Inside it was warm, clean and calm as heaven. Clutches of men and women stood in same-sex groups yapping happily over cups of tea. Three young women with greasy hair scraped brutally back from their foreheads looked me up and down brazenly, five men behind them maintained a conversation without taking their eyes off the women, and a group of tall Eastern Europeans leaned over a banister, pulling up the sleeves of their knitted sweatshirts and scratching at their stubble. One raised his mug to me and smiled. Behind them, visible through floor-to-ceiling windows was the smoking area, and the dozen or so who puffed out there leaned out of the way of the towering plants in the centre, careful not to disturb them. The thought of unrolling my sleeping bag in a corner and falling into a slumber was overwhelming.
'I'm sorry, mate,' the man at reception said, brushing away the thick hair which hung over his eyes. 'No one can see you right now. Thought they might, but…'
'It's all right,' I said.
'Rough sleeping's our priority.'
'It has to be,' I agreed.
'Here,' he said, unfolding a grainy, photocopied map on to the counter and circling a street with a fluorescent yellow marker. 'Go to Phoenix Court. It's the Bristol City Council office. If you're not rough sleeping now but think you might end up having to, they can help you.'
I decided not to tell him I had already been there, that they had been the ones who sent me here. I was aware that the few short moments he had talked with me would have been better spent with someone in genuine need, and I did not want to waste any more of his time. Instead, I thanked him shyly, and left.
Outside, descending the steps, I was seized by horror. The man walking along the pavement on the other side of the road was, I realised, someone I had been to college with. I could not remember his name and was sure he would not remember mine, but if I had recognised his face then doubtless such identification would be reciprocated. Pulling my hood over my cap, I pointed my eyes at the ground and walked in the opposite direction. We were not acquainted enough to acknowledge each other, but if he placed me, coupled that with my garb and then clocked the nature of the building I was exiting, there was a chance he might remark on it to someone, perhaps someone I knew. The unbearable shame of homelessness hit me at that moment, and I wasn't even homeless.
7
I told Stan about my visit to the Compass Centre.
'Hundreds – no – ruddy thousands of places like that across the country,' he said. 'Some are pits, and I'm talking pits of ruddy hell, but some are spot on.'
I described the Compass Centre to him.
'Sounds nice,' he remarked wistfully.
'Why don't you try and get in there? If I was for real, I would.'
Stan looked at me for a moment. 'Because I don't want to,' he said simply. 'I'm off for a kip. I'll see you later, Charlie, yeah?'
When we met up again that afternoon, Stan, half-drunk, revealed his theory of homelessness. 'Anyone can get out of homelessness,' he said between sips of his vodka. 'No matter how deep in they are. They just have to want to. That's the main problem. Most people don't ruddy want to.'
He, for one, did not, as he categorically explained. 'I could be living a normal life right now. But I've chosen this.' The issue, he said, was that he was deeply addicted to vodka and cigarettes. Every evening he drank vodka and smoked cigarettes until he passed out. 'That's what I do. That's how my life is. That's how I want my life to be. I've tried it all, but I've never attained such contentment as those two beauties give me. Anyway, I'm fifty-one now, my heart, liver and lungs are all fucked, so what's left for me?'
Stan was certain he would not see sixty. He had left it too late. Never married, never had kids. All his family were dead. 'The Crushaw line stops with me. It's no big deal.'
'I don't think I could do this year-round,' I said. 'Sleeping rough now is barely tolerable, and it's only just autumn. I couldn't handle the winter.'
'Doesn't bother me. I run hot.' He stubbed his cigarette into the grass and lit another. 'I suppose I wouldn't mind a little flat or something, but when you're homeless you can't just get your own place as easy as that. You have to go through a whole process, shelters, refuges, flatshares, all that bollocks. And there's no way I'd survive all that, not the level I'm at. You see, in most of these halfway houses you can't drink, and you definitely can't smoke. Some have a curfew, all doors locked at nine o'clock. What if I'm still awake and need a drink or a fag? No. I can't be doing with that.'
Stan's words echoed with an idea which had been building in my mind for some time. Already, I had seen some of the provisions in place for rough sleepers in the UK, and I had been surprised that they were not more successful. But the issue of homelessness was not so black and white as I had imagined before beginning my journey. Many rough sleepers, like Stan, were still on the street because they believed it was the best option for them.
While few ever chose homelessness the first time round, some rough sleepers who have been rehabilitated, put through schemes and systems, placed in housing and hooked up with a secure, albeit minimum-wage, job, have chosen to jack it all in and return to the streets. It is a kind of reversed institutionalism. Living on the streets is not easy, but if done for long enough it can become normal, and any departure from normality is difficult for most. Some theories claim that it can take just four weeks for a person to assimilate to street life and, more importantly, the street community. And, if you begin to develop a stronger relationship with this community than with your previous peers – if, for example, your homelessness was the outcome of escape from an abusive relationship – the prospect of returning to 'normal' life can be more disheartening than staying on the streets.
