I was on my hands and knees scraping a four-inch dog turd from the entrance to my bivouac in a small public park when the call came: “Oi! Get yer arse out of there you fuckin’ tramp.” The words came from a pair of angelic-faced young boys standing astride a pile of rubble. The message was clear. I had once again fallen on the road through life, this time to a new low. And, to make it worse, Christmas was just around the corner.
The pursuit of money (read: heroin) had become a Sisyphean task. Each day began and ended on the same note – flat broke, save for the few unspendable coppers left over from the last score. Working hours were spent covering the same 20 to 30 metropolitan miles with bags full of books, in search of purchasers, dragging my stolen wares up and down escalators, boarding trains, eventually making a sale, searching out the dealers, spending the cash, whacking up the gear, then beginning all over again, three, sometimes four times a day – weeks spent circling the capital in a perverse gavotte of relentless replenishment.
It had all been so different in the beginning. At first, in late summer, my homelessness had been tinged with boy scout romanticism. Despite urban regeneration, Clerkenwell retains elements of the picaresque, as I discovered one pleasant July afternoon. My old friend “Gorgeous” George and I slipped unnoticed through the ticket barriers at Farringdon station, on our way to a crack house located along the serpentine back funnels that led from the sink of lower Clerkenwell to the impossibly trendy heights of Exmouth Market.
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