Sage settles quickly into his job. Every morning he’s up and out before the winter sun has taken the knife-chill from the air. I rise an hour or so later, when the frost along the base of the window panes is beginning to soften. Steeping a teabag in my tin-cup until the liquid is dark and bitter, I curl my fingers around the warmth to thaw them for the morning’s practice.
He tells me about ‘The Commons’ in the evenings. It’s not your usual community centre; not just a charity or an advice centre. The place is organised as a community benefits society, where everybody has a say. Everyone living within a certain distance of the building is invited to be a member – rough sleepers can join too – and then they all vote on how to spend the budget.
As a result, Sage isn’t only teaching employability, he’s also been asked to do some literature classes. He’s starting with Brighton Rock, for the local connection. Using books borrowed from the library. And he’s proposing that they all group together – the members – and write a verbatim play about the community. Not just about cuts to the benefits system or the government vilification of the unemployed, but about the strength and humour and kindness between them as well. They’ll vote on whether to go ahead with that project in the next few days.
We’ve spoken about submitting a proposal for me too. Sage reckons I should offer guitar lessons or even songwriting classes, but I’d rather keep that separate. Instead, I’m working on something else to present to them, scribbling in the margins of the Christian pamphlets given out at the food bank we go to. A simple idea, but something I would enjoy.
For now, though, I stay in the squat during the day. To protect it from the heavies the landlord has employed. In the early days, within a week of arriving, we had the police round. They were easy. Sage gave them a lecture through the letterbox – about the morality of buildings sitting empty when folk are sleeping rough on the cold streets – and they were satisfied.
The heavies, however, are not content with the sign on the door or a shouted invitation to have us evicted through the civil court, using repossession orders and court-appointed bailiffs. They are not patient men.
At first I knew them only as noises. As voices whispering, then snarling. As thumps on the door, rattling the locks. But, one afternoon, I see a hand and then a peering set of eyes. They are up on the flat roof of the toilet extension, pulling the felt away and then ripping at the wood with the claw of a hammer. When the hand appears, I wonder what weapon I could use to strike out at it. To leave it bent and broken, with the wrist snapped and the back of the hand lying flat against the ceiling. It’s a panicked thought, though, and one that is quickly followed by the realisation that they’d have me up on assault charges. So, when the eyes look down through the hole, I try reasoning with the man behind them.
‘This was an empty building,’ I say, gasping and grasping at the words. ‘We know that the owner has no immediate plans to redevelop it, that it’s just for his portfolio, and – ’
‘You need to get the fuck out.’ The eyes narrow. ‘Now.’
‘If he wants to discuss his plans for the building with us, we’d – ’
‘No. You need to do one. Today.’
I try a different tack. ‘You’re damaging his roof. This building is structurally sound, but if you tear open the roof then you’ll leave it exposed to – ’
‘Right, mate. I’m coming in, then.’
‘There are about a dozen of us in here!’
I shout this as a warning. I’ve barely held it together up to this point – hearing the footsteps overhead, the blows of the hammer, and then seeing the disembodied, dangling hand – but the thought of them coming in, dropping down from the ceiling, really sets me off. Taking my tin-cup, I clatter it against the sinks, against the cisterns. I stamp my feet. Then I start a conversation with myself – one moment shrill, the next deep. The words are nonsense, are just noise.
‘We’ll fucking smoke you out, then, won’t we,’ the heavy calls.
They keep working to widen the hole, but now I’m not sure if it’s to gain entry or to set a fire. How do you tell if someone means something like that literally or not? If you can’t see the eyes, the face, but only the grabbing hand.
I run through to the main room and lift the ice-bucket from the primus stove. With it, I drum at the wooden bar and use my spare hand to strum at the open strings of my guitar. It’s not enough, though. So I start wailing – a thin, primal note that rises above the racket.
‘Ain’t nobody going to take my home from me, no,’ I sing, then, in a bass note.
‘Ain’t gonna take my home,’ in falsetto.
‘Ain’t nobody gonna leave me on the street.’ Bass.
‘Don’t you leave me on the street.’ Falsetto.
‘I’ve fallen far enough, I’m on the fucking floor.’
‘Don’t kick me no fucking more.’
I lose my rhythm, but I work hard to find it again and repeat my chanting. Drumming, strumming and screaming, I keep up the noise as best I can. Concentrating, losing track of the passing of time and the words coming out of my mouth. When, eventually, I trail off, there are no sounds from the toilets at the back.
Swinging the bucket in front of myself, I advance to the Gents. There is a cold wind swirling in through the hole in the roof, which is twice as big as it was, but there are no hands or eyes above. They have been scared off. Probably more by the thought of one lad with mental health issues than by the promise of a dozen reinforcements, but a victory’s a victory.
