No Fixed Abode

by Charlie Carroll

  We ate in silence as we stared at the Thames. Ibrahim gnawed the last string of meat from the leg in his hand, then threw the bone at a passing seagull.

  'Birds,' he said. 'Man, this is good chicken.'

  13

  It started with rain: not the insipid drizzle of an English autumn, but the thick, blasting torrential downpours of a tropical island; rain which smelled of the sea; rain which rose in pitch and violence with each passing second, bouncing and echoing off the pavements and car-roofs in fluctuating and visible sound waves. Those with umbrellas ran, soaked anyway by the water which streaked down their brollies and splashed up from puddles disturbed by their pounding shoes. Those without huddled in doorways, checking the sky, then their wristwatches or smartphones, before succumbing to desperation and stumbling off along the pavements in a weird hopscotch dance.

  I was trapped in an archway somewhere on Ludgate Hill, sharing my space with two cyclists and a foreign student. We stared out together through the waterfall which cascaded from the lip of the archway, then looked back at each other to exchange raised eyebrows and exaggerated sighs, but no words. Four teenagers gleefully darted under our shelter, laughing and hooting expletives, wringing their hair out on to each other's shoes and unzipping their jackets to proudly reveal saturated T-shirts. The rest of us moved back to let them in and then exchanged further glances with each other: the kind reserved for those moments when your lift's maximum capacity has been breached.

  The teenagers had somewhere to be, and they raced out again, their screams and hollers audible over the rain. Soon, the foreign student took her chances, too, and then finally so did the cyclists, who carefully wended their way out into the traffic and pedalled slowly and deliberately: a calm acceptance of their soaking fate.

  It occurred to me that I had nowhere to be and, for once, this was a boon. I could sit here in this cold archway and stay dry, or I could sit in my sleeping bag on the cold Strand and get wet. I slouched down against the wall and opened my knapsack. More for the sake of novelty than hunger, I brewed a Cup-a-Soup on my stove and then drank it with relish as workers and tourists and pensioners took their turns hiding from the rain beneath my archway. They rubbed their hands and wiped their faces and blew their noses, and I hit upon the marvellous business plan of selling hot drinks and renting towels on evenings like this and in spots like this all over London. But I had no water left, the only 'towels' I could offer were my own stinking clothes, and each shelterer never stayed longer than a few minutes. My entrepreneurialism would have to wait for another time.

  After an hour beneath the archway, the rain stopped as abruptly as it had started, and I set off back along Fleet Street and the Strand. I was astonished to find my sleeping bag still at my pitch – I had expected to find it washed much further down the road – and even more astonished to see some of my neighbours in their positions, to all appearances asleep, as if the rainstorm had been deflected from their inert bodies by invisible shields.

  My sleeping bag was present, but it was uninhabitable. Raising it high and upending it, I watched as a river poured out from its folds and splashed on to the ground before hurrying to join the thin streams and thick puddles which had overrun the pavement.

  There would be, I knew, no sleep tonight. No sleep and unimaginable cold. Nothing about me was dry. I slipped into a coffee shop to change clothes in the toilet, but there was no escaping the fact that my one pair of boots, my one sweatshirt and my one coat were all drenched. I tried to evaporate the water from inside my boots with the feeble hand-dryer, but was interrupted by a banging on the toilet door, and fled back out on to the street.

  I paced the Strand back and forth, hoping to create some warmth from within, never quite succeeding, grateful only for the fact that, for some reason, I was not tired. My sweatshirt and coat finally began to dry out as I walked – if I watched for long enough, I could see the lighter patches begin to spread across the fabric from my torso outwards – but my boots remained squelching and insufferable. I fancied that, for the tramp, there was perhaps no worse part of the body to remain wet than the feet, and graphic images of wartime trench foot appeared from a realm of my consciousness I could not pinpoint, forcing me into a fast food outlet, where I bought a cup of coffee, took it to the toilets and hit the metal button on the hand-dryer again and again while I sipped the coffee held in one hand and dried my boots held in the other. It was late now, and nobody disturbed me.

  Back at my pitch, I placed the bin bag on the pavement, laid my knapsack on top of it, and then sat on that with my back to the wall. My sleeping bag was still too wet to climb into, so I wrapped my coat around me as tight as I could, pulled my hat low and closed my eyes.

  I did not sleep that night, but the fleeting drifts of semi-conscious dreams occasionally floated my way, and I was grateful for them. The rain did not return, but the low-hanging clouds remained despite its absence, and beneath them it became the mildest of my nights on London's streets. I was grateful for that, too.

  14

  It started with rain, and it ended with my flight from the Strand.

  By three o'clock in the morning, my right leg had begun to cramp, sending jets of pain up through my body which ripped my dreams apart and opened my eyes. I jumped to my feet, hopping on one leg while I stretched and massaged the other. As the tension dissipated, I tentatively hobbled forward a few steps, then yawned and stretched my arms high above my head. The Strand was quiet, eerie in the ghostly fug of the mist settling from the clouds. I rubbed my eyes and my hands came back wet. Close inspection revealed a thin film of dew on my hat, coat and trousers. There was no wind, no traffic noise, no chatter in the air – just the still and wet serenity of Venice by night.

