by Anya Peters
The cold penetrated every part of me: my teeth, my eyebrows, my chin, my hair, my sternum, the curve of my waist. It seemed to circle my tonsils, stiffen my eyeballs, hang from my lashes. It was everywhere: in my car seat, on my dashboard, in all my boxes and bags heaped up on the back seat. I couldn’t escape it. It found its way to my kidneys, waking me almost hourly, forcing me out from under my, by then, warm layers into a brutally cold, pitch-black night to relieve myself yet again. I kept suffering nosebleeds from my right nostril, too, and I blamed that on the cold as well.
The heater in my car had never worked, but I couldn’t afford to leave the engine running anyway, or to draw that much attention to my presence. I didn’t want to die out there in the laneway, but each night, as winter tightened around me, I calmly accepted the possibility that I might—that one of those mornings I might simply not wake up.
Chapter 47
All the time in London I was still emailing off job applications. It was the main way I had of applying for jobs. I couldn’t go to a Job Centre because I would have to tell them my address in London. Once they knew I was ‘of no fixed abode’ I thought I would have to queue up every week with all the other rough sleepers to get my benefit money, or get nothing at all. In the state of mind I was in, I was convinced that the only way I could survive, and get any strength back, was by staying as invisible as possible and that meant not getting recognised by other people, including other people sleeping rough like me. It was partly denial about my situation but also a survival tactic. It was also something deeply ingrained: a lifetime of secrets had made it hard to be publicly visible.
So I applied for jobs online, where only an email address is needed for contact details. I was registered with every job search site that I knew, and applied for dozens of jobs weekly, but they only ever resulted in one interview. It was for an administrator to work part-time in a woman’s home. It meant I wouldn’t have to dress up or worry about my appearance too much every day, and it made me think it would be possible to do it while living in the car for a while until I’d saved enough money to rent a room. I wanted it so much and was determined not to mess up the interview. I knew I had to make an effort with my appearance for that at least.
As soon as the launderette opened I washed my clothes so I would have time to iron them in a corner of the hospital when I went in to have my shower. I had an iron in one of the unopened bags in the boot of the car; I just needed a socket somewhere to plug it in. I spent half an hour frantically hurrying from place to place and floor to floor in the hospital looking for a socket in an unused corner somewhere that I could use discreetly. I was hoping to use the floor of the corridor as an ironing board, but every time I thought I had found the right spot, someone always appeared just as I was about to plug in the iron. I started to think I was hallucinating them, like I’d thought about the guy in the green dressing gown down near A & E.
I knew I couldn’t give in to thinking like that, not if I was going to have any chance of getting this job and ending all this. I got the lift down to the basement and ran out to the car park. I had no idea what I was going to do. In the end I drove to a church I’d never been to before to ask if I could use a socket there. When it came to it I couldn’t bear to tell the priest the truth about living in the car in case he turned me away, so I made up a story about having just come from the launderette, losing my door key and needing to iron something urgently for an interview. He was quite amused by my predicament and happily agreed to let me use his ironing board.
It hadn’t left me much time to get to the interview but the woman had given me clear directions to her house and I was hopeful I’d make it. But on the way I got lost in roadwork diversions. Finally, twenty minutes after I was supposed to be there, I phoned to say I was just a few roads away and would be there any minute. She was justifiably annoyed and told me not to bother, as she needed someone reliable. I tried to convince her that it was the traffic, that I was reliable and would be there in five minutes at most, almost begging. She softened and agreed to see me, but I had trouble finding parking on any of the roads near hers. She had already said I could park on her driveway but there was no way I could let her see my car with all my possessions heaped up on the back seat, covered over with its faded black sheet. It was another twenty minutes before I got there.
It was raining heavily and I ran the three or four roads from the car to her house, with my bag over my head, trying to keep my hair dry, the rain splashing up my trouser legs. When she opened the door she looked me up and down and told me it was too late, that she had to go out for a meeting. I tried to persuade her to let me come back another time for another shot at it, but she must have seen the desperation in my eyes.
’I don’t think so,’ she said coldly, closing the door in my face. I walked away, feeling desolate, trying to swallow all the emotion that was threatening to come up. I could shut myself down almost at will by then. I drove back to the car park and spent the afternoon in a corner of Starbucks, just sitting there in the warmth, with my back to everyone, not thinking of it once, almost as if the whole incident hadn’t happened. I spent a lot of time that winter sitting in a corner of Starbucks, hoping no one would realise I was homeless.
The experience confirmed one of my fears. I had worried for a long time that although my voice on the telephone still sounded respectable and my CV was impressive on some things, I no longer had the right ‘image’, and that when potential employers met me they would always be disappointed. I hadn’t worked properly for almost two years by then, and with all this time sleeping rough in the car—my appearance getting shabbier and shabbier—I was already feeling unemployable. I didn’t completely give up hope of a job, though. I couldn’t; it was the only way out of my situation.
