Stuart

by Alexander Masters

  The latest attempt occurred several weeks ago, using a weekend’s worth of heroin. It wasn’t a ten-minute decision. Not even thirty seconds. Just a snap of the fingers. ‘Here’s the spoonful of molten smack and citric. Let’s have a good time,’ he thinks to himself. ‘No, let’s kill myself with an overdose instead.’ Thump. In it goes.

  He doesn’t remember the reason–there was no specific reason. Just an unbearable sense of hatred and waste. But because Stuart didn’t know what he was about to do, he didn’t use a syringe with a large enough capacity to kill him on the first injection, so he had to fill up again. By the time that was done, the heroin he’d already taken had long ago made him unsteady and he couldn’t find the original vein. All the others in his arms and legs had also disappeared. He ripped off his shoes and socks and stabbed between the tendons on his feet to find another entry point, wasted half the vial, realised he had only a few seconds of consciousness left, twisted round and emptied everything that remained into his right buttock. He was out cold for twenty-four hours.

  Other attempts appear as scars, weals, parentheses in conversation, absent days in his diary. But, at the same time, according to Stuart’s weird sense of etiquette on such subjects, only one son in a family is allowed to kill himself, else it puts too much strain on the parents, and his brother, Gavvy, like Jacob in the Old Testament, has stolen Stuart’s birthright. That’s why, when I first met him begging outside Sidney Sussex College, he was planning to get himself punched and kicked into non-existence by taunting drunks from the pub.

  ‘Aah, suicide–it’s a difficult subject. Do you mind if we give it a rest now?’

  All this interpretation gives me a slight thrill. Beneath the mould in the bathroom of his flat, the melamine sideboards, the fussing with welfare payments, the tedious addiction to drugs and alcohol, Stuart is a biblical character. His symbolic sense of justice, the expressions of hatred, his carelessness with life and longing for calm–cut out the ‘fucks’, add a few ‘thous,’ and he belongs in the Sinai Desert.

  16

  Despite his poor handwriting, Stuart is generally tidy in his diary, which allows for further exegesis. June begins well. He has arranged a home visit from his social worker, plans to sign up for disability living allowance, books in with his doctor for a drug detox programme. Then, Friday the 9th, the entry above: ‘Phone KAyT 1 yer To Day She nerly DieD on me.’

  The weekend is empty. Monday’s a mess. Stuart’s attention has clearly gone. The coloured highlighting vanishes. He doodles:

  He dozes off:

  (Which translates as: ‘8 p.m., go to CB2 café for a campaign meeting. Get there early.’ He did neither.)

  Temporarily he revives:

  Then he collapses altogether:

  The recollection of this business with Kayt has cast a strange, fading rhythm over Stuart’s days. He is like a man falling asleep on the bus. The next month, triumphant for so many of the campaigning people around him, is blank.

  In August, he reawakens: the highlighters are back–yellow for health, green for social, orange for duty.

  And:

  ‘K-A-Y-T, she spelt it,’ explains Stuart, weighing up my room with a single glance to confirm that I have not got up to any decorating silliness while he’s been away. ‘I told you about that already, remember?’ He pushes back the brown cover on my armchair and heavily flops down. ‘She was the one I cut me throat over, what got me me flat. I first met her in Hospital Town after I put meself on the streets the second time, because she’d had to have her stomach pumped.’

  Of course she did, Stuart. You wouldn’t want to meet a nice, stable, ordinary girl, would you, now?

  ‘This wouldn’t have been around May, by any chance?’

  ‘Yes. How’d you guess?’