‘Ha!’ I shout upwards. ‘Thanks for the skylight, dickheads!’
Then I retreat back to the main room and begin to barricade the door to the toilet. I use chairs and tables, trying to prop them up underneath the handle. They won’t hold, though, so I prise the panelling from the bar. Rusty nails come away with the wood. It takes me about ten minutes of frantic work to hammer it across the door jamb, using the butt of our screwdriver. All the while, I’m listening out for their footsteps on the roof or the thud of them landing on the tiled floor on the other side of the door.
Once I’ve finished, I sit cross-legged in the centre of the floor and clasp my hands together in my lap. To try to stop the shaking.
Sage comes back from work about an hour later. I ignore his first knocks, even though they’re in the agreed pattern – three rapid, three slow, then three rapid again. I sit where I am and stare at the door. It’s only when he repeats the knock and calls out – ‘Rab!’ – that I rise to unbolt the lock.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asks.
‘We’ll have to use the Ladies from now on,’ I say.
‘Did they try to get in?’
‘Through the roof.’ I nod. ‘Should we phone the police, maybe?’
‘And what?’ He smiles tightly. ‘Invite them in for a cup of tea while they take our details?’
He has bought dinner on his way back. There is bread and pâté, bananas, and grapes. One tin of beer, for me, and one of cider, for him. When he sees the state I’m in, though, he lets me have both. We ignore the fact that I’m trying to cut down, trying to loosen the grip of that particular vice.
We sit in the darkness and talk. About the need to move out. Not back to the streets, but somewhere stable. It’s getting close to Christmas – just a month away – and that means even colder weather. We don’t want to find ourselves sleeping rough again, or moving from one emergency accommodation to another: churches, hostels, B&Bs. It’s nearly New Year, and we make a resolution to find something more permanent as soon as we can. Now that Sage is earning a trickle of a wage.
‘There’s a room in one of the members’ houses,’ Sage says. ‘Nice lady. Used to be a crossword compiler for a national broadsheet until her eyesight started to fail.’
‘Has she offered it to you?’
‘Almost. She told me that it would be useful to have the help and the company…’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He shrugs.
‘Just one room?’
He clears his throat. ‘That’s the thing.’
I look over into the gloom, but I can’t see anything other than the bulk of him.
‘I can’t leave you.’ He says it that plainly. ‘We’re a pair, you and I. But maybe if we could find you somewhere as well, and if we could get your proposal off and running up at the – ’
‘I could ask Luke if he knows of anywhere,’ I say, thinking of the student flat up in Elm Grove.
‘Do that,’ Sage says. ‘And in the meantime – ’
‘We tough it out here?’
‘Absolutely,’ he says. ‘In our Sick Little Hammer.’
‘Getting sicker by the day.’
‘Today, yes,’ Sage chuckles. ‘But it’s not so bad. Just a bit like myself – rotten body, rusted head.’
I go to an internet café a couple of days later, to type up my proposal. In the normal course of things I might have gone to the day centre to use one of the computers there, but I don’t want to leave the squat unattended. So I wait until the evening, when Sage is back from work, and then take the scraps of paper I’ve been scrawling on to a place up by the train station.
The sullen owner takes my money and brings me coffee, though I asked for tea. Unwilling to go up to the counter to complain – knowing I would be addressing his leather-jacketed friends as well as him – I sip at the coffee. It is cloyingly sweet.
It’s been a long time since I typed. Back in Glasgow I would have been clacking away at online chats with two or three people at once, but now I can only stab at the keys, one at a time. I feel the eyes of those up at the counter on me and wonder if they see me as being like one of those elderly dears who claps and yelps excitedly every time they successfully get a word up on the screen.
I soon get back into the rhythm of it, though, and the document – with a bit of formatting – spews out of the printer as one sheet. For a moment, my mind drifts to the single-page promo sheet for Measures Taken. Quotes from other artists on the label and then a glowing gush from the publicity folk – ‘Ready to take on the mantle of his namesake, Dylan is the troubadour for troubled times, the balladeer against the banks, the oracle for Occupy, the prophet of protest.’
My attention is snapped back by the clicking fingers of the café owner.
‘Twenty pence a copy,’ he says.
I hand over the coin and get the sheet of paper, slightly creased and dented at the edges, in return. Smoothing it out, I read it through. It’s short and to-the-point. Smiling, I look back at the computer screen. I still have twenty-five minutes of my hour remaining.
It’s been months since I checked my email. There have been times, at day centres or even at parties with Luke and his mates, when I could have, but it’s been something I’ve avoided since… since when…? The day before I left Pierce’s house, maybe. July. Fuck, I’ve been off-grid for the best part of five months. I take a breath, then open them up.
Seven pre-approved credit card offers.