Stuart Shorter, the eponymous hero of Alexander Masters' biography Stuart: A Life Backwards, often referred to homelessness as self-destruction: a quality anyone who has spent any time on the streets will tell you is rife amongst the homeless. Many feel not just that they have to live on the streets, but indeed that they deserve to, as if they are not good enough for rehousing, rehabilitation, reintegration.
'I'm perfectly happy,' Stan continued, 'lying in my sleeping bag, drinking my vodka and smoking my tobacco until I'm tired enough to sleep. If someone's there to chat to, that's a welcome bonus, but I enjoy my own company. And anyway, my two best friends are company enough.'
Stan still had rules, though. He would not start drinking before three o'clock in the afternoon: he refused to do it all day long, making sure to preserve it as a night-time pursuit. He kept it that way because, as he said, if it was perpetual there would be no pleasure. 'Get something all the time and it loses its fun. That hour, between two and three, that's my favourite hour of the day. I know what's coming.'
It was now only five o'clock, and already his eyes had grown rheumy and his speech slurred. It was sometimes like this. Most days, Stan could drink for a solid ten hours; other days, two cigarettes and a mouthful of vodka would knock him to his back, and from the floor he would gently sing early U2 songs.
I was not in the mood for drinking myself, and the afternoon was still warm, so I left Stan and walked the Zig Zag pathway up to Clifton, where I sat on the Downs, cooked dinner on my stove, and lay back to enjoy the setting sun.
Four students – two boys, two girls – approached. One of the boys, perhaps trying to impress his female companions, took his wallet from his pocket and sidled close to me. I had made a resolution early on to accept money from no one and, if it was forced on me, to pass it on to a homeless person. The boy came so close his shoulders blocked the sun, and I considered how to politely refuse his charity.
'Knock, knock,' he said.
'Who's there?' I replied.
'I thought you were meant to be homeless?' He laughed, tucked the wallet back into his jeans, and turned to one of the girls. She joyously shrieked at him, 'OMG! Did you really just do that?' and the four sauntered away together in a fog of guffaws and chortles.
Never have I wanted so much to punch a man in the mouth.
8
Dinner at The Wild Goose was soft pasta topped by a ladle of tomato sauce. I fancied I could taste garlic. Cubes of a crunchy and unidentifiable substance – perhaps undercooked potato, perhaps a soya-based meat substitute – permeated each mouthful. Stan had not arrived, but this was half-expected. It was already eight o'clock, and he would doubtless be tucking into his own liquid dinner.
I sat alone as I cleared my plate. Two Eastern Europeans shared my table, but their common language designated me as an outsider. A woman – short, in her forties, too much lipstick – joined the table and sat on the chair which faced mine. She dabbed at her pasta with a slice of bread, chewed twice, and then stared at me.
'Hello,' I said, uncomfortable under the gaze.
'What's your name? I'm Tanya.' I could not place her accent: a mixture of the Home Counties and Scotland, with some Mediterranean thrown into the vowels.
'Nice to meet you, Tanya,' I replied, holding my hand over the plates for her to shake gingerly. 'I'm Charlie.'
'I've seen you here before.'
'I haven't seen you.'
'Didn't we have a little chat the other night?'
'Definitely not. I would have remembered.'
'I'm sure of it. You're Charlie, aren't you?'
'I've just told you that.'
'You've told me it before.'
'No, Tanya,' I remonstrated. 'I haven't.'
'Yes, you have,' she persisted. 'Now I think of it, it wasn't here. We met at that party in St Paul's last week. You brought your dog. What was he called? Brian? Brice? Something like that.'
Relief replaced trepidation. This wasn't clumsy flirtation: Tanya had mistaken me for someone else. I explained I had not set foot in St Paul's for at least a year, and she seemed to accept the mistake.
'Then who the fuck did I meet?' she laughed.
A man approached and crouched down next to Tanya, his forearms crossed on the table. He was my age, with a thin face and dark, greasy hair. Tattoos trailed across his arms, but they were so faded I could not decipher what they symbolised. A twitch around the left eye became pronounced as he looked at me, and then faded again when he turned back to Tanya.
'You want to go?' he asked her.
'You got it?' she replied.
'Of course.'
Tanya rose from her seat, her pasta barely touched. 'Nice to meet you, Charlie,' she said, then began an awkward march towards the door. I watched her leave, noticing that her strange walk came from the high heels which, a size too large, inched away from her feet with each step. The man followed her, hands in pockets, eyes on the ground. Beside me, the two Eastern Europeans chuckled while one placed his hands – palms up, fingers curved as if clutching balloons – before his chest, jiggled them, and then squeezed air.
9
I did not see Stan for the next few days. Bristol was boring without him, and I considered leaving. It was about time anyway. I was looking forward to walking again, along the towpaths to London. But then he turned up for lunch at The Wild Goose one day, and my departure plans crumbled.
'I thought you might have left,' I said.
'Left? I only just got here. No. Just had to shoot off for a few days. Needed to make a bit of money.'
'What were you doing?'
Stan looked at me and smiled. 'There are some things, Charlie,' he said, 'that I don't want going in your book.'
