On filing (BM/ES)

When I left the migrant centre I missed my pile of files. It lived to the right of my computer in the office in the Old Fire Station: each file between four and about thirty double-sided A4 sheets stapled together inside a plastic wallet, at any one time there were usually about twenty of them in the pile. A questionnaire with personal details made up the first five or six pages of each file.

Volunteers would fill this in when ‘triaging’ first-time visitors to the drop-in. Name, address (some vols would write ‘NFA’, others were less euphemistic and put ‘none’, ‘staying with a friend’, or ‘street homeless’), immigration status (again, sometimes roundaboutly put—‘working to regularise her status’, sometimes not: ‘refused’), monthly income (‘ca. 80/month from doing hair’, ‘£0’, ‘ZERO’), Hardship Given (Y/N?). Later pages were made up of case notes, written in long-hand by me, the office volunteers and sometimes the immigration advisers (though they mostly typed their advice, which ranged from the gushing and hopeful (A– from the commercial firm) to the laconic and dis-illusioning (M– from the law centre).

Time-travel-feeling-analogue: printing off a new ‘additional case notes sheet’ = putting your hand up to ask for more paper during the last half hour of your A Level history exam.

Some people had slim files, the slimmest were the no-hopers. I always wrote something like ‘signposted to Akwaaba/social-needs’: ‘giving them a biccie’, my therapist calls it. Yet some no-hopers had thick, worked-over files, with pages torn and Sellotaped back together, stapled and re-stapled in the top-left corner and hard to fit back in the plastic wallet after you’d written in them. They were the ones who’d sparked something in D–, my manager. Gnarly single-homeless types like O—, an old Nigerian dude who dragged a shopping cart round after him and took his glass eye out the first time L– volunteered. Leveraging his cavity. She came home and cried.

Every Wednesday morning D– would fill a shopping cart of his own and wheel it from the Old Fire Station to St. Mary’s, where the drop-in happened. I got to keep ‘my’ destitution files but had to email him a list of the ones I was holding onto so they wouldn’t be missed. As manager D– got to/had to keep/feast his eye(s) on the totality, the biggest pile of all.

I liked closing files but preferred opening new ones. A constant throughput made me feel at once productive and needed. (Affective dimensions of the Homelessness Industrial Complex…) Only now writing this do I realise how my pile of files = the piles I used to make of birthday & Christmas presents when I was a kid, to the right of the fireplace in the lounge = the lists I used to make in my head of my best friends in Year Six (Kevin Hung, Stefan, Alex T, Chanwit, Jack W…) = the spreadsheet of women accompanied by NELMA to Section 17 appointments = the stuff I gather round me when I’m sick in bed: tissues & eardrops, my phone & Macbook & ereader, vitamin D3, in-ear headphones, the Bluetooth speaker, Melissa (‘the calm balm’)…

Even when supposedly ‘organising’, I always gravitated to the bits that were more like service-provision. Tasks that involved keeping an eye on things and people that were already there rather than creating or disrupting anything. Planning meetings, writing the agenda, facilitating meetings, sorting teas and coffees in the break. Subvertising I thought a bit frivolous, & I was never in the direct-action working group.

How did you feel when you left the Manna? Is there anything you’ll miss?

If there’s one thing I won’t miss, it’s the papers. The Manna was supposed to be paperless at that point, but there had been no official transition or formal demarcation between hard files and soft digital records, so a black market persisted of exchanges of dog eared papers between case workers and clients. The papers had nowhere to go because there was no official home for them...ahem… so they lingered around and accumulated in odd corners. I would open an old filing cabinet and find stacks of printed out PIP appeals, heavy as bricks. I would open my office drawer and be jump-scared by a council tax bill as if it was a spider that had crawled out of a dark crevice. I think the fear value was one reason people insisted on giving them to me. I would say, I don’t need it. I have nowhere to put it. You keep it. Bring it next time. And the person would more or less beg me to take it. Terrifying capitalised red font headed debt letters, housing benefit calculations that looked like algebra. Take my fear and put it in your own head. And all the other stuff I don’t want in there too. Having them all around the place added to the sense of the constant danger of missing things, or forgetting things. Things sneaking up on me. This is a familiar feeling, of something being just outside my peripheral vision. The signal anxiety. The papers were the Big Bad signalling its approach. You have to keep it in view.

I tried to keep all the ‘important’ ones, the ‘live’ ones, related to tasks I needed to keep in my view on my desk beside me, weighed down with a stone so they couldn’t escape. The stone had a sunshine on it and a happy message. It was a little gift from a woman who painted stones and sold them in the street. It was my good object, my little talisman which had a mystical binding power over the immense hostility of the state that the papers stood for.

And all my shredding I kept in the bottom drawer of my desk, pushed down, all the intensity they represented, the moment in someones life of spinning out of control and all of the representations of it that were made to me about it, pushed away, displaced by new people, new ‘clients’, new fresh distress, swept away by this agitated river of relentless onward movement and forgotten about. We didn’t open and close cases. People drifted away of their own accord. Some didn’t, sometimes there was a swell. We relied totally and blindly on the organic movement, the tide of people and their problems advancing and receding according to the laws of nature. In this way there were no endings. When there were endings it was in the form of giddy news, a house, a shelter, money, some kind of relief. There were ecstatic phone calls. I will miss them. We would be so pleased with ourselves the two of us, me and the client. We have made fire, conquered death. Even then, there was a fantasy of an eternal mother; you don’t need me now, but perhaps you will again. We don’t close cases! We always used to say, proudly. I will always be here. Only I won’t. Others simply gently and silently gave up on us. We were not the only show in town. They faded out. Their ghosts sometimes lingered. I even had, in the top drawer of my desk, a set of passport photos, the face pale and unhappy. The real face it represented – who knows? What to do with such a thing? The last thing I did before I left my office and locked the door for the last time was all of my shredding. I felt like if I did that at least whoever picked up where I left off wouldnt somehow end up mired in it all. But maybe I also wanted to make a clean break. Shredding, annihilating. Violent destruction. The violence of the ending I couldn’t really face up to. Leaving home(lessness).

Conscious that I first found myself volunteering in a day centre for homeless people not long after my mother died, finding solace among people adrift. Finding a place for myself among the placeless. In that place I used to enjoy being included in conversations between guests as they bitched about the management. Little middle class white girl identifying with some feeling of being shut out. Though I hadn’t been, in all the ways that matter. Hungry for identifications. Perhaps sometimes only the raw edge will do.

I also feel like in activism I like to do the ‘containing’ work. Filling in the gaps, making sure everything fits together nice and snug. Propping up whoever I think is actually doing the work that I think should be done.