‘This might sound like an odd question, but do you want it back?’
Two policewomen were standing on my doorstep. I felt guilty for wasting police time. One of the two resident junkies in my Glasgow tenement had stolen my John Lewis duvet cover from the communal washing line in the shared back court. Pale green, it had a vaguely Chinese embroidered motif. I’d bought it to celebrate my mid-life property purchase, after decades of renting. My junkie neighbour had been witnessed taking it off the line, along with his own washing.
‘There was a big match on that day. Mebbe he wisnae in his right heid,’ a back-court neighbour had remarked.
In the grim context of Glasgow crime—the drugs, the gangs, the chaos of the city centre and certain suburban areas—reporting a nicked duvet cover seemed embarrassingly bourgeois and trivial. But it was in a grander cause, not mere property restitution but expulsion and the achievement of normal, peaceful life. The rest of the stair had ganged up on Bilbo (I’ll call him that) because he was making our lives hell.
There’s no such thing as one junkie. Bilbo had pals. Oh, so many pals, collected off the streets, and brought into the close, rough-looking men, prematurely aged, corroded, by years of hard, wasted life. When he didn’t answer his doorbell, they wailed up at his window, at all hours, for hours; or they simply smashed the lock or glass on the street door, a constant expense to owners until we refused to pay. These pals didn’t take silence for an answer. If they got into the close, they battered at his door, shouting. Police came to break up violent arguments on the landing. A neighbour was threatened with a knife on one occasion, a used needle another time.
Another hazard was junkie cooking. The fire brigade was frequently called for smoke alarm emergencies. Thank God social housing properties are fitted with mandatory smoke alarms. The electronic shriek couldn’t rouse Bilbo from his deep, substance-assisted slumbers, but it certainly got the rest of us moving. Once, or perhaps twice, firemen had to smash in his door. ‘Ah wuz only cookin’ a barger!’ he’d whine, finally showing his face, the victim of an unfair interruption.
A quiet young woman who lived next door to Bilbo was on the frontline. He harassed her for presuming to report the constant disturbance to the police (‘snitching’). His warped presumption (and that of his pals, who joined in the harassment) seemed to be that neighbours owed him loyalty, regardless of how badly he behaved. The worst crime was involving the polis.
The young woman had a friend stay with her, until she finally moved out.
The Bilbo era was well underway when Number Two was moved in, a skinny, stooped, hollow-cheeked man, not young, not old, carrying nothing but a daypack. I saw him struggling with the key to his front door, as if he hadn’t used one for quite a while.
Frodo never got the hang of keys. Like Bilbo, he was constantly losing them. One evening, within a few months of his moving in, there was a dreadful banging and drilling racket from downstairs. I popped my head out the door at the same time as my next-door neighbour, a good-humoured young man.
‘I’ll go down and see what’s happening.’ Unlike me, my neighbour is brave.
He came back up laughing in disbelief. He’d found Frodo ‘absolutely off his nut’, accompanied by a friend, ostensibly a locksmith, who was ‘helping’ him gain access to his flat by drilling and hacking the lock out of the door.
Like Bilbo, Frodo went through several doors during his tenancy. The last one was smashed in by the police during a dawn raid, toward the end of his reign of chaos.
The matter of doors became pivotal. Frodo and Bilbo were incapable of retaining keys—a key life-management skill, pun intended—and preferred the front and back doors left unlocked. If other residents were too efficient about locking them, the locks were simply smashed, time and time again. Frodo, who did not pay his own rent, complained to a neighbour that the housing association charged £8 for a new key.
As a gesture of goodwill, for which we were supposed to feel grateful, the housing association eventually installed a maglock entry system on the front door. Frodo didn’t like the new system, which logged all comings and goings. On one otherwise perfectly normal day, I found the metal panel ripped clean out of the stone wall and thrown onto the street. The strength, malignancy and impunity required for that level of vandalism stunned me. The panel was reinstated—well, stuck back on—but the audio hasn’t worked properly since.
