The man in the grave was alive.
‘Fuck off and leave me alone' came the gnarled voice from the depths, beneath the pink pastel candlewick its ornate Rose’s now caked in rivulets of mud.
‘If you don’t want soup, how about some coffee and biscuits ?’ I pleaded
‘Bugger off and gie me peace' .
‘ So that will be a no’ I thought as I wound my way through the gravestones and vaults, dark and frozen beneath the sycamores swaying in the cold Edinburgh wind that whips against the sombre outline of St Cuthbert's church.
Out on the street I found the care van dispensing soup and clothes to a group of about 30 graveyard dwellers fresh out of the homes they have made in graves and every other nook and cranny that the cemetery had to offer. A mere drop in the ocean of the 4500 homeless souls who live on the streets of Edinburgh, these people are Edinburgh’s homeless crisis an ever growing problem fuelled by social, demographic and housing policies. Many have mental health problems and this deadly concoction makes the Capital second only to London in terms of homeless numbers. We ask no questions, they tell no lies is our motto. But the overriding question hangs the air, an unspoken question that even the brave fear to ask: who are you and how did you get here? We hide in the safer mantra: why these people are here is not our concern, the fact that they are hungry is.
Yet 'these people’ are just that, ‘people’. They are not filthy sleeping bags lying soaking in doorways. They are not pathetic little paper cups sitting on the pavement asking 'for any spare change’ with mangy looking starving dog as a prop. These are people are as different as those that pass them by every day, avoiding their gaze as they scale the moral high ground. At best, amusing curiosities and at worst drug fuelled beggars looking for their next hit, characters in a daily Dickensian street show.THE
The taxi drivers sitting on their rank watch the gathering of no where men with disgust. The nightly show was addictive .Wasters. Chancers. Lazy bastards. They concurred as one, in a camaraderie unparalleled in their cut throat world. They watched the group of down and outs huddled around a small van parked in the taxi rank on Waverly bridge. They carried a variety of ruck sacks, carrier bags and boxes. One guy in a Hearts top looked smashed. The taxi drivers aggrieved at losing one of their parking spaces looked in disgust at the Christian ‘do gooders' that fed these wasters and encouraged them. Apart from one relatively well dressed guy with military upright stance and impeccably polished shoes, they were all in what are best described as rags. One guy had no trousers so had tied his sleeping bag around his waste kilt like fashion. One women, clearly pregnant laughed and joked with the mainly male crowd. She smoked heavily. They should beg on the streets of eastern Europe where they belong. They held a common hatred of these common men and women that even outstripped their mutual hatred for cyclists. Some even lived in skips with their kids. The murmurings of unbridled disgust grew.
My eye catches a young woman wearing a torn and ravaged camouflage jacket with disintegrating trainers and loose sole that flip flopped as she walked.
She stood in the queue speaking to a man in a Hearts top. They spoke warmly and quietly to each other which was somehow strange in the melee of banter and slagging. It was as if they knew each other, friends or relatives perhaps although in their demeanour they were worlds apart. His shirt was about three sponsors old and looked like it had yet to see the inside of a washing machine, it probably never will. Apart from her dress she was well spoken, public school even, and her well groomed hair was set neatly in a bun and her nails, perfectly manicured silvery black shellac with one painted gold caught my eye.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked
‘Does it matter?’
‘No'
‘It’s Karen’ she relents
‘What can I get you?’
‘Soup, what kind of soup is it?’ Came the reply in an accent more akin to a New Town dining room than the homeless care van.
‘Tonight we are serving Bethany butternut squash and lentils'. Despite their lurid lifestyles, the powers that be ensure that food on offer has a healthy option
‘It’s pure boak’ shouted the Hearts fan ‘yer better aff with the Cuppa Soup than eating that shite’
‘ I will pass your compliments on to the chef ‘
‘I love butternut soup,’ Karen said
' Where are you staying tonight ?‘ I asked as my curiosity prevailed
‘ O somewhere’
‘And tomorrow ?’
