Chapter 3

In the beginning - [some of the filling]

That morning it was still raining from the night before, not rain in its full and proper sense that could nourish the soil, but a steady, grey drivel, useful for nothing. I didn’t know what time it was because I didn’t own a watch any more, or a mobile phone, or frankly anything that people utilised to tell what time it is. I actually didn’t own much of anything any more, except for some odd trinkets that I kept at the bottom of a badly damaged sports bag in a plastic bag. It’s amazing what you will save from a our former life when you really have to make a decision. I don’t mean sit and think about it for half an hour.

I mean shove it in a bag with some cloths and leave. I took all the usual sensible stuff, a few blankets, and warm cloths, a waterproof cagoule [that turned out to be a shitty mistake], some socks and t-shirts. Of course underpants, for some reason you always think that underpants are going to be useful, they’re not, not when you can’t take a bath. All the things that could have really helped us where back where we’d left them, but that’s how it is. You forget, you get soft and stop knowing instinctively, at least I remembered the warmth and dry part.

Then there where the other things, the stupid things that took up space in a sealed plastic bag. Inside there was a Champaign cork, a small post card, and a picture of my younger brother. It had become tattered, barely visible and creased beyond repair to the point that people said that they couldn’t see anything like a face, but I could. I saw it glaring out at me every time I took it out and looked at it [which wasn't all that often].

There were also other things, a stupid watch that I’d bought the day I’d got my first job. To this day I have no idea why I chosen a watch that told two different times on the same face with two different dials, At the time it seemed sophisticated, and I wanted to impress people with gow world wise I was.I felt the lack of any other qualifications but my degree pressing down on me with every interview, so the cloths I war go more and more ostentatious. I don’t think I ever wore it after I got that job.

The thing didn’t work anymore anyway, either the battery had run down, or it had been a victim of bath water. I also had a broken Mont Blank pen with a gold nib that I’d used to write a story that had been submitted after being typed up, then promptly rejected. When most publishers reject a story contrary to popular belief they don’t send nice letters, they just turn it into a film five or ten years down the line if they actually like it. Why the hell would they cut you in for anything, that’s why this is on a blogg, and not in a letter with the customary sealed copy at the solicitors. At least I’d actually had the bollocks to submitted it. I used to tell myself that every day when I failed to write anything new, and it still felt crap even to that day, but I just couldn’t let go of the pen. It was like I’d poured something into it.

There was nothing all that special really, just some reminders of where I’d nearly been, how I’d nearly got to that final plateau, then slipped and fallen. A lesson learned. Never trust anyone in business, no matter how well you think you know them.

The streets around us where still empty, maybe the odd early riser, but nothing apart from that, and both the air and the light bathing in stillness had that cold fractured quality to it that lingers with the frost, and just as quickly melted into the fullness of the day. On the main streets, a few blocks away, commuters had started pouring out of tube stations in dribs and drabs, and off the busses, slowly filling the streets and food courts with an ever growing flood of cogs in the human machine. Nothing reminds you more about the functional aspect of society as not being a direct part of it anymore. They filed into coffee shops, grumpy with turned up collars due to the light drizzle, getting their grandee lattes, and handmade sandwiches to go. At a guess I’d would have said that it was probably around five thirty going on six, that point where suddenly the masses surge into the streets on their way to whatever part they played in all of it. I could tell as the noise grew, people pardoning each other pushing through the now growing crowd, grunting, complaining, walking, all the noise rising from round the corner, and the weather still clinging feebly to that last bitter ember of autumn.

The cardboard box we’d slept in was now soggy, and had already begun to sag with a thin frost covering its outer shell. All it really covered was our heads anyway, so none of it really mattered all that much anyway. Jenny was already awake, crammed next to each other. and both still dressed from the night before, and the night before that, and so on, and so on, but still covered by the damp blankets. I just didn’t want to pull back those sheets, well blankets really, [no place for sheets out there], and actually face the world, the fucking rain filled shitty drab world we had to live in day after day, night after night, like a drudge that never ended without any real conclusion like a funeral, to give you closure. One look at Jenny, and I knew she felt the same way. That bitter sense of loss that never left you alone, but I also knew it was only a matter of time before some cop came along to name checked us, they all knew are names, not our real names, that was the truly dumb part about it all. The best place to hide turned out to be the most populated part of England. At least 40% of the people out there where not who they claimed to be, but then on the whole the cops name checked people to piss them off. Getting name checked is like an insult, like saying you’re scum so we don’t trust you, which might have been true for a lot of people, but for those people who had simply ended up on the street it was a massive daily slap in face. One guy I know got stopped, and name checked, then searched six times simply walking down Oxford Street. I mean you’d think they’d have a better system in place so total waists of money like that didn’t occur.

