Stuart

by Alexander Masters

  He asks this fifteen times. I tell him to shut up. He starts on his middle-class geeky cunt routine again. What Stuart means when he says it’s not the cold or the hardness of the streets that drives you crazy, it’s the other people. It’s the people like fucking Stuart, ranting and raving.

  Shut up, will you!

  ‘You fucking middle-class…’ etc.

  The policeman for a second time bids us both a pleasant night and drives off.

  Stuart rubs his hands, retreats to the north edge of our cage, and sits in his ugly twisted way, hunched over the kerb. He is an animal. A disagreeable oaf. I wish he would die. Right here. On the pavement.

  I wish he would die.

  That, at least, would be a publicity coup.

  Across the road, above St James’s Park tube–a deserted, Soviet-style station–the Epstein carving seems tired of us. Epstein did two of these reliefs, in 1929. Day, round the corner, on the east face, is a man raising a naked boy into the air. When it was unveiled, it caused outrage because someone noticed that the boy had a rather large penis. Epstein denied it. The managing director of London Underground offered his resignation. A furious company director demanded to pay for the entire sculpture to be removed. A mystery person fired bullets at it in the middle of the night. In the end, the headmaster of a boys’ school was summoned to decide the matter and Epstein was forced to chop an inch and a half off the offending projection.

  Night is the one that overlooks us: a stolid, resigned woman, arms in lap, between her thighs. ‘When will you lot go away?’ she seems to sigh.

  At around two, a large, once well-dressed man, seeping drink, bumps round the tube station corner, past the blue wheelie bins, and stops to glower at us.

  ‘I was with the Provos!’ he declares at last, sounding, because of his brogue, like a cross between a cold-blooded assassin and a lilting boat at sea. ‘I know what the fucking government’s like. Fucking down with the British! Good on you fellas whatever you’re fucking doing. Do you know what day it was on Friday?’

  Friday was St Patrick’s Day.

  ‘Fucking right! Down with the fucking empire!’

  ‘I hear you, mate,’ Stuart yells back, to my acute embarrassment. I consider myself a monarchist. ‘We’re with the homeless,’ bellows Stuart, ‘and it’s the same fucking queen and government with us!’

  Speak for yourself. Horrid republicans. I do not speak, however. I keep quiet. I am not a suicidal monarchist.

  Stuart sits down again with an air of increased camaraderie and the IRA man bumps off towards Petty France.

  Much later, after I have finally fallen asleep, Deaf Rob and Jackie come back and have an argument. This is spooky. I don’t even know what has woken me to witness it, because the argument is in mime. The street light spreads an elfin glow over the entire camp. Traffic on Victoria Street sounds like rushes of gentle water. Deaf Rob, lying down, rocks from side to side. Deaf Jackie picks silently among their belongings, stepping over the rucksacks and the ‘Louis Pierre, Paris’ suit-holder as if each was in danger of being woken.

  ‘Don goohh, donnn goohh,’ moans Deaf Rob.

  In the morning I will learn that he has stolen her hearing aid to stop Deaf Jackie leaving him. She is searching for it.

  She makes a sound, but it is so quiet that I hardly know if she’s spoken.

  ‘Shaaarrr up!’ bellows Deaf Rob. ‘Can you see! They slee-ph, slee-ph, slee-ph!’

  We’ve arranged things, at Stuart’s recommendation, so that there are always two sensible people on site: either Stuart and me, or me and Linda, or Andria and Stuart, or Linda and Andria. While I was petitioning in Camden, Stuart and Linda kept watch. When Fat Frank was driving Linda round the bend, Andria and I held the fort. All Friday and all weekend, day and night, it has been like that, because it means we are never weak or caught off guard. It is because of this policy that we’ve avoided too much police interference, met Kevin Flemen, legal expert for the drugs organisation Release, been able to conduct newspaper interviews and arrange shots for photographers at any moment. When a radio programme happened upon us, just by chance, as they were cruising the backstreets looking for interesting snippets, a man called Brent, our kindly website designer, was there to say something sensible to News Direct.

  News Direct turns out to be our undoing.

  Monday morning. Never has a Monday looked so like a Friday–never a sun so glossy with relief and Epstein freshness!

