Stuart

by Alexander Masters

  With an equally brutal shift of pace, in an instant it was over. The bus shelter was empty. The rag bundles were already halfway across the park, or through the shopping arcade, scuffing off in their separate ways.

  Sam took me across the whole of the city on this night, and again on the next, and again, just to be sure I’ve got an unimpeachable average, on the third. We get on well. He claims his Gypsy family threw him out of Scotland after he moved in with a non-Gypsy girlfriend. ‘She comes from a real posh family, laddie. Wheeee! You should see her mum’s house. Worth a million!’ He is a patient, gentle, intelligent man.

  Thirty-one sleeping out.

  We poke under bins, wander into graveyards, look under sheets of plywood in the builders’ yards, run up and down the multi-storey car parks, tiptoe among the derelict changing rooms of the public swimming pool.

  Thirty-one is over one and a half times what the city council is claiming.

  Sam is a first-class guide. He has a strong theatrical sense, not just in the way he’s constantly emphasising the poignancy of people’s stories–shrewdly telling me lies on one or two or seventy-five occasions–but also in the way he sees himself. He is wrapped up in more defensive pretences than anyone I have ever met. He is a guardian of his people, a man on the edge of being murdered, a selfless boyfriend, an exile because of his sense of honour. Never is he just a tossed-out junkie. I suspect that his voice broadens an octave whenever he sees me.

  I write the piece for the Guardian. It is published as a lead feature a month later.

  I am a Social Reformer.

  ‘Oh, right,’ says Stuart, handing the article back to me.

  Does this mean he dislikes it? I wonder, uneasily. He is not given to compliments about anything I’ve written.

  I fold the pages back up and we return to what we had been doing before I first took them out of my folder, namely, waiting to see the Cambridge MP, Anne Campbell. After numerous delays and cancellations, Stuart’s appointment has finally come through and we are sitting on an oak bench in a hushed, wainscoted corridor of City Hall.

  Me, brimming with journalistic belligerence; Stuart, respectful.

  Lower-middle-class vulgarity, the hallmark of British local politics, is stamped all over the place, from the industrial carpet tiles to the soft-drinks machines propped against the oak panelling and photographs of important figures in cheap business suits. Amid this, Stuart is a twenty-first-century David Wilkie painting: determined social outcast, beskinned with tattoos, going to face his ever-approachable New Labour MP with rough, manly honesty–a heart-warming portrait of true democracy.

  His feet dangle from the bench, not quite touching the ground.

  Ms Campbell’s private assistant comes out bearing a shiny black folder.

  ‘Mr Shorter and guest?’ she snips.

  We nod.

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t come in.’

  We look boggled.

  ‘Because Mr Shorter lives in Waterbeach, which means he is not from Anne’s constituency–the protocol is quite particular about that. He must first go to his own MP.’

  ‘But he has an important issue to discuss relating to “Anne’s” constituency–it does not concern his own constituency.’

  ‘All the same…’

  ‘I am from Anne’s constituency,’ I pursue.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then that’s the answer: I wish to see Anne, taking Stuart as my guest.’

  ‘For that you’d have to make a new appointment.’

  ‘But we already have an appointment.’

  ‘Not exactly. Mr Shorter has an appointment, with you as his guest. To make him your guest, you must remake the appointment.’

  She excuses herself back to Ms Campbell, who comes out a moment later and ushers us in. It is a huge meeting hall, smelling of furniture polish, with large oil paintings on the walls and, at the far end, dazzled in sunlight, picture windows overlooking the market square.

  Stuart, discomposed, sits nervously, folds his hands, and stumbles into speech at once.

  ‘Right, not being funny, it’s about the rough sleepers–the fellas what doss on the street? Right, well, like this year there isn’t going to be an emergency winter shelter for them and I’m frightened because that means there’s going to be more deaths.’

  Ms Campbell gives a look as if she’s eaten a pickled onion. She does not like deaths.

  ‘Every year there’s deaths. Sometimes more than one a month, and this year won’t be no different, even worse, so I think there needs to be some emergency provision, and what scares me is I don’t hear the council making no noises about that but they’re just sitting and waiting for the bodies as far as I can see…’

  She gives a second pickled onion.