Frodo had no job, but he was fully employed: his flat was a busy distribution hub for local junkies. Another neighbour referred to him as ‘the busiest man in Glasgow’, as he constantly scuttled to assignations on the street corner, where his tracksuit-clad clientele waited with their phones, visibly jittery. He also offered what the unfortunate family who lived across the hall referred to as ‘click and collect’. From late in the evening and throughout the small hours, I could hear the steady slam of the street door as people came and went. A visit to Frodo’s flat took around 30 seconds. He didn’t do coffee and chat.
Often there were screaming junkie arguments and violence in the corridor. The police came, occasionally took people away, but nothing changed. The family had sleepless nights. The housing association did not reply to their emails. Eventually, like the young woman above them, they moved out.
On the top floor, I was spared most of the noise, but I dreaded who I might see on the stairs on my way in or out. The close felt like an indoor version of Sauchiehall St, formerly the empire’s great shopping street, now a wasteland of drug zombies, hooliganism and e-bike couriers wearing balaclavas, travelling at motorcycle speeds. (The recent BBC documentary was very contentious in Glasgow. Gatherings of black-masked fascists are no more common here than elsewhere in Britain, which is to say, increasingly not unheard of.)
It took letters to our MSP and a formal complaint to the housing association to break through the dogged indifference. The process of eviction is a long one, even longer than police investigations into low-level drug dealing, and the burden of proof is extremely high. Social tenants, regardless of antisocial and criminal behaviour, are very protected. The right of other residents—owner occupiers, private tenants or other social tenants—to safe and peaceful enjoyment of our properties is utterly negligible.
When the polis finally took Frodo away, his drug-addled girlfriend moved in and held court, even though she had her own social housing flat around the corner. Food waste and chunks of broken-up furniture were dumped in the corridor. Business continued. Junkies loitered in the corridor at all hours of the day. The housing association line was that as Frodo’s partner, she was entitled to stay in his flat, and that if we had any problems, we had to call the police. Without proof that she and her pals were dumping the rubbish, nothing could be done. For various unconvincing reasons, the housing association had repeatedly refused to install CCTV.
It took another complaint, right to the top, to have the drug hub closed down. The windows were boarded up and Frodo’s much-abused door was replaced by a steel one. I joked with my neighbours about the Glasgow branch of Berghain that had opened on our stair.
For months after, we still had ‘visitors’, old customers who hadn’t got the memo and turned up looking for their fix. Sometimes, somehow, they got in and hung about on the stairs, smoking and taking drugs. They didn’t like being told to leave. My Australian neighbour was told, ‘This isn’t your f–––g country, go back to England.’ The housing association said it wasn’t their problem and referred us to the police. It turned out that the staff entry code, used for all the association’s properties, had ‘leaked’ to the ‘local community’, and that junkies were simply letting themselves in.
An investigation into this security breach is ongoing. Whether we’re told the outcome is another matter. But at least it’s quiet, mostly, and the back door is, mostly, locked.
*
Did I want my lovely sage-green John Lewis duvet back, two weeks after Bilbo had taken it into his disgusting junkie lair, which emanated stale cigarette and weed funk, stinking up the close? He didn’t like opening windows, even when a charred burger was smoking out his flat. Maybe he’d sold my duvet cover in one of the dodgy pubs on the main road, or gifted it to his sometime-lady friend, who had a blonde bouffant that looked like a wig and absurdly inflated lips. Regardless, no disinfection process could redeem it for me.
‘Boil it! Burn it! Give it to charity!’
The policewomen were amused but not surprised by my vehemence.
‘We have to ask,’ one said laconically.
I’d apologised for wasting their time and explained the situation: an actual crime, properly witnessed, was eviction gold. They’d nodded. All part of the job.
The replacement, from Argos, is also green, a pleasant pattern, but the material is a little scratchy. I’m no longer in my John Lewis phase of bedding acquisition, and I haven’t used the common back-court washing line since.
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