No Fixed Abode

by Charlie Carroll

  I admitted I had not.

  'They're like a metronome. Three months off and then three months on with up to three a day. So regular and so bad some people just kill themselves to get rid. That's their cure. Suicide. Not me, though. You wouldn't catch me doing that, no matter how bad things got.'

  Forty years of headaches so bad they make you want to kill yourself, I thought.

  'The thing about them is they're caused by a lack of oxygen in the blood. And, for me, they seemed to come on worse when I was inside – less oxygen there, see? – and they got better when I was back outside. So I got to thinking I must just be a square peg in a round hole. Everyone else is on the streets because of addictions, but I'm actually healthier here. Funny. But now they've finally diagnosed. Took forty years of doctors, but they've done it in the end. I know how to control it now, nothing more than a little tank of oxygen. Doctor says when they come on I just go in and they'll give me one. It's been three months without. I'm due any day now. I'm almost looking forward to it, cos I can just go in and get my tank. Then I'll be off the streets for good.'

  Frank's story was rare on the streets, for it was an uplifting one. Someone stopped beside us to buy a Big Issue and I left Frank to resume his business. 'Any day now!' he gleefully hollered to me as I bid him farewell. 'Can you believe it? I'm actually looking forward to my next headache!'

  3

  I did not want to spend another night on Trafalgar Square. There had been no trouble there, but there had also been no sleep, and I felt the urge to close my eyes so acutely the following day that I wondered if I should risk a more dangerous location in the hope of gaining a few hours' rest.

  Perhaps the nights on that Dalston couch in that quiet and heated living room had spoiled me, but I had slept rough over the past months enough times to know what it was I needed. A space. A space which I could stick my metaphorical flag into and claim as my own, no matter how temporarily. I had no sense of that on Trafalgar Square; everything was too fluid, too open. There was no demarcation, no feasible notion that someone might point to where I had sat through the night and say: 'That's where Charlie sleeps.' I knew I would never find anywhere like my woods in Bristol, my sand dunes and cliff-tops in Cornwall, my canal-side pitches – nothing like that existed in Central London. But I had seen mattresses and duvets all around the city. They had not been discarded: they were makeshift bedrooms. That was what I wanted. Somewhere I could leave my sleeping bag.

  The nesting instinct, I thought, as basic as an insect. Rough sleepers have little, but territoriality comes before thought, is reactive, and ignoring it is as impossible as denying vision. It is pure self-preservation – never are you more vulnerable than when you are asleep, and if you feel vulnerable, you will not sleep – and so all tramps, like all nomads, will have defined spots they return to again and again when night falls.

  That was my problem. I had felt vulnerable on Trafalgar Square. And I had not slept. I thought back over my time thus far in London, trying to recall any locations where I might feel secure enough to sleep. I remembered the conversation with Tim of the London House and his allusion to a new Cardboard City. It was worth looking into. I set off for the Hammersmith Flyover.

  Driving from the West Country to London over the past decade, I had crossed the Hammersmith Flyover scores of times. Emerging from the shopping arcade into the dull light drifting down the sides of the road's legs, I recognised it with its Apollo Theatre and digital billboards. I never knew that this was the Hammersmith Flyover; for me, in my car, van or bus, it had been London's west gate, as familiar a watershed as Paddington Station.

  Beyond the pedestrian crossing, I walked beneath the gigantic totem to civil engineering from one end to the next. There was no Cardboard City. Aside from a car park, all available space beneath that thunderous shelter was subsumed by the jackhammers, portable fences, hi-vis jackets and dust of the Conway construction company.

  'What are they working on?' I asked a fellow pedestrian.

  'Who?' she replied.

  Though she passed the fences so close she could reach out to touch them, she had, it seemed, not noticed. And why would she? London itself could often feel like one huge construction site in perpetuity.

  I began to ask each person I crossed paths with about Cardboard City. The range of answers was non-committal and contradictory.

  'A cardboard city? Nope. Never been one.'

  'Sure, it's still down at the eastern end.' (It wasn't.)

  'Used to be, but they had to move it. There's a primary school right there.' He pointed at the St Paul's CE Primary School, which competed against the motor-noise of the flyover with its playground yells and screams of tiny children. He shrugged his shoulders and moved on. I wondered if he had confused the words 'homeless' and 'paedophile'.

  'I've never seen a cardboard city,' another said. 'And I've been coming here for months.'

  Only one person asked me why I wanted to know. I explained myself. She told me to follow her. 'It's all right,' she said, 'I'm going this way anyway.'

  We walked back towards the Apollo Theatre, keeping beneath the flyover whenever possible. She stopped momentarily and pointed at one of the pillars. 'Have you seen that?'

  I followed the line of her finger. On the pillar, beneath a cracked 'CCTV in operation' sign was the red, block-capitalised proclamation: 'BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.' Below that, someone had graffitied 'Bill Stickers is innocent!'

  The woman chuckled. 'That's good, that is.'

  We continued on our way to the far end of the flyover, and I asked her if she knew what the Conway workforce were doing.

