Stuart

by Alexander Masters

  I remark that it must have made life wearing to be always watching around, waiting to be assaulted by mods and casuals.

  ‘But that’s the mad thing. We all knew each other. There was a big punk/skinhead mate of mine, he got done by four of the old casual boys. It’d been sorted that we were all going to have a big bundle this Sunday night and we turned up, and the front row of the casuals was all people we knew. So the old boy who got his head kicked in by the four old boys just picked whichever one he wanted and had a one on one. People had fucking bits of wood with nails in, bricks, all gone for a fucking tear-up, but we all knew each other.’

  ‘You didn’t want to do it?’

  ‘What was the point? What was the point in beating each other up when we might all be in the remand hostel next week?’

  After a fight, Stuart would dodge back between the street lamps to the derelict houses by the railway, bang up the stairs, encrusted with blood and spittle, still stinking of glue, and fall asleep across the bare floorboards. The trains hummed past on their way to Ely and Birmingham. The stairwells marinated in urine.

  ‘Oh, it was horrible that place, it weren’t nice, it was a health hazard.’

  ‘Did you ever sleep outside, on benches?’

  ‘Yes, and I’ll be honest with you, I’d never sleep on a bench in a park again, because when they’ve come out the nightclubs it can be really violent. I’ve been punched.’

  Neighbours coming back from Cambridge on the bus to Midston would report sightings of Stuart to his mother. ‘You’ve got to sort your boy,’ they’d say, although on the whole he was still liked in his home village by the older, less vigorous adults because he put their rubbish out and would do a bit of gardening for them when he was around. One or two said that Judith should wash her hands of him, to which she replied, ‘How can you wash your hands of your own child? He’s my flesh and blood. He’s my son. Just wish I could do more.’

  She has often said to Stuart, she tells me, ‘I wish I could pick you up sometimes, turn you upside down, shake all the bad things out of your head, and put you back up the right way again.’

  Always attractive to women, this was when Stuart made a catch of Sophie, soon to be mother of the Little ’Un. She was the night manager at a local homeless hostel.

  At the time, he was living in one of the hostel rooms. She invited him to come across the road to the pub on the pretext of celebrating her birthday with a drink, then a few hours later guided him back under the street lamps to the staffroom.

  ‘I was sixteen! I thought I was the fucking bee’s knees! I was fucking sixteen and she was twenty-four!’

  Sleeping with ‘clients’, as homelessness agencies please to call them, is a sackable offence. So, ever courteous re the fair sex, the next morning Stuart packed his change of clothes and moved back on to the pavements.

  The two met whenever they could. Sometimes, on Sophie’s nights off, it would be in her small flat. If the two other managers who shared the night duties weren’t looking, they hustled into one of the hostel rooms.

  Stuart’s mother was not pleased.

  Stuart’s mother said Sophie was a dirty pervert.

  But within a month Judith had grown to like her. Even if Sophie’s taste in boys was a little unusual, she was efficient, generous, and determined. To this day, in spite of all that has happened, Sophie never forgets the birthdays of Stuart’s mother and sister.

  This is not to say that everything was fine and dandy at the start. There were warnings of what the future might be like. Once, one weekend in the summer of 1984, Stuart went down to see his father, Rex, in Portsmouth. Sitting in his father’s bedsit, he was talking to his father’s latest girlfriend, when Rex came back from the pub, slammed the front door, stumbled into the room, and hit the woman in the face. Enraged, Stuart attacked his father. ‘Smashed all his room up. Then he tried strangling me, so I smashed up his telly, his video, went berserk, then went outside and smashed all his cars.’ The next afternoon, Stuart met Sophie in Cambridge. To cheer him up, they decided to get drunk and bought a gallon of cider and a bottle of wine and went down to Grantchester Meadows, overlooking the River Cam, where they sat among the nettles and willow trees. But, as so often happens with Stuart, when one thing goes wrong, other errors of judgement start to cluster around.

