by Anya Peters
The following day, on the pavement outside the Odeon on the seafront, I saw a man half-lying on the ground with a crowd gathered around him. An ambulance flashed and wailed its way through the traffic towards them and I wandered over behind the others. He was obviously a vagrant—shabby and vulnerable, on his own like me—and had a cut on the side of his head dribbling black blood. I vaguely recognised him; thought that I’d sat in the same caf?as him when my benefit money had come through a few mornings before, and I’d gone in for an all-day breakfast. There was an open can of Special Brew in his jacket pocket and a thick paperback in the other. When I looked at him again I saw he was staring through the crowd directly at me like I was his salvation. I felt I should do something, smile even, but feared I was being pulled into another world, swallowed up into something I didn’t want to be part of. I couldn’t bear even being recognised by him. I turned and almost ran.
I was still in denial that I was homeless like all the other homeless people I came into contact with, but I could see how fast I was sliding towards where he had ended up. I knew I had to get out of Brighton. It was too small; I was being recognised, and soon there would be no going back. Returning to London was the best option. It was the only place I’d ever felt at home. All the other places I’d stopped in temporarily when driving aimlessly around the country hoping to find a place I could put down roots had just felt more and more alienating.
I’d only left London because of Craig. I’d just fled, frightened to be there any more, frightened of him catching up with me again, of his madness creeping in under my skin. But now I was beginning to see that I was running as much from all the emotional stuff that our relationship had opened up in me, as I was from him. I could see I’d been wrong to let him drive me out. London was where the jobs and the opportunities were. London was something I needed to face again. I was not going to let him control my life with fear as my uncle once had. Unless I fought back now I knew I’d be trapped in a cycle of abuse forever. My decision to leave made me feel as if I was taking charge of my life again.
Chapter 45
The day I drove away from Brighton was warm and sunny. For the first time in months I felt clear and strong and full of hope. It felt like Craig couldn’t hurt or control me any more; it felt like I’d moved on, that I’d got things into perspective again.
I knew I’d have to face some nights sleeping in the car when I got to London, but it wouldn’t be for long: I was ready to ask for help now to get back on my feet. I’d go to the housing agency straight away and call the homeless charity, Crisis, and some of the other homeless organisations to see what help was available. So I hoped it would only be for a few more nights…a week or so at most. The end was definitely in sight.
And once I got there I’d find a job too. Even if it was just sweeping floors, it would give me a way to get some money together for a deposit on a flat. I’d throw myself back into life. I wasn’t going to let this beat me.
I stopped off at a convent on the way, to return a book I’d borrowed and to talk through my plans with one of the nuns. I’d stayed in their guesthouse for a few nights, a few weeks before that first night in the car, and had found the nuns there to be strong, compassionate, surprisingly worldly women, who were very easy to talk to.
I sat in front of the blue enamelled crucifix that hung over the altar in their little wood-clad chapel, thinking out my plan and praying that I’d have the strength to cope with whatever happened once I got back to London. I left feeling strong and together, and certain that going back was the right thing to do.
One of the nuns very generously gave me £20 to help with the petrol for the drive back but I used it for supplies instead, thinking it was Friday and that my benefit money would be in my account that morning to pay for petrol. But I had lost track of the days again: it was only Thursday. As I drove away I panicked, realising I might not have enough fuel for the journey. As I entered London the gauge showed almost empty.
There was no credit left on any of my credit cards by then and I had only about £4 in cash left and no cheque guarantee card. I considered parking up somewhere and waiting for my benefit money the following morning but knew I’d probably just be towed away. In the end I decided to stop at the next garage and use one of the cheques I still had left to pay for fuel.
The next garage I came to was a small, privately owned business with just two pumps outside. I was concerned about looking the cashier in the eye, knowing I hadn’t got the money in my account right then to pay for it. But cheques take at least two days to clear and by then my benefit money would definitely be there to cover it, so I managed to talk myself into doing it. I knew if I went in and asked if I could use a cheque without a guarantee card they would definitely say no. I didn’t know what else to do. I said a prayer and filled up.
I gave the cheque to the cashier, making a play of not being able to find my cheque card. He said he had been told not to accept any cheques without a card and phoned the manager. She and her husband came in and I tried to convince them that there was money in my account. But the woman insisted on phoning my bank and they told her that they wouldn’t honour it.
She wouldn’t believe there was no other way for me to pay, or no one for me to call to pay for me.
’There must be a relative or friend you can call,’ she said.
But there wasn’t. I had let my life unravel so much while I was with Craig that there was no one left at all. In the end she got really angry and threatened to call the police, but I still couldn’t find a solution. I tried to stay calm and promised to drive back the following day to pay them in cash but she refused that. She would only let me go, she said, if I left behind my tax disc and came back later for it. I couldn’t do that; so she locked the door and called the police. I knew I was in the wrong but the petrol was already in the car and the cheque would definitely have cleared when the money went into my account the following day. I tried to reason with her but I was shaking, and by the time the police arrived I was having a full-scale panic attack.
