Stuart

by Alexander Masters

  ‘If you don’t mind, we’ll change the name,’ interrupts Stuart hurriedly.

  ‘–Midston?’ I improvise.

  Stuart nods. ‘I’ve caused me mum and dad enough grief as it is. Can we leave them out of it now?’

  A few days after Judith married Paul, Stuart and Gavvy secretly agreed to honour the new husband. The first Judith heard about it was when the headmaster at the Roger Ascham rang up and asked if it was all right to address her son as

  I throw on some clothes to leave my bedroom for half an hour, and walk across to the university library.

  In one of Stuart’s reports, the composition teacher has written that Stuart has

  Ladybird 7a turns out to be part of the Key Words Reading Scheme, and is called Happy holiday.* It’s on restricted access. I have to examine it in a special room of the library reserved for books with weak bindings and publications of a sexual nature.

  Happy holiday is the story of two children, Peter and Jane, who go to the seaside to visit their aunty and uncle. The cover shows Peter and another boy standing in a municipal pond, in shorts, showing off their motor boats.

  ‘It was good of Uncle to buy you a new boat,’ says Jane.

  ‘Yes,’ replies Peter, ‘and it was nice of Aunty to let you have her old doll.’ He looks a little incredulous in the facing picture. ‘I hope you like it,’ he adds.

  As the blurb on the inside cover announces, ‘Happy holiday embraces…the natural interests and activities of happy children’, like flying kites in the hills, balancing on seaside donkeys, leaping among the surf, whisking out on a motor boat–all the interests, in short, that the dribbling, callipered, wheelchair-bound pupils of the Roger Ascham could not do.

  ‘It is fun here,’ says Peter, picking up a crab, ‘I always want to run and jump when I am on the sands.’

  The preceding volumes seem to be devised for torture. Play with us–Oh, but not you, Wobble Legs. Things we do–Oops, things you can’t. Where We Go–Not the same place as you Spags and Divvies, that’s for sure. To ensure these cheerful messages were fully understood, teachers could buy ‘flash cards’ and make the cerebral palsy children chorus the words.

  ‘I like Peter.’

  I wish he’d die.

  ‘I like Jane.’

  Why doesn’t she break her back?

  ‘They like to play.’

  Go do it on the train tracks.

  And, accompanied by a painting of Peter and Jane flinging back and forth on a swing: ‘Up they go. Up, up, up, they go.’

  The Ladybird books are not entirely other-worldly. The series editor understood that the readership came from varied backgrounds and would have varied futures: towards the end of the volume with the swing painting there is a page of important, helpful information.

  ‘Look, Jane, that is a Police car.’

  ‘It says POLICE on it.’

  In 3b, Boys and girls (no cripples, please), Peter and Jane are at it again, bounding into the air on a trampoline.

  ‘Look at me, Jane. Look at me. Up I go. Up and up and up I go.’

  Two pages later, even the pet rabbit jumps.

  Cambridgeshire in the 1970s has a flavour of the 1870s. Because the family could not afford holidays for themselves, in the summer, from July until September, Judith did casual agricultural labour in the fields, planting in leeks, thrusting them into the soil under the scalding sun, being pernickety among the strawberries, gathering second-harvest potatoes in the leafy autumn.

  ‘In them days, the only employment women without qualifications could get in the country around here was on the fields,’ says Stuart’s mother.

  Some of Stuart’s first memories are of these fields: ‘sitting on the front of a tractor all day steering it’, closely guarded by the nervous foreman ‘what were doing about two mile an hour’.

  They worked in rows. For potatoes (the most common crop) each woman took on one ridge of earth that stretched the length of the field, while the children rioted or (the unpopular ones) joined in. Toddlers were piled by the hedge. It was blank, exhausting work. One hour, two hours, four hours would go by and you’d have thought of nothing. Just emptiness, rows and rows of female emptiness, baking in the sun, picking spuds. It was quite pleasant, really.

  The tedium of the day was broken by moments of gentle unexpectedness. Sometimes the machine that had gone ahead, shaking up the ridge to release the crop, would have sliced through a potato and its sheer face would glisten like honey beneath the clog of dirt. A weevil might scuttle between the sods. It was remarkable how few worms there were: so many potatoes, but no life. Farms prolific enough to require bussed-in teams of labourers have stillborn soil.

