The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  Yet, although seeing this, Finkel fails to see that his relationship with Longo is more of the same. He is still excited by the lie, still wanting to impress. It is certainly fascinating to read about, but is it possible to offer a mea culpa that is also a piece of recidivism? In the case that interested Malcolm, a witness says that he always knew the journalist had the option of not believing the murderer: what he didn’t know was that the journalist had the option of not liking him. That was thanks to the efforts Joe McGinniss had put into convincing his subject that he was practically the only person who did truly like him and believe in him. ‘The flaw in McGinniss’s character,’ Malcolm wrote, ‘may be that he doesn’t know how to be anything but ingratiating.’

  That’s Finkel’s problem. But disingenuousness can’t easily be allowed to stand at the centre of a man’s account of his escape from the perils of dishonesty. We might find Longo, as the jury did, to be murderous, lying and manipulative, but that will not automatically relieve Finkel from his own manipulations. He was ‘in’ on Longo’s guilt from the beginning, but chooses to be disgusted by Longo only when the trial is concluding and he needs nothing further from him. Finkel has his book, his redemption, and Longo has the death penalty. Finkel claims to have lost faith in his subject-friend when the latter gave evidence accusing his dead wife of having killed two of the children before he killed her. ‘I was mortified that I’d affiliated myself with Longo,’ Finkel writes, ‘that I had actually cared about him.’ And later:

  He was acutely aware that I was retreating from him. When Longo was leaving court … we’d briefly made eye contact, but I had felt so disgusted with him that my instinctive response was to quickly turn away. Longo referred to this reaction on his letter’s opening page. ‘I do hope that I haven’t lost you as a friend,’ he added.

  There you go. Finkel’s instinctive response was to turn quickly away, but not, he might have said, before he had his story and his fill of access to the killer. That is often the nature of the journalistic danse macabre, and how silly of Longo not to have seen where the steps would lead. Despite his ambitions, the murderer showed that he wasn’t a journalist after all: he didn’t have the necessary instinct. Only Michael Finkel was Michael Finkel, and he rises out of the case with a very readable book and a greatly revived sense of self. Loss of life is a relative matter nowadays, and so is betrayal – some betrayals matter more than others. To betray the editors of the New York Times would seem to be one of the great crimes of the moment. One would go to almost any length to make up for it. ‘And so,’ Finkel writes, at the end of his travels. ‘The last thing I want to say about my Times article is this: I’m sorry.’

  On Begging

  NOVEMBER 1993

  George Baroli and I were soaked to the skin. We sat on a wooden bench in the rain; a green bottle of sherry sat between us. George stared straight ahead most of the time, tilting the bottle up to his mouth with both hands, getting it into position, holding it there, and breathing through his nose. I tried to roll him a cigarette inside my jacket while he spoke of Newcastle, of how he thought he’d never leave it, and then telling me stories of his life now, as a beggar in London. He tapped my arm: ‘Times’s bad,’ he said. ‘but good times is just around the corner.’

  George talked a lot about time; mainly he spoke of how it went too slow. He was seventy, sleeping most nights at the Bondway emergency night-shelter in Vauxhall. When he turned to me, I noticed how mottled the irises of his eyes were, how patches of white and light grey jostled for space on them in such a way as to give him a look of shock and bewilderment. He wore one of the longest coats I’ve ever seen; it went all the way down, ending on top of a yellowish pair of sandshoes. His face was full of crevices and shelves, shallow nicks and lines of confusion, and his lips were dark and scorched-looking. He said he was schizophrenic, that years ago, in Newcastle, he’d had injections, but that that had all stopped. He said he needed medicine, tablets, something other than what he was given now and again for ‘bowel-opening’. Lunchers marched across the gardens, crouched under umbrellas, eating bananas. He puffed at my damp roll-up.

  ‘Do ye believe Christ is the Son of God?’ he asked casually.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said, wiping the bottle. He then did something which is quite unusual between beggars: he asked me for money. I gave him some change and the rest of the Golden Virginia. He stood up, nodded, slid his arms into the long coat and walked off. An attendant, patrolling the path, strode up and told me to get rid of the bottle. And he hoped I wasn’t begging: ‘This isn’t the place.’ I pulled my hood up and made off, slipping between the charging umbrellas, thinking to find a decent spot over the Thames.

