Immaterial

We met by accident. Jenna might believe in fate, but I don’t. Tell you the truth, I don’t know what Jenna believes in, could be pixies and stardust. Except I’m being unfair - the world’s not given the poor girl much to believe in; whatever makes her happy should be ok by me. Anyway, how we met. So I have a spare mattress, it’s ten o’clock at night, I step away from the ATM and the rain’s pissing down and she doesn’t even have a coat and it looks like she’s been crying – and I’m overcome by a sense of injustice. I mean, this isn’t how the world should be, if only I could fix it, blah blah blah… The revelation point is: I can fix it. A very tiny corner, at least. Everyone deserves a chance. I want a chance, why shouldn’t she have a chance too – even if she has to hitch onto the back of my chance for a little while? So climb aboard, says I. And we all live happily ever after. Except that’s a load of bullshit. Nothing’s ever simple, I don’t know why I thought it might be; guess I figured simplicity was like fixing the world: a concept I sidle up to and capture with nonchalance.

“What the fuck you staring at?” snaps she.

“Nothing,” says I. Two steps back. Bleeding-heart liberal I may be, but I’m just as wary of being stabbed to death with a rusty hypodermic needle as the next person. “What can I do to help?” I ask,

and she kind of snarls up at me, “Nothing, just piss off.”

 That’s two nothings in one minute and     0 x 2 = 0²                                 so now we’re stuck in some surreal square dance and if it leads her to square up to me I’ll likely fall back on my arse, £20 lighter than before. Nuls point, as they say at Eurovision.

“No, seriously,” I say. “Do you need money? Have you got somewhere to go tonight?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m just waiting on my pimp,” says she. Pauses for a second; looks at my face, bursts out laughing. “Jesus Christ, I’m kidding!”

My turn to laugh: at her joke, and at myself for being an idiot. Still, deep down, I’m not sure whether I’m happy with the joke – she’s making fun of my naivety, like all of a sudden paying rent on a one-bedroom flat joins me hand in hand with aristocratic oblivion. We’re outside an empty train station, in the cold and rain, laughing because she isn’t a prostitute. Hell, maybe that’s something worth celebrating.

“Do you smoke?” she asks, settling back onto the mound of her stuff stashed in bin liners. We’ve entered some kind of comfort zone, humour has smashed mutual suspicion. I brandish my cigarettes and shake one out for her. She waves them away. “I asked if you smoke, never said I smoke.” Start to put them away and she laughs again. “Hey, come on, I’m kidding. Hand it over. Just getting you to think outside the box a bit, yeah?” So now we’re smoking and it’s companionable but the rain is still pitching down two feet from where we’re leaning against glass panels and it’s not getting any warmer.

“Have you always lived in Coventry?” I ask.

“No,” she says shortly, stubbing out half the cigarette - carefully, saving the rest. A cure for consumer culture: free-fall your way onto the streets.

“Lucky you,” I say. “So, where you from originally?” She’s sizing me up with her eyes. “Yeah, like I’m an undercover cop,” I scoff. Her turn to laugh. This is good, we’re taking turns. Friendly-like.

“Milton Keynes,” she replies after a small silence. I can’t help it, this sets me off laughing again. “What’s funny about that?” she wants to know.

“You’ve not exactly taken a glamorous tour of Britain,” I splutter. “That’s all.”

“Are you on crack or something?” she says with narrowed eyes. And of course that’s even funnier; homeless girl concerned that I might be the druggie. “It’s just that you laugh at everything and it’s a bit weird,” she continues.

“Fair comment,” says I.

