Stuart Page 7

  Deaf Rob appears eagerly by my side.

  ‘Gotta fin’ my girlfrien’, wha?’ he says perkily, and starts away down the street.

  ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘Wha?’

  ‘Well, where does she live?’

  ‘Wha? We’re goin’ to move in together, wha?’

  Does moving in mean sleeping on the same spot of pavement together? I wonder. He says he last saw her six weeks ago by Vauxhall tube station. Her name is Deaf Jackie.

  I give him permission to go and off he marches, arms swinging, along the brightening macadam towards Westminster.

  ‘That’s what you’ll find, Alexander,’ observes Stuart uncharitably. ‘It ain’t loneliness what’s the trouble when you’re on the streets. It’s some of the fucking people you’ve got to live with.’

  Fat Frank, finally within the T-shirt, his freckled stomach pushed out above his belt like a great ginger egg, hoists up a box of leaflets and strides across the road to the tube station opening.

  Stuart said he wanted this protest to do two things. First–the obvious–bring publicity. Second, the bit that interested him the most: to teach me and any other person who’d had life ‘so fucking easy’ what sleeping rough was really about. ‘You fucking want to campaign about it? You get on the fucking streets and learn about it.’

  And it is strange: a few moments after the cars that brought us down drive off, I become aware that already I have discovered something new. Because we do not have a place of our own, nor will have for the next three days, we must invent one. I catch myself, and the eyes of one or two of the others, searching for a section of the pavement with which we might want to become familiar. We are looking among the concrete slabs for the outline of a home.

  Eight thirty in the morning–the show begins. The Independent, Channel 4, East Anglia News, Radio 5 Live, LBC–they’ve all shown up for our press conference. Me and Linda Outreach and Fat Frank get in our sleeping bags for the photographers and pretend (though, of course, Frank is only pretending to pretend) to be outcast homeless people.

  HELP THE HOMELESS:

  LOCK UP A

  CHARITY WORKER

  reads my placard. Linda’s has

  WHO’S NEXT?

  ‘What’s that mean, then?’ smirks the Press Association cameraman as he takes the shot. ‘Who’s next in ’er sleeping bag?’ The Home Office staff start drizzling towards work: some take leaflets, a few join in with us for a couple of minutes before stepping back into the flow again; others march past as if they were defying a picket and appear to be absorbed in a newspaper until their nose bumps into the front door. One or two stop to argue. Dull, stupid arguments: I’ve heard them a thousand times before.

  ‘They were convicted in a court of law,’ pronounces an upright man, white hair stuck to his scalp in plaster-of-Paris mounds. It is astonishing how often you hear this remark, always said with full verbal rotundity: ‘Court of Law’.

  ‘Which,’ I reply, ‘is exactly why we’re protesting–it was a miscarriage of justice.’

  ‘They must have been doing something wrong–no one else has ever been arrested for this,’ from a young beardy face.

  Don’t people think before they start mooing? ‘Of course people haven’t been arrested for this before–this is a test case. Part of the government’s ridiculous War on Drugs. That’s why we’ve got to do something about it.’

  A very tall, thin lady with a knitting needle in her hair: ‘The staff must have seen something!’

  Why must they have?

  ‘Have you ever stood,’ I ask her patiently, though perhaps not quite so fluently as I’m writing here, ‘in the middle of 120 toxic, hooting, scatterbrained, psychopathological social freaks, bottlenecked into an old converted tap-dancing studio, and tried to spot which two are doing something suspicious with their fingertips? The police surveillance camera showed one of their own officers walking within nine inches of a deal and not noticing it.’

  A theatre troupe consisting entirely of ex-homeless push up, having heard about the sleep-out: they wear Ping-Pong balls strapped to the back of their heads, painted to resemble eyes. ‘Ruth and John needed these,’ they shriek as they dance about. Reverend Ian Harker, an East End vicar, arrives with a squeeze box. A muscular Christian like one of Charles Kingsley’s Victorian friends, he plays some merry tunes. By elevenses our stretch of pavement is as jolly as a fairground. Twenty or thirty people are jostling on the pavement–Ruth’s family, John’s family, my friends, Stuart’s friends, street activists, drugs activists. Fat Frank has brought in a boy I nickname Dangerous Ginger. Springy walk, light red hair, a ski-jump nose, Dangerous Ginger keeps his shirt unbuttoned to the waist to show off his smooth chest even though it is distinctly cold.