Me, I had become a mental nut job, less chance of actually being arrested. The Old Bill really didn’t like having the mentally ill in custody. Too much could go wrong in their cells, and on the whole it was hard work. People with mental problems often know their rights down to the last paragraph, usually because they’d had them abused so fucking often. Then there where the really gone people, the drinkers who screamed at passers-by, they weren’t really part of anyone’s club accept their own. Everyone tended to avoid them, they were just too volatile, some of them where OK when they were sober, but those where rare events indeed. Most of the drinkers where deeply disturbed to begin with, and pouring really cheap cider down your through on a daily basis was not actually a good cure for serious personality disorders. The ones who actually coped the best with mental problems where actually the ones who smoked gear, not crack, that one you could never tell which way it could push people, but just smoking a bag or so a day, it usually kept most unstable people a lot more stable than their allotted medication. Because they turned up for meetings with their care services not looking wild eyed, and talking like a crazy person, they were usually sent back to their hostel rather than being sectioned. The drinkers never got to the point of assessment. They just disappeared one day, no one ever asked what had happened to them, nobody cared, so it didn’t matter, but every time it happened I couldn’t help think that they were someone’s child. At some point somebody had loved them, cared about them, maybe hoped that they might go to university and get a job and a wife and child. On the other hand a lot of them where from children’s homes from back in the sixties and seventies when things where really shitty. Like most people on the streets I didn’t really talk that much to them. As I said they weren’t really in anyone’s club but their own, and even that wasn’t a guaranteed membership. It would all depend what they came with. A fresh twenty pound note or a big bottle of booze and they were personality of the day. A shaky hand and a plea for some help, no one generally wanted to know.

The care home kids of our generation where all basically gear or crack heads, or both. That was more of a structured club, and a step up the ladder. People in that world in small ways looked after each other, sometimes to the point of sharing. The really important part that decided where you were in street pecking order [apart from being able to beat the crap out of someone] was how you made your money. People often teamed up in twos and threes. It was all broken down into beggars, runners, big issue vendors, pickpockets, cons, and shop lifters. Shop lifters where usually hard core crack heads and basically used crack as a way to dispose of the cash they made. It was the thrill they wanted, and they’d often smoke the stuff in the middle of Covent Garden, in full view of all with the “Fuck You” almost stencilled on their soul for police to read. One guy we knew was such a bad arse that the police wouldn’t go anywhere near him unless they were in a large team. He’d walk past pairs of patrolling officers and smile at them with wrapped up rocks in the gaps where his teeth should have been. He was firmly at the top of the food chain, in more ways than one. He once beat up this guy who had ripped him off for ten pounds until he was unconscious. Unsatisfied that the guy had got the message he slapped him back awake and carried on kinging the shit out of him. As he put it “What would be the point, he wouldn’t be able to feel it, would he.” No one ever argued with that logic.

We fitted into the beggar category, not really all that safe, but a lot less harmful than running cons, shop lifting, or pickpocketing. The safety in those practices had nothing to do with their legality [which they weren’t in any sense], and everything to do with the time you spent doing them. The longer it took to make money, the more likely you where to get caught doing it. A good pick pocket could get two or three hundred pounds in a few minutes, after maybe ten or twenty minutes doing some solid scouting. That was the most dangerous part and a lot of dips worked in pairs, or even in threes. The first person would scout out the mark, the second would do the actual lift, and the third would make the swap so that the person who did the dip didn’t actually have anything on them if they got stopped. That was one of the simpler schemes. However being junkies they usually couldn’t manage anything more complex. In reality the majority worked alone lifting wallets from drunken execs. Shop lifters on the other had used to run elaborate scams where some reasonably well dressed person, usually a girl, would go in first, and generally act somewhat erratically, looking at CD, gazing around and looking for cameras. This would generally draw the attention of the security guards. Meanwhile some other, really clean well-dressed guy would walk in, strip off the security tags, or just plonk them into a foil lined bag. A third person would come in as the girl was leaving and chuck a bunch of tags through the detectors as the real lifter was leaving with a bag full of DVDs at the other end of the shop. All the alarms go off, the girl gets detained, and the two guys walk away. They even had it down to a pay scale.