My other sleeping place, the one I drove off to at any sign of trouble, was a church car park I’d discovered was empty at night. It was surrounded by quiet streets of elegant Georgian houses. From where I usually parked in it I eventually realised I could see the old house of the therapist I’d visited for about eighteen months, almost ten years earlier. Sometimes, when the wind blew the branches aside, I could see the tall arched window lit up yellow at night, and through it the winding stairwell spiralling all the way up to the top floor. Giselle was the one person I’d told my entire background to, all the secrets of my childhood. Sitting there in the car at night waiting for it to be dark enough, or to brave the cold to get undressed, I’d find myself thinking of all the childhood stuff I had started to unwrap in the basement room of that house back then, and all those early memories would come back to me in thoughts or dreams.
Once, when I was very young and Brendan was taking me home one night, he stopped the car to watch the moon. It must have been somewhere along the Old Kent Road, a bright, straight road that seemed to go on forever in a very run-down area. I hadn’t known he was my dad then. We sat in silence for ages, with the engine turning over, watching a big ivory moon in a black sky sail up over the rooftops.
Brendan was never much of a talker, but before we drove off he broke the silence by telling me that whenever I looked up and saw the moon he would be there, not far away, seeing it too, and to always think of that. ’Okay?’ he said. I was already learning to shut myself off by then, and just sat on my hands and shrugged, continuing to stare right at the moon. I tried to tell him with my mind how much Mummy and I needed him there, my breathing like Morse code, turning to the window so that he couldn’t see the emotion snag across my face.
I swallowed back the secrets I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone and tried to keep the emotion from my voice and eyes as I shrugged again and told him that ‘I don’t need someone to be always there.’
The rest of that drive back was mostly silent. I pretended not to care about what he’d said. But in the wing mirror, I kept in my sight the big ivory moon that was following us all the way home; it was reassuring seeing it there around every turn.
And looking up through the windscreen at the
moon night after night in the laneway, I often thought of Brendan and wished he’d phone me, or that I could phone him. But I could never tell him how I’d ended up living—if he could have helped me he would have done it back in Brighton. I knew I’d be in his thoughts, though, and seeing the moon he was never far from mine. It was like a constant reminder of him. It always had been.
Chapter 48
The day it all changed began like any other. I was sitting in the hospital canteen trying to make my cup of tea last as long as possible, wondering what I was going to do with myself for the rest of the day. As I tried to work out if I could afford another cup of tea, I noticed a rolled-up newspaper behind one of the water fonts and pulled it out. It was a Sunday paper and since I could never afford to buy newspapers I started reading it from cover to cover. One of the articles that grabbed my attention mentioned blogs. I had never heard of the word ‘blog’ before and only vaguely understood from the article what one was.
The next day, after checking emails in the library and sending my CV off for various jobs, I typed the word blog into a search engine and discovered that a blog was an online diary that could be read by anyone who came across it. Readers could respond to it too, leaving comments after each entry. I immediately liked the idea. It was a way of reaching out and communicating with people whilst remaining anonymous. Within minutes I discovered that a blog is free and simple to set up and run. Before I knew it I had created one of my own.
You have to choose a user name; off the top of my head I decided to call myself Wanderingscribe—I’m not sure why, a scribe is someone who writes and I had been wandering for a long time, so it seemed appropriate. I hadn’t a clue what I was actually going to write—again it was something I hadn’t planned; it just happened almost by accident, a bit like that first night sleeping in the car. You have to put a heading at the top of the blog where you describe it. Again I hadn’t a clue what to put. I asked myself what I’d most want people to know about me in that moment. My fingers were already flying to the keys typing that I was ’homeless and living in my car, and desperate to find a way out of it’.
I couldn’t believe I was actually admitting I was homeless to anyone who might come across my blog, but then at that stage I didn’t actually think anyone would. I didn’t have the courage or incentive to actually write an entry that day—to send any words out into the world. Besides, I had nothing to write. What could I say? I was homeless and I was totally ashamed of it. I saw it as completely failing in life, ending up in a position where I had nobody to go to, losing touch with people whenever I moved on, totally estranged from any family by then too. It was the last thing I could tell people in the ‘real world’, but maybe I’d be brave enough to tell people online in the ‘virtual world’ of the internet. It was almost a month before I found the courage to write in it, but once I did there was no stopping me. After all those months of isolation I’d found a way to communicate again.
In one of the first entries I struggled for ages to write the words ’I am homeless’. I couldn’t understand why it was so hard to admit that, even to myself. Looking at the words on the screen, the sense of failure and shame made me feel physically ill.
On my blog I could be completely anonymous and honest about how I was living; I didn’t have to try to cover it up as I was doing in my daily life. Sometimes I think I am better at writing than talking, and blogging was like a mixture of the two. Because there were soon real people reading the blog it gave it the immediacy and intimacy of face-to-face communication.
