‘No. That’s the good car. It’s the one you nicked that’s not good because it’s not legit, is it? Good don’t mean good as in good quality. Good means good as in will the police bang you up if they catch you in it?’
What a classy misunderstanding. This is what I love about my friendship with Stuart: even the simplest words can spring surprises. It has turned out that we don’t understand each other’s use of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
For the next ten minutes I am lost in happy thoughts. The train rolls into Ely then rumbles off again, over the level crossing, under the grumpy eye of the Cathedral, alongside a canal lined with silvery willows.
It’s not just ‘good’ and ‘bad’ either. I see, when I think about it, that our notion of the word ‘car’ is also different. If someone said to me, define a car, I’d find myself caught in a long physical description, cautiously philosophical, like Bitzer defining a horse for Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times: ‘Automotive vehicle, modest in size, carrying up to eight passengers (seated), and wheels, minimum three, not confined to tracks.’ To Stuart, the answer is contained in one fact: a car is its numbers. The ‘bad’ nicked car has been turned into a different, ‘good’ car because the engine numbers have been changed, usually done by substituting the engine portions that have ‘bad’ numbers impressed on them with similar portions from a smashed-up, auction-purchased legitimate ‘good’ car. The hulk of legitimate metal, though it has wheels and an engine and may even still putter along, has now ceased to be a car at all.
Revelation comes with these misunderstandings. Stuart’s life and way of thinking momentarily exposed. Like a break in the hedgerow during the country lane part of a journey. For an instant you glimpse scenery you haven’t seen before–fields of poppy and cornflower, trees gnarled in the shape of demons. Then it is gone again. You press on, exhilarated.
‘What do you do with these rung cars, then?’
‘Sell them. Use them for getaways. Depends.’
‘How do you sell them? How do you advertise a rung (or is it “ringed”) car?’
‘Don’t need to advertise. People just know. Posh people, cos they’ve got the money to buy them, don’t they? Even people what have been brought up on a silver platter know about rung cars. They just hear about them on the estate, don’t they?’
Stuart on top form–again. Posh people on council estates. People so posh they don’t just get a silver spoon between their lips, they get carried around their four-bedroom semis on a silver salver like suckling pig.
The boy’s a freak, surely.
No. He’s not. People like Stuart–the lowest of the low on the streets, outcasts even among outcasts, the uneducated chaotic homeless, the real fuck-ups–people who’ve had their social and school training lopped off at twelve: they simply don’t understand the way the big world works. They are as isolated from us normal, housed people as we are from them. If Stuart is a freak, then it is for opposite reasons: it is because he has had the superhuman strength not to be defeated by this isolation. It is because he has had the almost unbelievable social adroitness to be able to fit in smoothly with an educated, soft-skinned person like myself and not make me frightened half to death. If Stuart’s a freak, I salute freaks.
‘So,’ I begin again, slowly, ‘if I decided I want to ram-raid a place, where would I get a suitable car?’
‘You’d just go and steal one.’
‘By smashing in the driver’s window and breaking the steering-wheel lock by twisting the wheel in opposite directions with my hands and feet.’
‘Well done, Alexander,’ says Stuart, giving me a look of Gradgrind approval. ‘And if the street’s too public to use a brick?’
‘Then a “jiggler” key. These are ordinary keys, which have been blunted, so instead of fitting into just one car they fit into lots of cars.’
‘Exactly. Not fit-fit, but almost fit. You only got to jiggle them a bit and it pops the lock. What if you haven’t got a set of them?’
‘A slide stick,’ I reply smoothly. ‘To make a slide stick, take a metal band from a pallet of bricks, cut down to eighteen inches, chop a big notch from one side and three smaller ones on the other. Slip into door panel.’
‘Yes, mate.’
‘But what if I wanted to get a car that’s been rung?’
‘You wouldn’t get a car what’s been rung to go and do a ram-raid with. What’s the point? You just go and nick one, cos you’ll just set fire to it or you’ll burn the engine out and it might get smashed up.’