‘Somewhere else, heading off to Stirling tomorrow’
‘Friends there ?’
‘ No I just have never been there. My late sister went to University there'. She paused, as if wanting to say more but held back then gave up.
She drinks her tepid soup quickly and tucks the buttered rolls in to her carrier bag that seemed to hold her everything. She lit a roll up, said goodbye then disappeared back in to the graveyard.
The guy in the Hearts top spoke. Rough, very rough with a voice that scraped along his cigarette and heroin eroded voice box. He seemed drunk or stoned or both but then I realised he was not. This was him, a brain battered by a life he hates and which hates him and where his youthful dance with the dragon had led him into a lifelong dalliance with his prince of darkness where a wrap of heroin is worth more than his life.
‘Av never had a job, never wanted one. Got bevvied on Buckie everyday since I was thirteen. Buckie, glue, lighter fluid, you name, I took it. Then straight on to the heavy stuff. A only went to school until a wis 14 then I got kicked out for nicking a teacher’s purse tae get some mare bevvy'
‘My mother kicked me out when I was 15 for nicking her fags and I’ve been on the streets ever since. The Social gave up trying to get me a job so now they give me £5 a day which I have to go and pick up at High Riggs then a just hing around for the rest of the day, see what comes ma way'
Sensing a lack of sympathy for his position his tone changed
‘Its nae fun ye ken. You wake and your cold and your worried, worry, worry, worry: where will I end up today? what will I eat ? where will I sleep? then you get tired and sleep in a doorway and your hungry and cold' as he spoke I noticed that he looked cold with cold blue eyes, skinny shivering arms and feet damp in a pair of torn summer sandals,
‘Your always cold even in the summer so you take a drink and see if anyone has any puff or crack if your lucky, because you need it, really really need it and if your not out the game you try to cadge some cash to get out the game. Ye dinny want it but you need it’. As he spoke, faster and faster and more and more desperate I knew that he really needed ‘it’ now.
‘ Then you go to the soup van for some hot soup because your so bloody cold then you try to find somewhere to crash, some shit hole that you can break in to or on the streets, cold, so cold then the same the next day then the next day it’s the same, then the same, then the same again'
His drawn eyes and unkempt beard make him seem far older than his 29 years. Hands covered in tattoos. ‘Love' on the left hand and ‘Nicki' on the right. Who was Nicki I ask ‘ Ma bird’ he says . It’s actually Nickie with an ‘ie' I but since I’ve only got 5 fingers I cut her ‘e’ aff he smiles, an affable smile and a smile that I feel is not seen too often, locked firmly in his prison of a mind.
‘A really loved her. We were goanna git married if we could get it together ye ken. Her father wis a big shot lawyer he’d sent her tae private school in England and paid for her to go to a Stirling Uni. but she jacked it in, she was too fond of the wacky baccy then Charlie and jellies. Then they wanted fuck all to do with her and she ended up on the streets and he said he was gonnae set us up in a nice house if we got clean and got jobs but we never did, so they never did. Then she topped herself, overdosed on jellies. Couldnae handle it any mare when she got pregnant, totally fucked off she wis. Then her mother and father turned up at her funeral. Bastards. Stood and gret like weans then pissed off for a do up in Morningside. Telt me a wis scum but a really loved her. Ah should have topped myself then but I’m shit scared of death; after all the things I’ve been up tae, it will the burning fire for me nae doubt. Cannae be much worse than here mind you and at least it wid be warm’.