  His temper boiled over. They argued. As they were shouting some students fluttered by on a punt, with champagne glasses and boaters, and started mocking their accents. Stuart jumped into the river in his fourteen-hole Doc Martens shoes–tried to chase through the silt and water after them. At which point everybody, including Sophie, burst out laughing.

  Stuart wheeled round, grabbed hold of her, and hurled her into the river.

  Sophie sank under the surface and the blast of water billowed out, speckling him and the white dress shirts of the students with polluted river. Then she spluttered up, yawping with shock: ‘You’re exactly like your fucking father!’

  ‘You’re exactly like your fucking father!’ the students mimicked, rolling with laughter.

  ‘You’ve just done what you always have a go at your father for doing,’ she screamed.

  ‘You’ve just done what your father done!’

  ‘What you going to do, hit me now?’

  ‘What you going to do, hit her now?’

  Too ashamed to argue, and drenched in weeds himself, Stuart lurched off. Up the road, he came across a car accident. A man had knocked someone off his moped, so Stuart started telling the driver off, and when the police arrived he told them off, too.

  Result: Ninety days for breach of the peace at Send Detention Centre, a hard place. One of Maggie Thatcher’s quasi-military boot camps for young offenders, run by men pretending to be sergeant majors.

  To me this sounds a stiff punishment for what was little more than a loss of temper, but Stuart considers it perfectly reasonable. ‘Look how much trouble I’d been in. Like, in a twelve-month period, I’d been in court about six, seven times, maybe more, and never for one offence, it was always, like, two or three offences, you know. That’s how the cookie crumbles, in’it?’

  When Sophie’s contract in Cambridge finished, she took a job in Norwich, where her parents lived. Stuart hitched up there to be with her after his release–through Thetford Forest, past the Snetterton speed track and Wayland Prison, where he would soon be an inmate himself.

  She and Stuart moved from bedsit to bedsit; then to a two-roomed flat. Sophie became pregnant.

  ‘That was on me seventeenth birthday. We’d gone out and had a good shag that night, and Sophie said to me the next day, “Stuart, I think you might have got me pregnant.” I just laughed, and said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Trust me: women’s intuition.”

  ‘You know, at seventeen, I thought I was Mr Stud. You know, little seventeen-year-old, got this twenty-five-year-old bird pregnant, and I thought, “Yeaah, what a stud!” Couldn’t wait to tell me mum.’

  Tell his mum he did. He couldn’t stop blabbing about it.

  But despite his cockerel strutting, Stuart did not look forward to the birth. To distract his attention and because he was inclined to such things anyway, he started trying to twoc cars (taking without owner’s consent).

  ‘I was shit at it,’ he admits with resignation.

  ‘What did you do with the ones you did steal?’

  ‘Took them down dirt tracks and just smashed them up.’

  ‘Was it fun?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Was it fun?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was just a way of life, whether it was fun or not. It’s just how me life was.’

  In February 1988, aged nineteen, he was caught. To guard against future charges that might land him with more time inside when the police looked through their unsolved crime records, Stuart asked for a number of other offences to be taken into consideration, otherwise called ‘tics’.

  In April, he was convicted of one twoc and four tics.

  One hundred and ni
nety hours of community service does not seem quite in Stuart’s line, but the magistrate must have thought there remained grounds for hope. He began the sentence in the probation-office café, until customers complained that he put them off their tea; then he moved on to grass cutting.

  Aged twenty-one, he put the finishing touches to his master-class on bad parenting by–as we have already seen–shoving his son up through a window at surrounding police cars and threatening to kill him.

  18

  Ten years later, aged thirty-one, Stuart woke up with a torch shining in his face.

  The intense beam lit the floor and the walls, ‘blinding but not blinding, if you know what I mean’. It wasn’t in his face–not startling him–he didn’t need to blink. It slapped his face. Cleaned out all the shadows. Scalded the backs of his eyes. It was an almost refreshing light.

  He was in his room, he saw that now. But he was not in bed. He could not be in bed because his bed had disappeared.

