Stuart

by Alexander Masters

  ‘Yeah, cos that’s the sort of bloke you are, in’it? Bang! You’re on the floor and the other fella’s fucking wondering if he hit you or bumped into a fly.’

  ‘But it must hurt,’ I reply stiffly.

  ‘Not if you do it right. Chin down, look up. If you can get hold of the fella it helps, then push off and fucking whack back. Breaks his nose every time if you do it right. I’ve had me nose split open, bumps on me eye as big as an egg when somebody else has head-butted me.

  ‘Yeah, alright,’ he adds reflectively, ‘sometimes you do get a bit of a headache afterwards, cos your brain do get mashed inside your bonce when you make contact, and the Discovery Channel says your skull isn’t smooth inside like what you’d expect, where it’s got these sharp ridges. But it only lasts an hour.’

  In a fight, Stuart would tell his enemies to hit harder, or to kill him, or to use an iron bar since their fists were so feeble. When he was being kicked in the face, he’d call out: ‘Is that the best you can do? What are you, a fucking girl?’

  The Grimes brothers tried to restore their community standing. They arranged a rematch in the scrapyard and put the word about that Nutty Stu, the fella with all the fresh bumps on his head, was about to be crushed.

  Children from all over the village were dotted about the heaps, sitting on old cars, in refrigerators, on discarded armchairs among the flies, when Stuart arrived. Nobody liked Spaggy Stu. Bobby and Johnny were standing in the middle, ‘armed in steel-toecapped boots’ according to Stuart, cracking jokes. Mountainous stacks of garbage reared up on either side. Stuart was barefoot.

  ‘Had to be, didn’t I? Couldn’t move in boots, could I? Too heavy for me legs.’

  He walked straight up to Bobby and head-butted him.

  Blood everywhere. Fight over.

  What I admire about this triumph is its lack of gentlemanliness. Stuart didn’t want honour or applause or to play by the rules. He had no intention of squaring up and indulging in fight foreplay. He wanted victory, so he took it. Those stupid Grimes boys didn’t know that a fight does not need to have a beginning, only an end. Not just madness, but lawlessness makes people frightened.

  Johnny ran away. So Stuart walked after him, across the metal-strewn scrapyard, past the silenced, now-watchful children, over the twisting road, along the new-mown bowling green, right up to the Grimeses’ front door, where Johnny had arrived minutes earlier, armed himself, and ‘was standing at the bottom of the stairs with an axe’.

  ‘Well, do it! Go on, do it! Hit me with it!’ Stuart coaxed.

  Johnny’s father phoned Stuart’s mother up at that moment. ‘He’s a fuckin’ nutter,’ he says, ‘he needs locking up, he’s a danger to all our kids.’

  ‘So, it was the children of Midston who began the process of messing you up?’ I conclude.

  ‘No. That was just kids being kids, bullying. Lots of kids get bullied and they come through it. They become responsible. But me–I decided to make out I was mad.’

  Six months later Stuart realised he was no longer in control of his mind.

  On the afternoon he discovered violence and head-butted Bobby, Stuart released or created (he can never decide which) an aspect of personality that for a period he toyed with at arm’s length, like one of those fictional friends that imaginative children have. But then it grew too strong for him and became himself.

  ‘Somebody who’s educated could probably control it better, because they’ve got a stronger mind. The more I try and control it the worse it gets. There’s no set pattern for my rage now. I don’t even ever see it coming. I have these conversations with meself, where the more I try and calm myself often the worse I get. That’s the bit I hate. I lie there fantasising, talking to myself, having mad conversations. I won’t get out of bed for a couple of days, won’t go out the house, won’t undo the windows, won’t answer the door, won’t answer the phone. Then I start getting really paranoid. Well, I call it paranoid, but the doctors keep saying to me, that’s not paranoid, it’s anxiety. I beg to differ.’

  By the time I got to know him, Stuart was trying to get a psychiatrist to say he was insane. If he could pin down his mental state with that label, there might be a drug that would bring him back to ordinariness.

