Chapter 6

Scum Bags in cash flat with no kitchen ceiling - [or should that be you unlucky bastards] 

This was our first real flat, and by an unhappy coincidence I had about twenty thousand pounds in the bank, strangely it should actually have been more, but the minute I had the right to vote, people I owed money to had the means to track me down and get it back, also the shares that should have been worth over £5 each ended up being more like 70p. The great idea that was going to revolutionise the world of network management turned into a complete lemon because although it used some interesting technology [interesting enough to draw the attention of Bridge Networks, it was also written largely by a bunch of incredibly clever mathematicians who knew nothing about how to actually write code that other people could read – having only ever written FORTRAN]. All that probably means nothing to most people, but it’s quite a significant thing if you’re thinking of buying a company. There’s a process that every company has to go through called “Due Diligence” to make sure that what you’re actually offering isn’t simply hot air. Basically it consists of a munch of experts either from the other company, or hired by them, going through all your records, and product design to make sure that what you say you’re selling them is actually what you claim you are selling them. In our case, as fun as it all was, it kind of wasn’t. We had a great product that was based primarily on another great product that someone had done as piece of research for the original company, pissed off with the idea, and started a company on the basis. Problem was no one else was convinced, and being a bit of a dreamer, and felling like the guy had been hard done by, I left a guaranteed pile of cash in options, for what should have been another guaranteed pill of cash in new shares. You know the basics. It didn’t pay off, and there are times when it has occurred to me that he knew it and just did it for the five million he walked away with.

I know that I could have put what was left of that money to better use, but we’d just come out of a hostel where drugs where not just the norm, but a completely integral part of life, as basic as food, and no one, not one person in that place attempted to change that fact, staff or resident. It was just easier to ride along with the status quo, to the point where we regularly got stoned, even with members of staff. When we were living in Endell Street, in London, we’d go out each day and beg up the money for drugs, which killed me, there wasn't much else to do after all, appart from watching day time TV.

The general consensus is that begging is some kind of easy option, but if that was true then why don’t aren’t the general public at it all the time? Probably because it really sucks as an occupation. It's like being gay; it's not a lifestyle choice. It is in fact one of the most taxing things you can do to raise money, short of actual prostitution. Sure, making a couple of quid isn’t all that difficult if you’re clean and well dressed, but making a living, making fifty pounds every day, that tears the guts out of you, and the thing is being homeless in London is fringing expensive on top of everything else. If you're pissed one night, just for a laugh try asking a total stranger to give you money for no particular reason, and absolutely no reward. No, better still don't wash for a couple of weeks, don't shave, don't change you're cloths, then go out in the rain and start asking people for money for doing nothing, for no other reason than you need it. Now that’s not an easy sale. You’re belittling yourself for the sake of the occasional pound, and more often than not a fraction of that, with the accompanying lecture on how you should clean up and get a job, but have you ever tried to get a job with no references and an address that's a homeless hostel, or worse still, actually haviny no address at all. No, begging is an act of prostration, 'I am lower than you, I deserve less than you from life please help me'. People always assume that you must be a moron of some kind, that you can't be intelligent otherwise you’d have a good job, and a nice car, and all the rewards of life. They also assume that those things are rewards, and that you became homeless because you squander them on drugs, and the sad fact is that for most of the homeless it's the other way round. People become homeless for all sorts of reasons, the drugs come later when their laying in an underpass that smells of piss and fresh vomit, and they wonder how the hell they sunk so low. When you beg it makes you feel less deserving, less than what you are, and fit only for the streets and the gutter because in the end that’s what they are buying from you, your humanity and your dignity so it becomes a vicious circle. People beg for money, they discover that drugs and booze take away all the self-hate.  After a while they begin to believe it about themselves

In our first one bedroom flat we slept on a pile of cloths in one room which we basically lived in. Even though we’d bought a bed, an expensive bed from Ikia, we still couldn't bring ourselves to sleep in it, we were only used to having one room, or to being outside on the street. So we went to our new flat from Endell Street with all the habits we’d picked up along the way, and no furniture to speak of. Living in a hostel is in essence is just like living on the street, except that you have a bed and a roof over your head. Our room on the top floor had broken windows the entire time we lived there, with plastic sheeting over the holes. The basic truth is that hostels aren't a way to house people, there a way to hide people.  Also it gives the individual freedom because you don’t have to worry about bills, except for the one which no one ever pays. The charge for us at Mare street was six pounds a week, and yet by the time we left we owed over two hundred pounds. You see when you leave the streets they don’t leave you. On the streets you just pick up and move on when it gets to messy and tangled up with the law, once you move into a room it just gets cluttered full of junk. When you finally get that all so rare somewhere to live that’s actually yours you have all these bills to pay that you haven’t had to do for something like eight years. You have to pay to clean your cloths, the rent, gas, electric. It just goes on and on, and so most people end up losing their first flat, and end up back out on the streets, which is often a relief to them because it’s what they know and understand, it's a place they've come to feel safe.

