Stuart

by Alexander Masters

  I hear the squeak of the bed and start in my chair.

  Then silence. I sit back again. Why would he want to jump? Because I’ve pinched his childhood? Because we’ve had a tiff? I don’t think so.

  The bed squeaks a second time.

  But again, a long silence follows and I relax.

  Then the rumble of the sash window shudders through the walls.

  ‘STUART!’

  There’s a smash, something bursts; the bed sears halfway across the floor.

  ‘STUART!’

  ‘Alexander…’

  ‘Stuart?’

  ‘Alexander…’

  I look round at the wreckage of glass. ‘What?’

  ‘You want to speak to your landlord about that window, you do. That might have chopped me fucking head off.’

  ‘What a pity.’

  I step across, crunching the fragments. The cords on this sash window are broken. Stuart had unlocked it, pushed the lower half up to look out at my balcony beneath, removed his hand, and promptly it had crashed back down again. Only one of the panes has shattered, but it’s thrown glass splinters over the whole room.

  Together we clear the nastier pieces out of Housemate’s underwear. Stuart appears at a loss what to do with what he picks up, stuffs one or two big fragments in his pocket and piles the rest in his right hand in the same way that he stores cigarette ash until it’s formed a tepee. Then he clumps to the kitchen across the hall. ‘Ooooh! It’s disgusting in here. Don’t you never wash up? This cooker–it needs throwing out. Aaauugh, the grill, what d’ya last cook on that? Dog food? Where’s the bin? Alexander, it’s got mould on the outside, how’d you get fucking mould on the outside?’ There is the sound of tinkling shards, then a pause as I imagine him peering closer. ‘Is it the same as the stuff on the inside?

  Stuart!

  ‘It’s a shame,’ Stuart concludes. ‘You could do something with this house. Put foreign students in it. Chinese ones. They’re small.’

  Downstairs again, reseated in my room, Stuart says, ‘Sorry, Alexander, didn’t mean to upset you, didn’t mean to be rude. You know–memories.’ He puts down my mug and gives a spiral gesture with his hand that suggests a landscape of bafflement. ‘It is hard for me sometimes.’

  For the next half-hour, as happens only in the best moments, we sit in silence.

  ‘Meant to tell you,’ he remarks at last, forcing himself up and arranging his jacket and goods. ‘I got a date for me hearing–it’s only pleas and directions–about the incident in me flat. Remember, with the helicopter?’

  Of course I remember. Forty police officers, knife fight, barricades…

  ‘That’s a point.’ It’s suddenly dawned on me–the little fact that’s been niggling away at the back of my mind during the whole of this interview. ‘Stuart, why are you here? Shouldn’t you be in prison?’

  The lobby of Cambridge Magistrates’ Court part surrounds a huge, windowless, pale brick central block: these are the courtrooms, their entrances set out in an impressive, Orwellian line along one side. The crowd of accused slouching around in spivish suits is mostly young, male and lower class. Some have brought their families. A couple in a small recess are crying. Two women, just old enough to be out of gymslips, have prams. One group laugh and joke, and call out to each other as if they were just in the dining hall at school. Stuart thinks they might be part of the infamous Gypsy Smiths, cousins of his old mate Smithy. Every now and then there is a waft of alcohol and sweat.

  Across the room a man in a baseball cap has slid so far down in his chair that his body pokes out parallel to the floor like a plank of wood. ‘Fuckin’ this, fuckin’ that,’ he grumbles. ‘Fuckin’ disgrace.’

  ‘They don’t look very upset to be here,’ I remark.

  ‘It’s just the magistrates’, in’it?’ says Stuart absently. He has changed into a lime-green shirt and outsize tie, as if the brightness and scale of this propriety might hide a fraction of his offence. ‘Fines, setting Crown Court dates, pleas and directions, which means, like, if you plead guilty or not, bound-overs, stupid things. Wait till they get to the Crown Court. That’s the next step–when they get sent down.’

  ‘How long before that happens?’

  ‘Months. It can sometimes be so long after that you’ve forgotten what you’ve done. With any luck, I’ll get time for a spring holiday in Wales.’