  Instead, Stuart’s doctor diagnosed him with borderline personality disorder (BPD)–sometimes called ‘Jekyll and Hyde syndrome’. BPD is not bona fide madness, but it has a death rate comparable to some forms of cancer. BPD is called ‘borderline’ not because it is less than a personality disorder, but for the opposite reason: because it is on the verge of madness. It exists in the shadow of lunacy.

  By the 18th century, a few doctors were beginning to study the people in asylums, and discovered that some of these patients had, by no means, lost the powers of reason: they had a normal grasp of what was real and what wasn’t, but they suffered terribly from emotional anguish through their impulsiveness, ragefulness, and a general difficulty in self-government caused others to suffer. They seemed to live in a borderland between outright insanity and normal behaviour and feeling.

  These people, who were neither insane nor mentally healthy, continued to puzzle psychiatrists for the next one hundred years. It was in this ‘borderland’ that society and psychiatry came to place its criminals, alcoholics, suicidal people, emotionally unstable and behaviourally unpredictable people–to separate them off both from those with more clearly defined psychiatric illnesses at one border (those, for example, whose illness we have come to call schizophrenia and manic-depressive or ‘bipolar’ disorder) and from ‘normal’ people at the other border…

  At first the students of Freud thought that the talking cure [psychoanalysis] would help all mentally ill people except those who were seriously psychotic. But over the years they found themselves dealing with some patients who were in the same ‘borderland’ described before: people who were not psychotic, but who did not respond to the talking cure in the way the therapists expected. Gradually, therapists began to define this ‘borderline’ group not so much by their symptoms as by the special problems that were underneath the symptoms, and by the effects these people had upon others. The symptoms of borderline patients are similar to those for which most people seek psychiatric help: depression, mood swings, the use and abuse of drugs and alcohol as a means of trying to feel better, obsessions, phobias, feelings of emptiness and loneliness…But, in addition, the borderline people showed great difficulties in controlling ragefulness.*

  Two other symptoms of BPD are self-mutilation and inability to recall autobiographical memories.

  There is one characteristic of BPD I have not seen in my reading about the subject, which makes the popular name of ‘Jekyll and Hyde syndrome’ particularly appropriate to Stuart. It is not just that Stuart’s personality appears split between peace and rageousness, but that he first became unbalanced because he discovered his Hyde (just as Henry Jekyll did in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel), and for a while controlled it and relished the freedom from weakness that this violent side brought. Then he discovered also, as Henry Jekyll describes it, ‘that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse’.

  ‘From the day I found violence,’ says Stuart, ‘I felt fifty times more strong. For once I felt normal, physically fucking normal, because I had this strength. And after you’ve been bullied and pushed about, and called spastic, is that you learn at a very early age that violence, and the fear of violence and madness, scare people, and people respect you a bit.’

  If he deliberately got himself into rages, he found he could even ‘get through the pain barrier’ and no longer feel a thing in a fight. ‘Yeah, violence and madness, people respect you a bit. Trouble is, as I got older I lost control and learnt it was the wrong type of respect.’

  During Stuart’s last two years at the Roger Ascham school for the disabled–up to, including, and after the day on which he splattered Bobby’s face–he oscillated increasingly out
of control. If he did well in one subject one year, he set out to destroy it the next. In English:

  Yet, in maths: ‘Very pleasing work this year’, ‘tremendous progress’. ‘A likeable lad, although he and trouble are not strangers!’ writes the head teacher. Stuart was not a natural delinquent, he believed. ‘When he is good, he is very, very good…’

  The following year, in English, he ‘tries hard’. His ‘effort has been inconsistent’, but ‘I have been particularly pleased with his work on play-writing’. But now maths has collapsed:

  There seemed, from the outside, even knowing about his discovery of violence, to be no rhyme or reason to the boy.

  In fact, there was an explanation for this erratic behaviour, which is now recognised as symptomatic of a certain type of distress.

  Between these two pieces of paper, Stuart’s last two reports from the Roger Ascham school, his affectionate brother and his babysitter had begun to rape him.

