London

Saturday 16
One homeless guy tells me Hyde Park is a safe place to sleep.

He says, “You have to hide inside at midnight, when the wardens come to lock the gates,” Fair do’s. I stop off at Marble Arch first, thinking I will sit and catch up with some notes. When I get there I am greeted by a large yellow sign. It says ‘MURDER’.

We are looking for witnesses, can you help?

MURDER
On the 30th of August at about 00.30am a male was assaulted near to the subway entrance to Marble Arch. He died from his injuries. In strictest confidence, please phone 0207 321 7228 Feature continues

I walk back through the subway tunnel and ask a young homeless guy with long hair, a beard and a smattering of low denomination coins at his feet if he knows anything about this murder. Specifically, I ask him if it was a homeless man that was murdered?

“Yeah, I think it was,” he tells me.

The murder is two weeks old. It could be the only murder in this area in the last ten years, but still I don’t like the odds. I tell myself in one breath that I am being silly, it’ll be okay to sleep here. Then I slap myself on the side of the head: think wife, think daughter, and I start walking, quickly, back towards the Strand and another night treading the boards, or the steps should I say, of the Theatre Royal.

On the theatre steps Michael is teasing Marijona about the likelihood of him getting an apartment. Marijona holds a piece of paper with apartment listings, he asks, “What does it mean, this 280 points?”

“It’s like this,” Michael begins. “You need a lot of points to get a welfare apartment. If you’re a young girl and have nowhere to live, you get points. If you are an old lady without a home you get even more points. If you are a young girl and pregnant or with a child, you get even more points.”

“What about me?” Marijona asks. “What is my points?”

“You,” Michael laughs. “A single working foreign male? You have no points.”

As we sit there laughing, with our cardboard beds set out for the evening, a group of young boys turn the corner and walk towards us. They are smartly dressed, like Ben Sherman adverts and though out in the big city haven’t quite mastered the art of hair gel. As they pass, the lad at the back, while keeping his legs and hips in a forward motion, turns his upper body and his spiky little head towards us and says, thumbs raised, “Alright boys?” To signify that this is not a rhetorical question he arches his eyebrows, he says, “Sweet as a nut?”

Some time passes before the four of us have control of our laughter.

4am. The streets of London, or at least Covent Garden… no, let narrow that down further, Catherine-Bloody-Street should be clean enough to eat off. Is it really possible that those little road-sweeping buggies, with their awful racket, are passing by my head every thirty minutes? Or am I at this point just going mad? Is it a bad dream? I grab my camera from my backpack and without sitting up take a quick picture as yet another one scrapes its way by. I must be sure its real.