Running the Show

There are normally two of us working shifts to cover the twelve and a half hours the community centre is open every day. This week it’s just me. Running the show with just one person is always a nightmare. I’ve been dreading it for months. When I wake up Monday to half a dozen missed calls and texts I’m not surprised. This is what it’s always like.

Monday

A tiny, damp, homeless, mentally ill Indian woman appears out of the drizzle. She’s the size of a child, barely four feet tall, coatless, bedraggled and desperate.

“I need to talk to a priest,” she says, “it has to be today…”

And she breaks down in tears.

I invite her into the office and she takes a seat while I listen to her story and try to find a way to help her. She needs money.

“For a hotel. I need to sleep. I haven’t slept for three days. I’ve been outside. I can’t stay in a shelter. I can’t be around all those alcoholics. I don’t feel safe. I just want to feel safe. I’ve been to thirty five towns. No one can help me. I don’t trust people. I can’t deal with organisations. I can’t talk to anybody. I don’t know why I’m talking to you….

“You don’t hate me do you?” she asks, wringing her hands.

“No, of course I don’t hate you.”

Forty minutes earlier I’ve got Rami in the office with me. He’s looking at his phone, reading off ten rules for dealing with someone who has dementia.

“My brother-in-law has Alzheimer’s,” he says, “I’m sending these rules to my sister. She breaks them all. Rule 1: Never argue, instead agree. She argues with him all the time. Rule 2: Never reason, instead divert. You can’t reason with him. He supports Trump…”

Rami runs through the rest of the rules and how his sister fails to follow them.

“What do you think?” he asks.

“They’re good rules. They’re based on empathy and compassion.”

“Look at this,” Rami says and shows me a meme he has also saved to his phone. The caption reads NEVER GIVE UP and the cartoon below it shows a frog being eaten head-first by a heron. I don’t get it. It takes me a moment to realise the frog has its hands around the heron’s throat. 

“Oh…The frog is strangling the heron as he’s being eaten…”

“Never give up,” says Rami as behind him a procession of children and their parents file out the door after the end of a Kid’s Kung Fu class.

I tell Rami about a documentary I watched at the weekend called The Raft, it was about a social experiment that took place in the early seventies. Rami looks the trailer up on YouTube while I add a few more things I’ve just thought of to my to-do list.

“It looks interesting,” he says a minute later. “Did you ever see that Robert Redford movie, the one where he’s alone on a boat in the middle of the ocean?”

“No, but I know the one you mean. What was it called again?”

“All Is Lost. I’ll lend it to you.”

Tuesday

Everything had been going so well. I was on top of things. My house was in order.

Earlier I had been outside having a smoke, waiting to be relieved by one of the volunteers whilst simultaneously turning away people arriving for a lecture series about glaciers and volcanoes that wasn’t starting for another week yet. Meanwhile an old lady sitting on one of the benches was talking loudly into her phone.

“He should learn to live within his means,” I heard her say and felt immediate empathy with whoever this man was. I’ve never managed to live within my means either. Then she added: “He earnt £82,000 last year,” and my empathy vanished. If I had those sorts of means I like to think I might be better at living within them. Probably not. But you never know. I’ll certainly never know.

Shift over, I’m cycling home along the seafront when my phone goes off. Being sensible I decide to pull over but I’ve forgotten that I’ve just fitted new brake pads and so when I do brake there’s no slowing down, I stop dead and go head over handlebars. I pick myself up and discover I just so happened to have crashed right beside an ambulance queuing in the rush hour traffic. The driver leans over to check on me.

“Are you alright?” she asks.

“Yes, thank you,” I tell her, “It was my own stupid fault.”

“Are you sure you don’t need anything?”

“No, thank you.”

She drives on and I assess myself for damage. Last time I came off my bike I landed on my face. This time I’ve fared better. Some sore ribs and a bloody leg is all. That’s a lot of blood. But if feels ok. Deep but superficial. I’ll be fine. I climb back on the bike. No, I’m not fine. Climb off again. That is a lot of blood. I could just clean it up if I had a tissue. But I don’t. Still, there are loads of people walking past, someone else might have one and it occurs to me that my best bet is to ask a woman. Women always carry tissues. I ask the first one I see and she says no, sorry, she doesn’t have a tissue. I ask the next woman I see and she doesn’t have a tissue either. Neither does the third. What’s wrong with this town? Why do no women carry tissues?