Five emails about online gambling.
Four from dating websites.
Two from Bower.
One from Pierce.
One from Ewan.
Nothing from Maddie.
A grand total of twenty emails across five months. Four a month. Not a good showing from the Voice of a Generation, eh? I open up my junk folder, just for the spike in popularity that the six emails in there will bring. There’s nothing of interest, though; nothing from Maddie. So I go back to the Inbox and click on Ewan’s. It is formed of blunt bullets, three of them:
It’s the use of the nickname that causes my chest to clench and my eyes to prickle with tears. More than the mention of my mum or the (faint) praise for the album. There’s no reference made to the name-change or all the Maddie-mess between us, just a straightforward request to hit ‘reply’. I do, but then sit staring at the blinking cursor.
Ten minutes pass. I close down the empty email and open the first one from Bower. It’s chatty, asking if I made it back to Glasgow and telling me he’ll keep in contact with sales figures for Measures Taken and anything else that might come up. His second is briefer, just asking for a forwarding address for their files and to pass on to the Performing Rights Society. As for Pierce, his email is full of the usual guff – how he thinks it could have worked, but we maybe rushed it all a bit. He asks if I knew that Bob Dylan’s first album sold poorly. That, for a time, Dylan was known as ‘Hammond’s Folly’ at Columbia Records because they all thought that the talent scout, John H. Hammond, had made this huge mistake in signing him up. I didn’t know that. I’m not interested.
There is no mention of Lydia. Thinking of her stirs memories of silk and shame, but I hold back from sending a confession to Pierce. I type her name into the search engine instead. And there, among the image results, is a photo from last month – early October. It’s a press photo from a book launch. Lydia stands in a grey trouser suit, by the book-stack, and Pierce stands beside her, with his hand resting on her shoulder. They both smile at the camera.
I open a reply to Ewan again. The email remains blank. I wonder what would come up if Ewan, or my mum, were to put my name into the search engine. They’d get dribs and drabs of information from before the launch, then a spate of reviews from the release, and a final drip-drip of write-ups from the gigs in May. And then? Nothing, most probably. Not a single result – no photographs or listings on venue websites.
I pause to consider, then hit ‘send’ on the empty email. That way Ewan will know I’m alive. He can tell my mum. It’s enough. Just barely, but it’s enough.
Rising from my seat, I lift the proposal and leave, ignoring the calls of the owner, who’s anxious that I don’t miss out on the last moments of my connection. Or the remaining granules of my sugar-coffee.
They sit in a circle on the floor, for the most part, although two of the elderly members and a pregnant woman sit on chairs to the side. There is a gap in the group for me, so I sit cross-legged between Sage and a young girl with frayed blonde hair piled on top of her head and an even more frayed infant heaped on her lap. This was not how I was envisaging the pitch. I was expecting to have to stand in front of them all, with a whiteboard perhaps, and deliver my ideas that way. Like a performance. Instead, I hand the single-sheet proposal to the girl next to me and it is slowly passed around the circle.
‘Essentially,’ I begin, ‘it would just be a few tables along the back wall, behind the reception desk. In the empty space there. And all that would be needed, for start-up costs, would be enough for a coffee machine and those few bits of furniture.’
There are sixteen people present, including Sage and Sandra, who don’t have a vote. That’s fourteen folk to convince. Nerves seize at my vocal cords, lengthening the silence. I swallow and start again with a stutter.
‘B-but… the primary purpose is to offer a meeting place. Because I’ve noticed that – erm – people come and go and wait about, but it would be good if they had somewhere to chat.’ I gesture towards Sage. ‘Before and after class, even. So that they’re not just turning up for class then leaving again straight after. So that it’s a community hub, rather than a…’
I’m wearing a shirt, but I’m glad that I turned down Sage’s offer of a loan of his Mozart tie, because everyone else is dressed casually. They’re all spread and splayed over the carpet, relaxed, while I sit straight and watch their faces for a flicker – smile or frown – as they read through the sheet.
‘So it would be like a café,’ I continue. ‘But with not-for-profit at its core. I’d be paid minimum wage, then any profit would go back to the centre to spend on other projects.’
‘Once the coffee machine is paid off,’ the girl next to me says.
‘Of course.’
‘I bake,’ an older woman, seated on the edge, says. ‘Could we maybe sell cakes or buns as well? If I donated them.’
‘We’d need to pay you for ingredients,’ someone else chimes in.
‘I don’t need a wage, though.’
‘So the only wage would be yours, then?’
It takes me a moment to realise that this question is directed at me. ‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Could we not reclaim furniture rather than buying it,’ another voice. ‘From skips or something?’
‘I’d be happy to fix it up a bit.’ Someone else.