  May is the anniversary of Stuart’s brother’s suicide, and it has set up a sort of periodicity in his life. His sense of disturbance is at peak amplitude; it is just the time when he is inclined to be pounded on the head by furious memories, to ‘kick off’, ‘be not too clever’, and find himself in hospital meeting unsuitable women. I have noticed this, or been told about it, with a number of chaotic people. The ones who end up on the streets following a major, well-defined disaster–their wife left them, their mother died, their business collapsed, their brother took an overdose (it is always a death of some sort)–acquire a new pattern in their lives, a sort of fundamental harmonic. As the anniversary of the event comes close they get agitated, swing off course, ingest rock-star quantities of narcotics, slurp enough beer to fill a football stadium, and soon all sorts of things are going wrong–smashings, bashings, evictions, convictions, vibrating from one mood to the other, maximally displaced. Then, after a couple of weeks, the annual peak passes into middle distance and once more there are moments of calm. The lesser harmonics reappear: the weekly disruptions around pay day at the dole office, the more or less bimonthly fussing of housing benefit, occasional affairs, breakdowns of relationships. The odd arrest.

  ‘So, like I was saying, I’d met this Kayt, and fallen bang in love with her. But, like, three times on that night I’d have to get her to promise me before I let her go that she wasn’t going to kill herself. At the time I was trying to get it together so much myself, I was just doing the meth, not using the smack or nothing, and I had just got me flat.’

  ‘Your current flat?’

  ‘No–how could it be me current flat? I haven’t cut me throat yet, have I?’

  ‘Silly me. OK. Go on.’

  ‘It’s no use you asking questions before I’ve got to where the answers is kept. This were just after I come off the streets. I decided I couldn’t handle it no more, I’ve gone to the council, explained to them I was disabled and apparently, because I had muscular dystrophy, it was detrimental to my health to be homeless for four months.’

  The council, obliged to house him, found Stuart a bedsit just around the corner from the hospital.

  ‘So, me and Kayt never had a sexual thing, only the odd kiss and cuddle, and we had a few little disagreements, where I wouldn’t see her because it was doing me head in, I was so in love with her. Then we had a little argument at Strawberry Fair [an outdoor music festival in Cambridge that Stuart ranks high in the list of the glories of the year], and I said I’d never speak to her again and that, then I went and wrote her a letter and said I was sorry. This perticliar night someone’s turned up and she’s gone off with him. I was in me flat and, at the time, I believed that I’d brought the Devil into that flat because I’d painted the walls burgundy, and I had black-painted wood. Black for the blackness, and red for the blood, the Devil’s colours. I believed it so much at the time, I was having conversations with meself about it. So I got pissed off with just being in the black and red there, gone back down the pub and sat drinking and talking to a friend of hers, saying how I was bang in love with her, and she’s come in and says, “Come on,” she says, “Come on,” so we went back to mine. And I’d bought a bottle of vodka before I went to the pub, and I drunk a quarter of it, so there was three-quarters a bottle of vodka.’

  Back at his flat, Stuart and Kayt drank the rest of the vodka, took methadone and sleeping pills, ‘which I knew she was scripted for. I had just me boxer shorts on, you know, and we lay on the bed.’

  The next morning Kayt didn’t wake up.

  ‘I’d set the alarm, but when I woke up all the lights were flashing on me clock, so we’d had a power cut. I didn’t think much of it. I looked at Kayt, asleep there, and I just thought, ah well, she’s fucked from a heavy night, and I sort of dozed off cuddling her again. I don’t know how long later, because like I said the clock was all in bits, I woke up and I’ve shook her and I couldn’t wake her. I’ve slapped her round the face, and couldn’t wake her. I’ve picked her up and she’s felt like you’d expect a dead person to in your arms. I’ve slapped her round the face again, I’ve tried finding a pulse, I’ve put me cheek to her mouth and when I pulled her eyelids back, her eyes were rolling i
n the back of her head. So I just laid there cuddling up to her. I don’t know how long, an hour, two hours, I don’t know how long. Then she just started making a really funny noise, like hhhhuuuunnn, hhhuuuunnn.’ The sound Stuart makes causes him to bare his teeth and strain his neck.

  The last sight Stuart had of Kayt was when the emergency services turned up in the early afternoon. There was only one ambulance man, ‘but she must have been half conscious, because whenever he tried to open her mouth, she kept trying to bite his fingers, because she was having trouble breathing’.

  At the hospital, her parents refused to allow Stuart in the room to see their daughter. They said the sound of his voice made them want to be sick. ‘I didn’t know what state she was in, but everybody’s telling me what happened, they weren’t asking me, they was telling me, and what they were telling me weren’t fucking right at all.

