No Fixed Abode

by Charlie Carroll

  'Ah! Enough said!' he laughed, and then his smile drooped and his voice turned menacing again. 'But if you get a touch, you come see me, yeah?'

  5

  Back at Parliament Square, I took off my coat and unzipped my tent, ready to dive in and sleep through the rest of the afternoon.

  'Charlie!'

  The holler hit my ears just as I was stepping into the tent, and I turned around to see Ian running across the road while there was a lull in the traffic.

  'You came!' he shouted, running the rest of the way to me, his flip-flops slapping on the concrete. 'I knew you would, man. I told the rest we had a writer coming to stay with us, but they didn't believe me. This your tent?'

  The effusive smile on his face and the strength in his arm as he wrapped it about my shoulders made me happy that he was still here.

  'This is mine,' I confirmed. 'I pitched up last night. I looked for you, but your tent had gone.'

  'Yeah, they took it.' He looked closely at my tent. 'Man, this is exactly like mine. Exactly. Did you take it?'

  'No!' I said, suddenly guilty beneath the accusation. 'I borrowed this from…'

  'I'm just fucking with you!' Ian laughed. 'I know it wasn't you. I saw mine go. I'm over in the Rainbow Tent now.' He pointed at a large, multicoloured dome which faced the Houses of Parliament, a few tents down from Brian Haw's camp. 'They're letting me use it for a bit. It suits me. I'm a sun-baby. You wanna come see?'

  We walked over to the Rainbow Tent, where Ian pulled out a tube of Pringles and shared them with me as we sat on the cold pavement. He explained that, just a few hours after we had met and he had invited me to come and live on the square, the police had come for one of their clean-up operations.

  'They're fairly regular,' he said. 'Every few weeks, sometimes during the day, sometimes at night, riot vans pile up and take away any unoccupied tents. It's Boris, man. He's a liar. And he's a bad liar. He says he respects our right to protest, but he doesn't. He knows he can't evict the people here, but he knows that if no one's in the tent then it can be classed as litter, and he can have it removed. Sneaky, man, sneaky. That's why I stay here as much as I can.'

  That day, for the first time in two weeks, Ian had left the square to visit a friend south of the river. When he returned, he found seven of the tents missing. One of them was his, and all the belongings he had kept inside it were gone.

  'My shoes, man!' he lamented as he told me the story. 'I had such good shoes in that tent. And they're gone!'

  He had, however, arrived home in time to see the dump truck which everything had been thrown into dismount the pavement and drive off around the square. Sprinting after it, he leapt in the back and frantically removed some of his possessions before the truck stopped and he was told to piss off.

  'I got some of my clothes and a bit of food, but not my tent. It's a shame, man, that was a good tent. Just like yours. But for some reason they didn't take the Rainbow Tent, even though no one's been in it for the last month. So I'm in that now.'

  I felt sorry for Ian, though I could not help but acknowledge a secret gratitude for my own good fortune. If Marcus had not asked me to stay at the house that night – if, as I had planned, I had come straight back to the square – the tent I had borrowed, along with my belongings inside it, may well have been swallowed up by the dump truck. I imagined returning to the Dalston house and trying to explain why, after only a few hours in my care, I had lost their tent. Once again, I found myself inordinately grateful for the seductive lure of that couch.

  Ian and I spent the next few hours rationing out the Pringles and talking. He was young, no older than twenty-five, energetic and charming. People often inquisitively strolled along the stretch of tents, usually tourists, and if they were female Ian would fling cheeky one-liners their way, or smile and say: 'I hope your boyfriend tells you how hot you are every day.' Some of the girls marched on, pretending not to have heard, but most smiled bashfully, though none ever gave him their phone number, despite his audacious demands.

  'What do I care?' he whispered to me. 'I haven't got a phone.'

  While the pedestrians rarely spoke to us, those who passed in their cars did so often. Sometimes people beeped their horns and raised their thumbs over their steering wheels in a gesture of solidarity, but more often than not, drivers shouted imprecations from their open windows, the most common: 'Get a job!'

