THE JOURNEY HOME We searched for Troy but found Byzantium Now we have seen it we will voyage home A fictional account of the life of a Big Issue vendor written by a Big Issue Vendor
1|Page
CHAPTER ONE – THE VENDOR
On the rain-glossed pavement, surrounded by scattered bones of dead umbrellas, the fringes of a little black plastic bag of dog shit flutter. The wind that shakes the plastic begs the question of this bleak September afternoon: who scoops shit up in a bag just to fling it down again? Hapless deckhand struggling with a loose sail, a Big Issue vendor tacks his red Poundland brolly here and there against the tempest. The shower, momently turned to hail, gusts it inside out and suddenly strips it from the spokes altogether, whipping it away spinning like a dervish drunk on divinity. 'There goes your tarpaulin overboard!' a passer-by laughs. I will call the vendor George. He is standing on Broadwick Street in Soho, outside Prêt A Manger. George is from Kent, from Norfolk, from Scotland. In his late teens, he ran away to London to escape his abusive stepfather. George is from Halifax, from Devon, from Derbyshire. He joined the Army at 18 and, after six years of service drifted in and out of part time jobs until alcohol overwhelmed him. George defiled his youth as a rent-boy in Soho. She is a young woman who started taking crack and living in squats after running away to the Smoke from a foster home in Brighton at sixteen. He survived the wreck of the Essex by eating his dead crew mate. George is, in fact, a 46 year-old former tinsmith from Liverpool. He is pale, short, gaunt and balding. Homelessness followed in the wake of a messy divorce from a justly vindictive wife. His finances collapsed, he took even more to drink, spending some time on the street. Now he lives between various central London hostels. He barely gets to see his two children, a boy and girl, fifteen and seventeen. He seldom hears from his half-sister and has not set eyes on his mother since his father died twelve years ago. Now in the dark rain is was yesterday and the shower passed, leaving George’s magazines slightly damp at one end, but the pages had not clumped, they were not especially tatty and he deemed them still saleable. A girl (he felt, at his age, he could reasonably call a young woman a girl) from one of the offices stopped by and bought him a piece of cake. As she handed it to him, smiling, George caught a hint of her perfume.
2|Page
George was absently mumbling to himself when a tall man in acobalt blue business suit approached, also muttering. George made out the word 'shitty,' and the words ‘fv@4ing rag.' The suited man gave him a sideways scowl in passing and George idly wondered what this person with no dress sense was really angry with: a crappy day at work? Not getting a leg over last night? It could have been anything. The man had probably sworn at the woman on the ticket barrier that morning and would definitely move on to ratty nitpicking and quibbling later unless he was hit by a bus on the way home. A well dressed woman of about forty slipped George a pound coin with a cheery smile: 'just a contribution.' As ever, George proffered the magazine. His own personal code was to offer the magazine when somebody dropped him money, whatever amount it might be. He would also always offer the correct change on a sale and ask 'Are you sure?' if people refused it. That way, he reasoned, he had kept some integrity and however many people did take their change or a magazine for one pound, George always finished the day on top. He wondered why people so often call it a contribution. Contribution to what? He contemptuously threw the umbrella remnant to the ground. A small brownish scabby dog padded past and ran away round the corner. Then Lennie and another lean young man, both beggars, came along. Lennie was a freckled Cockney with stubbly red hair and a goatee, on top of which his gait was, in essence, that of a satyr; the result of having thrown himself in front of an underground train. He tottered forward on what looked like back-to-front legs with a springing motion. His companion, from some unknown injury or malady, was wont to swing his legs wide from the hip, throwing them forward as though wading through floods. The effect was a balletic harmony of movement between the two. 'Which way did Daisy go George? Which way did she go?' Lennie asked. The vendor nodded toward the corner and the two beggars waltzed away after the dog. A man stood before him. Maybe in his thirties, perhaps a French accent. 'The system,… So unfair. I am going to buy a tent, you know. A tent… You just got to survive. You can’t get away from the system, non. People ave the system in their heads, you know: in their brains.’ George asked where this man intended to camp once he got his tent. 'You've got to hide… I just 3|Page
survive.' The man was dressed warmly and very scruffily, carrying a crocheted teddy bear sized clown under his arm. He simply turned and drifted away. For a moment, George thought the fellow in the duffel coat and corduroy pants was spray-painting the little bag of dog shit but no, he was marking florescent orange exes on Westminster’s broken paving stones, photographing them and registering them on some sort of electronic gadget. Without being asked, he looked up and explained that before the Council used to repair the pavement and charge it to various utility companies whose plant it covered, but nowadays the gas, electric and other firms paid the contractors themselves, direct. This clarified nothing. Low on magazines, George… Let’s make this narrative simpler. George can speak for himself. Let us look through his hollow, bloodshot eyes and share his understanding of the world. Low on magazines, I left this pitch to make the fifteen minute