Part Two - Staying Steady

Gez Mullan does the street work because it suits the shape of him. No building. No sessions. No formal relationship that has to be opened, reviewed and closed. Just walking a route through three known spots on the Brockton estate in the evening, carrying a bag of naloxone kits, clean equipment, condoms, some food, and his own phone number written on cards, and being - over and over, for as long as it takes - a person who comes back.

He started using heroin at nineteen, in a flat above a chip shop, among a set of people making a series of incremental choices that didn’t feel like choices because they were happening inside a context of nothing much: no work, no particular future, a high tolerance for discomfort built across a childhood he doesn’t describe in detail. He used, on and off but mostly on, until he was thirty-four. Two hospitalisations. Four spells in treatment. One conviction. And, threaded through all of it, a handful of people who never wrote him off: his mother, his old schoolfriend Phil, and Bev Nash, who first met him across an A&E bay and followed up afterwards, which she says she does for some people and cannot explain why for some and not others.

Sobriety took on the fourth attempt, on a Tuesday in October. He counted months, then years, and then stopped counting at seven, which he says is its own kind of milestone. He came to the group through Leanne - they’d ended up paired for CPR practice on a first aid course, neither there for any community reason. She told him what the group was trying to build. He said: That’s the kind of thing I should have had. She said: Yes. Come and help build it.

He does not have a theory about what makes a person ready to stop using. He thinks readiness is the wrong frame entirely. The right question, he says, is whether there is enough that keeps being there for you, waiting, for the moment you can finally use it. He is trying to be that thing. Most nights, that is all the work is: being the thing that is still there.

The street harm reduction is led by Gez and Yasmin, and it is conducted with a deliberate, almost stubborn refusal to log anything. No names recorded, no referrals made, no identification asked for or given. This is not sloppiness; it is the entire point. The people they reach are people for whom being entered onto a system is itself a risk, or a barrier, or simply a reason not to engage. A kit handed over with no questions is a kit that gets taken. Over eighteen months they have distributed more than eighty naloxone kits this way - through the outreach, but also through Phil’s pub, a barber’s, and a couple of other local businesses that agreed to keep some behind the counter. Yasmin trains members and willing locals in how to use them: how to recognise an overdose, how to prepare and administer the drug, when and how to call 999, and the plain fact, which she repeats until it lands, that you will not be prosecuted for trying to save a life.

All of this sits in a legal grey zone, and the group knows it. They have made a collective decision to carry on, because the alternative - fewer kits in the hands of the people most likely to be in the room when someone stops breathing - is not a decision they are willing to make.

Then Lee died.

Lee Pemberton was twenty-three. Gez had known him two years and had him saved in his phone, with the carelessness of long familiarity, as “Lee B Estate” - there were two Lees, and he’d never updated it. He had given Lee naloxone twice and once shown him how to use it on himself. Lee had a kit somewhere. Whether it was in the flat the night he died, nobody knows, because nobody found it and nobody asked that kind of question in the official version of events.

Gez found out the way you usually find out: from somebody who’d heard from somebody. A Monday morning, sitting in his car outside a café. He stayed in the car for forty minutes and called no one. That afternoon he rang Danny, and they met in Phil’s back room - Phil knew enough to put them somewhere quiet and ask nothing - and they didn’t talk much. Danny had known Lee less well, but had once spent an evening sitting on a wall with him, trying to talk him through something that never quite resolved. What the something was remained unclear. It usually does.

The group heard over two days. Leanne texted most of them; Yasmin told Bev in person, judging she’d need room to react. What surprised Leanne, she said afterwards, was how many people cried who she hadn’t expected to - people who’d met Lee only once or twice. The grief was real, but it carried something else inside it: a backlog of unmourned losses that had been waiting for somewhere to land.

A week later they held a gathering in the back room. Nobody called it a memorial. People talked. Phil put food out. Gez didn’t speak until near the end, and what he said was that he’d been turning over what he could have done differently, and the honest answer was probably not much, and that this was the hardest thing he had ever had to sit with. The room held it. Afterwards they planted a rosemary bush in a pot outside the pub. Lee never drank there, but it seemed like the right place, and it is still there.

What a group does after a death like this is not obvious, and the obvious instinct is the wrong one. The pull is to do more - intensify the outreach, push further, reach harder, as if effort could be retroactively applied. Yasmin argued against it, and her argument is the quiet centre of how this group works. Doing more in the immediate aftermath of a death, she said, is usually about managing your own grief rather than helping anyone. The most useful thing they could do was stay steady: stay present, keep showing up, and not make promises they couldn’t sustain once the rawness faded. The group accepted this unhappily, because it was true.

That is the discipline the work demands, and it is harder than it sounds. Almost everything in the culture around crisis rewards the dramatic gesture - the surge, the campaign, the visible response. Steadiness is invisible by design. It does not photograph. It produces no surge of activity to point to. It is just the same person, walking the same route, the following week, and the week after that, when the funeral is over and everyone else has moved on and the conditions that killed Lee are exactly as they were. Gez thinks about him often. He keeps walking the route. That continuation - unremarkable, repetitive, unrewarded - is the work. The kits and the cards are only how it shows up on a given night.