Strangers

I want to get back to José, his hands, his piropos. 

First, though, I must eat very humble pie.  That is because of the help I received from strangers in one those chattering internet forums I so recently disparaged.   There, I had three offers of help to translate a song from Spanish and two translations.  Some of life's most poignant moments must be the generosity and kindnesses of strangers. 

One of the translations was from a Brit I met recently in Murcia.  Two days previously, finding ourselves both about to do, separately, a spot of tourism before the encuentro, we decided instead to visit two of the sights together.  We had orange juice in the sun in front of the cathedral and later on, a tapas lunch.  I discovered he likes his music dramatic and from the 50s and is not averse to executing that move where a woman is persuaded to sit on a man's knee on the dance floor.  He said it was to pre-empt the woman initiating it herself, of which he apparently had experience.  In the four milongas that followed I had not looked to him for dance although we had sometimes chatted at a communal meal-table.  Then on the last day, I fell ill, barely moving from the bed in which I sweated out a fever which left me shaky, my lips peeling.  Yet during that day this man regularly offered help.  For this I was and remain immeasurably grateful.  Knowing that someone was there if I needed it was a bit like going to a strange milonga with someone you know:  it is just reassuring that they are there.  This sense and it is no more than that, can entirely change the experience.   During our chats I found him to be a man of humour and kindness, who, while not entirely well himself, visits friends from the milongas in hospital and, annually, runs a milonga and raffle with extraordinarily good prizes for which 100% of the ticket price is donated to a charity for the homeless.

At the weekend, my friend Isabella described, with much humour, how the milonga is her fantasy world. My children often describe their fantasy worlds to me.   The fantasy world I would describe to them is one where, instead of money, what makes the world go round are acts of kindness and prayers of gratitude.

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I wrote this piece in a poky, spartan, expensive, basement cafe with French soft rap, abrupt service,  uncovered cakes, leaky teapots, young people and tea with a taint of wee.  I walked out on to George Street, Edinburgh, a boulevard of expensive, boutique shops, upmarket chain stores and improbable pubs behind Greek porticos of tremendous size.  It was dark, nearing 6pm; the January temperatures were approaching freezing.  Immediately and outside one of these grand pubs, I passed two homeless people, a man and woman, sitting on the pavement in a mess of litter.  They were giggling, apparently high.  Bananas in fucking pyjamas shouted the man, with angry hilarity to the world at large.  My attention was removed from them by a gruff, grimy, well wrapped up guy with a sleeping bag under his arm who had just crossed the street and was approaching a male passerby, asking for change.  I walked on half a block.  Across the road I saw another homeless person kneeling down, talking to someone else on the street until I realised by the posture of the one kneeling that it was someone with a backpack possibly trying to help.

And then I passed a young man, asleep on the pavement, outside a shop, his back against the wall, his face towards the world.  I cursed fate, mostly for what it had brought him to and because he was asleep in the street on a cold winter evening in Scotland and I was passing him and felt implicated.

I went around the block looking for cash and passed a Starbucks.  I would wake him up, get him something hot in the cafe and give him some money.  A simple plan.  When I knelt down beside him, the man, to my great relief was breathing.  I could feel hot air from a vent rushing onto his body and the relief increased.  Less immediate danger, I thought.  But his coat was not even closed around him.   I realised I was scared and felt ashamed.  I spoke to him.  Nothing.  Poised to spring back, from a knife, from spit, a syringe, from god knows what, I put my hand on his leg to shake him.  He was deeply asleep, the abandoned sleep of young children or just, perhaps, the abandoned.  He needed somebody loud, confident and sure of themselves but he had me.  Now I didn't want to wake him up.  To bring him back to what?  I called Streetwork, advertised on the city's council pages and spoke to a slightly panicked-sounding young woman.  I described him, gave the address.  She said she would send a team out.  When I said I couldn't wake him up, she wanted me to call the police on 101.  This was a different story.  I doubted the guy would thank me for waking him up and confronting him with that.  What is Streetwork for then? I asked.  Now she said there wasn't necessarily a team nearby and if I couldn't wake him it was a question of getting him checked out.  Was he grey, pale, was anything coming from his mouth?  Yes he was pale.  Of course he's bloody pale I thought.  It's Scotland in winter, it's cold and he looks thin.   I felt uncomfortable and annoyed, as though the goalposts had moved.  Why don't you call the police? I asked.  Isn't that what you are there for?  I thought, but did not say, desperate now for someone else to take responsibility.  Could she pass on my number for a statement then, she asked?   No, I said.  And that was that.  I went on, feeling cross, guilty, confused and that I had in some way, failed.  That would be because I had, in the end, done exactly what I said I could not do.

I drove up Lothian Road.  There were people on the street on every block.  It is the same, worse even, in Glasgow and in Manchester.  Over the last couple of years, the numbers seem to have gone up and up.  Outside a convenience store near Tollcross I saw another body on the street.  Light spilling from the door silhouetted two young people kneeling down with a blue plastic carrier bag from which they seemed to be offering the body food.

After the milonga, I went to get bread for my son's packed lunch the next day.  It was nearly 11pm, with the nightime temperature about freezing.  Within days it was to fall well below zero.  A guy wrapped in a blanket sat outside the store cheerily asking for change.  I tried, distractedly, to enter by a closed door.  He called out:   Next on the left.   When I came out, I saw his cheeks were thin.  So many are like that.  I gave him a fiver which was the note I had on me.  I thought about the man from London and wondered what he would have done that evening.  Thank goodness for those few there are, that we know personally, who are moral compasses for the rest of us.

This week in my own town I passed on my bike a man with a loping gait heading down the street.  I realised that under his bright coat and sweat pants that he was thin but it was the unusual sound that had drawn my attention.  It was his laces, undone or broken, slapping on the street.  His thin tennis shoes were full of holes.

I see, often, a lack of pretension on my town's streets.  That could be because many shuffle about, lumpish, overweight, ill, on mobility scooters, or hang about the high street chatting in small groups, fag in one hand, pushchair in the other.  The population numbers under 50,000 and there are swathes of social and economic deprivation.  If they are not badly dressed, most people dress not for show or ostentation, but practically.  What I also notice is many people talk to those begging on the street, as though they know them, perhaps as equals, certainly as acquaintances do.  I wonder at it every time I see it.  Now it is no longer the beggars on one side of an invisible line and us on the other, it is the beggar with his non-begging friend on one side and I on the other.  I am separated from that easy communication by upbringing, accent, by how my nationality will be perceived, by a lack of understanding and empathy, by uncertainty and fear and it is a shameful feeling.

We connect with such facility with strangers in the milonga and yet great gulfs - chasms in the pavement which we step around, carefully, which seem so real yet are wholly imaginary - separate us from other strangers.