That’s not to say that they had it easy. Firstly they would get recognised, also they needed to keep up a really clean image, and look like they were just on their way to the office. This one guy we shared a bash with would hit the same branch of Boots every morning as they were opening and all the office crew where buying their sandwiches. I honestly has no idea before then how much you could get for a pocket full of razors, and the mad thing was that he kept on getting away with it. Every morning without fail his guy would be round the corner waiting for him, and he’d sell the lot in one go. As long as we knew him he never got caught. His girlfriend did. He was waiting for her to get out of lockup when we met him sleeping behind Cat’s. We’d been walking all night looking for a safe place to sleep [not actually an easy task at two in the morning on a Saturday night in the west end] when we noticed that the back of that theatre hadn’t been fenced off yet. That was the point where we ran into Tom the shop lifter, a skinny, well dressed kid, never asked him his age but he couldn’t have been older than early twenties. At first he was completely resilient to the idea of letting us sleep there.

“Where fucking exhausted” Jenny interrupted his diatribe on keeping his space safe from plunderers, and scam artists who would have all their mates round in a heartbeat jacking, up and dumping used needles where they stood. He was a junkie, but he was really careful about what happened to all the works he used. They always went into a sin bin and back to a chemist at the end of the week, or whenever they were full. He was actually very civically minded, and was a clean and quite a positive person. He was just a hopeless shoplifting drug addict with a girlfriend in jail.

Begging wasn’t legal, but it strictly wasn’t illegal either at the time in the sense that it wasn’t a recordable offence, which meant that they usually didn’t bother taking your prints, and would just arraign you to appear at Bow Street if you had an address. If you weren’t in a hostel [like we were] they’d hold you over night in the cells. If it was a Saturday night you were really fucked because there was no court in session on a Sunday. If you could blag an address, and they didn’t check, sometimes you’d get lucky and they might even give you back your cash. The mental act helped a lot with that one, but not always.

At first we would beg together, like a tag team [I way preferred doing that], but we soon realised that you made more money if you split up. Single young women would get a lot of drops [amongst other things] from middle age business men. Slightly mental older blokes on the other hand, not looking at the crowd and looking a bit fucked up, tended to do pretty well in the richer parts of town, where middle aged socialites shopped, especially if you appeared to have once come from a good family [which I had]. The problem was that the more time I spent by myself, away from Jenny for most of the day in a bustling crowd, the less it became an act. I hated the way people looked at me, and I just couldn’t bring myself to ask people for change. By far the safest way to beg was move around. Sitting with a cup and a blanket was like putting up a sign saying “Arrest me.” The problem was that to effectively walk about and beg you needed a back story, a reason for why you needed change. A lot of people would just give the usual “I haven’t eaten for a day.” But if you were looking for cash for something else, you ran the risk of being bough breakfast. Frankly it always really pissed me off when some nut went all mental because some guy bought him a sandwich. Before we discovered that restaurants and supermarkets threw out they sell by date food, those sandwiches kept us alive.

The biggest problem with not being able to walk around and blend into the crowd was that I had a pretty nasty outstanding warrant for something no so trivial, and one that I knew would catch up with me at some point. But that’s the thing when you drop off the map, you have to forget who you are, and become someone else, some nut job [not so far from the truth by that point]. To the police we were siblings, something we tried to keep up with people we didn’t really know well, we were just brother and sister fallen on bad times. So far it had worked out, and no one had actually taken my finger prints, but it was really only a matter of time.

I pulled back the now damp tatty assortment of worn out blankets that where still covering us, we still tried to sleep under the same sheets back then, before real winter came down and the blankets being too small for two people we were pretty much forced to sleep each alone in our own cocoons. The top blanket, woollen with holes in it, was covered in what might otherwise have been a beautiful sparkling frost, but when your colds as fuck all you see is more things that are cold.

As I pulled the layers back a cold blast of wind ran through my clothes like they didn’t even exist. It felt like icy pins striping the flesh from my bones.

“Jesus.” I cried out loud, Jenny just moaned, and shot me a pitiful look that suddenly brought back a with a big fucking side order of guilt. Without me, none of this would have happened, was this really the adventure I’d promised her?

“We’ve got to go beg.” I said in a pleading guilty manner, hoping to assuage the bad psychosis tunnelling through my soul.

“Yeah, I know.” She said bitterly, crouched and hugging herself on the concrete stair way we’d slept that night.

