Abandoned (22 page)

Chapter 48

T
he day it all changed began like any other. I was sitting in the hospital canteen trying to make my cup of tea last as long as possible, wondering what I was going to do with myself for the rest of the day. As I tried to work out if I could afford another cup of tea, I noticed a rolled-up newspaper behind one of the water fonts and pulled it out. It was a Sunday paper and since I could never afford to buy newspapers I started reading it from cover to cover. One of the articles that grabbed my attention mentioned blogs. I had never heard of the word ‘blog’ before and only vaguely understood from the article what one was.

The next day, after checking emails in the library and sending my CV off for various jobs, I typed the word blog into a search engine and discovered that a blog was an online diary that could be read by anyone who came across it. Readers could respond to it too, leaving comments after each entry. I immediately liked the idea. It was a way of reaching out and communicating with people whilst remaining anonymous. Within minutes I discovered that a blog is free and simple to set up and run. Before I knew it I had created one of my own.

You have to choose a user name; off the top of my head I decided to call myself Wanderingscribe—I’m not sure why, a scribe is someone who writes and I had been wandering for a long time, so it seemed appropriate. I hadn’t a clue what I was actually going to write—again it was something I hadn’t planned; it just happened almost by accident, a bit like that first night sleeping in the car. You have to put a heading at the top of the blog where you describe it. Again I hadn’t a clue what to put. I asked myself what I’d most want people to know about me in that moment. My fingers were already flying to the keys typing that I was ’homeless and living in my car, and desperate to find a way out of it’.

I couldn’t believe I was actually admitting I was homeless to anyone who might come across my blog, but then at that stage I didn’t actually think anyone would. I didn’t have the courage or incentive to actually write an entry that day—to send any words out into the world. Besides, I had nothing to write. What could I say? I was homeless and I was totally ashamed of it. I saw it as completely failing in life, ending up in a position where I had nobody to go to, losing touch with people whenever I moved on, totally estranged from any family by then too. It was the last thing I could tell people in the ‘real world’, but maybe I’d be brave enough to tell people online in the ‘virtual world’ of the internet. It was almost a month before I found the courage to write in it, but once I did there was no stopping me. After all those months of isolation I’d found a way to communicate again.

In one of the first entries I struggled for ages to write the words ’I am homeless’. I couldn’t understand why it was so hard to admit that, even to myself. Looking at the words on the screen, the sense of failure and shame made me feel physically ill.

On my blog I could be completely anonymous and honest about how I was living; I didn’t have to try to cover it up as I was doing in my daily life. Sometimes I think I am better at writing than talking, and blogging was like a mixture of the two. Because there were soon real people reading the blog it gave it the immediacy and intimacy of face-to-face communication.

I hadn’t spoken to anyone for months, not intimately anyway, so with the blog it felt like I was smashing down a wall back into the outside world, without exposing myself to any danger or embarrassment. I could tell people what was happening in my life and how I had become homeless without having to see the pity, disapproval or fear on their faces. For the first time in longer than I wished to remember, I could be real—maybe in some respects for the first time ever.

Almost straight away the blog started to give purpose to my days, becoming a reason to get out of the sleeping bag in the morning: to hurry off to see if anyone had left any comments or emails overnight. Complete strangers leaving messages saying ‘Good morning, Scribe’ and ‘Keep your chin up today, Scribe’ and ‘Hang in there, Tiger’. I started writing in it daily. And very soon I wouldn’t let anyone stop me from doing it, even when it seemed futile, even when some people online ridiculed my attempts to tell my story or dismissed my efforts to get out of my situation. For the first time in ages, something was driving me and I refused to listen to them. It was like something in me had switched back on. I was thinking positively again for the first time in what seemed like years.

Most people responded with kindness and encouragement to my situation, promising to pray for me and offering advice and assistance. I found it hard to respond, even though they made me feel connected and less alone, giving me some of the ‘company’ I hungered for, albeit at a safe distance online.

Once, early on, I almost met one particularly supportive woman for a coffee. She told me where she lived and it was quite close by. I liked the idea of spending some time with another woman after so many months of sitting in caféon my own, making cups of tea last as long as possible, and trying to block out the sad songs blaring from the radios and the stares of other lonely people.

I noticed that the fifth email she had sent me came from what seemed like a man’s address. Scrolling down, I found the address of a website which, when I checked it out, contained some very disturbing pornographic images. I felt confused and shocked. I emailed ‘her’ several times about it, but she didn’t reply, leaving me feeling upset and far too freaked-out to meet her. I think I probably had a lucky escape. But it made me wary of ever meeting anyone else.