  22

  Spring turns to summer. Things do not change. Stuart is given a fresh car and ‘wraps it through a roundabout’.

  ‘Truly. The fucking trees was poking out me head.’

  He finds a girlfriend. ‘Walking back from the pub I was, and she ’twas on the other side,’ he says blushingly, using oddly poetic speech. “Fancy a kiss, luv?” I says. And she says: “Yes, please!” Mad, in’it? Says she’s been bang in love with me since she was a little ’un.’

  ‘What? Through all the troubles? Homelessness? Prison? Care? Is she all right in the head?’

  ‘Wondered that meself. Cor, big, healthy girl, if you know what I mean. She don’t half wear me out.’

  Mixing Viagra and Ecstasy, in proportions one to one and a half, he has discovered a cure for his premature ejaculation. It makes you ‘fucking blow off the walls’.

  A second car is abandoned on the A14. He and I and his new girlfriend, who turns out to be a psychiatric nurse, amble across the fields to try to jump-start it, but the engine is dead. For several weeks I pass this car-shaped piece of metal on my way to visit Stuart at his mother and stepfather’s pub, where he continues to be under police curfew. It sits untouched in the lay-by as if the owner has just stepped into the bushes for a pee. Then one night vandals set fire to the seats. For a few weeks longer it clings on, blackened, lopsided, aching with burns. Then it is gone. Nothing left behind except three smudges and a handful of windscreen safety glass, swept neatly into a pile by the kerb.

  Stuart is sometimes full of balm during these months: the plaintiff in the knife attack case has gone missing, the secondary witness is reluctant to testify, Stuart’s solicitor has discovered an inconsistency in the prosecution statements. At other periods he is back on the smack, ‘doing me nut in’: two more witnesses have been found and his barrister has forgotten his name. He has been put on the temporary shortlist for a Crown Court appearance eight times, which means he must ring up the magistrates’ office every night for two weeks to find out if tomorrow he will or will not get his day in front of the jury and be sent to prison for the rest of his life. Each time, the fortnight has passed without his case being picked, so he is taken off the shortlist and can relax for a month or two longer. The attempted murder claim has come up again. It looks again likely to be added to his charges.

  Autumn approaches. ‘If I wanted to find out where the homeless sleep and count them,’ I ask Stuart one day, ‘where would I go?’

  ‘No use asking me. What might be the place one week isn’t used next week because the police have come down heavy on it, or there’s building works or someone’s upset somebody else and it’s fucking madness tonight where it used to be really peaceful yesterday.’

  I have an idea for an article, I explain. The city council housing department has done a street count of the Cambridge homeless and found only nineteen rough sleepers. Everybody knows this is nonsense–the figure is a lie, a fudge or an ineptitude. But a lot of reward depends on it. Keep the street count low and central government provides grant money and plaudits; lose it into the twenties and thirties, and central government, which operates according to a sort of Soviet Union-cum-Lewis Carroll logic, withdraws funding and gets nasty.*

  Cambridge, the homeless, hints of corruption: with that combination I’ll be able to sell a newspaper article and make a few bob out of the homeless myself.

  Except for one trouble: to do the research I have to do a street count myself. I need to know where the homeless sleep, especially the better hidden places, where the city council might not bother to look.

  ‘Who else can I ask? I’ve tried the outreach workers. They’ll lose their jobs. The hostel staff ditto. Everybody complains, nobody can afford to take part.’ There is another reason Stuart doesn’t feel able to help me personally: yesterday he tried to stab his stepfather and is feeling the worse for wear.

  I have been to several of what are called ‘agency meetings’ between local-government representatives and charity staff, which follow a sickeningly predictable pattern: preceded by chin-jutting resolutions by disaffected staff ‘to tell it as it is’, concluded with angry walks back to the office muttering ‘and that’s when I almost said to her…’ and filled up in between by an hour and a half of toadying.

  It is no wonder the government doesn’t know what it is about–their control of statutory funding for charities means charities have to toe the political line and no one reveals the truth. Altogether I am at a loss. How can I find out where the homeless sleep?

