Real Conversations

Geordie: 2008

Geordie Boye isn’t a nickname. He changed his name by deed poll, relieved to shuck off his old identity for what everyone calls him.

Everyone knows Geordie Boye and his little chestnut barrel of a dog Bruno. He’s top dog on the streets—Geordie that is, not Bruno. There’s a clear, if shifting, hierarchy on the streets, a bigger version of the school playground.

Geordie’s been on the streets so many years no one, not even Geordie, knows how long. You can’t imagine the streets without Geordie. He holds court, hangers-on and runners around him, sitting on the steps of the derelict theatre or the triangle of grass by the river. 

The council have a legal duty to house “vulnerable” people and homelessness manager Matt is concerned. Geordie’s always resisted all blandishments to get him off the streets. But he’s 48. The average age at death for homeless men is 45. The heavy toll of daily drinking is becoming obvious, but he maintains his place at the top of the pecking order, getting one of his lackeys to thump upstarts back into place. 

He let us get him a flat last winter. It wasn’t a success. Despite our efforts, it became a drinking den: Tom buying cheap ersatz “cider” on his payday, tomorrow Jimmy’s money buying the two-litre bottles. A hub of shouting, fights, threats to neighbours. (Anti)/social behaviour depending if you’re (housed)/drinkers. 

Geordie’s back on the streets. 

Always hoping, always believing, that’s homelessness. 

My quest, too.

Home. Less. 1995

The people I define myself against daily—“at least I’m not…”—are endlessly told they’re not like “us.” Defined by what they’ve lost. Less than everyone else.

I have a secure home and grew up in a family that appeared solid. But even as a child you can measure what you’ve got against stories and classmates. It’s homeless people who teach you most about what was missing.

For my hostel newsletter Question of the Week, I ask: Who is your hero? Half say: ‘my mother.’ I say nothing. 

Mostly, I say nothing to my mother either. Although I did have some real conversations with her. Fewer than with Matt or Geordie. 

Seven precisely. 

An average of one for every 13 years of my mother’s life. 

Every 9.14 years of mine.  

Conversation 1: 1961  

I’m five. Too young to censor what I say, too naïve to know I have to. Tucked under tight crisp sheets in my cosy little room, boiler purring comfortingly. My mother perches on the mattress, asks: ‘What’s the matter?’ 

‘No-one will play with me.’ Miserable slow tears as I go back to earlier, standing against the railings in the school playground, my feet curving uncomfortably down their round concrete base, the thick black-painted iron hard and heavy on my back stretching as far as I can see left and right. 

My mother goes rigid as the railings. Instantly, I’m back in the now: I can never again make her feel like this. 

‘I didn’t have many friends at school either. It won’t matter when you’re thirty,’ she says. Tightens the sheet across my chest, tucks it hard under the mattress and leaves.

Except it did, of course.  

Geordie: 2009

Matt comes to find me.

‘I’m worried about Geordie Boye. I’m not sure he’ll survive another winter on the streets.’

‘I don’t know what to say, Matt. What can we do that we haven’t tried already?’

We have this conversation a lot. Geordie doesn’t care if he sleeps under a roof or not – the streets are his domain and his comfort zone – and he knows we worry an awful lot more about him dying on the streets than he does. 

We give him a bed in the hostel again. He does something we deem unacceptable so we exclude him. We try again. He takes umbrage and walks out. We try again. Can’t give up. Can’t think of anything different to try. 

Conversation 2: 1975  

Nineteen, pregnant. The sexual revolution liberated men: I let Simon have free rein over my life. A health freak, nothing foreign is going into his girlfriend’s body, not the new pill, the old-fashioned coil, the messy cap. Our sex will be all natural. Naturally, youthful fertility triumphed. 

‘Ohmigod, don’t tell my parents, they’ll kick me out!’ Like me, he lives at home. 

I have to tell my parents because I need their help. The irony does not escape me, although it doesn’t occur to Simon. His parents never find out. 

I take a deep breath.  

‘I’m pregnant.’  

Silence. My dad, shocked and hurt, looks to my mother, as always. She purses her lips. 

