No Fixed Abode

by Charlie Carroll

  Another customer bought a magazine: after dropping the two pound coins into Sue's gloved hand he smiled awkwardly at me and then walked away. 'Thank you, my love!' Sue called after him. 'You have a cracking day!'

  'So,' I faltered, suddenly nervous at the question I was about to ask. I was nervous because I reasoned Sue would ask me my status, and I did not want to lie; or perhaps she would just see right through me, and then I would lie out of misguided panic. 'Where's decent to sleep around here?'

  Sue asked no questions, and barely even looked at me as she fired off a response so quick it seemed automatic. 'Couldn't really say,' she replied with no succeeding justification. Another customer approached her.

  'Of course, my love, thank you so much. You look after yourself,' Sue said as she handed over the magazine, and then, as her customer left, turned to me and grinned: 'What a day!'

  'What about where you used to sleep?' I persisted.

  'Nah, can't stop there any more. Closed off. It changes all the time. I don't really know any more.' Again that swift delivery, that mechanical and almost rehearsed answer which gave nothing away. It was so unlike the candour of her earlier confessions, and one of the few things she said to me not delivered with a smile.

  I continued walking, away from the centre and towards Stokes Croft. At the underpass by the bus station, a busker hollered an incomprehensible song, and I leaned against a wall and waited for him to finish. His leather jacket hung in tattered strands from his shoulders and the spikes of his Mohawk were wilted and grey. It was this cavern of the underpass which stank of piss, but it looked like it could have been him. He moved arhythmically between a D and a G chord, bellowing gibberish above the out-of-tune triads. He had made £1.20. Finally, he came to the end of his song and nodded at me. I approached him.

  'All right, pal?' he asked.

  'Do you know anywhere round here to sleep?' I asked, favouring a direct approach.

  'Ha! Nah, I ain't getting into that.' He paused. 'You got a guitar tuner?'

  'No.'

  'Ah, well.' And with that he burst sonorously into the next song, an atonal note for atonal note replica of its predecessor.

  Along Gloucester Road, an old man with a beard which crawled up his cheeks towards his eyebrows rummaged through the ashtrays of a pub's roadside beer garden, carefully placing the choicest morsels in his pocket. When he saw me watching, he smiled and held one out to me. I took it.

  'No light, though,' he said, and I handed it back. 'What are you?' he asked, casting a long gaze down my body to observe my clothes. They still looked cheap and ragged, but I had cleaned them, and myself, thoroughly in Portishead. 'Outreach?'

  I shook my head. Again, I was uncomfortable lying. I did not want to say 'I'm homeless', because I wasn't, and to say 'I'm a tramp' somehow sounded ludicrous. 'I'm walking,' I said.

  He seemed happy with that, and continued to forage in an ashtray.

  'I was wondering if you could help me out,' I said. 'Whereabouts can you sleep round here?'

  'I'm not going to get into that,' he said, stepping backwards. 'I'm not going to get into that.'

  Those words again. What was it with Bristol's homeless? All had been kind to me in their own way – Sue's cheerful intimacy, the guitarist's encouraging nod, this tramp's proffered stub of a smoked cigarette – but when my stock question came up this sudden evasion and concurrent suspicion was unanimous. Why did they think I was asking? This latter man believed I worked for Outreach – an organisation which supports people with learning difficulties or mental health needs. Perhaps the others did, too. Or, worse, perhaps they thought I worked for the council or the police, here to uncover the local pockets of rough sleepers and move them off Bristol's streets. Perhaps even they mistook my question for an invitation – 'Want to share my sleeping bag?' – and the response 'I'm not going to get into that' was far more literal than I had understood. Most likely, I thought, they simply had a tried and tested spot, one which was safe and dry, quiet even, and revealing its location to a stranger would be the equivalent of giving that stranger your door keys.

  I rolled those adjectives around my mind: safe, dry, quiet. A stretch of woods flanked the edge of the Avon before the gorge – I had registered them as I passed on the way into the city that morning. It was an unplanned but unavoidable consequence of becoming a tramp: I looked for and assessed likely sleeping-spots everywhere. Those woods, I noticed, were littered with beer cans and cigarette or condom packets on the periphery, but inside they were dense enough to hide a quiet individual. The thought appealed to me. It was not late, but I was tired and I was hungry, and the woods were only a half-hour walk from the centre. I bought a tin of beans and a loaf of bread from a supermarket and set off for them.

  3

  Four large trees with low-hanging branches and thick clusters of leaves sheltered an inner quadrangle. Inside, the treetops arched inwards to form a tangled and spiny cone, and there was enough room to hang a hammock, if only I had brought one along. This was my nest. Each evening, I came back from the centre and slept here. The nights grew colder, but little rain ever fell inside the quadrangle, and the walls of leaves deflected the winds. Though I often cut myself as I pushed through the sharp and splayed branches to exit or enter, once inside I felt secure and comfortable. I cooked there, slept there and, when it was light enough, could even perch on one of the tree's branches with my back against the trunk to happily read my book. Often, after it was dark and I was wrapped within my sleeping bag, noises floated across from the outer edges of the woods – laughter, shouting, singing, grunts, hoots, shrieks, and once, on a weekend night, the splintering crash of broken glass followed by a howl – but such noises were never close enough to cause concern. My little woodland den became both refuge and relief.