‘I see. So, what next? I’m in the car, in the village, about to ram the…’ I gesture at the window of our train carriage, imagining that it is the plate-glass shopfront that I’m about to accelerate into and behind it, among the Norfolk reeds and the River Ouse, lie bootloads of pinchable goodies. ‘Do I go in front first?’
‘No, rear first. You have to keep your head turned away from the window.’
‘OK, rear first. Bkkoooowwww! I’m in the post office, boot in the rubble…’
‘Alexander, what are you like? You wouldn’t ram-raid a post office neither.’
Disappointed, I let go of my imaginary steering wheel. ‘Why not? You did.’
‘No, I told you before. That was a crowbar.’
‘My mistake. What would you ram-raid then?’
‘Electrical shops, warehouses, little places. There’s no point in ram-raiding a fucking post office, because there’s never no money in the tills at night and there’s nothing else to steal, is there? Take it from me,’ he says wistfully, ‘gone are the days where a post office might get one big delivery a fortnight.’
An air of nasty stuffed-shirtery hangs over the cobbled squares of King’s Lynn. As soon as the train clicks to a stop and the doors open, bundles of solicitors and barristers, displaced from Cambridge, clack down the terminus to the taxi rank. Behind them come the likely lads in shiny suits, surrounded by sallow girls and chain-smoking mums. They wander languidly to the bus stop. The lawyers will return in early afternoon, ciabatta in one hand, mobile in the other. Then the bus of likely lads will also reappear, but minus one or two of the members.
At the courthouse, Stuart’s solicitor, the same pink-cheeked, pleasant boy we met in the last courtroom, takes him to a quiet hallway and whispers sternly.
From a distance, I watch Stuart frown, look shocked. My heart sinks. As Stuart’s solicitor has often pointed out, it’s a miracle that he has got bail at all, especially since his victim and principle witness are both still living in the area, alive and still stabbable. Now the judiciary must have come to its senses. They will snatch Stuart away on to remand and I will spend the rest of this book whispering to him in HMP visiting rooms while Alsatians sniff my underwear for heroin wraps.
For a second, I have a sense of ‘the System’: a terrifying, clumsy, lumbering, inconstant, self-righteous, unself-critical, sloppy piece of state machinery. If it takes against you, you are never safe from it. If it can do what it did to Ruth and John, it can deliver the same outrage to anyone. It puts on a face of broad community concern. It wallows in baggy sanctimony, like American soldiers. It is always brutal in the details.
The police haven’t given Stuart time even to put together a bag with his toothpaste and a change of clothes.
‘Everything’s changed,’ Stuart acknowledges, returning at last.
I nod with resignation.
‘What you looking so miserable about? We got the wrong idea. It’s not the hearing today. It’s just an affray charge, what the Old Bill want added, because of me threatening them on the night. They’ve still got to set a date for the proper trial. I’ll have the summer, at least. It might be another six months yet.’
‘What about the attempted murder?’
‘Nah, that’s been dropped. I ain’t looking at life any more. It’s six years again.’
‘So you’re not about to go to prison?’
‘Course not. What are you on about? They can’t go giving bail and taking it away just like that. Thought you’d kno
w that by now, Alexander. This isn’t Nazi Germany!’
We return in high spirits. Stuart banters with the woman in the station café and buys me a hot bacon and fried-egg sandwich–the first I’ve ever had–and a can of beer each, which we slurp on all the way back to Ely.
It is good, I tell myself, to step aside from Stuart once in a while. The homeless are not a real community. They are like a bunch of schoolkids, held together by proximity and pettiness and angst and the rules of tit-for-tat. Stuart’s view of them is really no more than another view of Stuart. One needs to shuffle about among them to get a true view of homelessness. This is another advantage of my plan to investigate the claim that there are only nineteen people on the streets. It is not just an enjoyable desire to poke the city council in the eye but a love of truth that means I am now standing outside the city’s drug-dealing public toilets at five minutes to midnight, waiting for a suicidal Glaswegian beggar who owns a £600 greyhound and claims to be an expert on Formula One sports car engines, in order that I can go around waking up all his fellow homeless psychopaths and say, ‘Hello, I’m here to count you.’