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She’s sharp, physically and mentally. Protruding bones and nose and a quick wit that won’t let me get away with anything. Speaking of which, have you ever allowed a stranger to enter your home? Gets the cogs up in the grey matter grinding, doesn’t it? By which I mean, your eyes start flitting over your stuff, your possessions, your life or what passes for it; walk a mile in my shoes is the invitation and suddenly you’re really keen to do so. Witness. Now, if I were a junkie, what would I steal first? Hi-fi system might fetch a few hundred quid…at best; it’s a good one, but who bothers to buy CDs nowadays – and barring that, who’d want a CD player with a double cassette deck? Hell, nobody buys tapes. Nowhere sells them. There was a period of bargain bins flush with TDK six-packs…and then it all evaporated. No matter, we lived. Is my passport hidden well enough? My wallet? Bank book? DVD player is pretty lightweight, but it’s a few years old – might get twenty quid for it if you found a willing car-boot victim. Funny, my book collection probably adds up to around two grand and it’s the least mobile item in the bedroom; shit, I’d pay to watch someone try to rob it – put my own back out a few years ago just carrying the empty bookcase, flimsy as it is. Overall, my flat doesn’t amount to much of a heist and I’m relieved, but all the same panic sets in when I realise I need the toilet badly, that I’ve actually been holding it in unawares…that I’m going to have to leave her unsupervised. Juddering rewind back to the cocky congratulations on owning a load of worthless crap: hell, what do I know about desperation? A handful of DVDs, the Wii console that I failed to mention tucked under her armpit and away we go…that could be, what, sixty, seventy quid minimum. Thirty seconds work. Thanks to my faulty bladder and mawkish, trusting ways. Anyway, suffice to say I return from the toilet and haven’t been robbed. Jenna is sitting at the table where I left her, nursing a cup of sweet tea and systematically nibbling her way around the edges of a ginger biscuit.

“Look, it’s a rabbit,” she says, and holds it out for inspection.

“Oh yeah,” I say. It only vaguely resembles a rabbit, but the steady spatter of rain on my windows renders me charitable. Jenna could be out there, alone in the dark. Who knows where she’d have ended up?

“It’s nice and warm in here,” she remarks, as if the persisting rain is weighing in on her reflections too.

“Yeah,” I say. I’m standing awkwardly, my hand resting on the back of the other chair. The flat is no longer my sanctuary; I am now the host. Not host as in organism invaded by parasites, host as in the person expected to provide entertainment. Same difference, perhaps. “The mattress is clean, by the way.” I gesture to where I’ve laid it out, next to the couch with a rolled-up duvet on top of it and a plain pillow on top of that. This is connected to nothing. Even though I intended to come across as accommodating, it comes out like I’m saying shut up about biscuit rabbits and go to sleep.

“Sorry, am I keeping you up?” she asks. Not sarcastically, the way teachers used to say it if you had the nerve to yawn in their presence; she’s apologetic.

“What? No, no, it’s only half ten. I’m fine…unless, did you want to go to sleep now?”

She shakes her head. I wonder why she hasn’t taken off her coat, whether she’s waiting to adjust to the warmth or whether she hasn’t yet decided to stay. Coat is too grand a word, it’s more a jacket really, lacking winter bulkiness; almost a second skin, it seems so thin and of course the rain has soaked through and plastered it to her. I make a mental note to hang it over the radiator for her later, if she eventually takes it off. I’d deduct runaway-points for the unpractical outerwear, but then who knows under what circumstances she had to leave? Runaway strikes me as a childish word to describe a girl of about nineteen, although she could be younger than she looks. It seems unlikely that she can be much younger, but I’m suddenly anxious to ask her age; if she’s under sixteen, my nice gesture might technically have warped, without me knowing, into abduction. It turns out she’s nearly twenty-one, so not that much younger than myself. I am therefore not a kidnapper, which is excellent news. By this point, I’ve managed to submerge my awkwardness into complex activities such as re-boiling the kettle and opening a tin of soup. It’s not demeaning that I’m feeding a homeless person soup, I just haven’t gone shopping for a while so there isn’t much else in my cupboards - which I explain to Jenna before offering the exciting choice between beef broth and oxtail. She feels more anchored once she’s spooning broth and ripping bread into strips for dipping, so I brace myself and ask: “Is there anything you’d like to talk about?” Alternatively, maybe I’m more of a conversationalist coward than I realised, since I waited until she was eating to pose the question, surely aware that it’s hard to open up to a stranger with your mouth full of soup. Anyway, I am both relieved and disappointed when she mutely shakes her head. Once the soup is done with, we’re back on a more level playing field. I open two bottles of beer and we chain-smoke until the living room is obscured in a thick fog, forcing me to open a window and let some of the cold night air find us again. She’s reluctant to talk about herself, so my questioning repeatedly strands us up dead-ends. On neutral subjects, she has the ability to crack me up. It’s her tone: alternating between street-wise confidence, philosophical self-deprecation and outright humour.

“There’s something I gotta tell you,” she says, reaching for my lighter. “I got a bit of a habit.”

