No Fixed Abode

by Charlie Carroll

  'I don't know, somewhere on the Strand?'

  'I'll do that, and someone else will kick me in the ribs while I'm sleeping and tell me to fuck off.'

  'The Strand's not like that. It's like a queue. They sleep in a line up there. Find a gap in the line and it's yours. You'll have it for as long as you want. I don't like it there. Too busy. But if you can handle all the feet you can lie there twenty-four-seven.'

  'Thanks,' I said.

  'You got a fag?'

  'No.'

  'Any food?'

  I reached into my knapsack and produced a cereal bar. He snatched it from my outstretched hand and tore it open.

  'I missed the soup run today,' I said. 'What time should I get there tomorrow?'

  'This time of year,' he replied with a mouthful of cereal bar, 'between five and seven.'

  I pushed my way back through the crowd of drinkers and up on to the Strand. Walking its length once I could see what my interlocutor had meant: the rough sleepers did indeed form a kind of line which was perceptible if you looked for it. Each was alone, and there was never less than twenty feet of space between a head and the next pair of feet. Finding a gap in the line was easy, there were many along the street, and I made sure to observe the invisible demarcations between me and my closest neighbours.

  An hour passed before I was able to fall asleep again, but when I did I stayed comatose until almost six in the morning. I awoke to the feet. Already, the Strand's pavement was a motorway of pedestrians who hurried in both directions, impatient but careful to make no physical contact with each other or, I noticed, with any of us rough sleepers. A foot-wide no-man's-land flanked me, and none ever stepped into it nor even looked down to check that which they skirted. I turned on my side, pulled the sleeping bag tighter around my body, and watched the river of boots, wedges and black shoes as it flowed ceaselessly past my ground-level eyes.

  6

  Jane sat begging with her back against a tree and her bare legs open. It was rare to see a woman on the streets but, as Jane explained, 'I can look after meself'. She looked like she could and, with her deep Midlands voice, I briefly wondered if she was, under all that padding, male.

  'Cheers for this, love,' she said when I gave her a pound. 'Last bloke gave me a penny. I threw it back at him and told him to fuck off. Better dressed than you he was, too.'

  She was sixty-two, though she looked younger. That was another rarity on the streets. Homelessness aged people perceptibly.

  'It all depends on how you take care of yourself,' she said. 'And I do.' She made a fist. 'What do you think of that bloke with the penny, though, eh?'

  'Taking the piss,' I said.

  'It is taking the piss. I fucking hate it when they give me coppers. I don't want them. It's like all those foreigners coming over here and taking English jobs. Taking the piss. I don't want them.'

  Oh, no.

  'I have to go now, Jane,' I said, and walked away.

  7

  Many equate busking with begging. They are wrong. Accuse a busker of begging and he may wrap his guitar around your ribs. There is a stock phrase many buskers use at the close of a 'set', one which I have used myself many times:

  Thank you for listening/watching, ladies and gentlemen. And please remember, I'm trying to make a living, not a phone call.

  Buskers earn. That's what we'll tell you. We provide entertainment. And if you feel that entertainment deserves recognition, financial compensation, then so much the better. I never made enough to live from busking, but I knew, and still know, some who do. Busking is an al fresco alternative to the pub gig, the circus act or the spoken-word event. An 'Open Mic' in the afternoon. A street sideshow. A performance.

  Nevertheless, busking grew from begging as a subsidiary legal loophole. Until as late as the first half of the twentieth century, Britain's vagrancy laws could condemn a man to seven days in jail for openly begging. But if that man were to belt out an a capella song while he walked the streets with his hand out, he was deemed to be in pursuit of a legitimate trade. Many beggars would carry with them a tray of loose matches to sell or a stick of chalk with which to etch an impromptu picture on the ground should a policeman approach.

  Today, begging is perfectly legal and, with this in mind, I walked to Aldwych and sat on the pavement opposite Australia House, crossing my legs and placing my cap on the concrete before me. Begging was not a statutory requirement of being homeless – Stan once told me he had never begged a penny in his life – but I wanted an insider's perspective on as many of the tramp's experiences as I could, and one of those was to become a beggar.

  The first ten minutes were humiliating and they were demeaning. Visible poverty was, as Orwell once noted, spiritual halitosis. But the shame exhausted itself quickly. I began to look up, to search for eye contact with the myriad passers-by. Some looked at me with pity, others with hostility, and still others with a palpable fear. But most ignored me. Begging on the street, I attained an invisibility comparable only to that I had experienced when I awoke on the Strand that morning. It is this ignorance which hurts the beggar most, and it makes the few acknowledgements one receives almost too tender to bear. Four people stopped to give me money, each of a different character: a forty-year-old man in a suit who looked away as he dropped a pound coin at my feet; a woman who implored I 'spend this on food'; an old Indian man who passed me three times and then insisted on placing a fifty-pence piece in my palm rather than my hat; and a girl whose smile was shy but lovely. 'You're very welcome,' she said when I thanked her.

