Stuart Read online

  Stuart aged 29 fetched up in this car park after leaving his mother’s pub, meeting Asterix and Scouser Tom, being kicked out of Smudger’s flat, and messing up his chances at Jimmy’s and the day centre. He’d been told that ten to fifteen people ‘skippered’ there every night, but wherever he looked he couldn’t find a single one of them. He took his blankets and rags and walked up the circular staircase to the top storey, just under the magistrates’ court, where the pigeons sleep. It took him four days to find the place for people.

  Between the magistrates’ court end and the Holiday Inn end of the building are ramps and an aerial walkway, plus a mezzanine basement dug, it seems, into pure concrete. HUMANS NOT ALLOWED indicates an accompanying sign. Another notice reads TO LEVELS A-B-C-D. A little stick man with a Ping-Pong head marches behind the letters in an encouraging manner, guiding you along a narrow pavement. Grey drops of chewing gum splatter the way, congesting towards a stair door and lift door at the other end. Then Ping-Pong Head pops up again, on a sign hurrying back towards TOILETS. The pillars supporting the ceiling here (we are now under the Holiday Inn) are stencilled with the letter A. IS THIS A RT MUMMY? someone has scrawled around one.

  By the lift other signs fight for attention. A bewildering list of charges. More funny round-headed stick figures explaining how to stand in a lift. ‘Get into your car or get a move on,’ they appear to say. ‘Stop being such an uncertain quantity.’ A dulled brass honorarium:

  To Commemorate the Opening

  of the

  Lion Yard Car Park Extension

  by

  The Right Worshipful the Mayor

  COUNCILLOR DR GEORGE REID

  on

  Friday 10 August 1990

  Dr Reid, the main university force in our campaign to release Ruth and John: a fine humanitarian, conservative to the ends of his toes (which have gout).

  The lift is boarded up. Recently, a student leant against these doors, they opened accidentally and he plunged into the dark down the shaft.

  ‘PLEASE BE AWARE,’ declares a bill on the door by the stairs, ‘if approached in this car park by someone claiming to need money for petrol or to replace a broken car key please do not give them any money and immediately contact a member of staff at the exit.’

  On the other side of the door is the concrete staircase: cinder grey, regular. The banister is red. The smell is dust and disinfectant. Go down two flights. The walls still show the grain of the plywood moulds that once held them when they were poured. If you peer hard through the dark Perspex window in the door of this floor–Level B–you can often spot something interesting. Couples kissing passionately in the front seats, couples in the back seats, couples shouting. Depth, in this building, quickly gives a conviction of privacy. Down two more flights and Level C begins to show the strain. The walls are laterally cracked, like an exposed vein of a leaf. Occasionally, the smell loses its warm chemical hint and a waft of urine insinuates itself instead. There are still currents of air.

  Down the final two staircases, forty feet under ground, to the lowest subterranean floor. You could take off all your clothes and do handstands down here and you’d be safe any time between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m.

  The cleaners have been at this piece of graffiti with their scrubbing brushes many times. Six inches to the right, beneath a picture of a falling bomb, some more:

  Above you, the noises could be of people just leaving the staircase at the top; or, equally, stomping across the floor directly above. Sound is impossible to place.

  Push through this door, out of the stairwell into Level D, and you will see in front of you 15,000 square feet of car park that is completely empty.

  This is where the homeless sleep.

  ‘’Ere, Jonny, stop pissing on that bloke, he’s trying to snooze.’

  ‘Can I have another sarnie, pleaaase? I’ve only ’ad three…’

  This is where the homeless sleep.

  ‘Coffee with five sugars, love, ta.’

  ‘Jonny! Get over here and tell Linda…’

  ‘Aww, that’s not fair. Penny’s had six. And she’s nicked a burger and chips from that geezer outside Gardenia. Gooo on, jus’ one more…’

  ‘Is that five? You sure? Put another one in, just in case, pet.’

  ‘JONNY! He don’t want ketchup poured over him neither! He’s not a frigging hot dog! Come here, it’s important, tell Linda about Psycho. Honest, Linda, not joking, he’s a nutter–he’s taking over Level D. A danger to everyone. Giving us a bad name. Like, we don’t even dare go down to Level D no more. You don’t know him? Where have you been the last five months? JONNY!’

