Stuart

by Alexander Masters

  ‘How long did you stay in the booby-trapped place?’

  ‘You know, to be honest, that sort of question don’t mean nothing to a person like me. That’s what you’re going to find difficult to understand. You grew up with order so you’re going to want order to explain things. Where, me, anything ordered was wrong. It weren’t a part of my days. My life is so complicated it’s hard for me to actually say what happened in them days let alone in what order.’

  ‘But some sense of time–you must have had that?’

  ‘Nah. Some minutes was long, other minutes was short. I know that. Sometimes I was in the park, sometimes I wasn’t. Sometimes I was in a cell, sometimes I wasn’t. Sometimes, which were supposed to be weeks and months–I don’t think they happened at all. The one constant was, I hated the Old Bill. Anything for an argument with the Old Bill. Then, I hated going to jail, but I hated the Old Bill as well. Funny days, weren’t they?’

  Stuart squeezes his diary out of his jacket pocket, squashes it over his knee and writes with tongue-bitten concentration. All this talk of arrest and policemen has reminded him that he wants to speak to his MP.

  During the day the fifteen-year-old Stuart rared through the streets, blind smashed, and dozed out the sunny afternoons on the green. Stuart was a glue-sniffer–as heavy as you can get at it without bypassing the rest of life and fixing yourself directly to a gravestone. He had perpetual headaches; his lungs started to give in. ‘I was at it eighteen hours a day. Three tins of glue a day. I was on death’s door.’

  ‘Do you know anyone who’s died from it?’ I ask, rather shocked by my boldness.

  ‘Fellow called Nutty Norman. He’d tattooed his face up. That was part of his problem, that everyone was staring at him. From my experience, everybody I know who’s tattooed their face up, they either end up in a nuthouse or they end up very volatile. In jail you see, like, some fellas, they’ve got swastikas tattooed on their forehead or on their cheek, so they get loads of shit off the blacks all the time. I know a fella who’s got both cheeks tattooed, right across his forehead, tattooed here, teardrops, and he’s paranoid to fuck. You know, 99.9 per cent of tattooists won’t tattoo on your face, but there’s always the one who will.’ Nutty Norman hanged himself, high on glue, aged twenty.

  Most of Stuart’s tattoos were done at this time (including FUCK) using a pin. ‘Just put a bit of cotton wool round it soaked in Indian ink, and stab it in.’ The five dots above his knuckles, arranged as on a dice, are the five Fs: Find ’em (’em being girls), Follow ’em, Finger ’em, Fuck ’em, Fling ’em. The tattoo I’d thought was a swastika when we first met, two years ago, is an ordinary cross with a pattern round it. A saint–a stick man with a halo above the head–is popular with home tattooists. Unfortunately, Stuart’s version is decapitated. ‘I don’t know why. I think I got disturbed or caught or something,’ he says, peering round to look at the sorry sight on his left bicep. ‘Probably got caught,’ he concludes. ‘Must have got the ink confiscated.’

  Another of Stuart’s friends died from sniffing Tipp-Ex. ‘Clogged his lungs up and he died. You pour Tipp-Ex on your cuff, then put your mouth over it and inhale it. They found traces of Tipp-Ex in his lungs. Fourteen, fifteen years of age, he was. He’s gone to the chippy to buy the family’s tea, and he never got home. I lost five friends through glue-sniffing, aerosol- and Tipp-Ex-sniffing, and every time I used to glue-sniff I was hoping it was my turn. For the amount of years I was doing it I don’t know how I didn’t die.’

  Each winter Stuart gets minor bronchitis in his left lung because of the damage from solvents; part of the reason he had a bad memory, he thinks, is because of glue; it is possible that his black mists, his outbursts of rage, his love of knives and the severity of his crimes are to some degree related to the brain damage caused by toluene, the volatile substance that gives the high.

  ‘My favourite’s Fix-a-fix, which come in a bright red and green tin, if I remember correct. It’s like a paste. Timebond’s a paste, but Timebond tastes uuuu-ughw. Evostick, in a red tin, you get a real heavy head after you’ve finished, where Fix-a-fix is the sweetest going.’