I fight to keep my expression placid. “OK. Which habit are we talking?”

“Well, I know you’re gonna disapprove… and I’m really sorry but…I keep smoking your cigarettes,” she says, choking on a cloud of smoke as she laughs.

“You had me going there,” I admit.

“I know it!”

Resigning myself to not knowing her back-story, at least not right away, I ransack my brain for topics to talk about; it’s been awhile since I had company stick around for more than a couple of hours and I’m kind of enjoying myself. Her eyes roam around the room, like she’s drinking it in.

“You’ve got a lot of stuff,” she says.

I shift uncomfortably. “Yeah, I know…I waste my money on crap.” It’s an apology: you don’t have a home and I do and I’m sorry.

“What kind of crap?” she wants to know.

“Like…all those DVDs and CDs and shit.”

“Do you watch the films, do you listen to the music?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Then it’s not a waste,” she says simply.

“It is when you think about what goes on in the world, people starving and dying. They’re not a necessity, are they, CDs and films. Not when other people have nothing. You kind of feel guilty, like until everyone has their basic human needs, you shouldn’t have excess comforts.”

Jenna thinks about this for a minute, then says, “Some people are blind. Do you walk around with your eyes shut? Do you? Nah, because you acting blind doesn’t do them any good.”

“It’s sort of different though. If I stopped spending money on books and CDs and gave the money to charity instead, that would actually be helping people.”

“You can’t help them all though.”

“True…Plus, besides that, having too much stuff ties you down. I couldn’t spontaneously walk out tomorrow and go travelling or anything, I’d have to find storage for it all first and that costs money…Sometimes I think about just giving it all away, being completely free, fresh slate…That’d be kind of amazing.”

“So why don’t you?”

I shrug. “Too weak, I guess. Society defines us by what we own. Wiping it all out…yikes. Nah, I couldn’t. But then, people lose all their stuff in house fires or whatever, and they still carry on, so it’s possible. But doing it to yourself…it’s like a mini suicide.”

“But you’d feel free…to do whatever it is you wanna do?”

“That’s the theory. No one knows until it happens though, do they?”

We meditate on this for a little while; more cigarettes. Have to wonder if I’ve offended her by glamorising the same poverty I’m trying to help her out of. So much for the unburdened traveller: Milton Keynes, Coventry. One-way ticket, here we come. There is all the mental baggage to consider in Jenna’s case. Unless I’m being too dismissive - maybe she did hit the road because of the liberty it promised, as opposed to one of the messed up scenarios flickering through my head.

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The next day is a Sunday and nothing of any significance happens. I wash my towels so that Jenna can use the shower; we order enough Chinese food to last three days and eat some while watching one of my comedy box-sets; Jenna laughs so hard she almost chokes on her egg-fried rice. Sunday night, I explain that I’ll have to go to work in the morning. I let her know she’s welcome to read any of the books, listen to any of the music or watch any of the DVDs. She’ll be stuck inside because I only have one key for the door, so I leave ten fags on the table. She has my work number in case she gets locked out for any reason.

It’s all very civil.

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I finish work early on Monday; the boss was understanding about my having a relative turn up to stay unexpectedly. I buy milk and cigarettes from the newsagent. I also buy a scratch-card but we don’t get lucky. I’ve never even won my pound back so don’t know why I bother, like I’m guaranteed to win some huge jackpot as compensation for a lifetime of disappointment. If that’s the case, every loss is an investment. It’s a cheerful walk home. The fact of there being someone waiting for me at home is a buoyant one; not that I’m so naïve as to expect Jenna to be eagerly anticipating my return, or even glad to see me. But she might be. It’s a gamble, like the scratchcard. Arriving at the block of flats, I’m about to let myself in when I notice smoke billowing from around the corner, where the wheelie bins are stored. Thinking that kids might have set the bins on fire for a laugh, I nip round to see what’s going on.

“Hi,” says Jenna. “You’re early!”

“What are you doing, what’s with the fire?” I cry.

“I’m liberating you!” she declares, poking the burning heap with a stick. I experience a devastating jolt and look a little closer at exactly what it is she’s burning. I have no sense of smell, so couldn’t detect the plastic/paper combination…but now I can see the melting cases, the disintegrating spines, the charred mess that was once a shelf of philosophical texts.