Vianne by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2025-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

6

15 October 1993 Any vagrant will tell you this. You have about twenty-four hours in any given place before being marked as undesirable. That’s twenty-four hours of relative peace and comfort in a waiting room, or on a railway platform, or on the crowded concourse of a busy coach terminal. Use it wisely; because once you have been identified as one who is not merely passing through, officials will make it their business to force you out, harass you, drive you from the safety of the shelter into open streets, where police will move you from place to place, take your blankets, your bedding, your tent; and finally drive you to settle in worse and more dangerous places, until at last you are driven to seek another town entirely, where the whole process will happen again – and again – for as long as your strength endures.

The trick is to keep moving, and not to come to rest for too long. Furthermore, to convince other people that you belong, you have to first convince yourself. The narrative of self-loathing is one that I have encountered many times. Treat a person like garbage, and soon they will end up believing they are as lazy and worthless as society believes them to be. Why do they not get a job? Why do they simply sit around doing nothing?

But what I have learnt is that homelessness is a full-time occupation. When you have nothing, everything costs; everything must be accounted for. Days are spent looking for food; keeping warm; searching out facilities. Some people are aggressively independent; others seek the company and security of others. Some people seek the comfort of alcohol or substance abuse, and are judged for this by those who believe such things should be reserved for those with homes and productive employment. But a job, a home, a family – anyone can lose these things. Loss is not linked to virtue, whatever the Church may tell us. Everyone has a story.

Stéphane tells me all of this as we sit outside the coach terminal, with Pomponette on his shoulder, sheltered from the rain by his coat. He has been homeless for nearly four years; ever since his marriage broke down. Alcoholism, depression, bad luck and trusting the wrong kind of people have all played their part in his circumstance; and yet he is curiously upbeat, in a way that I almost recognize. ‘No one lives rough for more than five years. That means my luck must be turning.’

Stéphane was originally from Marseille. He spent his first eighteen months with friends, sleeping on sofas and in spare rooms, but in the end their friendship ran out, and he ended up with the sleep merchants, and then in a home-built shelter in one of the city’s bidonvilles.

‘That was a bad time,’ he tells me. ‘A township built from garbage, filled with humanity’s rejects. Live there long enough, and it feels like there’s nothing else in the whole world. And so I hitchhiked

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