  Stuart was five to ten years old during these holidays. When he could be caught and forced into labour, his job was loading: ‘It was just…bosh! Trying to get the sack on the trailer with me hip and shoulder. Twisting me body to make it work. As soon as it left the ground I was…do-ing! Anything heavy, I’ve always had mad ways of doing things.’

  When it was very hot Stuart’s mother used to put a bottle of orange juice in the freezer the night before. The next morning they’d take the bottle with them, frozen solid, and by lunchtime it wouldn’t even be cold. ‘You’d do everything you could, throw it under the van to keep it cool, but it didn’t very often work. When you’re out on the field it’s like being on a motorway.’

  Paul tried doing the work for one day, collapsed and never went back.

  Stuart’s mother kept at it, every summer for ten years, with (once Stuart’s half-sister and brother were born) up to four children in tow, each day picking up to three tons of spuds. Scoop, shake, into basket. Basket full. Trudge basket to huge container. Tip basket in. Back to row, scoop, shake.

  ‘But they knew it was worth it, the kids,’ says Stuart’s mother. ‘My £8 a day bought their pens for school, bits of uniforms, exercise books, extras. And it put food on the table. We ate a lot of stolen potatoes in them days.’

  In November, when the children were back at school, Judith went on to Brussels sprouts.

  ‘Stu–you awake? ’

  It was his brother Gavvy, whispering across the bedroom, half an hour after the last creak of the bed in his parents’ room as his mother turned over into sleep position.

  Stuart lay, eyes wide open, heart pounding.

  ‘Stu? Can I come over?’

  There was a double creak from Gavvy’s bed: one (Stuart imagined) for rising up on elbow to listen for dangers, another for throwing legs from under blankets.

  Night was exciting time in those days. In the last half-hour a dozen things had happened, just in the form of noises, to liven Stuart’s imagination. The neighbours had returned home, back from a party: their car headlamps had swung across the window as they passed the church, then away as they rounded the cul-de-sac, then back across the window as they pulled up to their house, three doors to the left. Two doors had slammed.

  ‘…told you not to fucking wear that skirt, you fucking…’

  ‘Don’t you dare have a go at me! I saw what you were up to with little Miss…’

  Ten minutes later, next door, on the other side, the three-bedroom house, there was a scuff on the path, then a stumble, a giggle and a moment later the bang of a door. The father, one of the two sons, or the lodger? This family did not like the Shorters, and made it known. They said the Shorters had jumped the queue to get a four-bedroom house. They said a lot else besides, most of it unprintable. But the woman at the council had told Judith they were talking rubbish. If they could fit an illegal lodger in their house, which the council knew all about, then they didn’t need an extra bedroom, did they? The two sons made up for it by pouncing on Stuart.

  Then there’d been one of those chattering birds that sounded halfway between a woman being attacked and an owl with beak-ache. It had come from the churchyard, and made Stuart think of the gravestones, peacefully trotting on through life, day to day, minding their own business, and the yews, hanging ove
r the bumpy corpses, bathed in moonlight.

  ‘Stu?’ Gavvy again.

  ‘Come on, quick, yes,’ Stuart breathed.

  Gavvy clambered beneath the covers and filled up the room with stories about the rough and tumble of real school. Gavvy was the popular, easygoing joker of the class. ‘Not cruel jokes, nothing like that,’ insists Paul. ‘He’d do Scotsman, Englishman, Irishman jokes, but never a cripple joke.’

  Gavvy would leave school in a few years, at sixteen, and become a good workman in the press shop of the same car factory where Paul welded axles. If Gavvy had a subject, it was football. He loved the game. Mad about it.

  ‘…and then Mark, you remember him,’ said Gavvy, insinuating his arm around Stuart’s waist and pressing hard against him, ‘he was in the year above you? Ginger hair? Yeah, down the garage, he said, in Mr Carlyle’s, what’s now the biology teacher, his voice, fuck, ha ha, it was funny, he said, oh, fuck, I can’t say it, he said–you remember how Mr Carlyle has a fucking stupid lisp?–he said, “I want to exsh-pell this boy because he took out the…”–Ha ha! Don’t be so nervous, Stu, Mum can’t hear, it feels nice, doesn’t it?–“I want to exsh-pell this boy because he took out the axsh-olotl to beyond the sh-cool boundary and ssh-tamped on it!” ’

  Stuart would roar with laughter. That nightmare revolting, deformed axolotl: it had sucked around a fishbowl in the biology-class window even when Stuart was a pupil there.