  We discover that Deaf Jackie’s transistor radio has run flat. Who needs distraction and stupid music on a morning of loveliness?

  We can’t listen to the News Direct report.

  Someone needs to fetch batteries.

  Deaf Rob refuses to leave his sleeping bag. He’s in Deaf Jackie’s arms. Stuart’s disappeared. Linda’s left to get back to Cambridge. Fat Frank has rolled away. The only other member of our group is a newcomer called Scotty, an alcoholic who is already chuckling over his second can of Tennant’s Extra.

  Brent and I, bursting with goodwill, wander off to buy the goods. We will get trays of coffee and buns for everyone into the bargain. Yes, a surprise six-pack for Scotty also. On the house!

  It is while we’re gone that the Home Secretary Jack Straw shows up.

  According to the garbled report I hear, he’s been very pleasant. His car–‘a Jag, first class–it’s the bollocks’–drew up alongside the pavement and two big men got out with him. Scotty recognised them immediately as bodyguards.

  ‘I’ve seen you before,’ says Scotty, spraying up his beer can. ‘I was on the bench having a wee drinkie when you and them walked by, and me mate said, “Who’s that?” and I said, “That’s Mr Straw with his security men.” ’

  ‘You’re on the ball, eh?’ the Home Secretary replies.

  Scotty’s face goes purple with pride at the intimacy of this exchange.

  To give him credit, Deaf Rob at least got to the point. I could imagine the guards tensing as he adopted his gunfighter stance and fired off his Free Ruth and John speech. But Mr Straw just dodged the subject with his favourite ‘The Home Office is not concerned in this case. It is a matter entirely for the judiciary.’ Deaf Rob still doesn’t know the answer to that one, and Deaf Jackie couldn’t hear what the Home Secretary was saying anyway.

  By the time Brent and I returned, the street was empty again.

  Three weeks of preparation and £600 spent on publicity and planning, and who does the Home Secretary meet as representatives of the campaign? A middle-aged drunk, and two deaf homeless people stealing each other’s hearing aids.

  Stuart and I laugh about it on the train all the way back to Cambridge.

  His primordial mood, briefly glimpsed, has gone.

  We see a pair of hares boxing by a stream, and Stuart, exultant, calls out, ‘OK, yaa! Right on, chaps!’ and adopts a sniffy, Edwardian pose, holding his fists fingers down. He is going back to his flat to sleep and tomorrow on to Norwich. ‘The Little ’Un–it’s his birthday.’

  ‘The little what?’

  ‘Little ’Un.’

  ‘What’s an “un”?’

  ‘Me son, stupid.’

  ‘You’ve got a son?’ In four months he has never told me.

  ‘Thirteen years of age.’

  We scoop through the last stretch of country, past the Gog-Magog Hills and the Addenbrooke’s Hospital cremation towers, while I take in this revelation. I don’t know what to say. I fall back on platitudes.

  ‘Have you got a present for him?’

  Stuart beams. ‘A golf club. He loves his golf. Always out on the golf course is the Little ’Un.’

  11

  ‘And this is the order of me prisons: Send, Baintnow House, Send, back to Send again, Eriestoke, Norwich, five lots of remand in Norwich, then I was sentenced for five years, so I started off in Norwich, transferred to Aylesbury, transferred to Glen Parva, back to Aylesbury, Littlehey, Grendon Underwood, Grendon Underwood to Littlehey, was released. Next sentence: Bedford, Littlehey
, Whitemoor, Bullingdon, Long Lartin, Grendon, Long Lartin, Norwich, Long Lartin, Winchester, Long Lartin, Whitemoor, Blundeston, Wayland…I don’t think I’ve missed any out. Oh yes I have, I been to Leicester three times as well.’

