Well, um, I guess I must be. Or should I say I was. (Ok, I still am....)

I am writing this because I was prompted to do so by the above photo which I took a couple of days ago, of some homeless guy’s shelter, right next to Perrache railway station, here in Lyon. Welcome to the opulent West.

I used to live in a small town on the Mediterranean coast. A tourist town. It was a very agreable place to live, particularly in summer. Lots of nice tourists (read ‘women’, I admit) to meet and wonderful beaches. I used to run a bar-restaurant and also sell apartments. It was hard but interesting and varied work.

One day though, as has happened a few times in my life, I decided that I needed a change of air. I felt bored. So, after two-point zero-four seconds deep thought I decided to move to Paris in order to be a translator and teach English. I wasn’t sure if I would find work immediately though, so I left with just a week’s money and a backpack full of clothes. Destination, a friend’s house. I left all my possessions in storage.

I had decided to hitch-hike up there, in order to kill a day or two and see the countryside in a more intimate manner, and, after all, Paris was only 430 miles (700 km) from where I lived. I left early in the morning of a chilly november day.

I was having fun on the road, but at around seven thirty in the evening I had only done a couple of hundred miles because I had spent a little too long over lunch (in a pretty roadside cafe) and just generally being curious. This meant that I was only just north of Lyon, at the separation of two highways, one for Paris, and the other going back down to Lyon. It was getting a little cold. There was a guy parked there, eating a sandwich, and I asked him where he was going.

“Lyon” he said.

So I went back to Lyon with him in order to book into a hotel for the night and continue on up to Paris the next morning.

The guy dropped me off at Perrache, the city’s biggest rail station, at around nine pm.

I went into the station in order to snack on something. The first thing that struck me was the number of homeless people on the station. There were homeless men, women, families even, as well as the usual cohort of alcoholics and junkies that you find on any major railway station in Europe. They were all there, of course, because it is warm in a railway station at night.

Time went by, and I was becoming more and more fascinated by these homeless people. I was sat on a bench, watching them unobtrusively. They just kept wandering about, to-and-fro, talking, sometimes shouting, to each other or asking people for money. There were some real characters, and, after two hours of watching them, I decided to spend the night there to “see what happened”.

So I did.

And I lived on that station for the next month and a half.

As the night wore on the drunks became more and more vociferous and the occasional scuffle broke out between them. Nothing really nasty though, because they needed each other to lend each other a swig of their cheap wine when they had none. Kind of a family preservation instinct. People began to go to sleep here and there, lying on their posessions so as not to have them stolen during the night. Others talked in hushed tones about secret things. I decided to stay a few days to find out how life was lived on a railway station. (I still do not know how to explain that (inexplicable?) decision, even to this day....)

Four a.m. I needed to sleep too.

So I lay down on a kind of marble bench, put my head on my rucksack, and fell into a kind of worried sleep.

The photo here is of that bench. I took it a few years ago for my “archives”. It still exists today.

I began to run short of money after five days, mostly because I had “lent” it to some of those, notably women with children, whom I had met as time went by. People ignored me at first, but, as it became clear that I lived there too they began to open up. It was comical how each little group, or clan, would warn me against the others. It was as if they wanted me to be a part of their group, because groups mean company....

Many of them had been “normal” people, who had had jobs or husbands or wives, but had lost one or another of them for various reasons and then they just lost their homes in the middle of all the upheaval. Many were psychologically weak (of course, if not they wouldn’t have had to live on a station) and they had a hard time imagining any other future. They had kind of “dropped-out”, because things seemed simpler that way. They were hurt, damaged, fragile, people. It was very hard to remain neutral at first whilst talking to them (because you have to be neutral, if not you get too many feelings, and that’s not a good thing in that world....)

All the quiet ones were worried about alcohol related violence so, even though days were spent wandering around, in or out of the station, asking for money or food, on an individual basis, when night came they, and I, all slept in the same area, a large undergound waiting-room for long-distance buses. Safety in numbers. Also, those who had cigarettes would share them, as well as good tips on practical stuff like eating, drinking (not just alcohol), warm and comfortable places to spend time in during the day, free, without getting thrown out.

I ran out of money. I could have gone to a bank to get more, but decided not to. This meant that starting from the second week I, like the others, would wait for the church van to arrive in the morning with hot coffee and yesterday’s bread and pastries to fill me up in the morning. The priests and nuns were polite, not at all proselytising, and said little. We were cold and unforthcoming. They also told me where to go to get a shower and clean up, all for free, towels included. Yeah!! So I would go and clean up every two or three days on a big riverbarge one mile away, specially equipped. Free coffee and biscuits and newspapers were also available. Living on the station was becoming “easy” because I was learning the ropes.

