No Fixed Abode

by Charlie Carroll

  Happy to listen, I became her captive audience for the next few hours while Ian smoked, Greg read his paper, and Marek stood up to limp back to his tent. Diana had been homeless for two years and had lived on the square for the best part of them. She was in her early forties, perhaps, and shared the largest of the tents with Greg, though it was never clear whether they were an item. She took to me almost maternally and, perhaps disappointed that Greg seemed determined to ignore me, she tried to draw him into our conversation.

  'Greg, Charlie's writing a book. Isn't that good?'

  Greg grumbled something incoherent and continued with his paper.

  'I write, too,' she said. 'I want to write something about my daughter. I know a publisher who's interested. I'll tell him about you.'

  Diana's way of linguistic diminuendo meant that I could only follow each of her sentiments halfway through until her voice became a low and inaudible mumble. She had children, but I did not catch how many; she loved them, but I did not catch how much; she wanted them back, but I did not catch how she was going to do it. Something had happened two years ago, something big, but it remained an enigma until much later. I gathered it was that which had put her on the streets, that which had wrested her from her family. There was a court case pending, which she often referred to possessively, though she never explained her role within it, nor what it was intended to achieve. Any questions I threw her way were considered and then discarded for a more favourable tangent.

  'I'm going to get my daughter back, and then my son, but I need to get through my court case first…'

  'When I get a place, I can take that to my court case and then…'

  'That's all come up at my court case, and if I can just show them that…'

  There was a hint of Kafka in our dialogue. All communication rattled around the edges and then spiralled towards her court case, but whatever her court case was remained a dark and unfathomable hole which swallowed definitions and then spat us back up to start all over again, encased in intrigue but never satisfied.

  Somehow, we got on to the subject of mice. Diana wanted to show me the destruction they had wrought on the inside of her tent, and so the four of us stood and walked up the line. As we reached her tent, three men walked past us.

  'Greetings!' Ian said. 'Welcome to Democracy Village!'

  While his fellows walked on, the largest of the three stopped, looked at Ian, offered him a weird smile, and then followed his friends.

  'What the fuck was that all about?' Ian said, staring after them.

  'He squared up to you, mate,' Greg told him. 'Prick.'

  'Look at this!' Diana called from the opening of her tent. 'Those mice!'

  'In a minute, in a minute,' Ian said, still looking at the three men, who seemed to be inspecting each tent they passed with careful scrutiny. 'What're they doing? Let's see if they come back this way.'

  'Cops, mate,' Greg said. He looked briefly at me. 'Checking us out. Pricks.'

  We watched as the three came to the end of the row and walked a slow lap around the last tent: mine.

  'If those fuckers go in your tent,' Ian said, 'we'll do 'em.'

  Looking satisfied, the three men left my tent and began the walk back up the southern aspect of the square towards us.

  'Cops,' Greg mumbled. 'Sure of it.'

  Ian walked forward and stopped directly before the man who had smiled at him. 'Why you looking at me like you know me?' Ian shouted into his face. His whole demeanour had changed, from the gleeful 'sun-baby' to an angry and confrontational yob. The man smiled back at him.

  'Why you looking at me like you know me?' Ian repeated.

  'Leave it, Ian,' Diana called.

  I looked over at Greg, who was also smiling.

  'Come on,' Ian shouted. 'Why you looking at me like you know me?'

  The other two walked on, and Ian's opponent, always smiling, back-stepped away from his antagonist.

  'Why you looking at me like you know me?' Ian shouted as the three rounded the corner and moved on to the Peace Box.

  'Fucking cocksucker,' Ian breathed heavily. 'You see the way he was looking at me?'

  Greg walked into Diana's tent and, without a word, zipped up the doorway behind him while Diana was still inside. Ian, disconcerted, one leg twitching, turned to me.

  'Thanks for the beans, Charlie,' he said, and then marched off back to the Rainbow Tent, where he stood and stared at the three men until they crossed the road and disappeared over Westminster Bridge.

  8

  If I ever made friends on Parliament Square, it was with Ian, Diana, Marek and, to some extent, Greg. For the rest of my time there, we became a group, a social circle, and, though Greg never really accepted me, I think the rest did, and when we spent time outside our tents, we spent it together. Others would pass by, nod, swap sentences or poke their heads from their tents and tell us to shut the fuck up because they were sleeping, but our pack was five-strong, and it remained as such until I left.

  There were, however, two others I met on Parliament Square: two others who were not so much a part of our group but who I still spent a meaningful amount of time with, though I would not come to know their full stories – the information they kept hidden from us all – until after I left.

  Their names were Rolly and Rudy, a young couple who looked to be on the verge of their twenties. I met them only during the evenings, for they begged full-time during the days, always on separate pitches since, as Rolly explained to me, the 'punters' did not give money to couples. 'If they see you've got someone, they think you must be doing all right.'