  Stuart tried lighter fuel, ‘but just didn’t like it. Some puncture-repair kits aren’t too bad,’ he muses.

  Almost any household item containing volatiles can be used: nail varnish, clothing dyes, dry-cleaning fluid, windscreen deicer, hair fixative, car paint, aerosol painkillers. Some people spray lighter fuel into lager or Coca-Cola; others suck on fumes from rags soaked with petrol and paraffin (Australian Aborigines are particularly partial to this). According to research, the typical gluehead is an adolescent, lower-class male with low interest and motivation, whose father left or died when the child was young, who is excluded or rejected by his peers, and short of stature–i.e., Stuart to a T.

  Stuart doesn’t remember exactly when he started sniffing. ‘You’re lucky if you can remember many instances of glue. The ones you normally remember are because you ended up getting arrested.’ But after the age of fifteen most of his free time, and all of his artistry, was spent trying to find good places to get high. In a deserted house ‘all falling to bits’, he hallucinated that he saw ‘cameras, a film set. Outside it was all overgrown grass and I believed that was an air bag. I ran and dropped straight out the window, landed on me back in a bramble bush on this heap of bricks and laid there all night. I fucking broke me back, couldn’t move, until the next morning I managed to get away.’

  Another time, he crept into a cemetery, ‘hoping to see ghosts come out of their graves’.

  ‘If you go and glue-sniff in woods, the trees come down and shake your hand. You see trees with mouths on ’em. It’s mad. If you could paint what you see when you’re glue-sniffing like me in the woods, tripping, it would make wicked art. Through hallucinogenics, I’ve been to Toyland, I’ve been in a movie as a stuntman, had conversations with bushes. Have you ever done acid?’

  ‘No.’ Stuart, please!

  ‘Imagine taking ten acid strips, it would probably fuck your head up for about ten years, but you still wouldn’t get one-tenth of the hallucinogenic as you get off glue.’

  Anywhere with lights was good, because of the images they provoked during a hit.

  One girl was rushed to hospital after meandering across a road into the path of an oncoming lorry. ‘The police are lying,’ she protested. ‘I was never near any motorway or roadway. I was minding me own business just having a sniff and going about this field picking some lovely yellow and pink flowers and suddenly this bloody lorry was coming straight at me across the grass.’* Another boy was arrested for weaving his way through six lanes of traffic–he thought the car headlights were the illuminations on Blackpool Pier. Habitual users often report that glue makes up for a sense of loss: it makes their nan, or their dead/eloped/imprisoned mother, come back to life.

  There is an endearing innocence about glue-sniffers, which Stuart still tries to recapture now and then (he has admitted to doing it twice since I’ve known him). Foul-mouthed, slouching punks with noserings and ‘h A T E’ written across their knuckles, take glue in order to have fantasies about going to the seaside and being nice to their mums.

  Even the patterns of glue-sniffing arrests and referrals by police have a naivety about them. An early report in the Lancet observed that the number of incidents always drops during mealtimes, when the children put down their solvents and skip home to have tea.

  ‘The main thing is to keep moving about,’ advises Stuart. ‘When you do it all the time, if you go back to the same place too much, you can have repeating trips and they get boring, so you change your place. Anywhere. Trees, derelict houses, even in the centre of town.’

  ‘What happens in the centre of town?’

  ‘Normally get arrested.’

  One of Stuart’s best mates, Eden, gave it all up to become a Muslim.

  PUNK DOES A BUNK TO

  JOIN MULLAH’S ARMY

  Punk rocker Eden Fernandez has swapped his love of t
he Sex Pistols for a Kalashnikov rifle and a life of perpetual danger as a fanatical Muslim guerrilla fighter.

  The 23-year-old tearaway, who used to spend his days sniffing glue and roaming the streets [looking] for gang fights, has astonishingly been accepted into the brotherhood of the Mujahadeen rebels who are struggling to overthrow the Communist regime in far-off Afghanistan.

  The tough mountain men could hardly believe their eyes…

  WORRIED

  Eden’s mother Janice, who still lives in

  St Ives, is also proud of him. ‘I’m so pleased that he has found something at last that he really does believe in,’ she says. ‘Of course I’m very worried about him fighting in a war, but at least I know he is happy living his new life. If he had stayed in England I don’t know what would have happened to him in the end.