  Without warning, a cry pierced the air. It was stark and shrill, a guttural howl which could have been a cat's territorial war cry were it not for the elongated but clear monosyllable which resounded within it: 'No'.

  Another cry, the same, followed, rising out of somewhere from the east, perhaps Fleet Street. Leaving my knapsack on the floor, I went in search of it, skirting the rough sleepers who lay in their puddles. Most remained motionless, though one had lifted his head to locate the source of the noise. Another cry sounded as I passed him, and he turned to look at me, his shock melting into submission as he hurriedly lowered his head and tucked it under the folds of his sleeping bag.

  Another cry. This time louder. I was getting closer. In the mist-horizon, I began to define shapes: four on their feet, one on the ground. My approach slowed with stealth as I placed my footsteps close to the wall, encouraged by the obscurity of the mist.

  Three men and one woman surrounded a rough sleeper who cowered beneath a blanket on the pavement. The rough sleeper was howling his feral 'No' with increasing frequency and terror while one of the men bent over him, his own voice drowned out by the floored screamer's.

  I moved closer. The four were imbued with the false confidence of too much alcohol, the men trendy and well-dressed, the woman in surprisingly little for the climate. The man who bent over the rough sleeper had begun to shout and point an accusatory finger at the sleeping bag.

  '… my girlfriend… the fuck… you can't… to my face?…'

  'No!' the rough sleeper screamed again. It seemed to be all he could say.

  '… had my way… sick fucks like you… castrated, you cunt.'

  'No!'

  The woman began to remonstrate with the two other men. I could dimly ascertain through the mist that both men were smiling while their friend continued with his belligerent outbursts.

  '… piece of shit… my taxes… say that to my girlfriend?… kill you, you prick…'

  I had not moved for seconds, had frozen against the wall. I needed to get involved, to try and assuage, to alleviate, to make peace, to protect, but my limbs held fast and I could not bring myself to even walk over to the group, let alone announce my presence and attempt rational resolutions. I reminded myself of my appearance and justified my inact
ion with the thought that another tramp would only serve to raise ire, and that even my voice – which had betrayed me so often on this journey – would carry no wait within their middle-class alcoholic fog, that they would trust only their eyes and not their ears, and that their eyes were already blinded red.

  But that was all hokum. I was too terrified to intervene. I was too terrified I might get hurt. It was as simple as that.

  As I vacillated, the shouting man stood up straight. The woman began to tug at his arm and the other two men had already started to walk away down Fleet Street. My sense of relief was interrupted in one brutal and swift motion. The man lurched forward with his foot, barely lifting it from the ground nor swinging it behind him, and kicked the rough sleeper so hard in the face that I heard the sickening crunch through the mist. The woman let go of his arm and scarpered off down the street, followed closely by all three men.

  My thaw was immediate. I ran to the rough sleeper and dropped to my knees beside him. His hands were pressed tight against his face and small sobs percolated out through his fingers. In the single moment after I asked if he was all right, in the single moment before I found myself sprawled out on my back on the pavement, in the single moment when his hands left his face and one fist punched me hard in the chest – in that single moment, I saw the river of dark blood which coursed down his broken nose, I saw the thick welt already beginning to form around his left eye, I saw the split lip and the strange line across his jaw, and I saw that I recognised him. It was Lom, the deaf man I had met outside Zimbabwe House.

  I ran to the nearest phone box (surprisingly difficult to find in Central London), dialled 999, requested an ambulance and then sprinted back to Lom.

  But he had already gone. A dry patch of pavement spattered with four droplets of congealing blood was all that remained in his place.

  15

  Following Lom's example, I decided it was time for me to leave the Strand. I had my bedroom there, and I had even learned how to offset the deleterious effects of a rainstorm (so long as I had the money for a cup of coffee), but my original fears had been confirmed – the Strand was too open, and with that came the threat of potential violence which I had seen with my own eyes. To my shame, I realised I had done nothing to stop it happening to another man; what on earth would I do if it happened to me?

  I needed somewhere safer: an impossibility, surely, on any of London's streets for the rough sleeper. The threat of violence was part of the package, what you traded in for soup runs, lucrative begging spots and the proximity of other rough sleepers. Never mind that they did not talk to you: it was still better to be among them than to be the only rough sleeper in a place like Hatherleigh.

  I packed my sodden sleeping bag into its sheath, shouldered my knapsack and then tucked the bin bag over it so that it could drip-dry while I walked, and I left the Strand at four o'clock in the morning, meandering a circuitous route across London while I searched for a new pitch.

  I was heading, I realised at sunrise, back towards Hackney, back towards Dalston. Back towards that couch. There was no other object I coveted more. While the housemates worked, I could sleep; sleep for ten or more blissful hours. Then, when they returned home from work, we could go to the pub, and I could get pissed on two pints.