  I was often amazed by how much they pooled each day, more so by their cavalier way of flashing it about the campsite at night. Once, Rudy held up a twenty-pound note an old lady had given her that day, and I did not like the way Greg looked at her. I remembered Ian's teasing threat of robbing me, and wondered if this lot ever stole from each other. It was not improbable.

  The first night I met Rolly and Rudy, they had had a very good day, begging close to eighty pounds between them. They celebrated with a crate of lager and generously shared it out amongst the seven of us. Rolly wore an old leather jacket with 'Peace to all Jews' spray-painted in yellow across the back, and his flabby paunch suggested diabetes. Rudy found it hard to sit still. In fact, she often did not sit at all, but crouched low to the ground, her knees bouncing with nervous energy. She spoke in a street patois which seemed too conscious to be genuine, and when I looked at her closely I realised she was younger than I had at first imagined. The two of them would have been called 'crusties' fifteen years ago, when Swampy made the front page for inhabiting a tree in protest against the Newbury Bypass, when The Levellers headlined festivals, and when a white person with dreadlocks was either a hippy, a backpacker or an eco-warrior, or possibly all three.

  It was perhaps this thought, coupled with the cans of lager, which led me on to describe a protest I had once attended in the mid-1990s against the construction of a bypass in Cornwall. Rudy listened with barely concealed disinterest.

  'But when me and my friend turned up, there was no one else there. Just us two with our placards in the middle of a hundred workmen who laughed and told us to fuck off before they got nasty.'

  'It's the system, man, innit,' Rudy said. 'You gotta fight it true. Dey wan' us all as, like, their slaves, y'get me?'

  'Do you go on many protests here?'

  'Nah, bruv, I doan protest. Not even protesting here. Make no. Life is good, right? I got no issues.'

  That was clear enough. Both Rudy and her boyfriend were euphoric in their homelessness and their love for each other. Young and happy, with time to waste and the romantic angst of the teenager, they seemed to treat their life on the streets as a game. If it was, it was a game with stark undertones which I wondered how they managed to ignore.

  Rolly was pointing to the welts and cuts on his forehead where his skin was broken. He said they had come from the baton of a policeman, and he described the beating wit
h pride. 'That was the first hit,' he pointed at a fresh scab over his left eyebrow. 'I was still standing after, so that was the second.'

  'Fucking cunts,' Ian growled, increasingly fidgety and angry as he drained the beers.

  'Laughed in his face, dintcha?' Rudy prompted.

  'Laughed, and then spat in his face,' Rolly replied. 'That's when I got this one.'

  'You shouldn't have done that,' Diana said.

  'Why the fuck not?' Ian shouted. 'Give the fuckers back some! Who gives them the right to piss all over us all the time?'

  'Fell after that one,' Rolly continued. 'Smacked my head here.'

  'Then they kicked you, right?' Greg muttered.

  'Couple of boots in the ribs. Nothing I couldn't handle. I just laughed again and shouted "peace be with you".'

  'Peace be with you!' Rudy imitated.

  I looked over at Marek, who had understood perhaps half of the conversation, and seemed horrified with it. A whirl of questions spun about my mind. Why had the police officers beaten him? What had Rolly done? Why hadn't they arrested him? And, most importantly, why was no one else asking these things? Ian, Greg and Diana seemed to follow the dialogue as if it was commonplace, but could it really be?

  'Why did they do it?' I finally asked.

  Rolly gave me a blank look while Rudy sniggered.

  'Shut up, Charlie,' Greg said.

  9

  Greg began to trouble me. There was a grudging amicability to his actions – when he offered around his joints, water or the bags of mixed nuts he fed from incessantly, he always included me; when he returned to the square each morning with a copy of the Metro and each evening with a copy of the London Evening Standard, he became used to passing them directly on to me once he had finished his slow and methodical perusal – but a manifest antagonism lay buried in each word he exchanged with me.

  It was not long before he revealed why. 'You sound like you were born with a massive plum in your mouth.'

  'I'm from a working-class background. I'm just well educated. There's a difference,' I said.

  'Yeah, he's self-educated,' Diana chimed in, though I didn't know how she had arrived at that conclusion, for I was not.

  'Still,' Greg mumbled. 'Not one of us.'

  I had never claimed to be; indeed, I had come clean to each of them about my reasons for being there the first time I met them.

  Diana had noticed Greg's reticence around me and had told me a little about him. In his forties, he had been on the streets since he was a teenager. For the last six years, he had lived in Victoria Square with a changing group of others, none of whom he had ever grown to like or trust.

  'He doesn't really like any of us, either,' Diana explained. 'He doesn't like or trust anyone. He wouldn't speak to Ian for the first week. Thought he was too obvious.'

  Diana had met Greg one night in Victoria Square and had invited him to Parliament Square, where he had moved into her tent and then lived there with her for the past month. As always, much was left unsaid, and I was never sure of their relationship status, nor if he even liked or trusted her.

