Attack of the devil Bomzh.

(Bomzh is an acronym in Russian that denotes a homeless person)

2 or 3 years ago, with guitars strapped to our backs, I was going to a rehearsal with my son, in one of the repeating bases* near the railway station where the homeless people, the Bomzhes, gather.

The glorious heat of summer had brought the classic Somme chic to the railway station area: thousands of people flooding in and out on the suburban trains, buying food made from rats and fried in the bile of cockroaches in their little wheeled deep fat fryers, kiosks full of melted chocolate and low price alcohol, gypsy women in gangs of half a dozen roaming the edges of the herd like wild dogs straggling after wildebeest, looking for the sick or lame. And the Bomzhes, roused like lizards, by the burning sun, stripped of their plastic bag shoes and mangy coats, crawling forth in search of prey.

As we went into the territory of the factor the boy decided he wanted to eat. He always wants to eat when we are late, he would willingly die of starvation when I need him to order in a restaurant full of attentive waiters, but if we are in a forest 300 miles from the city with an air raid alarm sounding, and napalm canisters falling like rain then he will demand cakes before he is able to take another step.

Kids huh? Or Russians maybe, he’s part both.

Anyway I dragged myself into one of the less slime covered food kiosks to get him a cheese and ham toastie and as I ordered I saw a Bomzh approaching him, a green shirted red faced Bomzh in early middle age with that look in his eyes that tells you drunkenness has already metamorphosed into some deeper, darker form of destructive dementia. “Oy” I screamed at him; “fuck off” as he got within a yard of my son, arms outstretched. People who cannot speak a word of English invariably grasp the meaning of those two words, and this fellow did as the rich pickings of a 10 year old kid with a guitar morphed into a complicated and bewildering situation involving angry looking foreign men and the potential for pain. He backed off, and set off again on his way. I relaxed again, and then he turned without warning and lunged at the lad. I, scattering toasties, lunged too and reached him just as he got his purple hands round the boy’s neck. I took hold of the back of his green T shirt and pulled him off with a fair degree of force but no great violence. But he was all messed up and went reeling off backwards, arms windmilling, eyes and mouth wide open until after about ten steps he lost his balance and went over backwards cracking his head on the asphalt as he went down. Then he just lay there.

  It’s kind of startling how quickly a crowd gathers when you have just killed a homeless man on a busy summer street. You’d think people have nothing better to do.

“Run” said the saleswoman of toasties: “get out of here”.

“come on papa, let’s go” said the boy; “before the cops come”…and I wanted to, but something in me held me there and I approached him to see if he was really dead. Everyone around joined in, telling me to get out of there, saying they’d seen what had happened, urging me to flee and strongly implying that it was ok to kill homeless people as long as you ran off quickly enough afterwards.

  And I knelt down over him and he was blank; eyes wide open and unmoving, a trickle of blood running out from the back of his head, no breath. And as I looked around me his Bomzh friends gathered too, kneeling and looking and my eyes met those of the lady Bomzh next to me, the one whose friend I had just killed. “Run” she hissed. “the cops will be here any second.” But I couldn’t do it, I was going to prison for killing homeless people, that was it.

And then he puked. Dead Bomzh man puked, rolled onto his side suddenly and started vomiting and cursing and gibbering in the way that only living people do.

Then I ran, grabbed my son and scarpered into the gates of our Baza away from the crowd and the Bomzh and the police who probably never came anyway. And as we walked over to the cellar door, the shock sinking in from the whole flash of random violence, my son looked up at me admiringly and said: “Papa, you are Batman!”

* “Repeating base” is a translation of “repetitsionaya Baza”, which is a rehearsal room, generally in the basement of some old disused factory. Someone fills a room up with amplifiers and a drum kit, then rents it out to one of the thousands of bands forming and mutating all over the city, All you have to do is turn up with people and guitars, pay a nominal price and then make more noise than is strictly necessary. Most of these Bazas have three or four rooms in them and lots of punky style posters on the wall: all pics of dying people and bold type demands concerning the reason for the atrocity enacted therein. Then they hang carpets on the walls and employ their druggie girlfriends to hang out there and take bookings and money and so on. It’s the mines of Moria crossed with the suburbs of Sheffield in 1982 as far as I can figure it.