‘What are you going to do about it?’ 

I’ve already been to the nicely anonymous neat stuccoed Georgian house in town. A waiting room of girls my age staring at the carpet, sneaking glances at each other’s shoes, trousers or skirts. The woman I see is professionally kind, lays out options. But for once, I know exactly what I want: I have no idea about babies; I’m going to uni. I get a date for the termination, the neutral term finely calculated to erase awkward emotions.  

My mother’s matter-of-factness is just right.

Homelessness: 1993 

Homelessness isn’t always, or just, house-less-ness. You can be legally homeless with a roof over your head: domestic abuse; overcrowded; temporary; third floor if you’re in a wheelchair. Only a small percentage are the visible face of homelessness, the people in doorways, in tents on roundabouts, bunking down in multi-storey car park stairwells. 

I’ve never been homeless. But vividly etched is how I felt that day when I bobbed down on my heels to talk to a guy sitting on a scruffy blanket. Earnest do-gooder, eager to believe everything I was told, keen to help, bursting to problem-solve. 

Instantly, the people walking by didn’t look me in the eye. I felt disregarded. Not so much unnoticed – although I was – as erased. People didn’t want to see homelessness. Didn’t want to see a person behind their label. 

Viscerally, immediately, I wanted to shout, “But me, I’m not homeless!” 

Shame-faced at my own hypocrisy: wanting to stand alongside people, simultaneously wanting to separate myself from “unfortunates” – and there it comes, that distance. 

You feel less, sitting on a pavement, looked down on literally and metaphorically. 

One in twenty of you can expect to end up homeless sometime.

Conversation 3:1986 

Christmas. Off-guard in the usual slumped warm boozy overfed end-of-day way. Talking about my friend Annabel, a fellow single-parent who also chose a wildly unsuitable man as father of her child. I’m in awe of her vivacious beauty and insouciance in the face of poverty and men’s idiocies. Upper-middle-class, not intimidated by anything or anyone. I’m a bit enthralled by her, a bit humbled she’s friends with me. 

I’m spooling anecdotes. How shocked I was when she stepped over the low metal border to march across a huge circle of pristine lawn. Her problems with her colonel father. A throwaway comment slips out, ‘…but everyone has something they don’t like about their childhood, don’t they?’ 

‘Oh really; what’s yours?’ 

Never have I sobered up so quickly.  

I cannot even hint at anything wrong about my mother to my mother. But everything was wrong with my mother. Annabel and I spend hours exploring how our childhoods warped us, sent us off in crazy directions, keep us running away. 

My mother is staring at me. The fire crackles. Ice clinks in my dad’s whisky and lemonade. 

Couching it as neutrally as possible and deliberately not mentioning her, I say: ‘I didn’t have many friends.’ 

‘You didn’t WANT friends! We took you to places and you wouldn’t PLAY with people!’ 

I knew it would be my fault. There are no win-win situations, everything has to be pinned on someone. And with the deflecting superpower of the fragile, she bounces everything back at us, her defences impenetrable. 

Geordie: 2010

It’s Saturday night. I’ve never seen Geordie worried. 

‘It’s Bruno. He needs the vet.’

We don’t accept dogs at the hostel – there’ve been nasty incidents involving fleas, faeces and bites – so a mate looks after Bruno overnight. Daytimes, Geordie and Bruno walk and sit on the pavements just like always. We’re only protecting him from the overnight cold; but that’s good enough.

The PDSA hospital is open. Geordie carries Bruno to my car and cocoons him on his lap for the ten-minute journey. In the waiting room, I’m annoyed at the visible prejudice – tutting, stares, moving away – that must be Geordie’s everyday. He’s stroking Bruno, telling him he’s loved him since he was a puppy, years ago. Exact time doesn’t exist in a drinker’s world.

The vet examines Bruno and with a sober face explains he’s very ill, it would be kinder to put him to sleep. 

Geordie’s face crumples. ‘I love him so much, he’s my life.’

The vet and I wait. Geordie hugs Bruno’s panting body. He is crying. Geordie, cock of the streets, cope with anything, nothing bothers him.

