#85: Undignified City

On dignity, or the lack of it for Brussels' most vulnerable citizens

I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here!

This week’s newsletter is a little heavy - just a warning for anyone who’s dealt with substance abuse. The floggings of Brussels will continue until morale improves…

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Because I’ve never quite shaken my smalltown naïvety after 15 years in the big city, it took me a couple of seconds to register exactly what I was looking at. There are things you expect to see while waiting on the metro platform for the train to arrive and take you home after work, and there are things you do not expect to see while waiting on the metro platform for the train to arrive and take you home after work. I did not, on this or any other evening, expect to see someone shooting up in an abandoned corner of Trône station at half past five on a Thursday evening.

I was, I’ll admit, taken aback when the penny dropped and I clocked what was going on. I found myself staring, slightly out of the corner of one eye, at a woman who was sat in front of the station’s lift, in a recessed, unconsidered space behind a ticket barrier of the kind Brussels metro users will be used to hurrying through, maybe with a hand over their nose. The woman had pulled the sleeve of her stringy maroon jumper down below her armpit so that she could pop out her bare arm and rest it on her crosslegged lap. Her face was taut but from this distance her features were vague, and her head lolled back against the metro station wall. When she flexed her naked arm I saw a black elastic strap wrapped tight around what remained of a pale bicep on her right arm. In her left hand, cradled in her lap, looked from my distance like a syringe, held in the usual manner between index and middle finger.

Treinspotten

The world beyond the barrier did not exist for her, and in a different way the commuters standing beside me acted too as though she wasn’t there, willing her to evaporate. The woman was absorbed in her work, bare feet splayed out now in front of her and bicep flexing and left hand holding onto both the strap and the syringe. It wasn’t clear to me whether she’d already injected whatever was in the syringe into the pit of her elbow. Either way, she was engrossed in her work and did not notice the trio of metro security agents who were walking across the platform in her direction with quiet steps, thumbs hooked into the arms of their security vests.

They stopped at the ticket barrier and lingered. Immediately on becoming aware of their presence the woman was up on her bare feet, unwrapping her elastic band and pulling the sleeve of her jumper down again to return her arm to its sleeve, palms splayed upwards towards the security staff in a gesture of pathetic supplication. The needle had disappeared too, stowed away somewhere on her body the moment she had been disturbed in an expert gesture I failed to spot.

All this in the two minutes it took for my metro to pull into the platform to take me home. I couldn’t see what was happening anymore, my view obscured by the heads of my fellow commuters, but as the metro ground away from the station no doubt they were informing her she couldn’t stay where she was, that the metro wasn’t a shelter, and that she’d have to pack up her things, put away her syringe, and move on.

But where was she going to go? Where are any of the people now living in Trône metro station supposed to go? There is one supervised drug use clinic in Brussels, and the people with pretensions to run Brussels are trying to close it down. There is not enough emergency accommodation for the people who find themselves living out on the streets. For the undocumented men who have fled war and persecution abroad, Belgium’s emergency asylum is closed.

The reason that woman was there, and many others like her were at the very same moment in Kunst Wet and Simonis and Yser and Ribaoucourt and Merode and Rogier and Naamsepoort and Botanique and all the other metro stations in Brussels that have become misery sinks for the city’s wretched and abandoned is because they simply have nowhere else to go. The metro stations at least offer respite from the biting winter cold, and though they might admit it, the city authorities must be just a little relieved these underground shelters exist when the population drops below zero and the local news headlines are not dominated with stories of people freezing to death in shop doorways.

It could never happen here

If I am honest as to why I was taken aback to see someone shooting up in Trône, it was because that’s not the part of town you would traditionally associate with that kind of scene. To a somewhat jaundiced degree, witnessing drug use has become a regular part of the metro-going experience when riding it through the stations of Brussels’ north and west. I have been on metros coming from Simonis, occupied by men sparking up their crack pipes and filling the whole of the clockwork orange carriage with an unfamiliar, acrid smoke. I’ve waited on platforms at Yser and Rogier while in a far corner men have pulled on stubby little joints that leaked their resinous funk into the platform air. These are metro stations where you get used to seeing burnt scraps of tinfoil on the stairs and the escalators.

But Trône is supposed to be, along with Schuman and Kunst-Wet, the gateway to Brussels’ European quarter. but in the past 24 months there is a sense that the poverty that has always existed across and alongside the canal has broken through the enclosure that’s kept it contained and away from the Brussels bubble and the richer neighbourhoods of the city’s south. Maybe it’s good in a perverse way that the twin drugs- and housing crises do not restrict themselves to Brussels’ poorer neighbourhoods any longer, maybe it is time more residents were confronted with the poverty and despair of their fellow Brusselaars, and the destitution into which some of them have been forced by a cost of living they can no longer afford, asylum centres that will no longer take them, and a freewheeling drug-taking epidemic that appears irresolvable - however uncomfortable it may be to bear witness to men asleep in the corners of the ticket concourse as you’re making your way into work.

Discomfort was certainly what I felt on the ride home that evening. Discomfort and shame. Shame for being an accidental voyeur in what was an intensely private experience no matter how public the venue in which it occurred. Guilt too that we’ve let the city degenerate to this state. Leaving people to live from night to night, rolling out flattened cardboard boxes and sleeping mats, unfurling sleeping bags and cushions in the quiet corners of metro stations, surrounded by all the possessions you, making yourself small in the morning to stay out of the way of commuting office works using the station for its intended purpose. There is no dignity in this. There is no dignity in shooting up amid the evening rush hour. No dignity from tramping from one station to the next, riding the metro until it’s done for the day. No dignity in trapping yourself in the metro’s metal entrance gates or being trampled to death in one of the metro’s dark tunnels. There is no dignity in this self-described left-wing bulwark treating its most vulnerable citizens so poorly.

What are we even doing, Brussels?

There is no dignity in us commuters having to stand there, complicit in this human misery and squalor. We stand there on the platform or sit quietly in the metro carriage, indignant that people should be left to live like this, and that we should be forced to endure their presence. Indignant, and ashamed, by association and proximity, hiding behind our impotence and our anger that something should be done about it.

Something should be done about it. But the city appears incapable of enacting either a people-centred or security-centred response. It stands there next to us on the platform, looking on at the mess it has become and ringing its hands just like the rest of us. What can it do, it seems to say? The city is broke. The city is exhausted. And increasingly it feels as if, at some fundamental level, Brussels is broken.

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