We went out to the car. When the police took down some details and asked me for my address I refused to tell them. They were understandably suspicious and got quite angry, telling me they could arrest me. In the end I gave them my old Newcastle address, which was where the car was still registered. They still seemed really suspicious though. When I said there was no one in London I could call to pay over the phone with a credit card for me, they asked me how I intended to drive all the way back up the motorway to Newcastle if I had no money and only one tank of petrol. I had no answer. The woman from the garage was shouting that I was a criminal and a liar trying to steal their hard-earned profits; her husband was telling her to calm down but agreeing with her, threatening to siphon out the petrol with some rubber tubing, which he’d dragged over from the repair shop. I just wanted to run from the forecourt screaming that I didn’t have an address, that I was homeless! Fortunately, no words came out and on the outside I stayed calm.
I shut down standing opposite the five of them as one of the policemen radioed through to get more details about the car, and the manageress continued to call me a thief and a criminal. I’d never done anything criminal in my life and yet here I was being accused and shouted at by the manager and her husband. I was shaking inside and could hardly hold myself upright, but I knew that all she could see was my stony face as I stared straight ahead trying to imagine myself back into the calm of the silent chapel I’d sat in that morning. But I couldn’t, any peace I’d had that morning had completely gone.
The police agreed to let me go, but warned that if the cheque didn’t clear I’d be arrested. I knew that it would clear, but I was visibly shaken. I was shocked at their aggression and hostility towards me and felt so totally alone.
Here I was in London, the city where I was born and had spent most of my life, and there was nowhere to go and no one to go to. I wasn’t prepared for how isolated I would feel. Was Craig right? Would I be driven back to him
after all? He was the only person I knew left here really. One telephone call to him and I wouldn’t have to spend another night in the car, or stand in front of more strangers somewhere being shouted at and feeling so low. It would be utter madness, of course, and I absolutely wouldn’t do it.
For the first couple of nights in London I parked in a quiet, one-way street where Nighthawk security guards came out of one of the driveways and walked up and down past the car, staring in at me but saying nothing. I wasn’t entirely sure at that stage whether sleeping in your car was illegal or not, but I assumed it wasn’t. They didn’t question me or move me on, and I was so exhausted that eventually I managed to shut them out enough to fall into a restless, broken sleep.
Sleeping in the car in the residential streets of London was harder than it had been in Brighton, where I had convinced myself that sleeping in a car was almost acceptable, given the clubbing scene down there—I could just have been clubbing and too drunk to drive home. But here there were neighbourhood watches, twitching curtains, traffic wardens and private security men patrolling the posher streets.
In the depression I was in, all I wanted to do was sleep all day but I woke up early to dress and get the car and myself looking respectable. I brushed my teeth with bottled water and washed my face with wads of toilet paper soaked in water before driving off to find a McDonald’s or a hotel bathroom to wash properly in, well before the traffic wardens started for the day.
After the first couple of nights I parked on different roads every night. A lot of my time and petrol was taken up just trying to find ‘safe’ ones. The incident at the garage had completely destroyed any confidence I’d had about coming back to London, and I felt more and more fearful about everything. I was feeling as low as I had when I left London in the first place. All my defences were up again; it was just me against the world.
Some mornings, as I sat in the car eating breakfast, commuters would see me as they made their way to work. I dreaded the looks most of them gave me, but some of them seemed almost scared of me: glancing in nervously and then looking away, all of us trying to out-scare one another. I knew none of them would confront me. Anyway, I’d done nothing wrong. I told myself that I wouldn’t see them again so it didn’t matter, but I felt increasingly ashamed of myself for how I was living and for not knowing how to stop.
Soon I began to notice the same milkmen rattling down streets early in their floats, the postmen pulling their red carts around, the workmen eating breakfasts in their vans, reading papers with their feet up on the dashboards until it was time to start. It wasn’t long before I began to feel recognised and watched by them all. I was mostly sleeping in the same few ‘safe’ streets I’d found. I felt trapped in the area, subsisting on the benefit money, which wasn’t enough to allow me to drive far out of London again or do much else. More and more of my energy went into trying to conceal my situation and just survive, rather than finding a way out of it.
I did go to the housing advice centre a few days after arriving back in London but they wouldn’t even give me the most basic information without me telling them my address. But I didn’t want to tell them who I was at that stage or that I was homeless. I thought that my benefit money would stop if I did. It was the same when I phoned some of the homeless charities—Housing Justice, CHAS and Shelter. All I really wanted was help with getting together a month’s deposit and a month’s advance but none of them seemed able to give that. It seemed an obvious solution to me but I suppose they thought I’d spend it on drink or drugs.
All the organisations I phoned wanted more information before they would tell me what other help they might be able to provide. After the incident with the police taking down my details, and not being one hundred per cent sure if it was legal to sleep in a car anyway, I was wary, and reluctant to give them any details. Especially since I knew they were probably only going to advise me to go in person to the local Homeless Person’s Unit. I was too afraid of losing my benefit money to do that, even though it wasn’t housing benefit I was getting. I also knew I wasn’t a ‘priority homeless’ person, so short of just registering me I knew they couldn’t do much else.
