Stuart Read online

  ‘There’s some nice people who go down Jimmy’s, but you get a lot of the mentally ill and the drunks down there. And they chuck you out the door at nine o’clock in the morning. They get a good whack of money for you staying there but they put you out on the street at nine o’clock in the morning till half seven at night.’

  Jimmy’s, named after a charismatic dosser, another of the homeless now-dead, is something of a throwback to George Orwell flophouses, though a good example of one. It can be a stabilising place for people who would otherwise spend all night on the beer and brown. But it’s useless for someone who likes privacy, or is easily bullied, or has a persecution complex, or likes to sleep in a dress, or snores so loudly that the other residents gang up and stuff a sock in his mouth.

  Whatever service you provide, no matter how welcoming, tolerant, well staffed, and decorated with pretty pot plants, there will always be homeless people it doesn’t suit.

  ‘Because that’s the point of them, in’t it?’ explains Stuart. ‘The homeless are what’s left over after all the usual things what keep people straight and narrow–yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir–like family, career, the army, have been taken out.’

  For a year while writing this book I worked at the Willow Walk hostel, the best hostel in the city: twenty-two beds, single rooms, twenty-four-hour staff sitting in an office by the door. Rent: £279 a week per person. (The homeless don’t pay that, of course. They pay around £6.50. The rest comes through housing benefit, from you and me.) It is run by Ruth’s husband, a kind, relaxed and thoughtful man.

  The residents at Willow Walk are in general pleasant, although some individuals have their moments. (The list of people banned from the premises, for example, includes one with six convictions for attempted murder and another for trying to kill a hostel worker.) They are essentially a cautious, edgy crowd who, when they ‘lose it’, are raging against their own losses more than against anyone else. Some of them have experienced things that would make you throw up if you knew the details, but they don’t become serial killers, arsonists, letter bombers. They doubt, they grizzle, they stamp about their little cubicle rooms, they suspect everything is their fault (or they think nothing is their fault and therefore think they have no control over their existence), they cut themselves, they watch the days and months slip by, they get smashed out of their skulls. Some are hilarious, some are very talented, many are kindly, many are boring, a few were once rich, a good number are to some degree insane. Some are so apologetic it is unsettling. They might have been a bit rude to you the day before, called you a ‘twat’ (frequently with some justice) or just stumbled about for a while, being merry and foolish. But they apologise at the soonest sober opportunity, even when the person listening to these sorries hasn’t the foggiest idea what they’re on about any longer. It is impossible to be precise in characterising the people who live in such places. In my own estimate, about a quarter of them you could pass on the street and not have the faintest reason to think they are anything other than successful (the best-dressed man in Cambridge at the moment is a man living in Jimmy’s). But alongside these are the usual stereotype figures so beloved by people who write about lowlife: the crackheads, the dope fiends, the Irish drunks, the nonces, the whores (but don’t read that word in a Raymond Chandler voice–think instead of pallid girls with fungal infections, and grandmothers who’ll let you feel their varicose veins in return for a mouthful of half-digested beer), the burglars, the shoplifters, the ambitionless, the self-disgusted, the weak of will, and, very rarely, the just plain poor.

  The final step on the ladder of opportunity–after Wintercomfort, Jimmy’s, 222 Victoria Road, the young persons’ project in Haverhill, Willow Walk, Emmaus, temporary shared housing with organisations such as the Cyrenians–is to be put into a bedsit or flat of your own.

  If this rehabilitation process works well, you can be off the streets, in accommodation of your own and looking for a new job within half a year, though even that is not quick enough. On average, it takes nine years for a person, after the event that has unsettled them (abuse, bankruptcy, marriage break-up, etc.), to become homeless. It then takes four weeks to become ‘entrenched’, i.e. to settle into street life and begin to adapt irrevocably.*

  But the ladder hardly ever works well–at least, not with ‘chaotic’ rough sleepers. Stuart’s sort do not live under the stars and endure piles and hypothermia simply because they’ve run out of luck and ‘self-esteem’. Therefore, it’s not just a matter of providing encouragement, vocational training, and money to put them back on their feet. To them, every day is a hum of casual outrages. In the worst cases such a person is hardly human at all, but like the shell of a man walking around crammed with minced ego. It is as though some piece of their soul is missing. The way he is and the manner in which he lives are symptoms of a mental disruption–maybe even a full-blown incurable illness–and it is as good to tell him to apply for one of the fifty warehouse packing jobs advertised in the employment office as it is to tell a man with half a leg to drop his crutches and run home.

