David went on to tell me about a day that changed his trajectory completely. One night, while driving on the motorway with his family, including one of the youngest members, David had an accident at high speed. As you can imagine, everything happened very quickly. One of them didn’t make it. This consumed him thereafter, and he became estranged until he was unrecognizable to them and himself. Things spiraled from there.
“I lost my husband to cancer last year … his name was Kenan. We were together for twenty-eight years. I go through stages of being able to talk about it and sometimes I just cry my eyes out, you know?” Emma looked down the street into the distance, and then to the ground. “I lost my partner, my backbone, my best friend. I haven’t been doing too well, to be honest …”
Before Nick, I was married for ten years and I had a really bad relationship … There was a lot of domestic violence. I left after he put me in hospital for the second time. That’s when I became homeless. I’d been abused as a child … at the hands of my dad. When I was thirteen, I was taken into care, and for years moved from children’s homes to foster homes.”
“I’ve come a long way, man. My dad’s an alcoholic. It wasn’t pretty … My mom was everything to me. She died back in 2000. I know she’s looking down on me and I take a lot of strength from that. I want to put out a message to inspire people that I’m a survivor. I’m living with cancer, on the street, and I’m still smiling. So be optimistic.”
“Everybody out here is looking for money,” Dennis said as we moved away from one another, “but it’s the little things that count to make somebody feel better about themselves.”
The mother pulled the extendable hood back so her little girl could see me and Zero. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen months old. Zero waved at her and she shook her arm back at him. “Hang on,” he said, before leaping up. He rushed over and kneeled down next to her. Holding his hand up, he said, “High five.” Her parents were laughing and encouraged their daughter as she extended her hand to touch Zero’s. Children often react like this, with a natural curiosity that seems so organic at that age. There are usually two types of parents: the ones who nurture and allow these interactions to flow, and those who tighten their grip to forbid them. I feel that these moments are pivotal in our social development.
“There are some hostels we can stay in, for sure, but I won’t use them because, one, they won’t let the dogs in at night, and two, there are too many idiots there … meth heads who carry on all night, flying around, so you don’t get much sleep. Sometimes you’re sleeping on the floor anyway, so what’s the point of me being in there? I might as well be out here. I think people assume we’re all junkies and that we just want money to go and get off. They don’t realize that some of us are legit and are what we say we are.”
Whatever your views are as to why somebody is homeless, I think we can agree that it shouldn’t be normal to see thousands of people sleeping on the streets while others live in such abundance.
A smile is the most contagious thing in the world. When you smile at someone, they can’t help but smile back, and as they walk away, they think about that smile … and they smile themselves. Then, someone else catches that smile, and within an hour a thousand people can smile. For them five little seconds of your life, you forget it all. Every trouble and every problem. That’s the truth.