  He was always very kindhearted, but he did get into a few fights and he did drink far too much.

  ‘He was like a square peg in a round hole…I’ll send him a blanket and just pray he can survive through the winter.’

  This article appeared in the Sunday People magazine in December 1989, when Stuart was just starting his prison sentence for taking his son hostage.* Stuart looks closely at the accompanying photograph of Eden on a mountain top. ‘There, I thought I remembered it right. You can just see a bit of one of his tattoos on his neck.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘ “TERMINATOR”.’

  The second photograph shows Eden peering down a gun. ‘There’s another tattoo on his forehead, only they’ve made it faint in the photograph,’ says Stuart.

  ‘What’s that say?’

  ‘ “FUN”.’

  Looking for new ways to provoke Stuart’s memory, I pick out his pre-con sheets–the catalogue of his past offences that is shown to the judge before every sentencing.

  THIS PRINTOUT IS PRODUCED FOR THE USE OF THE COURT, DEFENCE AND PROBATION SERVICE ONLY AND MUST NOT BE DISCLOSED TO ANY OTHER PARTY.

  says the note at the top of the cover page.

  ‘It’s a bit thin,’ notes Stuart with disappointment. ‘It only goes up to ’98. There’ll be a good few more pages since then.’

  The punishments begin mildly and creep upwards over the months.

  Aged fifteen, he was arrested eleven times. A twelve-month conditional discharge and £20 for his first offence, a case of criminal damage. Stuart is a little vague about the details: ‘Knocking school property around, I expect, something like that. When you say “the first time I was arrested” what you got to understand is that in one year alone I’d run off eighty-six or eighty-nine times, so I been in the police station so many times. Don’t ask me about the time I first got arrested. How can I remember?’

  A month later: forty-eight hours at an attendance centre for four more counts of criminal damage. ‘At that age I was naive: I admitted it.’ He and another boy put a paving slab through a shop window and stole a half-bottle of gin, a packet of cigarettes and a pouch of tobacco. ‘Fucking stupid, really. I helped drink the gin.’ They stumbled about the town and damaged a telephone box. ‘What else did we drink? I don’t know. Might have bought some Coke. Whatever you drink with gin. I’ve never drunk gin since, to be honest with you.’

  Soon after, he stole a tin of glue from a DIY shop. ‘I’d already been in to try and buy a tin of glue earlier, and they’d refused me, so I’ve gone back to the same place, nicked the tin of glue, tried to run, they’ve grabbed me.’ One of the young shop assistants started pushing Stuart around because he kept trying to escape out of the door, so Stuart whacked him back and the boy’s elbow went through a glass door ‘and then a scuffle spilled out into the shop, tins of paint, bits and pieces…that was the criminal damage’.

  This story confused me. ‘So,’ I said, ‘let me get this straight–you went back to the same shop that had already refused you, and therefore knew you had to be watched if you returned, stole exactly the same thing that had got you under suspicion in the first place, then tried to escape by running away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I know the shop he’s talking about. There’s a big car park in front of it that has to be crossed before reaching the street. For someone like Stuart, who had to leave his first school because it had too many steps, it was sheer lunacy to think that in such a place he could get away from a horde of able-bodied staff led by an enraged young manager.

  ‘Why did you do it? What happened to your brain?’

  ‘I don’t know. I told you–I’d lost it.’

  A great many of Stuart’s stories show this odd side of him: a grim wilfulness, a refusal to be thwarted. Sometimes it comes across as a display of spirit; sometimes as idiotic defiance in the face of failure. He simply keeps going until either brute force or exhaustion steps in and puts a stop to him.

  In the evenings, Stuart had gang fights. He was a Nazi skinhead at one time, ‘or I thought I was. Only for about six months. Then I was a ska skinhead, I was a mod, I was a punk. I was an oi boy. I was nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean, nothing?’