  In, out, in, out. All day long: in, out, in, out. The pistons of the law.

  The oldest people are the wardens. Every few minutes they receive bits of paper from an usher containing notes from the court, and shake their heads in disbelief. The solicitors, fresh and sober, march between courtrooms and the lobby in a self-absorbed manner. Stuart’s one looks as if he hasn’t started shaving yet.

  What happened that night in the flat, as far as I can make out, is this:

  One evening, in the local pub, Stuart called his next-door neighbour a poofter.

  ‘Nah,’ interrupts Stuart, ‘I didn’t call him a poofter.’

  Sorry. Stuart didn’t call his next-door neighbour a poofter.

  Stuart nods. ‘That’s the whole point. He thought I’d called him a poofter but I didn’t. He just sticks his head out his window and goes, “Who you calling a fucking butty boy, then?” Then he’s come storming out, arms all in the way, eyes on fire.’ Next-Door Neighbour is an army-loving man: the sort of lad who dreams of disembowelling disaffected members of the Saudi royal family with his teeth.

  ‘And you hadn’t said anything to him of the sort?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘So what had you done?’

  ‘Just asked his mate if he was a poofter.’

  There are times when Stuart has the emotional acuity of a frog.

  ‘But at the time,’ Stuart protests, the mate ‘just laughed and said, “Don’t be stupid,” and told me he suffered from premature ejaculation.’ In fact, Stuart thought that this exchange improved everything wonderfully, because, as he readily admitted to the friend, ‘I suffer from the same complaint meself. It is quite interesting, really.

  ‘Did I tell you,’ Stuart remarks to me as we’re waiting in the magistrates’ lobby, ‘they’re considering upping the charge to “attempted murder”?’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘Because the fella says I tried to cut his head off.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes, and if the bastard hadn’t of moved I’d have got him, too.’

  Stuart’s solicitor, carrying a clipboard, breaks free of the flow of officials, strides across the floor, and crouches on the floor in front of us.

  Stuart agrees he is guilty of ‘affray’ (‘I hold me hands up to that’), he denies everything and anything else, especially the charges of ‘threats to kill’ and ‘attempted murder’.

  ‘Yeah, because at the end of the day, he’s got no marks on him, so obviously I didn’t cut him. I might have fucking lost it and gone a bit mad and smashed me flat up and got all them Old Bill out of bed, but the fact that he ain’t got no mark on him proves I didn’t go overboard.’

  Solicitor Boy taps his list.

  ‘A couple of things I want to sort out before we go in. In one of the depositions, the police say they could smell smoking oil when they arrived at the scene. What was that?’

  ‘Chip fat.’

  ‘Ah, chip fat. Of course.’ He taps some more.

  ‘I saw a police officer outside the window. My head had already gone and I believe I had to burn the Devil out of me. It was then that I put the chip pan on. I was intending to harm myself and towards killing myself was going to pour the fat over my head. Before I could harm myself with the chip pan the electricity cut out. To self-harm I cut myself and started drinking my own blood and locked the door.’

  Another question concerns Stuart’s bail conditions, which require that he lives with his mother and stepfather, at the pub they run in Midston. The police are goggle-eyed that Stuart has got bail at all.

  ‘But you want to chang
e them so you don’t have to live with your parents all the time,’ says Solicitor Boy, as if talking to someone very spoilt.

  ‘I can see why the prosecution’s not happy about it,’ agrees Stuart. ‘But, me being an alcoholic, it just don’t seem sensible to make me stay in a pub.’

  Solicitor Boy makes another tick, taps the clipboard thoughtfully, then gets up and strides back to rejoin the stream of fellow lawyers hurrying between doors, looking neither to right nor left. Stuart and I wander across to the allocation board, then into his assigned courtroom, which is not at all how I remember the place from my one experience in the dock. The room in my memory was a tawny, squeezed-up Tenniel drawing, and the magistrate, high up, had hung over me like a cloud. ‘Take your hands out of your pockets, young man,’ he had boomed.