  A muscular Christian

  ‘If you gave me a bomb, I’d put it under Number Ten,’ he announces loudly, arms akimbo. ‘I’d go right up there and smash all the windows. I wouldn’t care. Your man Jack Straw would know about it if I was in charge.

  ‘I hate people who aren’t happy,’ he bursts. ‘Look at me: no job, no home, but I’m always happy. What have they got to be fucking unhappy about?’

  Another protestor is Andria, director of the Mordaunt Trust, a charity for junkies affected by hepatitis or AIDS, and editor of User’s Voice, a magazine for health- and policy-focused junkies. She has a laugh like a train coming off its tracks and has taken more than a professional interest in Stuart. Wonderful woman, but really! Fancy Stuart? She must be even more peculiar than Dangerous Ginger.

  Deaf Rob reappears. Out of twelve million Londoners he has achieved the impossible–he has located Deaf Jackie. We all gawp. He fetched her out of a pile of dustbin bags by Waterloo. Is this another of the things Stuart wants me to learn? That the street homeless are not isolated wastrels. They are wastrels with a social fabric, and even in the vastness of one of the world’s largest cities they soon produce a sense of village community amongst their peers and friends.

  Deaf Jackie is a plump girl with bad teeth. Deaf Rob clears a space in the middle of our chosen square of concrete slabs, and props his discovery up on three sleeping bags, supported by a throne of pillows and clothing, like a fattened lunatic queen.

  She has written a poem about Ruth and John, addressed to Jack Straw, and politely asks my permission to read it to one of the journalists.

  ‘Let them free/For all eternity!’ she chants, sounding as though she wants them hanged. In the background, I see Stuart, carefully facing away from the cameras, bow-legged, calling to Home Office workers like a seller of penny dreadfuls.

  ‘Miiiss-carriage of juuus-tice!’

  ‘Charity workers imprisoned because drugs found on homeless peee-pul! Knew nothing abaaat it! In prison for doin’ no wruooong! Thirty years working for the ’omeless–locked up cos they couldn’t stop them taking druuuguhs! Miiiss-carriage of juuus-tice! Thank you, madam, thank you, yes, I’ve been homeless meself, in prison also, miss, robbery and hostage taking, here’s a leaflet, if you’d sign the petition? Thank you! Have a nice day! Charity workers imprisoned in miiiss-carriage of juuus-tice!’

  Sour with disapproval, a plump man with bookshelf glasses accuses Stuart of wanting to legalise heroin.

  ‘No, sir, just cannabis. Smack means more junkies and less long-term economic production.’

  Does the man know ‘how many detox beds there is in Cambridge for all them junkies? Two, sir. And half the time when they’ve been in them beds for five or six days they’re put straight back into the situation they were in before they went there. They fall off the wagon as quick as they got on the wagon. Where, the tax off puff would actually pay for all the treatment programmes and policing for heroin addiction. Legalise cannabis but come down like a ton of bricks on the class As.’

  When I come back after fifteen minutes, Stuart and the man with the glasses are having an amiable conversation about South American politics.

  The police arrive mid-morning. An officer, his be
lt trailing communication equipment and restraint devices, strolls among the sleeping bags to explain to me that the Home Office security staff have said they don’t want us standing next to the building or crowding the doorway. ‘See these brass plugs in the pavement?’ He points. The very same that Stuart has been brooding about. ‘You mustn’t cross them. Not even by an inch if the Home Office doesn’t want it. You’ve got to be on the other side of those.’

  Except the vicar.

  The Home Office guards don’t mind the vicar. He can stay up against the wall as long as he keeps playing his squeeze box. The Home Office likes a squeeze-box-playing vicar.

  ‘That’s not good enough, is it?’ explodes one of the Ping-Pong eyes, pausing for a moment in his leaping about. ‘That’s social fucking fascism that is.’