  Linda was one of the two members of the Cambridge Homeless Outreach Team in those days. Her job was to walk round the city streets in the evenings talking to anyone who looked homeless: i.e., anyone selling the Big Issue or three months away from a bath or stationed in public spaces at lower than a standing position. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she ran the soup kitchen in the market square. This service is gone now, but in the late 1990s it was not only a charitable provider of food and hot drinks to rough sleepers, it was the best way to learn street gossip.

  That evening, after the soup kitchen was locked away, Linda met up with her work colleague, Denis Hayes, an ex-film cameraman, and went to seek out Psycho.

  For outreach workers, the best way down to Level D is by the car ramps, because it brings each floor gradually into view–allows them to assess the situation slowly and not to pounce in on it through small yellow stairway doors at one end.

  ‘I always think if I wanted to do a film again, the scene that night would be the opening shot,’ remembers Denis. ‘I’ll never forget that image. It was, like, coooold. Me and Linda go right down until we get to the last bit, Level D, and that would be how I’d start. Coming down the ramp from Level C above, panning slowly across this eerie, vast space. Empty car park. Left to right: not a car, not a car, not a car, nothing, nothing, and then…Psycho!

  ‘What he reminded me of was an IRA hunger striker. Skeletal, in his cell, all his things around him. He was like that man in Birdie, crouched on the end of his bed. Nobody could make him up to look how he did at that moment. Angry as hell. Hated me. Hated Linda. Hated everything from the fucking dust upwards.’

  Psycho!

  8

  Stuart says it is a ‘blinding’ idea.

  He is in my study again, standing by the piano, swiping the air with his arm in excitement. He and I and half a dozen street homeless smackheads and drinkers will sleep rough on the concrete pavement outside the Home Office, corner the Home Secretary when he arrives for work on Monday morning, and force him to release Ruth and John. That’s Stuart’s inspiration.

  Always the first to discourage unnecessary illegality, Stuart points out that we will have to warn the police about what we are going to do, but not tell them until after 4 p.m. on the previous day, ‘because that way the courts will be shut and it’ll be too late to get an injunction what can stop us. Then there’s the security cameras.’

  I look quizzical.

  ‘All over. And that’s not counting the ones you can’t see,’ he adds darkly.

  ‘It’s better than that nutter Brandon’s idea, in’it?’ Stuart enthuses. Professor David Brandon is the ex-director of another charity for the homeless; it was his suggestion that he and half a dozen other homelessness workers present themselves to the police and demand to be arrested. If Ruth and John are guilty of ‘knowingly allowing’ drugs in their day centre, then they are all guilty of it, since other homeless charities are run according to the same rules. I disagree with Stuart. I think that is a gem of a stunt, too.

  ‘Fucking stupid. Asking to get arrested! Then who’s going to get him out? Expect his missus will be wanting a go next.’

  ‘But that’s the whole trick, isn’t it? They can’t put him in prison, too. He’s known all around the country–there’d be an outcry. Cambridge Police Gone Mad!’

  Stuart shakes his head, his mood sudd
enly dampened. ‘Fella goes to the Old Bill and asks to be banged up, and they don’t do it? Don’t make sense.’

  I return to typing the campaign newsletter.

  ‘All of us in fucking nick and no one fucking left to get us out. Just a load more work all round, that’s what I think,’ Stuart rumbles on. ‘See, you got all your nine-to-fives saying what drugs is about and they don’t know the first fucking thing. Like piss-testing prisoners. Everybody thought that was a good idea cos drugs leave traces in your urine, so with piss-testing you couldn’t get away with it any more. More tests, less drugs. Right? Wrong. It’s because of them tests that there’s a heroin epidemic in prison. Why? Because the drug of choice used to be cannabis, but cannabis lasts up to three weeks in your system, so if the screws do the random tests at weekends, like they do, you’ve got three chances of getting caught. Where, heroin lasts only three days. Result: everyone starts switching to smack. Your nine-to-fives think they’ve done something useful, where in fact they’ve just made the fucking problem worse.’

