WALK ON BY.
I gave him
my lunch. His gaze, half grateful for the sandwich, half lost in another place.
Yet he managed to turn to the next passer-by and ask “any spare change?” Perhaps he would have preferred my coins to
food but I knew that would only end up on drink or drugs and what the boy
needed was sustenance.
I only
hovered for a moment, just long enough to notice the filthy blue sleeping bag,
his scruffy hair, his white vacant stare. A hint of a handsome boy now almost a
corpse. I walked on, each doorway it
seemed was a space for littered bodies. There among the cacophony of gulls,
buskers and the beating of feet hurrying about their lunchtime business, were
cardboard boxes and plastic bags holding something resembling “wrapped-up
people.”
I found
myself looking down at my feet to evade the beggars’ eyes. I couldn’t help them
all. I was to be like all the others who
managed to avoid these desperate pleas; no doubt passing here every day, now
experts in avoidance with their designer carry bags – Were they blind or just
hardened to it?
The woman in
the shop told me it was like an epidemic – young lives lost to addiction and
neglect. There were so many of them the council had gated off an area behind
the multi-storey car park where they all congregated: It was like a little
village she said.
“It’s the
Spice you know? It’s killing them. “
I wondered
where their mothers were – the women who bled to give them life. Had they
abandoned them or were they left somewhere grieving for their lost sons and
daughters?
I wondered
why all the empty buildings couldn’t be opened up –made into liveable, safe
accommodation. Why wasn’t someone, somewhere, helping?
This is a
proud city. Its heart beats with its music. Its history flows through its
blood. Its people look out for each other; stand up for each other… yet its
streets are awash with the homeless, the lost- unwanted and invisible.
