Tor mainly works out of the cramped Home Help office in town, coordinating the food bank donations and the charity admin, but thanks to Brexit and Covid, she’s lost most of her volunteers and runs the outreach catering van herself with Greg and Arek.
Now she gives out the last mustard-coloured polystyrene carton from the thermal bag in the back of the van and stamps her feet. The temperature has plummeted, and she blows into her cupped hands, wishing she had thicker gloves than the cheap fingerless ones she has on. Having come straight to her shift from her swim earlier, she hasn’t had the chance to properly warm up.
She jumps down from the van and starts to clear up. She knows she needs to get in the warm soon, remembering now, too late, that she’s forgotten to take her dose of methotrexate. She reminds herself to accept her condition with good grace. After all, it could be a lot worse. When she started losing weight a few months ago, with no reasonable explanation, she thought she might have cancer, or something properly nasty. Then her joints had started aching, her toes and ankles feeling as if they’d been stuck with glue. She progressed onto thinking that she must have Covid-19, but then, after a blood test, she was told that she had Rheumatoid Arthritis. She was stunned. She thought only old ladies got it, but apparently not.
It was Lotte, ever her princess knight in shining armour, who threw herself into researching RA, presenting Tor with several articles on cold water swimming, along with some glittery jelly shoes. It helped some people by taking down the inflammation, she explained, and was surely worth a go? After that first freezing dip in the sea, there was no turning back. The sea is Tor’s drug and her salvation.
Tor feels a kind of pride in her stoicism and forbearance, especially when Alice, her twin sister, regularly declares that Tor’s a ‘mentalist’ for going in the sea in the winter. Alice only deigns to go in the Med in August. But then, Alice has always been a hypochondriac, scamming their mother into days off school and perpetuating the myth of her ‘delicate’ constitution, like she’s some kind of heroine from a Jane Austen novel, when actually she’s as tough as old boots.
Tor could tell her the truth, of course, but she won’t. She’s not going to give Alice any kind of ammunition to hold over her. Besides, there’s no point in bitching about her health when she has so much more to be grateful for in her life than the homeless people she deals with at work. Especially on a day like today.
There’s a low rumble of voices under the awning they’ve rigged up, as the crowd prod the meagre contents of their boxes. The air smells of cigarettes, damp clothes and school dinners. It’s impossible to tell, looking at the crowd, whether they’re young or old, men or women. What unites them is their defensive body language, their mismatched layers of hoodies and jackets, and their general resignation. This is usually a jolly event, but the Covid restrictions have made everyone more guarded and ground down.
Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ is playing on the van’s speaker – one of the Christmas songs that particularly grates on Tor’s nerves. That’s one good thing about Christmas being over soon; she can finally stop playing these dreadful cheery songs, because their over-sung trite lyrics only seem to augment how strained this charity event really is. Because, no, Noddy, not everyone is having fun. OK, maybe apart from Vic.
She can smell him before he arrives. She knows for a fact that he used to wash every day in the public toilets on the seafront and was horrified when they closed during lockdown.
‘It’s Christmas,’ Vic sings in a silly voice, gurning as he gives Tor his empty food box and she puts it in the black bin bag. His straggly beard is caught in the sling of a grubby medical mask and he licks gravy off his dirty finger with relish.
‘Best turkey I’ve had in years. Reminded me of being a boy in Margate.’
‘Is that where did you used to live?’
‘We used to have wonderful Christmases,’ he says. ‘Big tree. The works.’
Tor listens patiently, knowing Vic likes to talk, knowing too that this might be the first and last friendly conversation that he’ll have all day. He lost everything when his family kicked him out for drinking and, after he did time in Lewes jail, they made themselves impossible to find. Tor knows that if her only option was to live in a bus shelter like Vic, she’d probably drink Frosty Jack’s for breakfast too. Who wouldn’t? But Vic has a jolly disposition and seems to accept his lot.
A young lad she hasn’t seen before nods at her as he puts his empty food box in the bag.
‘You all right?’ she asks. ‘You got somewhere to go for the lockdown?’
Despite the PM, Boris, ‘giving’ everyone Christmas, the government has announced another lockdown. It’s awful for people who are homeless.
The young guy nods. He’s probably barely twenty, judging from his patchy beard, but his face is ravaged by familiar signs of despair, his hands shaking – possibly from withdrawal. Tor sees that all the time and her heart goes out to him. She knows how easy and alluring the drugs trap is – how young men like him are sitting targets for the scumbags who get the vulnerable hooked. She knows how impossible it is to escape. He shuffles back towards the street, and she wants to call after him and to say something encouraging, but the moment passes, and she feels the usual sinking feeling of not having done enough.
She knows these people can find shelter, although the rough sleepers like Vic baulk at what’s on offer. But, even with the best will in the world, the hostels and temporary accommodation hardly constitute a home, especially at Christmas. She feels deeply for these poor people who can’t put down any roots. It’s so exhausting having to move on all the time.
She smiles across at Arek now, who starts to dismantle the awning. He was in the army in Poland and is a wall of muscle. She doesn’t know what she’d do without his strong arms. He usually works on a building site but having been helped by the charity when he first came to Brighton and got clean, he now helps other people. He’s a genuinely good guy.
‘I have to go soon. Give my wife a break. The baby was up all night,’ he says. ‘What are you up to, Tor?’
‘Warming up. I’m freezing from my swim earlier. Then it’s the family Zoom.’
Tor is rather dreading the forced family chat and how it will undoubtedly make things awkward with Lotte. She promised Lotte ages ago that she’ll ‘out’ them to her family, as Lotte has to her parents in Amsterdam, but Lotte’s are a liberal bunch and the opposite of her parents in Tunbridge Wells. But as Tor contemplates dropping the ‘actually I’m gay’ bomb into the Christmas Zoom, she already knows she’ll chicken out.
Her parents still can’t understand the whole thing with Mike. Her ex’s parents are good friends of theirs and Tor knows that they used to plot and gossip about Tor and Mike’s imagined nuptials and shared grandchildren. The disappointment of Tor calling off their ten-year relationship is still raw – even now, all these years on. She regrets carrying on the doomed relationship for so long and for not coming clean. Of course she’d known all along she was gay – and for a long while suspected that Mike secretly might be too. Their relationship was hardly sexually charged. But then Tor had started to fool around in secret and she’d plucked up the courage to leave, grabbing an opportunity to work for a charity in Africa. She’d stayed in Burkina Faso for six years. When she’d moved back to the UK, she’d headed straight for Brighton and her single life had been a whole load of much-needed fun. But then she’d moved into their shared house and Lotte had dazzled her.
It had been a laugh at first – a naughty fling. Something serious between them was never going to be on the cards. Outgoing Lotte, with her huge personality, surely couldn’t possibly be right for Tor, but somehow, against all the odds, something between them just clicked. She owes it to Lotte to tell her family, so they can potentially move on to the next stage of their relationship, but she doesn’t quite have the nerve.
‘Well, merry Christmas,’ Arek says.
‘You too.’
‘Hey, Tor. Smile,’ he adds. ‘We did good today.’