  Gavvy had to cram a pillow in Stuart’s mouth to stop him waking the whole village.

  Next, a scrap:

  ‘Yeah, so Adam tells Kev, “Do that again and I’ll punch your gob in.” I mean, he let him know, it wasn’t like it was–anyway, then Wilbur–you know, in my year, big fucker?–he reckons he’s hard, and he comes up and Adam just gives him one, fwaack, right as he’s getting close, right in the dial, heard it across the park, like a fucking twig snapping…’

  Gavvy’s stories kept Stuart in touch with the fine and busy world of winning. He could smell the vigour on his brother’s chest. Gavvy’s arms were stiff with new muscles and excitement.

  ‘What happened in your school?’ Gavvy demanded.

  Stuart tried to think. On the bus in to the Ascham he had seen a car by the side of the road with its bonnet dented and a woman standing on the verge, smoking. In fact, now that he considered it clearly, the woman wasn’t really smoking, she was screaming. As the bus had gone by, he had spotted bodies in the grass, four at least, and the old wrinkled couple who lived by the golf course also. Arm in arm. Which made six. ‘There was more in the ditch, too, I reckon, still in the pile, what was two articulated HGVs, one from Marks & Spencer’s, the other from the…pet fish factory, plus a coach, and a bicycle, and they was all burning.’

  Ruby had refused to stop the bus, of course. She’d screeched round the corner and away before you could say ‘terrorist attack’, but Stuart reckoned they had been the first on the scene. He’d spotted three helicopters–air ambulances–thumping over the horizon towards the carnage.

  Gavvy hadn’t heard about a road crash that bad in months.

  ‘Yeah, and another thing…’ said Stuart, as if it had only just occurred to him. He broke out of his brother’s arms and turned to face the wall.

  Gavvy laughed. He found Stuart a bit difficult at moments like this, when the boy suddenly went ‘sensitive’ on him. The very thing that attracted Gavvy–Stuart’s undisguised, insistent vulnerability–also made him a bit of an embarrassment. ‘Not another incident? At this rate there’ll be nobody left in the whole world! Well? Aren’t you going to tell me? What is it?’

  ‘Nah. A friend. Remember the boy in the wheelchair what I told you about? What liked cars and told jokes, and I used to sit next to? What had what I’ve got? He died today.’

  On the nights that Gavvy did not come over and press against him, Stuart lay awake listening to the lorries until one or two in the morning, imagining their lights cutting along the road, the gruff men in the cabs and the buffet of the airstream as they left him behind.

  And this was when suddenly, aged eleven, Stuart ran away.

  During the whole of the next five years, there was only one time when Judith and Paul recaptured Stuart once he’d got out.

  It was ‘an awful night, absolutely bloody awful. Horrendous,’ Judith remembers. Snow and sleet stormed down. Drifts blocked roads, broke telephone cables. By the war memorial an oak cracked and exploded against the street, gouging a crater in the Tarmac. ‘We’d been all round. Round and round and round, and when we came back we went an unusual way, because the tree was blocking the road, and we caught him in the headlights.’

  ‘Get in!’ shouted Judith. ‘We’ve been up for two bloody hours looking for you!’

  But, she says, ‘he never ever told us why he used to run away. You’d ask him, Why, Stuart?’

  ‘I don’t want to live here.’

  ‘Why? Is it the new baby? Is it because you want to be at normal school? Is it your real dad, living in Portsmouth?’

  ‘I don’t want to live here.’

  ‘But what’s the reason? There’s got to be a reason, Stuart.’

  ‘I want to go in care, I want to go into a children’s home.’

  20

  ‘No!’ shouts Stuart, grabbing the pages of the last chapter (he is catching up with me) from my desk. ‘Don’t you never learn?’

  He storms around my study, kicks over a pile of books, waving fifteen sheets of typescript.