Then I see a middle aged couple with two small boys. A woman with children. If anyone around here is going to have a tissue it will be her. She does and although I have interrupted them all eating their chips as they take a stroll along the esplanade she hands me a wad of napkins. While I’m mopping the blood from my leg her husband stuffs more spare napkins into the gaps between the brake lines on my bike.

“Thank you,” I tell them, “that’s very kind.”

One of the little boys carries on eating his chips while he looks me up and down.

“Your hand is bleeding too,” he says.

Wednesday

“But who are these women? Are they trustworthy?”

I’m on my way into the centre forty minutes early, still sore from yesterday’s bike accident, when I get a call from Astralfalcon, one of our volunteers, who has called me because he has a woman in the office with him who, as he delicately puts it, ‘has some questions’ for me.

Astralfalcon’s real name is Matthew but I’ve seen his email address and it’s now impossible for me not to picture him as an unfettered winged seer flying through the stars with a rainbow wake. I wouldn’t say there is very much falcon-like about Matthew, I’d be more inclined to associate him with a field mouse than a bird of prey, but the astral part I get. He’s very spiritual. He used to live in Glastonbury. He’s back volunteering with us after getting fired from his last job as a mini-bus driver ferrying kids with learning disabilities. They let him go after he abandoned his bus, along with its occupants, mid-shift one afternoon because a broken door alarm wouldn’t stop sounding and he had a meltdown. The powers that be were not impressed. The kids on the bus loved it.

The woman Astralfalcon puts on the line, Bridget, has come in to the centre to enquire after an over sixties Tai Chi class. The instructor is in hospital waiting on a heart operation so two of the women from the class have taken over leading it until he’s recovered. Bridget is sceptical of these women’s credentials and motivations for running the class. She wants to know what they’re planning to do with the money they’re taking from people. She’s firing off one question after another at me as I’m walking down the road.

“Listen,” I tell her, “I’ll actually be with you in a few minutes, shall we have this conversation in person?”

“Alright,” she says and moments later I’m walking through the centre doors.

I sit down with Bridget in the foyer and explain the situation with the Tai Chi teacher and the women temporarily taking over the class.

“I think they just want to keep the class running for people,” I tell her. “They’re just taking donations to cover the cost of the room rental.”

She remains unconvinced.

“What do you think of 5G?” she asks.

“I haven’t given it any thought.”

She looks disappointed in me.

“Do you think I should?”

Bridget tells me how she’s glad they’re not erecting a 5G tower in the street where she lives because she’s looked into where Extinction Rebellion get their funding from and it’s technology companies.

“Always follow the money,” she says.

Bridget’s theory seems to be that the aim of the climate change movement is to get children arrested so that they are on a police database for the rest of their lives. Whilst Bridget is telling me all this I notice Astralfalcon putting on a pair of unplugged earphones and walking purposefully out of the building. I carry on talking to Bridget whilst out of the corner of my eye I watch him pace slow circles around the garden. I’m also occasionally interrupting my conversation with Bridget to tell mothers carrying babies that the child-weighing clinic they have turned up for is no longer running because funding for children’s services in the city have been cut.

“One hundred years,” says Bridget, “that’s how long criminal records are kept on the police database for.”

Bridget knows this because in her youth she had been fined £5 for possession of drug paraphernalia, namely a clay pipe that someone had brought back from India and left in the flat she moved into. One afternoon she was raided by the police who suspected her as a drug dealer. Her flatmate had let them in because when she asked who it was they’d told her: ‘Your uncle’. How sinister is that? Bridget’s theory is that someone who had visited the flat – “there were people in and out all the time” – had seen the pipe and told the police. Decades later when she applied for an admin job with the Crown Prosecution Service she had forgotten to declare the conviction in her application. But they had found a record of it and cited Bridget’s failure to declare the conviction, though not the actual crime itself, as grounds for questioning her honesty and therefore suitability for the post. Needless to say, she didn’t get the job.

