5. The New Occupant

e new occupant

Jimmy’s position was pretty desperate but it could have been worse. People didn’t cross the street to avoid him as he shuffled up the street. He didn’t stink of piss and his hair wasn’t horrendously knotted and matted with lth. He didn’t have a beard that was alive with vermin or running sores al over his dirt-blackened skin. Not like the wretched wreck of a man who was shuffling up Webb Street, past al the houses that Jimmy had brie y believed he owned.

e man’s name was Bob, not that it mattered. He didn’t need a name because nobody spoke to him now. Sometimes he nearly forgot it himself.

Except it was hanging round his neck on the ID that the people who ran the Big Issue had sorted out for him a year or two before. at had been during a brief period when some charity worker had tried to get him together; they tried occasional y, those charity workers, although Bob doubted that they ever would again. He was too far gone now, even for the freshest and most evangelical of do-gooders. He stil wore the ID, even though it was at least a year since he’d been together enough to sel a magazine. It was useful when trying to get a bed for the night. e hostels always needed a name and ID.

For their forms. But he didn’t stay in hostels now either: they were too crowded, crowded with people better able to argue their way into a bed than he. A whole different breed from what he was used to. IT consultants and estate agents. Estate agents becoming homeless? at was funny.

Bob had seen them al . He was rst-generation street. A pioneer. A survivor from that time in the eighties when suddenly towns had become ooded by young people sitting in doorways. Some people didn’t remember now, but if you were over forty- ve or fty you might recal that there had been a time when there were virtual y no homeless people on the streets of Britain and begging was almost unknown.

Begging? Unknown in Britain? e thought actual y made Bob laugh. But it was true, when he was a kid that was how it had been. It had al changed when Mrs atcher made it so young people could no longer claim housing bene t if they’d left home voluntarily. Overnight, it seemed, every abused kid in the country was on the street.

Getting abused.

Bob had been one of them and he’d been on the street ever since. He’d seen the doorway population change from almost exclusively young runaways in the eighties to the poverty-trapped underclass that emerged in the nineties through the boom years of the squeegie merchants to the shawled, shuffling Eastern European women of the early noughties with their drugged babies and sad little notes on bits of torn-up cardboard saying, ‘Hungre. Plese help.’

Now it seemed to Bob that things were coming a weird ful circle as the very yuppies who had tossed him coins when he rst hit the streets more than twenty years before were joining him in the doorways. ‘What was al that about?’ he asked himself through a methylated, petrol-scented haze.

No, Bob didn’t apply for hostels now. He was just too screwed up. Mental y and physical y. His sores festered, his mind raged with whatever drug, drink or solvent he could push at it and nobody went within ten feet of him. He was literal y dying as he walked. But it was taking a while. He marvel ed at how his body kept on keeping on. And wondered why it bothered.

at night Bob found himself in Hackney. In Webb Street. A semi-derelict and entirely abandoned property development that had run out of cash. At one end of the street some of the properties had been nearly renovated. ese desirable bil ets had been squatted by smart, savvy class-war warriors with dreadlocks and posh accents who changed locks and sorted out the leccy.

e other end of the street had not been touched, and the houses were almost as rotten and forlorn as Bob himself. It was into one of these that Bob managed to creep with his shot of meth and the remains of a hamburger that he’d found in a bin. e door had been boarded up but kids had long since kicked that in. He decided not to trust the stairs. His bones were brittle and thin and Bob knew that if he were to put his foot through a rotten oorboard he would probably leave it there. Turning into the rst room he found, a room which had once been an elegant reception area and more recently home to a whole family of Somalis, Bob lay down on the boards and went to sleep.

Bob was not quite the new occupant that Jimmy Corby, the nominal owner and developer of Webb Street, had had in mind when he began his development project. But then, as Bob often muttered to himself, it was a funny old world.

OceanofPDF.com