  ‘See, the homeless culture is a weird culture,’ explains Stuart. ‘One minute they’re all fighting against each other, but then there’s days we all stick together through thick and thin, all different little groups. Like, once, I sat there begging with a fellow, and he just jumped up and started kicking me in the face. He don’t know why neither.’

  At one point, in an effort to get away from this mayhem hostel and street life, Stuart bought a caravan for £25 and had it towed down to the river, but something came a cropper there, too. Other people took it over. He let the wrong friends sleep on the floor. They set light to it. It exploded.

  Another time, Stuart got into an argument with Frank the Tank, and Frank the Tank walloped him in the park behind the bus shelter. Result: bus shelter out of bounds.

  ‘Even if you get a job, you’re caught in a catch-22, because the only time you can get work is if you’re living at one of the hostels, because no one gives you work if you haven’t got an address. But if you get a job when you’re staying there, the staff immediately raise the rent. They got to, because them rooms cost fucking £200–300 a week and benefits won’t pay the full whack any more if you got a job, will they? It might go up to £60–70 a week, overnight, from the first fucking day you get work! Fucking frightening to someone who was paying a fiver a week the day before. But this is the stupid bit: legal jobs don’t pay except in arrears. Two weeks, a month in arrears, that’s when you get the first pay cheque. How can you pay the new fucking ridiculous rent them first four weeks? It isn’t possible. Where’s the money going to come from? Get a job and what happens? Get kicked out of your accommodation for non-payment of rent.’

  I do know about this. I have myself advised homeless people not to get work, especially if they have just arrived on the streets (the benefits situation improves slightly if you’ve been down and out for six months, although by that time the sense of community with the homeless, and sense of homelessness not being that bad really, has set in) because if they do they will lose their hostel accommodation, and hence their job, too, for exactly the reason Stuart describes.

  In short, at every step up the ladder, the chaotic homeless person will stumble. He throws a tantrum, loses his nerve, drinks himself to the brink of oblivion, ends up in the police cells, and three weeks later has to be restarted on the bottom rung by people who grow increasingly tired of seeing his mottled face.

  This is why Stuart, sicker than most, within a few weeks of leaving Smudger’s flat, fell off the ladder and sank like a stone.

  Much of what happened over the next four months before the outreach team found him is, even to himself, a blank.

  6

  ‘Tying the bastard to the back of a car and dragging him down the road,’ growls Stuart. It is three weeks after Stuart’s visit to my rooms when we began recording his life. We are walking along the verge of the A10, outside Cambridge, kicking our way through the flowe
ring coltsfoot, towards the Emmaus Homeless Project, which runs a furniture shop. ‘Tying him up on a lump of wood like the Japs did, burying him up to his neck in a pool of slurry, and then dragging him up and splitting him, cutting him slightly in places and putting him in so he all got infected and died a painful death. Or just sit there playing darts with him. Slow and suffer. I just wanted him to know what fucking suffering was about.’

  Stuart wants a display cabinet. It is to go alongside the Boing, Boing, Whoosh bed. It is for his stereo, his Teach Yourself Driving books, and his bong. The air blast of a passing pallet lorry makes his legs sway.

  Stuart leans out into the A10 and eyes the traffic.

  Another HGV appears round the corner half a mile away and Stuart steps quickly back.

  ‘Something’s coming–I can feel it. It’s not all gone.’

  ‘What’s not all gone?’

  ‘The anger and bitter twistedness. I’m not finished. I’m going to be not very clever again. Somebody’s going to get hurt, that’s what scares me.’

  ‘When is this going to happen? In a week?’ The juggernaut thunders past. ‘In the next ten seconds?’ I add, humorously.

