OK," Harder says. "She works sometimes at night and I don't go to bed until I hear her coming in."
On Christmas Day, Harder will attend church and later eat a seafood lunch alone. She will walk Molly. In the afternoon, she will visit friends. "You do have your down times when you feel lonely, everybody does. I am lucky I have my dog," she says.
"We don't take the time to be with people any more. On my morning walks I say hello to everybody I come by. And if you keep that up, you eventually break that barrier down."
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