Xmas Tripping

    I was walking in the city. It was only 4 o’clock but the winter evening was already closing in. People scurried through the streets finishing up their business and their Christmas shopping for the day, before the rush hour took hold. It was very cold and our every breath hung before us in misty vapour. Despite my jacket I felt the implacable chill skewer my core. My ears were stinging from the frosty air; they were raw and when I rubbed them my hands felt red-hot.

    In a wide doorway, to my left, two homeless English boys, around fifteen or sixteen years of age, had set up a temporary nest. They may have been brothers, or perhaps they had once been just strangers thrown together by fate as they tramped along the mean pavements. It was hard to tell because the street had moulded them into a generic abjection. They sat on an elderly, dirty-pink eiderdown and they had two blankets which they were now pulling up over their scrawny legs. There were a few bags arranged by their sides, which undoubtedly contained all their meagre worldly possessions. I wondered what items would be deemed essential for a life on the street – and what could be easily dispensed with – and how good would any of us be at making that kind of decision? 

    One boy’s hair had been hacked into a ruthless number-one crop; the other’s was quite long, and stringy with grease. They both wore jackets, the colours of which had been lost in time and constant wear. One boy wore a single black, woollen glove against the cold. I wondered if he had lost the other. Or perhaps he had found one? As I drew level with their encampment, and the passing crowd in the street slowed to a near-crawl, I was able to take in the boys more clearly. They were street-hardened by the unimaginable daily indignities that rolled over them. Their cold-reddened faces were streaky with dirt. The crop-haired boy now raised his gloved hand, in slow motion, to his forehead. He was laughing loudly. It was a barking shout of a laugh, out of a Hogarth etching. His friend sat slowly rocking beside him with a wide, many-gap-toothed grin. It was obvious that their happiness was not of this world but had been induced by some or other sweet poisons. Their eyes were witnessing things none of the rest of the world could see - things that were really funny, but also just a bit scary. The cropped boy was in the grip of a side-splitting trip. Every shivery, fluorescent, creepy, cartoony, monstrous, delicious, hilarious moment of it was playing across his face. His pupils were enormous. His friend was on the way up, too, and would soon be joining him in the psychedelic lagoons on cloud nine. Now they were both laughing. Occasionally they would yell words or fragments, which made sense only to the denizens of the brilliant, echoing caverns in which they now found themselves. 

    As I passed, I took a last look at these two kids, down on the ground on their rude bedding, completely, blissfully, out of it, in the middle of London, in the midst of the Christmas rush, in the freezing cold. I bent to tuck a ten pound note into the numb, un-gloved hand of the cropped kid. He could barely recognise the sensation. As I headed further down the street I hoped that the money would come in useful to buy a couple of hamburgers, even though I knew it would probably be used for more solvents or glue. And who can possibly blame the poor bastards?