Despite this setback, the majority of the responses were giving me strength and perspective. All this time I had given in to negative thinking and now saw how wrong I had been to let Craig and my uncle win. I didn’t deserve to be treated the way they had treated me. I didn’t deserve to end up homeless, living in a car in a laneway. No one did. But all those months it was almost like I was punishing myself, saying I didn’t fit in and didn’t belong, making an outcast of myself, the way my uncle had all those years ago. Sometimes I shrunk to the size of a little girl.

The blog wasn’t just about my homelessness; in fact it wasn’t even about that a lot of the time. It wasn’t about anything really; it was just a blog, a diary. There was such ugliness in my life and in people’s reactions to me while I was homeless that I found writing in the blog often brought some beauty back into it; and sometimes that became the most important reason for doing it. Other times I wavered between just desperately wanting someone to realise I could still write and think rationally—despite what I was going through, and to give me a job to save me from the worse that was to come—and soon wanting to say some of the things that had been shut up in me for years. Although I wasn’t ready, bits of information and splinters of memory would come out onto the screen from time to time.

I mentioned my childhood a few times in the blog, alluding to past traumas. This surprised me because I never intended to. I began to see that I had been deluding myself about any family still being there for me. They hadn’t been there for years, but in my mind they were still family and I didn’t know how to stop loving them.

Being in the car in the dark all those months had brought it all back. Vulnerable and alone and on the outside of everything, I sometimes felt like the little girl who had been sent out to stand in the kitchen in the dark. It felt like punishment in a way. The emotions it brought up in me were the same, too. As a child, under my uncle’s abusive regime, I learned to cope with my emotions by shutting myself down to them. And that’s how I coped with my emotions when I was living in my car, too. I was like a terrified child, trying to keep herself invisible so that no one would send her away. Writing the blog helped me see that I’d been frightened of moving on. And realising that finally allowed me to change the situation.

Chapter 49

W
ithin a couple of months of starting it, my blog was stumbled upon by Ian Urbina, a journalist on
The New York Times
. He emailed me about an article he was doing on homelessness, and the moment I saw his email I had a feeling that this was somehow going to change things. After a series of emails and a meeting with one of his colleagues from their London office, he called and interviewed me by phone. He told me that I might end up not being mentioned in the article because it was about the ‘hidden homeless’ who live in their cars in America. But the internet does away with international boundaries.

The internet has taken the lid off the world, and blogs enable people—wherever they are in the world—to tell their stories. I was just a person reaching out to other people. It didn’t really matter
where
in the world I was; I had a story to tell and through my blog I was putting it out there. Sometimes it felt close to prayer. I was living in a battered old car in an isolated laneway at the edge of some woods in England but I was a human being just like the rest, looking for a dignified way out of my situation. I had already received emails from people in America, Canada and Chile as well as all over Europe, who checked into my blog daily to see how I was doing. Those people were just as likely to offer a solution as the people I passed on the street every day.

A few weeks later, Ian Urbina’s article appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition of
The New York Times
with a reference to my blog at the end of the article. There was also an audio interview with me included in the online edition. People all over the world seem to read the
NYT
online, and my Wanderingscribe blog went international overnight. Within hours I had hundreds of emails and comments from all corners of the world, giving support and advice about how to get out of the car and back into mainstream living.

Sean Coughlan, a BBC journalist, got in touch a few weeks later, having read the
NYT
article. He subsequently wrote an article about me on BBC News Online Magazine, and there was an overwhelming response from the media. Once the initial spate of thousands of hits after the
NYT
article died down, the blog was then receiving about 120 hits a day. But in the week after the BBC article was published it received over 48,000.

My luck eventually turned when one of the emails turned out to be from a literary agent who had looked at the blog after reading the BBC article. She invited me to a local caf?for coffee. As we chatted, she wanted to know a bit more about my background—how I’d ended up in the car and where my friends and family were. I told her the bare bones of my story and she eventually asked me whether I had considered writing a book about my experiences.

It was like a miracle. I could so easily have slipped through the net and ended up like the other people I had seen living and dying on the streets, but instead I was being offered a lifeline, a way back to the real world. It felt like I was waking up out of a nightmare straight into a dream.

Epilogue

S
ometimes I can’t believe this is over. I have to keep pinching myself.

I’ve found a place to live again now; somewhere I can start afresh and, I hope, in time put down roots. It’s only a room in a shared house—a small, cream-walled room that still smells of new paint—not a place of my own. But it’s a room with a door I can lock and curtains I can draw, and in many ways it is starting to feel like home already. After all this time of living in the car I finally have some privacy—no one staring in at me as they did through the windscreen as they walked down the laneway or past me on the street.

