Can't Anyone Help Me?

by Maguire, Toni

  London, a city of contrasts: to that woman, the homeless were invisible, anonymous, annoying whiny voices coming out of the shadows of doorways.

  I went to a camping shop, bought a sleeping-bag, dark blue with a bright yellow lining. That night, too frightened to sleep, I sat in a doorway with my legs against my chest and my arms tucked into the bag. Hidden at the bottom of it were my purse and my few possessions.

  That was when I thought I had hit rock bottom.

  For my first few days on the streets, I was clean enough not to look destitute. I went to coffee shops, with my sleeping-bag wrapped in the bag it had come in. I used their amenities to wash my face and brush my teeth. But gradually the dirt of the streets clung to me and, with it, the acrid smell of the homeless.

  Unless someone has slept on the streets, it is impossible to visualize the dehumanization it brings. We spent nights quivering with fear lest our few goods were stolen or even worse that we were murdered or raped. In the morning, the sound of traffic woke us and we could hear voices and footsteps of people walking past – past us, the invisible people.

  It was a week before I, too, whined from a doorway, ‘Spare any change?’ then seized the coins dropped on to my piece of cardboard. My hair became lank; grime crept under my nails and into the creases of my hands and neck. Now the smart coffee shops barred my entrance. ‘You can’t come in here,’ they said. To them I had ceased to be a person – I was just an unsightly something that they did not want on their premises.

  I moved around, as we all did in our search for sites where the people were generous. Shaftesbury Avenue, with its theatres, restaurants and bars, was where I headed at night. There, people flocked from the theatres or pubs, faces flushed with bonhomie.

  ‘Spare any change?’ I said, time and again, and as my voice scratched irritatingly on the edge of their consciousness, coins were tossed down carelessly before the man or woman climbed into a taxi that would take them back to their centrally heated home.

  The worst were the ones who thought they had a duty to lecture me.

  ‘I don’t give money,’ they said self-righteously. ‘You should get a job.’

  But by then I had learnt how hard it was for the homeless to achieve that. We had no address to give and nowhere to make ourselves look presentable. Social Services would not pay out to people without accommodation, and even if they had, I was still under age and a runaway.

  Over the weeks, I blended in with the vast invisible army of the homeless and met others who, like me, had run away. Young and broken, they had escaped from bullying stepfathers, drunken parents who beat them, foster families who abused them and children’s homes that had failed them. Everyone had a story – and few seemed to think it would ever have a happy ending.

  I found a certain comradeship. Sometimes it was just the sharing of a doorway, being shown where the best café was for a cheap breakfast, and taken to the places where at night volunteers came round with free food.

  We tried to avoid the older ones who, shapeless in their bundles of tattered clothing, stank of cheap alcohol, bad teeth and unwashed bodies.

  Passers-by recoiled from them as, pushing their stolen shopping trolleys filled with plastic bags that contained all they thought was precious, they muttered, swore and shook their fists at demons only visible to themselves.

  Unable to gain admittance to even the scruffiest of cafés, they had no other recourse than to find a bush in one of the parks or a dark alleyway to relieve themselves. I once saw a deranged old lady lift her skirts and squat in the middle of the road. The cars just swerved round her. Had she come into the world so alone that there was no one, no relative, who could have cared for her? ‘Where have they all come from?’ I asked a boy, after I’d witnessed that incident.

  ‘They were kicked out of the mental hospitals when Mrs Thatcher closed them down,’ he told me. ‘She said the community would care for them, but the fucking community doesn’t want to know. Does it?’ And it appeared that they didn’t.

  It was cold that winter and we searched for sheltered places and doorways deep enough to protect us from the lashing rain. I discovered that at night, when the temperature dropped, cold water was sluiced over the steps of certain restaurants to keep us away. When it froze, we would have to search out another place to sleep.