               

Way back when we were first homeless we met a guy, short clean looking in a scruffy sort of way that allowed him to ply his trade with ease, basically relieving HMV of CD’s and DVD’s, then selling them to people in pubs. There was also this one shop, tatty looking place with stacks and piles of CD’s and DVD’s on rough, ready-made shelves. The man behind the counter was middles aged and had long hair, and seemed out of step with the rest of the world, and in the wrong time, but he bought Yoda’s DVD’s without asking for ID. You see normally you need ID to sell second hand goods, which meant that Yoda and all those other shop lifters couldn't just pop down to crack converters and sell their stolen booty. Gerry, this other guy we lived with under a shelter outside Cats, who basically let us share his bash for a while, he’d hit boots in the morning and come out with arm’s full of razors and other men’s accessories which he’d sell to his contact that would be waiting round the corner for him every day. He did this every morning and was never ever caught. Life for these people was comparatively easy, if you were good at it, and believe me Yoda was a guru, a one man crime wave. He could make hundreds of pounds in a single day. The thing was he didn’t like smoking by himself so he’d always drag us round some corner with a fist full of rocks and go into the most elaborate rules for smoking crack. He’d turned it into an art form which he passed down to us, probably because we were the only one's who'd listen to him ramble on about his intricate rules and traditions. There wasn’t anyone else out there who could get as much out of a rock as Yoda. He lived his life one day at a time, quite literally, without any care for the day ahead of him, as he said, tomorrow you could be dead.

                

He was also a frightening mother fucker. There was this one guy who pissed him off, tried to get him nicked or something, so he went out and found him. He battered the guy unconscious then slapped him awake before beating him unconscious again.

“What’s the point” he said “of beating someone up if they can’t feel it anymore?” We never pissed him off, but he helped us out of some deep shit countless times.

                

Anyway, this flat we got stuck in was a piss pour excuse for a residence. It was on the ground floor of a low rise building, just round the corner of the Hackney market, and smack in the middle of crack central. As karma would have it the first week we were there we ran into this guy we knew from a hostel in Hackney called Mickey. He was a short skinny little kid who basically tried to ingratiate himself with everyone he met, probably a care kid. Care kids where always either hard psychos, or shy introverted and devious. We never actually got to meet the guy we were buying off, he always sent some kid on a bike that was too young to get prosecuted if he was caught. Never the same kid, and for a while different meeting places every time, until he trusted us, then he'd just deliver to our flat. Or at least his kids would. That's the one service that you don't want if you're trying to get your life back on track.

                

When I was working I used to make music, basically because I was in an unhappy relationship and I needed something useful to do while my would be partner got smashed on gin and tonic, heading feat first  into an early death while watching soap operas. I had a studio in the spare room, two synthesisers, a hard disk recorder, a sampler and a rack full of effects and processors, but in the end all of that got sold to pay for drugs.

The money I had when we moved in to our new flat was from the remaining shares that I had left from Clear Water Software. With it I went out and bought a synth, a hard disk recorder, and a drum machine. Actually Jenny bought me the drum machine as a birthday present, and I bought another synth. I was planning on making tracks and selling them on the internet, but although I bought the computer, I never actually got an internet connection, so none of that plan ever happened. I did however create some pretty good music, or at least that's what people told me.