  'Give me one!' was Ian's standard retort.

  I told him about the night before when, at three or four in the morning, I had heard the unmistakeable whirr of a bicycle's spokes and a teenage voice call in a sing-song lilt: 'Pikey, pikey, pikey, get a mortgage.'

  'That happens,' Ian said. 'You'll notice that, whatever people say, whether it's good or bad, they'll usually say it from the safety of a passing car. They never stop. Whether they're supportive or hateful, they still don't want to come close. They're scared of us, you know.'

  'People are generally scared of the homeless.'

  'Definitely. And so they dismiss us. You know how I deal with it? I dismiss them back. Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em all.' His voice rose to a shout. 'I'm not one of them! I am me! I an!'

  Though he was at least six years younger than me, Ian seemed to take the role of my mentor. He carefully explained how to live successfully on the square: detailing the buses which could be hopped for free; the nearby bars and cafes which were either sympathetic or hostile to a rough sleeper who walked in looking for a toilet or a glass of water; the local soup runs and charity outlets which donated food or clothes; and the best places to find discarded cigarette stubs.

  'But the jewel is that place,' he said, pointing behind us up Victoria Street to the Methodist Chapel Hall. 'Great toilets in there. I go every day to wash. No one ever says a word. Good people, man.'

  He was interested in me and what I was doing – 'This needs to be written. I would do it myself if I had the patience.' – but his longest monologues featured himself and his time at Parliament Square.

  'Have I told you about the time I was almost tasered?'

  'Definitely not.'

  'Almost tasered. I was close. I've been getting into trouble with that lot,' he pointed at the policemen who stood outside the gates to the Houses of Parliament, 'since I've been here. They know me. In fact, it was that one right there on the left who almost tasered me. He didn't in the end. But I was stuck in one of those black sheds over there, interrogated for an hour and a half. In my pants.'

  'What?' I laughed at the unusual punchline, and Ian laughed with me. 'What did you do?'

  'I went on one.' He sighed. Sometimes a look of regret or perhaps self-reproach flashed across his face, as it did then, though it always vanished in seconds. Ian, I suspected, did not do regret. 'Last summer, that whole patch of grass in the middle of the square was filled with tents. "Democracy Village", we called it. In the centre, we made a little garden for ourselves. For some reason, I don't know why, there was a stone bust of Prince Charles in the garden. So one morning, I was fucking drunk, man, I was just in my pants, and I took the bust into the middle of the road there and sat on it. I sat on Prince Charles's face. The traffic stopped and jammed up. I just stayed there. I'm half-mad usually, but that morning was total. That policeman came into the road and pointed a taser gun at my chest. I'm glad now I heard him and stood up. That's when I ended up in the shed.'

  6

  I shared my space with three mice: three incautious and intrepid little rodents who became a constant presence in the evenings. I felt sure that, were I to spend enough time living on the square, I would eventually come to refer to them as 'my little friends'. Two were small and fast, and they appeared from the lawn's grass, which rose up over twice their height, by leaping and bounding like insane dogs. The third was fat and bulky, and he shuffled about the porch of my tent in search of food, oblivious to my shoos and waved hands: a tough old London mouse. All three appeared as the sun began to set and then disappeared again when the London night sky's few stars began to twinkl
e through the light pollution. I never fed them, but this did not discourage them, and in the end I let them scurry about my porch without bother. There was, after all, no one else about to talk to at night on the square.

  This was apparently unusual. Ian had explained that afternoon that, the night before I arrived, there had been an altercation between two of the homeless residents. 'It happens every now and then. People get drunk, man. And when they get drunk they fight. I've done it myself.'

  His description of the event was sparse. Following a 'tent-party', two of the younger men had got into a fight at four o'clock in the morning. The police had arrived, and everyone was keeping quiet for a few nights.