  ‘I was never really into the music. It was the way of life and the dress sense, you know, “Fuck you, up the world.” I never really understood what being a punk was all about, and I never understood what being a National Front skinhead was all about. It was the same with a lot of us. There was a National Front skinhead called Laurence I knew. And he was black! He got stabbed by seven Pakis!’

  ‘What about you–were you racist?’

  ‘Yeah, I was a right racist cunt,’ agrees Stuart, and then pauses for a moment: ‘No, that ain’t rightly true, because when I was in care homes there was different nationalities. I didn’t get on with them all, but it was because you didn’t get on with them, not because they was black, that you called them black cunts. Not to their face all the time, because, you know, it weren’t the environment to do it.’

  ‘Why did you do it? What had happened to your brain?’

  It was prison that taught him tolerance. ‘Once you go away, you’ve got every nationality there is, and you start learning that there’s good and bad among everyone. I think the word racism is used too freely. Too many people use it when it’s got nothing to do with racism–it’s the fact that they’re a horrible cunt and the person don’t like them.’

  Stuart misses those early days on the streets. They had an individuality about them that he thinks is lacking for children today. ‘In the mid-eighties, there was a real big anti-establishment thing going and everybody had their own identities,’ he pronounces, like a man about to say that when he was a boy he had to walk three miles to get to school, respected his elders, and for good measure got a smack across the backside, which never did him any harm. ‘You had rockers, casuals, punks, mods, three different types of skinhead: ska skinhead, like I said already, right-wing skinhead, scooter-skinhead; you had Hell’s Angels. You used to have what we called posh punks. All their punk gear would be clean. They never looked dirty.

  ‘If you got a picture of a sixth-form college now,’ he concludes sentimentally, ‘you’d be lucky if you found two people who didn’t look exactly the same as everyone else. But in them days it wasn’t boring and materialistic, like today.’

  ‘Then you’d get together and beat the hell out of each other?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They’d meet in the shopping centre. Skinheads and punks at one end, the mods down one side, and the casuals with their Pringle jumpers at the other end. They’d have knives and bricks, broken bottles, knuckledusters and lumps of wood with nails in.

  ‘Hang about,’ I interrupt. ‘With those weapons, why aren’t you all dead?’

  Stuart’s answer is as if fresh from the battle.

  ‘Because if you have a proper group, if there’s like ten of you fighting, people are getting thrown about left, right, and centre, getting knocked about, and there ain’t much room. You’ll find that the one who’s got the weapon is standing at the front and he’s the one everyone goes for and he’s only
got time for one swing. It’s the ones behind him, at the back, that hurt you. The fellas at the front with weapons are the stupid ones and they normally get thrown.’

  ‘Like getting past the row of archers in a medieval battlefield?’

  ‘Yeah, like Henry the Fifth,’ replies Stuart, startling me with one of his flashes of History Channel knowledge.

  ‘Then, next thing you know, the Old Bill’s turned up. If a group fight happens, you know, there’s a build-up to it. It don’t just fucking kick off there and then. There’s a lot of verbal. Members of the public see and phone the police. So by the time it gets going it’s over with as quick as it started. And if someone looks like they’re really getting hurt, quite often people shout “Police!” anyway, and everyone just fucking runs off in different directions. You might meet one of them you was fighting in a side street and have a scrapper down there, or whack him with a bottle or pick a bin lid up and whack him up the side of the head–then get back to running again. It’s a funny thing that–a lot of the excitement of them fights is in the running away. Of course I’ve had a bottle over me head, but in one on ones, not gang fights. I’ve never got hurt as bad in a group fight as I have in one on ones or a couple against ones. And I’ve been stabbed. I’ve had a brick over me head twice. The first time I had four stitches. I was glue-sniffing with this old boy and he whacked me over the head with a brick and it snapped in half.’

  On the second of these jolly brick-bashing occasions, ‘I was fighting this fella and he was beating me quite bad, all me mouth and nose and eye had gone, and cos I wouldn’t stay down he picked this brick up and threw it at me fucking head. Opened me head up. He just walked off and I head-butted him in the back of the head. Because I never stop. Once I get going, I go and go and go. That’s part of my badness, is I lose sight of me goodness completely and then I can’t stop.’