by James Bowen
Chapter 7
The Ghost of Christmas Past
‘Stay there for a while, Bob,’ I said, draining the last of my tea and throwing on my coat.
He wasn’t keen on being left alone, I could tell.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t be long,’ I said, giving him a reassuring ruffle of the thicket of fur on the back of his neck before heading out the door.
It was Christmas Eve but I had got up early. I couldn’t have slept in late, in any case. My mind was still endlessly replaying the moment I’d got out of my seat on the bus. I still couldn’t believe I’d been so careless.
There had been another light snow overnight. Outside I could see that the cars parked on the road had a fresh dusting of what looked like icing sugar on their roofs. We were definitely going to have a white Christmas.
The weather wasn’t going to deter me, however. The local bus garage was about half a mile away. I’d been prepared to walk but luckily a bus came by almost immediately and I was there within minutes.
The fleet of red buses in the garage were already streaked with a new coat of white. Drivers were busily de-icing their windscreens while others were scraping the snow away from the parking areas with shovels.
‘Where’s the Lost and Found Office, mate?’ I asked one of them. He pointed in the direction of a hangar-like building. Inside there was a small booth where I could see there was a lady on the telephone. She spotted me and held up her hand as if to say ‘wait a moment’.
When she eventually deigned to speak to me she couldn’t have been less helpful.
‘Did anyone hand in a white gift bag last night?’ I said. ‘About this size,’ I added, holding my hands about a foot apart.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Well, who does know?,’ I said, slightly irritated.
‘Try Baker Street,’ she said, in a monosyllabic grunt.
‘Baker Street?’
‘Yes. Anything we find here gets sent to the main Transport for London Lost Property Office for all the Underground and buses. It’s next to Baker Street Tube station.’
‘Oh, OK. Is it open today?’
‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘But even if someone found it here last night, it might not be there yet. To be honest, I’d give it a day or so.’
‘But it’s Christmas Eve. It’s a Christmas present.’
She just shrugged her shoulders. She clearly couldn’t care less.
‘Well do you at least know what time the office closes?’ I said.
‘Half four normally,’ she said.
My heart sank. I hadn’t planned on going into the centre of London again. I was tired of the crowds and the constant rush. I was fed up with some people’s selfishness and, yes, sheer greed at this time of the year. I was ready to take it easy and to start my Christmas, but it seemed like I had little choice in the matter.
I thought I’d give it a few hours in the hope that the bag would make its way to Baker Street. In the meantime I decided to head into Covent Garden. I popped back to the flat and collected my guitar and the couple of spare Big Issue magazines I’d left there. Bob had clearly missed me when I had gone out earlier and was keen to come so I slipped him into his Santa Paws outfit again.
‘What do you think, mate? Might as well give it one more outing before we put it in mothballs ready for next year.’
I couldn’t face another epic bus trip so we walked to the Tube station. The trains were running well and we were in Covent Garden within the hour.
The Piazza was packed with people soaking up the Christmas atmosphere. The mood was vibrant and very jolly. I found a good spot at the top of James Street and started playing the jaunty ‘Jingle Bells’ stuff again. Small knots of people stopped to say hello and sometimes sing along.
One family stayed with us for about ten minutes, the children singing along with me. We all enjoyed ourselves.
Bob was on top form and was again inviting me to do tricks with him. There were lots of oooohs and aaaahs as he stood on his hind legs to snatch a treat from my fingertips. He must have been photographed a hundred times in the space of a couple of hours. Goodness knows where those photos would soon be spread on the internet. There were already dozens of photos and videos on sites like YouTube. ‘At this rate, he is going to get into the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most photographed cat, I laughed to myself, not really believing it, of course.
Two of our regulars passed by on their way home after a half day in the office. I had a couple of cards left still and gave them one each.
‘All ready for the big day?’ one of them, a middle-aged lady called Patricia asked.
‘As ready as we will ever be,’ I said. ‘How about you?’
Her face sank.