“Besides, I want to get away from here before any of the tenants get up and go to work, if you know what I mean.” That was yet another danger of sleeping on someone’s porch. They could come out and start pissing you off whenever they felt it was appropriate. These people actually resent someone sleeping on a piece of covered concrete outside their flat. We got up and crammed the blankets into our bags, slung them over our shoulders and started the trudge to Euston station. I still had a tatty Starbucks cup from the day before, and my feet where cold and wet and all we wanted to do was hold Jenny in my arms in a warm bed, but instead we split up and made our way to our respective pitches. It was around this point that I started questioning our move from the west end to Euston, but it was a massive commuter hub, and there where a lot of terraced houses that had been turned into flats in the 90’s, which mean porches that sheltered you from the rain in some small way. It didn’t actually stop you getting wet. Rain falls sideways in the wind, that you learn quickly.

The main reason we’d decided to up bags and go to Euston was that we had a really great stairwell at the back of this official building that was covered, and below street level, which mean that drunk people didn’t pee on you. Unfortunately the whole thing was ruined by this runner who’d come down and smoke crack once she found out about the place. I mean it was sheltered from the wind, lit, and hidden from street view. Unfortunately they also had camera mounted to look directly at the stairs where she’d blaze up, and that was the end of the cups of coffee in the morning, and a usually peaceful rest.

Back at Euston, within two hours I was soaked through to the skin, plus I’d hardly made a penny, but I had to stay, there was nowhere else to go anyway. Besides which, I still needed six pounds. That was the way we did it, we’d each go out into the world with a fixed target and beg up at least that amount if we could manage it. Then we’d go and find each other, and put our money together. If one of us got nicked, we’d leave a penny on the floor, or the sill of the shop window outside wherever we were begging at the time.

Today was getting worse, for me at least. At the best of times I hated crowded places, they made me feel panicky and sick, that day I couldn’t even look people in the eye, it was all I could do just to sit there with my head down, and hold a really tatty cup that had more water than cash in it. Then some girl started handing out those stupid free commuter magazines, the ones with all the ads in them for jobs and services no one ever wanted to do. I just sat there in the rain holding my soggy paper cup, and said nothing to anyone. I just let them all pass by, shoes and legs and smart clean trousers on their way to work. It happened to me like that sometimes. The world would seem too big and too loud and splinter into multiple facets, and the sharp nasty ones would lodge in my brain, and I’d be stranded at the centre, unable to communicate with anyone, unable to move. The one thing that helped was the one thing that eluded me, and became harder and harder to get. The problem is that when you sit there all quiet looking pathetic, people disregard you, you become invisible, and they pass you by. You have to look them in the eye, make a connection with them, become cheery, a cheeky cartoon of a homeless man, plus you need to look out for the cops. Cops don’t like beggars because it’s basically it’s paper work without any real arrest stats, but it’s also an easy bust for them so they can get back to the station on a rainy day [like that day]. The really fucked up part is that even though it wasn’t a recordable offence, which meant that it didn’t go on your criminal record, it did feed into the street crime stats. That’s right the massive drop in street robbery is nothing more than a crackdown on homeless people. They did it every time there was a big story in the paper about some pour guy getting beaten up or killed for his mobile. The funniest part was that getting caught begging meant a fine, which you had to beg to be able to pay. It’s a really god social system, that honestly works, I mean just look at all the clean streets and drug free estates in this country.

All I wanted to do was go somewhere and curl up and go to sleep, but I couldn’t, Jenny was counting on me, just like I’d counted on her a thousand times before, just like I was counting on her now. My brain slipped back to better times; being at college, learning, doing, hoping. That was the best time. I couldn’t really put my finger on why because it wasn’t real pressure or anything, and that’s what busted me up in the end, made me start drinking like a fool, and then started me on that road again that lead back to drugs. That and a really fucked up relationship tagged to a massive mortgage. There was something about college however, something that was at least hopeful in a way that had never been present in my life before. Sure, I had friends back then, people I liked and who I hope liked me, but none of them where here now, when I needed them, needed their support and help because maybe if they’d been there I might not have been where I was either.

My mind started to drift to a day long ago when I was studying. We were preparing a report, part of a marked assessment, when suddenly a voice came out of nowhere.

“Wake up…” I could feel her hands shaking me “Wake up, you can’t fall asleep.”

It was something I already knew, but it doesn’t matter how much you know, it how you react to what you know. It was Jose, thin like a rake, short with tatty shoulder length dirty blond hair.

“Don’t you know you can die if you fall asleep in the cold, it’s raining for fucks sake?”

She screamed the words at me as I opened my eyes.

“It’s not winter yet.”

I replied grumbling. I knew she was right, but there was a part of me that just didn’t care anymore. She crouched down beside me.

