Tonight two girls sit in the near doorway, one is very young. I find later that she is pregnant. this information she volunteers, one does not ask if one is to be trusted. They are drinking from a bottle. It may be water but I suspect it is to keep them warm and to chase away the dread realities of cold hard life on the pavements and the city streets. City streets where gaiety, fuelled by alcohol, mocks girls attempting warmth in a shop doorway, or make innuendoes dark, suggestive, loathsome, as laughingly they spurn the helplessness and the mute appeal.
More usually one or more men of various ages share the doorway but only one, middle aged and tough; long used to the harshness of the streets, but vulnerable all the same, sits in another, nearby doorway. As if in mockery of their state, the shops display for sale, clothes and jewellery of luxury and for ostentatious display well beyond the pockets of even the moderately well off. Conspicuous consumption there for sale to the masters and the mistresses of vice. For those who deal in drugs and who have bodies and souls for sale or for rent.
By the older man a used plastic MacDonalds box, discarded but put to use, by him to beg for pennies, while all around the crowds drink lager for many pounds. These unfortunates are invisible to the pleasure seekers who outnumber them by their hundreds. They are bypassed and ignored as bypassed and ignored by the state, they eke out dull and lonely existence in the chill of early Spring waiting for the Summer sun, the Winter dread forgotten for a while.
Are we blinded to such scenes or do we rationalise and tell ourselves they are but drug or alcohol addicted and must learn to give up these nauseous habits, get a job and find somewhere decent to live and so respectable become?
Are we blinded? How do they respectable become, or how to get a job without a home without address; The Big Issue their only lifeline in the rain and chill of Winter's night?
Are we blinded? If so, by what? The addictions we condemn are also all our own, as we our pleasures seek, with euphoria in a bottle, or a pill; and then make jokes as if these things were on another world.
Across the road on other, lone girl sits and begs. Shunned by the others, they say she has a home and only begs for "gear" to buy. It may, or it may not be true. She sits and begs who ought to have a job, a family, a home and love. While along the pavement stagger two men, middle aged. Old enough to be the fathers of the girls they are, but stagger drunk . Not too drunk to be unaware, just a little unsteady on their feet. Not too unsteady to watch a girl not yet ready to be ground down by despair. Though blind to desolation in a doorway, they eye her, leering and stare salaciously. Unsteady on their feet and with their morals almost gone they turn and totter off giggling disgustingly . The burning lust in their eyes makes one frighteningly aware of the elemental forces fermenting not far below the surface of our increasingly disturbed society. They may as well be slavering and drooling. Drink has dissolved that casing of respectability which holds in check the libidinal drives within, and which keep caged the beast in its once safe guarded den.
Are we seeing here the breakdown of a culture? Is this the dissolution of a strong and mighty nation where once courtesy and kindness reigned and where the fond compelling memories of loved and respected womanhood, mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and cousin, kept the beast safely chained. Love, respect and honour made it a taboo that women should be so treated and certainly, young girls were protected as well as respected. What has become of us that the night is filled with lewdness, that minds are a swirling sea of lust and delight is taken in the shame and degradation of those who were once, perhaps wrongly, put on a pedestal.
Round the corner a group of five middle-aged women, all tarted up for hunting the hunting males in their Friday evening finery, huddle in a circle. They are in deep and earnest discussion but their voices already have the strident shrillness of girls on the prowl. The conversation is both serious and private but is such that one cannot help but overhear a certain amount. I have to confess, though not accustomed to eavesdropping, my ears do prick up and I hear something of what they are saying.
In the shadow of the University building they argue about the best techniques with which to entrap their quarry. Sexual conquest is the subject. One of them, presumably the matriarch, long experienced at such games with many scalps hanging from her belt, hastens to warn the others. "You have to let them make all the running, don't let them think you're too eager." She relishes her position as counsellor and guide to the other, less experienced girls, not girls. Perhaps she is just seeking to impress the others; who knows? Possibly she could be just passing on some old saw of wisdom picked up in other such conversations where she was once the tyro and an older woman there held court. It is all very sordid and one is sorrowful that the desperate search for happiness yields such barren results and gives such scant glimmers of satisfaction. A Friday night spending energy and money with lust inflamed by drink and drugs; where happiness, as rare as a dodo on some remote island in the Pacific or Indian Oceans, eludes all in the frantic desperate quest. Its shadow flickers enticingly among the bottles behind the bar or around the feet of the girls miniskirted at the tables and on the disco floor.