  Just as wonderful as these kind donors were the three who gave me a warm and caring smile. I felt inordinate gratitude for all seven of these people: they had no need or reason to give me money or attention – who was I to them? Nobody! – but they did regardless, and the pure loveliness of that outweighed all the humiliation.

  Rising to my feet and walking away, I found Frank, still at his pitch in Covent Garden. The long-anticipated headache which would be enough to send him to the doctor, who would give him the oxygen tank which symbolised the start of his new life, had not yet arrived.

  'Good day?' I asked.

  'No. Only shifted three.'

  That was six pounds for a full day's work.

  'Here,' I said, holding out the £3.25 I had begged.

  'You sure?'

  'I can't keep it.'

  8

  I arrived at Zimbabwe House in time for the soup run and was given a cheese roll, which I demolished in seconds. When the food was gone, three people left immediately, but the rest of the forty or so there remained. Some sat and talked, smoking roll-ups and drinking from cans, but most lingered quietly and alone. I wondered why, then realised that I was also one of the latter, and that I had not left, either.

  What was the point? What else was there to do? We could all sit about here with nothing to do or return to our sleeping-spots and sit about there with nothing to do. Perhaps I should go for a walk, I thought, see some of London, warm up. There was money in my pocket. Maybe I could go to the cinema, or buy a decent meal, or sequester a table in a pub and drink pint after pint until last orders. But I barely had the energy to even choose between the options, to make any kind of concrete decision, and so I remained outside Zimbabwe House, daydreaming of my wife, of television, of a bottle of wine and of curtains.

  I had left my sleeping bag at my spot on the Strand and, when I returned, it was still there, untouched. I realised I finally had my own pitch in London, my own bedroom, but the thought merely caused further depression, listlessness, demotivation and, below them all, the oncoming throbs of an insistent headache. Crawling into my sleeping bag, I turned my face to the wall and closed my eyes, drifting in and out of consciousness through a serial of dreamed and imagined dramas, through the windows of memories and the doors of sensation, through feverish emotion and wracking conundrums, all the while keeping my eyes closed, even when I cried.

  Night passed and dawn brought the feet which rapped an urgent
tattoo a foot away from my head. I lay still, face to the wall. A soft rain fell, dotting the tip of my nose and spreading a metallic odour across the flagstones. I lay still, face to the wall. A flash of sun became discernible through my closed eyelids; a burst of wind whipped and buffeted the sleeping bag about my legs. I lay still, face to the wall.

  This was not life. It was barely even existence. Fatigue, boredom and longing wrestled with such strength and volume in my mind that to even begin to assess or evaluate, to decide or act, became mere trivialities. Until now, tramping had been exciting, romantic even, but here on the Strand I felt like I was waiting to die. And this was me, me with my safety net: enough money to buy a bus ticket home that day and return to my wife and house, where I could be warm and listen to music and mow the lawn and get fat.

  The thought of the safety net speared my mind like caffeine, and I sat up, looking down the Strand queue. What if I didn't have that? I doubted that any of them had anything which came even close. How did they cope? How did any rough sleeper ever find the resources to pull themselves back up from this slow-frying rock bottom?

  I stood up. My body trembled. I needed salt, sugar, a quick hit of something familiar and comforting, the greasier the better. I found a McDonald's, bought a Happy Meal, and ate it miserably.

  9

  The food squirmed in my stomach like a mound of writhing leeches, but walking it off made me feel better. Walking made me feel better. I met Don, who had been flogging his Big Issues all morning and was ready for a break.

  'I'm heading back to Victoria Street for a bit,' he said. 'You can come, if you like.'

  'I've got nothing else to do.'

  Like many others, Don slept on Victoria Street because of what he called all the 'free roofs': the hundreds of metres of concrete overhangs which pushed out from the shops, supported by stone pillars, creating an awning-esque shelter across the pavement.

  We passed Victoria Station and the touch-screen information point which stood beside the pedestrian crossing. It was there for local rough sleepers, and its various pages gave information on where to stay at night, where to go during the day, and contact points for emergency help. Above the screen, in a gigantic font, were the words:

  On the Right Track

  Free 24 Hour Homeless Advice

  THIS IS NOT TOURIST INFORMATION

  Don pointed at it as we passed. 'Don't use that. Nobody uses that. It records your fingerprints. Then they know who you are.'

  'How long have you been homeless?' I asked.

  'Only eighteen months.'

  'Only? A year and a half sounds like a long time to be on the streets.'

  'Two winters isn't bad. Not compared to some of my mates. Here's them now.'

  He stopped at the edge of Christchurch Gardens and nodded towards six men who clustered around a bench.

  'Best we part company here,' Don said.

  'Why?'

  'You're not homeless, are you?'

  'I'm sleeping rough.' I was about to tell him where, but something stopped me.