“How much are you short.”

She said expectantly, with a thin hint of concern. She was a runner for a number of the local dealers, she got clients for them, and they gave her drugs in return, it was a simple arrangement, not really fair though given that different people spent different amounts, and they only counted heads, not cash.

“A fiver”

I said gloomily digging into the pocket of my ratty coat trying not to disturb my rat that was asleep.

“You’ll make it.”

She said in a somewhat weak motivational manner. Clearly she’d attended one of those

“How to motivate and manage people” seminars.

“Just don’t fall asleep”

she said emphatically, with somewhat more conviction.

”You could go into hyperthermia, ok.”

The OK part came like a massive red dot at the end of a familiar and dull sentence, completely out of place, and way too upbeat.

Everyone on the street knew not to fall asleep in the rain, I knew it, but it was difficult when you were freezing and soaking wet, and not making any money. Difficult not to just drift off into some place better where there’s no pain or hunger, where all your dreams are real if only for a moment.

“How long you figure?” 

I knew she wasn't asking because of my health and state of mind, she wanted her little slice of the pie, but then who could blame her. Running, now that’s the other way to maintain a habit out in the urban wilds. Everyone had to survived in one way or another, but I’d never run for anyone, the price was just too high if you got caught you where don for supply, and the rewards weren't exactly bountiful.

Just remember one thing, that sometimes when someone comes up to you with an empty petrol can saying 

“I’ve run out of petrol”, 

“I’ve had my wallet stolen”, that sort of thing, they might actually be telling you the truth.

The thing was that at the time I wasn’t feeling depressed, and that made it completely impossible to talk to people in any meaningful way. By that I don’t mean blag them out of cash with sob stories like 

“I really need to get into a hostel for the night”. 

When I wasn’t on a massive downer I’d just chat to people on the street, they’d stop and start talking to me about my life. I suppose in those situations there was something approachable about me in some way. I’d make them laugh, talk about how I’d get by, what it was like. A lot of people where genuinely interested in what it was really like to be homeless, and they wanted it from the horse’s mouth, unfortunately a lot of those horses where actually ponies. Unfortunately that was yet another thing that got to you in the end. Constantly running over and over how and why some guy like you had ended up living on the streets. When you’re talking to a complete stranger you tend to be a lot more honest, and admit both to them and yourself things you’d otherwise not be honest about, You end up having the same heart rending conversations over and over again, embedding that sense of failure deeper and deeper int who you are until one day pissed up cunt comes along and utters the immortal and completely original words 

“Get a job you scum” 

and you think all those thought’s you know aren't real. What it’s like really like to be homeless, how it’s a disgrace, how you are worthless, in the end it makes no real difference, you just end up feeling crap. Sure Jeremy Kyle can go into the city and “Reveal to the nation” all the scams that go on, but the cunt can’t spend a week in a council flat without losing his mind.

One summer’s day we stood outside Shaftsbury theatre shouting “You too can be homeless, ask me how.” We made a ton of cash that day, just by fooling around. I was messing about on a skateboard, doing flips, and spins. I’d found it the night before, and I was calling out random jokes to passers-by about having nowhere to live, making it seem like a trivial thing. One guy dropped me a tenner and told me that I was funnier than the comic he’d paid to see that afternoon, it made me feel great, like I’d actually done something useful for a change. It’s self-perpetuating that attitude. If you’re down you get more down, if you’re up you get more up, at least I do, and that’s the maddening thing. You actually make more money if you look and sound happy, even if you are so depressed that you can barely function. Most people managed it, but something in me just kept getting worse, these where definitely the bad times. Maybe it’s just that people don’t like to think about the prospect of their own progeny in the same situation, or maybe being happy allows them to get past something that usually blocks out those ailing faces, makes them feel that deep down inside there still ok, still a functional human beings with souls intact. Money, that’s all you need? Money can’t buy you love, but on the streets, getting it can buy you sanity…

