Stuart Read online

  I rewind the tape a fraction and replay a few seconds:

  ‘…Bit nervous, I think. Me fucking life, you know…’

  Stuart says ‘fucking’ frequently, but rarely plain ‘fuck’ or ‘what the fuck’ or ‘fuck that’. Sex is ‘a shag’, not ‘a fuck’. ‘Cunt’, his only other swear word, is also never used sexually. A ‘cunt’ can be a nasty or an ordinary person, or a thing, such as a toilet brush. There’s usually no aggression in these terms and they are not there because he’s too stupid to think of a more appropriate one. ‘Fucking’ and ‘cunt’ are just part of the flicker of his speech.

  In this excerpt he’s talking about what happens when he gets ‘rageous’:

  You know, we’re not talking kitchen knives, we’re talking, like, fuck-off-cunt knives. So, like, obviously me stepdad’s a bit fearful. He’s a big fella but he’s not getting any younger. With ten years he would have fucking thrown me all over the gaff. Now the family don’t know who’s going to get hurt, or whether I’m going to end up getting locked up, or is me mother going to end up losing her husband? How do they deal with it? It’s hard on them, because this fucking cunt gets scary. It can get scary for the person who does it, because there’s no control. It’s not until sometimes months afterwards that you can sort of really reflect and see it for what it was, because you’re living in this different world at the time when it happens, because your head’s not like on a normal cloud.

  Stuart’s vowels often turn into diphthongs, as if he has pressed the sound out against the roof and walls of his mouth: not ‘of’, but ‘u-uhv’; ‘you know’ becomes ‘you knah-ow’.

  ‘Oh, noooo, is that what I sound like? Oh, fucking…Don’t ever do that to me.’ He winces, shakes his head as if caught by a bitter taste, laughs.

  ‘Right, again.’

  ‘When and how did you become homeless?’

  Stuart checks his tea by dabbing his finger in it, then sinks half the mug.

  ‘Well, each time is different, Alexander…’

  5

  ‘Homelessness–it’s not about not having a home. It’s about something being seriously fucking wrong.’

  2 Laurel Lane: Aged 29

  ‘I put meself on the streets this last time,’ Stuart says firmly. ‘29 years of age. Just come out of prison: robbery, a post office. Done four and a half years out of the five-stretch because I’d been a bit of a bad boy, got this day job at a vehicle recovery company. It was legal, did a lot of police work, but you couldn’t help learn a few useful bits and pieces. Like, an XR3i? A Ford XR3i? At the yard, I learnt all you had to do was get the screwdriver, take the two screws out gently from the side indicator, take out the plastic bit, take the light bulb out, get a piece of tinfoil, put it in, put the light bulb back in, shake the car to set the alarm, and it’d fuse it. End of alarm. I really did actually find me job interesting.

  ‘Slide-sticking–that’s another one. Sliding a stick down the window to pop the lock? Well, the AA and the RAC had a memo out at that time because in America someone had locked their keys in and they’d put the stick in and the door had a side impact bag. The bag went off and the stick shot up and killed the bloke. Went under his chin and right into his brain. That’s why I liked it there. There was always something different. Never got bored.

  ‘Trouble was, money. Too much of it. It’s a funny thing about money, in’t it? A lot of people, it’s not being skint what gets you, it’s having your pockets too full. Where, when I had money, I’d come home from work and wouldn’t go get a shower some nights. I’d just sit there Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, drinking. I started to get a bit lairy, agitated on drink. But on the Friday I’d go to Huntingdon and smoke smack. Literally, within three months, a £70 a day habit. A gram a day!’

  ‘Why?’ I ask, irritated by the speed at which Stuart’s life is turning to waste.

  ‘Well, that’s what the book is about, in’t it?’

  ‘It’s going to be that miserable?’