  The railway bridge by Charing Cross, I thought, might make a good begging pitch what with all those mauve scarves and coats making their way over to the South Bank Centre. I found a plastic bread-board and, placing it upside-down, sat on it at the top of the stairs on the Embankment side. I stared at the ground, soaking dirt covered with fag stubs and tickets, lifting my head just occasionally to see who was looking. Then I’d ask them for money. I’d put a hand out and ask for spare change.

  This matter of sitting on the ground begging was as far from my normal point of view as any I can properly imagine. It wasn’t my life and, previous to this, I knew nothing of it. Yet as soon as I folded my legs on that bridge, the moment I looked up to address some stranger with my bogus little request, I felt I was no longer part of the places I knew. I felt I’d been here for years; already I burned with resentments that normally take time to kindle. I had never been among the walkers-past, I was sure – though, in fact, I had never been anywhere but among them. Without quite knowing why, I forgot all about the conditions of journalism and the vantage points of my own life and felt, at once, that I was genuinely and irrevocably under someone else’s feet. In this frame of mind, you begin to notice things about passers-by that you would never, when following your normal routines, notice about yourself.

  Searching for signs of pity, I see only embarrassment. In the seconds of eye-contact, some people evidently wish the ground would swallow them up. Others, newly elevated, puffed-up and tight, looked as if they wished the ground would swallow me. In my new way of thinking I began to detect contempt and fear in the faces of most who passed. I obviously looked – and the thought made me uneasy – like I’d meant to look; people responded in the ways I knew they’d respond; in the ways I responded myself when passing a lone, wet beggar on a bridge. There were signs of sadness and disappointment in some faces, as if the promise of a pleasant evening was somehow blighted at the sight of me. There are those who tell you to get a job, to piss off or to leave them alone. And others – with their ‘Sorry, mate’, ‘No change, pal’ or ‘I’m in the same boat’ patter – return you to yourself a bit, speaking to you in ways you’d thought suspended by the rules of the game. But perhaps not, perhaps they’re just the kind of people who can return a glance with a glance of their own, and who prefer to speak when spoken to.

  People say that they hate the way beggars publicly expose themselves, expose their need and their need to expose their need. The walkers-past, on the other hand, with their maddened eyes and embarrassed shoes, their twitches and blushes and grunts, expose just about everything a beggar would wish to know about who they are. In waves of the hand and the words they choose to spit, in haughty tut-tutting and superior giggling, a great number of those who pass by express their dislike of beggars and their general scorn of any sort of in-your-face poverty. Or that’s how it looked from where I sat.

  The money I was given that afternoon I got in different ways. Usually, it arrived in my lap after falling through four feet of air. I’d chase coins from the flying givers all but into the Thames itself; a few coins bounced beside me and leapt through the bars of the railing, vanishing into the water. The trains might rattle in and out behind me for an hour without my gaining a penny. Then someone would appear at the top of the stairs – usually a woman – and over she
’d come with a disquieted expression, a look of concern. She’d ask, was I OK, hungry? ‘You look very tired … I’m sorry,’ she’d say. She’d hand over a pound or 50p and leave with a glance backwards. I’d wonder who she was. A beggar’s relationship with strangers (i.e. anyone who isn’t a policeman or another beggar) is always the same: a request made and usually ignored though occasionally met. I tried begging at different spots along the bridge and was glared at by beggars who had their own territory marked out with bin liners, cardboard and sleeping bags. With the light fading and the tourists elsewhere, I leant against the railing and looked at my hand, separating the coins to count what I’d made. It came to £2.86.