I am covered in layers of thin clothes and have a tape recorder squashed into my pocket. I feel like a deep-sea diver putting on his suit–a social diver, I tell myself.
Another reason for my research is that Ruth and John’s hearing against their conviction is due in two months. The campaign has been rumbling on since their release, but it is time to up the pace again.
Jesus Green is bracketed by toilets. On the east side is a small car-park convenience, occupied by an old lady who cleans the floor and basins every day and wraps herself around one of the two lavatory bowls at night. On the west, a five-pissoir cottage, favoured by homosexuals, mentioned occasionally in indecency trials. Drug takers use the one I’m next to. It’s neatly placed: across the river from the dole office, the Battered Women’s Hostel, the Wintercomfort rough sleepers’ day centre, the seventy-four-bed hostel on Victoria Road–it’s the neighbourhood dispensary. It’s shaped like a cricket pavilion. In the other direction, across the moon-lit park and beeches, towards the glow of the city centre, are the spires of St John’s and Jesus Colleges. I stand in the lamplight to one side, looking as idiotically harmless as possible and glancing occasionally in the direction of the amicable crowd around the loos. Different events are going on at each of the entrances. ‘Women’ is the hot spot. There are lots of ragged bundles shuffling near the entrance of that one, lots of laughter, cans being tossed around. ‘Men’, on the other side, is dingier, colder–a hint of squalor. It is for the younger ragamuffin. ‘Wheelchair’ is heavy duty. Every now and then someone emerges from this last cubicle and knits his way unsteadily down the ramp into the dark over the river. No time for a friendly ‘Fuck this’, ‘Fuck that’–just straight off home.
Sam is five minutes late, ten minutes, fifteen minutes…then suddenly beside me. A thin, handsome man in his early twenties. ‘I’m taking a big risk, doing this.’ He indicates the bog moths outside ‘Women’. ‘If they find out, I’m for it. Police do a raid any time in the next two/three weeks they’ll put two and two together and make fucking eight hundred.’ He checks my £30 and asks for £10 more.
A scrappy fellow stumbles up and demands £3.
‘Three pounds–it’s just for smack–a bag costs a tenner,’ sniffs Sam. ‘That’s all they think about, tenners. I’ll bet you he’s only got seven.’ To the man: ‘Got seven, have ya’, mate?’
The other nods.
‘This bloke’s a journalist, mate. Counting the homeless.’
The man accepts this as a ‘no’ and clatters off across the footbridge.
‘What percentage on the street take drugs?’ I ask.
‘Two-thirds. A lot of them become homeless because they’re on it already. A lot of them start when they get homeless because of the cold. Someone says, “Here, have a toot of that. Warm you up.” ’
‘A dealer?’
‘No. Just friendship. Friendship gets you on the smack more than dealers do.’
And boredom keeps you there. ‘That’s the worst thing about the streets. It’s so fucking boring. What else is there to do twenty-four/seven? Who will be your friend, tell you where the food and dossholes are, if you willna’ associate with addicts? If you could get rid of the boredom of this life, a lot more people would give up drugs.’
It starts to drizzle. We squelch off across the park, stopping to check on the woman wrapped around the toilet bowl. ‘That’s your first one. Fucking tragic. The council wanna kick her out, but she’s the only one who keeps this place clean. Cleans it spotless every morning.’
Nevertheless, it occurs to me a bit unkindly, bad luck if anyone who’s caught short and has to sit there with a female tramp under their bottom. ‘I have a friend who used to sleep in the toilets.’
‘Ooh, aye? What’s his name?’
‘Stuart.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘Psycho?’
Sam shakes his head.
‘Knife Man Dan?’
‘New one to me.’
‘That mad bastard on Level D?’
Sam pauses a moment, then walks on. ‘There’s about fifty of them.’
It is while we’re walking along Sidney Street that I spot the man himself, stalking ahead in the lamplit street, green puffa jacket, hands in pockets, the modern vision of Mr Hyde.
‘ ’Ere, mate,’ Sam calls out.
But I cut him short–urgently–‘Shhh!’
We dart off down Green Street. ‘That was your second,’ protests Sam. ‘He sleeps out.’