  ‘Nah, that’s the point: heroin isn’t miserable, not at first. It makes you feel good. It don’t matter if you got lots of troubles or no troubles, it takes them all away. All you people think is nasty, dirty needles because of the adverts, which I think is fucking wrong and dangerous because when you’re on the smack, at the start, you don’t feel like a dirty, nasty, scummy person so you know the adverts are lying. You feel happy. You like everyone. It’s peaceful. Like that feeling you get when you wake up in the morning, feeling really, really tired, and know you don’t have to get up.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘Alexander, if we’re going to get on, you’ll have to learn to stop interrupting. Anyway, like I says–the machine still on?–right, the drink and the drugs were ruling my life. So I started having to go out and thieve at weekends to pay for it. Opportunistic. If I was walking along the street and saw a car with a briefcase in or a laptop, I’d pop the window. Then use the money for drugs, not riches, if you know what I mean. Or I’d take special orders. If someone wanted a new pair of wheels, I’d take them off the scrap heap from work. Not if I knew the boss needed them–of course not. Stuff he was throwing away anyway. Lights, indicators, mirrors, handles. Down the pub. Here you are, mate. Nice one. Off to Huntingdon. Spend the money what I’d got to pay for the habit what was so large because of the money I’d got. Fucking stupid! Fucking Stupid: it is me middle name!’

  Stuart plunges his hands into his pockets and takes his annoyance out on a pouch of Old Holborn–biff, biff, tumble, squash–then rubs a worm of tobacco into a Rizla.

  ‘If I was a bank I’d have been liquidated years ago.’

  Stuart’s whole attitude to gaspers could suggest a disdain for my carpet if I didn’t know him better. Once lit, not only does he let the burning end go untapped until there is half an inch of ash quivering in the draught, but when it does fall he ignores ashtrays: he tries to catch the powder in his hand. This process continues until the butt has become smaller than a splinter, then he stubs his fag out in the ash pile he is holding, flips his palm and rubs everything that he hasn’t dropped onto my floor into his trousers.

  ‘Then one day I’d had enough. So I did what a lot of people who end up on the streets do. I fucked it up–deliberate. Told the manager to stuff the job, stole a packet of money off me mum, took the bus into town and, like I told you, put meself on the streets.’

  Recently released prisoners often end up sleeping rough. Institutionalised, broke, addicted to drugs and hated by their old friends–after a month or two of free life under these conditions, giving up your house and responsibilities to sit on the pavement with a bunch of like-minded ex-burglars doesn’t look so bad.

  Stuart’s case was slightly different: his family was supportive; his friends were not disloyal; he was able to get a good job even though he’d just been in for a violent offence and his prison behaviour had been diabolical.

  So, ‘Why mess it up?’

  ‘I don’t know, Alexander, sometimes it gets so bad you can’t think of nothing better to do than make it worse.’

  ‘Two old boys called Scouser Tom and Asterix, in the park behind the bus station, them’s the first ones I got talking to when I got off the bus.’

  ‘No one on the bus?’

  ‘Wasn’t in the mood for talking on the bus, was I? That was the old world still, weren’t it?’

  ‘How did you meet Tom and Asterix, then?’

  ‘They were just sitting there.’

  ‘What were your first words?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. What’s it matter?’

  A great deal, I think to myself in frustration. The moment of transition is one of the great mysteries of homelessness. At what point does a person change from being inside his house to being outside all houses? When does he go from being one of us to one of them? I can imagine being desperate; I can see being up against the wall, bills dropping through the letter box, wife in b
ed with the bailiff, bottles piling up on the kitchen floor, closing my own door behind me, walking down the hill with my bag, getting on the bus–what I can’t see is the point at which I think to myself, ‘Bother! Homeless!’ and genuinely believe it. Do I look in a panic through my wallet as the bus pulls out of the station (no credit cards, no chequebook), beat my pockets (no keys, no addresses, no letter from parents with gruesome invitation to return to the room I used to have as a boy), and wonder how I’m going to work up the nerve to start begging? Then suddenly it hits me: Jesus Christ! No bed! No home!

  Caitlin Thomas–in the last words of her autobiography, after Dylan’s death in New York–says she could make out only two phrases in the sound of the train wheels banging over the rails as she travelled back to Wales: ‘No Dylan, no home, no Dylan, no home, no Dylan, no home.’ Is this what real homelessness is like? Not just a particular set of roof and walls gone, but a sense of the death of companionship? Is this why outreach workers say it is so important to catch new homeless people within a few weeks of ending up on the streets, maximum, because otherwise they will start to build up a new sense of belonging, to the street community, because they are human and must have companionship, and thereafter it is a hundred times harder to get them back where they started, among the rest of us?

