Stuart (6 page)

HELP THE HOMELESS:
LOCK UP A
CHARITY WORKER

reads my placard. Linda's has

WHO'S NEXT?

‘What's that mean, then?' smirks the Press Association cameraman as he takes the shot. ‘Who's next in 'er sleeping bag?' The Home Office staff start drizzling towards work: some take leaflets, a few join in with us for a couple of minutes before stepping back into the flow again; others march past as if they were defying a picket and appear to be absorbed in a newspaper until their nose bumps into the front door. One or two stop to argue. Dull, stupid arguments: I've heard them a thousand times before.

‘They were convicted in a court of law,' pronounces an upright man, white hair stuck to his scalp in plaster-of-Paris mounds. It is astonishing how often you hear this remark, always said with full verbal rotundity: ‘Court of Law'.

‘Which,' I reply, ‘is exactly why we're protesting–it was a miscarriage of justice.'

‘They must have been doing something wrong–no one else has ever been arrested for this,' from a young beardy face.

Don't people think before they start mooing? ‘Of course people haven't been arrested for this before–this is a test case. Part of the government's ridiculous War on Drugs. That's why we've got to do something about it.'

A very tall, thin lady with a knitting needle in her hair: ‘The staff
must
have seen something!'

Why must they have?

‘Have you ever stood,' I ask her patiently, though perhaps not quite so fluently as I'm writing here, ‘in the middle of 120 toxic, hooting, scatterbrained, psychopathological social freaks, bottlenecked into an old converted tap-dancing studio, and tried to spot which two are doing something suspicious with their fingertips? The police surveillance camera showed one of their own officers walking within nine inches of a deal and not noticing it.'

A theatre troupe consisting entirely of ex-homeless push up, having heard about the sleep-out: they wear Ping-Pong balls strapped to the back of their heads, painted to resemble eyes. ‘Ruth and John needed these,' they shriek as they dance about. Reverend Ian Harker, an East End vicar, arrives with a squeeze box. A muscular Christian like one of Charles Kingsley's Victorian friends, he plays some merry tunes. By elevenses our stretch of pavement is as jolly as a fairground. Twenty or thirty people are jostling on the pavement–Ruth's family, John's family, my friends, Stuart's friends, street activists, drugs activists. Fat Frank has brought in a boy I nickname Dangerous Ginger. Springy walk, light red hair, a ski-jump nose, Dangerous Ginger keeps his shirt unbuttoned to the waist to show off his smooth chest even though it is distinctly cold.

A muscular Christian

‘If you gave me a bomb, I'd put it under Number Ten,' he announces loudly, arms akimbo. ‘I'd go right up there and smash all the windows. I wouldn't care. Your man Jack Straw would know about it if I was in charge.

‘I hate people who aren't happy,' he bursts. ‘Look at me: no job, no home, but I'm always happy. What have they got to be fucking unhappy about?'

Another protestor is Andria, director of the Mordaunt Trust, a charity for junkies affected by hepatitis or AIDS, and editor of
User's Voice,
a magazine for health- and policy-focused junkies. She has a laugh like a train coming off its tracks and has taken more than a professional interest in Stuart. Wonderful woman, but
really
! Fancy Stuart? She must be even more peculiar than Dangerous Ginger.

Deaf Rob reappears. Out of twelve million Londoners he has achieved the impossible–he has located Deaf Jackie. We all gawp. He fetched her out of a pile of dustbin bags by Waterloo. Is this another of the things Stuart wants me to learn? That the street homeless are not isolated wastrels. They are wastrels with a social fabric, and even in the vastness of one of the world's largest cities they soon produce a sense of village community amongst their peers and friends.

Deaf Jackie is a plump girl with bad teeth. Deaf Rob clears a space in the middle of our chosen square of concrete slabs, and props his discovery up on three sleeping bags, supported by a throne of pillows and clothing, like a fattened lunatic queen.

She has written a poem about Ruth and John, addressed to Jack Straw, and politely asks my permission to read it to one of the journalists.

‘Let them free/For all eternity!' she chants, sounding as though she wants them hanged. In the background, I see Stuart, carefully facing away from the cameras, bow-legged, calling to Home Office workers like a seller of penny dreadfuls.

‘Miiiss-carriage of juuus-tice!'

‘Charity workers imprisoned because drugs found on homeless peee-pul! Knew nothing abaaat it! In prison for doin' no wruooong! Thirty years working for the 'omeless–locked up cos they couldn't stop them taking druuu
guhs
! Miiiss-carriage of juuus-tice! Thank you, madam, thank you, yes, I've been homeless meself, in prison also, miss, robbery and hostage taking, here's a leaflet, if you'd sign the petition? Thank you! Have a nice day! Charity workers imprisoned in miiiss-carriage of juuus-tice!'