  'They've been here ages. I don't think they're doing anything. Just keeping the homeless from coming back.'

  'So there used to be homeless here?'

  'Used to be. Now there's just one young couple. I give them money sometimes. I'll introduce you. They're nice.'

  She led me on to the western tip, where the flyover slowly begins to descend over the busy A306. There, the far perimeter of the Conway fencing pushed up a few feet away from the final pillar, and nestled between the two was a tiny habitation.

  'They're not in,' my guide said, peering over its walls. 'Odd, they're usually around at this time. Wait a bit and they'll probably come back. I can't stay.'

  The habitation was chest-height, its four walls each composed of different materials: at the back, the concrete pillar, then a wooden pallet on one side and cardboard boxes on another, and at the front a sheet of plywood which was clearly moved back and forth as a makeshift door. Between them, they comprised the exact dimensions of a double mattress, and I imagined there must have been one beneath the pile of coverless and filthy duvets.

  I waited there for some time, but the homeless couple did not return. To compensate, I allowed myself a brief inspection of their dwelling. Old and knackered suitcases served as ballast for the walls, propping them upright, and on top of them a carefully constructed stack of empty cider cans formed a fortress-like impression. Crushed cigarette packets littered the bed alongside a wind-up torch, torn and empty crisp bags, and a half-empty jar of Marmite. A small rucksack, zipped shut, lay in the corner, beside it a transparent bottle of fizzy pop filled with a dark liquid which was either brown or yellow depending on the angle I looked at it. Around that was scattered a mess of tiny glass bottles with their labels removed.

  I walked one final length. At the eastern dip, a courthouse stood back from the road. Before leaving, I decided to hazard one final attempt at discovering whether or not there had ever been a Cardboard City here, and stepped inside.

  Two security guards, with their thin stubble and thick East African accents, sat behind the reception desk. A fat and bald policeman, his voice as resounding and Cockney as, I imagined, his grandmother's, leaned over the desk and cracked one-liners. Their conversation stopped as I approached.

  'Help you?' one of the guards asked.

  The policeman shifted his hips so that his bulk faced me.
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br />   'Was there ever a Cardboard City here, under the flyover?' I asked.

  'Why?' the policeman drawled.

  'I'm doing some research into homelessness.'

  'Research, eh?' He stared at me for a few uncomfortable seconds, then turned back to face the guards and rested his chin on an open palm. He did not speak again, but listened.

  'Cardboard City,' the guard mused. 'Let me think.' He spoke quickly but carefully, the intonation of a stutterer who has overcome his impediment. 'There used to be a Cardboard City here. But that was a long time ago. How long have I been working here? It was… erm… two years… yes, two years ago they cleared it. Had to for the roadworks.'

  But this was not Conway. The original company had been there for a brief resurfacing project. When they finished, the homeless moved back.

  'Not for long,' the guard continued. 'These lot came in straight after and chased them all away again.'

  'How long have Conway been here?' I asked.

  'Who?'

  'Conway. The construction company out there now.'

  'Seems like forever.' He laughed, and the other guard laughed with him. The policeman did not.

  It was scant information, but it revealed one thing. Beneath Hammersmith Flyover, permanence was the issue: a fear of homeless permanence replaced by construction permanence. There were no more cardboard boxes; no more wafts of alcohol or recycled fag-smoke; no more incomprehensible roadside ranting or belligerent begging. Instead, there was the never-ending staccato of the jackhammer; the bellows not of a drunken or distressed rough sleeper, but the banter of shouting workmen; and the derangement of high-decibel noise pollution. No one seemed to know how long Conway would stay, or what they were even there for. But they were tolerated nonetheless, one public nuisance in place of another.

  4

  It was clear that I could not spend the night beneath the Hammersmith Flyover. Feeling the ache of miles of walking on a lone sandwich and no sleep in the last twenty-four hours, I trudged sullenly back towards the Strand and Fleet Street, remembering the policeman I had met on Trafalgar Square on the day of the Paralympic Games celebration. He had suggested this long stretch of road as an emergency venue for new rough sleepers, and I was beginning to feel that I could readily pass out anywhere upon it, regardless of who I might meet.

  But first I needed to eat. The policeman had also said that there was a soup kitchen near Charing Cross Police Station. I stopped the first homeless person I met on Belgrave Square and asked if he knew about it.

  'Soup kitchen?' he spat. 'No fucking kitchens round here. There's a soup run outside Zimbabwe House. Run, mate, run.'

  The distinction between noun and imperative was unclear to me. The man laughed, and whether or not it was spiteful was also unclear. I needed to eat. I needed to sleep.

  'What time is it?' he spat. He seemed to have no other mode of verbalisation.

  'Half seven,' I said, checking my digital watch.

  'You'll make it, no prob. Don't usually serve till gone ten.' He laughed again.

  Much later – gone ten, in fact – I decided the laugh was spiteful. I arrived outside Zimbabwe House on the Strand at eight o'clock, gratified to see the large congregation of homeless there milling about the cobbled space, perched on shop windowsills or slumped on the ground. They were clearly waiting for something.