  Rageous:

  Aged 25–29

  To be honest, Stuart’s years in prison after the post office robbery infuriate me. I don’t know what to do with them. Each time I rewrite them something is missing. He disappears from view metaphorically and literally when he steps down from the dock in Peterborough Crown Court after sentencing. The reason he vanishes, however, is not because he stops being noticeable, but because he ceases to be (to me) human. Instead of Stuart Unexpected–the soft-spoken, worried, edgy lover of archaeology programmes, the half-boast, half-benevolence–in prison, as he presents it, there is only Stuart Fury, the set of bloody incidents. Events replace character. For the next half-decade he responded to every significant difficulty with the intensity of a bomb going off, ‘going right off on one’, being ‘not too clever’, and it is a form of simplification that quickly becomes, well, boring. It takes away subtleties. In prison Stuart turned himself (trained himself, he would argue; perfected his technique) into the unpredictable wrecking machine that later made him distinctive on the streets. Personality is gone.

  Stuart in prison was a category-A (where he soon ended up) pest. Category-A prisons are top-security institutions, for offenders whose escape would be highly dangerous to the public, the police, or the security of the nation. When Stuart wasn’t brooding in solitary, he was on the wing flashing through his nastier personas as if showing off his wardrobe: riots, dirty protests, smashing up the prison toilets, threatening to set fire to other prisoners–those are just the outbursts he can remember. Incidents that the rest of us would consider defining moments of horribleness are so frequent to Stuart that they soon become as unremarkable as last week’s laundry. They sit sullenly between a bore and a swagger.

  At HMP Littlehey, he could have worked in the kitchen (but that tends to be a job for sex offenders, who are considered cleaner and more reliable than ordinary convicts). Or he could have gone to the underpants factory (although the authorities admitted that producing 200,000 underpants a year was unlikely to give prisoners useful skills for the outside community). Instead, he ended up in the shoe shop and attacked the factory officer with a chair.

  ‘I’m not exaggerating when I say between ten and fifteen, maybe twenty screws took me down the block. None of them got the helmets on, which I was quite surprised about. They’ve bent me up, put me in the strip cell, stripped me clothes off me, left me stark bollock naked, so I’ve ripped the lino up off the floor, shat on the floor, pissed on the floor. You know, just disobedience…’

  ‘Just disobedience.’ Childish, comforting, petulant, ‘Fuck You’ disobedience.

  Ruth once told me when I went to visit her at HMP Highpoint that it is surprising how much of what you imagine to be your innate sense of self actually comes from things that aren’t one’s self at all: people’s reactions to the blouse you wear, the respectfulness of your family, the attentiveness of friends, their approval of the pictures in your living room, the neatness of your lawn, the way people whisper your name. It is these exhibitions of yourself, as reflected in the people whom you meet, which give you comfort and your identity. Take them away, be put in a tiny room and called by a number, and you begin to vanish. It is almost the subject of a million magazine headlines–except that the magazines read ‘What your clothes say about you’; in prison, you realise they should read ‘What is left of you once your clothes have had their say?’

  In From the Inside, the book she subsequently wrote about her experience in prison, Ruth is struck by the speed of this sense of self being stripped away:

  Following the screw back from the canteen shop to the cell, I realized I had developed a prison persona: hands in pockets, a slow uncaring walk, shoulders hunched, scowling and grumpy; a woman of few words but always a curse at the ready. It had happened in just two or three days. There I was, Wyner, prison number EH 6524: scared but not going to show it; ready for anything but behaving as if I didn’t give a shit. My defences were up, and I knew I needed them, but also I feared that the real ‘me’ had been destroyed. Would I ever get her back again?*

  ‘Just disobedience’: to Stuart it’s hardly worth mentioning. Of course you have to be disobedient. In prison, being a pain in the neck is one of the few ways to make the officers react to you as an individual. Disobedience is one of the few tricks you have left to hang on to the idea that you continue to exist distinctively and are still reliably connected to the person who bore your name on the outside. What comes from within turns out, in prison, to be not nearly as great as people hope.

  ‘Next morning,’ continues Stuart, ‘I’m up on report, damage to the workshop, damage to this and that, in front of the governor. He’s lost me loads of days again, more fines. Told me it was only because the officer didn’t want an outside court that I wasn’t being taken to an outside court. I said to the gov’nor, “You mean you ain’t taking me to outside court, because you fucking put it on me. I told you what would happen if you fucking stuck me in the shoe shop and you turned round and told me I wouldn’t do it. In other words you encouraged me to do it, because you should know better, being a gov’nor.” You know, give him loads of verbal, sat there cussing him.’

