Cry Myself to Sleep: He had to escape. They would never hurt him again.. Joe Peters

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СКАЧАТЬ anyone in there who looked like me either, and in the other direction there were some railway arches, which merely led to another street full of rushing traffic. Apart from the people manning the flower stall, or selling the evening papers from metal stands, everyone else was moving about purposefully between the Tube and what I soon discovered was the mainline station at the top of the hill.

      Where was this community of carefree runaways that I had been led to believe would be there to welcome me into their arms? There was no option other than to tramp around the streets to see if I could find some secret entrance to this world I had come searching for.

      I started walking, looking round every corner for one of these places where I had heard a homeless boy could find a meal or pitch a bed, but I couldn’t see anything. All the shops in the Strand were brightly lit and full of people spending money. None of them seemed as if they would welcome someone as scruffy and disreputable looking as me, so I stayed on the outside, staring in. I still couldn’t see any homeless people anywhere, just normal citizens going about their daily business, all of whom I assumed would be returning to their homes and their comfortable beds in a few hours. What was I going to do then, when the streets were suddenly empty? Was I just going to have to huddle down on my own in one of these shops’ doorways once the staff had pulled down the shutters and gone home? Or should I go round the back of the buildings and see if I could find an air vent which would provide me with a bit of warmth against the night air?

      I had probably been walking for an hour or more before I came across a lad who looked about my age and was sitting on the pavement begging off passers-by. He was scrawny and rough looking, but his clothes looked as if they had once been better than mine, although they were now dirty and worn. He had a young, pretty-boy’s face but his expression was furtive, like that of a wary little wild animal, poised to either attack or run. He didn’t look like someone who could be trusted. He was sitting on a sheet of cardboard with a sleeping bag over his lap and a pot in front of him, holding up another piece of cardboard scrawled with the one word ‘homeless’.

      ‘Spare any change?’ he asked as I drew near, staring at him curiously.

      There was no way I was going to give him any money, being sure I was going to need every penny of the sixty quid that Mohamed had given me in order to survive, but I still wanted to strike up a conversation with him.

      ‘I’m homeless too,’ I said by way of an apology as much as an explanation.

      ‘What do you mean?’ he demanded, seeming quite angry despite his soft way of talking. To me he sounded quite well spoken, as if he was more educated than me, but maybe it was just a regional accent I was unfamiliar with. ‘You look all right to me.’

      ‘Just telling you,’ I said.

      ‘How long have you been here?’

      ‘I’ve just arrived and I don’t know no one.’

      He looked exasperated, as if he knew I was one more stupid kid expecting pavements of gold and not knowing what to do next now that I had actually arrived.

      ‘Sit down then,’ he said, gesturing to another grubby sheet of cardboard beside him while he continued to hold his sign up at the passers-by, most of whom ignored him. ‘Spare some change?’

      In between begging, he told me his name was Jake, and once he’d got used to the idea he seemed to like teaching a newcomer the rules of the street. He told me that I should avoid the police because they would have me down at the police station in a van if they could get hold of me, and then I would be shipped straight back to where I had come from.

      ‘You need to stick with the same bunch of people all the time,’ he explained, ‘because that way you’ll be protected from the rest.’

      I had heard from other runaways about how homeless kids got together into little social pods for self-protection. I liked the idea of being a member of a gang instead of always being on my own.

      ‘So where do I meet these people?’ I wanted to know.

      ‘You have to be careful,’ he warned. ‘They get quite funny with new people coming in. They’ll see you as an outsider and they won’t want to take responsibility for new people.’

      I must have looked a bit crestfallen.

      ‘You’d better stay with me for now,’ he said, ‘and we’ll go from there.’

      All the time we were talking he was shaking his pot at people and asking for change. I was surprised how many of them actually gave him something and every so often he would empty most of the contents of the pot into his pocket and then go back to shaking and asking. One or two people would annoy him by refusing to give him anything and he would get quite cheeky with them, which made me nervous. I didn’t like the idea of attracting the outside world’s attention if I could avoid it–not till I knew my way around a bit better. He told me about the outreach centre, which was a project for the homeless run by volunteers, where I could get something to eat and some warmer clothes and a blanket for the night.

      ‘They’ll give you a list of hostels if you want and if they aren’t full. You can have a shower there, too, and clean yourself up a bit. I’ll take you there now.’

      But when we got there we found it was closed for the night. Jake didn’t seem bothered and just started introducing me to a group of homeless people who were sitting around outside the centre, killing time. If you have no home and no job and no family, killing time is pretty much all you ever do.

      Now that the city workers were beginning to disappear off the streets and into the stations, it became easier to see the homeless community that they left behind. A lot of the people Jake knew appeared to be paired off in boy–girl relationships, which seemed a bit strange to me. They were a bit like a normal group of young people meeting up of an evening and having a few drinks together, except they were doing it in the street rather than in a bar or a pub. It wasn’t what I had been expecting, but the pairing off was encouraging because that was what I wanted: a nice girlfriend who I could love and be loved by, someone who would understand me and always be there for me and who I could look after.

      Everyone seemed to recognize Jake, which made me think he must have been living on the streets for a while and knew his way around, but I got the feeling they didn’t particularly respect him. The first people were a bit wary of me, but then he found a group who were more relaxed. There was a lad they called Jock, although I think that was just a nickname given to him because he was Scottish, not his given name. He was older than Jake and me, probably eighteen or nineteen years old, and seemed to be really wised up to everything, as if he was a sort of leader amongst the rest of them. He looked even older than his years because his teeth had already started to rot–not that mine were too clever at that stage, since I’d never been near a dentist and had suffered from malnourishment for most of my life. After Dad died I wasn’t allowed to see daylight most days, let alone be taught how to use a toothbrush. Jock and his friends seemed happy for me to hang around with him and so his other friends automatically accepted me. I had found a gang I could be part of and I started to relax and enjoy the adventure.

      As we all strolled from one place to another, as normal teenagers might wander from one person’s house to another or from one pub to the next, we talked all the time. They all asked me questions about my past and initially I was a bit cagey, always finding it hard to talk about how I had been treated by Mum and my brothers and all the men who she had sold or given me to. It seemed like a shameful and humiliating thing to have had happen to me, and anyway I didn’t like to think about it.

      ‘My dad used to rape me all the time,’ one girl told СКАЧАТЬ