                

We also had three rats when we moved in, what we didn't know was that Martell was pregnant. We tried to sell the babies, or even give them away to pet shops and just people we knew, but no one wanted them, at least not enough to make any real difference. Apparently there had been a glut of rats, and no one was buying them anymore, so every pet shop had bags full of rats that they couldn’t shift. What we didn't know was that Martell was bread from a lab rat, which meant she had babies that could get pregnant at five weeks, well before we could sex and separate them, which effectively meant that they were almost born pregnant. Before we knew it we had about fifty rats, in a piss pour damp ridden flat with a dodgy kitchen ceiling that sagged in the middle and was ridled with cracks. We had all the girls in a closet in the hallway, half the boys in the living room, and the other half in the bedroom. A couple died of cancer, and a couple of old age, but the worst was the girl who got trapped in the door. It was the middle of the summer and Jenny was working in Birmingham, I was alone most of the time. The girls where always trying to get into the living room to get to the boys, and vice versa, never underestimate the power of genetics. This one day I was bringing a cup of tea into the living room from the kitchen, and one of the young girl had snuck in behind my shoe just as the door closed behind me. Unfortunately she got trapped by the kneck in the door frame, and it crushed and cut open her jugular spraying blood everywhere. She bled to death in my hands, and there was nothing I could do about it. I know that she was just a rat, but I loved all our animals, and it really shook me up.

When I was a kid we had a cat that my dad refused to have neutered, so she was always pregnant. The problem was he could never get rid of the kittens, so it fell to my mum to drown the pour fuckers in a bucket of cold water. I hated him for that, and now I'd become that guy. I ended up having to call the RSPCA, who tried to re home them all, but just like the shops no one wanted rats, babies or otherwise. In the end they turned up, three of them wearing massive thick gardening gloves, and a big pile of metal cages like they were vicious animals. I slept with them for fucks sake. I hated it, having to watch the animals that I'd raised from babies no bigger than tip of my little finger, sitting in cages looking at me. Just staring like I could save them, I should have saved them, they were pleading with me for their freedom and I should have just given it to them. Just let them loose in that deserted land behind our garden. People tell me that I anthropomorphised them on that day, but I know that they knew something bad was going to happen. Later that afternoon the guy rang me to tell me they'd all been put to sleep. I wept for the rest of that day, and got as stoned as I could afford. Without the rats, all we had was a one bedroom, damp as fuck flat. The damp was actually so bad that the kitchen ceiling caved in the very next day. It took the housing association three months to repair the fucking thing, but they did nothing about the damp, except send round some creep with a few instruments. He yammered on about needing to open windows, and such bollocks, but any idiot could see that the damp was structural.

“Well I can’t really find any damp here that can’t be cured by a dehumidifier.” He said smarmily. You could see the outline of the cement holding the bricks together, all wrought out in a mouldy square pattern, like a mould Mondrian painted on our grey green walls.

“You’ve got to be kidding.” I said to him, fucked off to hell. Jenny had developed really bad asthma since being on the streets, and living in bad hostels. She couldn’t take that place; it had become so bad that when she was there, she always end up spending significant time in the hospital. We'd naturally thought that it was probably down to the rats, but getting rid of them didn't make any difference, even after I cleaned everything thoroughly, she was just as bad when she came home on the weekends.

“You realise that Jenny, my girlfriend’s asthmatic, don’t you.” I said to him forcefully. He made a note in his little black book, but didn't offer any suggestions about what we were supposed to do. Leave I suspect was his thinking. The next time she was down we talked about finding a place in Birmingham, she'd been seeing Patrick, our son, most weeks she was down there working. The first week she stayed with her parents, after that they made her stay in hotels and cheap hotels. She found a uni dorm that was closed for the summer and renting out rooms at a knock down price. Her parents never liked me very much, particularly her farther who thought I was a waster who got his little girl into heroine. The fact was that if anything it was the other way round, that thought he hated even more, but the real truth is that no one can make another person do anything against their will, unless their holding a gun to that person’s head, which I didn’t. The bottom line was that it was her idea to get the stuff, and being pissed I went along with the stupid idea. If I’d been sober that night things might have been different, maybe better, but I doubt I’d have kept my house, whatever way you look at it I was heading for a nervous breakdown. I was drinking every day, and not just a couple of pints in the afternoon. I’d go out at night and get cripplingly drunk, then wake up and start again.

After months of searching Jenny found us this two bedroom house in Spark Hill, which wasn’t the best aria in Birmingham, but it wasn't the worst either. It was full of these fantastic shops that sold every spice and vegetable, and fruit known to man. Also it was like kebab central down there, if you haven’t had a kebab in Nan bread, then you really haven’t had a proper kebab at all. I know, I was sceptical at first as well, but they really are great, extremely fatty however, in Birmingham they have this chilli mayonnaise, which is also great, but might as well be liquid fat. They also had a lot of those weird shops that sell everything from pencils to cookware.