  The officer smiles and says ‘we’ also have to put up riot fences. ‘A fence behind you to ensure you’re not trespassing. And you must have fences on either side, to protect you from the public.’

  ‘Why do we need to be protected from the public?’

  ‘They might step on you in the middle of the night.’

  Finally, ‘we’ also want a fence in front, to shield us from the street.

  ‘In case you roll off the pavement in your sleeping bags and get run over,’ points out the friendly copper.

  ‘You mean you want to cage us in completely?’

  ‘I didn’t say cage, sir, no. That was your word.’

  Paul Boateng–junior minister, responsible for prisons–is spotted. I run after him. A well-poised, balding man in an expensive dark overcoat, he is striding alongside the wall of the Home Office trying to escape without losing his sense of elegance. He smiles. He has nothing to say. He really must be getting on.

  ‘Social fucking fascism.’

  Mr Straw, we are informed by one of the door staff, is not in the office today.

  For an hour and a half Fat Frank Who Never Speaks About His Past stands like a boulder by the tube station, distributing leaflets. The press photographers get him in a good pose, massive back to the cameras, clutching the hands of two endearing blond boys. Then at lunchtime he leaves to do the shoppers in Hammersmith.

  Only Stuart has become muted while the residue of his creation gambols round him. Despite the spring warmth, he wears the largest sweatshirt he can find. The journalists, attracted to Ruth’s four-foot-eleven mother and her enormous velvet, pea-green hat (she is a mosaic artist–she made the decoration on George Harrison’s swimming pool), manoeuvre to snatch her photograph alongside him, with his shaven head, broken nose, and hotchpotch of dull blue home-made tattoos.

  Enormous velvet pea-green hat

  Saturday is cold. The hours drag by wearily. I stretch plastic sheeting across the east side of the barrier to act as a windbreak and to stop the litter bustling in. It works quite well for the wind that comes at us horizontally, but the gusts that billow over the top make two of the barriers bang against each other like an old signpost in a Western. Around noon I go to Camden to collect signatures from young men and women in designer ripped trousers and thick-rimmed NHS-style glasses. Fat Frank lumbers along the edges of Victoria, returns to Hammersmith, rolls off to Notting Hill. Deaf Rob and Deaf Jackie amble west. Stuart disappears later with Andria. (She returns him intact the following morning.) Dangerous Ginger strides down to Westminster clutching a washbag. Deaf Rob reappears having mislaid Deaf Jackie again among the twelve million. He has tumbled upon a middle-aged drunk, instead.

  ‘Wha! Wha! He’s gotta TV company! Gonna make a film! Put us in it! Wha! The Cambridge Two Campaign!’

  A little man, he wears a broad-rimmed hat, white jacket, and white gauze neckerchief, both grey at the edges but still dandyish. The spittle from his bottom lip drops on to our lunch. ‘I borrow money off my friends,’ he glows. ‘I’ll go up to a friend and ask for some money to buy a meal and he’ll give me £200. It’s quite embarrassing.’

  His voice is a shock: clean enunciation, scrubbed-up vowels.

  ‘Wha! I found him! Make a film about Ruth and John! Wha! I’m gonna be in it!’

  I decide the little man belongs to the Anomalous Class of homeless: the collection of oddballs who really have no reason to be slumming it on the streets, yet aren’t doing it because they like the image. They seem to prefer life this way. Living in the ordinary manner of housed people is to them like walking around with a stone in their shoe.

  ‘Wha! Wha!’ bleats the inane Deaf Rob until I feel like punching him. ‘Film! Film!’

  ‘It’s true. I’ve got these television guys following me all over. Everywhere, except at the weekends. London Weekend Television and they don’t work at weekends. Having a laugh, aren’t they? Have you got anything to eat?’

  He tells a joke: ‘A man begging at Victoria Station calls out to a young woman, “Please, miss, got any spare change? I haven’t eaten in four days.” “Really?” says the woman, suddenly interested. “What’s your secret?” ’

  ‘Wha!’ laughs Deaf Rob. ‘Wha! Wha! Wha! Film! Film!’

