Stuart: A Life Backwards. Alexander Masters

No, I work for my living. I’ve got a house.

      ‘… if you go out and your socks get wet, you come home and your skin’s white, in’it? Imagine that when it’s been raining for two or three days. It’s all water and little mushrooms and no foot.’

      The fourth passenger in the car, a man generally sympathetic to the poor person’s complaint – a union member, a lifelong activist for the cause of Right and Fairness – has cupped his hands against the side of his face.

      ‘’Ere, Drew, something wrong? What for are you holding your head?’

      ‘I’m trying to block you out, Stuart.’

      Stuart keeps his thoughts sealed as we come down into London from the northern hills, but one might as well try to button up the ocean. His lips twitch. His face stiffens. He stares out of one window, then the other, looks at the lining on the car roof, fidgets with both sides of his hands. At Walthamstow Town Hall he draws a preparatory breath but stops. By Seven Sisters and Holloway it’s beyond control.

      ‘Not being funny, is that a prison?’ he blurts.

      ‘Holloway, mate,’ confirms Drew.

      ‘Here’s another idea you should think of doing, Alexander,’ he gushes forth, laughing with relief. ‘Get a room full of, like, policemen and MPs and judges, then get someone else with, fucking, a couple thousand quid of smack and get them to put loads of little £10 bags in everyone’s pockets.’

      Brilliant, Stuart. Excellent. How do you think of them?

      ‘Nah, serious, I am. Cos then they’d understand what John and Ruth was up against. Any good dealer could do it, cos a £10 packet is only about the size of a sweetcorn kernel, then at the end you’d tell them what had happened while they was all standing round having fucking sherry and them little pieces of toast with orange bits on, just to let them know how fucking easy it was. And you’d have to give them something to talk about, like with Special Brew Sue and Spider kicking off or food served by waitresses in short skirts. Nah! I know! Lap dancers! Cos you’ve got to create for them judges and nobby cunts the same environment – only it’s not the same-same obviously – you know, for them, the equivalent level of disruption what John and Ruth …’

      We pass Camden Sainsbury’s. ‘But smack’s not a nice middle-class drug, is it?’ Stuart says, giving me an accusatory look as if, but for the disapproval of people like me, heroin would be sold in polypropylene meal trays alongside Chicken Tikka For Two. ‘All the publicity with Ecstasy. There’s been like sixty deaths in ten years of E on the street, and whenever someone dies it makes the front pages of the newspaper, especially if they’re under twenty-five. But more than sixty people under twenty-five die every year in England of heroin. You know, we’re talking a year, and it’s not a big issue! And crack – that’s not a new drug like it’s all made out. It’s the same as freebasing which has been going on around the middle/upper classes since the sixties. It’s in Cambridge. It come in through the colleges. You know, if they went and piss-tested all the college students I reckon they’d be really surprised at how many had crack cocaine in their system,’ etc., etc., etc., etc.

      You’d think the homeless would despise the rest of us, but it seems the thing they want to do most is talk. If only they could sit us down and let it all spill out – every twist of their history, down to the last murmur – then they’d be cured.

      At Camden we get lost. Stuart, now on his second visit to the Big City, waves out a hundred directions that turn out to be totally wrong. I make a few suggestions that are correct. Then I make a mistake: we end up for a few minutes on the Strand.

      Stuart laughs at me like a schoolboy.

      As if about to come under fire we unload the battered sleeping bags and rolls of toilet paper outside the Home Office in a human chain. A desolate sort of place, 50 Queen Anne’s Gate sits on a narrow street that splits off from Victoria Street above Westminster Abbey like a wind-blanched shoot from a robust and colourful stem. The building, shot full of windows, is a vertical extension of the pavement. Next door is the Wellington Barracks. New Scotland Yard, protected by armed officers, stands round the corner. We spread our luggage between two saplings struggling through the concrete slabs – the sort of things that look nice in architects’ plans – and cover them in posters. Dawn seeps gradually among the narrow, torpid streets.

      Stuart’s mood has changed. He is no longer yapping. He busies himself with arranging boxes and fussing about how to keep order among the badges and petitions, protect sleeping equipment, arrange for our general security.

      ‘There’s something about that one,’ he says, indicating Fat Frank Who Never Speaks About His Past. At this moment, Fat Frank, another street person, is in the ludicrous position of having his head stuck in the armhole of a T-shirt. His stomach is so obscenely large that his elbows bounce away from his sides like tangents in a maths textbook.

      ‘Something, you know, I don’t mean his personal hygiene, he might not be able to help that.’ Stuart picks up a box of leaflets. ‘Why wouldn’t Linda sit next to him in the back of the car this morning? Linda’s not normally scared of nobody.’ Stuart is endlessly singing this woman’s praises: someone who stuck by him in his thousands of hours of need. Because no one living rough feels threatened by Linda, her apparent physical weakness is her strength; or it has been so far, anyway.

      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