Stuart (8 page)

10

Sunday is hard outside the Home Office. Excitements include three cups of coffee, a bacon-and-egg sandwich, closing eyes and imagining Spain, rolling up a sleeping bag, rolling up Linda's sleeping bag, counting signatures, recounting signatures, checking to see if any famous names are among the signatures and finding an actress on
EastEnders,
eating a lamb samosa from the work-every-day-especially-on-Christmas-then-rack-the-prices-through-the-roof shop round the corner–too bored even to read a magazine.

I begin to see why bag ladies have bags. When life is this dull, you have to invent purpose. Collecting torn-up newspaper gives you a hobby, provides an anchoring intimacy with your surroundings, keeps the streets clean. Or so you think. Then one day you wake up and realise that it was all a con: what you had thought was an escape from madness was in fact the arrival.

During the morning people stray off. Often it is just Stuart and me together keeping fort, and Stuart is talking too much again. If words were legs he'd be a billionipede.

Yap, yap, yap.

Andria says all ex-junkies are like this. After so much time brainless on heroin, they soil the road with spittle trying to make up for lost time.

Yap, yap, yap.

Andria is an ex-junkie. Once, she stormed the stage at the United Nations and berated all the world's delegates on their inhumane policies towards her fellow ex-junkies.

Yap, yap, yap.

Andria talks a lot, too.

Stuart has decided that Fat Frank Who Never Talks About His Past is a paedophile. He has no grounds for this. It is entirely based on ‘me sixth sense'. Stuart can't even pronounce the word properly: ‘ped
e
-
o
-phile', he says, undoing the diphthong. He's ‘really worried' because Mr Frank spent the night in Stuart's flat the night before we came down to London and might have looked at Stuart's address book and found telephone numbers. John Brock has children–did Fat Frank get their number? He's just had his arms around John's sons, hasn't he? Ruth has a daughter. Is Fat Frank interested in girls, too?

Stuart, I say in my roundabout way, calm yourself. He's smelly, that's all. There's obviously also mental health ‘issues' as workers in the care professions call it when someone's as loopy as a carousel. But so what? You've got heaps of those, too. In the meantime he's our best petition collector. He's gathered double the rest of us. A dedicated worker–don't alienate him. We could do with ten more like him.

But Stuart's not to be put off.

Why did the fucking nonce end up staying at Stuart's place? That's what Stuart wants to know. Does Stuart attract kiddy-fiddlers? Is there something about Stuart that makes boybuggerers reach for him? Is Stuart to blame? Is Stuart a Perv Pimp?

Forget about Fat Frank. Stuart doesn't need hate figures. Just Stuart dissecting Stuart makes Stuart want to vomit.

In the afternoon comes the shock. The police contact me through a social worker. They have observed and waited, not wanting to intervene before now unless it is absolutely necessary, but a photo of the sleep-out, published in the
Cambridge
Evening News,
has forced them into action. It is difficult for the social worker to be direct. Let him put it this way: there is someone, a homeless man, who is playing a prominent role in the campaign–do I know him? Yes, a very intelligent, capable, eloquent, but very erratic individual who lives in the vicinity of Cambridge. A character who is highly dangerous. ‘Are we on the same wavelength?' I must kick him off the campaign immediately.

‘Why?' I demand, outraged.

‘Like I say, it's difficult because of confidentiality…'

‘To hell with confidentiality. You've got to tell me. This is a democracy, not a fascist state,' I find myself saying in a Ping-Pongish way. ‘The police can't just demand that I evict any campaigners they don't like.'

‘If I tell, will you promise not to let it go any further?'

Fat Frank, it turns out, is not just dodgy, he is number four on the list of Britain's worst paedophiles.

The extra shock is that Fat Frank is well known to the homelessness services, and his social worker knew of Fat Frank's involvement in the campaign long before the sleep-out. But he couldn't say anything because he has a professional vow to keep his clients' secrets.

How tortured is that? Ruth and John are sent to prison for upholding the principle of confidentiality. Yet here, in this case of Fat Frank, concerning the same category of people–i.e., the homeless–social workers are forced by the same principle to put John's children at risk.

I do not tell Stuart.

At around lunchtime I want to cry. Perhaps it is tiredness–although, as I've said, I have slept extremely well on the street. Nevertheless, I have a sense that I am losing control. I can imagine that if it goes on like this there will be nothing left of me by Monday. I will not be myself. I will be like the dead, a function of other people's thoughts. Two days on the concrete trying to run a camp and I'm cracking up. I am sick of my friends. I am especially sick of Stuart. I have lost sight of my enemies. Everything is messy. Nothing is simple. I wish I could simplify the enemies of the success of this campaign like Stuart does. I wish I could gather them under a single heading. I wish I had the quasi-religious spirit of homeless people and conspiracy theorists to believe in the System or the Masons or the FBI.

Looking up, I catch Stuart watching me. It is still early afternoon. There is a long time and another night yet to go.

‘You alright, Alexander?'

I nod. Is there any point in saying that if I have ever been close to punching him, it has been during the last yapping half-yapping-hour?

‘Don't get stressed, mate,' he says softly and lifts his Stella. ‘You done alright, Alexander.'

It is in the evening that Stuart finally ‘loses it'. Walking along Victoria Street with Linda Outreach after dark I see him lurching towards us, pressing campaign stickers on shop windows, telephone boxes, the pavement, and rattling the HSBC bank doors and shouting through the letter box because he thinks there is someone hiding in the building. It might be amusing to watch, but there is a feral quality. A little tipsy myself, I see him as a Robert Louis Stevenson character, trying to escape the good manners and parental neatness of people such as Linda and myself. He is sniffing out an atavistic world, beyond words.