walk to Long Acre in Covent Garden and buy more form the barrow there. Regent Street would be closer, but I find the guy on that barrow such a miserable bastard. As I passed near Leicester Square, I gave a nod to the one-legged Buddhist monk, with his smoothas-an-egg head, in his burgundy and saffron robes. Our smiling, chubby brother’s main activity seems to be handing people gold charms, paper prayers (spells?) and bead bracelets, then asking for donations. Do not imagine for one moment that reality will dominate this story; this journey. The West End you imagine will melt away like time itself, and day from night will fall confused before the twilight of its end. Or passing, or to come The next morning, in Soho, a white, presumably English, woman asked me 'Where are you from?' When I told her that I was from Liverpool, she said that was 'good. It's just that some of these eastern European fellows, well… I can't believe that they don't have an actual home back in Poland...' She gave me a pound and I made no comment. My hair is thick, curly and dark brown - I am quite tall and have a tan. My family name is Urian, Cornish, but not unheard of in Lancashire - I think my Granddad was Cornish. My mother is of Italian parents but raised in Liverpool. I cannot remember a time when she did not hate me. But I have found happiness in the Way of the Red Tabard. Not that I don’t have my demons - I see them; they crowd me sometimes and sometimes they talk to me. I followed one, 4|Page
a fluffy black lamb, down Old Compton Street on Wednesday… it was very weak: one of its eyes had been put out, leaving a bloody wound. The other eye had been sewn shut. Eventually it wandered into a shop and I didn’t dare follow it. We are coming closer to the present, and now I think it best if I copy from my notes. They cannot all be transcribed coherently, but in the writing, I have worked hard not to stray from the truth of what happened, as I remember it. When I first set out to write, it was because it struck me that politicians, academics, the press, they all talk about us and they all have, everybody has, opinions about who we are; what we are. Often they have fv@4ing horrible opinions. Many people who stop and talk with a vendor want to know: 'so, what’s your story?' and they can ask us because we are homeless. When last did you ask your dentist or the supermarket till worker 'So, what’s your story, then? How did you come to be doing this?' Most don’t actually want to know our story. At least, they don’t seem to. They appear to want to properly satisfy themselves that we, the vendors, have some defect; that real, normal people like them can rest assured we are a separate case, a separate species even. Others need confession and absolution. People are afraid of us; we crowd the fringes of their world along with past misdeeds, regrets, fleeing souls floating toward them over the seas, debt, the government and more debt. But I am getting ahead of myself. Then it occurred to me that no matter what I write, no matter what Promethean feat any vendor achieves, no matter how sparkling their notions, however eloquent their elaboration of the niceties of vendordom, they will still only ever fuel that narrative of redemption which is The Big Issue and serve to burnish the brazen form of a tarnished sinner re-cast in bronze: the immutable icon of some cured leper. We are a legion renowned for taking in those whose pasts and presents are best forgot because they are ruinous. That is the rule. There are exceptions, but they just prove the rule. We are a red-tabarded order, an adoptive clan with all the solidarity of a realm of cats. And we are heroic: we render ourselves to catharsis and stand, stigmatic milestones on the richest streets of London, measuring the space between shopping and reality, the distance between wealth and heaven and so long as those 5|Page
realms remain separate, we cannot rest. We haunt. Draw a frame: from Bond Street along Oxford Street to Holborn; Holborn, down Kingsway to Strand; on to St James’s Palace and back up Bond Street to Oxford Street. This is the great eruv hazerot, where our tribe lives so much of its private life in public while the passing world looks on and where Shabbat is forever suspended so we can be endlessly cleansed of our iniquities by work. Yesterday again Another rainy day outside Pret, with no umbrella, no prospect of rescue by the coastguard and no chance of building an ark. But I was finished early, about 1.45. A young (around 30) man, a Maghrebi convert to Christianity from Islam, earnestly impressed upon me the importance of testifying Christ's love for me. He told me I should 'check out a born again' church, rather than a Catholic one. In fact, further up the week, too, another man (he appeared English), prayed over me fervently, spreading his cold spidery old hand on the crown of my bald, slightly bowed head. A young woman bought me coffee early on today, for which I was very grateful. Sometimes I buy my own coffee in the red round fish-eyed morning, usually from the Algerian Coffee Shop on Old Compton Street. Sometimes I stand on a pitch all day and nobody thinks to ask or buy me one. Not that anybody is obliged to. While on other days people spill out of the sandwich shop in droves bearing unsolicited beverage and food. My motto: never ask, seldom refuse. The human bladder having a limited capacity, I have come to a kind of arrangement with loitering couriers and some of the builders on the site over the road, which kicks into operation once the kind coffee buyer has moved on (so as not to offend). Why don’t people ask first? On days when I have not eaten by around 3, and sometimes even if I have, I will go and buy chips at the chip shop where I once unexpectedly encountered the W@^4£r….
6|Page