  And the light came from outside, he saw that, too. It pierced through the reflective sheeting on his window that the neighbour had put up for him to stop people looking in–the same neighbour who’d promised to make (but never had) the boing, boing, whoosh folding James Bond bed. Had Neighbour messed up the reflective sheet? Stuart’s first thought. The trick in these situations was to think rationally. Had he put the reflective sheet on backwards, for example, so that now it had grabbed all the light in the world, sucked it into Stuart’s room and trapped it, turning Stuart’s flat into a light bomb?

  Where had all his furniture gone? Why would someone want to steal his bed, even as he slept on it, so that now he, Stuart, who had muscular dystrophy as everyone knew, and therefore needed his bed, was without boing, boing, whoosh or ordinary bed?

  If he was not in bed or on boing, boing, whoosh, he must be on the floor.

  He was not on the floor.

  He was standing against the wall with a twelve-inch knife taped in his hand.

  Boing, boing, whoosh; boing, boing, whoosh. He understood now. That was the sound of the police helicopter hovering outside. It was responsible for the bleaching light.

  He had not just woken up. He was emerging from a Black Mist. Somewhere, smirking in the back of his mind, was a recollection of Neighbour’s arm with–curiously–a meat cleaver attached to the end of it. Or had it been an aluminium baseball bat?

  A face appeared: at the window. A policeman’s face, hazy, shaking with the maddening noise. Face mouthed something at Stuart. There was more than one policeman behind Face. Beyond the window, Stuart realised, his self-control starting to slip away again, among the dustbins, on the roofs, battering down his front door, digging under ground with huge drills and tunnel props and hard hats, there were at least forty more.

  ‘I, Stuart Shorter, care of R——Street, Midston, Cambridgeshire, make this statement believing the contents to be true to the best of my knowledge and belief and would say as follows:

  Sankey was my neighbour. We spoke on friendly terms as neighbours, we would go around each other’s house for a beer every once in a while, every couple of weeks or so. Sankey is very gobby.

  [Due to an argument at Christmas, two weeks before the incident] every time I saw him he would just stare at me, blank me out or play paranoid head games with me. His mate Tom said, ‘You want to watch him.’ He also said, ‘He is pissed up. He has already been throwing punches.’ I said I was getting pissed off with it all and said to Tom that it would have to be sorted because it was doing my head in.

  [On the night in question] Sankey stuck his head out of his window and shouted, ‘Are you calling me a fucking butty boy?’ Within a minute or so he came outside, then said, ‘I am not going to hit you.’ This put my guard up immediately.

  I said to Tom, ‘I am getting fucked off with this, let’s get it sorted.’ Sankey said that we could go into his flat. I said, No, I did not want to go into his flat and I knew that he had an aluminium baseball bat in there by the door. Instead I suggested that we go into my flat. The three of us walked into my flat. I could feel myself getting irate. He picked up something in the main area of the flat which incorporates both the bedroom and the living area. I was sure that he picked up a knife, as there was a knife on the table, then threw it towards the settee.

  He then walked over again to the knife and picked it up and walked towards me. I was stood near the bed. There was a knife under the pillow, it is always there.

  Sankey Doyle’s movements are very quick. He came towards me very swiftly. I was sure that he had the knife but I could not see it. He was hitting me, pushing or punching me. I was dragged on to the bed and in any event it kicked off. I grabbed the knife from under the pillow, turned round on the bed so that I was on top of him. I was then swearing at him and abusive, stating that he had better leave me alone.

  The knife I had was an eight-inch blade, perhaps twelve inches in total. All I wanted to do was scare him enough with it to get him out of my flat. We rolled over again and this time he was on top. I put my arm up against his chin and put his head up against a wall. At this stage I do not know what was said. My knife was in my left hand, it was raised.

  I went to Stuart’s flat with his mother, while he, banned from returning to his village, was staying at her house in Midston.

  The front door, beaten to slivers when the police had tried to extract him in the ordinary way, had already been replaced. The flat number had been rescrewed on by the council and a new letter box to match. A new window was in the frame, although it had been hurriedly done and the pane had cracked.

