Stuart

by Alexander Masters

  19

  ‘It’s a question I often ask meself: what would I do with me? And I don’t know the answer. I don’t know what I’d do, except run away.’

  A Plucky Little Lad: Aged 10–15

  I have taken to working in bed. Trying to write Stuart’s life ‘like a murder mystery what Tom Clancy writes’ has defeated my study room. Stuart doesn’t like guns, can’t do karate chops, finds sex disgusting, and, despite repeated exciting promises to put his enemies in wheelchairs, whenever things turn ‘not too clever’ the only person who gets rushed off in an ambulance is himself. Trying to expose the ‘murder’ of Stuart’s innocence/ potential/responsibleness, if any of these was murdered, rather than simply never present, is befuddling. I want to kick him for suggesting such an idea. I’d like to thwack him over the head. I shall commit the murder.

  The room I began in is now coagulated with photocopies and library hardbacks with titles such as Institutional Abuse; Suicide in Care; Miserableness, More Misersableness and Gloom and folders, forgotten folders, confusing folders, folders labelled ‘Research I Spent a Month Doing and Then Never Used’, and (especially thick, this one) ‘Completely Unhelpful, Untrust-worthy, Fatuous, Overwritten, Verbal Diarrhoea Printouts from the Internet’, or folders with no label at all, because I’ve accidentally flicked the label from its clip-on plastic display and it has spun away like a sycamore seed. When this happens I have to scrabble around the carpet, crack my head on the chair, squeeze an arm behind the piano till my elbow sticks, all to discover where the tiny ticket of paper has fluttered off to, and which I could have rewritten in half the time, but which at last, triumphantly, with a furious face, I find poking out of the turnup of my trousers. Then I see that I have lost the folder.

  This has clogged on for months. Now, when I glance into my study, it seems to me more like a cave, with strata.

  So I have extracted everything I can find relating to Stuart’s school years and escaped next door.

  With the curtains closed, my bedroom sinks into muffled twilight. The lamp gives the air a comforting orange-yellow tint, and the world outside, slicing through in the gaps between the curtains, sounds tinny and unreal. Occasionally, I hear my neighbours’ voices: the Professor of Theology and his wife, just back from holiday with a scroll-handled urn for their Tuscan garden; the Australian lawyer, who has spent so long fighting Cambridge City Council to get compensation for child-abuse victims that it has destroyed his marriage; my landlord’s shadowy grunts from downstairs.

  It is a freer Stuart in here, unmanacled from books, less hounded, as he angrily calls it, by my attempts ‘to simplify’ him. When the dark descends outside, I turn on my overhead light, which has coloured bulbs, and the Christmas lights that I have strung along above the mantel, and the room around me turns a clubbish, library red.

  ‘Stuart was a happy little boy. A real happy-go-lucky little thing.’

  His mother says this was the way he started. Each time we meet, she gives one of her respiratory laughs, leans back in her chair or sofa, puts on a faraway expression, lights another Benson & Hedges, and repeats: ‘Yes, a happy, lively little lad. Always up, building things. Absolutely loved it. Anything that he could build he used to like. He’d sit for hours on his own, playing cars and building roads in the dust and the dirt. Yes, quite amazing really.’

  Each school morning he waddled, something like a goose, from his parents’ house to his classes, half a mile into the village along the country lane and up a short, steep hill, satchel swinging, hand in hand with his brother, to Midston Primary, a skinny, chipper fellow, pleased with the world and with himself. His favourite subjects were battering the water in the swimming pool as if it had done him a disservice and calling it ‘crawl stroke’; making fat, greasy marks on pieces of paper with coloured crayon, calling them ‘MuM’; and sums.

  Stuart was talkative, curious, loud, irresponsible, restless, fond of practical jokes, enthusiastic, determined, even wilful, unusually attentive to other people’s changes in mood, and overfond of embroidering stories. He made friends easily. But despite Stuart’s suitability for the school, the headmaster soon noticed something was amiss with the little barmaid’s boy. It wasn’t just his funny gait: he couldn’t kick a football–when he tried he usually missed, coiled up like a rope, pulled a funny face and fell on his nose. He had trouble with steps, too, and no school on a hill could be expected not to have at least a few hundred steps. Slopes were fine. Stuart had got to the school quite happily. It was steps. The sudden up-down, rather than the teeth-gritting push forward. Even the three steps into the front classroom seemed like pitting a boy, a very skinny boy, against a mountain. Stuart had to haul himself up by the banister like a fairground tug-of-war strongman.