‘Going home now to start on a meal for fourteen people tomorrow afternoon. Absolutely dreading it.’
‘Oh dear. I’m glad it’s just me and Bob for dinner at our place. Much more straightforward,’ I smiled.
‘Sounds lovely, can I join you?’ she laughed. I got the impression that she was only half-joking.
By 2 p.m. or so the crowds were thinning as everyone began heading home to begin their Christmas, so I decided to follow suit.
‘Come on, Bob, it’s Christmas, mate, time to call it a day,’ I said.
For a while we just walked around, taking in the atmosphere, like a normal pair of Londoners. Covent Garden looked – and smelled – absolutely beautiful. The Christmas lights were a riot of colour and the air was thick with the smell of roast chestnuts and mulled wine. There were still a few street entertainers at work around the marketplace in the middle of the Piazza. With Bob on his lead, I took a stroll. Some of the stallholders were packing up for Christmas while others were offering last-minute discounts in order to clear their stock. I took a look at a couple of jewellery stalls on the off-chance that they had something that might replace the earrings I’d left on the bus, but there was nothing that caught my eye. I was also reluctant to fork out another £15.
There were all sorts of tempting things in the shops but I decided I wasn’t going to spend any money. I had the Marks and Spencer voucher I’d been given so headed there instead. As a treat, I bought myself a jar of onion chutney. I was tempted to buy a smart Christmas pudding but decided against it. Belle was coming over on Boxing Day for our traditional feast and I knew she was bringing one with her. I resisted the temptation. Just. Instead I bought a nice box of chocolates, just so that I had something nice and Christmassy to give her on Boxing Day if the present didn’t show up at Baker Street. I also had an idea for another, home-made present which I’d work on later this evening. By now I’d begun to put the loss of Belle’s present in better perspective. It wasn’t the end of the world, I told myself. I had suffered much bigger blows in recent years. Belle, of all people, would understand.
The sound of another Salvation Army band playing carols was drifting across the Piazza. They were singing ‘Silent Night’.
‘All is calm, all is bright.’
It was true, I told myself. All was calm. The future was bright, well, certainly compared to my all-too-recent past. I had a lot to be grateful for.
I’d let Bob walk on his lead so that he could explore the nooks and crannies under the market stalls. When I heard the clock strike 2.30 p.m., however, I scooped him up and headed out of the market past a guy on a unicycle who was entertaining the crowds at the west end of the Piazza.
‘Come on, Bob. Let’s just see if that bag has shown up, then we will head home,’ I said.
I was going to head towards Leicester Square but suddenly Bob started making telltale noises that he wanted to go to the toilet. I knew a couple of spots that he could use, so headed in a different direction.
I decided to cut through Neal’s Yard and emerged on to Monmouth Street, opposite the Covent Garden Hotel. The sight of a figure lying on the pavement across the road stopped me in my tracks.
It was, I could tell from a distance, a young man. He w
as lying on a cardboard box and wrapped in a threadbare blue sleeping bag and a grey blanket. His body was curled up against the biting cold. I crossed the road to take a closer look. He was a young guy, no more than nineteen or twenty years of age. He had a woollen hat on and was wearing a pair of ripped mittens. His face was covered in grime and was red raw from the cold while his hair and beard were wild and unruly. He probably had lice which was a common affliction among rough sleepers given the lack of washing facilities on the streets. He looked like he hadn’t had a shower in a month.
I was shocked, not by the fact he was sleeping on the streets, but by the fact that he was living rough here, at this exact spot. It was eerie. It had been here, at this precise place at this precise time, that I had experienced the worst Christmas of my life.
At that point I had been at my absolute lowest ebb. I had been eking out an existence on the streets for about a year. I’d tried to get a job to break the downward spiral but no one was willing to give me a break. I’d turned to petty crime to survive, shoplifting meat from supermarkets and reselling it in pubs to make enough money to feed my drug addiction. That was the be-all-and-end-all of my existence at that point. Heroin completely controlled me. It was my only friend and comfort, the only source I had for numbing all my emotions. It was all I could think about. I was in a really bad way.