I had also learnt how to eat for free. Every day I would walk almost two miles to a kind of homeless people’s kitchen for free (very bad, but free) lunch. Then, back to the station. It was ok except when it rained, and children and old people found it hard, so some only went every two days.....and ill people and drug and alcohol abusers hardly went at all....

I also became aware, little by little, that I was becoming more and more cut off from the “real” world. No tv, music, friends, work to go to, home to go to, nothing at all on the horizon. No plans to make, places to be, things to look forward to. It was like living in a parallel world, a cocoon, suspended in time, which in fact it was. It was all very comforting in a way...

Time went by unnoticed, lost in days full of looking into shop windows, sitting on benches, not talking to anyone for hours on end, watching people from another planet go to and come back from places I had no idea even existed. In fact, the only real reminder of time was the fact that I was permanently hungry. That was because it was not easy to find an evening meal without money. It wasn’t enough to be a threat to my health, but I learned then what the words “nagging hunger” mean.

Perrache station is a place both loved and hated by people here. The station complex itself is hated by everyone, including me, because it’s one of those massive modern architectural monsters that is not growing old gracefully. But, as I say, it was a cocoon then. In fact, I noticed myself leaving its “familar, homely” surroundings less and less as the weeks went by. I was becoming a kind of denizen of the station or something. I had forgotten what to sleep in a bed felt like. The rest was distant, far away “outside”. Also, it being a station, those who live there live in a permanent kind of echo chamber, because the central hall is large. It means that after a while the world of sound becomes fuzzy and unreal. Echos of feet walking, train announcements, train noises.........But it’s not disorientating, because that’s all there IS. Timeless, tiresome, meaningless echoes.

Around week four, and the approaching winter has drawn more and more homeless people to “my” place. Strangers, who do not belong here. The atmosphere has become more tense as more people are sharing less and less public generosity. Fights are more common and the Police are becoming more and more frequent visitors to “our” parts of the station. I have lost weight, but am still feeling ok. Woah, this is becoming weird. Also, the cold means that the weaker ones are beginning to fall ill. Children, and their parents if they have any, are taken away by the city’s social care services. It’s getting a bad-vibe place to be.

My best friend, a woman of sixty who’s husband threw her out into the street five years ago, has been taken to hospital suffering from several infections and a slight cardiac problem. I go to see her every few days, and begin spending more time “outside”, discovering Lyon and how beautiful a city it is.

I am spending more time outside because the station is becoming a mean place to be, even in the daytime. And, my thoughts are returning, little by little, to the other world, the world I haven’t seen for well over a month.....and I feel more and more hungry. I have definitely lost weight. Every day is a constant struggle to find somewhere warm to be. There are shopping malls of course, but again, the echoes just fog up any effort to think serenely, to relax. Just give me somewhere quiet and soothing. A library maybe, but the staff are vigilant....

The end of week six. I am tired. Very. Permanently. Most of my clothes have been ruined by cheap launderettes and sleeping in them, and nothing gets ironed. My shoes are in a bad way. I badly need a haircut but don’t have the money for one. I shave every three or four days, so that my last two razor blades last as long as possible. Also, there are more and more prostitutes on the station. This happens each winter apparently. They bring with them their hangers-on and pimps and clients. Bad company.

Days and nights are one. Neon lighting and loudspeaker announcements to keep us awake. The boredom is crushing.

Saturday night. Time to sleep after a cold evening spent watching the normal people catching Saturday night trains back to the suburbs. The women smell of perfume. The men look sleek and sophisticated. We are invisible to them, and we smell of the station.

Sleep. Almost as bad as being awake. It is bitterly cold.........

Around five in the morning. Police everywhere!!

We are surrounded by policemen and women, being rounded up and put into vans, around fifteen in my van, and off we go to the police commisariat, where we are pushed into cells. The news has already spread like a firestorm.

Two of the station’s homeless inhabitants have been found battered and stabbed to death down on the tracks, a couple of hundred meters from the quays. (I knew one of them). The station staff heard the fighting and saw four tramps or homeless people running back into the station.

Hence our presence in cells. I am taken out of my cell to be interviewed.

At the end of my “interrogation” (friendly, because I think they knew who they were looking for, in fact, and found them a day later) one of the detectives asked,

“But why are you homeless, with all your culture and education and the fact that you could find work tomorrow?”

“I’m homeless deliberately.”
“Deliberately?!! Are you CRAZY?!!”
“Well, yes and no. I know I can stop when I want. I’m just here to see. I needed a change; A break in my routine.”

They obviously thought I was nuts.

But the deaths of those two people were like a warning bell to me.

It was clearly time to leave.

I left the station two days later.....

This is what my eyes saw as I came off the exit escalator.........

_____________________

(You know, more than fifteen years later, when I go through Perrache station, I see that some of the people who lived there then are still there now. Maybe they still like it, maybe they’re still frightened, maybe nobody cares.......

The best of luck to them all..............)

Michael C