  ‘See, last year’s shelter was brilliant. Everybody liked it. It weren’t violent, not particularly, well, yeah, only once or twice, nothing much, and the staff and the customers got on mostly, it was in a sensible place. And this year, there’s going to be more deaths than ever–that’s what frightens me. Hypothermia, drug overdoses, especially those, you’ll find, because…’

  ‘Because…?’

  ‘Because there’s been two new dog litters, of puppies, on the street.’

  Christ to buggery! He’s finally lost it.

  Ms Campbell tilts her head to one side. Now she looks as if she’s testing wines: Shiraz or Cabernet? Chateau Stuart: benefit scrounger or schizophrenic baby-killing drug psychotic? ‘I’m not sure I follow,’ she suggests.

  ‘Right, not being funny, the homeless love their dogs. They fucking…sorry, excuse me French. What I’m saying is, a lot of them, like, they wouldn’t give a…care if they never saw another human again. Pets is better than people to them. But the hostels don’t fu…allow it–well, they only got two or three places what are for pets–and they get filled up every night as it is, reglier, which is why you’ll find a lot of people with dogs sleeping out, even when there is non-dog places still available in the hostels. But now there’s been two litters, loads more people are going to have dogs during winter, and it scares the fuck out of me cos…’

  In short, unless the government stops their Singapore-style social fashioning and provides an emergency winter shelter with pet facility, more people than ever will sleep outside this winter, catch cold, take drugs and come unstuck.

  Vintage Stuart. A vast conclusion exposed to have a tiny cause.

  Ten breathless seconds between a dog and a bitch sometime in September dictates the course of a whole community’s life and the period of its deaths.

  Afterwards we do a post-mortem in a nearby pub. Stuart wonders if he was insulting. He thought perhaps Ms Campbell was annoyed. His point was not got across. He twice repeated himself foolishly; he said ‘fuck’. I reassure him it is all untrue (except the last one). He made, as he always does, a profound and extremely effective impression. To stop his concerns becoming morbid, I distract him by pointing out an old, muttering alcoholic who is shuffling past the window with his trousers sagging.

  ‘Terry Moore,’ says Stuart. ‘He’s a good old boy.’

  ‘Someone told me he’d once inherited a lot of money.’

  ‘Thirty thousand quid. Some say it were £50 or £100,000. Old girl left it to him in her will, to help him get off the streets, and he just turned his back on his old mates, only hung about the people he looked up to and spent it all on champagne. So when he come back down again, his mates didn’t want to know him any more. He was in McDonald’s the other day, and I said to the waitress, cos she was about to call the police, “Look, just give him what he wants and he’ll go.” And he turned on me even though I was trying to help him! He’s been in and out of the magistrates’ court so many times they must think: “Oh, no! Not him again! What can we fucking do with him this time?” ’

  This reminds me of the night I’d been going around with Sam and seen Stuart walking ahead.

  ‘Tuesday? Oh, yeah, I remember! Sleep out? Don’t be stupid
! Well, nah, yeah, sometimes. Once, last week, when I missed the bus. Well, twice, actually. Not being funny, you don’t suddenly become someone else when you come off the streets. Not frightening any more, is it? You’ve done it so much before, haven’t you? Anyway, it’s cheaper to sleep outside than get a taxi. Now, can we give it a rest?’

  He takes a long drink of beer.

  ‘Funny thing happened that night, though. I was going up to the hospital to fix me arm, what I showed you?’ During one of his recent sudden depressions, he deliberately cut his bicep open, almost down to the bone, and the wound had become infected.

  ‘Thing was, when I got there I saw that the A&E was really busy, so I went and sat down outside with me can of lager to wait till they’d calmed down. And a nurse went and called the police on me. I weren’t making no noise or nothing. So the police came up in their car and CS-gassed me and arrested me.’

  I am appalled, disbelieving. ‘What were you doing? You must have provoked them in some way.’

  ‘No. Just sitting outside, drinking. I puked up immediately because I got more of the CS in me gob than in me eyes. Then once it had kicked off I ripped open a can of beer and threatened to cut me throat open. When they got me down the police station, they ripped all me clothes off and, next morning, released me without charge. Mad, in’it?’