  ‘Don’t know when this thing will come, Alexander,’ says Stuart, stopping again and looking up and down the road. ‘It’s me black mist. It will come.’

  ‘Who is this man you want to torture?’

  ‘He knows. I let him know. I’ve phoned him up a couple of times since I got out of jail, telling him that his time was coming. I’ve let him know. But anyone can do it over the phone. And then one night before I become homeless it got to the stage where me head was telling me I had to go, his time was now, and I’ve gone to his house and kicked his door in.’

  There was nobody there.

  Next, Stuart tried the bedroom door, and it was locked. So he kicked that in, too.

  ‘And there was this girl in there screaming. So I’ve left her, gone round and there’s another door upstairs locked and I just kept head-butting it and punching it until it just fell away, I went through the middle of it, and nobody was in there. I’ve gone in another room and I’m undoing wardrobes and fucking punching them as I’m undoing them, and I seen this other woman, weeping on the floor, so I picked her up, let her know that I ain’t coming to hurt her, but she’s seen it as threatening and she’s run off. So I’ve gone out his front door there and that’s when I seen all the police. And there he was, sitting on one of their cars. “Ha, ha, you didn’t get me, didya?”

  ‘He’s laughed at me! Then he’s run off down into his garden, shouting to the two coppers with the dog, “He’s got a knife, he’s got a knife, he’s got a knife!” So they set the dog on me, and the dog took the arm clean off my jacket and bit me straight through the arm, even though I didn’t have no knife. And the coppers jumped on me, and I started saying to them “What you doing protecting a fucking kiddy-fiddler? What are you doing defending a fucking child molester scum cunt nonce?”

  ‘So, like I say, the boss got a right arsehole with me for going and getting meself involved with the police, cos he’d given me a chance and he has police work. He was unhappy about it.’

  ‘You surprise me.’

  Stuart shrugs. ‘Up until two years ago, I used to mentally burn out before I’d physically burn out. So if I went on one, I’d mentally burn out and then there’d be a right lull. All the anger would be gone and I’d be physically fucking knackered. Where…’ Stuart pauses. He often begins sentences with this word, ‘Where’, as if literally lifting the thought out from a back room in his brain, like a box, and placing it in front of the listener. ‘Where, in the last two years there’s been so many curious instances, back to back, that I think it is because I don’t peak. I physically get exhausted before I do mentally.’

  He gives the road in front of us another suspicious up-and-down glance, then indicates a collection of pitched roofs beyond a line of bushes on the other side of the road: Emmaus, the homeless community. It is half a mile from the nearest village, cut off from the rest of human habitation like an Amish settlement.

  A Fiesta appears far away, heading from Cambridge–and God’s Gift to Road Safety waits for that to pass, too.

  Then we cross in a hurry. ‘Fucking maniacs,’ he says.

  Set up in Paris in 1949 by a French cleric, Abbé Pierre, the Emmaus communities put homeless people to work repairing and selling cheap household goods in return for an income so small that the wind blows it away before they can clench their fingers on it. Drink is banned. Any hint of drug taking: immediate eviction. The idea has so much right with it that is wrong with hostels: it makes the homeless work to regain their ‘self-respect’; it takes them out of the street community that’s holding them down; it breaks the cycle of dependency on the welfare state, and because it works them on slave wages they can’t afford to splash out on a three-week sherry binge even when they do manage to escape back to the city on their one free day a week. ‘Like a detox programme for being homeless,’ grumbles Stuart.

  ‘Through here, Alexander.’ We duck into a hedge gap, down a little ditch, another hole and finally into a farm courtyard.

  An ancient urchin with a face like sucked parchment lifts his screwdriver hand to Stuart, grins, and goes back to staring at the bedside cabinet slumped between his legs.

  From another direction, beside a tractor, a black beard nods at us.

  ‘Watcher, Alan!’ Stuart calls.

  ‘Stuart,’ it returns.

  The twenty men and women who live here are happy. The work they do is important. Further up the road they have allotments and greenhouses and keep chickens.