  In the last ten years, street-begging in Britain has become visible in ways unseen since the early nineteenth century. This has coincided, of course, with the Thatcher years, in which the idea of society as a non-thing, as a fruitless misnomer, has come into its own: with the time it has taken the word ‘dispossession’ to become wholly familiar to anyone who dwelt anywhere near the wrong side of the tracks. To many, the large-scale return of begging – like rises in unemployment, house repossessions and the closure of hospitals – was a sure sign that things were not going well. But the most powerful mediators in this non-society have chosen to prove it a sign of something else: that the chosen profession of scroungers and layabouts, of wasters and filthy idlers, is on the move. Such voices boom loudly these days. It’s not about economic ruin, they say, it’s about idleness; it’s not to be called poverty, it’s to be called sponging.

  ‘Beggars were once a rare sight on Britain’s streets and provoked more sympathy than disgust. But all that has changed over the last few years as the streets of our major cities have become hunting grounds – not for penniless unfortunates, but for a new breed of professional beggars. Many of them are not in need at all.’ This, from a July report in the Daily Express, was headlined ‘Scandal of the Bogus Beggars’. Two months earlier, the Mail on Sunday had spoken of ‘a sinister and violent new phenomenon which threatens to engulf the capital and, if police fears prove correct, could break out into open warfare as the tourist season reaches its peak: aggravated begging’. It went on: ‘More and more respectable people are having to run the gauntlet of intimidating beggars, blocking their path, being abusive, spitting and threatening to infect them with Aids.’ According to which report you read, beggars are making so much (‘Benefit cheats who gang up on victims net £1,000 a week,’ roared the Daily Mail) that jewellers, brickies and bankers are giving up their jobs in favour of begging. ‘Scruffy Dave Naylor’, according to the Daily Star, ‘has got it made. He can earn up to £85 a day – doing nothing. He just haunts a tube station looking pathetic, and people drop their hard-earned cash into his plastic cup. For dirty, greasy-haired Dave, 19, is king of the hard-faced professional beggars working Central London.’

  These reports – with their penny-dreadful conflation of begging with theft, social security fraud and gang violence – have taken their toll in public wariness. People are increasingly suspicious of anyone who’s asking for money. London Underground pasted up thousands of posters warning customers not to give; warning them to avoid being exploited by the increasing number of ‘professional’ beggars. Opposition comes from unexpected as well as extremely predictable places. Churches, once the final and surest refuge of the needy, are turning people away; some have their own poster campaigns. Father Ken Hewitt, of St Augustine’s Church in South Kensington, thinks beggars are, in the main, liars and cheats: ‘They’re all professionals, they know what they’re doing. They’ve actually got homes, most of them … I’m not aware of any part of the Gospel which suggests that Jesus casually gave money away to anyone who asked.’ Hewitt claims to know of a family of beggars seen wheeling a supermarket trolley full of alcohol. He earns £12,000 a year and reckons some beggars must make around £200 a week.

  Intolerance of this kind may be striking, but it is not new. Unlike, say, dramatists, beggars have never had a break from being one of the sub-groups of the great British underclass. With bards, vagabonds, rhymers, minstrels, fencers, wastrels, robbers, cripples, rioters, barrators, ribalds, sloths, rag-and-bone men, COs, gypsies, dole-scroungers, poll-tax dodgers and Avon ladies, they are more or less permanent fixtures on the mythical list of great British degenerates. Whatever was happening in British history, you can be sure that there or thereabouts was some supposed counterfeiting hedge-creeper, lying by the road with his clack-dish.

  In 1362, Langland was writing about the ‘loller’s way of life’; about beggars ‘filling their bags and stomachs by lies, sitting by night over a hot fire, where they untie their legs, which have been bound up in the daytime, and lying at ease, roasting themselves over the coals, and turning their back to the heat, drinking gallantly and deep, after which they then draw to bed, and rise when they are in the humour … and contrive to live in idleness, and ease, by the labours of other men’. Acts and proclamations sprouted over time, sympathetic to the idea that beggary was in most cases the favoured trade of the impotent lush and thieving bawd. Henry VIII’s statute against vagrancy proclaimed that ‘vacabundes and Beggers have of longe tyme increased & dayly do increase’ and allowed that justices of the peace should provide the true poor with limited licences to beg; anyone begging outside these limits would be set in stocks; beggars caught without a licence would be stripped and whipped; compulsive beggars-without-a-licence would be whipped, pilloried and have an ear cut off for each of their two subsequent offences. The idea of ‘licensed’ begging caught on. Holinshed’s chronicles tell of a proclamation of the City of London which demanded ‘that all vagabondes depart the city within five days’. Some beggars, deemed truly to be in need, were given badges to wear so that they might beg legally and be allowed to buy from grocers.