  There was one restaurant where parents of small children could meet for a weekend brunch. They could hand over their warmly dressed offspring to a clown or face painter, then relax over cocktails and order food. Content that their children were being cared for, they lingered over lunch. When they left, we would stand nearby the door, hoping for some coins to come our way. They seldom did. Instead the mothers moved their children a little faster past us, no doubt frightened that our homelessness was contagious.

  Incensed that we had the temerity to loiter anywhere near his premises, that particular restaurateur was proud of his actions. He didn’t stop at throwing water on the steps and letting it freeze. Instead he waited for us to tuck ourselves into our sleeping-bags and huddle up together.

  It was then that he turned the high-pressure hoses on us, the ones that were used to clean the streets. Jets of freezing water saturated us and all our possessions. The force was so powerful that one slight girl was thrown against the doors.

  ‘I want to wash the vermin off the streets,’ he said, roaring with laughter at the damage he had caused. Dazed and bewildered by his cruelty, we gathered up our wrecked possessions and crawled away. My treasured Walkman was destroyed that night.

  There was an outcry: newspapers published his remarks and people recoiled at his heartlessness – but that didn’t make any difference to the amount of money that was dropped near my hand.

  After a month, I was oblivious to the smell of my body, my dirty lank hair and the grubbiness of my clothes. I was no longer concerned about how I looked. Thick jumpers too large for me, bought from charity shops, became my nightwear, the steps my bedroom, the scant public toilets, with only cold water in the taps, my bathroom – and solvents my new drugs.

  Did I think of returning home? No. Did I think of a future? Maybe sometimes, for a fleeting moment. Just existing took up all my energy.

  My five-year-old self, if she made an appearance, was not noticed by the human flotsam around me, so if she appeared, wondering what world she had stepped into and then left, I have no memory of it. It is doubtful that the homeless would have told me if she had. They were not critical of each other. If they had seen anything, they would most probably have put it down to an odd reaction to the glue I had sniffed and left me alone.

  46

  It was not just the rain and sleet that were our enemies but also the howling winds that drove it in thick sheets against our bodies. We would cover our sleeping-bags with whatever we could find – cardboard, plastic bags and pieces of matting to try and keep the worst off. But however hard we tried, the water seeped in, soaking not just us but everything we owned.

  It was when rain was dripping from my hair and running down my face and my teeth were chattering with cold, my voice shaking with the effort of asking one more pair of legs for change, that I heard a voice and realized it was speaking to me.

  ‘You look very cold,’ it said.

  The old me might have muttered, ‘No shit,’ or ‘Clever bastard, aren’t you?’ but the rain and the cold had chased away that person. Instead, I looked up, feeling simple gratitude at the concern shown in those words.

  He was young, somewhere in his middle twenties, and strikingly good-looking: tall and slim with black hair pulled back from a bony face and dark green eyes, which crinkled at the corners as he smiled down at me.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a hot drink and something to eat. In a café,’ he added quickly, in case I was suspicious of his intentions.

  That was the night I met Eddie.

  He took me to a pizza place somewhere off St Martin’s Lane. A wave of hot air filled with the aroma of garlic and pizza dough greeted me
as we entered.

  The buzz of conversation in the crowded place, with its cheerful red-checked tablecloths and candles stuck in Chianti bottles, not to mention the thought of real food, made me relax for the first time, it seemed, in many weeks.

  My jacket was removed and my damp clothes steamed in the warmth.

  ‘Have a glass of red wine. It’ll do you good, put some colour in your cheeks,’ he said, pouring from a bottle that had been brought to the table.

  ‘Choose whichever toppings you want,’ he said, and I shook my head, confused at the choice – cheese, salami, chicken, seafood, artichokes. I told him to choose and that I knew any of them would taste wonderful. He ordered two thin and crispy, large, with all the extra toppings. Within minutes, a plate was in front of me.