  It was early when I walked back into Bristol following my first night in the woods. I was beginning to enjoy living by the rise and set of the sun: it felt natural and elemental, and I was free of the mild guilt which always succeeded a late night and a lie-in. At the same time, I knew my joy was seasonal, and I would feel very different when, not long from now, daylight only lasted for eight of each twenty-four hours.

  In the centre, the shops were still closed. A thin mist hung along the streets of Broadmead. A man sat with his back against a wall, sipping slowly from a can of ale. I recognised the brand. It was not cheap.

  'Where's good to—'

  'Fuck off,' he growled.

  4

  I met Jan on a bench at Broad Quay. He was dressed warm, had a thick Polish accent, a wide grin and the peach-fuzz stubble of a schoolboy. 'I haven't seen you in Bristol before,' he said.

  'I'm new to the area.'

  'Have you been to The Wild Goose yet?'

  'No.'

  'Oh-holy-shit-Jesus-Christ-motherfucker!' he cried, spewing the words out as if they were a single, monosyllabic obscenity. 'You haven't been to The Wild Goose? You must! You must!'

  'What is it?'

  'It is the best place in the world. Run by the best people in the world. You can get food there, food for free. Do you know Easton? Stapleford Road? Just head for the swimming pool. It is close to this. If you go now, you might be in time for the end of breakfast.'

  'Thanks,' I said, rising to go. 'You coming?'

  Jan shook his head. 'Already eat. Today will be a good day for business, so I must make an early start.'

  'What's your business?'

  'What do you think?' Jan laughed, pulling his vendor-jacket and a stack of Big Issues from his bag. I thanked him again and walked away in search of Easton and The Wild Goose. Jan stopped me a few steps later with a shout. 'Charlie!' he called. 'Oh-holy-shit-Jesus-Christ-motherfucker, you are going the wrong way!' He pointed in the opposite direction, and I set off again.

  I was too late for breakfast, so passed the hours before The Wild Goose reopened for lunch by wandering Easton. It was a bleak part of the Greater Bristol metropolis, the poorer cousin to the city centre and the more affluen
t areas such as Clifton and Redland. Down one backstreet, legal notices were affixed to doors, warning any squatters who might be there that they would be evicted. Down another, alternate houses had replaced the glass in their ground-floor windows with sheets of plywood. Along the main street, a sign hung from the door of a small and independent shop begging passers-by to refrain from destroying the flowerbox which sat on the windowsill. The sign seemed to have worked, for the flowerbox was intact and in bloom, and it was the prettiest thing on the street.

  The morning passed slowly. I checked my watch with frequent impatience, waiting for the doors of The Wild Goose to open. When they finally did, I was less than two minutes late. Already, the place bustled with life.

  The best place in the world, run by the best people in the world. Those were Jan's words, and he was right. The Wild Goose is a wonderful, generous, altruistic, kind, magnificent, philanthropic and gladdening institution, open to all. The owner, Alan Goddard, once said, 'It doesn't matter if you have one pound in your pocket or one million. You are welcome to eat here.' They served free food to anyone who entered, and all they asked in return was that nobody smoked, took drugs or fought either on the premises or outside of it. Such rules were adhered to by all.

  The crowd that afternoon was varied and plentiful. Only one was obviously homeless: an old man with a thin, white beard and rips in his woollen jumper which revealed further rips in the woollen jumper he wore beneath it. I caught him staring at me each time I looked over from my beans on toast, shovelled up with a plastic knife and fork. When our eyes met, his instantly darted to the floor, though whether it was from fear, shame or embarrassment, I could not decipher.

  Around the edges of the room, single men sat and focused on their food: most young and tattooed, others with shirts and brushed hair, all seemingly red-eyed and exhausted. In the middle, the largest table was occupied by four teenage girls who loudly boasted about the number of care homes they had been through, boyfriends in jail who hadn't written for two weeks, how many blokes Lisa had shagged last week – 'she's already got warts, she'll get chlamydia next, the fucking skank' – and why lager had a better buzz than cider. One rapped a verse so rapid it was incomprehensible, another cupped her hands around her lips and beatboxed, and a third rose from her seat, leaned her elbows on the table and wiggled her arse furiously at the two Eastern Europeans eating their slices of sponge cake.

  I turned away from the spectacle to see a large man huff through the door.

  'Stan!' the young lady serving behind the counter called as he approached. She piled beans on toast (a far larger portion than she had given me) on to a plate and thrust it towards him. 'All right, gorgeous?'

  'Hullo, my pretty,' Stan replied, letting his eyes trail from her blonde hair to her glasses to the spiderweb of tattoos along her arm.

  He took a seat at my table and nodded to me.

  'You must be a regular,' I said.

  'Came here for the first time yesterday,' he replied, and winked at me. I knew then that I was in the presence of a charming old bastard.