As he reaches me, his expression changes. Standing himself against a dustbin, he jabs a finger in my direction.

‘You fucking, wanky, middle-class cunt-fuck, Alexander, always saying “What's the answer?” That's the difference, in'it? No answers! You want to know how I become what I am? Write a book what don't have no answers. But that won't make your fucking name, will it? Nah, see? Fuck off. Go find your fucking answers.'

He gives the dustbin a thwack and then peers unsteadily through one of the rubbish slots. ‘Not here. Stuart Fucking Shorter, ask them, how can he justify his mother lying across his brother to stop him chopping him up with two catering knives? Ask the fucking answers about that!'

Back at the camp the others leave, muttering things about supper, when they see us approach. Stuart perks up when a police car arrives.

‘Tell you what,' Stuart goads across the pavement at the huge officer who's rolled down his window to wish us good-night, ‘since you got so much fucking time on your hands, answer this one for me. Ten people on the street beat the fucking crap out of somebody and they'd all get ten years for it, where, in prison, your mates put on shields and riot gear and fucking pour into somebody's cell and do the same thing, and they're doing a public service. Explain that. And then they wonder why the person they just beat up so there's blood all across the walls and screaming what can be heard from one end of the wing to the other doesn't turn into a nice boy. Do you know what I mean? Do you? Do you? Nah, of course not.
You
ain't got the faintest fucking clue, have you?'

The officer stays in his car, smiling back.

Never one to shy away from making a bad situation worse, Stuart picks on another topic. ‘You
know
there are drugs in the hostels in London, don't you? You
know
they're full with drugs, don't you? Why don't you fucking arrest the hostel managers then, like they arrested Ruth and John? Give me the fucking answer to that, then, will you?'

He asks this fifteen times. I tell him to shut up. He starts on his middle-class geeky cunt routine again. What Stuart means when he says it's not the cold or the hardness of the streets that drives you crazy, it's the other people. It's the people like
fucking
Stuart, ranting and raving.

Shut up, will you!

‘You fucking middle-class…' etc.

The policeman for a second time bids us both a pleasant night and drives off.

Stuart rubs his hands, retreats to the north edge of our cage, and sits in his ugly twisted way, hunched over the kerb. He is an animal. A disagreeable oaf. I wish he would die. Right here. On the pavement.

I wish he would die.

That, at least, would be a publicity coup.

Across the road, above St James's Park tube–a deserted, Soviet-style station–the Epstein carving seems tired of us. Epstein did two of these reliefs, in 1929.
Day,
round the corner, on the east face, is a man raising a naked boy into the air. When it was unveiled, it caused outrage because someone noticed that the boy had a rather large penis. Epstein denied it. The managing director of London Underground offered his resignation. A furious company director demanded to pay for the entire sculpture to be removed. A mystery person fired bullets at it in the middle of the night. In the end, the headmaster of a boys' school was summoned to decide the matter and Epstein was forced to chop an inch and a half off the offending projection.

Night
is the one that overlooks us: a stolid, resigned woman, arms in lap, between her thighs. ‘When will you lot go away?' she seems to sigh.

At around two, a large, once well-dressed man, seeping drink, bumps round the tube station corner, past the blue wheelie bins, and stops to glower at us.

‘I was with the Provos!' he declares at last, sounding, because of his brogue, like a cross between a cold-blooded assassin and a lilting boat at sea. ‘I know what the fucking government's like. Fucking down with the British! Good on you fellas whatever you're fucking doing. Do you know what day it was on Friday?'

Friday was St Patrick's Day.

‘Fucking right! Down with the fucking empire!'

‘I hear you, mate,' Stuart yells back, to my acute embarrassment. I consider myself a monarchist. ‘We're with the homeless,' bellows Stuart, ‘and it's the same fucking queen and government with us!'

Speak for yourself. Horrid republicans. I do not speak, however. I keep quiet. I am not a suicidal monarchist.

Stuart sits down again with an air of increased camaraderie and the IRA man bumps off towards Petty France.

Much later, after I have finally fallen asleep, Deaf Rob and Jackie come back and have an argument. This is spooky. I don't even know what has woken me to witness it, because the argument is in mime. The street light spreads an elfin glow over the entire camp. Traffic on Victoria Street sounds like rushes of gentle water. Deaf Rob, lying down, rocks from side to side. Deaf Jackie picks silently among their belongings, stepping over the rucksacks and the ‘Louis Pierre, Paris' suit-holder as if each was in danger of being woken.

‘Don goohh, donnn goohh,' moans Deaf Rob.

In the morning I will learn that he has stolen her hearing aid to stop Deaf Jackie leaving him. She is searching for it.

She makes a sound, but it is so quiet that I hardly know if she's spoken.

‘Shaa
arrr up
!' bellows Deaf Rob. ‘Can you
see
! They slee-ph, slee-ph, slee-
ph
!'

We've arranged things, at Stuart's recommendation, so that there are always two sensible people on site: either Stuart and me, or me and Linda, or Andria and Stuart, or Linda and Andria. While I was petitioning in Camden, Stuart and Linda kept watch. When Fat Frank was driving Linda round the bend, Andria and I held the fort. All Friday and all weekend, day and night, it has been like that, because it means we are never weak or caught off guard. It is because of this policy that we've avoided too much police interference, met Kevin Flemen, legal expert for the drugs organisation
Release,
been able to conduct newspaper interviews and arrange shots for photographers at any moment. When a radio programme happened upon us, just by chance, as they were cruising the backstreets looking for interesting snippets, a man called Brent, our kindly website designer, was there to say something sensible to
News Direct
.

News Direct
turns out to be our undoing.