Roskov, Book 22, page 26
‘Most European cities have such men, and hide the statistics – I used to see those statistics. And you are nothing in comparison to America and their homeless problems and drug problems. They dwarf us.’
‘I hear that the New York subway is smelly.’
‘I used it once, never again.’
Ross Daniels called me next. ‘We had a northerly wind last night, and it rained for an hour around 2am, so that helps a lot. Today it’s nice, was damp when we woke.’
‘Good. Is Frances House and Scorfo Valley equipped for fires?’
‘They don’t have forests around them, they’re fine, and the homes are all concrete, nothing to spread the fire. Oh, there’s an issue in Scorfo, a marine biologist insists that there’s a small baby Great White in the seawater canal.’
‘A Great White?’
‘They breed in the Mediterranean, babies can be seen around Malta.’
‘How big is it?’
‘Two foot long.’
‘And it will grow to be…’
‘Twelve foot long maybe and weighing two tonnes.’
‘That could be an issue. So have them release it before it eats a slow-moving pensioner.’
‘They swim back into the Atlantic. The sharks not the pensioners.’
‘Has the heat affected our residents?’ I asked.
‘We think we had two cases of heat stroke, but they are warned each day and told to go inside. And most were born on the island, they know it gets hot in August. Today is cooler, some high clouds.’
‘Any stats on my rare metals?’
‘Still being dug up, tens of millions of Euro for your company there. Some talk of fresh digging.’
‘And the roads across the lake?’
‘A few miles long they said, crews working at night. Golf course has been started, rocks are soft enough. Sand will go into the cracks, then turf on top, but the watering system will be under the turf.’
‘Did my partner plan the villas at the golf course?’ I asked.
‘Same as the others, but on a curving road, forty villas with gardens, a shop planned.’
‘The extra Irish lads?’
‘In total I think it’s an extra three hundred that arrived, but that includes about sixty apprentices.’
‘Must be more on the way then,’ I noted.
‘I met Lee Tong, put a name to the face, and he had a good look around Frances House and then Scorfo Valley, and he inspected his villa in Mandoch Valley, happy with it.
‘He was amazed by the waterfall in Mandoch, promised to come back on holiday one day soon.’
‘We start the extra Mandoch villas in October?’
‘End of October, no tourists around. Oh, Prefect opens the Mandoch nursing home next week.’
‘I may pop down. Residents?’
‘All the rooms were taken before it was completed, not a hard sell, and they’re expensive rooms. From the roof terrace the residents can see the waterfall, and few nursing homes can claim that.’
‘No, just ours I would think. When do you fly back?’
‘A few days, after I do the rounds and check on business here.’
‘And your hotel profits?’ I asked.
‘Are excellent, as expected.’
‘Do your part to help with new roads this winter, there are isolated beaches that can be opened up.’
‘I’ll get a team on it, surveys done. Your place, The Swamp, is busy now with construction gangs and surveyors.’
‘The Swamp? Is that the official title now?’ I complained.
‘For locals, yes.’
‘Not good for holiday brochures.’
‘What will you call it?’ he asked.
‘No idea. What’s the village called?’
‘Uh … Lozzi.’
‘Lozzi Beach Resort then. Tell them to put up a sign. And tell the villagers that if they call it “The Swamp” that I’ll bulldoze their fucking village!’
He laughed. ‘I’ll tell them. They’ll be worried.’
The Airfield gets smelly
In the morning I returned to The Airfield prison, everyone talking about Grog, as well as the nation’s reaction to the BBC news segment. Grog himself was still sedated, no one quite sure what to do, since waking him would be a bad idea. But at least the colonic irrigation had worked, the maggots in his descending colon now gone.
But necrotising flesh has been found in his colon, which put Grog on the clock, a week left at most. And the medics wanted to burn his body, soon, very soon – he would not even be required to be dead.
The doctor had increased the amount of morphine being administered, and the amount of antibiotic had greatly increased, the most likely result being heart failure – which was what they were hoping for.
I did the rounds and met the inmates that were coherent, a quick look at those that were less than coherent, the smell being bad – despite the clean-up efforts of the staff. Several inmates were incontinent, so they said, but it smelt as if they were all incontinent. Adult nappies were available for use.
At the Welcome Centre I observed as eight men arrived, soon followed by eight more straight away, but we had the staff to cope. ‘How many inmates now?’ I asked.
‘Three hundred and eighty, and rising by a hundred a day,’ the ex-Army medic informed me. ‘Most are not too bad, not like Grog.’
‘Did anyone you know puke?’
He shot me a look. ‘I was getting calls for an hour, and complaints. But it’s as I kept saying to them: you come and work here.’
I nodded at that. ‘They know now, every person in the country knows now, and that’s good.’
Bill at the charity called me. ‘There’s been a big spike in donations, like thirty million so far.’
‘Good, we can afford the good biscuits now. I’m at the Airfield. Did you vomit?’
‘No, I know what it’s like with the homeless, I’ve seen men like Grog before. But the girls in the office were complaining, and everyone in Leicester is talking about it today.’