              
It was around this time that old wounds started to resurface, one of the main reasons that I drank so much when I was working was interacting with people in large groups. Ever since I can remember I’ve been scaired of social situations, they just put me on edge. I was the kid who couldn't play football or cricket, I did in the end manage to learn karate, but by then the damage had been done.

              
The other good thing about moving to Birmingham was that Jenny had actually found a job, even if it was a twelve months contract with the council. The fact that she had a job of any kind went a very long way to placating her parents who still viewed us as total losers. Unfortunately it was a twelve month contract doing work which she hated, working for frankly obnoxious people, for not much more than a hotel porter, plus there was no guarantee that anything more concrete was going to manifest it's self from her current position. We both knew that one or both of us needed to find something more stable with better pay. Unfortunately something realy  crappy happened before either one of us could actually manage to do that.

Jenny found us a house to live in which was probably overkill because we really didn't need the space just yet. The chances of her parents allowing us to actually have any custody of our son were marginal at best. So yet again we started off living in a two bedroom house, and actually using one room, with the rest of the rooms given over to the now once more expanding rat colony we were housing. The great thing was that was this place had a washing machine, and we managed to get our hands on a fridge, so just for amenities Birmingham was far more practical, even though the only person that I knew there was Jenny, and my son, who was being looked after by her family. For all intent and purpose he could have been with any family because I hardly ever saw him, but at least I was closer, and that was something.

                

The house it’s self was a typical Birmingham house with two adjoining living rooms, that lead to a kitchen, and a garden that hadn’t been tended in years. We had big plans, how we were going to do it up, despite it being rented, make the garden nice, and make the second bedroom into somewhere our son could stay, but none of it ever happened. It all started out with the best of intentions, but then one day while walking through town Jenny bumped into a big issue vendor who she’d been giving money to on her commute from Birmingham to London and back. We started chatting innocently enough at first, until the subject finally turned to drugs, and that as they say was that. We went off with him to an underpass just outside the city centre where he called up a guy he knew and promised to introduce to us. We waited for God alone knows how long, it might have seemed longer than it really was given that we hadn’t done any drugs in three weeks, but eventually the guy turned up. Big black guy with a dark woollen hat, though having since seen him on numerous occasions, I think that might have been more to blend into the background than anything else. We bought two of each and got the buss back to our house. None of this might have happened if we hadn’t bought some travelling drugs before we left London, and therefore arrived in Birmingham with quite a lot to spare. There’s only so much crack you can smoke at a holiday in before you just get too paranoid, and leave. Leaving for us meant getting back on the road, it was about four in the morning, and the cold wind blew through me as I checked on the rats in the back of the van. We'd made a couple of traveling boxes, with shredded newspaper and cardboard. There were still three of them left after the heartbreaking cull, and they seemed happy enough. They were a little edgy, but can you really blame them, they'd been stuck in a box for six hours and they were used to running around, unfetered and trusted. We got into the cab of the truck, the usual ford plastic everything rental, with margenaly clean seats. Jenny shifted it into first and then we were on our way to a supposedly new life in Birmingham. The roads where empty in the dark cold drizzle, and we made good time to the heart of the city and the very same underpass. From there we went to the big roundabout by PC world and turned towards Spark Hill. At night it just looked like a terraced house on a typical road in probably any city in England, but inside it had all this unexploited potential that I could see lurking in the flowered wallpaper and tiled fireplace housing an electric two bar fire in the second of the two living rooms. We fetched the rats and put them in rooms upstairs, and decided to unpack in the morning I just wanted to finish what we had so that we’d be free of it. But we weren’t going to be, not this time anyway. We’d fallen back into the trap and within a couple of weeks we were just as bad as we were in London, only worse because we not only had Jenny’s wages coming in, but also the rent check that I was claiming as a sublet from Jenny. It was supposed to actually pay the rent, and pay for the cable TV we’d had installed, with broadband, except that we didn’t have a working computer since the one I bought in London with my share money had given up on me. I eventual found a working chip in a computer someone had thrown away, but by then it was too late, we hadn't paid our council tax bill, our rent, the TV licence, and just about everything else you can imagine. 

Debt letters from the bailiffs started dropping through the door, and we decided that the best, well the only thing we could do was move. This time it wasn’t a house, it was a shabby one bedroom flat that we could actually afford, the only thing that we didn’t know was that the landlord was a completely fucked up lunatic, suffering from alcohol demetia, and a wife straight out of the dark ages.