ones you canât see,â he adds darkly.
âItâs better than that nutter Brandonâs idea, inâit?â Stuart enthuses. Professor David Brandon is the ex-director of another charity for the homeless; it was his suggestion that he and half a dozen other homelessness workers present themselves to the police and demand to be arrested. If Ruth and John are guilty of âknowingly allowingâ drugs in their day centre, then they are all guilty of it, since other homeless charities are run according to the same rules. I disagree with Stuart. I think that is a gem of a stunt, too.
âFucking stupid. Asking to get arrested! Then whoâs going to get
him
out? Expect his missus will be wanting a go next.â
âBut thatâs the whole trick, isnât it? They canât put him in prison, too. Heâs known all around the countryâthereâd be an outcry. Cambridge Police Gone Mad!â
Stuart shakes his head, his mood suddenly dampened. âFella goes to the Old Bill and asks to be banged up, and they donât do it? Donât make sense.â
I return to typing the campaign newsletter.
âAll of us in fucking nick and no one fucking left to get us out. Just a load more work all round, thatâs what I think,â Stuart rumbles on. âSee, you got all your nine-to-fives saying what drugs is about and they donât know the first fucking thing. Like piss-testing prisoners. Everybody thought that was a good idea cos drugs leave traces in your urine, so with piss-testing you couldnât get away with it any more. More tests, less drugs. Right? Wrong. Itâs because of them tests that thereâs a heroin epidemic in prison. Why? Because the drug of choice used to be cannabis, but cannabis lasts up to three weeks in your system, so if the screws do the random tests at weekends, like they do, youâve got three chances of getting caught. Where, heroin lasts only three days. Result: everyone starts switching to smack. Your nine-to-fives think theyâve done something useful, where in fact theyâve just made the fucking problem worse.â
For a few moments longer Stuart falls back to brooding on the wickedness of ignorance and people who disorder the world by asking to be put in jail. To cheer him up I return to his Blinding Idea. I really do like it. Exciting, freakish, bound to get publicity. The more I think of it, the more it sounds a corker.
âWhat else should we plan for?â I enquire enthusiastically.
âThe brass.â
âTop brass? Policemen, you mean?â
âAlexander, what are you like? In London, the pavement isnât all public: some of it belongs to them and some of it belongs to us. The brass bits is little bits put in outside of all government buildings in London what lets you know the differenceâthereâs brass bits all over London. If we sleep on the bit what belongs to them, they do us.â
âSo, weâre OK if we sleep on the other bit?â
Stuart shakes his head. âNah. If we sleep on the bit that belongs to us they still do us, only itâs not the same.â
âThe main place you get them is around your bollocks.â
It is six in the morning, six weeks later. We are flicking beneath the motorway lights in convoy, in one friendâs beat-upsmellymobile and another friendâs smooth new Volvo estate, down towards the doomed Home Secretary and the Home Office in London. The boots are filled with posters, badges, T-shirts, petitions, and pale Tupperware boxes containing sandwich-shaped objects beneath the lids. In the back of the seedy conveyance, Stuart and I are squished up with Deaf Rob, whom we picked up off a Cambridge bridge, where he was sitting in the honey glow of the street light surrounded by luggage. He had sneaked out of a hostel an hour earlier without paying his rent. Tongue-twisted, pallid, his hair sawn at the night before with a grapefruit knife, he