  A third possibility: it is a gradual disillusionment. The homeless person is playing at the start. It is almost fun to sleep rough. He is like the waiter in Sartre’s Words: acting the role of waiter–a waiter in bad faith–until one day he looks around and finds all his friends are rough sleepers, the girl he fancies is a rough sleeper, the things he looks forward to doing each evening are rough-sleeper things, like getting plastered on Tennant’s Super behind the Zion Baptist Church; his whole community, no longer with any irony, is made up of rough sleepers, and now, at last, he is among them.

  For a person like me, who knows I would never let myself get into this stupid, degrading situation, it is hard to find a good metaphor for this moment of transition. That is why every word of the opening conversation with Asterix and Scouser Tom matters.

  ‘So you just saw these two people,’ I try again, ‘and said, “Hello, I’m Stuart, I’m homeless,” and started a conversation?’

  ‘No, of course not–I didn’t say “I’m Stuart, I’m homeless,” did I? Why would I do that? I’d known them two cunts for years.’

  They sat together behind the bus shelter and drank for three days.

  Stuart’s night address was 2 Laurel Lane, Christ’s Pieces. Set in three acres of mature park, with en suite toilets, six tennis courts and a bowling green, he slept soundly. When he woke, he crawled out, covered in old cigarette boxes and polystyrene cups, and bought coffee and a slab of shortbread from the gazebo stall. Christ’s Pieces is the public green at the back of Christ’s College. Number 2 is the second shrub from the left–the one with the biggest cavity in the middle. Stuart did not brush his teeth. He did not wash. Between beers with Asterix and Tom he puffed away at the heroin he’d bought with the money he’d stolen from his mother. It made Stuart laugh that the police walked by thinking that all he had was an ordinary roll-up.

  On his fourth day in the park he met Smudger, a man with a home, and moved on to his floor. Smudger had himself been living on the streets a week earlier. This new tenancy of his was move-on accommodation, provided by the city council, which sets aside a handful of properties every year to be handed out to the homeless. Smudger had a lot of friends: they hurried off the streets to congratulate him on his good luck; drank his coffee; brewed up his tea; stole his chewy muesli bars, tinfoil, spoons, matches; then jacked up on the floor and got bored.

  To liven up the evening they went on the rampage (Stuart not included, he insists) and barricaded an eighty-year-old neighbour into her flat with flowerpots.

  Another man living in the same block of flats got all his windows shot out with an ‘Uzi’. The bullets made a curve on the opposite wall, like this:

  Smudger was evicted for non-payment of rent and having atrocious friends.

  ‘But that’s just life’s story, in’t it? Everybody expected everything for nothing not realising that he had bills to pay.’

  Stuart moved back into the open. To keep costs down, he started injecting heroin instead of smoking it. ‘I almost overdosed, the buzz was that strong. And I thought, “Ah brilliant, I’ve cut me habit from seventy quid to a tenner a day.” A month later I was doing £70 a day in me arm.’

  ‘Can we leave it at that?’ says Stuart.

  ‘What? Stop recording? But we’ve only been doing it half an hour.’

  Stuart shuffles in my armchair. ‘Got a busy day,’ he complains.

  I reach out to click off the tape recorder, think twice, and sit back. ‘OK, but five more minutes. Let’s just recap. You were in prison, yes?’

  ‘That’s right, for–’

  ‘We’ll get to that, that’s for later. Then you came out, messed up your life for six months, and ended up on the streets?’

  ‘Exactly, like I just explained it all. I was thirty at the time, and I stayed on the streets from June until December.’

  ‘Which is just after I first saw you, round the corner from Sainsbury’s, correct?’

  He nods in exasperation and starts struggling with his puffy jacket.

  Busy? What’s a benefit bum like him got to do?