  I pressed Ian for further information. What had they been fighting about? Was it serious? Did the police arrest them?

  Ian only responded with the sentence: 'Better you don't know.'

  I did not like the undertones of Ian's secrecy. Like Stan, there were clearly some elements of his chosen lifestyle he did not want me to write about.

  'You'll get to know some people,' he had said. 'Maybe they'll tell you. We'll all forget about it soon anyway, have another tent-party, and you can find out for yourself. Fuck, man, maybe someone will want to fight you!'

  With no one about but the mice, I closed up the tent for my second night on the square, strapped my miner's torch to my forehead, and pulled Dickens from my knapsack. But reading, relaxation, was difficult. My mind kept slipping back to that fight, all the withheld information that went with it, and Ian's closing taunt – that someone might want to fight me.

  These attempts at immersive involvement in a subject could, I knew, end up backfiring in the face of the writer. When Hunter S. Thompson spent a year living with the Hell's Angels to gather material for his non-fiction book about them, it all finished when he was 'stomped' by the very men he had befriended. During the year of my first book, when I had travelled about England teaching in its most challenging schools, a thirteen-year-old had launched forward at me to, in his words, 'break your fucking jaw', and I had run home to recover for close to a month, unsure if I could continue the journey. He was a teenager, and that punch had, ultimately, never even been thrown. What on earth would I do if a lagered twentysomething rough sleeper took an equal dislike to me and decided it might be fun to see how many kicks it took to make the writer cry?

  I shuddered at the thought, a thought which, in that dark and loud tent, morphed into my second paranoid fantasy: of someone – anyone – upending a jerrycan of petrol over my tent and striking a match to the hyperflammable material while I slept inside. Those football hooligans I could hear marching past with their tone-deaf, drunken chants, they weren't the kind of folk you wanted outside your tent in the middle of the night, your unwanted tent in the middle of a city, of the capital city, no less! They could do it. And, if not them, maybe someone who lived here, one of my supposed comrades. If they fought each other anyway, why not pick on the new guy with his journal and his posh accent? It was a fantasy which I could not dispel as I lived on the square; a fantasy which grew exponentially when I encountered Greg.

  7

  It came as some surprise to me when I checked my watch and discovered it was eight o'clock in the morning. That meant I had slept for a full six hours. It was hardly refreshing, but I nevertheless felt the tiny achievement, and decided to celebrate with a wash at the Methodist Chapel Hall.

  A spattering of well-dressed men and women gathered about the doorway and foyer, but none paid me any heed as I passed them and made directly for the toilets. The cold water was a balm for my skin, which stretched and prickled along my arms, and I gasped with exhilaration each time I plunged my face into the full sink.

  The campsite was quiet again when I returned, but later that day a few of the homeless began to emerge from their tents. The first was Marek, a Polish man who spoke with a hesitation born from a lack of confidence rather than a lack of vocabulary. Our conversation was slow and methodical, but meaning always prevailed in the end.

  Marek had moved to England at the start of the year. He knew no one in London, but used his meagre savings to secure a room in shared accommodation and used his abilities as a skilled labourer to gain employment on a construction site. He had become friendly with the four other Eastern Europeans, none of them Polish, in his flat, bonding over a mutual love of smoking weed. They could not afford to frequent the bars or clubs at night, and so instead loaded up on bong-hits at the flat and then drove around the city late at night: in search of what, Marek could not explain. The owner of the car was the only one of the group to hold a licence, but he gladly let the others drive whenever he fancied a spliff-break in the back seat.

  One evening, one of the unlicensed drivers, stoned beyond belief, misjudged his breaking distance, swerved wildly to avoid a cyclist, and rolled the car. Marek woke up in hospital, his right leg mangled. He showed me the long, twisting scars down his thigh and behind his knee.

  'With this,' he said, 'no work. So no money. So no flat.'

  He had spent two weeks in the hospital, and when he left he found his friends had all returned home, his belongings were nowhere to be seen, and the flat was already occupied by five others.