  This room is spacious and light. The sun glances in from a spread of windows above and illuminates the considerate, friendly woman presiding at the pale wood bench in front. We are a few minutes early for Stuart’s hearing, and are gestured by an usher to the back row of the visitors’ seats, where we sit down and arrange our expressions into ones of respectful attentiveness. At times like this, each display of politeness seems like a reason to hope. The case before Stuart’s is being finished off. It concerns a portly man, ‘widely respected in his community’, who’d ‘uncharacteristically’ punched a total stranger in the face in the toilets at Tesco’s. He looks as though his usual method would be to use a sherry bottle. He gets three months’ community service.

  Half an hour later we are back outside, Stuart undoing his tie as if shaking off an insect. The magistrate has agreed that his case is outside her domain, and has asked that it be referred to the Crown Court as a matter of urgency, given the dangers of keeping a knife-wielding sociopathic alcoholic confined to a public house.

  ‘How long do you think you’ll get?’

  ‘Depends on the judge on the day. If he’s had an argument with his missus, he could hand me a ten.’

  One of the dealers caught in the Ruth and John raid had been expecting seven years. It was his second offence. A class-A drug. The judge was a known hard man. But on the morning of the sentencing, the judge didn’t show up. He had to have a hip operation. A softie court recorder took over, and the dealer got away with a three. I know it’s a trite observation, but it always shocks me: there is very little connection between law and justice.

  ‘It’s got to start at six,’ Stuart reflects. ‘Six plus. Me last two were for five, and I still haven’t learnt me lesson, have I?’

  Cambridge Magistrates’ Court is a hundred feet above street level, a vertiginous building on top of the city centre multi-storey car park. The lift back to street level smells of urine and ash. It is ironic that Level D, where the homeless sleep, is in the same car park, four storeys further down: the greatest source of prison fodder efficiently connected to the institution set up to put them there by a lift. We step outside. There is a clutter of grubby types nearby: one begging next the telephone box, another entangled in blankets and beer cans against the wall, a third playing the penny whistle–all considerately trying to save the police and judiciary the bother of having to go the extra four floors lower, to Level D.

  Stuart nods at the penny-whistle player.

  ‘Funny, me and a mate was talking in the Man in the Moon the other night about what become of all the people we used to know when we was in care. So many of them ended up on the streets. Matt Starr, he become a junkie, I seen him gouched out on a bench last Saturday; Ali Crompton, junkie, six months for shoplifting, gets beaten up by her bloke reglier; Timmy what’s his name, Harris, dead, a car crash, and his brother Mike, but a different car crash, after a burglary; Julie Dover, selling herself, to pay for a habit. Eight out of ten of them are junkies, done bird, or dead. Two brothers have been charged with murder. One’s already done two fours for GBH–he got a reduced to manslaughter for someone on the park. The other’s done little bits of bird, and he got a six-year for stabbing his wife eighteen times.’

  ‘Did you know which ones in care were going to pull through, sort themselves out, and which ones wouldn’t? The man who stabbed his wife–did he, when you knew him, seem like the sort of man who’d end up doing that?’

  ‘No, but that’s what I keep saying to you. I never looked at things in that way. That weren’t how I lived. Because you’ve lived such a different, fucking straightforward life, you’re asking me to think like you’d think, and put perspectives on things. I can’t do that. I can’t even say I knew of any purpose I had in life meself.’

  We walk on in silence, through the civic vulgarity of Lion Yard shopping centre, where ‘Topple’ died, past the Big Issue seller who’s called Sean and injects in his stomach, and the Baker’s Oven bakery and tearooms, on the roof of which ‘Scouser’ sleeps. This shop has good chocolate éclairs in its bins, which the homeless eat, although sometimes–if the manager’s had a bad day, or one of the rough sleepers has been particularly untidy or abusive when rifling through–they are deliberately mixed with floor dust and glass.

  ‘Put it this way,’ I say, ‘if you had to pick one thing only, one incident involving yourself that has made you become what you are, what would that be?’

  ‘The day I discovered violence.’

  He always says it like that.

  ‘The day I discovered violence’–as if he had unearthed a great treasure.

  21

  ‘A lot of the madness now does stem back from when I was ten, eleven, twelve.’

  The Discovery of Violence: Aged 10–12

  ‘Stu Spag! Stu Spag! Stu Spag!’

