‘you know’ becomes ‘you knah-ow’.
‘Oh, noooo, is that what I sound like? Oh, fucking … Don’t ever do that to me.’ He winces, shakes his head as if caught by a bitter taste, laughs.
‘Right, again.’
‘When and how did you become homeless?’
Stuart checks his tea by dabbing his finger in it, then sinks half the mug.
‘Well, each time is different, Alexander …’
‘Homelessness – it’s not about not having a home. It’s about something being seriously fucking wrong.’ 2 Laurel Lane: Aged 29
‘I put meself on the streets this last time,’ Stuart says firmly. ‘29 years of age. Just come out of prison: robbery, a post office. Done four and a half years out of the five-stretch because I’d been a bit of a bad boy, got this day job at a vehicle recovery company. It was legal, did a lot of police work, but you couldn’t help learn a few useful bits and pieces. Like, an XR3i? A Ford XR3i? At the yard, I learnt all you had to do was get the screwdriver, take the two screws out gently from the side indicator, take out the plastic bit, take the light bulb out, get a piece of tinfoil, put it in, put the light bulb back in, shake the car to set the alarm, and it’d fuse it. End of alarm. I really did actually find me job interesting.
‘Slide-sticking – that’s another one. Sliding a stick down the window to pop the lock? Well, the AA and the RAC had a memo out at that time because in America someone had locked their keys in and they’d put the stick in and the door had a side impact bag. The bag went off and the stick shot up and killed the bloke. Went under his chin and right into his brain. That’s why I liked it there. There was always something different. Never got bored.
‘Trouble was, money. Too much of it. It’s a funny thing about money, in’t it? A lot of people, it’s not being skint what gets you, it’s having your pockets too full. Where, when I had money, I’d come home from work and wouldn’t go get a shower some nights. I’d just sit there Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, drinking. I started to get a bit lairy, agitated on drink. But on the Friday I’d go to Huntingdon and smoke smack. Literally, within three months, a £70 a day habit. A gram a day!’
‘Why?’ I ask, irritated by the speed at which Stuart’s life is turning to waste.
‘Well, that’s what the book is about, in’t it?’
‘It’s going to be that miserable?’
‘Nah, that’s the point: heroin isn’t miserable, not at first. It makes you feel good. It don’t matter if you got lots of troubles or no troubles, it takes them all away. All you people think is nasty, dirty needles because of the adverts, which I think is fucking wrong and dangerous because when you’re on the smack, at the start, you don’t feel like a dirty, nasty, scummy person so you know the adverts are lying. You feel happy. You like everyone. It’s peaceful. Like that feeling you get when you wake up in the morning, feeling really, really tired, and know you don’t have to get up.’
‘But –’
‘Alexander, if we’re going to get on, you’ll have to learn to stop interrupting. Anyway, like I says – the machine still on? – right, the drink and the drugs were ruling my life. So I started having to go out and thieve at weekends to pay for it. Opportunistic. If I was walking along the street and saw a car with a briefcase in or a laptop, I’d pop the window. Then use the money for drugs, not riches, if you know what I mean. Or I’d take special orders. If someone wanted a new pair of wheels, I’d take them off the scrap heap from work. Not if I knew the boss needed them – of course not. Stuff he was throwing away anyway. Lights, indicators, mirrors, handles. Down the pub. Here you are, mate. Nice one. Off to Huntingdon. Spend the money what I’d got to pay for the habit what was so large because of the money I’d got. Fucking stupid! Fucking Stupid: it is me middle name!’
Stuart plunges his hands into his pockets and takes his annoyance out on a pouch of Old Holborn – biff, biff, tumble, squash – then rubs a worm of tobacco into a Rizla.
‘If I was a bank I’d have been liquidated years ago.’
Stuart’s whole attitude to gaspers could suggest a disdain for my carpet if I didn’t know him better. Once lit, not only does he let the burning end go untapped until there is half an inch of ash quivering in the draught, but when it does fall he ignores ashtrays: he tries to catch the powder in his hand. This process continues until the butt has become smaller than a splinter, then he stubs his fag out in the ash pile he is holding, flips his palm and rubs everything that he hasn’t dropped on to my floor into his trousers.
‘Then one day I’d had enough. So I did what a lot of people who end up on the streets do. I fucked it up – deliberate. Told the manager to stuff the job, stole a packet of money off me mum, took the bus into town and, like I told you, put meself on the streets.’
Recently released prisoners often end up sleeping rough. Institutionalised, broke, addicted to drugs and hated by their old friends – after a month or two of free life under these conditions, giving up your house and responsibilities to sit on the pavement with a bunch of like-minded ex-burglars doesn’t look so bad.
Stuart’s case was slightly different: his family was supportive; his friends were not disloyal; he was able to get a good job even though he’d just been in for a violent offence and his prison behaviour had been diabolical.
So, ‘Why mess it up?’
‘I don’t know, Alexander, sometimes it gets so bad you can’t think of nothing better to do than make it worse.’
‘Two old boys called Scouser Tom and Asterix, in the park behind the bus station, them’s the first ones I got talking to when I got off the bus.’
‘No one on the bus?’
‘Wasn’t in the mood for talking on the bus, was I? That was the old world still, weren’t it?’
‘How did you meet Tom and Asterix, then?’
‘They were just sitting there.’
‘What were your first words?’
‘Can’t remember.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Haven’t a clue. What’s it matter?’
A great deal, I think to myself in frustration. The moment of transition is one of the great mysteries of homelessness. At what point does a person change from being inside his house to being outside all houses? When does he go from being one of us to one of them? I can imagine being desperate; I can see being up against the wall, bills dropping through the letter box, wife in bed with the bailiff, bottles piling up on the kitchen floor, closing my own door behind me, walking down the hill with my bag, getting on the bus – what I can’t see is the point at which I think to myself, ‘Bother! Homeless!’ and genuinely believe it. Do I look in a panic through my wallet as the bus pulls out of the station (no credit cards, no chequebook), beat my pockets (no keys, no addresses, no letter from parents with gruesome invitation to return to the room I used to have as a boy), and wonder how I’m going to work up the nerve to start begging? Then suddenly it hits me: Jesus Christ! No bed! No home!
Caitlin Thomas – in the last words of her autobiography, after Dylan’s death in New York – says she could make out only two phrases in the sound of the train wheels banging over the rails as she travelled back to Wales: ‘No Dylan, no home, no Dylan, no home, no Dylan, no home.’ Is this what real homelessness is like? Not just a particular set of roof and walls gone, but a sense of the death of companionship? Is this why outreach workers say it is so important to catch new homeless people within a few weeks of ending up on the streets, maximum, because otherwise they will start to build up a new sense