  5

  Stan was the only person I met on that long walk from Sennen to London who called himself a tramp. The pockets of his faded green puffa jacket were stuffed with small, plastic cola bottles: most empty, but some filled with cheap vodka. I had some once and it nearly blinded me. Stan's nose and cheeks were a grid of burst capillaries, his eyes bulged out as if someone had squeezed him too hard, he had the wrinkles of a lifetime smoker and the dental hygiene of an aged camel, but he managed to have a wet shave and flatten his thick hair down with Brylcreem once a day. He made a point of that.

  'Why won't anyone tell me where I should sleep?' I asked him as we left The Wild Goose together.

  'Why should they?'

  'I'm not asking where they sleep, I'm asking for any spot.'

  'There's plenty of good sleeping-spots in Bristol, but we don't just stick to one, we move around. Me, I've got about five, I know another ruddy ten, but I wouldn't tell you about them, either.'

  'Why not?'

  'What if I need them myself?' He stopped on the pavement and turned to face me. His palm bounced off the spring of his hair as he absent-mindedly checked for consistency. 'All right, then, Charlie, tell me this. Where did you sleep last night?'

  I visualised my den, from the dry sleeping bag unfurled on the soft ground to the spire of interlocked branches at its peak. I was not prepared to reveal it to anyone. 'Good point,' I said.

  Stan laughed. I do not believe I had ever seen anyone so pleased with themselves. 'Come on. Let's go to Castle Park. I need some baccy and there's a guy there who sells it cheap.'

  The image of the archetypal tramp paints him as alone. In fact, this is not the case. When you see homeless on their own, they are more often than not new to the streets. Humans are inherently social animals, and the need to pack is one of our most primitive urges. Though so much else of what we might consider included in being human is stripped from the homeless, this instinct is not, and the whole gamut of social relationships – from the casual acquaintance to the close circle to the best friend – exists as profoundly amongst the homeless as it does amongst the homed.

  By Bristol, I was no longer new to rough sleeping, but I was new to the streets, and that, coupled with the hostility I had felt so far, pushed me into keeping myself to myself. So Stan was a welcome ray of light. We met each day and, for the short time I stayed in Bristol, we became friends. Eating with him at The Wild Goose, sitting together under the covered arches of Cabot Circus when it rained, accepting free mugs of tea at a Methodist chapel and politely nodding along to the evangelising of our hosts, and sharing his vodka and my cans of lager at Castle Park in the evenings, his company cheered me, and I think mine cheered him, too.

  'This book you're writing,' he said, for I had told him the truth regarding my journey, 'am I going to be in it?'

  'I hope so. Do you mind?'

  'You'll have to speak to my lawyer.'

  I needn't have worried along the Cornish coast of thinking up a back-story. Stan accepted my reasons for rough sleeping as naturally as if I had told him any plausible tales of addiction and downward spirals. He spoke often about his own time on the streets over the years, but only once, during our last night together, did he allude to what originally put him there. Stan's verbose nostalgia was a rarity on the streets – I came to learn that most homeless did not talk about their past, often because they did not want to. For 99 per cent of homeless people in England, the past will hold shame; shame which is best left alone. Few homeless talk about the future, either. Theirs is instead the present, in itself absorbing enough.

  6

  I felt nervous. The door was locked. There was a buzzer and intercom system: an explanation was demanded before entry allowed. Four young men with cigarettes, tracksuits and welts on their faces hovered near the door, and I became so paranoid that my voice would betray me I had to leave and walk around the block. The men watched me leave and return minutes later. I prayed I had the courage to try my hand or – more accurately – my accent.

  'Hello?' A distorted voice through a tinny waist-high speaker.

  I bent down and kept my voice low. 'I just wanted to talk to someone.'

  'Are you sleeping rough?'

  The voice had not asked if I was homeless. To answer 'yes' would be to tell the truth. I was sleeping rough, but here it suddenly all seemed like a silly folly, and I could not bring myself to admit it. That morning, I had visited a Bristol City Council office to enquire about provisions for the homeless, and had been referred here: the Compass Centre. A combination of hostel, Outreach centre, health service and advice bureau, the Compass Centre was Bristol's flagship in care for the homeless and destitute. If I admitted over that intercom that I was sleeping rough, they might insist I take a bed for the night, and I could not do that. There was a bed only a few miles away in Portishead if I needed it, and the thought of a legitimate rough sleeper missing out on a hostel bed for
the night because of me and my research appalled me.

  'No,' I replied.

  'I don't think there's anyone who can see you right now. Are you staying somewhere?'

  'A friend's,' I said.

  'Hold on a minute.' Murmurs percolated through the intercom, and I heard '… anyone available… guy here… sleeping on his mate's sofa'. Those last words had been assumed, I never said 'sofa', but it was a testament to the kind of problems people came here with. The voice returned. 'I might be able to get someone to see you. Pull the door on the buzz.'

  Feeling the stares of the young men behind me on my back and the smoke of their cigarettes around my bare ears, I pulled on the door.