Beans on Toast

I got a call from Russell, my rough-sleeping friend.
‘Listen, Dicky boy,’ he said, coughing and spluttering.
So I listened.
Having gone to sleep on his favourite bench, he’d woken up and found that his back wouldn’t budge when he tried to get up.
‘I can’t bloody move,’ he said.
‘I’ll come, but we’re not just going to a café to warm up and talk horses,’ I said sternly, ‘we’re going to A+E’.
‘Oh no,’ he replied, and I could hear him yelp from trying to move as the thought hit home, ‘I’m not going there.’
‘Then I’m not coming,’ I said.
I heard him scraping his beard as he thought, weighing flimsy pride against necessity, core-conditioning against the survival instinct.
‘OK then,’ he said, ‘I’ll go.’
‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’
When I arrived, he’d made it up to a seated position, still huddled in his sleeping bag, so I gave him a roll-up and asked if he could make it to the bus stop if I carried his bags.
Once down the hill, I turned around and saw Russell bent down trying to pick up a fag-butt. He just couldn’t get to it.
‘How low is that?’ I asked.
‘Not bloody low enough,’ he said, looking up at me, smiling sardonically as his fingers fumbled just shy of the butt.
When we got to the hospital, I commandeered a wheelchair and placed Russell in it.
He was seen by a nurse and then we waited for a doctor, who gave him some pain relief.
‘They’re no good,’ he said, checking out the tablets. ‘I need the big orange ones. They’re the only ones that do the trick.’
‘Can he stay overnight?’ I asked the doctor, but there were no beds.
I started phoning the numbers my key-worker had given to me before leaving the hostel, but too many hoops needed jumping through.
My hope was to find an emergency bed but self-referrals are no longer accepted, and he hates wet-houses with avengeance.
‘Look, Russell,’ I said, putting on my stern voice, ‘the only way you’re going to get through winter is in a dry-house, and the only way to get into a dry-house is..’
‘Not drinking,’ he said.
We talked about whether he’d consider it and then I asked him what his plans were for the evening.
‘I’ll have to go to Soho and do me spot-begging,’ he said. (‘Spot-begging’ is approaching people and asking them for money, ‘Ham ‘n Egging’ is sitting and waiting with the cap.)
‘So if I give you a tenner, which’ll get you fags and a couple of tinnies, will you stay in the area and sleep at the bank?’ I asked. (He sleeps till seven in the warm cashpoint-area, which he always leaves tidy, and then moves to the bench well before staff arrive).
He agreed, so we made our way to my hostel where I’d make him some beans on toast and show him around the place, which I hoped would entice him to consider giving up the drink, if only to get him through winter.
When we got there, I took him downstairs to relax in the dining room.
I started cooking and a peer came up to me.
‘What’s he doing here?’ he said.
‘He’s a friend and I’m cooking a quick meal for him.’
‘Has he been drinking?’ he asked, bending down to sneak a pin-eyed look at Russell through the hatch.
I felt like kicking him up the scrotum.
‘No, he hasn’t had a drink today.’
‘Don’t look like it to me, mate,’ he said, still watching Russell.
‘Just take from me. He hasn’t had a drink.’
Then he turned to face me. ‘I don’t mean to be funny, mate, but these types always drink. Look at him.’
‘He hasn’t had a fuckin’ drink. Now piss off and leave us alone.’
He didn’t like that, and came to stand nose to nose with me.
It came close to blows, but only expletives were exchanged.
I told him I’d been with him all day but he didn’t want to know. He’d already made up his mind.
‘You never been homeless before?’ I asked him.
‘Course I’ve been bloody homeless. Why d’you think I’m here?’ he replied.
‘Presumably to get well. What I’d like to know is why you’ve got a problem with my friend being here?’
‘I’ve got a problem because he’s been drinking, and you’re lying.’
‘Why would I lie about him drinking?’
No answer.
‘This program’s one day at a time, isn’t it?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, just for today, he hasn’t had a drink.’
‘Look, what if I invited seven crackhead friends over and they were all high?’ he asked.
‘If I was stupid, I’d tell them to leave,’ I said, knowing their wrath.
‘Well, that’s just what I’m doing now. I think he’s been drinking and I want him out of my house in ten minutes,’ he said, and walked away.
‘Why don’t you smell his breath?’ I shouted after him.
‘I’m not smelling his breath.’
We ate up and left after I grabbed a tenner from my room. Russell gave me twelve euros in coins that he’d saved for the elusive trip to Greece.
The pills had kicked in by then, so he took the bus alone and I went back to the hostel.
Later that night, I was doing my washing in the little alcove off the dining room when a female peer came bowling in.
‘I’m getting married!’ she said to the male peer sat at the table. She hadn’t seen me.
‘Who the hell’s marrying you?’ joked the man.
‘What? Wouldn’t you marry that?’ she said.
Folding my clothes, she’d come to stand at the entrance of the alcove and I could see her from behind gesticulating with her body to the man. I felt sick.
‘So who’s the geezer?’ he asked.
‘He’s Jamaican,’ she said, ‘no relatives, no kids.’
‘They all say that,’ he said, but she’d already made up her mind.
‘No, he’s actually a really nice guy, known him for months, and he’s paying me.’
When she saw me standing behind her, she almost jumped out of her tracksuit.
In my room, I remembered the story of a woman who had found true love in sobriety.
In her drinking days, when she was much younger, she’d married an illegal immigrant for a thousand pounds.
Now, with a child by her new partner, he’d asked her to marry him.
She broke the news and they sought advice, but found that it would cost three thousand pounds to find her husband and more if he decided not to divorce, holding her to ransom.
After selling herself for a month’s worth of alcohol, the perpetrator of the crime now held the keys to her marital rights. In the end, the couple dropped the case and put it down to the past.
I thought about telling my peer this story to let her know the true cost of a sham marriage, but I knew she disliked me, as do a lot of them.
It seems that half the people here only want a flat to go back to old ways in.
I wondered if I should warn the UK border patrol or tell the hostel staff what was going on under their roof, but then I thought about the Jamaican.
For the first time in my life, I saw the thankless task of government as the losing battle it has become.
Constantly undermined by the very people it aims to help, each caught in the wires of the wretched law system they created, everyone seems to lose, except the criminal.