  Strings of cheese fell down my chin as, using my grubby fingers, I forgot any table manners my mother had drummed into me. My knife and fork sat untouched – it was easier to shovel pizza into my mouth with my hands. Without needing to be told again, I washed it down with large gulps of red wine.

  As I ate he studied me intently and asked what had happened to me, how I had come to be on the streets. My glass was filled again, and before I knew it, I had confided in him the details of the last couple of years of my life. How I had been sent to the special school, how I had run away and ended up in London. I couldn’t tell him about Dave, just that the friend I had been staying with had left the flat where I had been living.

  ‘What happened then?’ he asked.

  ‘The landlord came round and told me to get out.’

  ‘What about your parents? Could you not have gone to them?’

  ‘They don’t want me,’ I said, omitting to say that, if I had rung them, my father would not have turned his back on me.

  ‘So, you have nowhere to go?’ he asked. ‘No friends who could help you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fifteen,’ I told him, and in admitting that, I had confirmed what he already thought, that I was an underage runaway.

  ‘You’re very pretty,’ he said, ‘too pretty to be on the streets. You’re lucky to have survived so long.’

  Why did no inkling of suspicion come into my head then? I think it was because he was so good-looking, and young.

  He told me he had a sister my age, how he would hate it if she lived as I had. How he hoped that if anything like that ever happened to her, there would be someone out there to offer her help.

  ‘I can give you a bed to sleep in, with clean sheets, and you can have a hot bath too, wash your clothes,’ he told me. ‘I want to help you.’

  Well, I thought, the worst is that he might want sex.

  I was wrong. That was not the worst, not nearly the worst.

  He gave me dope again, nice, mellow dope.

  Later he gave me something else.

  He took me back to his flat that night. And, like a grateful puppy that has found a new home, I trotted along beside him.

  He ran a hot bath for me, poured in something sweet-smelling and let me soak right up to my ears. There was a soft fluffy dressing-gown to snuggle up in and a big T-shirt to sleep in.

  He showed me where the spare bedroom was, turned the bed down and left just the glow of the bedside lamp on.

  That night, unafraid, I slept well.

  In the morning he resumed the role of big brother. Breakfast was made and served to me, more concerned questions were asked, and for the first time since Dave had disappeared, I felt safe.

  That was how I came to live with Eddie. Tall, good-looking, charming and empathetic Eddie, who had stored up every bit of information I had blurted out when red wine had hit an empty stomach.

  I wish I had never met him.

  47

  Information, I learnt, but not fast enough, was money in the bank to Eddie.

  I was not naïve about what sometimes happens to girls who are ‘rescued’ from begging in doorways. I’d seen some, who had found out that the streets of London were not paved with gold, standing shivering on street corners, waiting for a punter in a car to stop. I’d watched curiously as they climbed in and were driven away, then returned to the same spot later. Other men had picked them up in the early hours of the morning, the same ones who, once darkness fell, had brought them to the streets.

  I had heard whispers about how they sold themselves, and that most of their earnings went to their pimps.

  But that could never happen to me, could it? I was far too smart.

  It did.

  Oh, not at once – it was a gradual process that crept up on me until I found myself in a bedroom with a man I didn’t know.

  ‘You might wonder,’ I said to my therapist, who had not yet shared with me anything she thought, ‘what was the difference between that and what I had done in my home town. But it was different. Often the first time those men spoke to me was to tell me to take my clothes off. My body was no longer mine, but then neither was the money. It was drugs again,’ I said, ‘drugs that controlled me, drugs that had trapped me. Only by that time I had not stopped at smoking dope and swallowing a few Mandies.’

  ‘Tell me about the early days first, Jackie,’ was all she said, and I continued with my story.

  The early days when I lived with Eddie were wonderful. The first day we went on a shopping spree, and it was like letting a child into a sweet shop, a greedy child who had gone too long without.

  ‘Let’s have a look at your clothes,’ he had said earlier, then wrinkled his nose in distaste when he saw my assortment of creased, grubby garments.

  He found a pair of jeans that were not too bad and a dark T-shirt. ‘That,’ he said, ‘will have to do until we’ve been shopping.’

  I asked how I could repay him. He said he wanted to help me and that I was not to worry. Wanting to believe him, I didn’t.

  ‘Some funky evening things first,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you clubbing tonight.’

  At the first boutique we went to he chose strappy tops in soft bright fabrics and a cropped black leather jacket.

  ‘Skirts,’ he said, when I protested that I liked jeans. Short ones that flared above my knees – and fishnet tights came next. He made me come out of the changing room and twirl round to show him each item. Like a schoolgirl, I obeyed every command while he watched me lazily. If I had known more, understood what Eddie had in mind, how he saw each purchase as an investment, I would have realized that the look he was giving me was rather like a trainer giving an untested racehorse the once-over. He was weighing me up, imagining the money he might make if I went the full distance. Maybe if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have been so carefree. As it was, I didn’t. I had no thoughts in my head as I handled those clothes, apart from thinking that a miracle had happened.

  ‘Shoes,’ he said, looking at my water-stained pair, and was oblivious to my protests that I really wanted another pair of Dr Martens. ‘High heels,’ he said, and chose a pair in black and a pair of ankle boots in soft black suede that sported four-inch stiletto heels. Then he took me to another shop where the whole ground floor seemed to be dedicated to makeup and perfume.

  ‘Red,’ he said, when my hand strayed to an orange lipstick.

  Within a few minutes there was a pile of makeup and beauty products ready to be wrapped. Eddie only glanced at the bill as though it was of little importance, then peeled off more notes from his bundle and paid.

  He directed me to the underwear department and stood over me, pointing to the blacks and the reds, rather than the whites and pinks. Then he took me to the final destination he had marked out for me: the hairdresser Michaeljohn near Regent Street. ‘This should complete your transformation,’ he said, as he left me with the stylist. ‘I’ll be back for you in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Cut and streaked,’ she told me, picking up my hair. Evidently Eddie had already given his instructions. The girl I had left behind, when I had taken to the streets, might have complained, but I was simply bemused by the change
in my circumstances.

  The stylist ran a few strands through her fingers, then told me that I needed a special conditioner.

  Well, I thought, there hadn’t been much chance of using one of those in a public loo.

  A manicurist appeared and my broken nails were filed into shape and a glossy red polish applied before I had a chance to choose my own colour. Eddie had selected that too, it seemed.

  Two hours later, I was finished. My hair, now glossy and several shades lighter, bounced on my shoulders. The street look had disappeared, all right. I just looked like a rather scruffily dressed teenager with a new hairstyle. Then I remembered all my new clothes: that look was about to change.

  Eddie was waiting in Reception. He told me I looked great, tipped the stylist extravagantly, then took me for something to eat at a small wine bar where he knew the owner. It was a smart place, with pale wooden tables, chairs with cushioned seats and flower arrangements at the entrance. No questions were asked as to my age when he ordered for me, without asking, a glass of white wine and a club sandwich.

  A taxi was hailed once we had finished and, surrounded by bags, I sank happily back on the seat.

  In the flat I did what I had done nearly three years previously. I took out makeup and created a new me. On went the clothes and out I came, smiling with shyness and pleasure at how I knew I must look.

  We went to a club that night; three large doormen stood outside and greeted Eddie as an old friend. That place, all chrome and glass, where men of all ages wore suits and girls very little, was nothing like the clubs I had visited with Dave. A long bar with a mirrored back, silver cocktail shakers, waiters in black and a small restaurant behind a glass wall made up the ground floor. Downstairs, in what must once have been a basement, there was a dance floor where a DJ mixed and spun his vinyl, while above our heads the multifaceted silver sphere rotated, sending flashes of colour down on to us.

  We danced to the thumping sounds of the music, and then it was back upstairs for more drinks.