  Then, one day, Stuart overreached himself in gym. In a fit of exuberance, he shinnied halfway up a rope, lost his grip, fell to the ground, and bit through his tongue. Another boy was sent running up to his mother’s house.

  Stuart was dying.

  His spine was smashed up.

  His arms and legs were splattered over the wall bars.

  When Stuart’s mother finally reached the sanitorium, Stuart was sitting in a plastic chair in the corridor, perfectly calm and essentially unharmed. He was not even crying. Indeed, the PE teacher, who agreed that ropes and five-year-old boys have an unhappy tendency to part company sooner than they should, told her that after the initial shock he had not cried at all. His face was covered in drying blood, that was all. He did not need to go to hospital.

  But it was the final straw for the education authorities. They had seen an ill boy from the start and they weren’t about to give up their disquiet just because he could take a tumble as well as the next kid. He had tumbled, that was what mattered. The boy was not fit to be with normal children. They had Stuart transferred to a school for the severely disabled.

  Cerebral palsy children, whose lips flopped and wobbled in proportion to the degree they’d been asphyxiated at birth, jiggled around little Stuart. Epileptics dropped like stones, usually picking themselves up again immediately they hit the floor and walking off, but occasionally remaining frozen, faces discoloured, jerking rhythmically until, beset by massive contractions, foamy saliva ejected from their mouths. Then, flaccid and comatose, they’d seep back to life. Spina bifida kids, more twisted than coat hangers, insinuated themselves through the new school’s corridors–one was only two feet high, with a huge hump on its back pushed to one side as if all the burdens of the world had been stuffed into a knapsack. Approach from the front and you saw a little girl locked inside this perversion. Another boy, with muscular dystrophy–Stuart’s brother in illness as it were, the symbol of his future–always sat against the wall during classes watching Stuart pallidly, oozed into a wheelchair.

  To get to the school now, Stuart had to take what the local children uproariously called ‘the Spaggy Bus’. To Stuart’s ears, the sound of this small, twelve-seater coach with low-slung doors at the back and side knocked out every other noise as it wrenched among the pretty lanes towards his house, throttling up the hill, and stopped with a wobble outside his picket gate. The pneumatic doors wheezed open, Stuart would clamber on board and join the others–the driver was a woman called Ruby, who had a big head of red curly hair–then the doors clicked shut and off they’d scoot. It was lucky Stuart did not get carsick as some of the others did: the journey took an hour. If the local able-bodied children spotted them they’d run alongside, laughing and waving their arms, their faces bobbing up to stare aghast at the freaks behind the windows.

  Stuart loathed that journey more than the school. It had not just the handicapped on it, but also the full-blown mentally retarded. (‘They weren’t physically, but mentally spasticated,’ as Stuart puts it.) Of course the village kids didn’t know that. To them, they were all the same and all hilarious: Stuart, who had fallen off a rope, was the same as the Down’s children, with their old man–moon faces and lidless eyes, who fixed him in ridiculous sho
uting conversations. To get away from them, Stuart would change seats and end up next to an autistic case who never spoke at all, just tried to hide in the luggage rack. There was no telling who or what would get on at the next stop. When it came to churning out mental and physical distortions, the villages around Cambridge appeared to have an insatiable imagination. It might be a birdlike girl who looked as though she’d just tumbled from a nest, or a boy bristling with body braces, stinking of urine, which meant that Ruby had to lower the hydraulic lift at the back of the bus and ease him in as if he were a parcel at the sorting office. Then, just as the mood settled back again, and Stuart managed to distract himself by pressing his face against the window and daydreaming about an odd-looking car he’d just seen parked by the roadside, one of the Tourette’s two seats behind would burst into giggles and repulsive abuse, like a sneeze.