Anyway, by late afternoon I’d migrated to a bus stop on New Oxford Street with the same soggy cup, with the same wet shoes and feet, and wet change, looking down at the wet pavement wandering what had happened to my life. I felt cursed, but then maybe, just maybe it was all bad luck, it had to go somewhere and I was the one that caught it. In truth all I really wanted was my camper van back, and that big bag full of drugs I used to have at my disposal day and night. Just for a while we had everything we thought we wanted, money, a place to live, and everything we needed to keep us stoned for a long time, and it did. The problem was that it wasn’t what we really wanted deep down, what we wanted was our child back. We’d given up drugs because Jenny had become pregnant, but one night she was given a couple of lines to smoke. Maybe not the smartest move, but not the massive indulgent, and self-destructive chaotic behaviour that the Social Service rather the now inaptly named “Children and families services” protested to the court that I personally live a “Chaotic and unmanageable life style” Direct quote. This was at a time when I was running my own business and making in excess of £130,000 a year profit, not turn over, profit. I’d love to know, having met and known chaotic users, how anyone leading that life style could make that kind of income working for some of the largest companies in the world. The really great part of the way this was set up at the time [don’t really know how things are now] was that you essentially had no access to the people making the decisions. Our solicitor, who turned out to be completely incompetent, refused to actually do anything that I told him, and treated everything I told him [as did everyone else], as some wild and made up fantasy. In the minds of the court I was a drug dealer. That could be the only explanation for the money, and any other accounts where false and simply there to launder money. Naturally they couldn’t actually prove anything, so they couldn’t take my assets, but they did freeze them, meaning that I couldn’t sack the now court appointed solicitor [by the numbers idiot] who was completely destroying our lives.

One day, sitting on the steps of the family court waiting from Jenny’s mother to arrive it dawned on me that even if I could get my clients to testify in court, it wouldn’t change anything except that I wouldn’t have any clients anymore. Dawn, Jenny’s mother arrived in a well-appointed dress looking for all the world as though she should have been representing us instead of the shabby looking man walking next to her. Clearly they’d just had a meeting. I’d already decided, and Jenny was crying and trying not to show it in the strong wind that wrapped it’s self around us like the opposite of a blanket. “Can we go somewhere and get a cup of coffee or something. “ I said despondently. “I’m afraid I have no money” I said shamefully, then mumbled “thanks to dickwad over there.” He obviously heard because he shot me a look, the one he obviously reserved of unruly drunken and squabbling couples he’d represented in the past that meant ‘I’ll be seeing you latter’. I knew that after that conversation I’d never have to see that incompetent freak ever again, and that if I did he would not be walking away from it.

The deal was simple. I knew that we were going to lose. Dickwad had made sure of that, and had actually pushed for it “For the benefit of the child.” I can only hope that he’s in a bar somewhere spending his last pound on some foul drink in the hope that the massive crushing debt he’s in won’t catch up with him, followed by two men bend on his physical destruction, in the literal sense. Anyway, we worked out a deal where we would sign over custody of our child to Jenny’s parents, with the idea that when all this blew over we’d be able to get him back. Life is never that kind. Because I was now being investigated for distribution of large amounts of class a drugs, all my money was frozen, and I hadn’t paid my mortgage in months. No one would touch me because of the curs that had been screeched out by the court action and social services. I even phone a friend and tried to get hold of some money to pay the smallest part of my mortgage that would allow me to keep my house for a moths, but at £1500 a moths, even that was a lot of cash, and the best of friends run scared when they hear the whispers from un named third parties. Needless to say they bailed, every one of them, and I never got another call, not that I could have accepted it anyway, my mobile service got turned off, and the handset [which was still worth something at the time] got sold for so little that it actually pissed me off. Thankfully before all this had happened I’d bought a camper van with the idea that Jenny and I could come with me on contracts, and instead of sleeping in a faceless hotel, we’d stay in it as a family. Of course by this time the system had created what they had set out to prove. We’d started just smoking a quarter of a bag between us because of the stress and depression that knowing our child was in a premature unit being force feed morphine, unable to eat and getting sicker. Then the pressure just kept on mounting with each new civil servant they sent to ask us the same old questions, and the answers where taken without any relevance to any previous answers that we had been given, it was almost as though they knew they were driving us into the situation that we had been accused of. I stopped working, for one thing Social service’s made it impossible for me to keep appointments by demanding that I was available 24/7 for their investigation, regardless of any commercial commitments that I might have had. Trying to persuade some pin head that you are running a business and that it’s not convenient for you to meet them at 2 PM that day with half an hour’s notice was not really the best thing for my business. Clients didn’t find it a positive point of my business strategy either, this after I’d built a contact list that most consultancy groups would killed for and a reputation to go along with it.

After it happened a couple of times, and I had to ditch jobs to meet some bearded cunt driving a moss ridden opal who looked at my car with more than just envy told me everything I ever needed to know. They had all the power in this situation, and they were going to abuse it as much as they had to in order to satisfy their inferiority complex about not getting into their chosen profession, which I doubt was a career in social services, but more importantly they needed to meet the initial criteria that they’d used to take our child off us. We had about three of them in a row, each one of them walked around our house peering at all we owned, gazing with narrowed envious eyes asking themselves ‘How can a couple of junkies own two houses worth a half a million pounds, and a brand new Lotus, with a new Ford Fiesta.’