‘Did the BBC apologise?’
‘They did, several times, then they blamed you.’
‘That’s OK, I can take the blame.’
Sat in an office with a nice lady doctor, she explained, ‘Drug addicts are like teenage girls who starve themselves, anorexia, and the muscle mass diminishes around vital organs such as the heart.
‘Problem is … that the muscle mass doesn’t grow back very well after it’s lost, and heart failure is an issue a few years down the line, as they put on weight and seem to recover.’
‘Nothing that can be done?’ I asked.
‘Nothing found so far, but we are looking, ways to help the heart recover. And the addicts damage brain cells as well, they get foggy and stay foggy for years, they have paranoia and delusions, agoraphobia. It’s a long list of issues.’
‘And how many of the ones that you’ve seen here can go back into society?’
‘Many can, but they would just sit in an apartment paid for by the council, they don’t generally get a job and re-join society. Once the damage is done it’s done, and they can be in an institution for life.’
‘What’s your speciality?’
‘Anorexia, and recovery plans, which affects most all drug addicts. I asked to come here, I’ve released a few papers and now specialise in the subject, and here you have all the material any doctor could wish for.’
‘What do you hope to find?’
‘Statistics on recoveries, which people do better than others - and why, what the death rates are, causes of death. This will be the definitive study, so many drug addicts in one place; no one has completed a survey like this before.
‘I’ll write a book, and other doctors will read it, and we hope to set the benchmark for decades to come.’
‘Talk to my researchers at the AIDS hospice, they’re experimenting with stem cells, and those stem cells help to build new muscle tissue.’
‘Really? I’ll go see them, I did read a few articles about the successes the Americans were having with stem cells.’
‘If you think it may help here … contact me via the manager and I’ll fund some research, not least because we want to get the druggies back into society.’
‘Don’t get your hopes up, a few years of addiction is almost impossible to reverse.’
I made it to London for 3pm, and to the BBC Newsnight studio. Cup of tea and a chat, make-up done, mic tested, and I sat.
The intro music faded out. ‘With us tonight is the man responsible for so many people in this country vomiting on their carpets at the sight of the homeless man “Grog”.’ He faced me. ‘My wife has a few sharp words for you.’
‘I didn’t hold the camera and zoom in on someone’s backside, or the maggots, I was not there. I was there for a while to peer through the window at Grog as he lay on the medical bed, the medics wanting to cremate him; being dead at the time was optional.
‘But they told me today that he has a week to live, and that the necrotising disease he has is so dangerous that they may burn the medical bed he’s currently on - as well as his body.’
‘He’s highly contagious?’
I shot him a look. ‘Have you been paying attention? He could start a pandemic by himself! And until recently he was sleeping rough in London, touching the same shop door handles that Londoners touch, touching the same underground hand rails that normal people touch, and Londoners were walking through his urine.’
Paxman screwed up his face. ‘Thanks, I live in London.’
‘Wash your damn hands when you get home, and after every journey on the tube. And wash the bottom of your shoes as well.’
‘I’ve walked past many homeless sat outside a tube station,’ he noted with a nod. ‘Some in shop doorways. But those days are at an end, soon there’ll be no homeless people on the street...’
‘The police in London will, from now on, grab any homeless person and send them to me, till I have a facility in London. But the fact is that most of the homeless down here do not come from London, and they will in time be sent back to their local councils – who will be legally bound to look after them -’
‘All councils are supposed to do that now…’
‘Yes, but they don’t, they closed their hostels and rehab places. They will be forced to open them up again, but the fact is … that the damaged homeless are better off in my facilities.’
‘Damaged?’
‘Drug addicts and homeless people suffer from anorexia; muscle wastage as well as the death of brain cells. What they tell me … is that the heart loses muscle mass it never gets it back, and most drug addicts that reform will die from heart failure. Unreformed drug addicts die from overdoses.’
He noted, ‘So if a person is in very poor health … they’re better off with you instead of residing in some poorly-funded local hostel...’
‘Very much so, they’ll just die slowly in such a place or go back to drug use.’
‘You don’t have confidence in the local councils?’
‘They can build a refuge for women, and that we know works well, they can build a hostel for men out of prison and with nowhere to go, and they can handle some of the drug addicts – the milder cases.
‘But if a doctor says that a homeless person or an addict is too far gone, the NHS gets lumbered with them or they come to me. Better to come to me for long-term care, and at a saving to the taxpayer.
‘AIDS sufferers are better grouped together, we can help them more, and we save taxpayers’ money, the same for cancer sufferers, the same for drug addicts with lingering health issues.’
‘So they may never leave you…’
‘Some will never leave, and some are like Grog. How many British people, having seen the news segment, want Grog back on the streets and near their children on a park bench?’
‘None, for certain.’
‘So we have to keep men like him locked up. And most are terminal anyway, AIDS and TB and Hepatitis – as well as anorexia and potential heart failure. And some are just plain mad, and were previously held in facilities that closed.