  A lot of the children on the bus didn’t know what was wrong with them.

  ‘My dad said it was because my mum ate too many potatoes.’

  ‘My dad said, in the womb, I couldn’t breathe properly because I had me face sticking in my twin brother’s bottom. What’s wrong with you, Stu?’

  Sometimes they confessed to each other that they hated handicapped children.

  ‘Oi, Breakable Sally, are you going to go to normal school?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about you, Tom-without-a-heart?’

  ‘No.’

  And, ‘Stu, what about you, Stu? Stu the Fighter! Are you going to go to normal school one day?’

  The Roger Ascham School, named, rather oddly, after a fifteenth-century longbow expert, belonged to a set of ‘special’ establishments. In the jaunty words of the Cambridge Evening News, some of the pupils at the Ascham ‘are spastics, some suffer from spina bifida, some have water on the brain’. Just across the playing field was the Lady Adrian, for children with ‘moderate learning difficulties’. Half a mile north-east, the Rees Thomas dealt with the mental cases.

  Between these places and schools for ordinary children such as the one he had just come from, there was no contact. ‘It was,’ says Stuart, ‘two different worlds.’

  ‘Yes, and even then he wasn’t unhappy at first,’ marvels his mother. ‘A plucky little lad. His legs were all over the show, bless him.’

  He became used to his new status as a cripple. He even began to enjoy it. He was by far the fittest in the school, the Olympic athlete.

  The only material left from Stuart’s schooling at the Ascham are six school reports. The first thing to notice about these is that they exist at all. Nothing in Stuart’s possession usually makes it beyond a year. Furniture, books, clothes, his long-suffering television: all soon smashed up, burnt, taken away for evidence or lost. Paper objects, crammed into the pockets of his green bomber jacket alongside bus tickets, screwdrivers, tobacco, yesterday’s lunch, this morning’s beer can: after two days, they begin to resemble seaweed. Yet these six school reports, quarter of a century old, are neat and flat.

  ‘Yeah, Alexander, you’ll find this lot interesting,’ he insisted when he handed them to me one day, standing at the front door, lopsided with fatigue because he’d spent half the day at the drug dependency unit and the afternoon sorting out a housing benefit claim. ‘Nah, can’t come in. Reggae Night at the Man in the Moon, in’it?’

  He seemed reluctant to give the envelope up.

  ‘Wonder what you’ll think of them,’ he pondered, clinging to one corner while I, slightly embarrassed, pulled at the other. ‘Funny little old boy.’

  His school reports, his social care reports, his collection of letters from his solicitors when he was in prison and copies of his prison complaint forms, also stored in an envelope in my possession: these official documents he preserves.

  Finally, my cling exceeded his.

  ‘What do you call that fucking horrible thing you’re wearing, anyway?’ he demanded by way of revenge as, triumphant, I slotted the envelope under my arm.

  ‘It’s my dressing gown! Don’t be so insulting. It’s made from pure silk.’

  ‘You got flu? What you in bed for then? No wonder you ain’t never got no money, Alexander.’

  Back in my bedroom, I lay the reports out on the duvet cover and try to put out of mind the rude ogre who has just been at my door. The A4 sheets of paper are heavy and slightly furry, like moleskin.

  reads the heading of the first.

  There is something odd about this, which I don’t catch at first.

  Below, the sheet is divided into subjects, leaving an inch of blank space for the teacher’s remarks. This is the next surprise: they are excellent. It’s no wonder Stuart didn’t trust them. Nobody could connect the man now loping across the city with two suicide scars around his neck with the six-year-old goody two-shoes who smarms across this piece of paper in dark blue Biro.

  And, in summary, at the bottom of the page, in pale blue:

  The next report is in a different hand. Aged seven: ‘Stuart enjoys arithmetic and has made good progress.’ ‘Stuart’s comprehension is good, whether of the written word or of stories.’ He ‘has a lively mind’, he ‘adds much to the class discussions’. Aged eight: ‘Excellent progress’, ‘remarkable progress’, ‘very good work’, ‘very creative’, ‘great understanding’. In PE, Stuart ‘has done particularly well at swimming and archery’–rather an alarming sport in a school for the disabled, one might think.

