Ways to scrape by
My flat is on the second floor. From my bedroom window I can see the big wheelie bins across the street. The waste company empties them twice a week, on most days the bins are packed to the brim. Besides rubbish and recycling, people chuck away boxes of unwanted stuff, often treating the council bins as a rubbish tip. London is scarce with living space and each home move presents a guiltless opportunity to throw away cheap clothes and regrettable buys.
One warm summer night I woke up wearily from a fitful sleep. I didn’t know what woke me up. It just passed 4 a.m, a dead quiet hour. As I turned my back and tried to drift back into sleep, I heard some noise coming from the street. Someone was talking to himself, some loud, incoherent rambling. It sounded uncanny, nothing like the usual shouty expletives by a grumpy nightwalker. I was too wakeful to ignore it, so I got out of bed and peeped down from the window. A man was stooping beside the rubbish bin, his jeans down to his thighs. He was rummaging a canvas bag with old clothes. He held up a big t-shirt, examined it for a moment and tossed it to the pile on the left.Astonished, I drew my head back abruptly, wary of intruding his privacy.
I retreated to my bed, put my earphones on and played a yoga nidra recording to drown out the noise he made, and try to soothe my perturbed mind.There is the nocturnal world of the working poor doing a six-hour shift of cleaning an office building, earning barely enough to rent a small flat in Ealing by a ten pound forty-five hourly wage. Then there is a parallel nocturnal world of the dispossessed, scouring for something useful among heaps of disbelongings—in one of the luckier nights.
I wonder if he sleeps nearby or drifts habitually from borough to borough to try his luck, in a city with overflowing excess from the haves and little concern for the have-nots.