  For a nice boy like me, sitting with the homeless is a bit like Miss Marple and St Mary Mead: in order to understand any fraction of what they are talking about I must relate everything back to my own world. For example, earlier this afternoon, after I’d stomped off from Camden in disgust, Linda and I were petitioning in Chiswick and I fell behind to read a good-looking restaurant menu pasted in a burnished brass box.

  Boccata roll with onion chutney

  Goat’s cheese, spinach and tomato pissaladière

  Panzanella salad

  Baked pancake roll with a Cephalonian salad

  Baked honey-glazed Magret of duck

  I couldn’t let this list of dishes alone. Boccata? Pissaladière? Panzanella? Cephalonian? Magret–isn’t he a French detective? Pissaladière? £11.95 for goat’s cheese and urine dressing? But it bothered me. Thirty-six hours on the street and already the world had rushed so far ahead that I couldn’t understand a menu. Then I noticed the sign-off line: ‘Most teas and coffee’s available.’ Thickos! Halfwits! These prancing pseuds couldn’t even spell a plural in their own language. My self-confidence restored, I marched off to catch up with Linda.

  My conclusion? When you are homeless it takes between a day and a half and two days to discover ways to protect yourself from feeling cast out–in my case, by abusing menus in poncey restaurants that I would, but for my newly adopted campaign ‘principles’, probably patronise.

  Another thing: this feeling of homelessness is insidious and creeping, because, of course, by no stretch of the imagination am I actually homeless. I will do this for three nights (I will not disappoint Stuart on that score), then I will go home and be admired. But, even so, I already feel a sort of pull, a sense of outsideness beginning to form. What’s more, I rather like it.

  I have learnt also that sleeping in a cardboard box is not uncomfortable. In fact, last night was the first time in months that I’ve slept more than six hours. ‘I don’t know what you bums are complaining about,’ I tell Stuart.

  9

  ‘Three minutes: in, cigarettes, out.’

  Ram-raids and other hard work:

  Aged 24

  Stuart, aged twenty-four, living in a bedsit on the east side of Cambridge: this was five years before he fetched up on Level D, six years before I first met him, seven years before we found ourselves camping in a cage outside the Home Office. Not the most stable period of his life.

  When Stuart moved into this room he closed the curtains immediately. He wanted mopey darkness. The front door of the house was smashed up; the kitchen furniture, cracked and bloated. The wind pushed in off Newmarket Road, depositing leaves and biscuit wrappers in the hallway. In the backyard, plastic flapped among the debris. Stuart began chain-drinking: vodka, lager; lager, vodka; vodka, vodka. ‘Two bottles a day, reglier.’ The couple downstairs packed their bags and ran off within a week. ‘Could have been cos of me, I suppose. Too drunk to notice.’ Stuart moved into their o
ld living room. In the morning he would find himself lying across the floor or over the arms of the sofa, the television still on, his cuts and bruises healing, and finish off whatever was left in the nearest unspilt can for breakfast. When he did go out, it was to the Co-op by the roundabout to buy frozen sausages, vodka and peas.

  ‘I believed that if I didn’t get involved with people, there’d be no one to wind me up and set the fireworks off.’

  Once Karen came by the house unexpectedly and he rushed at her with a hammer thinking…

  …God knows what he was thinking. He started to have visions of the Devil. John Smith saved him from this growing madness.

  ‘A travelling fella,’ Stuart explains, with pride. ‘Part of the Gypsy Smiths of the Hertfordshire/Cambridgeshire borders. He was like the brother I never had. Respect, trust and honour, that’s what keeps us together.’

  Stuart takes a fastidious interest in words (except mine). Official ones, especially when they appear in brown envelopes, give him the quakes. He ponders their meanings to death. Gypsy ones, because of Smithy, he holds in the greatest esteem, though he hardly ever uses them himself.

  ‘You see, the thing with travelling fellas is that they’re a very close community. They’re like Indians, they stick with their own–the only time they normally step out is with what they call “rattlies”, a non-Gypsy bird who’s willing to open her legs, who’s up for a good shag. And, if they’re serious about a gal or they going to marry a bird, a lot of them call them their “maud”. And because I’ve never lived in a trailer or lived the Romany way or nothing, even though I’ve got Romany blood in me, I’m a “gorgia chappy” and I live in a “kennel”.’