No wonder she’s got trust issues: From old ladies running Tai Chi classes to global technology’s machinations to enslave us. I can’t see the relationship myself but who knows how deep this conspiracy runs?

What I really want to know is who was that hippie grass all those years ago, and what other consequence their actions? Who else’s life course did they alter with their own wild brand of suspicion and paranoia? Who were they working for?

“Thank you for speaking to her,” Astralfalcon says to me after I finish with Bridget and finally make it in to the office to start my shift. “I can’t listen to that kind of thing. It makes me too anxious.”

Which makes some sense of why he was pacing around the garden wearing unplugged headphones, at least.

Thursday

Uneventful. Apart from a searing pain in my chest every time I breathe, which is making breathing in general problematic, the day’s events pass without any major issue. The evening’s groups include people fighting each other (Shaolin Kung Fu), people arguing with each other (a Labour party meeting), people dancing with each other (Salsa), and three women exploring how to get exactly what they want just by thinking about it (a workshop on how to turn yourself into a ‘Manifestation Magnet’). It’s only after everyone has left the building and I’m about to lock up that I realise the facilitator of the latter workshop has forgotten to manifest her payment to us for hiring the room. Or maybe she just manifested my forgetting to ask her for it. Either way the universe has tilted in her favour, so maybe there’s something to this manifestation business after all?

Friday

I’m sitting on the wall across the road from the community centre with Liam and Sam. Sam had begged me out of the office to play football with him and then thrown the ball on the roof. So nothing new there.

I’ve got an hour and a half to the end of my shift and the end of my week. I’ll still be on call if the volunteers have any problems tomorrow but unless some kind of major disaster occurs I should be in the clear.

I tell Liam about my cycling accident.

“I won’t even go near the roads,” he says, “I’ll go round the corner but that’s it.”

Sam is watching the wheels on the cars turning while he drowns out the noise of us talking by making a low growling sound.

“Cyclists are the worst,” Liam says, shaking his head. “They’re worse than car drivers. D’you know what I mean? Look at London. That’s a civilisation in decline. I reckon that half of all those bicycle fatalities aren’t accidents at all.”

“You think they’re deliberate? People are going out of their way to kill cyclists?”

“You can’t blame ’em. Did you see that clip on the news this week?”

“About the cyclist headbutting the pedestrian he nearly knocked over? I was about to mention that to you.”

“I mean, that was -“

Both our heads turn to the sound of someone shouting.

“Oi, it’s a crossing here!”

A middle-aged man on a fold-up bike flies through the zebra crossing we’re sitting beside, narrowly missing a bodybuilder type and his girlfriend. The man on the bike calls back over his shoulder.

“Fuck you!”

Liam and I look at each other, gobsmacked.

“What were the chances of that just happening?”

“Just as we were talking about it.”

“That was weird.”

“That was fucking weird.”

“We’ve sat here for hours every day, every week, for years. I’ve never seen anything like that. That was some kind of what do you call it? Cosmic coincidence?”

“Grrrrrrrrr…….”

“That bloke on the bike though? The fella on the zebra crossing looked like he could have knocked the shit out of him.”

“He wasn’t even worried.”

“I know! I mean, he had some balls didn’t he?”

“He had wheels.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“He knew he could get away.”

“Only just though. Did you see him? Little legs pedalling. He wouldn’t have got far with that cunt chasing after him.”

When I return to the centre I find a note put under the office door from Eve who has recently started running yoga classes in the Friday evening slot. It’s a difficult time to fill. It’s the end of the week. People don’t want to improve themselves, they just want to relax. Eve’s note says that no one came for her class so she’s gone home. Result. I get to close the centre early.

It wasn’t as bad as last time. There were no Sandy Hook deniers threatening to sue us for refusing them a platform. I didn’t end up having to work any twelve hour shifts. I only cried twice.