I saw it on a sign this morning when I went into the library.
New Year, New You – how to get refreshed for 2020.
The chance would be a fine thing. I’d love a new me for the New Year – in fact I’d love a new life entirely, but I’m not going to get one.
I always used to look forward to going to the library when I was a kid. Me mam used to take us after school once a week and I’d never want to go home. We always had books in the house, like, but in the library it seemed like there was an infinite amount, such a pile that I barely knew where to start. So many stories to read and so many different worlds to explore – paradise for an imaginative child. I spent some of the happiest hours of my life in the library and it holds a lot of fond memories for me. I still love going there now, but it’s not the same as it was. Now I only go in to get out of the cold, and it’s hard to concentrate on reading when all you can think about is all the food that’s not in your belly, all the money that’s not in your pocket and how worrying it is that your hands have turned blue inside your gloves cos you’ve spent the night in a bus shelter, keeping one eye open for the coppers or the drunks stumbling out of the clubs in the endless frozen hours between midnight and dawn.
My mate Spike got battered a couple of weeks ago by a gang of fellas fresh from their night out. He was mooching down in town and he fell asleep in a doorway down by the big Morrisons on Merrion Street. They woke him up pissing all over him, and when he asked them what the fuck they were playing at they all piled in, five of the bastards, and gave him a real kicking. Broken nose, two black eyes, a couple of missing teeth, cracked some ribs as well by the sound of it. Poor sod looked like he’d done ten rounds with Tyson Fury afterwards, and for what? Some pissed-up idiots thinking he’s fair game just because he’s got nowhere to live. You’ve gotta wonder what goes through their heads. That kind of thing is just normal now, though. I’ve been spat at, kicked, punched, and called every name under the sun. It’s like people think that you’ve got no feelings if you’re homeless. It’s not a choice, you know? Do you really think anyone would choose to live like this if they didn’t have to?
Me mam always had a misguided attitude towards it, bless her. ''What those people need to do", she used to say, "is have a bath, get some clean clothes on and go find a job". There’s not a lot you can say to that, is there? It’s a good job she’s not here to see that state of me now. It’d break her heart.
She was an absolute star, me mam was. I loved her to bits, and if she was still around there’s no way any of this would have happened. There’s this idea that rough sleepers are all from broken homes, smackheads for parents and that, but it’s not how it was for me. Me old man worked as a forklift driver in a warehouse and he was making a pretty decent screw, and me mam topped it up with a few quid from working the tills part-time at Fulton’s on Harehills Lane. I always had new clothes, we ate decent food and we got away on holiday somewhere warm once a year. I was an only child and me mam doted on me. Me dad too, although he didn’t really show it in the same way, gruff northerner that he is. We were a nice little family. We weren’t rolling in money but we were doing okay, you know? And then one day mam found a little lump and came back from the hospital with a face like nothing you’ve ever seen. Six months later she was dead, the cancer in her breast having turned metastatic and spread to her liver and lungs, eating her from the inside with a speed that blew your mind. She weighed five stone when she died, and for all her forty years, she looked like a woman double her age. With her gone, everything just fell apart.
Me old man took to drinking and he didn’t have much time for looking after me, smashed as he was on the living room floor every night with a litre of Royal Czar for company; me, I fell in with some older kids at school who were up to no good, started bunking off to go out grafting down in town, nicking clothes to sell outside the school gates, serving a bit of weed and that. I started getting in trouble with the coppers, and in the end me old man kicked me out. He had enough on his plate without the law braying on the door looking for me two or three times a week, so that was the end of that one. There are only so many sofas you can crash on, especially when your mates are always getting banged up for the night, and in the end I ran out of places to go. That was about a year and a half since, and now here I am, still a couple of months off my eighteenth birthday with well over a year of rough sleeping behind me.
You wouldn’t believe some of the places I’ve had to kip. I’ve slept on park benches and in underpasses; I’ve slept under bridges and in the maintenance hatches of railway tunnels; I slept in a tent in a cemetery for a couple of weeks, until some bastard nicked it. I even lived in a dustbin round the back of Wilko’s for a few days, until I got woken up by the sound of the wagon coming to empty it one morning. It’s a good job I heard it or I could have been brown bread, crushed in the machine with no one any the wiser about me ever having been there.
That was in the early days; I’m a lot more careful now. It’s tough at first, but you soon learn. You talk to some of the old heads and they reckon times have never been tougher than they are now. There used to be a few hostels round here, like Pennington Place near Little London, but they’re long gone. They lost their funding, so the doors closed forever and more safe spaces were lost. Now there’s only the Crypt, and it’s always full. Look around the city and you see empty buildings all over the place – some absolutely huge ones, like the old Arc in Headingley – that could shelter loads of us, but people would rather let them fall to pieces than let the likes of me in there to keep out of the rain. It just doesn’t make sense, but I guess in times of austerity, Brexit and people protesting about vegan sausage rolls in Gregg’s nothing does, and nothing has to.
Until recently a few of us had taken to sleeping up near the top of Woodhouse Lane multi-story. It’s freezing, but at least it’s dry and you’re out of the way. That was okay for a couple of weeks, until someone complained and the coppers moved us on, saying we posed a safety risk to the car park users. Strange to be talking about safety, under the circumstances. What about my safety, and all the other poor sods that are sleeping outside every night, starving to death in the streets before the eyes of a public that pretends not to notice, eyes down, not even wanting to acknowledge our existence? No one’s talking about that.
The few benefits I got, I lost because I could never turn up to appointments on time. It’s pretty hard to do that when you don’t even know what day of the week it is, never mind the time, but try telling that to the DWP. Week on week it gets harder and harder for people like me, and there’s an army of us out here, an occupying force in every major town and city, thinking, feeling human beings reduced to the level of street urchins, the kind of thing spawned by the Industrial Revolution, urban foragers of a type that should have been consigned to the dustbin of history years ago. With things as they are though, it’s hard to see anything changing any time soon.
I stayed in the library for a couple of hours today, pressed flat against a radiator in a comfy chair, thawing out my aching bones and pondering the message on the sign – New Year, New You. New hope?
Not likely.
As we said...thought provoking stuff. Thank you Stu.
You can find Stu on Twitter @Stu_Hennigan, drop in and say Hello
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Blog by Sue