Sour with disapproval, a plump man with bookshelf glasses accuses Stuart of wanting to legalise heroin.

‘No, sir, just cannabis. Smack means more junkies and less long-term economic production.'

Does the man know ‘how many detox beds there is in Cambridge for all them junkies? Two, sir. And half the time when they've been in them beds for five or six days they're put straight back into the situation they were in before they went there. They fall off the wagon as quick as they got on the wagon. Where, the tax off puff would actually pay for all the treatment programmes and policing for heroin addiction. Legalise cannabis but come down like a ton of bricks on the class As.'

When I come back after fifteen minutes, Stuart and the man with the glasses are having an amiable conversation about South American politics.

The police arrive mid-morning. An officer, his belt trailing communication equipment and restraint devices, strolls among the sleeping bags to explain to me that the Home Office security staff have said they don't want us standing next to the building or crowding the doorway. ‘See these brass plugs in the pavement?' He points. The very same that Stuart has been brooding about. ‘You mustn't cross them. Not even by an inch if the Home Office doesn't want it. You've got to be on the other side of those.'

Except the vicar.

The Home Office guards don't mind the vicar. He can stay up against the wall as long as he keeps playing his squeeze box. The Home Office likes a squeeze-box-playing vicar.

‘That's not good enough, is it?' explodes one of the Ping-Pong eyes, pausing for a moment in his leaping about. ‘That's social fucking fascism that is.'

The officer smiles and says ‘we' also have to put up riot fences. ‘A fence behind you to ensure you're not trespassing. And you must have fences on either side, to protect you from the public.'

‘Why do we need to be protected from the public?'

‘They might step on you in the middle of the night.'

Finally, ‘we' also want a fence in front, to shield us from the street.

‘In case you roll off the pavement in your sleeping bags and get run over,' points out the friendly copper.

‘You mean you want to cage us in completely?'

‘I didn't say cage, sir, no. That was your word.'

Paul Boateng–junior minister, responsible for prisons–is spotted. I run after him. A well-poised, balding man in an expensive dark overcoat, he is striding alongside the wall of the Home Office trying to escape without losing his sense of elegance. He smiles. He has nothing to say. He really must be getting on.

‘Social fucking fascism.'

Mr Straw, we are informed by one of the door staff, is not in the office today.

For an hour and a half Fat Frank Who Never Speaks About His Past stands like a boulder by the tube station, distributing leaflets. The press photographers get him in a good pose, massive back to the cameras, clutching the hands of two endearing blond boys. Then at lunchtime he leaves to do the shoppers in Hammersmith.

Only Stuart has become muted while the residue of his creation gambols round him. Despite the spring warmth, he wears the largest sweatshirt he can find. The journalists, attracted to Ruth's four-foot-eleven mother and her enormous velvet, pea-green hat (she is a mosaic artist–she made the decoration on George Harrison's swimming pool), manoeuvre to snatch her photograph alongside him, with his shaven head, broken nose, and hotchpotch of dull blue home-made tattoos.

Enormous velvet pea-green hat

Saturday is cold. The hours drag by wearily. I stretch plastic sheeting across the east side of the barrier to act as a windbreak and to stop the litter bustling in. It works quite well for the wind that comes at us horizontally, but the gusts that billow over the top make two of the barriers bang against each other like an old signpost in a Western. Around noon I go to Camden to collect signatures from young men and women in designer ripped trousers and thick-rimmed NHS-style glasses. Fat Frank lumbers along the edges of Victoria, returns to Hammersmith, rolls off to Notting Hill. Deaf Rob and Deaf Jackie amble west. Stuart disappears later with Andria. (She returns him intact the following morning.) Dangerous Ginger strides down to Westminster clutching a washbag. Deaf Rob reappears having mislaid Deaf Jackie again among the twelve million. He has tumbled upon a middle-aged drunk, instead.

‘Wha! Wha! He's gotta TV company! Gonna make a film! Put us in it! Wha! The Cambridge Two Campaign!'

A little man, he wears a broad-rimmed hat, white jacket, and white gauze neckerchief, both grey at the edges but still dandyish. The spittle from his bottom lip drops on to our lunch. ‘I borrow money off my friends,' he glows. ‘I'll go up to a friend and ask for some money to buy a meal and he'll give me £200. It's quite embarrassing.'

His voice is a shock: clean enunciation, scrubbed-up vowels.