And so it was that on Christmas Eve that year, as everybody else had headed home to be with their families, I had come to Monmouth Street and laid down my piece of cardboard for the night at this same spot. There was a reason why it was popular with rough sleepers. The patch of pavement was next door to the swanky Covent Garden Hotel, right in front of a wall where there were two large vents. I could see that they were still there now. The vents extracted or pumped out air from the kitchens of the hotel. The air, while not exactly hot, was certainly several degrees warmer than the outside temperature. It made a huge difference if you were trying to get a decent night’s sleep, especially during the winter.
I had slept here a few times, much to the annoyance of some of the local shopkeepers. One of them really disliked me. She was the kind of person that had absolutely no sympathy for anyone who was sleeping rough or selling The Big Issue. As far as she was concerned we were all losers who had somehow ended up in the same boat by choice. She had no interest in how we might have arrived at this point in our lives or whether we needed help. We were just blemishes on the landscape. I’m sure if she could have had her way we’d have been cleared up by the garbage collectors.
On more than one occasion she’d sworn at me when she’d seen me near her shop in the morning. When I’d protested, she’d let out a stream of expletives.
Fortunately, that Christmas Eve, however, there was no sign of her or anyone else. Every shop on the street had closed by the time I arrived there, early in the evening. While the rest of the world went to their Christmas Eve carol services, gathered around the television and ate big family meals, I wrapped myself up in my sleeping bag and lay there, shivering and feeling desperately lonely. Not a single soul stopped to ask if I was all right or needed any help. It was a long and desperate night.
I eventually fell asleep and woke up around mid-morning on Christmas Day. The place was bizarrely quiet, as if London had been evacuated. A few people were coming in and out of the hotel next door, but otherwise it was a ghost town.
I hadn’t really planned anything, I rarely did then. But I knew there were a couple of charity shelters that might be serving Christmas lunch. I figured I’d try to get into one of them.
I gathered up my cardboard and belongings and got ready to move off. As I shuffled past the Covent Garden Hotel, I saw a group of people in the window. They were dressed up to the nines and had flutes of champagne in their hands. My guess was that they were there for lunch and were just having the first drink of the day. I didn’t begrudge them their meal. I knew that they worked hard through the rest of the year. They had earned it. I didn’t want to spoil it for them.
I was about to walk on when one of them spotted me. He just looked blankly out, as if I wasn’t there. It just underlined that feeling that I was invisible, a non-person. I didn’t even merit a raised glass or a Merry Christmas.
I felt pretty sorry for myself, but if I’d imagined I couldn’t get much lower, I was wrong. Relations with my father were at an all-time low at that point. I’d effectively gone missing for the best part of a year and he’d been understandably furious with me when I’d resurfaced just a few weeks earlier. I’d telephoned him at his home in south London. At first he’d refused to come to the phone, and when he did he unleashed a string of expletives at me. He’d had every right to do so, of course. He had been worried sick about me. We’d exchanged some heated words again the previous week when we’d spoken and it had been clear that I wasn’t wanted at his house this Christmas. He was also going through problems in his marriage to his then wife Sue, whom he would soon divorce.
I passed a phone box and decided to give him a call, reversing the charges. I perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised by the reception I got. Sue answered the phone.
‘Oh, Merry Christmas, James,’ she said.
‘Merry Christmas to you too. Is my dad there?’ I said.
I could hear her muffling the receiver and then heard a brief exchange of words. I then heard Sue back on the phone, nervously clearing her throat.
‘I’m really sorry, James, but he doesn’t want to talk to you,’ she said.
‘OK.’
I felt close to tears. I knew I’d been a terrible disappointment – and more to the point, a huge worry – during the course of the preceding year. But I couldn’t hide my hurt.
‘You all right, James?’ Sue said.
