by James Bowen
I wasn’t due to see the writer guy again until the New Year so I’d pretty much forgotten about it. It was a sign that perhaps things were turning around, that the future might just be brighter than it had been for a very long time. In the short term, however, I knew it wasn’t going to pay the gas and electric bills. The future wasn’t a luxury I could afford to think about, I had to focus on surviving the present – and getting through this Christmas with Bob. I had a really bad feeling about what might lie ahead, and with good cause, as it turned out . . .
Chapter 3
Beep, beep, beep
Beep, beep, beep.
I woke up to the sound that I’d been dreading for days. It was Monday morning. The weekend was over and the £5 of emergency electricity we’d been living on had finally run out.
I knew that the beeping would repeat itself every minute for twenty minutes before falling silent. There were twelve beeps in each cycle and each one cut through me like a nagging headache. It was irritating, but there was nothing I could do about it unless I could get the card recharged. I jumped out of bed and rifled through my pockets. I had about £3.50 to my name, nowhere near enough to pay off the debt on the card. The situation was clear as day. That was it. We had no heating or lighting of any kind.
Beep, beep, beep. The meter went off again.
It was another grey, overcast morning and the house was bathed in shadow. The kitchen was quiet, with only the winking light of a battery-powered clock illuminating the gloom. I opened the fridge door and felt the contents. They were cold but wouldn’t last for long.
I knew this moment had been coming. The meter wasn’t going to continue to run on fresh air. But it was still a shock to the system. My mind was suddenly racing. How long could I leave the food before it would go off? How much money would I need in order to get the electric back on? How was I going to get both the gas and electricity running through the Christmas holidays? How were Bob and I going to cope if I simply couldn’t raise the money? Would we have to head to a shelter or charity for Christmas? That particular thought was too awful to contemplate.
Beep, beep, beep.
There was a time, particularly when I was in the depths of my addiction, when I’d have panicked and been unable to cope with a setback like this. It was a measure of how much I’d changed that I almost immediately knew what to do.
It’s strange how a crisis clarifies the mind. In a way it simplified life for me. During the recent snow, I’d had a choice about going out. Now I had no such freedom. I had to get out there and earn enough money to get the electricity back on. Realistically, if I didn’t do that within about nine hours, the Christmas stuff I had stored away would be ruined and would have to go in the dustbin. I simply couldn’t allow that to happen.
I had a quick bowl of cereal, using the milk that was left in the fridge. I still had a reasonable supply of Bob’s food, so I gave him a bowl of tuna and some water. I then went into a kind of autopilot mode and just started grabbing everything I needed to head out – my guitar, my copies of The Big Issue, my vendor’s tabard. I threw in some more food for Bob and a roughly made sandwich for myself.
I looked outside. At least it wasn’t snowing today. The rooftops still had a dusting of white powder on them, but there were cars moving around which meant that, with luck, there should also be some buses.
Beep, beep, beep.
As I headed out the door it felt a blessed relief to escape the sound, but I was soon experiencing another set of emotions. I headed off into the cold feeling a mixture of determination, uncertainty and slowly growing panic.
At the bus stop with Bob I made a plan of action. I’d done some basic calculations. The bottom line was that I simply had to get the electric back on today. I had popped into the convenience store around the corner and got the balance checked. I needed to repay the £5 emergency loan and a further £6.50 for that to happen. So I needed a minimum of £11.50 to keep the contents of the fridge from going off.
I had also checked the gas card. I’d run up a debt of just under £15 on that. Realistically, I needed to put around £25 to £30 to get the heating and hot water back on and running for just a few days. This was the minimum target, but beyond that the next goal was to find a way of keeping the meter alive until this coming Thursday, December 23rd, the start of the Christmas holiday period. As long as I had some credit, even emergency credit, at 6 p.m. that evening, then I would be guaranteed to have energy through Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. It would, however, go off again at 9 a.m. on December 27th.
I knew, however, that allowing that to happen really wasn’t a good idea because the chances of me earning any money between Christmas and New Year were pretty slim. London was effectively a ghost town during that period. There was also the weather to take into account. What if we had more blizzards, as the Met Office were predicting? I’d be taking a big risk if I was going to rely on earning more money during that holiday week.
No, there was no doubt about it in my mind. My ultimate goal had to be to get myself through the next fortnight. I had to go all out to get enough money to stop worrying about the gas and electric until the New Year.
Of course, my energy bills weren’t the only outgoings I had to contend with in the days ahead. I also had the rent on my flat, travel and Bob to take into account. So as we sat upstairs on the bus, heading into town, I scribbled a flurry of figures down on the back of an envelope. Taking everything into consideration, I had calculated that I needed to make another £150 in all. And I had to make that money in the next two to three days. It was going to be a very, very tall order. But I had to somehow find a way.