  'Why didn't you go home, as well?'

  'I cannot.'

  'Do you need money?'

  'No.' He pulled a Polish chequebook from his pocket, thumbed through it like a flick-book, and then produced a cheque guarantee card from the same pocket. 'My money is here. But look. Not cash card. And no one will take my cheque. Do you know any money shops to cash my cheque?'

  I did not.

  'But there is money here! I sell you?'

  'No,' I said.

  With no money, no work and no accommodation, Marek had slept rough on the Strand for a week before meeting Ian on the square, who pointed him towards one of the unoccupied tents and told him it was his if he wanted it. Marek had been there for the last fifteen days. He remarked elusively on someone who told him he was eligible for benefits and a crisis loan, and that he was waiting for them to arrive so that he could move out of the tent and into a flat, but when he talked he gave the clear impression that he knew they would never come, and that he was stuck in this alien city living in a tent beneath a massive clock.

  Movement caught my eye. It was Ian, appearing from the doorway of the Rainbow Tent and stretching luxuriously. He strolled across the flagstones and greeted Marek and me with a wide grin.

  'Ian,' Marek said. 'Do you know a money shop where I can cash a cheque?' He held the chequebook out, and Ian took it from his hand.

  'Yeah, I can help you out with this, man,' Ian said, putting his arm around Marek. 'I'll take you to a place in the morning. Just make the cheque out in my name.' He laughed, winked at me, and Marek slid the chequebook back into his pocket. 'Either of you got any food? I'm starving.'

  'Come over to my tent and I'll cook something up for us,' I said.

  'Cook?' Ian exclaimed.

  We walked down the strip to my tent and I unzipped the door. Ian jumped inside and stretched his arms out to touch both walls. 'Man, this is exactly like my tent. You sure it's not?'

  I pulled the camping stove, the mess tins, two cans of beans and half a loaf of bread from my knapsack.

  'Fuck me,' Ian whistled. 'Look at that. What else you got in here?' He grabbed my bag and stuck his hand in, rummaging through my clothes. 'Money?'

  'No.'

  'Shit. I was thinking of robbing you.'

  'You could try. But it'd be pointless.'

  Ian laughed, nudged me with his shoulder, and bounded out of the tent. 'Come on then, Chef. Make us a fucking feast.'

  I cooked the beans in one tin and set it on the ground with the bag of bread next to it. We took turns folding our slices and dipping them into the beans. As soon as we finished, Marek produced a bottle of water from his pocket, washed out the tin, and handed it back to me. Ian lit a joint and leaned back against the fence.

  'I could do with one of those,' he sai
d, nodding at the stove. 'Maybe I will rob you. You owe me for the tent.'

  The cheeky glint in his eye seemed to diminish, though perhaps that was the weed. A man and woman walked past and peered over at us behind the tent.

  'Diana! Greg!' Ian shouted. 'Check this fucker out! He just cooked!'

  Diana and Greg sat next to us. Ian beamed happily, but I noticed that Marek had edged out of the circle slightly. He looked uncomfortable. Ian made the necessary introductions.

  'Have you got any mixed herbs?' Diana asked inexplicably.

  'Err, no,' I faltered. 'I mostly live on a diet of beans and soup.'

  'Ho!' Greg said. 'It speaks English!' Then he opened his copy of the Metro newspaper, and did not talk to me again for the rest of the day.

  Offsetting Greg's belligerence, Diana embodied kindness and felicity. She talked and she laughed and then she talked again, always with enthusiasm regardless of the subject, and never stopping for breath. Her few questions were succeeded by a pause, and then she would navigate whatever the answer was back to herself, and happily espouse her thoughts on the subject from her own personal point of view. Her accent was round and Mancunian, and, while she started a topic loud and full of confidence, her voice quickly dropped in pitch so that one had to move closer to her to hear her words – a tactic I wondered if she induced on purpose. Diana liked nothing more than to host an intimate one-on-one lecture.