  Mad? Frankly, it’s unbelievable. ‘You weren’t swearing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Abusing the patients? Telling them to fuck off?’

  ‘No. I’d gone in, saw it was really, really busy, then come outside to wait till it was quieter cos my case weren’t urgent.’

  ‘Not jacking up? Throwing beer cans at the ambulances? Defecating in the bushes?’

  ‘Alexander! I was just sitting there minding me own.’

  This event would keep me outraged for a decade if it had happened to me. It would be the centrepiece for every conversation I ever have for the rest of my life. But it is not serious to Stuart. Two days later he rang up the hospital to make another appointment.

  In fact, I have heard another story by someone a little like Stuart (a street drinker, a man who lives in a hostel). He claims he’d had two ribs cracked when he was beaten up by ‘security men’ in the same place, just sitting by the outpatients’ entrance, having a beer.

  I tell Stuart about the fight I’d seen in the bus shelter and the gun.

  ‘Really! What happened?’

  ‘That’s the thing–nothing happened.’

  ‘That’s what it’s like with the chaotic,’ Stuart agrees. ‘It don’t work like it does for the rest of the world. The minutes aren’t connected together like it is for you people. Every day is like no day and, at the same time, it’s a hundred different days.’

  Suddenly, I feel annoyed and bang my hands together. ‘I should have tried the council estates, too. I didn’t look out there. I would have got much more! There must be dozens of rough sleepers out there, too!’

  ‘No, no, not on the housing estates,’ Stuart replies gloomily. ‘The people won’t have it. That’s where you’re more prone to be attacked is on a housing estate than anywhere else. It’s all clicky, in’it? Do you understand what I mean? All righteous people.’

  He gets out his mobile phone. Last week, Stuart came round to my house in great annoyance. He had just called his son and got an answerphone message. ‘It’s rude,’ he fumed, appalled. ‘Really rude. Didn’t think he was like that, cos, you know. I dunno. Listen to it! I was thinking he should go into business school! But, now, I dunno. It ain’t right. Not at all. You know, really!’

  I rang up and listened myself. A proper-sounding, fourteen-year-old boy’s voice: ‘If I don’t know you, go away. I’m not in and I don’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘I’m really shocked to be honest,’ muttered Stuart.

  Since then he’s had words with the boy about the importance of politeness.

  Now, as we sit in the pub, Stuart takes a long drink of his Stella and rings again, deliberately at a time when he knows his son will be at school. Stuart listens, hangs up, dials a second time, his brow furrowed. Then he dials a third time and hands the mobile to me, beaming with paternal pride.

  The young boy’s crystal voice at the other end: ‘I apologise for not being currently available. Be so kind as to leave your name and message.’

  23

  ‘I say this quite openly, there’s never been a day gone by since my brother Gavvy has been dead that I’ve missed him, because he was a monster, and I’m so glad that it’s all over. I was absolutely relieved when they told me that they’d found him dead.’

  Karen, Stuart’s half-sister

  Sex: Aged 12–15

  The whole of Stuart’s life after the age of twelve acquires a sexual tinge. In his ‘black mists’ he is fuelled by his memories of what his brother and babysitter–and, later, others–did to him. His sexual relationships with women usually fail because he finds intercourse ‘dirty and disgusting’; his main topic of conversation about prison is his hatred of sex offenders, ‘bacons’, ‘pervs’, ‘nonces’, ‘kiddy-fiddlers,’ or, to use the Stuart longhand, ‘nasty fucking dirty scum cunts’. Several times he deliberately lost his temper in jail because the warden murmured something that associated Stuart with child molesters. Then the riot squad had to grab their shields and clang along the metal balconies, ram him down to solitary, and ‘ghost’ him the next day across country to yet another institution.

  There are few details to be had from Stuart on exactly what the babysitter and Gavvy did to him. Gavvy had been touching him up since the age of nine or ten, ‘but at first it was all like loving. It wasn’t horrible, if you know what I mean.’ Then the babysitter, six months older than Gavvy and full of hormones, joined in. Stuart lost his last prop. His brother, who had previously held him with at least the pretence of a lover, now penetrated him as prey.