‘I’ll have to do the best for him, won’t I? It’s the least I can do.’

There’s no question Geordie will stay while the vet gives the injection. He wants me to stay too.

Afterwards, the vet raises the question of Bruno’s body. One option is cremation and giving his ashes back to Geordie. 

‘Yes! Definitely. I want him with me.’

The vet tells us the cost. 

Geordie says the PDSA will have to do the necessary. 

Conversation 4: 1995  

‘Have you ever talked to your mother about how you feel?’ 

Of course not.  

‘What do you think would happen if you did?’ 

Next Sunday, I indicate I’ve something important to say. My dad goes upstairs to listen on the extension. Carefully, impartially, I lay out my version of the trajectory of my life, try to untangle what shaped me, explain the reasons for the chaos after chaos they never understood. For the first time, I venture to implicate her, slightly, gently. Even a hundred miles away, circuitously, down the phone, it feels daring. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes later, I’m out of words, spent. They are silent. But I expect that, it’s a lot to take in. 

All week, I’m on edge, anxious how she’ll respond.  

On Sunday, on schedule, the phone rings.  

‘It was the school fête yesterday. They were lucky, it was a beautiful sunny day. We like to go, it’s important to support the local community.’ 

As if my words never existed. 

Geordie: 2010

I tell Matt about Bruno. Geordie has shrunk a bit from his usual bombast.

‘I wonder if 1180 would work,’ Matt says. It’s a dry house for people trying to stay off alcohol, run by Brett. 

Astoundingly, Geordie manages almost two weeks before he goes back to drinking.

‘He couldn’t cope with what was in his head without the alcohol to drown it,’ Brett tells me. ‘You know he went back to the North-East for a funeral? The abuse he had from his family you wouldn’t believe. No wonder he never kept in touch with his brothers.’ 

Conversation 5: 2000  

In my forties I don’t blame her as much. I can see the thread of mental fragility down the motherline from behind my grandma, through her, into me. 

‘Mummy was ill and went to the doctor, and he said if she didn’t work, she’d be more ill.’ I remember this response to a now-forgotten question word-for-word. I must have been young because of how it’s phrased. And it had to be mental illness; no bodily illness would be improved by working. 

Maybe I can make a connection through our shared experiences. 

Tentatively, I talk around motherhood and babies, how tough I found it as a new mother. What our different generations grappled with, her in the restrictive 1950s, me in the liberated 1970s. Reaching out. Tiptoeing through the minefield.  

Then I step on a detonator. 

Suddenly, her face is thrust forward, her neck tight and stringy, jaw jutting towards me. Her hands like talons on the arms of her wing chair propel her shoulders forward into the room at me. Face twisted into inescapable gorgon stare, she hisses, ‘IT wouldn’t take ANY milk from ANYone, IT wouldn’t stop crying for ANYone, IT wouldn’t….’. I shrink smaller down into my chair. 

Apparently, I’d only take milk from my grandad, her father, hands down the kindest person in the family, and wouldn’t let anyone but him bath me. I can only imagine her hurt at the rejection.  

Before bed, I have a shower. Turning the water off, I drape my bath sheet across my back, hunched against the shivering cold. The feeling of the towel on my face makes my eyes scrunch tight tight tight shut. My mouth a grimace, teeth set, cheeks pushed into fat teardrop shapes, feels like a clown face of garish, hard, chipped plaster. Sad echo of my mother’s visage. 

My hands rub and rub, hard, compulsively.  

An ur-memory, primitive throwback to the time before conscious recollection, a baby, my grandad bathing me, maybe.  

But he was a gentle man. This feels rough. It must have been my mother drying me, viciously wishing she were elsewhere. Or I was. 

Geordie: 2010

We try more different variations of accommodation to see if anything will work. 

As good as it gets is our motto. 

Conversation 6: 2011  

Another question slips out. The balance of power’s tipped. She’s eighty-two, eight years widowed, still a powerhouse, still independent, but underneath there’s frailty. I’m fifty-five, more sure after a lifetime analysing and coming to terms with everything. And we’re on my turf. A year ago, she eyed up our garage. ‘That would make a lovely annexe,’ was how she asked if she could come and live with her only child. 

