Stuart: A Life Backwards - Alexander Masters

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      A third possibility: it is a gradual disillusionment. The homeless person is playing at the start. It is almost fun to sleep rough. He is like the waiter in Sartre’s Words: acting the role of waiter – a waiter in bad faith – until one day he looks around and finds all his friends are rough sleepers, the girl he fancies is a rough sleeper, the things he looks forward to doing each evening are rough-sleeper things, like getting plastered on Tennant’s Super behind the Zion Baptist Church; his whole community, no longer with any irony, is made up of rough sleepers, and now, at last, he is among them.

      For a person like me, who knows I would never let myself get into this stupid, degrading situation, it is hard to find a good metaphor for this moment of transition. That is why every word of the opening conversation with Asterix and Scouser Tom matters.

      ‘So you just saw these two people,’ I try again, ‘and said, “Hello, I’m Stuart, I’m homeless,” and started a conversation?’

      ‘No, of course not – I didn’t say “I’m Stuart, I’m homeless” did I? Why would I do that? I’d known them two cunts for years.’

      They sat together behind the bus shelter and drank for three days.

      Stuart’s night address was 2 Laurel Lane, Christ’s Pieces. Set in three acres of mature park, with en suite toilets, six tennis courts and a bowling green, he slept soundly. When he woke, he crawled out, covered in old cigarette boxes and polystyrene cups, and bought coffee and a slab of shortbread from the gazebo stall. Christ’s Pieces is the public green at the back of Christ’s College. Number 2 is the second shrub from the left – the one with the biggest cavity in the middle. Stuart did not brush his teeth. He did not wash. Between beers with Nick and Paul he puffed away at the heroin he’d bought with the money he’d stolen from his mother. It made Stuart laugh that the police walked by thinking that all he had was an ordinary roll-up.

      On his fourth day in the park he met Smudger, a man with a home, and moved on to his floor. Smudger had himself been living on the streets a week earlier. This new tenancy of his was move-on accommodation, provided by the city council, which sets aside a handful of properties every year to be handed out to the homeless. Smudger had a lot of friends: they hurried off the streets to congratulate him on his good luck, drank his coffee, brewed up his tea, stole his chewy muesli bars, tinfoil, spoons, matches, then jacked up on the floor and got bored.

      To liven up the evening they went on the rampage (Stuart not included, he insists) and barricaded an eighty-year-old neighbour into her flat with flowerpots.

      Another man living in the same block of flats got all his windows shot out with an ‘Uzi’. The bullets made a curve on the opposite wall, like this:

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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

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