  ‘I should have phoned the ambulance when she started making that funny noise, I know that now. But I didn’t, I phoned me mother, told me mother what had happened, but my money run out in the phone.’

  Stuart started receiving anonymous phone calls: a man muffled and distorted–sharpening knives, biffing baseball bats–accused him of deliberately drugging her ‘so that I could have me wicked way with her. And all cos her clothes were ruffled. Parents never believe their child could do something wrong, do they? Their children couldn’t have taken drugs because they fucking begged for them or slept with a dealer to make him give her some. There’s got to be some nasty other person to blame.’

  Two weeks after the anonymous threats began, Stuart marched into the pub where he knew Kayt’s father and brothers drank every night, smashed the end off an empty pint glass in front of all the customers and shouted, ‘You want to fucking get me? Is that what you want? I’ll do the fucking job for you!’ Then he rammed what was left of the pint glass into his neck.

  That’s how he got his current flat. The council had to move him away from his old flat near the hospital ‘to a place what was stable and safe and over the fucking other side of town’.

  Stuart frowns and takes on an expression of concentration. ‘I tell a lie. I did see Kayt one other time. It was last week. It was on the street.’

  ‘Did you speak to her?’

  ‘Yeah, only she reckons she wasn’t Kayt. She reckons she was from Devon. The funny thing is that her name was Kayt, and if she wasn’t Kayt then she was her fucking twin sister–same teeth, same way on her shoulders when she was walking.’

  ‘Well, did she recognise you or didn’t she?’

  ‘She come up to speak to me, only she reckoned she’d never seen me before.’

  There are times when the metaphysics of the street is beyond understanding.

  17

  ‘You don’t go quietly. I never did in them days. Didn’t agree with going quietly. Gobbing off and spitting. As you do, as you do.’

  Funny Days: Aged 15–21

  The first time Stuart became homeless he was 15 and high on glue, not heroin.

  Aged fifteen, full of zing. The streets were not exactly cosy, but they were not friendless either–a sort of home from home–they suited his temperament. He wanted to live. His brain wasn’t fogbound by thoughts of death.

  ‘Where did you spend the first night?’

  ‘There wasn’t a first night.’

  ‘But there must have been a night when you stopped being at home and started sleeping rough.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying, Alexander, no. I’d been running away since I was eleven.’

  Half-sister Karen’s first memory of Stuart ‘was I was in bed and they were all arguing downstairs. The next thing I remember is Stuart running into my bedroom, up on to the bed, and he had this old silver radio with a handle on it, and he was going out towards the window, to jump out the window, and my mum come behind him and grabbed him and they started scuffling in my bedroom.’

  Weekends, schooldays, during the holidays, it didn’t make any difference to Stuart. He’d balance on his window ledge and leap out into the garden. His legs might buckle into the flower bed and the pain of landing split his groin, but he recovered quickly. Contrary to what the doctors had said, Spaghetti Legs was getting stronger. ‘Fuck them if I didn’t. Ever since I can remember, I thought of it like a war, me against the muscular dystrophy. I’d push meself and push meself. I’d show them I’d win! I wasn’t going in no fucking wheelchair! Fuck them!’

  He scrabbled up from the dirt, blundered as fast as his new bruises would allow down the incline to the estate road, past the air conditioner at the back of the Queen’s Arms, the VG Stores, with their blue stickers advertising cheap fruit, and the aged quietude of Midston churchyard.

  I have a great sense of Stuart and silence on these nights. The village, wrapped in sleep; owls glide between the yew trees, badgers poddle across the graves. Then Stuart, cleaving the peacefulness. All people, gone. No educational experts, medical specialists, bullies, policemen. His mother’s disapproval, hot on his heels, runs out of breath after half a mile. It is Stuart and the earth, just those two.

  He usually didn’t reach the cars passing through the village in time. Their yellow lights rose and dipped among the hills, then somehow always swirled past in a bellow of noise just before he reached the crossroads. He’d push himself furiously along the country lane towards the night workers on the A10 clanging by in their vans: a crop-haired, foul-tongued, crippled boy.