But there were many other things which he did not mind about at all. Stan did not talk about the days before he became homeless – everything before the age of forty was excluded – but all that had occurred over the last ten years was fair game, confirmed by the frequent imperative, 'Put that in your book'.
Like the tramps of Down and Out in Paris and London, of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, of those gloomy and monochrome inter-war years, Stan toured the country. Before Bristol, where he had been living only for the last month or so, he had spent time in Chester, Leeds, London, Bournemouth, Worcester, Northampton and Newcastle. Some places he stayed for months, others for years. Some places he left through choice, others because he had to. Every place, it seemed, had a story. Bournemouth, for example, was not its beach nor its sleeping-spots nor its climate, but was 'where I saved that kid'.
I pictured Stan on the beach at the peak of the summer, fully clothed and drunk while those around with their exposed and tanning flesh did their best to avoid eye contact with the filthy tramp; there is a scream – a small child has been caught in a rip current and is being carried out to sea; Stan, fuelled with alcohol, leaps in, thrashes towards the youngling, scoops him up in glistening, tattooed arms, and carries him back to shore; as one, the beach comes together to surround Stan, hoist him into the air cheering, and carry him to the nearest strip club with fresh wads of twenties bursting from his pockets.
I told him that. He laughed and said, 'Where do you ruddy live, Charlie?' Stan's life was never so easy, nor so light. 'I saved the kid from being raped.'
Bournemouth, Stan explained, had a disproportionately high population of rough sleepers. 'It's got a lot going for it, that place, so a lot of homeless turn up and then stay. I liked it there. Weather wasn't too bad – not for me, anyway, I'd just come down from ruddy Newcastle – and there's always a load of tourists around to scrounge from. Best of all, though, is there's loads of parks there, and no one comes to check them at night, so there's plenty of action. But you've got to have your wits about you if you're going to hang around those parks after dark. And that kid didn't.'
Stan's 'kid' was not the helpless toddler I had imagined – he was a gay eighteen-year-old who had an unfortunate habit of getting drunk in a nearby nightclub and then turning up at the wrong end of the park trying to pick up.
'There's places he could have gone for that. Safe places. But he kept coming back to the park, and he wasn't subtle either. He'd walk through shouting at the top of his voice what he wanted and how. Nobody paid him much mind at first. But then I heard that three blokes were starting to talk about him. And these were not nice blokes.'
Nor were they Stan's friends. He did not mix with them, but they shared mutual acquaintances. One – Stan would not tell me his name – revealed to Stan that the three men were planning on giving the young lad 'what he wanted' that night. He was going to watch; did Stan want to join him?
'I knew that meant they were going to rape him. And at first I didn't care too much. Maybe it was what he wanted. He used to shout some pretty rough things. I wasn't going to watch, but I wasn't going to try and stop it, either. None of my business. But then this other guy told me something I didn't know. One of those blokes was HIV.'
By Stan's logic, the best method of intervention was attack. He could not attack the three men, each of them alone was tougher than him, so he decided to attack the boy.
'I got him the moment he set foot in the park. He always came in the same way, and usually at the same time, so I knew where and when. The other three were somewhere deeper, hiding, waiting to ambush, so I had to get to him first. I nutted him hard enough so that he could feel it through the drink and told him that if he ever came into this park again I'd cut his feet off.'
'Did he?'
'Not as far as I know. I stayed around for the next two weeks and he never came back then. But I had to go after that. I wasn't in danger or anything. Everyone knew what I'd done and why, and no one gave a shit, not even the three blokes. But I stopped liking Bournemouth after that. It lost its fun.'
London, too, was little more than a setting for Stan's only love story.
'See,' he said, 'most people think all us tramps are single. Not the case. Not the case at all. I know plenty in healthy and stable relationships. But if you want a woman you've got to head to the big cities, the bigger the better. And there's no bigger or better than London.'
'So why's that?' I asked. 'Are there more female rough sleepers there?'
'Just more ruddy women, Charlie. They don't have to be on the streets. My Melissa wasn't.'
I found this hard to believe, and my incredulity must have shown.
'Rapists and murderers have girlfriends, why can't I? You'd be surprised how many guys on the streets have girlfriends with houses and jobs tucked away here and there – and some of those girlfriends aren't that close to the breadline, if you know what I mean. Look, when you get to my age, you're as libido-less as a neutered dog. I haven't had a hard-on for three years. But all those younger ones – more and more of them every day, if you ask me – are as randy as a young man should be, and they've got to get some somewhere. There's a few women on the streets, but not enough to keep things fair.'
Melissa was considerably younger than Stan: in her late thirties while he had passed his mid forties. Her three children were all in care, she had finally divorced her husband after years of abuse, and she lived alone in a small bedsit south of the Thames.
'She had the most beautiful face,' Stan said. 'I mean, stunning, really stunning. Honestly, Charlie, if you saw her you would have fancied her. Like a model. But when you saw her body, that was when you realised what that cunt had done to her, and you forgot about her face. Scars and burns all over. And really bad ones, too, ones you could tell came from a knife. Her right arm was completely disfigured from the shoulder to the elbow, absolutely mashed, because he had taken a fucking blowtorch to her.'
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