We’d both been in previous relationships before we moved in next door to each other along with our partners. It was the culmination of all those pointless hopes and dreams, of those things turning from emotionally barren, sexually vacuous and pointless mechanical acts turning into something valid. When we met each other all the pieces fell like dominoes into place. But it took something like five years for us to get together, by that time I’d left the company I’d helped to start, worked for a consultancy, and then started my own business. A it was a very successful business. They took our new born child off us because he sneezed, and as a result then pumped him full of so much Morphine that he couldn't eat. They’d try to feed him, but because he was barely conscious he couldn’t swallow, actually he could barely understand that he was being fed.

Of course eventually the money ran out, and by that time I couldn’t get a client because I was a mess, all I could do was sell some of the drugs in an attempt to make more money before we couldn’t afford anything at all. The camper van broke down and we had it towed to a council estate on the edge of Peckham. In retrospect it wasn’t really a very good decision. All the local kids got curious about the van, and one night we came back to find it had been torched. From that moment we slept on the streets, begging for whatever we could get. Some days were ok, we made out, got enough to eat and keep our habits in check. Some days we weren’t that lucky. Before it got burned up we had two vehicles, a camper van, and one of those little mini vans. Jenny had bought it for a ton back when we still had some money. It wasn’t the best means of transportation we’d ever owned, but it worked, and it was taxed and insured, and we could use it to get into town and back and sleep and eat in the camper.

The small van we lost one day to a postal truck that jumped out of a small turning at five in the morning, just as the sun was coming up round over the horizon straight into my eyes. Jenny had refused to drive because she said she was too tired, I was feeling way too sick, but I did anyway because someone had to. I didn’t even see the guy as he just came out of nowhere, and drove straight into my oncoming path. I slammed into him at thirty five miles an hour, and crippled the cheap old minivan, buckled the front wheel all the way so we skidded to a halt some twenty yards from the impact and came to a halt at the curb. I remember clinging onto the steering wheel running over the events in slow motion, piece by piece trying to work out what had just happened and how I was still alive. It possibly one of the most terrifying experiences I’d ever had. For a moment everything was in free fall, nothing from the future was certain unless I made it so, the ultimate Schrodinger’s cat experiment done with two people, and I still had no explanation. All I could work out was that it had come suddenly and with no warning, but I there wasn’t any panic involved for some reason, just a calculated thought process as the world slowed down and I tried to create some kind of shift in momentum of the now large block of metal traveling across the tarmac. As it was actually happening I was as calm as mill pond, it was only when the chunk of cheap metal came to a stop that I started to panic. It was only after the initial examination of events that led to an emphatic conclusion that we’d been involved in a crash that I stared to panic. The inescapable though strangled every other thought ‘We could have been killed’. That simple, that obvious and yet it wouldn’t let go of me, it was all that I could think about. I kept touching myself looking for red stains where some loose piece of metal had pierced my spleen, or my liver. Then I looked over at Jenny who’d been sitting with her feet on the dash board, half asleep. She looked utterly shocked to the core. It was only then that I felt dislodged from my own self obsession, the presence of another human being that I loved who’d been in all the same, if not more danger than I had been.

“Are you ok?” I asked her in a shaky voice that barely drew enough breath to push out the words. She just looked at me, her nose bleeding, disorientated look on her face, just dumb struck. It was the postal workers fault there was no doubt in that, but we were shabby lowlifes with a van full of crap that included a crossbow, a toy bow, but a crossbow none the less. I could see light returning to her eyes, that quality of thoughtful consideration of the facts. If she’d been more together she might have done it the other way round, but she reached into the back of the van and took out the crossbow and handed it to me with the words “Take it back to the camper”. The camper was nearly two miles away, but she wanted me to stash. Basically leaving the scene of an accident, which hadn’t occurred to me at the time because of the fucking swirl in my brain that was starting to subside as I put it under the blanket I had rapper around me, but not enough to reason clearly about the situation. I just did what she told me to without thinking.

By the time I got back to the van, put the bow in the bedding, there was a knock on the door, and it wasn’t that much of a stretch to realise that it was the police. I opened the door and there they were, standing to attention as they always did when they had a positive message to impart to someone, positive form their perspective that was for me. It was a massive slap in the face as I realised what I’d just done. Actually I’d realised it the moment I heard the knock on the door.