  Half an hour later, he’d be grabbing his way into a passenger seat.

  ‘Where you going, mate?’

  ‘Anywhere. You take me–I’ll go.’

  Or:

  ‘Hop in–going as far as Royston–that any good to you?’

  ‘I’ll go far as China, mate. Got any baccy?’

  Back in Midston, Stuart’s older brother, Gavvy, who shared Stuart’s room, slept on. His mother Judith: deep in dreams. Little sister Karen and the youngest, Marcus, dozed in the toddlers’ quarters. Paul, Stuart’s stepfather, was out on nightshift: he was an axle and cross-beam welder and laboured all night in a noisy car factory. He would whisper back in the morning.

  The phone call burst Judith’s sleep. Before she knew where she was she was bolt upright, snapping on lights, address of the police station that had just found Stuart making whoopee on the streets snatched on to paper. Gavvy was put in charge of tiny ones, especially difficult daughter (another village nasty growing up there–thank God Gavvy knew how to control her, there was never a peep of trouble when he was in charge). Then Judith hurried out into the night to begin disturbing the neighbours with a car ignition that rasped and rasped and rasped and refused to start.

  Not that it always was a police station that had got hold of Stuart. Sometimes the call came from a stranger whom Stuart had befriended or from Judith’s mother’s on the other side of Cambridge. Often, Judith would discover he had gone missing before she’d got to bed herself. Paul would rush back from work whenever he could and he and Judith would spend two hours or more searching the lanes for Stuart, but ‘it didn’t matter how much you looked, you wouldn’t find him’.

  Judith sighs and shakes her head. ‘I was always totally amazed at people, because Stuart was a real little scrawny old kid. Getting lifts from all over the show. People who didn’t want to know what a child was doing out and about at that time were actually giving him lifts in the middle of the night.’

  Today, Judith is heavily lined, with a ready bronchitic laugh and cigarette permanently attached to her right hand. ‘Before he started running away he used to get frustrated with things but that was the muscular dystrophy. The boys all playing football: every time he swung his leg to kick he went over. And if the boys all ran off up the road Stuart couldn’t keep up with them, he’d be angry with himself. But he was such a caring boy.’

  She often marvelled to the police officers as she was standing in the lobby waiting for her son to be returned to her: ‘It was when he was eleven that it happened. Always such a caring boy, then all
of a sudden, this sweet little boy who’d always been so caring become a little horror! Unbelievable. The change, to this little horror. The change in him was unbelievable!’

  Stuart’s favourite dosshole when he managed to avoid the police was a squat: a row of battered houses by the railway tracks. ‘The punks–they told me where it was, though I was a skinhead at the time, myself.’ It was 1984. The year the Libyans shot WPC Yvonne Fletcher. There were still Victorians in old people’s homes.

  In Stuart’s squat, the top ceiling was held in place with scaffolding. There were no boards or banisters on the lower floors; the doors and door frames were wrenched out ‘because when some of us needed to keep the fires going, we used to nick the coal off the railway line, if we could be bothered, or just burn whatever wood we could get in the squat. It stunk of piss and shit cos all the toilets and bathroom were blocked.’ Then, one day, ‘the Old Bill come and hammered hardboard over the entrances’. Someone tried to start the squats up again, ‘ripped all the windows up and whacked all the bricks out the walls, but them squats were finished’.

  Another time, ‘I was in a squat, which was a college house, and the students had left all their stuff in it because it was summer. You could guarantee that every couple of days the police would come and pay a visit at six o’clock in the morning looking for people on warrants or looking for runaways. So in the middle storey if you didn’t know where you were going you fell right through the stairs. We’d made big booby traps on the stairs, big holes hidden in the steps. Even in the one by the railway, we left one door that hadn’t been burnt at the top of the stairs, so at night when everyone was in, if people had been out robbing and there was nicked gear, then you just put a big lump of wood against the wall and on the door and the Old Bill couldn’t push the door open. It would take some doing to get that door off.’