Ralphie was a soldier and a piper. He was one of the battalion of ex squaddies whose parade ground was now the long streets of Edinburgh which many struggled to march in without their sergeants discipline to guide them. Ralphie had left the army many years ago but still he had the gait, pride and manicured appearance of someone who had spent a lifetime protecting and lamenting his Queen. He fought and played in Iraq and Afghanistan and his sandy hair, his sand paper skin and pock marked face looked as if they had imbibed the desert battleground where he had spent so long. His front teeth were gone. His accent, no longer the lilting west highland of his youth but rather a hybrid variety of dialect perhaps middle England. After the army he had pursued successful career in security in the south east but came to Edinburgh to marry a woman he had never loved but who could give him a bed back in Scotland.
‘The army was good. The Taliban were there and were deadly but you didn’t have to get in to bed with them, unlike my three wives who were more deadly than any roadside bomb.’ I look for an ironic smile, but there was none. He meant what he said.
‘See these teeth that you can’t see ? ‘ he joked ‘ these weren’t the result of the Taliban, ISIS or the IRA, I lost these when my second wife panned me’
‘You’d have thought I’d have learnt my lesson after two, but what did I do? Move back to Scotland and get married for a third time. I must be really mental. That one only lasted 2 years but she cleaned me out. No home, no cash, no woman, only my pride’.
Public complaint and political pressure means that soldiers do get some priority for health and housing and they do have access to many support groups however drug reliance and mental health problems mean that many do not avail themselves of that support.
‘Thankfully I had managed to develop PDSA in the army which meant I got in to a military hostel but I’m on the streets all day and I’m bloody starving. I don’t get any money as I still have a house in Kent except that I don’t have a house in Kent because wife number 2 lives in it’ and I can’t afford a lawyer to sort things out'
I muse whether his PDSA was the result of military action or the life long guerrilla war that he seems to be fighting with his ex wives.
‘I can’t go for a job or else the hostel will charge me £800 a month and I’m bottom of the council housing list. 18 months most have to wait but because of me being mental they say I should get somewhere soon but in the meantime I am as they say, fucked’.
The Right To Buy policy removed 495,000 houses from public housing stocks in Scotland. Private sector rent increases and growing numbers of short term lets have added to a problem that Edinburgh refused to acknowledge for too long keeping the problem ‘hidden deep in it’s Old Town until it rose – much like the haar fog that creeps in from the sea - until it could no longer be ignored.’ (New Statesman)
‘These characters here get by on drugs’ continues Ralphie but I wouldn’t touch that shit so I hang around the libraries and museums all day then it’s a la carte dinner at the care van then back to my bed'
‘You guys in the care van are a marvel, apart from the crap soup you serve – butternut squash and lentil soup ? You must be joking'.
Before we drive off, a short man with long matted locks lurks out from the cemetery carrying an infested once blue sleeping bag with a ravished pair of trousers that barely reach his ankles.
‘Any coffee left pal?’ he asks.
‘Aye there’s soup and rolls if you like’
‘ Coffee with 6 sugars please’
‘Do you know the guy sleeping in the grave with the pink sheet ?’
‘Aye that’s Rab’.
‘Is it worth me trying to get him up again ?’ I ask
‘ No way! Once he gets cosy with his shoes off he disnae like to go oot’.
Such is life with homeless: the story is that there is no story other than a the bleak final chapter that they are now living. Occasionally there is a happy conclusion but usually there is not. The most likely next step is a room in a dirty B&B with draconian rules and a curfew that make prison sound a better option and for many prison will be the next, sometimes welcome step. Death is often, again sometimes welcome outcome with suicide rates higher than anywhere else in the population and where the average age of male death is 44 compared to an average of 76 with 600 people dying on the streets of Britain in 2017 as a result of suicide, drugs and alcohol overdoses. This is not care in the community but careless as a community. The situation is one of paradox: no home means no benefits which means no chance of getting a home. No home means no job application which means no job so no home, and no home means no chance of getting 'clean'. In fact no home means no chance.
Epilogue
Then the audience give up waiting for a hire. The show’s over so they turn their meters off and head for home. Home to nice painted semis, with small loving wives and warm comfy beds. To small loving children with long happy futures but who maybe one day will star in the show.
Brian Harris