  Today’s equivalent of these licences are the cards given to the homeless vendors of the Big Issue. Launched in September 1991 with backing from the Body Shop organisation, the magazine’s stated objective is ‘to help the homeless help themselves’. There are over 3,000 registered vendors selling around 90,000 copies a week, in Manchester and Brighton as well as in London. A separate edition is published in Scotland – launched last June – with weekly sales of 60,000. The licensees buy stock from the Big Issue’s distributor for 20p and then sell them at the cover price of 50p. Most of the regular vendors I spoke to shifted around thirty copies a day. Charismatic, friendly showmen sold a lot more; those who drank or looked dirty sold fewer. An old vendor I spoke to at Oxford Circus said the secret was to ‘smile a bit more than usual’.

  The Big Issue seems a very Nineties way of making begging a little more respectable; with its entrepreneurial benevolence, its ‘feelgoodishness’, it can at times look like the acceptable face of destitution. (In the same way the Youth Opportunities Scheme and the Jobclub were intended to make unemployment more respectable while keeping the figures down.) There’s a lot of suitable talk about giving people confidence, adding to their self-esteem, helping them to ‘reintegrate’, to raise their heads from the ground-staring position. Someone involved with the magazine told me that selling the paper taught the vendors how to become ‘like tele-sales people’. It’s an independent thing, though, and it shouldn’t be blamed for doing what it can (and can’t). So long as homelessness and poverty are not the big issue, the Big Issue will provide a small-earning option for those who can’t make the money anywhere else. The real difficulty is for those who, for one reason or another, do not sell the magazine. For, in line with historical precedent, the benefits accruing to the licensed are simultaneously deemed undeserved by the unlicensed, the illegitimates. People think they’re a fraud.

  Londoners have always been worried about being exploited by those posing as needy. A writer to the Gentleman’s Magazine for December 1796:

  In my late walks about London and its environs, I have observed with some concern the multiplied swarms of beggars of every description … Impressed with the idea that more of these misera
ble objects are beggars by choice than by necessity, I leave them with the wish that our laws, or magistrates, would at least endeavour to lessen their numbers, or by some badge or other enable kind-hearted Christians to discern their proper objects.

  Visitors to the Spitalfields Benevolent Society in 1802 were exhorted to take note of the Society’s newly adopted maxim ‘that street-beggars are, with very few exceptions, so utterly worthless and incorrigible, as to be undeserving the attention of such a Society’. The general fear was that London workhouses were attracting scroungers from all over the country. J. C. Ribton Turner, a nineteenth-century beggarologist, recorded the graffiti on the walls of the vagrant wards of various workhouses and relayed it to a Victorian public eager for confirmation of their views on the great unwashed: ‘Private notice – Saucy Harry and his moll will be at Chester to eat their Christmas dinner, when they hope Sarcer and the rest of the fraternity will meet them at the union – 14 Nov. 1865’; ‘Wild Scoty, the celebrated king of the cadgers, is in Newgate, in London, going to be hanged by the kneck till he is dead, this is a great fact – written by his mate.’

  Sellers of brass rings, rotten cotton and fake Windsor soap, ballad singers, china-menders, smashers (who dealt in counterfeit money), mushroom fakers (umbrella-repairers), fraters (licensed beggars who preyed on women) and begging-letter writers vied for the attentions of a London public increasingly ambivalent about the Christian duty of giving. Lurid tales of advanced conmanship filled the papers: ‘Many beggars,’ Francis Grose reported, ‘extort charities by practising Faquir-like voluntary austerities and cruelties on themselves’; and, in London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew offered a chart of ‘prices of articles in the begging line’: