Stuart: A Life Backwards. Alexander Masters

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      Smudger was evicted for non-payment of rent and having atrocious friends.

      ‘But that’s just life’s story, in’t it? Everybody expected everything for nothing not realising that he had bills to pay.’

      Stuart moved back into the open. To keep costs down, he started injecting heroin instead of smoking it. ‘I almost overdosed, the buzz was that strong. And I thought, “Ah brilliant, I’ve cut me habit from seventy quid to a tenner a day.” A month later I was doing £70 a day in me arm.’

      ‘Can we leave it at that?’ says Stuart.

      ‘What? Stop recording? But we’ve only been doing it half an hour.’

      Stuart shuffles in my armchair. ‘Got a busy day,’ he complains.

      I reach out to click off the tape recorder, think twice, and sit back. ‘OK, but five more minutes. Let’s just recap. You were in prison, yes?’

      ‘That’s right, for –’

      ‘We’ll get to that, that’s for later. Then you came out, messed up your life for six months and ended up on the streets?’

      ‘Exactly, like I just explained it all. I was thirty at the time, and I stayed on the streets from June until December.’

      ‘Which is just after I first saw you, round the corner from Sainsbury’s, correct?’

      He nods in exasperation and starts struggling with his puffy jacket.

      Busy? What’s a benefit bum like him got to do?

      ‘Look, I’ll tell you what’s bothering me. Why didn’t you just go straight to one of the homeless agencies and get yourself booked into a hostel? They could have got you on a job programme, into a shared house, or in a private tenancy and arranged to sort out your deposit. That’s why these hostels cost so much, because the money is used to fund twenty-four-hour support staff: they’re there, specially employed by what you please to call the System, to help you. In other words, you didn’t have to live outside in parks. If you did, it was because you insisted on it. Why?’

      For a moment Stuart looks at me as if I am beyond hope. His shoulders slump in disbelief. ‘Nah, Alexander, keep your tape recorder on. You fucking nine-to-fives believe everything you read in the bloody newspaper or watch on the telly, when the reality of it is so fucking different, it’s unreal.’

      Show a tiny element of responsibility, don’t assault anyone or openly take drugs, and the staff at Wintercomfort Day Centre will connect you to the outreach team, who will get you into a hostel, usually an English Churches Housing property. Willow Walk hostel for rough sleepers, or Willow Walk’s big sister, 222 Victoria Road, are the ones. They have small private rooms with settled accommodation. At 222, there are seventy-four beds. A Dantesque institution with an innocuous pale brick façade not far from where I live, I pass by it on my way to the local supermarket. Occasionally there are ambulances or a police car outside: somebody has overdosed, been beaten up, been beating someone else up or smashed the window of a nearby off-licence and come stumbling back with an armful of chilled beers. It is run by a friend of mine, a conscientious, highly intelligent, imaginative woman who, with her staff, performs something of a miracle to keep this place going every day.

      There is a constant air of watchfulness in places like 222 (especially) and Willow Walk (to a much lesser extent). Long periods of quiet are followed by short tempests of violence in which it seems people are ‘kicking off’ on every wing and the housing officers rush from one incident to the next, clatter along the corridors with fingers on walkie-talkie buttons wondering if the full moon has snagged on the nearby traffic lights.

      This is why Stuart hates hostels. ‘Because in them places you’ve got little kids trying to be bully boys and they see someone small and skinny like me, and with a limp, and to people like that I’m an easy target. So I have to deal with them in a severe way, if they take a liberty, to get the message, then I end up in nick again. Well, I can’t condemn them because I used to be the same. But if the person killed me, I wouldn’t like him to end up having to do even three years in prison. I wouldn’t wish it on nobody.’

      ‘You didn’t mind the idea of getting three drunks from the pub to kill you, risking their imprisonment,’ I remind him.

      ‘Yeah – but they weren’t homeless.’

      Hostels are not right for most people. They become (as the pun goes) hostiles. Or, worse, a sense of contentment creeps up on the residents. After six months, outrageous incidents are no longer reasons for threatening staff with letters of complaint to the chief executive or promising to tip off the Cambridge Evening News – they are gossip. Street life is testimony to man’s self-defeating powers of adaptation. The same thing applies in prison: people get used to the outrage of the new circumstances – they give up trying to fight back. John Brock, the former Wintercomfort manager that Stuart and I are campaigning for, is a good example. After a few months inside, he writes to his wife that prison has started to feel right. He likes it when the warden closes the cell door on him. He is beginning to feel that it is easier to be guilty.

      Hostels, despite all their best efforts, encourage drug addiction and alcoholism. The main reason why Stuart demanded that the council give him a flat five miles outside of Cambridge was to get away from the city’s drug and petty crime set. Putting a man trying to get off heroin and burglaries in a homeless hostel, no matter how dedicated the support staff, is like putting a paedophile in a kindergarten. Temptation is everywhere. The only place that has more drugs in it than a homeless centre is prison.

      At 222, Stuart got beaten up and didn’t squeal; got beaten up again and still kept his mouth shut; got beaten up a third time, head-butted one of the bullies, ‘split all his eye open’, had a knife fight with another and had to leave.

      He wouldn’t go in Jimmy’s, either, in the basement of the Zion Baptist Church on the other side of town. СКАЧАТЬ