  By nine o'clock, that something had still not arrived, and though I knew I had another hour to wait, I noticed that the crowd had not increased but had in fact diminished. Two six-strong groups of Eastern Europeans had come to dominate the small area, circling around and then facing off against each other in what appeared to be some weird West Side Story love-and-revenge melodrama. One woman ran back and forth between the two groups, wailing her invectives and stoking the flames, appearing to be simultaneously on both sides and neither, until a young man heeded her screeches and stepped forward into the no-man's-land between the two packs. Within a second, another young man from the opposite group rushed out to meet him with a punch to the face. The first man swayed and fell to the floor as the second man kicked him in the gut, and then the woman's screams rose even higher in pitch at the fallen victim. He brought himself back to his feet, wavered once, and returned to his group. The argument continued.

  The rest of us stood at the periphery, bags dangling from hands, watching with no intention of intervention. The man closest to me, sucking hard on a roll-up as fat and wet as a slug, nudged me with his shoulder. 'Feckin' pikeys,' he laughed, blowing smoke into my face.

  'Where's the soup run?' I asked. 'Did I miss it?'

  'What?'

  'The soup run? Has it already been here?'

  He laughed and nodded. 'Feckin' pikeys,' he said again. 'Always at it.'

  I realised he was profoundly deaf.

  'Lom,' he said, holding out his hand.

  'Lom? That's your name?'

  He looked bewildered, then laughed again. 'Lom,' he repeated. 'What's your name?'

  'Charlie,' I said. 'How long have you been homeless, Lom?'

  He laughed once more. 'Watch the pikeys. Who needs telly?'

  By ten o'clock, the two groups disappeared in opposite directions along the Strand. By half past, the rest of the homeless followed, leaving me alone outside Zimbabwe House. Dinner had been served long ago, I realised. That laugh was spiteful.

  I had never felt so hungry, nor so tired. I was cold, too, but that barely registered. I needed to eat and I needed to sleep. Not far from Zimbabwe House, I pushed my way through the throngs of wine-quaffing businessmen who had filled the still air with cigarette smoke and down a small alleyway. I saw two wheelie-bins and, behind that, the requisite sleeping bag. I did not care any longer. I pulled a tin of beans and sausages from the bottom of my knapsack and wrenched it open with my bending penknife, eating it cold with my plastic spork. I could have cooked the food in a mess tin on my tiny stove, but I was too impatient. I would have happily spooned the meal into my mouth with my fingers.

  My dinner over, I cast the empty tin into one of the wheelie-bins, licked the spork clean before placing it back in my knapsack, and crawled into my sleeping bag. To close my eyes and surrender to the all-consuming exhaustion which had nagged at me throughout the day was perhaps the most blissful sensation on the whole journey so far. Spread long on the concrete, my knapsack beneath my head, I opened one eye and could see that I was in full view of eleven or twelve men who stood outside the pub. Even that didn't matter any more.

  5

  The first thing which came to mind was that the kick was not so much a kick, more a gentle nudge. Consciousness was immediate, and I even had time to make the decision whether or not to open my eyes. I chose to do so.

  'Can't sleep here,' the man towering over me said.

  'Fuck it,' I grumbled, closing my eyes again – another conscious decision. 'There's room for everybody.'

  'No,' the man said. 'No, there ain't.' He kicked me again, this time slightly harder. 'This place is mine. I ain't sharing tonight.'

  I sat up quickly. I had thought it was someone from the pub, or maybe even the police, but understanding that this was the owner of the sleeping bag transformed my blasé attitude into fear in an instant.

  'Sorry, mate, sorry,' I blathered. 'I'm just… sorry, mate… I didn't know where else to go.'

  'Go where you want,' he said, seeming satisfied enough with my reaction to begin stepping into his own sleeping bag. 'Just not here.'

  I jumped to my feet and began to bundle my gear beneath my arm. 'Sorry,' I said again. 'I'm new here.' But he was no longer looking at me, was already tying the hood of his sleeping bag around his head and squirming into a foetal position.

  I felt suddenly preposterous. What claim did this man have to this small patch of concrete? Why couldn't I sleep here? I fancied kicking him in the ribs, see how he liked it.

  I stood there for a while, unsure what to do. The man ignored me.

  'I don't know where to go,' I finally said.


  'Go where you want. Somewhere else.'

  A glass smashed somewhere behind us. A drunken cheer rose from the outdoor smokers.

  'Sake!' the man announced from the folds of his sleeping bag, before sitting up with his back against the bin, pulling the hood down around his neck and looking at me. He was younger than me, I realised, much younger. Perhaps only just twenty. A light and ginger stubble grew around his upper lip but nowhere else on his face, and the high cheekbones which would have made him pretty in a catalogue made him sinister in the refracted light from the nearby pub. He was lean and wiry, and looked the kind to scratch and bite you in a fight if it came to it. I was glad I had not kicked him.

  'You need to fuck off,' he said. 'I'm done in.'

  'Where?'