  'Yeah, but you're not homeless. Are you?'

  I laughed. 'What gave it away?'

  'Your voice. And all the fucking questions.'

  'Do you think they won't like me?'

  'Some of them have been on the streets for over thirty years. Put it this way. They won't take to you.'

  10

  My journal on the grass beside me reminded me that I had a purpose. Hyde Park in the late afternoon on a cold October's day was quiet, and the acres of green, un-peopled space around me gave me succour. I cooked two cans of chicken soup in a mess tin on my stove, turned the heat down low and spooned away at the liquid while it bubbled, turning the pages of my journal with my free hand.

  My journey from Sennen to here lay within the bullet points, sketches and mini-essays of my handwriting. When I had left Don at Christchurch Gardens and walked without aim until I found myself on the lip of Hyde Park, I had wondered whether it was time to go home. I was footsore and burned-out, exhausted and sullen, but seeing those blank pages at the back of my journal made me want to fill them. I had, I reasoned, only spent three nights thus far on the streets of London. There was still more to do, more to experience and more to observe. If I could muster enough self-discipline to keep on my feet, to keep away from the seductive lure of that sleeping bag and its all-consuming darkness, I still had the time and the will to conclude this journey, and not simply run from it.

  Two men with five children and a ball appeared from the edge of the lake, dropped their bags on to the grass at a respectable distance from me, and initiated a game which involved booting the ball as far away as possible and then shouting encouragement as the children raced after it. Once, it came my way, landing a few metres from my stove. I rose to my feet and kicked it back. 'Thank you!' one of the children called, trapping the ball between his legs as another, tinier child expertly tackled him and sent him plummeting to the ground. His giggles rose into the sky and drifted out over London.

  11

  When the feet woke me at seven in the morning, I wrenched off the sleeping bag, rolled it into a ball, sat upon it and ate a cereal bar. The feet seemed to have doubled in volume that morning – what day is it? I thought, and could not remember – and I lay my hat before me and tried the line I had heard so many times since arriving in London.

  'Spare some change, please?'

  It had no effect. Perhaps I wasn't saying it right.

  'Spare some change please.'

  Still nothing.

  'Spare some change… please?'

  I might as well have been petitioning the government.

  I decided to focus on individuals.

  'Spare a quid, mate?'

  'Any spare change, love?'

  But heads remained fixed, pointed towards the office and the day of work ahead. Perhaps it was me, my lack of conviction. I didn't need their change. Maybe they sensed that. I tried a different approach.

  'Spare some books, please?'

  Success. One man, jolted out of his composure by the non-standard request, looked briefly down at me. Eye contact. I continued.

  'Anything to read, mate?'

  He grinned nervously, said nothing, and continued walking. I tried again.

  'Spare a book, please?… Poor and hungry to read… Down and out but not illiterate… Got a spare paperback?… Will work for Dickens.'

  A pregnant woman with a rotund bulge distending out from her fitted jacket stopped, reached into her handbag and pulled out a copy of The Independent. 'Will this do?' she asked.

  'You've saved a man's life,' I grinned, taking it from her hands. 'I'll read it today and use it for insulation tonight.'

  Her smile faded at my tasteless joke and she hurried away. I wished I had not said it.

  12

  Ibrahim had no time for my questions.

  'What do you mean, on the streets? I am not on the streets. I am a living man. I live. That is all.'

  'Where do you sleep at night?'

  'Everywhere. I sleep where I like. This does not mean I am on the streets. Where do you sleep at night?'

  'On a couch,' I lied.

  'And do you tell people you live on the couches?' He laughed loud and slapped his open hand against my shoulder, almost pushing me off the bench. 'You see the nonsense you speak?'

  I laughed, too.

  'You think I am homeless, don't you?' he said.

  'Yes.'

  'And why do you think this?'

  I hesitated, unsure how to answer. It was because his hair was unwashed, his clothes were torn and dirty, he had a sleeping bag draped over his legs, a stained and bulging rucksack at his feet, and he was sitting on a bench eating chicken legs and watching the River Thames. But I didn't want to tell him that.

  'It is because I look homeless, isn't it?' he said, anticipating my response before I could give it. Then he laughed again, dropping the chicken leg into the plastic tray. 'It is OK. I know what I look like.'

&
nbsp; 'So you're not homeless?'

  'I am not homeless, and I am not-not-homeless. You see?'

  'No.'

  'What does it matter to you if I have a home? And what does it matter to me if I have a home? Here, eat this chicken.' He held a leg out to me.

  'I'm all right, thanks. I've already had lunch.'

  'Eat the fucking chicken. It's good meat.'

  He waved it so close to my nose I took it, if only for fear that he was about to thrust it up my nostril.

  'Now. Eat that. And look at the river. You think that has a home? It has no home. It is always moving. But does that mean it is homeless?' Another laugh. 'The water move. I live. You see?'