‘No, I know about him. That’s Stuart. He’s got a tenancy.’
‘I’ve seen him sleeping out.’
‘Where?’
‘Doorways and that.’
I feel annoyed. Almost jealous. Stuart should have told me. Why has he kept this a secret?
‘You must be mistaken,’ I say firmly. ‘He’s in a flat. Been there eighteen months, in Waterbeach. Away from Cambridge.’
Two incidents occurred that night that are important to record.
First, halfway down Green Street, Sam remembered that there was a sleeping spot in one of the buildings. We found the entrance in a dingy courtyard that smelt of vegetables. Inside was a brightly lit garage. Sam immediately began fiddling around the tables and boxes looking for ‘mementos’ and I found the next entrance, into the half-empty office block above. Here we found a computer and dozens of party things: balloons, streamers, colourful hats, all cast off and lifeless under the light from the street lamp outside. In the corner, three syringes and tinfoil. What happened next frightened me so much that my memory has already become confused about it. We heard a security guard. In the nick of time we slipped back to the stairwell, down towards the garage–and discovered we were locked in. The exit door had been bolted. Sam battered at it with his shoulder. The footsteps of the guard clicked down the steps. Sam wrenched the door handle, saw another door, grabbed at that–locked, too–started kicking it. The guard’s footsteps now reached the landing. Click, click, click. One more turn and he’d have us.
When I think that I have now known Stuart for three years, met his parents, sister, social workers, been out with his friends, and studied and thought as hard as I can about his life, in detail, for two and a half of them, it seems astonishing that there have been only a handful of occasions when I have had a genuine sense of what it is like to be Stuart. What’s more, they are such apparently insignificant events: unexpected confusions about language, for example. This fright in the office block was another. Sam was terrified. He didn’t know what to do. He cowered like a rat.
‘We’ll have to bluff it,’ I said.
‘Don’t be fucking crazy.’ He banged his hand against the door again. ‘We’ll get six months, minimum.’
We bluffed it. I walked in front, met, at the top of the stairs, the guard, who turned out to be nothing of the sort, just a businessman working late, and asked in my
calmest tone if he would open the front door for us. He obliged without a hesitation.
It never for a second occurred to Sam that we might get away with it. I have never felt before so strongly the fear of insignificance, and the power of a good accent.
In my recollection it was almost the middle of the day as we walked away, and the street full of people. But it wasn’t. It was about 1 a.m. The town was empty. The pavement rang hollow. My memory has characterised my relief by filling it with crowds.
The second interesting incident took place half an hour later. Just as we were passing a large group of rough sleepers sprawled on the plastic seats at the bus station, they suddenly jumped up and started stumbling around, threatening to stab each other with hypodermic needles.
‘Where’s me fucking bike? Gimme me fucking bike!’ shrieked a man with a scraggy beard.
‘Stupid fucker!’ This was Suze. I’d seen her before. She belongs to one of those weird families that are all homeless. Her father, her twin sister, her brother, her uncle: social nightmares, every one. Four foot six, wrapped in swathes of blanket, Suze danced about Whispy Beard as if there is nothing in the world to fear. ‘I ain’t got your frigging bike! What’d I want your frigging bike for?’
‘It was ’ere a minute ago! Give it fucking back!’
‘In me pocket? Up me fanny? How can I give it back? Where’d I put it?’
‘Oh, fuck, this is all we need,’ Sam kept saying. ‘Oh, he’s got a gun, he’s got a gun, he’s a Yardie.’
Yardie? But he’s white.
There were eight in that bus shelter altogether. Overcome with a sudden sense of ‘responsibility’, Sam rushed into the fray and made it nine.
Not that Suze needed help. She’d got a can of lighter fuel out and was holding the nozzle up to her teeth.
‘I’ll burn your fucking face off!’ She pushed her head forward, ready to spit the ‘Yardie’ over with lighter gas. With her other hand she flicked a cigarette lighter on and off, while a tall red-headed girl started pogo dancing, and a man with lots of scars ripped off his shirt and was busy trying to add to his collection of skin marks by getting in the way of anyone with anything sharp.