  'You could be police,' Greg said to me once. 'You could be a journalist. If me and my mates was to hang around with you, if you properly lived with us for a year, say, and then one day you disappeared, and someone said to me, "You know that Charlie? He was undercover", I would believe it.'

  'Surely if I was undercover I would have fed you some story about being homeless myself?' I remembered the Cornish coast, where I had toyed with the idea of concocting a back-story but had dismissed it instantly. 'The last thing I would say is that I'm a writer.'

  'I know, man,' Greg said. 'That's the only reason I'm talking to you now.'

  From then on, Greg liked to call me 'Undercover'.

  'You want some nuts, Undercover?'

  'Undercover, you get fifteen down on the crossword?'

  'Do you puff, Undercover?' he asked, toking on the stub of a joint.

  'No,' I said.

  'See. That just makes you more suspicious.'

  He laid the roach on to the rim of his beer can, took a pretend swig, and then passed the can to Ian, who took it, removed the joint, cupped it in his palm, took a draft of beer, and passed the can back. I thought of these clandestine motions, of Greg's refusal to sit on the aspect of the square facing the Houses of Parliament and the ever-present guards at the gate, of his wordless departures when police vans slowed beside us during their routine circumambulations of the square, and concluded that it was unjustifiable to call me the suspicious one.

  10

  Time passed on the square rapidly: a surprise when the ringing machinations of Big Ben punctuated every hour. I soon spent all the money I had taken out in Portishead and ripped open my jacket to get at my emergency hundred pounds. Unlike Rolly and Rudy, I kept it hidden, but it diminished nonetheless, mostly on beer, for I was drinking every day. It was common to begin in the afternoon, something to do while we sat with our backs against the fence and talked about nothing. Soon, I found myself to be the regular. While Diana or Greg or Ian or even Marek disappeared for a day or a night, I remained on the square, leaving only to wash and defecate at the Methodist Chapel Hall. With time, my brain muted the traffic and my skin snubbed the cold. This was far easier than I had ever imagined; was even, in a perverse way, appealing. I had no work to go to, no bills to pay, and no expectations to disappoint myself with. When I woke, later and later each morning, my initial thought was of when I should take my first beer. If I smelled rotten, I was unaware of it.

  Ian had been gone for two days. He returned to find me sitting with Marek, who was teaching me Polish words. 'I think you like it here, Charlie,' he said.

  I squinted up at him, high on the short boost my current can of lager had afforded. 'Where you been?'

  'Got a girl,' Ian said, winking at me. 'She is hot, bruv. Hot. Been staying at hers for the weekend, but she had to go to work today. I let myself out.'

  Work, I thought. Is it Monday?

  Ian dropped a plastic carrier bag between me and Marek. Inside it were branded cans of ready-mixed rum and cokes, gin and tonics, whisky and lemonades.

  'Booty!' Ian shouted, sitting down and cracking open a gin and tonic. 'Let's get fucking drunk!'

  'You want anything, Marek?' I asked, rising to my feet.

  He rummaged in his pocket, producing a few pound coins. 'Cider.'

  I took the cash and walked up the road to the Victoria Street Sainsbury's. I knew that, while we shared company, stories and sometimes food, we did not share alcohol on the square. Rolly and Rudy were the only ones who had ever willingly handed a drink to someone else, and I had not seen them for some time. At the supermarket, I bought a two-litre plastic bottle of cider for Marek and an eight-pack of on-offer lager for me. When I returned, Diana and Greg had appeared from their tent and were filling their plastic cups from a bottle of white wine. Ian rose to his feet as I sat, for behind me a pretty woman was nosing about our tents and taking photographs.

  'You look good,' Ian called as she passed. 'You know that?'

  'I have an idea,' she smiled as she walked on beyond us.

  'Don't be such a tart, Ian,' Diana said, grabbing his coat-sleeve and pulling him back into the circle. 'You've got a girlfriend.'

  'Man can have more than one girlfriend, you know?'

  'Did you hear what she said?' Greg grinned. 'I have an idea. An idea. Mark that word.'

  'She's got an idea, bruv.'

  'She's got an idea, all right.'

  Greg rose to his feet and playfully punched Ian on the arm. Ian, laughing, punched him back.

  'That's really nice,' Diana said quietly to me. 'Greg's got a chip. You know that. He puts up walls. But underneath it is the kindest person ever.' She smiled as she looked at the two who had twenty years between them. Greg had grabbed Ian in a headlock and was pretending to swipe his can while Ian beamed and giggled. 'They're bonding,' Diana said, and her smile then was maternal, and quite beautiful with it.r />
  That afternoon was giddy and flushed with an abundance of drink for everyone. While Ian and Greg continued to bond, Marek drank contentedly from his large bottle, and Diana turned to me.