The one thing I’d completely forgotten was that a few weeks ago some random guy came to us and asked if we’d drive him to a chemist that was out of town, so we did. It turned out that he had two blank prescription sheets that he needed to fill out and cash at a chemist that might not be to suspicious. Jenny immediately knew where to go, and how to fill out the script. She learned way too fast all this worked, like it was a game or something, a fantasy she’d been dying to try out like playing Sims. She pulled a perfect copy of the local doctor’s handwriting, asking for fifty ten milligram tablets of Valium for a man who he had the ID for. We waited round the corner and he pulled it off without a hitch. Unfortunately he left the other prescription in our van, and I put it in my pocket with completely honest intention of giving it back to him when we tracked him down. He’d told us that he’d been in town where most people sold downers [That one I’m not telling people]. We didn’t, and I forgot about it, but when the police took me in for the crash, they searched me and found the script, and charged me with handling stolen goods. The good thing was that they got my height, eye colour, and tattoos all wrong so that when a warrant finally caught up with me, it didn’t stick, but on the day they nicked me it was a real pain in the arse.

The crossbow also turned out to be a thorn in my side. One morning we were waiting by the bus stop with our blankets when a white BMW screeched to a halt and these two wide boys scum bags got out and started hurling abuse at us. I knew this was a dangerous situation, and I was right, it escalated so fucking quickly that it blurred into a mas of tangled motion. Before we knew it we were in a serious fight, with two not so small men, one of whom pulled off my shoe, probably because I was kicking him in the ribs, as hard as I could and making crunching noises. They did their best to keep us on the ground, that’s what pricks do, they try to get you in a position where more than one person can attack you and you c can’t attack. In simple terms I can’t really complain, it’s simple tactics, but you need to make sure that when you employ tactics that the person you attacking doesn’t know how to fuck up what you’re doing. I knew exactly how to fuck up what they were doing. A few cracked ribs and a broken nose [courtesy of Jenny] and they soon found their way back to their car and vanished. The next day I took out the crossbow with us when we went to town. It wasn’t much of a weapon, probably couldn’t even puncture skin, but it was black and made of fibre glass, and from a distance looked real enough unless you knew what you were looking at. Partly we had it in case they showed up again [it was the bus stop round the corner from where out crippled camper van was parked], and secondly because some guy had said he’d give me a tenner for it the day before. So we stood at the bus stop, and the local kids started throwing stones at us, so I cocked the thing and they ran off. After that I didn’t think any more of it, until a police car cruised by with a van in tow. I looked for the bus, the car turned around and suddenly five semi-automatic weapons were pointing at us.

“On the ground, on the ground…”

That loud barking sound just came out of nowhere. Obviously I obeyed. I’d heard that tone before and knew that it was usually accompanied by serious intentions, the kind that could put a bullet in your skull.

“Hands behind your head…” Someone shouted.

I obeyed and interlocked my hands behind my head at the nape of my neck. I could feel someone putting handcuffs on me while I could now see all the mussels of the guns trained on me. Someone kicked the bow away and picked it up. I heard him mutter “It’s just a toy.” Whatever it was, or they thought it was, it didn’t stop them from prosecuting me for possession of an offensive weapon. Actually it was pretty good luck that they’d just caught me with a bow, back when I had money I had a penchant for weapons when regular money had run out and we needed to start selling what we’d normally take. It was a balance, and the people who worked for us got a pretty good deal, as did the people who bought our product, it worked out well all round.

Anyway they mounted the thing in a box with the bolts to make it look more menacing than it really was. It was actually a toy that I’d bought in Brighton on the same day I’d been arrested for possession of eleven grams of heroin, but that’s another story for another time. Well, actually it’s kind of related as there was still a warrant out for my arrest for not appearing at court for that one, and another story behind how ten ounces turned into eleven grams. Basically I never left anything to chance, except for sop called friends

Eventually the wagon arrived, and we were bundled into the back. The SO19 team, or whoever they were sat on the separated from us by a Perspex box affair. None of the armed police looked at us, they just sat there in two neat rows, upright, talking to each other and laughing, the last thing I felt like doing was laughing. I remember having this dread in the pit of my stomach, but I also felt so fucking angry. Where were they when we’d been beaten up the previous week, no one seemed to feel the need to call the police then, when two thugs where trying to knock the living shit out of us because they didn’t like the way we looked. But that’s society, isn’t it. All voices are equal, but some are more equal than others.