  Everything else was chaos. Shattered glass was spread across the floor. Bottles, knives, driving theory test books, computer manuals, a roll of carpet that he’d bought to redecorate his hallway–all stuck pell-mell in a hedgehog pile of broken furniture and table legs in the middle of the room. The council workmen had had to hack their way not just through the front door, but down the whole corridor, which Stuart had rammed full of everything he could find–his mattress, his chest of drawers, side table, bedside lamp, even old letters and Bic biro pens–in an attempt to barricade the police out.

  There was no blood. Stuart’s mother told me, usually there is blood. She wondered if the cleaners had also been in, just for the blood, and left all the rest.

  So this is how it is with chaotic people, I thought to myself. Even though Stuart’s off the streets, in a flat, and regarded by the local homelessness agencies as a great success story–indeed, practically the only one on the books–he has not changed fundamentally. Where everyone else has one disaster, his sort has seven hundred, all at the same time.

  If Stuart is a success story, then it is pointless to imagine that we can ever really help these people without breaking the national budget. The depressed businessman, the bankrupts, the cuckolds, the father who’s just lost his daughter in a car crash–perhaps these late-arrival emotional wrecks can be turned round fairly quickly if they want to be. But the chaotic? It isn’t a bedsit and employment that they need; it is a new brain.

  At best we can keep them steady with drugs. At worst we must throw them in jail, and hope that we are not in the room when they decide to hang themselves.

  The image that stuck with me was the kitchen window. Stuart had wedged into the window frame a plastic plate-drying rack and a small set of pine shelves, the sort girls use for china puppy dogs. It wouldn’t have kept out a baby.

  From under one edge of the pile in the centre of the room, I retrieved a Dictaphone I’d given Stuart several months earlier. By the wall, among the broken glass, was the cassette, half used, with ‘Alexder Onely’ written on it.

  Hello, Alexander, it’s Stuart. You know I was supposed to speak one night when I was feeling really down, confused and…everything else. You know, admitting I’ve had lots to drink and all that, but I can’t help but reflect on a programme called Care what was on Sunday night, today’s date being Wednesday, 11 October. I think about that programme, and when I see the fella w
ith the bottle of vodka and the pills at the end, after reflecting that he went and gave evidence against the magistrate…well, in my case I went to the police about my brother and my brother’s friend, and how I’d had no justice, only abuse, and then going into care having [been] asked to do things that I wouldn’t have thought was possible that anyone could ask of an eleven-year-old…and then Midfields home and assaulted maybe because of my doing, maybe because of the way I was, being locked in what they called the Red Room and telling me doesn’t matter what I done, there was nothing I could do that they’d let me out unless I calmed down. I just head-butted and head-butted and head-butted and head-butted and head-butted the window what was supposed to be unbreakable.

  Coming back to that programme, Care, I couldn’t watch the abuse of that, the child, had to keep turning over. I couldn’t watch all that. Too hurtful, too soon. But the way the drink and the violence and the lies and the hatred became his life. The more he spoke, the more you felt he was disbelieved, and that nobody listens to anything you have to say. So you just carry on and carry on. You don’t want to be here any more, you feel dirty and disgusting. You feel, what’s justice? So you sit there and you talk about it to the police, you go and kick the paedophile’s door down who abused you with your brother. He’s still out there walking. Yet there are times regular when I sit in this flat and I look around, and I look what’s here in my life–do I really want to be here? If the truth is known, I’ve used alcohol every night recently, just to go to sleep. If I’ve got my drink inside me I sit here having mad conversations with meself, talking about mutilating myself, killing myself, killing those who I think have done me wrong, from me babysitter to tracking down those who were responsible who abused me in care to executing the police officers who never gave me any justice. I wanted just to lay down and die. I felt so dirty, and fucking horrible and hated and attacked anyone I got close to. I can’t even have a relationship if I want it because I think sex is dirty and disgusting. I just wish once there could be an escape from this madness.