  ‘Wobble Foot!’

  ‘Spaghetti Legs!’

  Bobby and Johnny Grimes roaring out of the clouds, arms wide, balletic swoops across the street, shrieking like Stukas. Midston, 1979. Location: outside VG Stores.

  ‘Divvy alert, nine o’clock right.’

  ‘Looks like a bad ’un, Dad in nick ’un, has it up the bum ’un, spag on brain ’un, eliminate!’

  ‘Bandy Boy!’

  ‘Bendy Boy!’

  ‘Skeeeeaaaaahhhh…Divvy, Paki, divvy, Paki, divvy, Paki…’

  ‘Giiiimp-eee!’

  ‘Nnnngguuuoooo…Vegybles, vegybles, vegybles…’

  One day Stuart, when he was older, would learn that he could speed up his legs by stabbing them. ‘ “Live, legs, fucking live,” I says to them. Key, pen, whatever I’ve got in me pocket at the time. Just wound them and hurt them, to make them go. “Live, legs, live.” ’

  But on The Day He Discovered Violence they plodded.

  ‘Get him! Pull his hair! Break his nose!’ cried these ghastly Lord of the Flies children. ‘Trip him! Kick him! Eat his eyes!’

  Plod, plod, plod, went Stuart’s legs. Yard after yard, minute by minute. Up Fore Street, North Street, Fenner’s Green, the churchyard, Spense Road, the river, Castle Hill.

  ‘What do you call a bloke who’s got no arms or legs who is floating in the sea?’

  ‘Bob!’

  ‘What do you call a bloke with no arms and legs who sits in a bath of boiling hot Bovril?’

  ‘STU!’

  Plod, plod, plod, went Stuart’s legs.

  Outside the church gate, the Grimes’ sister joined in and fluttered behind like a flag, throwing her polka-dot skirt as high as her shoulders with every skip.

  Stuart battered through a hedge, down a path, across the park, the way behind bellowing with bloodlust.

  ‘Three women, all up the duff, right?’ whispered Bobby, trotting now, two steps behind. ‘Buns in the oven? First one, she says, “I’m making this lovely pink sweater because I hope I’m gonna have a baby girl.” Second one, she says, “I’m making this lovely blue sweater, because I hope I’m gonna have a little baby boy.” But the third one, she holds up her sweater, and says, “Well, I hope I get a spastic, because I’ve fucked up these arms.” ’

  ‘Stuuuuuaaarrrt…weee’rrrreee coming to kiiiii-llllll you,’ whispered Johnny in his other ear. S
oft and long and amorous.

  Stepfather Paul was making tea when Stuart finally clattered into the kitchen.

  Yet instead of giving sympathy, he also turned on the boy.

  ‘He told me that if I didn’t go out and stick up for meself, he’d fucking belt us one,’ recalls Stuart.

  ‘No,’ protests Paul, ‘I never would have said that. I never would have said I’d hit him myself.’

  1980: Larry Holmes knocked out Muhammad Ali; Henbit won the Grand National on only three sound legs.

  Stuart Shorter, four foot three in his nylon socks, opened the kitchen door, walked up the garden path, and smashed his forehead into Bobby the bigger bully’s face.

  In Stuart’s eyes, the whole of his life pivots on this incident. It was the unexpected moment at which he found some power, and the weakling became strong. In his ‘murder story’ like ‘what Tom Clancy writes’ the head-butting of Bobby is equivalent to the moment at which the timer on the anthrax bomb to serve up the president starts ticking down to zero, only Stuart’s good character is not going to be saved. It is possible it still could be saved, if Stuart didn’t have the luck of Job. But in this murder story the baddies have a few more tricks up their sleeves. Not the least of these is that Stuart is not sure, and never has been sure, whether or not he is one of the bad guys himself.

  The next six months after his triumph over the Grimes boys were a feast of head-butts. ‘Honestly, I got X-rayed a year ago and they said I had a hairline fracture in me skull what had been there since I was ten, twelve years old.’

  ‘Doesn’t it knock you out?’ I ask. ‘If I hit my head against someone it’d knock me out.’