  ‘Look, I’ll tell you what’s bothering me. Why didn’t you just go straight to one of the homeless agencies and get yourself booked into a hostel? They could have got you on a job programme, into a shared house, or in a private tenancy and arranged to sort out your deposit. That’s why these hostels cost so much, because the money is used to fund twenty-four-hour support staff: they’re there, specially employed by what you please to call the System, to help you. In other words, you didn’t have to live outside in parks. If you did, it was because you insisted on it. Why?’

  For a moment Stuart looks at me as if I am beyond hope. His shoulders slump in disbelief. ‘Nah, Alexander, keep your tape recorder on. You fucking nine-to-fives believe everything you read in the bloody newspaper or watch on the telly, when the reality of it is so fucking different, it’s unreal.’

  Show a tiny element of responsibility, don’t assault anyone or openly take drugs, and the staff at Wintercomfort Day Centre will connect you to the outreach team, who will get you into a hostel, usually an English Churches Housing property. Willow Walk hostel for rough sleepers, or Willow Walk’s big sister, 222 Victoria Road, are the ones. They have small private rooms with settled accommodation. At 222, there are seventy-four beds. A Dantesque institution with an innocuous pale brick façade not far from where I live, I pass by it on my way to the local supermarket. Occasionally there are ambulances or a police car outside: somebody has overdosed, been beaten up, been beating someone else up, or smashed the window of a nearby off-licence and come stumbling back with an armful of chilled beers. It is run by a friend of mine, a conscientious, highly intelligent, imaginative woman who, with her staff, performs something of a miracle to keep this place going every day.

  There is a constant air of watchfulness in places like 222 (especially) and Willow Walk (to a much lesser extent). Long periods of quiet are followed by short tempests of violence in which it seems people are ‘kicking off’ on every wing and the housing officers rush from one incident to the next, clatter along the corridors with fingers on walkie-talkie buttons wondering if the full moon has snagged on the nearby traffic lights.

  This is why Stuart hates hostels. ‘Because in them places you’ve got little kids trying to be bully boys and they see someone small and skinny like me, and with a limp, and to people like that I’m an easy target. So I have to deal with them in a severe way, if they take a liberty, to get the message, then I end up in nick again. Well, I can’t condemn them because I used to be the same. But if the person killed me, I wouldn’t like him to end up having to do even three years in prison. I wouldn’t wish it on nobody.’

&nb
sp; ‘You didn’t mind the idea of getting three drunks from the pub to kill you, risking their imprisonment,’ I remind him.

  ‘Yeah–but they weren’t homeless.’

  Hostels are not right for most people. They become (as the pun goes) hostiles. Or, worse, a sense of contentment creeps up on the residents. After six months, outrageous incidents are no longer reasons for threatening staff with letters of complaint to the chief executive or promising to tip off the Cambridge Evening News–they are gossip. Street life is testimony to man’s self-defeating powers of adaptation. The same thing applies in prison: people get used to the outrage of the new circumstances–they give up trying to fight back. John Brock, the former Wintercomfort manager that Stuart and I are campaigning for, is a good example. After a few months inside, he writes to his wife that prison has started to feel right. He likes it when the warden closes the cell door on him. He is beginning to feel that it is easier to be guilty.

  Hostels, despite all their best efforts, encourage drug addiction and alcoholism. The main reason why Stuart demanded that the council give him a flat five miles outside of Cambridge was to get away from the city’s drug and petty crime set. Putting a man trying to get off heroin and burglaries in a homeless hostel, no matter how dedicated the support staff, is like putting a paedophile in a kindergarten. Temptation is everywhere. The only place that has more drugs in it than a homeless centre is prison.

  At 222, Stuart got beaten up and didn’t squeal; got beaten up again and still kept his mouth shut; got beaten up a third time, head-butted one of the bullies, ‘split all his eye open’, had a knife fight with another and had to leave.

  He wouldn’t go in Jimmy’s, either, in the basement of the Zion Baptist Church on the other side of town. Technically, Jimmy’s is a ‘shelter’ rather than a ‘hostel’: people do not have rooms there, just the possibility of a bed in a dormitory, which must be arranged night by night. No alcohol, body searches at the door, and no sin bins in which to deposit your needles safely.