We’ve invited her for a meal. I’m discoursing expansively, explaining how I’ve changed my thinking, grown and developed. 

‘Don’t you ever feel the urge to try and make yourself better?’ I ask, knowing the answer. 

‘No.’ Instant. Clipped. 

‘Why not?’ Mischievous, pushing. 

‘I like me as I am.’ 

I still don’t know if she realises that she’s spinning herself a yarn, weaving a web to contain her terrifying fear and disappointment.  

Geordie: 2014

We don’t run the hostel anymore. 

I hear Geordie’s acquired an old wheelchair and commands his second lieutenant (who later takes over his money lending business) to push him round. 

Eventually I hear he’s died. 

I think about Bruno’s ashes. 

Conversation 7: 2020  

My mother’s only with us six months before a massive stroke takes her to a care home. Imperceptibly, eight years pass and you’re walking down the familiar corridor for the weekly duty, breathing shallowly so as not to inhale the sweetish nauseous mixture of talc and E45 cream masking the sharp urine smell. At least it’s the least rancid of the eighteen homes I checked.  

Mick the handyman is doing health and safety checks. He leans on the wall under one of the series of identical pictures repeated down the corridor. 

‘Eyup.’ He smiles, pleased to see someone he can have a conversation with. Although it’s the same every time. Here we go. 

‘What’s it all about? I don’t know.’ He shakes his head. 

I play my part. ‘No idea, Mick. If that were me, take me to Switzerland.’ We both believe assisted dying is preferable to life in name only.  

‘Does she even know who she is?’ 

‘I think so, Mick. Sadly.’ 

‘Look at her. Just lying there day after day, can’t even move her arm to scratch her nose. I don’t know.’ 

I don’t mention when I reached out to stroke her hand and she jerked away from me. I rally back, ‘She can’t even enjoy her food, all liquidised. And her drinks thickened, she must miss her whisky-and-lemonade.’  

Mick wants to get on. Sometimes we go on for ages, shaking our heads in unison. Most days I see no staff. 

I push open her door, the dressing table she’s never sat at to do her hair – as far as I know – on my left. She hasn’t left this room, this bed, for a couple of years. The carers long stopped pretending she speaks to them. They turn her religiously every two hours. Shrivelled, weighing less than five stone, she lies foetal-curled as though she’s trying to disappear into herself.  

Five minutes of falsely bright conversation. I can’t look away from her almost mummified face and unblinking rictus stare. Somehow, even though she can hardly move a muscle, she still dominates and disarms me. Occasionally she raises her eyebrows or frowns. 

Her eyelashes are crusty; watery trails running down her nose and cheek. Blocked tear ducts. I know what’ll help – cotton wool squeezed out in piping hot water pressed into the corners of your eyes. But there’s no cotton wool, the ensuite water isn’t hot enough. Excuses; I can’t bear to touch her. I ask the staff to sponge her eyes. I never check if they do.  

In 2020, coronavirus stops visits. Already marginal, she fades further. On her birthday, ninety-one, she sees her beloved granddaughter and hears her toddler great-grandson sing happy birthday; lucky they’re with me when the staff WhatsApp call me.  

A month later the home rings again; she doesn’t have long. In plastic apron and gloves, I hold her hand, stroke her, tell her family news, about the virus. Force awkward words to say we love her. 

Then comes an unexpected generosity. I’ve long felt sorry for her in a dispassionate way. But now, just once, I feel kind-hearted. And I let her feel it.  

Maybe this finally allows her to slip away. Maybe she never heard. She died shortly after I left.  

A covid funeral, six people, but people across the country watching online. Hiding how few people there for her, unlike my dad’s funeral in the ancient church, full of village folk, the funeral she’d wanted. 

It was done. Laid to rest. 

Up to a point.  

She’s still in my head. 

Identifying as neurodivergent and queer, she is chief horizon-gazer for a medium-sized homelessness enterprise she helped build. J S has had poetry and prose published in half a dozen publications including the 2022 NeurodiVERSE anthology, Firewords 15 and Queerlings.