Treading Carefully

‘You look like a street person,’ she said.
‘Funny, that,’ I replied, leaving it there.
Maybe that’s why she gave the next job to someone else.
Normally, she’d have called me, but she’s shied away now.
Before that day, she’d promised to introduce me to some film people who needed set decorators and the like.
I waited but no call came.
I moved out of where I was to save money that I didn’t have. The monthly thousand I need to find for my ex and the children isn’t my only obsession. There’s the drink, and the dope doesn’t help. When I’m agonisingly close to the thousand, I’ll gamble a sum, but I usually lose.
Friends think I’m either an idiot or a star, or maybe both. I know I’ve let myself down. I couldn’t handle the bills so I left. Now that I’m Z-list homeless, I owe British Gas a thousand and have nowhere to put the children’s belongings. I haven’t even moved the stuff out of the garage. There’s never enough for van-hire and the place it was going to has now been taken. Maybe the landlord will have removed it by the time I next visit.
This morning, I couldn’t face the world. The sofa I slept on last night was too small, or I was too big, and my neck aches. I called the ex to see if I could get some sleep at the children’s house but I’d have looked like a tramp, and she told me time was too short.
I saw clothes strewn across a charity shop’s forecourt this morning. Videos, toys and books had been sifted; taken or discarded. Dead men’s belongings. Parents and children dodged the debris, soon to be sold or dumped or even flown to Africa.
I called the doctor but there are no appointments this week and they’re a bit wary that I’m homeless now. I shouldn’t have told them. I must keep my status quiet, and make light of my situation, otherwise no one will want to know me. Now I know what it’s like for an Aids victim.
I’d like to think I could go back to treatment but who’ll pay the grand a month while I’m there? Tomorrow, I have the luxury of a proper bed in a B+B.
I see people walking out of a house and think how amazing it must be for them.
I think of the smell of a brand new bed and imagine being in a garden with the children.
But I’m not there. I’m here, in the air.