‘And it makes no sense…’ this is Sandra ‘… for all this to be stuck behind the reception desk. Better to move me to the back wall, so that the first welcome is the – what would you call it – foyer, maybe?’
‘That might attract outside customers,’ someone says. ‘Other than members.’
‘It’s important, that, if it’s going to make money.’
I’m finding it hard to follow the conversation. My eyes dart around the circle as if I’m trying to follow a fast tennis rally and the angles, the players, the lines on the court, all keep changing. I’m pretty certain it’s going well, but the proposal is no longer confined to the single sheet.
‘You’d have to be answerable to this general meeting.’
Again this is directed at me. I nod.
‘And it would have to be part-time, at first,’ the pregnant woman says. ‘Until we see if it works out and – ’
‘That’s a point – you said it would be minimum wage?’
I nod again.
‘Let’s make it a living wage, surely?’
‘How about seven-fifty an hour?’ someone else suggests.
‘Any concerns with that?’
Silence. I look around the circle. All the folk on the floor – whether they’re leaning back on their elbows or perched forward on their knees – are listening intently. Most people have spoken, but even those who haven’t are paying attention. One man, directly opposite, takes notes.
Sage explained to me, last night, how the meeting works. The facilitator – Sandra, today – will eventually ask whether there are any ‘stand-asides’ or ‘blocks’, and then they’ll decide on the proposal. Hands held up in the air, fingers waving, for agreement. I don’t point out to Sage that he’s explaining jazz-hands to me with a straight face when only a short while ago he put a towel over Braids for using hand signals.
‘There’s a sink in the back for washing cups,’ they start up again.
‘And someone will need to check with the council, to see if we need to register for licences or whether it can all be tied in with – ’
‘I’ll do that,’ Sandra says.
‘Excellent, then…’
There is a pause while everyone draws breath. The proposal has worked its way back round to my hands. The white space around the typed words has been filled with scribbled notes. ‘Baking,’ it says, and ‘How about a living wage?’ Then, in tiny, cramped handwriting: ‘just tea/coffee facilities – no need for staff’. An objection, down in the corner.
I look up. One of the older members on the fringes stands. He holds his cloth cap in his hands. When he speaks, there is a rattle like a loose ball-bearing in his throat.
‘Seems to me…’ He coughs. ‘Seems to me we could just have a kettle and all make our own. I’ve no need for anything fancy, and the money could maybe be better spent – ’
‘If I may…’ I say, rising to my knees. I don’t want to stand because the rest of the group is sitting, but I also feel that Cloth-cap has a bit of an advantage in standing over me. ‘The idea is to more than pay my way. As in, we should be able to turn a small profit, hopefully, for re-investment, and perhaps even hire more staff eventually. It’s not a hand-out I’m looking for.’
‘We could have a trial period, maybe,’ the pregnant woman says.
‘Three months?’ comes the suggestion.
‘Let’s vote already.’
‘OK, any stand-asides or blocks?’ Sandra asks.
She raises her own hand, palm flat, to show that she’s abstaining, and Sage does the same. They both show how they would have voted, though, by smiling warmly up at me from the floor.
Cloth-cap sits looking out of the window, his hands on his lap. I’m waiting for him to raise his hand and then clench his fist. That would be a block and the proposal wouldn’t go through. He doesn’t make any move, though.
‘OK,’ Sandra says. ‘Two stand-asides. And the rest of you?’
I watch as hands go up. There are twenty-six of them. Fingers start to wave in the air. The only person not agreeing is Cloth-cap, who has stood to show his hands held downwards. That’s OK, though: there’s still a consensus. Proposal passed.
‘I’ll check with the council,’ Sandra says. ‘And Rab, if you could source a coffee machine that suits, then…’
‘OK, any other business?’ someone asks.
The rest of the meeting passes in a blur. They split into working groups: one to discuss using social media to raise awareness of the Commons; one about problems folk are having with the benefits and housing offices in town; one to start advance planning for a community Christmas dinner. I go with Sage to a group with two others, which is all about organising a theatre trip to see the panto. It’s fairly big of Sage to get involved, considering they shot down his verbatim play idea. It was a tight vote: eight to six. Some months ago – weeks even – Sage might have seethed at that, broken the circle and stormed out. Now, though, he calmly swallows his disappointment and suggests calling the box office to see if we can get a group discount for Peter Pan along in Hastings.
I tune out. Not because I’m not interested, but because I’m already imagining the shiny coffee machine I will buy. And the hiss and swell of steam it will send out over the chattering members – no longer cross-legged in a circle on the floor, but seated in threes and fours at tables in the main foyer of the building. My nostrils are already filled with the familiar smells of bitter coffee and warm milk, and I can see the rug I’ll hang on the far wall, to create the backdrop for the small stage. Where I can play a few songs at the end of my shift.