So, besides being fucking freezing, what is it like on the streets? The first thing that you notice is that you become invisible. It feels like being litter. People plainly know you are there, but they look straight through you because they don’t want to make eye contact with a beggar and… what?... you certainly don’t trust a beggar – even though I was not actually begging. I was just sitting there. Over those ten days, people who I knew would walk straight past me and I suspect most of them genuinely did not see me. What is more, I was out of role, so they didn’t expect to see me either.
During the daytime, if someone talks to you as you sit on a pavement, they are usually about to say something horribly charitable or else just horrible. And, at night-time, if people talk to you it usually means that they are totally pissed and may be thinking about kicking your head in. So, I learnt to keep my eyes down and just sit, passively.
The next thing I found was that it is incredibly boring – there is nothing to do and, for a lot of the time, you don’t want to do anything, either. I didn’t have a phone to play with, money to buy things with or anything to look forward to. If Harry had not been there, I would have had no one to talk to either and, as he said, when you are on your own on the streets you get incredibly lonely. There is no community on the streets and you never trust other people who are in the same position as you are. So, you start playing around with thoughts in your mind and you feel as though you are going mad.
Nobody trusts you either. When Harry and I bought food together, people tended to treat us like biblical lepers – they kept as far away as possible and, when we went into the supermarket down the road, we were watched all the time in case we did a runner with something that we had nicked.
Very quickly I also came to understand the sense of hopelessness that Harry and other homeless people feel. It’s like being stuck in a transparent bubble – you see the world going on around you, but there is no way you can join in. There is a feeling that you have no future – you’re never going to get a home to live in, you’ll never improve and things can only go downhill. Like shit, you can only go down the drain. I also found myself worrying all the time about my health in a way that I never normally do and I was only on the street for ten days. Harry had constant pain in his rotten teeth but no means at all of getting dental care.
The final thing that I want to mention is that you stink and never get properly warm. At home, I shower twice a day and, even more than that when I do exercise. I use soap and dry myself with a clean towel. I change my clothes. I use deodorant and aftershave that costs more for a bottle than all of the money I spent in ten days. On the streets, I didn’t change clothes once and I never took all my clothes off – I’d have been arrested if I’d tried that outside the two ladies shops. There is nowhere to wash and getting to public toilets is a drag and involves a walk of about half a mile to get to somewhere that is, itself, filthy and which also stinks... So we used to pee down a side alley between two shops and do the rest in the park behind a tree before picking it up in a polythene bag and chucking it in the bin.
But, with all that said, those ten days taught me things that nothing else could have done and they took me to something that I had searched for all my life. Faith. Pantheistic faith. To a belief that there is no such thing as them. There is only us. That there is only one universal, overarching truth – that God is the force that unites us, be we beggar or be we prince. And so it is our contribution to our shared existence as part of God that defines our value, a contribution that can be defined in one word, compassion. Shared suffering. The truth that Harry taught me during those ten days is not earthbound either, as most monotheistic religions are. It has nothing to do with Jerusalem or Bethlehem. It is universal. If there are living beings elsewhere, as there must be, I cannot see why that core truth should not apply where they are, as much as it applies here.
I know now that I don’t believe in the Christian God and never will do. Harry doesn’t, either. There is no creator God; if there is, what was God doing for the infinite years before creation? But, because of all that Harry has taught me, I know that God exists. And when I die, as die we all must, I will not continue as a separate entity, I wouldn’t want to anyway, but if I have shown compassion to life around me, then I will have contributed to the force that unites us all, to God. If I haven’t, well, then I have been a waste of space.
When I was with Harry, he gave me his most prized possession. It was a book, by then filthy, and somewhat torn. It is called The Good Heart and is a discussion between His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and Christian academics. Like Harry, I have found it to be the most influential book I have ever read. And, like Harry, I have read it cover to cover many times.
So, Harry, I want to thank you. Susan and my children want to thank you. Homeless and penniless you might have been, but you gave me something that is worth more than all the riches in the world. Faith. I am a lousy Buddhist, I know, and very shaky on the concept of reincarnation, although I’m not sure if that matters at all. But as I watch you now, as I do most days when we work together, I am constantly reminded of all that you have taught me.
I also think that I kept to my side of the bargain. I helped Harry decide what he wanted to do with his life. And the answer to that did not lie in money. It did not lie in going back to his family because that was, by then, a closed door. The answer was simple. He learnt to be happy. He learnt that it was OK to get off the streets, to accept the friendship that was offered to him by me, my family, my friends and the community in which we live. He even learnt to look after his teeth.
So, what did we do in those ten days? In one sense, sweet fuck all. But, in another sense, we changed each other’s lives. I taught Harry to live again. He taught me something much more important and much more enduring…faith. A faith that has let me understand my place in the world and has reinforced my love for my family – the place where I truly belong...
So, that is why this book is called Harry. How could it not be? Susan suggested the name.