  ‘What you on about, Alexander? You say…“This is the next surprise: they are excellent.” That’s me school reports, you’re talking about, what isn’t excellent. “It’s no wonder Stuart didn’t trust them.” It’s not them what I don’t trust, Alexander, it’s you. “Nobody could connect the man now loping across the city with two suicide scars around his neck with…” Did you read them reports?’

  ‘Of course I read them reports.’

  ‘And was they all good? Was they?’

  He has now snatched the original school documents and is flapping these about like a flyswat.

  ‘Not all.’

  ‘Exactly!’ There is glee in his voice. ‘ “Extremely disruptive”…“Very distractable”,’ he exposes. ‘And ’ere.’ He gives the pages an extra stab with his finger. ‘ “He can be most uncoo…prara…tive and unpleasant to his classmates and adults.” Why haven’t you put those fucking bits in?’

  ‘I di—’

  ‘You don’t get it, Alexander, do you?’

  ‘Bec—’

  ‘You haven’t been listening, have you?’

  ‘I bl—’

  ‘You haven’t done no “research”.’

  ‘Whe—’

  ‘You can’t even be bothered to fucking read a couple of school reports properly, can you?’

  ‘Yo—’

  ‘And now you’re going to fucking make me out in this book like it was all good and then loads of things went wrong, that’s–’

  ‘Per—’

  ‘Just talk, talk, talk with you, in’it? Yeah, you got the house, the education, the money, the fucking past what weren’t full of abuse, you already got all that on me, and now you want me all tied up in explanations. That’s what fucking people like you want, in’it? Because then it’s all sorted, in’it? “Stuart? Done him. Stuart? Yeah, explained him.” But you can’t. I haven’t had it that simple. Why should you get to put reasons on it when I’ve fucking lived it and still can’t? These two scars?’ He clenches his fists beside his throat and puts on a poncey voice, as if mimicking some faux swagger in my writing: ‘These two fucking “suicide scars”, as you call them, is these “suicide scars” simple? Is that, oh, he was good, then he was bad, and here are the reasons, one to fucking five? Tick them off, make them into more numbers, put them in a government speech, put them on the telly.’

  Will the madman never stop? Waving his fists around near my grandmother’s china, just as he ranted at me at the Home Office, clanging on dustbins, peering in letter boxes, p
retending to be me looking for ‘me simple fucking answers’. Now he’s shrieking I haven’t done my research! Three years of effort and a whole fucking week in the fucking university library reading Peter and Jane fucking Ladybird books, Ladybird books!

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ I suddenly explode. ‘So what? So there are one or two bad comments in those reports. All children have their bad days. That’s not interesting. When did you lose the good, that’s what I want to find out. When did you become fucking useless? Look at you now, why couldn’t you spend just ten minutes of your time, even when you were ten, without turning it into a fucking world war?’

  ‘Alexander, it was my childhood,’ Stuart spits, wrenching the study door open.

  ‘Was,’ I yell back. ‘It’s mine now.’

  Stuart does not storm out of the house. A moment after going into the corridor I hear his heavy tread on the steps. He is clonking upstairs. Goodness knows why–there is nothing up there for him except the kitchen and the television. Perhaps he wants to test my telly out on the wall.

  I sit back and listen to his slow progress: clonk, clonk, pause, clonk, clonk, pause. I imagine him hauling on the banister. When he was little, the effort of it regularly used to pull the handrail off the wall of his mother’s house. Clonk, clonk, pause. The sound reverberates like someone banging on the central-heating pipe. Now I can hear him in the room above me: my housemate’s office. He has a heavier tread on one side, I am surprised to notice. The left side? Because he is left-handed and his left side is stronger, like a prop? Or the right, because it falls to the ground with a greater thud? Clonk, clonk, clonk, clonk. He approaches the window.

  I wish he’d throw himself out.

  It would be messy and create a fuss, just when I want to finish writing this book, and to get to the window he would have to climb on my housemate’s spare double bed, which is encrusted in Housemate’s socks and underpants. In biography, most of the time, the real person is a nuisance. One wants them out of the way. If only they’d stop muddying the waters with inconsistencies, denials, forgetfulness and different interpretations of your language, you could extract their essence and be off down the publisher’s. The heart of it is probably this: the subject fears that if you get what they are down on the page then you have debased them, so they flap about like aboriginals claiming photographs steal their soul. What, me? That’s all there is to me? Fuck off! Biff! Take that!