  But something nagged, and it was incessant. In part, it was my pride. The housemates knew where I was going when I left Dalston: to the streets. Returning to the couch would be an admission of failure. They would not be disappointed in me, I knew, but perhaps I would, even though the concepts of pride and rough sleeping were oxymoronic. Yet there was more. Something in me wanted to stay on the streets, just for a little while longer, and the nagging came from a means to do it. There was a name somewhere, a name which floated just beyond my reach, and I clawed for it until it popped up and dispelled itself from my lips somewhere in Broadgate.

  'Brian Haw.'

  I turned on my heel and walked straight to Parliament Square.

  Brian Haw might be London's, and perhaps England's, most famous rough sleeper. Or at least he was, for he died just three months before I arrived in London.

  On 2 June 2001, the fifty-two-year-old Brian Haw pitched a tent upon the roundabout opposite the Houses of Parliament, and began his political protest against Anglo-American foreign policy regarding Iraq and Afghanistan. Leaving his wife and seven children behind at their home in Redditch, Haw lived in his tent on Parliament Square for the next decade, enduring along the way countless attempted prosecutions by Westminster City Council and a number of short-lived arrests, surviving on the food donations of his numerous supporters. His protest was singular and showed a stamina which many of the Westminster politicians he denounced each day for ten years through his megaphone could not reciprocate. Just five months before his tin anniversary at Parliament Square, Haw finally left his tent for Berlin, where he was treated for lung cancer. He died five months later, on 18 June 2011, exactly ten years and sixteen days after he erected his tent in Parliament Square.

  Despite his death, many of his supporters remained at the protest camp Haw had created. Each of these had their own conclusion regarding Haw's demise.

  'You see this traffic? It never lets up. You breathe in these levels of carbon monoxide for ten years, and you try and not get lung cancer.'

  'Those bastards over there, in their Houses of so-called Parliament, they did it. I've been here long enough to spot the agents provocateurs they send over here looking for information. It was them who poisoned Brian. Not to kill him. Just so they could whisk him away to Germany. And out of here.'

  'Brian Haw? Never saw him without a fag in his mouth. Two packets a day easy. I heard he smoked like that since he was fifteen. No surprise.'

  Arriving at Parliament Square, I darted across the busy road towards the line of tents. Two quiet men sitting on the kerb ignored me as I approached, as did the Nigerian who hurried back and forth along the pavement, waving his placard and shouting rapid and incomprehensible flurries of vocalisation at the roaring traffic. I came to a gap between two tents. A young and dreadlocked man, dressed in jeans, flip-flops and a football T-shirt, smiled and offered me a Pringle.

  'Ian,' he said, pointing at his chest. He wore mirrored sunglasses and I could not tell if he was looking at me, though the angle of his head suggested he was not.

  'I'm Charlie,' I said, perching on the kerb next to his folding chair.

  'I'm Ian,' he said again. 'I am I an, and inside you, you are, you an. But what are you? You. Y-O-U. Why oh you? And why are you not letting me be what I an?'

  'You mean me personally?'

  'No, not me. You not as an individual, but you as a concept. You is the opposite of me. You follow?'

  'No,' I admitted.

  Ian leaned in and turned his face to mine, so that I could see the convex reflection of myself, the confused and unshaven headpiece of a long line of diminishing tents, in his sunglasses. 'It's language, bruv,' he said. 'English is old. Patois is younger. But before English there was Latin, Sanskrit, hieroglyphs, cuneiforms, lines and dots. But, you think, how can we communicate in lines and dots? Yet how do computers communicate? Lines and dots.'

  He came to an unexpected stop and removed his glasses. With a blink, his eyes flickered from inquiry to mischief, and he gave a sudden laugh, shaking his dreadlocks and squinting up at Big Ben.

  'So what's your story, bruv?' he giggled. It was not just his eyes and tone which had changed, but his whole demeanour, and I wondered if I had just passed some sort of test. Sitting there, he must have had to endure the hectoring of any number of zealots and crackpots, and perhaps the enigmatic speech I had sat through was his way of scaring off others first – if they stayed, they were all right.

  I learned later it was not a test. It was classic Ian. Living on Parliament Square, I was to grow close to Ian, and this flitting vacillation between elusive philosophy and warm camaraderie – often interposed by flights of merry or enraged hooliganism – was indicative of his chara
cter. As he loved to say of himself: 'Don't mind me, I'm half-mad.' I remembered Orwell's words in Down and Out: he had used that very same phrase, 'half-mad', to describe those whom poverty had forced into an eccentric freedom which existed outside of the 'normal' boundaries of behaviour.

  I explained to Ian what I was doing.

  'Get a tent,' he said immediately. 'Come and live with us for a bit. There's a space next to me. I guess you could call us homeless, but I think we're unique.'

  Rising to my feet, I shook his hand and promised I would be back. A few metres away, two old men sat under a Brian Haw banner: they were, they said, 'keeping things going until Barbara is released'.

  Barbara Tucker, a friend and contemporary of Brian Haw, had demonstrated alongside him at Parliament Square for a number of years. At the time of my arrival, she was finishing one of her many prison-stints for her refusal to, as one of the men said, 'do what they told her'.