My first option was to step up my main source of income, selling The Big Issue at my pitch outside Angel Tube station in Islington. Very few people understood the way it worked. It wasn’t a ‘free’ magazine that homeless people sold to make a few pounds. The charity had been set up to ‘help people to help themselves’ so vendors effectively ran their own businesses. We had to buy supplies of the magazine at a certain price and then sell them again at the cover price, making ourselves a profit – and hopefully a living – in the process.
This Christmas the magazine was selling for £2 and cost me £1 per copy, so I was making a clear £1 profit with each sale. As I weighed up my situation, I could see that I would have to sell dozens and dozens of magazines in the next few days. That simply wasn’t going to happen.
Bob and I had built up a solid and loyal collection of supporters at Angel. Before we’d got there, I’d been reliably informed, our pitch outside the Tube station had been something of a graveyard for The Big Issue vendors. We’d made it a success. A lot of passers-by stopped to talk to us and lot of our customers bought the magazine off us week in, week out. But even allowing for that, I think the best I’d ever done in a single day was thirty magazines. The average was nearer fifteen to twenty. If I was going to save my Christmas, I needed to supplement this with other earnings. The most obvious was busking, which I knew was an option. Bob and I still did reasonably well singing in and around Covent Garden where, again, we had a core of people who gave us money on a regular basis. I would have to put in an extra shift doing that over the next couple of days. It wasn’t a mission impossible, but it was going to be difficult, I knew that.
I wasn’t being pessimistic, just realistic. I’d worked on the streets for far too many Christmases so I knew very well that money was tight for everyone at this time of the year. And because money was so thin on the ground it was only natural that it became even more competitive between those who made a living busking, performing, begging or selling The Big Issue. The fact that there was a serious recession only added to the feeling that it was every man and woman for themselves. It really was survival of the fittest so I had to be fit over the next few days. Otherwise, my Christmas plans were not going to survive. If only it was that easy.
I arrived at Angel to discover the place was alive with activity, but not in a way that was good new
s for me. The concourse of the Tube station was packed with charity collectors, or ‘chuggers’ as many people refer to them because of the way they pester people often to the point of making them feel like they are being mugged. Of course, most of these collectors are working for legitimate charities like Greenpeace or Save the Children or Cancer Research who do important work, so I have never had an issue with those ones. They have as much right to be on the street as I do.
The problem is that there are an awful lot of other, less scrupulous ‘charities’ out there. A lot of them prey on young or vulnerable people and send them out to wave buckets in people’s faces for hours on end, paying them a pittance. I’d seen groups of them moved on by the police in the past. On one occasion they did a spot check and found that the charity buckets weren’t sealed as they were supposed to be in order to ensure the money goes directly to the charity. Another time, they’d found that the permits they were displaying had been cobbled together on Photoshop. They weren’t licensed by the local authority or Transport for London who ran the Underground. They were just opportunists making money for themselves.
Needless to say, these collectors had no real concept of who else was working in the area and what the rules might be. And they had absolutely no concern for others who were trying to earn an honest crust.
I worked out pretty quickly that the people inside the Tube station today were from one of the more dubious charities. I’d never heard of them for a start. They claimed to be collecting for some vague Third World Anti-Poverty Fund. The badges they were carrying were bent and battered; it all looked pretty suspicious. There was nothing I could do about it as they seemed to have a licence to operate inside the station so all I could do was hope a community police officer or someone else would check them out and move them on if they were bogus. The lines were clearly drawn in that respect. I had a legitimate pitch outside the station, but I couldn’t venture in there to sell my magazines. They were free to operate inside the Tube station.
The downside to this, from my point of view, was that the chuggers were getting to the commuters emerging from the Underground before me. It was bad news. And it wasn’t long before it had become even worse.
As the evening wore on the chuggers and their buckets started to spill out on to the pavement outside as well. Before I knew it there was about half a dozen of them covering each of the exits, accosting everyone as they left.
I wasn’t the only one who was annoyed by this. My pitch was opposite a flower stall and a newsagent. The owners of them were fuming at the way this mob were monopolising the area around the Tube entrance. Not only were they taking spare change that could have been diverted towards buying a magazine, a bunch of roses or a copy of The Big Issue, they were also driving people away. They were making people uncomfortable.
I watched as a long procession of commuters emerged from the Tube station with their heads bowed, unwilling to make eye contact with the chuggers, and by extension, anyone else. Any attempt I made to lift my voice above the noise of the buckets and the people wielding them was futile. I was just another voice. No one heard me.
Bob had been getting increasingly agitated. He could cope with almost all the noises London threw at him, but the sound of the buckets being shaken was making him nervous. He had curled up into a ball and had narrowed his eyes, a sure sign that he wasn’t happy. At one point he hissed at a chugger who came too close. My sense of frustration was growing too. I’d managed to sell two copies of the magazine in almost an hour and a half. At that rate I wasn’t going to earn enough to get home let alone to get the electric and gas running again.