I have housemates again too, who are all friendly and relaxed and go out to work during the day. And I’m hopeful that soon I will be back out there with them. I am longing to throw myself into work again. But for now I’m relishing this time getting used to living indoors—being here where it is warm and clean and safe, and there are lots of plants and a big bath and shelves filled with books. I keep wandering in and out of the rooms just looking at things, picking objects up and putting them down again, finding the comfiest chairs, giving myself permission to be here.

Just propping a pillow against the headboard and lying back to read a book is an amazing feeling. For days I have pottered about doing nothing, feeling carpet under my toes, or standing barefoot on the cold tiles of the kitchen in the morning, eating toast dripping with butter and staring out at the early sky and down on the big horse chestnut tree in the neighbour’s garden, amazed at how quiet it is from up here, even with the window open.

There’s even a milkman who delivers, so there will always be milk for tea every morning. Even that makes me smile—knowing that I won’t have to drive off somewhere every morning to get it in a polystyrene cup, or pay over a pound for it, or drink it out on the street somewhere. It’s the small things I can’t get over.

I dreamed of doing so many things when this moment came: taking a long bubble bath with music in the background and a glass of wine in my hand; watching TV; cooking the food I’d fantasised about all those months. But on my first night I was too tired and just fell into a deep sleep. It will take a while for my body to get used to lying straight, to realise it can uncurl and slowly release some of the pain. But I know it will happen.

I had slipped into another world and started to fear that I would never find a way out. I understand why so many people turn to drink, drugs or crime to blot out the reality of homelessness—it’s almost impossible to live it and experience it at the same time; you have to detach from the harshness and the loneliness of it somehow. I really thought I had come to the end of the line. I couldn’t have imagined getting back to where I was before. I know it will be a difficult road ahead as I readjust and come to terms with everything that has happened, but everything feels possible again, and I’m feeling positive.

I’ve even had the courage to get back in touch with some of my friends from the past and have been amazed by how supportive they have been. None of them have judged me badly. I’m also back in touch with Brendan. I finally plucked up the courage to call him and have even been over to see him to explain about this book and how it came about. I haven’t told him everything about how I ended up living yet but quite surprisingly he has been the most supportive of all in me writing this book. So he will find out when he reads it. I hope Mummy and Kathy come back into my life one day too. I hope they’ll see that this isn’t a book about blame. Neither, apart from the abuse, is it about anyone doing anything wrong. It’s about people making mistakes and trying to make the best of the situation. It’s about being human, about falling and picking yourself up again.

The room is still full of my bags and boxes. It’s taking me a while to bring myself to open them, to have the courage to put things on shelves and away in drawers. To find a place for even the smallest possession is emotional in ways I hadn’t expected. I’m doing it slowly, bag by bag, evening by evening, finding everything a home—somewhere to belong.

It’s hard to believe there will be no more cold nights sleeping in pain with my head against the car doors; no owls calling through the trees at night or foxes wailing; no birds keeping me awake at five in the morning; no rain blowing in through the unsealed car windows, or other cars turning up in the pitch dark. I shiver when I think of it—it’s only now that the reality of all the dangers I faced every night is starting to hit me.

My first instinct was to hide all the evidence of my homelessness—to start afresh, burn my boots and put down new roots—to have nothing more to do with the way I was living. But I keep reminding myself that there is nothing to be ashamed of in how I ended up. Lives unravel. People don’t, or won’t, keep up for all sorts of reasons and have to find other ways of living all the time. I am not the first and I won’t be the last. And although my life felt over many times in the last year, I now see how lucky I have been all along. I had almost given up, but it seems that life
is
full of second chances after all.

Yes, I have been very lucky, and I won’t ever forget that. So many times in the car, when I expected things to go wrong, they didn’t. Something always turned up. But it’s more than just luck.

When I was in the car I used to feel I had a guardian angel watching over me. Sometimes, when walking away from the car, leaving it there with all my bags and boxes heaped up on the back seat, I would imagine a pair of angels standing either side of it. And I knew it would be safe, everything still there when I got back. Glancing over my shoulder as I turned to walk out of sight, I would see their huge, radiant, white-feathered wings draped across the green, mud-streaked roof, shielding it. Last night I imagined them here, with me, in this room.

The bed still felt huge after so long in the cramped inside of my car, and as I rolled over half-asleep in the luxury of a warm duvet I felt tiny, like that little girl again. And I imagined them whispering down to her, ‘You did it, little Anya, you made it, you survived.’

If you want to read Anya’s blog, or start your own, go to: http://wanderingscribe.blogspot.com