  For a few moments longer Stuart falls back to brooding on the wickedness of ignorance and people who disorder the world by asking to be put in jail. To cheer him up I return to his Blinding Idea. I really do like it. Exciting, freakish, bound to get publicity. The more I think of it, the more it sounds a corker.

  ‘What else should we plan for?’ I enquire enthusiastically.

  ‘The brass.’

  ‘Top brass? Policemen, you mean?’

  ‘Alexander, what are you like? In London, the pavement isn’t all public: some of it belongs to them and some of it belongs to us. The brass bits is little bits put in outside of all government buildings in London what lets you know the difference–there’s brass bits all over London. If we sleep on the bit what belongs to them, they do us.’

  ‘So, we’re OK if we sleep on the other bit?’

  Stuart shakes his head. ‘Nah. If we sleep on the bit that belongs to us they still do us, only it’s not the same.’

  ‘The main place you get them is around your bollocks.’

  It is six in the morning, six weeks later. We are flicking beneath the motorway lights in convoy, in one friend’s beat-upsmellymobile and another friend’s smooth new Volvo estate, down towards the doomed Home Secretary and the Home Office in London. The boots are filled with posters, badges, T-shirts, petitions, and pale Tupperware boxes containing sandwich-shaped objects beneath the lids. In the back of the seedy conveyance, Stuart and I are squished up with Deaf Rob, whom we picked up off a Cambridge bridge, where he was sitting in the honey glow of the street light surrounded by luggage. He had sneaked out of a hostel an hour earlier without paying his rent. Tongue-twisted, pallid, his hair sawn at the night before with a grapefruit knife, he is clutching a pigskin suit-holder in businessman’s-overcoat beige with ‘Louis Pierre, Paris’ woven below the handle. In the other car, Linda the Outreach Worker, Fat Frank Who Never Speaks About His Past, and space for two King’s College students who said they wanted to join in, were ‘passionate about social justice’ and absolutely to be relied on, then couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed.

  ‘And hairy places,’ continues Stuart. ‘Under your arms; if you’ve got hairy legs, on your legs. That’s the difference between lice and scabies. Lice is when you’re on the street and someone pulls a blanket out and you sit on it.’ He holds up his hand, thumb and forefinger pinched together. ‘Not as thick as a match–a third of a match long is fucking ginormous. A fucking monster lice that is. It’s scabies, what are smaller, what goes under the skin. You scratch and that’s what ends up. Literally, live under the skin. Where, lice–all you need is one lice. A male or female lays eggs. At the same time, the cold doesn’t kill them. Last year, sleeping out under the bridge, Tom the Butcher had lice and they was hopping over his three mates next morning. It weren’t because it was fucking warm!’

  Stuart has been talking non-stop since 4.30 a.m.–I feel he has been talking ever since the Blinding Idea first came to him–yap, yap, yap, HIV, hepatitis C, why homeless people smell, why homeless people can’t get their heroin doses right, why homeless people never do anything except shout obscenities and shit on charity workers, why homeless people always feel obliged to make ten times the amount of noise as anyone else, why homeless people blame everyone but themselves for being homeless, yap, yap, yap.

  ‘Then you got drying out and foot problems. Homeless people get wet, you know.’

  Who cares?

  ‘Your foot just fucking ends up mouldy basically.’

  I wish it would drop off.

  ‘You know what it’s like…’

  No, I work for my living. I’ve got a house.

  ‘…if you go out and your socks get wet, you come home and your skin’s white, in’it? Imagine that when it’s been raining for two or three days. It’s all water and little mushrooms and no foot.’

  The fourth passenger in the car, a man generally sympathetic to the poor person’s complaint–a union member, a lifelong activist for the cause of Right and Fairness–has cupped his hands against the side of his face.

  ‘’Ere, Drew, something wrong? What for are you holding your head?’

  ‘I’m trying to block you out, Stuart.’

  Stuart keeps his thoughts sealed as we come down into London from the northern hills, but one might as well try to button up the ocean. His lips twitch. His face stiffens. He stares out of one window, then the other, looks at the lining on the car roof, fidgets with both sides of his hands. At Walthamstow Town Hall he draws a preparatory breath but stops. By Seven Sisters and Holloway it’s beyond control.