I had been in this situation often enough to know that something was going to snap at some point, and sure enough it did.
I was in the process of selling a magazine to a regular customer when one of the chuggers started encroaching into my space. He was a big guy, about 6 ft tall and eighteen stone and was wearing a very bright, luminescent yellow bib. He had emerged out of the station and was backing towards me and Bob, shouting and waving his bucket around flamboyantly. He was getting closer and closer all the time
‘Hey man, give us some space here,’ I said, as politely as possible when he was within a couple of feet.
His response was less polite.
‘What’s your problem? I’ve got as much right to be here as you,’ he said, holding his laminated permit in my face.
I gave him a dismissive look but told myself not to do anything silly.
I looked down and saw Bob was squeezed into a tiny space between my feet. He had effectively been driven into a corner; he looked so vulnerable. I was about to reach down to pick him up when the chugger lurched towards us and stuck his boot on the rucksack where Bob was sitting.
Eeeeeew. Bob let out a loud screech.
‘Oi, buddy, back off. You just stepped on my cat,’ I said, leaning into the guy.
He just looked down at Bob and sneered.
‘What’s a bloody animal doing there in the first place?’
That was it, I was furious. I nudged him out of the way and he turned to face me. There was a bit of shouting but before it could get out of hand a community police officer appeared to separate us. I recognised him as he often patrolled the area.
‘Come on, you two,’ he said. ‘What’s the problem?’
To be fair to the policeman, he understood. He asked the guy to stick to his designated area, which he did, much to his displeasure. He was a pretty unpleasant-looking character and kept glaring at me from the concourse. I sensed that he might cause more trouble once the policeman had left, so I made a decision; this was no place for Bob, we needed to head off elsewhere. I gathered my stuff together and slipped into the Tube station via another one of the entrances. By the time the guy noticed us we had gone through the ticket barriers and were on the escalator heading down.
I decided to head to Covent Garden where I might be able to buy a few more magazines or, failing that, do an hour or two of busking. There was no point in heading home yet. For all I knew, the weather might get even worse than this and I might be trapped indoors for a month. I had to make the most of my opportunities.
We took the Tube, mainly just to keep warm. Bob drew lots of admiring glances, as usual, but there were the inevitable sneers and snide remarks as well.
‘What are you doing to the poor creature?’ one elderly lady said to me.
‘He’s fine, madam, don’t worry about him,’ I said, but it didn’t placate her and she started lecturing me.
I’d had this argument a thousand times. Bob had chosen me, rather than the other way around. He could leave me at any time, he had ample opportunity. But he didn’t, he preferred to be at my side. It was his choice. On this occasion, however, I was simply too tired and cold and anxious about Christmas to be bothered. I simply hopped off the Tube at the next stop, walked down the platform and got back on again, this time in another, quieter carriage where, thankfully, we were left in peace.
I didn’t want to get into trouble with The Big Issue for selling the magazine away from my authorised pitch, so I had planned to talk to Sam, the regular Big Issue co-ordinator at Covent Garden to make sure it was all right. Unfortunately she was nowhere to be seen, so I had no option but to get my guitar out and do a little busking. I found a spot near the end of James Street, off the Piazza, where I’d played for many years.
It was never easy busking in the freezing cold. The cold could have a detrimental effect on the guitar, warping the neck so that it needed constant tuning. Sometimes it got so cold the strings would snap. As I started strumming away, however, the biggest problem was my fingers. I was wearing a pair of black fingerless gloves that a regular customer at Angel had given me. She had noticed me rubbing my hands all the time and dashed off to buy them for me. But even the gloves couldn’t protect my fingers from the effects of the cold. My fingers burned when I played the metal strings. It didn’t sound great either. It all felt a bit half-hearted.
As if that wa
sn’t bad enough, people could barely hear me. The area was crammed full of street performers. It was a cacophony of noise, with buskers, clowns and even the living statues vying to make themselves heard above the din. The noise was simply too much; I’d have needed an amplifier to make my presence felt.
I decided to head away from here, down Neal Street. It was quieter, but at least there was a chance we could be heard there.
As I set up once more, I went through my pockets and took stock of how the day was going. It wasn’t good news. I had been out for the best part of five hours but had barely earned £10. It was depressing.
Neal Street was little better.
There was a very strange atmosphere. A couple of shops were really busy. In particular, a trendy store selling classic American-style parkas was thronged with youngsters, tourists probably, who hadn’t bargained on this weather and were seemingly buying some fashionable winter-wear. On Monmouth Street, the famous coffee shop had queues snaking down the road. But a lot of the other shops, bars and restaurants were closed. Parts of the street were deserted. It was a bit surreal.