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ I said, pulling myself together. ‘Happy Christmas.’
I then hung up.
I wandered in the direction of Dean Street, in Soho, where I knew there was a temporary refuge run by the charity Centrepoint. They knew me because I’d slept there several times.
There were a couple of guys standing at the door, one of whom recognised me.
‘Oh hello, James, Merry Christmas, mate.’
‘And to you,’ I’d said. ‘Any chance of Christmas lunch?’
‘We’re pretty full actually,’ the other guy said but his colleague interrupted, nodding as if to say, It’s OK, I know him.
‘Yeah, of course, James. Come on in.’
London was dotted with refuges like this at Christmas time. They provided a basic living space for homeless people and served Christmas dinner for those who wanted it. It was a far cry from the fare on offer at the Covent Garden Hotel, but at that point I didn’t much care. There was some ham and a turkey crown, roast potatoes, sprouts, some stuffing and gravy. It hardly compared to the feasts being eaten around London and the rest of the country, but I wolfed down a couple of plates in no time at all then followed it up with some Christmas pudding.
There were around three dozen people sitting around the makeshift table. I recognised one or two faces but most of them were strangers to me. I could tell a lot of them were addicts and users which put me on my guard immediately. I’d had some bad experiences staying in shelters where they were sleeping. They would steal the clothes you were wearing if they could. I hadn’t sunk that low yet.
Along with a couple of dozen others, I sat around for the afternoon and played a few board games. Everything had been donated by the public so most of the games were incomplete. We used Coke bottle tops and buttons as pieces. There were trays of chocolates on the table. I helped myself to as many as I could eat.
Later on we watched a bit of television. I remember that Who Wants to be a Christmas Millionaire had just begun and was on at some point during the day. In the quiz, of course, contestants can take a 50/50 gamble. I couldn’t appreciate it at the time, of course, but in a way that was precisely what I was doing with my life. In fact the odds weren’t that good.
That night I went to bed in the men
’s dormitory and had another fix. In the run up to Christmas, I had somehow got hold of enough money to get myself a week’s supply. I’d spent every penny I’d made on it; I’d not even bothered to eat properly. I had divided it up into a dozen little sachets that I planned to ration over the coming days. Addicts generally aren’t any good at rationing stuff out like that, however. I did it all in the space of forty-eight hours or so. I spent Christmas night and Boxing Day in the shelter but barely registered either day. They were lost to me. Again, looking back on it, I can see that I was taking ridiculous risks. Christmas time was notorious for ‘stingers’, drugs that had been mixed with ground-down breeze blocks and goodness knows what else. I’d heard tales of junkies dying from taking stuff at this time of the year. I had bought my stuff from some very dodgy characters. My odds had probably been a lot less attractive than 50/50 but somehow I survived, but only to do the same thing all over again. That was the vicious circle I was trapped in.
By the time I was kicked out of the refuge on December 27th, I was keeping myself going with what addicts call ‘filters’. I had saved up bits of cotton wool that had residues of heroin in them which I then washed to extract enough for a small fix. It was like using old tea bags. Just more desperate.
My priority had been to score some more. Again, I managed to raise the money I needed to keep feeding my habit. I always did then. You do when you are an addict. It feels like it’s a matter of life or death, which, in a way, it is. I remember seeing myself reflected in the window of a big department store that week. I barely recognised the broken, bedraggled, sickly looking character that looked back at me.
As I looked at the figure lying here on Monmouth Street, a montage of images from that time passed through my mind. What had people seen when they’d walked down this same street a dozen years ago? Had anyone tried to help me? Probably not. Had anyone even noticed me? Probably not. The truth was, I would never know.
I couldn’t get over the fact that this guy was lying in the exact same spot, on the same day of the year. He was even around my age at that time and looked a little like me. It was as if I’d been given a window back in time, as if I was actually looking at myself. I felt like I’d walked into Dickens’ Christmas Carol and been shown the Ghost of Christmas Past. It really freaked me out.