Toqueer — a man in grave need

I was sat in Birmingham Central Library on a February morning in 2016 when a man approached me. He was clutching a few pieces of crumpled up paper in one hand, a roughly sharpened pencil in the other.

“Excuse me bro, can you please help me? I need to send an email, it’s a really important email. I can’t use the computers here because they said I’ve got fines which I didn’t know about and I can’t pay them.”

I looked away from my screen towards this man and saw that he was small and skinny. His clothes were dirty and he had dandruff all about his shoulders. His face was sallow, full of spots. He looked tired. He sounded desperate.

“What is it that you need to send?”

“Just an email to my friend, it’s really important. I just need to use Gmail. I can’t use the ones here and it’s distressing me.”

I hesitated for a second. The way he said “it’s distressing me” sounded fake, rehearsed even. In the background my instincts and experience assessed the situation. I said OK.

“Oh thank you bro, thanks.”

He sat down next to me and began writing rapidly with his pencil on one of his battered pieces of paper. I pressed CTRL+SHIFT+N and a new incognito window opened up. I navigated to Gmail.

“What’s your email address?”

“T-O… hang on.”

He continued writing. I wondered what this man needed to send so desperately. It could only be something to do with money, considering his appearance and inability to pay his library fines. Thoughts of phishing emails from Africa and Asia crossed through my mind and I hoped he hadn’t been taken in by one. If this was the case, would I say something or let things chart their own course? He stopped writing, stood up, and leaned over my shoulder.

“So what’s your email address?”

He told me and I typed it in. I offered him the keyboard so he could type his password. It didn’t work.

“Maybe it’s gmail.co.uk. I can’t remember.”

He tried another password but that didn’t work either. We tried @gmail.co.uk but Google said that domain name didn’t exist.

“This is what happens when you’re distressed. You can’t remember things.”

We reverted back to @gmail.com and he tried another password. This time it worked. He shifted my laptop so it was easier for him to type, navigated to his sent items, opened an email thread, and began to compose a reply.

For the whole encounter he had been sniffing his nose at regular intervals. Now, waiting while he leaned over me and typed with his index finger, the sound was magnified; the stroke of the keys punctuated by his sniffling. I was suddenly aware of his smell too — not entirely unpleasant, but odd.

Having ample time to consider these things while I waited, it occurred to me that this stranger had invaded my physical and digital personal space. Very rarely do I allow people to handle my laptop, let alone invite complete strangers to compose entire emails on it. There was clearly something about his desperation, sad appearance, and my own human nature that had caused me to help this man.

I read his email while he typed. He was asking someone he knew for £38 so that he could pay his bank charges, which had accrued because he couldn’t pay his mortgage. It seemed he had no money until March, when his sister would arrive back from holiday with his father. I felt a detached sense of empathy. But I wasn’t hopeful for him.

In a previous email he had asked this same person to help him find a job. He’d received a reply asking about him and his family, sidestepping the request (demand?). Would I agree to help someone find a job, or indeed give them £38, if I received an email from them? Probably not. I imagined the recipient of this email being a long-lost school friend or long-vacated neighbourhood acquaintance. Perhaps the man writing an email on my laptop had some deeper problems?

The language he used in the email was that of desperation, emotion, and urgency. He even supplied his bank account details so that the recipient could pay the money in straight away, without having to waste time replying.

Before sending it, he gave the email a once over. And then he just walked away. Not a word. Not a ‘thanks’ or ‘bye’. Nothing. He even left himself signed in to Gmail. I was left feeling quite strange about it all. For five minutes of my life this man had imposed his troubles upon me, and I’d accepted them. Then he was gone. He left his pencil behind.