  ‘Alexander, what are you like?’ retorts Stuart. ‘Think again.’

  I think again and am left with the same answer.

  ‘Ask somebody on the streets. Ask a homeless person.’

  It is odd how, even in the depths of supposed concern, one forgets that these people are capable of usefulness.

  It was at the courts in King’s Lynn that Justice Jonathan Haworth (may the shame of it be inscribed forever upon his memory) directed the jury to convict Ruth and John. It is to the courts in King’s Lynn that Stuart is finally to be taken to trial. The date is fixed, his appearance checked, verified, validated, confirmed, checked again.

  The same people who decided that Ruth and John were guilty of ‘knowingly allowing the supply of a heroin on the premises’–despite Ruth and John arranging regular meetings with the police (which the police usually did not attend), producing a drugs policy that was sent to the police for approval (to which the police never replied), banning people for even suspicious conversations that might relate to drug purchases, and on a number of occasions calling the police to get them to remove suspected drug dealers from the premises (to which the police usually responded four hours later, or, once or twice, so long after the summons that the charity had closed for the day)–these same sorts of King’s Lynn people will also make up Stuart’s jury. It will be the same judge, too, awful in wig and robes.

  We take the train up together.

  The lime-green shirt of Stuart’s magistrates’ court appearance has been replaced with a conservative deep blue item, three sizes too large. His shoes, his smartest pair, are black Doc Martens with the scuff marks drowned in polish. Because the campaign’s success in getting Ruth and John released so quickly has been a mighty slap in Mr Justice Howarth’s face, we wonder if he might remember Stuart and decide to have him executed.

  Yet Stuart is in good spirits. He is about to be convicted of a ghastly, violent offence after two previous convictions for ghastly violent offences, at a time when the Home Secretary, a man who shops his own son to the police, swaggers about with his baseball jargon policy of ‘Three Strikes and You’re Out’. After the verdict, Stuart will have one last week of freedom before sentencing. The term is likely to be fifteen years, possibly longer. Yet he is treating the whole thing as if we’re on a day trip to north Norfolk to play in the penny arcades. How can this high-strung, morbidly imaginative man remain sanguine?

  The train jangles among the flat, black-rich fields of Cambridgeshire and we talk about ramming cars into
brick walls.

  Did I know, he says, that the best stolen cars are ‘rung’?

  No. ‘Rung’, as in a missed telephone call? ‘Wrung’, as in what I did this morning to my towel after I’d dropped it in the bath?

  ‘Nah, r-u-n-g, when the identity’s changed. Like, you’d get a car what’s a write-off, and go and nick another car what isn’t, and turn the write-off into a new one,’ explains Stuart with the confident air that this expels all misunderstanding.

  ‘How can you turn the write-off into a new one?’

  ‘Right, insurance companies have auctions of cars what have been written off, cos dealers can buy them to break down for spares?’

  I nod.

  ‘So you’d buy a smashed-up Ford Cosworth, go and nick a different car, change all the plates, change the numbers, give the nicked one a respray. If you know what you’re doing, you can turn what looks an ultimate smashed-up never-driveable car again roadworthy.’

  Clear as second-hand engine oil. Stuart’s meaning is, I think, as follows: a) scrap dealers buy smashed-up, broken-down cars at insurance company auctions to use for spare parts; b) thieves can also buy these cars; c) to ‘ring’ a car (is ‘ring’ the present tense of ‘rung’?) thieves steal a good car from the roadside, take all the distinguishing marks off it and attach the marks to the smashed-up car; d) because the smashed-up, broken-down car with no windscreen and only two tyres now has the good car’s identifying marks, you can drive it again.

  Immediately, as Bertie Wooster would say, I put my finger on the flaw in the argument.

  ‘So, you’ve put all that effort in to turn a useless car with one set of numbers into another useless car with a different set of stolen numbers? Why not simply take the good car and change the numbers over to that one?’

  ‘How can you ring the good one? It’s fucked.’

  ‘What? No! It’s the other one that’s fucked. The one you bought at auction.’