  As with the Unmentionable Crime Stuart can be asked about it only in certain moods, and only on days at the end of an untroubled week, when he has money to spend from the dole, so there’s a distraction to look forward to in the evening. Pick the wrong day and the subject puts him into immediate depression; he drinks, cuts himself, and then injects citric acid.

  In the last two years alone, my friend Stuart has on three occasions been sitting quietly alone in his flat when he has been suddenly overwhelmed by the resurrected agony of these memories, grabbed the nearest available implement, and butchered himself.

  His younger sister, Karen, is better controlled.

  A slight, taut, attractive woman in her mid-twenties, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, she has two young boys–Stuart’s half-nephews. Like Stuart, she has a gift for unclouded imagery. She sits, precisely, knees together, on the edge of a bed in a guest room above her mother’s pub during our interview. I loll opposite.

  ‘It wasn’t until four years ago that I finally told someone,’ she begins, and immediately pauses to distract herself with a cigarette. ‘But I don’t want to talk about me.’

  Karen’s boyfriend knocks on the door. ‘Stuart makes all the trouble for himself. He’s just selfish, that’s what I think,’ he says, and leaves.

  Karen’s son runs in. She is friendly but a little cool with him. The boy grows bored and runs back downstairs.

  ‘I think that Stuart’s had a horrendous life,’ she begins again. ‘I think the reason Mum still pampers him like she does is because she feels guilty about it. I’d say 80 per cent of Stuart and everything he’s done is down to what Gavvy and others did to him. He doesn’t trust anybody. He’s ever so feisty. If he gets caught in a topic he doesn’t want to talk about, he can be sitting quiet one minute and he’s off his head the next. I’m like that. I’m like two different people. I can go for months and months without thinking and then I’ll have a week where I can’t stop thinking about it. I shout, say nasty, horrible things. I used to sleep around with men, for attention. I took drugs, dabbled in them, really, for the same reason Stuart did, to forget abo
ut it, but then you come back to reality and you come back with a bang. Didn’t ever stay in a relationship, wasn’t interested. But since I’ve spoke about it, I’ve stuck with my boyfriend. I find days when I can’t cope with it, and I don’t want him even to cuddle me. And some days I need the affection, and I want the cuddles, and I want him to love me. That’s me. One minute I’m as nice as pie, and next minute I’m a rattlesnake. In primary school, I was the same. I wanted people to notice me. I used to distract the whole class if I didn’t think I was getting enough attention. I can remember my teacher saying, “It’s all right, Karen, we can hear you.” But when my son was born, I didn’t want to be on my own with him. I didn’t want people to think that I was doing to him what Gavvy did to me and Stuart, touching him. On a scale of anger, one to ten? I’m probably on four and Stuart’s on eleven.’

  We hear footsteps on the stairs. They reach the top, halt, suggest leaning forward, someone peering along to the closed door of our room, then creak down again. The sound of this interruption is, it occurs to me, similar to the sound her brother must have made when he came up to her bedroom to molest her. It is interesting that Karen’s response even today is to freeze.

  ‘Did Stuart know what Gavvy was doing to you?’ I ask.

  ‘That was my biggest reason why I didn’t tell anybody, because of Stuart finding out. When I think about it now, the things Stuart said to me when I went to visit him in prison, he was almost asking me. I think Stuart had an idea. But I told you, I don’t want to talk about myself. I’ve never ever been able to talk graphically about it. I was referred to group therapy, went three times, and I couldn’t handle it. I was normal compared to the others. Young girls, fifteen, sixteen, complete drug addicts. One girl kept trying to commit suicide, and I lost my temper in one of these therapy sessions because she hit a raw nerve, and I said, “Look, if you really wanted to commit suicide that bad why don’t you tie a noose and hang yourself? You obviously don’t want to be dead, else you would be by now.” She’d tried to commit suicide over thirty times. I never went back after that. This counselling was on a Thursday between one and three, but I didn’t always want to talk about it then. I don’t want to talk about it every Thursday between one and three.’