  The dens of Emmaus are ordered in mountain ranges. One big room is filled with cabinets and tables and squishy chairs; two smaller ones with Hoovers, fans, and sound systems; a side den full of music; then there is a book room, a knick-knack lobby, and a cafeteria with a little toothless man sitting outside looking up donated LPs in a book of record values the size of a six-pack.

  ‘Why aren’t there Emmauses in every town?’ I quiz. Stuart looks around theatrically, shrugs, then plunges among the vaults of junk on the other side of the main entrance. ‘Isn’t the answer obvious?’ his gesture has said. ‘Because homeless people don’t all want to spend their time mending cheap furniture with Olde English doorknobs for £35 a week. They don’t fancy living with two dozen ex-alcoholics and failed bankers five miles away from the nearest pretty girls. Excellent for some, the regime might be. For others it reminds them of prison or Eton.’

  Stuart soon discovers something he likes. A glossy ‘ebony’ display case with leaded windows and a dainty writing surface to pound your head against in disgust. ‘That’s good that.’ He pats one of the glossy shelves. ‘Lovely bit of workmanship.’ The price is on a cardboard star stuck to one of the leaded windows. ‘Sixty-five quid? Now that’s value!’

  People sometimes ask me if I am ever frightened of Stuart. Never, not for a second, not in the smallest way. Why not? I don’t know. Perhaps it is because his anger has a purpose. It is focused against diffuse but determinable enemies for understandable reasons, i.e., everything associated with care homes and paedophiles and prison and the police. I am not part of those worlds. To be honest, I find his remarks a little silly.

  But he has attacked his half-brother, trashed his parents’ pub, once threatened his own mother with a knife, people point out. Why should I be safe?

  I don’t know. He just does not frighten me. None of the people I know, who, like me, have become friends with him during the campaign, are frightened by him. Even his addiction counsellor isn’t scared and he’s thrown a chair at her.

  Working at a hostel, one gets used to bold comments about violence and self-destruction from the homeless. The first three or four times they alarm you. By the fifth or sixth, they’re becoming old hat. You learn to try to change the subject, tell a joke, treat the person like a petulant schoolboy: ‘Now, Tom, I don’t think it’s really a good idea for you to pick a fig
ht with Jenny this morning. She’s already beaten you up three times, and that’s quite enough for one day.’ Or, ‘No, Adam, if you slit your wrists with that razor it will not be “all my fault”. It will be your fault, because they’re your wrists and you’re the one who’s spent the last ten minutes breaking the blade out of your Bic shaver.’

  Little clarifications like this are important in hostel life.

  ‘And remember to slit along the vein, not across it,’ you sometimes feel like adding.

  Even so, a niggling concern remains. One has heard that suicides and violent men frequently need to work themselves up. Big boasts, little trial runs–like sprinters doing exercises in the last minutes before the start gun bangs.

  ‘But I’m still confused on this point,’ I say, changing the subject as we return down the A10, along a narrow little lane beneath the rowans, back towards his housing estate. ‘Why did you put yourself on the streets?’

  ‘I told you. I was already stealing money off me mum to pay for me smack at the time. So one night, after I lost me job cos of the kiddy-fiddler, I took a lot more money and come to Cambridge.’

  ‘But why put yourself on the streets?’

  ‘Alexander! Why, why, why!’

  ‘But it’s important. I want to understand.’

  ‘I dunno–because I’m part Romany, I wanted to live like my roots. I liked the Romany, independent lifestyle.’

  ‘But that’s what I’m getting at. That’s exactly what you weren’t doing. You just slept on the pavements of the nearest city and never moved.’

  7

  ‘Stop asking why, Alexander. I don’t know why. I was so off-key, half the time me mind had a head of its own.’

  …Psycho! Aged 29

  Lion Yard Car Park is a boat of a place. Its cargo hold, nine concrete storeys of smog and tyre burns, is topped by the glass-covered, centrally heated magistrates’ court–the galley, so to speak. The prow of the boat–an eighth of a mile further south, under the Holiday Inn–thrusts towards the university museums of geology and anthropology.