For the next few weeks, as everything spiralled out of control again, I spent my days mostly in the car dodging the traffic wardens or feeding parking meters with money intended for food. I tried to think things through, but the worse the situation got the more difficult it was for my mind to focus on my problems. Mostly I’d spend the time just sitting, my head completely blank, or working out which street I was going to park in that night, or reading until I spotted a traffic warden and had to drive off again, all the time watching the petrol gauge. It felt like they were making a game of it, spotting my car and then getting on their radios and telling the others. Every corner seemed to hide another one. I felt as if my car was being shunted around a giant board as I drove off around the corner until another one appeared.
I was applying for jobs online in the library every day, still convinced I could get a job and work, sleeping in the car until I earned the money I needed to rent somewhere. But more and more of my effort was going into just surviving—finding somewhere to park each night and eking out the money so there was enough for petrol and food—and just concealing my situation from the world.
I was washing in pubs and hotel toilets but I couldn’t find anywhere for a shower or to wash my hair; and in the end that was the thing that almost had me going to the homeless shelters in London, just as it had in Brighton. I couldn’t smell myself any more but knew it couldn’t be nice.
I was living in one of the most expensive cities in the world on virtually no money but still trying to eat well to keep my strength up and prevent my mind from flipping completely: fruit and raw veg, nuts and yoghurt and tinned sardines. But hot food was what I craved and I could only afford chips, Macdonald’s or cartons of egg-fried rice. Because I had to buy petrol and live on takeaway food I never had enough to make ends meet. The last few days at the end of every fortnight, before my next benefit money arrived, I would have little, if anything, to eat.
About a month after arriving back in London, when the cold weather finally set in, I bought a sleeping bag—searching the Argos catalogue for the cheapest I could find. For three whole days that week I ate nothing but some sour apples I picked from a tree in the walled garden of an empty house. I’d noticed the side gate unlocked when I’d walked past before and was tormented by the apples I could see fallen under the tree. I was at my wits’ end the next time I walked past, weak, light-headed and almost hallucinating with hunger. I took a deep breath and went in, locking the gate to the street behind me, and sat on the wet grass under the tree eating them and crying. It was a new low. I felt so alone and just didn’t know what to do. I went back several times in the next couple of days, sitting there on the damp grass in the blissful silence. Those apples were the nearest to theft that I came.
I eventually found some food stalls in Camden market where at closing time the hot Chinese food was sold off at one pound instead of almost five pounds. It was a revelation. Other homeless-looking people like me seemed to emerge from the shadows at the same time and slip in through the after-work crowd, and I felt the people behind the stalls picking us out from the crowd, putting up one finger to let us know that it was only one pound, while they continued to charge the work crowd full price. I felt like I had ‘homeless’ tattooed on my forehead. I felt humiliated and degraded, but not enough to turn away.
Chapter 46
Sometimes my phone, which I was using as an alarm clock, would run out of charge and I’d oversleep. I’d end up getting parking tickets I had no way of paying, just as I had in Brighton when I ran into shops to buy food, or, getting lost in the unfamiliar streets, returned to the car after the ticket from the meter had expired. One day, a Portuguese traffic warden who I was always trying to avoid—after he’d seen me waking up in the car late one morning—must have taken pity on me. He had already given me a few tickets. Putting anoth
er one under my wipers as I ran back late, he told me about a hospital car park not too far away which was off-limits to them.
’Do you ever park there?’ he said. I shook my head and unlocked the car, too tired to even be embarrassed in case he smelt the inside of it. ’Hospital security staff check the cars themselves there,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think they’re as thorough as we are.’ He winked conspiratorially.
That same afternoon I headed there and it was true; there was a sign saying it was a private car park. And there were no traffic wardens. At last I could leave my car somewhere and not feel hounded by them. It was an enormous relief and instantly took some of the pressure off me. For the first week I paid in the machines and could afford to stay long enough to wash in the hospital toilets and have a cup of tea and maybe some food in the canteen in the mornings. Then one day I came back late and found that no one had given me a ticket.
A few days later again I had run out of money but I desperately needed a wash so I risked it. I crossed my fingers in my pocket, hung my blue-glass Rosary beads from the rear-view mirror and left the car park without paying. Although it was wrong I did it day after day after that, and never once got a ticket. I noticed that a lot of the other cars had notices up on the windscreens saying ‘obstetrician…’ or ‘surgeon…’ or ‘midwife…’ ‘…on call’, together with a bleep number on which to contact them. So most days I put one up too, inventing a bleep extension and praying that the security guards wouldn’t check and try to contact me on it.
I had only been in London for a few weeks but it already felt like months, and I was going almost insane just from not being able to take a shower anywhere. For all those months, ever since I was last in London with Craig, I wasn’t having periods, which almost felt like a blessing now when I was sleeping in a car without anywhere to shower. It would have been a worse hell if I had been menstruating every month. After lots of tests the consultant I’d seen in Newcastle couldn’t find any other reason for it than stress. I didn’t know that that could happen just through stress.