  Where does this man get his energy from? Is it as exhausting for him as (already now) it is becoming for the reader?

  ‘The governor says, “You think you’re a smart-arse, you.” He says, “We’ll see who’s laughing. You’re going to Whitemoor.” ’

  Stuart leans forward, goggle-eyed. Don’t I understand the horror of what he’s just said? Whitemoor.

  Stuart, I’m surprised they didn’t take you into the backyard and shoot you.

  Whitemoor. Stuart shakes his head in memory of the injustice of it.

  ‘On me first night I melted a toilet brush up into a big point and melted two razors in it and I slept with the cunt under me pillow. You’ve got everything at Whitemoor. You’ve got terrorists, you’ve got psychopaths, professional gangsters what are called “faces”. Then you’ve got their henchmen, your heavies, which are people that are respected by gangsters, the muscle for these people to work behind. There are wannabe gangsters, psychopaths, plastic gangsters, what are people who think they’re gangsters, but like they’re just smackheads, and when they’re in jail, they ain’t got a pot to piss in. They think they’re Charlie Big Potatoes and they do loads of crime but what they got to show for it? At least your henchmen, heavies, and gangsters–you never see them short of a few bob in jail. They’re not running around asking people for dog ends like plastic gangsters. Proper gangsters would say to us, “Him, him and him over there, you wouldn’t believe he used to have a half-a-million-pound house, and we used to do a lot of business with him.” Because he got on the rock cocaine and sunk a thousand pound a night off on rock. It’s really the older drug people: they’re doing sixteen years for a stupid armed robbery, being really blunted, where before they were good crooks. But because of the party lifestyle, the Big I Am, they ended up losing everything. Then you got your people who are security threats, or have good sources and could gain escape, your murderers, your manslaughters, your crazies. People who are just unstable, unpredictable. Then, on separate wings in Whitemoor, the dirty nonces and the sex offenders and a fucking load of scum cunts…’

  ‘Which lot do you come in?’

  ‘I suppose I come in the crazies, really.’

  Two days after Stuart arrived there was a riot.

  The Times, 22 December 1993

  Liquor trouble at jail

  Prisoners brewing liquor for Christmas caused damage estimated at over £30,000 in five hours of vandalism at the high security Whitemoor prison at March, Cambridgeshire. More than 160 prisoners were involved in starting small fires; toilet fittings were smashed and doors ripped off their hinges. Three prisoners
and three prison officers were hurt. Andrew Barclay, the governor, said: ‘The catalyst, I think, was a search I carried out yesterday afternoon in C and D wings. They may have been drinking the hooch while the search was going on rather than pouring it away.’

  ‘It just took off,’ remembers Stuart with a tremble. ‘Anything they thought would fit through the bars and reach the screws. Then fires started getting in. Bedding. Just going right off, smashing up their belongings.’ The violence ‘kept coming in waves’. The furniture and table-tennis tables flared up, the flames catching hold of the piles of rubbish that had been flung into the netting between the balconies, then the pool table was added, and fresh bedding, and the fired crackled two storeys high. ‘If you don’t fucking join in we’ll all get done!’ the leaders threatened. ‘We want to get the fucking wing closed down.’

  ‘I was petrified,’ Stuart declares to my surprise. ‘I didn’t want to get involved. You know, you’ve got all these dangerous people, so embittered with rage and hatred–they were fucking scary. I legged it up the cells to the third floor what was the only place where the windows would open outwards.’

  There he stood on someone’s bed with his nose pushed between the bars, the smoke pouring out around his head ‘and the fire engines down below and their stupid fucking flashing pea-sized lights like bits of glitter’.

  Stuart made a few friends. Colin Richards lived on the floor above. He’d killed a policeman (accidentally, of course) during a robbery in Walton on the Naze and was paralysed from the chest down by the storm of bullets that the police fired in return. The wardens hated him. They never gave him the nappies he needed or the right amount of sterilised equipment, but he was a hero with the inmates, who, at mealtimes, gathered round to lift up his wheelchair and carry him down the steps to the dining hall, like an emperor.

  Jeremy Bamber, who murdered his adoptive father, mother, sister, and her two children, had to walk round with National Geographics strapped to his waist because so many people had tried to stab him.