‘Some will fail a mental health test - and tell the medics that they want to kill people and eat body parts, so they would stay anyhow.’
‘How many are like Grog?’ he asked.
‘He was an extreme case, which is why we filmed him. Others have lice, many have AIDS and TB and a variety of nasty diseases, some just need a hot bath and some tender loving care.
‘The teenage runaways can be cleaned up and sent home, the man past forty who’s been taking drugs for years will need to stay quite a while.’
‘And how many men do you think you’ll need to hold permanently?’ Paxman asked.
‘Ten thousand to start with, hopefully less, and I’ll build several more soft prisons like the one in Leicester. But as the years roll on that number should go down, because we’ll grab a homeless druggy when he first hits the streets, there’ll be no men like Grog sleeping rough for ten years.’
‘So the numbers will fall as you grab people early and process them early, hopefully moving them away from drug abuse.’
‘Yes; ten years from now the numbers should be falling rapidly. We have the Thatcher legacy, but when the backlog is cleared we’ll greatly reduce the numbers.’
‘So in the second Labour term in office, anyone who sits in a shop doorway will be grabbed and sent to you…’
‘Within a year that will be the case, a homeless man from Newcastle that travels to London will be grabbed, processed and sent back. If you see a homeless man in London a year from now … he’ll be gone the next day.’
‘So the money being spent now won’t be needed in a few years…’
‘No, this is a blip, a round-up process and then the matter of the new daily homeless arriving in London being grabbed. And men like Grog will cease to exist, because they won’t be left alone for ten years to fester.
‘Taxpayers’ money spent this year is a waste caused by that backlog, but that backlog will be gone in a year, and my long term residents will be mostly dead in ten years.’
His eyes widened. ‘Mostly dead?’
‘They don’t live long happy lives, reformed drug addicts.’
‘And ten years from now, how many will you need to keep in prison?’
‘I’d say five thousand or less, the worst cases, plus the mental health burden.’
‘The mental health burden?’
‘We have a chronic shortage of suitable mental health places at the moment, so ten years from now we’d see twenty percent drug addicts and eighty percent mental health residents, and the number of mental health patients in the population is static just about.’
‘The numbers won’t rise?’
‘Each year people are born with issues, or they develop issues later on, a fact of human life, sometimes made much worse through drug abuse.’
‘How long … before you know that this experiment has worked?
‘It’s not an experiment, we know what the variables are – there’s no guess work here. We had a backlog of people with nowhere to go, no rehab, no mental health places, so we’re filling in the gaps.
‘As for results, a year from now we’ll know how many drug addicts we have in this country, how many die from overdoses, how many reform and how well they reform, how many are mental health patients that became homeless. We’ll analyse each person that arrives at the soft prison.
‘The only guesswork is about how many homeless there are out there. We think that there are five thousand in London, and another twenty thousand around the country. But it could be double that.’
‘Fifty thousand?’
‘Every city in Britain has unemployed people and druggies in sub-standard housing, hard to put a figure on it. They’re not homeless, not yet, but they are one step away from it, they only need to wreck the rented housing and upset the council.’
‘When will you take people from outside of London?’
‘When the Met Police say that most people are off the streets of London, then we’ll start on other cities, and that could be six weeks from now.
‘After that the Met Police will do some proper police work, not nurse-maid druggies and homeless people, they’re coppers not social workers; they joined the police force not the Salvation Army!’
‘Moving on, but still in London, and Tony Blair wants to build many new towns in the south east…’
‘He does, and it’s needed, and I’ll be the one building those towns with fund money, a few loans from the Government. The problem is … that house prices are rising fast in London but not the rest of the UK.
‘The reason for that … is partly because many people want to live and work here in London, partly because many people open businesses here in London, partly because many foreigners live here or visit here and push up prices.
‘And if I built a thousand apartments and put them up for sale tomorrow, most would be bought by landlords and foreigners, few by young graduates who want to work here. I’d have to build thirty thousand to have an effect.
‘And if nothing is done … then house prices in London will spiral out of control, nothing to do with a Labour Government or a Conservative one.
‘If nothing is done … then ten years from now house prices will be four times where they are today.’
‘Four times more! People can’t afford to live here now!’
‘Prices here will rocket upwards in the years ahead due to the existing shortages causing an exponential curve upwards, plus a nasty cycle of people demanding higher wages to live here, more foreigners, more absent owners, more landlords trying to make a killing. London is unique, and not like other British cities.
‘And ten years from now you’ll pay fifty quid for a drink in a coffee shop, and your nanny will cost you five times as much as now.’
‘The nannies are impossible to find now, and damned expensive!’
‘Things will get worse, much worse, because there’s a free-for-all here, no laws to limit house prices rises, not enough new housing being built.’
‘But you aim to correct that…’
‘We aim to build six to ten new towns around the M25, close to the motorway exits and close to commuter train links, and to ease the pressure on house prices here. Because as that shortage increases so house prices rise faster, so wage claims rise as well, so the price of a coffee rises.’