I hadn’t spoken to anyone for months, not intimately anyway, so with the blog it felt like I was smashing down a wall back into the outside world, without exposing myself to any danger or embarrassment. I could tell people what was happening in my life and how I had become homeless without having to see the pity, disapproval or fear on their faces. For the first time in longer than I wished to remember, I could be real—maybe in some respects for the first time ever.
Almost straight away the blog started to give purpose to my days, becoming a reason to get out of the sleeping bag in the morning: to hurry off to see if anyone had left any comments or emails overnight. Complete strangers leaving messages saying ‘Good morning, Scribe’ and ‘Keep your chin up today, Scribe’ and ‘Hang in there, Tiger’. I started writing in it daily. And very soon I wouldn’t let anyone stop me from doing it, even when it seemed futile, even when some people online ridiculed my attempts to tell my story or dismissed my efforts to get out of my situation. For the first time in ages, something was driving me and I refused to listen to them. It was like something in me had switched back on. I was thinking positively again for the first time in what seemed like years.
Most people responded with kindness and encouragement to my situation, promising to pray for me and offering advice and assistance. I found it hard to respond, even though they made me feel connected and less alone, giving me some of the ‘company’ I hungered for, albeit at a safe distance online.
Once, early on, I almost met one particularly supportive woman for a coffee. She told me where she lived and it was quite close by. I liked the idea of spending some time with another woman after so many months of sitting in caféon my own, making cups of tea last as long as possible, and trying to block out the sad songs blaring from the radios and the stares of other lonely people.
I noticed that the fifth email she had sent me came from what seemed like a man’s address. Scrolling down, I found the address of a website which, when I checked it out, contained some very disturbing pornographic images. I felt confused and shocked. I emailed ‘her’ several times about it, but she didn’t reply, leaving me feeling upset and far too freaked-out to meet her. I think I probably had a lucky escape. But it made me wary of ever meeting anyone else.
Despite this setback, the majority of the responses were giving me strength and perspective. All this time I had given in to negative thinking and now saw how wrong I had been to let Craig and my uncle win. I didn’t deserve to be treated the way they had treated me. I didn’t deserve to end up homeless, living in a car in a laneway. No one did. But all those months it was almost like I was punishing myself, saying I didn’t fit in and didn’t belong, making an outcast of myself, the way my uncle had all those years ago. Sometimes I shrunk to the size of a little girl.
The blog wasn’t just about my homelessness; in fact it wasn’t even about that a lot of the time. It wasn’t about anything really; it was just a blog, a diary. There was such ugliness in my life and in people’s reactions to me while I was homeless that I found writing in the blog often brought some beauty back into it; and sometimes that became the most important reason for doing it. Other times I wavered between just desperately wanting someone to realise I could still write and think rationally—despite what I was going through, and to give me a job to save me from the worse that was to come—and soon wanting to say some of the things that had been shut up in me for years. Although I wasn’t ready, bits of information and splinters of memory would come out onto the screen from time to time.
I mentioned my childhood a few times in the blog, alluding to past traumas. This surprised me because I never intended to. I began to see that I had been deluding myself about any family still being there for me. They hadn’t been there for years, but in my mind they were still family and I didn’t know how to stop loving them.
Being in the car in the dark all those months had brought it all back. Vulnerable and alone and on the outside of everything, I sometimes felt like the little girl who had been sent out to stand in the kitchen in the dark. It felt like punishment in a way. The emotions it brought up in me were the same, too. As a child, under my uncle’s abusive regime, I learned to cope with my emotions by shutting myself down to them. And that’s how I coped with my emotions when I was living in my car, too. I was like a terrified child, trying to keep herself invisible so that no one would send her away. Writing the blog helped me see that I’d been frightened of moving on. And realising that
finally allowed me to change the situation.
Chapter 49
Within a couple of months of starting it, my blog was stumbled upon by Ian Urbina, a journalist on The New York Times. He emailed me about an article he was doing on homelessness, and the moment I saw his email I had a feeling that this was somehow going to change things. After a series of emails and a meeting with one of his colleagues from their London office, he called and interviewed me by phone. He told me that I might end up not being mentioned in the article because it was about the ‘hidden homeless’ who live in their cars in America. But the internet does away with international boundaries.
The internet has taken the lid off the world, and blogs enable people—wherever they are in the world—to tell their stories. I was just a person reaching out to other people. It didn’t really matter where in the world I was; I had a story to tell and through my blog I was putting it out there. Sometimes it felt close to prayer. I was living in a battered old car in an isolated laneway at the edge of some woods in England but I was a human being just like the rest, looking for a dignified way out of my situation. I had already received emails from people in America, Canada and Chile as well as all over Europe, who checked into my blog daily to see how I was doing. Those people were just as likely to offer a solution as the people I passed on the street every day.
A few weeks later, Ian Urbina’s article appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition of The New York Times with a reference to my blog at the end of the article. There was also an audio interview with me included in the online edition. People all over the world seem to read the NYT online, and my Wanderingscribe blog went international overnight. Within hours I had hundreds of emails and comments from all corners of the world, giving support and advice about how to get out of the car and back into mainstream living.