It was a little sideways surge in foot traffic that forced me to step directly over his leg. His feet were bare. Impossible to ignore his toes: gnarled and crusty little snails without shells. I looked down on the top of his head as I passed. No more than an instant and I’m gone.
Earlier, from the safety of the other side of the street while cars sniffed each other and we waited for the Green Man to usher us across, I’d been watching him with a growing sense of anxiety. He was sitting directly in the flow of the pedestrians, a cardboard coffee cup placed in front of one shin. Its meaning was obvious. His head was bowed. He didn’t look up. No one looked down.
Homeless. They’re around on the streets of Sydney of course, like every city in the world. When we worked down in Woolloomooloo I knew a few guys pretty well; at 23 and from the squeakiest-of-clean-middle-class backgrounds, it took a while for me to learn to converse, to shake hands, to squat down on concrete while ciggies were rolled and words produced, one by one, shaken out reluctantly like the last roll-your-own from a battered packet.
What I know about homeless people:
Everyone has a story
Change your own plot just a little and recast your brother or your uncle or your dad or yourself– a marriage gone wrong, a love affair with the bottle, a lost job, one too many late rent payments, too many nights on a friend’s couch and…
You might think you could never feature in this drama, but work the script a little and there you are, spotlit on the stage.
Depression, schizophrenia, paranoia – little kings of the streets
Drugs will sing you to sleep. Every time
Even jail is a family
Almost everything is just a bandaid on a missing limb
I cross the road heading for the massage place – I’ve got 45 minutes til my train and plan to use most of it sorting out the back pain that’s been jagging me for days. But on the table he’s there with me. I’ll be passing him on my way back to the train, which I’m on a deadline to catch because I have to get the girls from school. This is not the first time I’ve faced this situation. Good grief, of course it’s not! But today it’s the most pressing.
A little question for the massage table: what will I do?
That $50 note in my bag: give it to him no questions asked. But what will he spend it on? Does it matter? In developing countries – and I’ve been there and broken it – the rule is to never give money. It encourages begging rings that exploit children, keeping them out of school, and the money is seldom spent on ‘the right things.’ Quite likely, this homeless man will spend the fifty on alcohol or cigarettes. And? Is that a good reason to hold it back?
Buy him lunch. I picture myself in the sandwich bar near where I work, selecting something that a ‘homeless person’ might enjoy (what kind of stereotypical sandwich filling works under the genre of ‘Homeless Person Cuisine’ anyway?) Laying it next to him as I head back to my train, I wonder how he’d react. Is it hopelessly patronising to have someone select your lunch filling and lay it next to you on the footpath in a brown paper bag? Would he imagine that it was a leftover sandwich I was too full to eat myself? Would I stop to explain I’d bought it for him especially? Would it even matter what he thought as long as he was given something to eat?
Crouch down next to him and ask him what he needs or simply stop to say hello. Anything other than walk past him as though he’s a stain on the road… And then what? My train won’t wait. And again, is it conversation he’s after? I know how to point him to a hostel. But the skills and support he needs to get back to living in a home, being part of a community, is much bigger than a 2 minute conversation on a street corner.
Go home and make a donation to the Wayside Chapel or Hope Street where we used to work. Write a letter to the government pleading for more resources to tackle mental illness, housing stress, domestic violence… all those calloused fingers twitching on the triggers of homelessness.
As I lie there being worked over inside and out, I’m all too aware that each scenario is mostly designed to make me feel better about the fact that I stepped over a homeless person. And I’m aware that I’m making this all about me and less about him.
4 minutes before my train is due out, I cross the road and see him, still sitting like a log in a merry pedestrian river. He’s smoking and has a bottle of Coke and a bag of Subway next to him. So someone, I find myself thinking vaguely, perhaps bought him his lunch… or he made enough begging to get his own.
And then I cross the road and walk on past. And I do nothing.
Outside St James Station there’s a young guy selling The Big Issue. It’s a magazine sold by street corner vendors who are struggling in life in one way or another – half the profits are kept by the sellers. In a rush of I-don’t-know-what I buy a copy and the young guy is all smiles when I tell him it’s okay, I don’t need change.
But the homeless man? I walked over him and did nothing. And today, right now, nothing will change that.
Komentarai