  ‘Not being funny, is that a prison?’ he blurts.

  ‘Holloway, mate,’ confirms Drew.

  ‘Here’s another idea you should think of doing, Alexander,’ he gushes forth, laughing with relief. ‘Get a room full of, like, policemen and MPs and judges, then get someone else with, fucking, a couple thousand quid of smack and get them to put loads of little £10 bags in everyone’s pockets.’

  Brilliant, Stuart. Excellent. How do you think of them?

  ‘Nah, serious, I am. Cos then they’d understand what John and Ruth was up against. Any good dealer could do it, cos a £10 packet is only about the size of a sweetcorn kernel, then at the end you’d tell them what had happened while they was all standing round having fucking sherry and them little pieces of toast with orange bits on, just to let them know how fucking easy it was. And you’d have to give them something to talk about, like with Special Brew Sue and Spider kicking off or food served by waitresses in short skirts. Nah! I know! Lap dancers! Cos you’ve got to create for them judges and nobby cunts the same environment–only it’s not the same-same obviously–you know, for them, the equivalent level of disruption what John and Ruth…’

  We pass Camden Sainsbury’s. ‘But smack’s not a nice middle-class drug, is it?’ Stuart says, giving me an accusatory look as if, but for the disapproval of people like me, heroin would be sold in polypropylene meal trays alongside Chicken Tikka For Two. ‘All the publicity with Ecstasy. There’s been like sixty deaths in ten years of E on the street, and whenever someone dies it makes the front pages of the newspaper, especially if they’re under twenty-five. But more than sixty people under twenty-five die every year in England of heroin. You know, we’re talking a year, and it’s not a big issue! And crack–that’s not a new drug like it’s all made out. It’s the same as freebasing which has been going on around the middle/upper classes since the sixties. It’s in Cambridge. It come in through the colleges. You know, if they went and piss-tested all the college students I reckon they’d be really surprised at how many had crack cocaine in their system,’ etc., etc., etc., etc.

  You’d think the homeless would despise the rest of us, but it seems the thing they want to do most is talk. If only they could sit us down and let it all spill out–every twist of their history, down to the last murmur–then they’d be cured.

  At Camden we get lost. Stuart, now on his seco
nd visit to the Big City, waves out a hundred directions that turn out to be totally wrong. I make a few suggestions that are correct. Then I make a mistake: we end up for a few minutes on the Strand.

  Stuart laughs at me like a schoolboy.

  As if about to come under fire we unload the battered sleeping bags and rolls of toilet paper outside the Home Office in a human chain. A desolate sort of place, 50 Queen Anne’s Gate sits on a narrow street that splits off from Victoria Street above Westminster Abbey like a wind-blanched shoot from a robust and colourful stem. The building, shot full of windows, is a vertical extension of the pavement. Next door is the Wellington Barracks. New Scotland Yard, protected by armed officers, stands round the corner. We spread our luggage between two saplings struggling through the concrete slabs–the sort of things that look nice in architects’ plans–and cover them in posters. Dawn seeps gradually among the narrow, torpid streets.

  Stuart’s mood has changed. He is no longer yapping. He busies himself with arranging boxes and fussing about how to keep order among the badges and petitions, protect sleeping equipment, arrange for our general security.

  ‘There’s something about that one,’ he says, indicating Fat Frank Who Never Speaks About His Past. At this moment, Fat Frank, another street person, is in the ludicrous position of having his head stuck in the armhole of a T-shirt. His stomach is so obscenely large that his elbows bounce away from his sides like tangents in a maths textbook.

  ‘Something, you know, I don’t mean his personal hygiene, he might not be able to help that.’ Stuart picks up a box of leaflets. ‘Why wouldn’t Linda sit next to him in the back of the car this morning? Linda’s not normally scared of nobody.’ Stuart is endlessly singing this woman’s praises: someone who stuck by him in his thousands of hours of need. Because no one living rough feels threatened by Linda, her apparent physical weakness is her strength; or it has been so far, anyway.