  Aged nine, he changes his name.

  I see what is wrong with the first report now–the name, ‘Stuart Turner’. After this it never reappears in his life, except on his collection of official documents and, ironically, at moments when he wants to disguise himself.

  ‘One night,’ explains his mother, ‘Stuart was about thirteen and had got it into his head that it was his stepfather’s fault that I’d left dad. I sat down with him and I said, “Look, we were living, you and Gavvy and me, on our own when I met your stepdad. Rex weren’t there,” I said. “Your stepdad’s not the reason that Rex’s not here now. I’ve never told you about your father. I’ve never run your father down to you. What’s gone on in marriage was between me and him, I always thought. But I’m gonna tell you a few home truths now, just what it was like.” So I told him that night and he looked at me, I can remember him just sitting with his head down and he kept looking up and I said that was what life was like. He was amazed.’

  ‘Did you tell him about the violence?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That he beat you up?’

  ‘Yes. You’ve got him on such a pedestal, I said, because you thought your dad would make everything right.’

  It was a few years after this conversation that Stuart came out of his six-month sentence in Send Boot Camp (where beatings occurred daily) and went to visit Rex in Portsmouth and Rex beat a woman up in front of him. ‘That’s why he went mad. He’d put his dad on a pedestal and then finding that Rex proved right what I told him–Stuart did have a job coming to terms with that.’

  ‘Did these things happen when Rex was drunk?’

  ‘And when he was sober, but far worse when he was drunk.’

  ‘What provoked him?’

  ‘Nothing. You couldn’t put a finger on anything. He was just so unpredictable.’

  ‘Why didn’t you leave earlier?’

  ‘Because in them days, thirty years ago, there wasn’t the help for women on their own with kids. And your loyalties are that you try and keep the family together. And you just think that they’ll change. And you’re young, you’re naive and excited and bloody stupid. You are! I’ve never seen anything like that behaviour. I didn’t come from a family like that. I don’t even think my mum and dad argued, certainly never in front of us kids. Rex didn’t care about anything. I just found it totally amazing. Karen says to me, “Ah, Mum, I’ve always liked naughty nice boys, haven’t I?” Yes, I understand just what she means! “It wasn’t all bad, Stuart,” I says. “There was obviously good times, it wasn’t all bad. Dad and I had some good tim
es.” ’

  In my view, Rex Turner should have been dispatched at birth. He was a savage. Stuart’s grandparents heard the screams from two houses away when Rex kicked their pregnant daughter in the stomach. One of brother Gavvy’s first memories was of leaning over the banister, aged three, trying to crack his father on the head with a broom as he beat their mother up. Rex was a man who injected poison wherever he went, and for generations after he’d passed.

  ‘But what right have I got to condemn him?’ says Stuart. ‘Everything he did, I did worse.’

  Stuart’s mother met his stepfather, Paul Shorter, in 1973. A burly person with tattooed forearms, Paul was first a plasterer, then took a job welding lorry axles. Paul was a kind, placid, hardworking man, untalkative to the point of muteness, and loyal. One time, says Stuart, ‘Paul, me dad–I call him me dad–and Mum had a serious car accident. This was driving me to see the headmaster because I was being real disruptive in school. Me dad went to brake at the junction, and the brakes went on the car, and we went out on to the main road, hit a lorry, practically head-on, ripped the whole side of the car off, car somersaulted from front to back, then ended up in a ditch upside down. Paul had done all his back in but he got me mum out. They had trouble finding me, but he got me out, then he collapsed himself. So obviously he did care about me.’

  Another time, a friend of Paul’s came to the house. The friend was having troubles with his wife and worrying about leaving his children. ‘It don’t matter for you if you was in my position,’ the man reflected, ‘because Stuart and Gavvy aren’t your sons.’

  Paul flipped: ‘Don’t you ever say that again!’ He pounded his finger on the kitchen table, ‘They are my sons!’

  Paul took the battered Turner family to a new house, on the other side of Cambridge, in a village called–