Stuart (13 page)

Stuart's legs start to flail. They don't work in reverse. I step in and guide them down, left, right, left, right, rung by rung, until Stuart's back to floor level again, covered in dirt and abandoned cobwebs.

‘Oh, forgot–Tommy can't do the electrics. He's in Dartmoor.'

I agree with the police. Stuart should not be allowed within ten yards of a motorised vehicle. He is a danger to civilised living. A brand-new ride-on lawn mower: a red beast with a fat plate of cutting blades dangling between its wheels–seething to get loose and scalp the soil. Stuart has discovered this in the potting shed. He clambers on and yanks the levers.

‘Oh,
fuck
!'

I do my best to repair the damage.

He fiddles with the seat spring. ‘Oops.'

I attempt to jam it back to rights. When I put my mind to it, I can always fix things better than Stuart.

He turns the key in the ignition. The engine makes a noise that I have never heard before.

‘Er, Alexander?'

He is a Job's curse.

Eventually, he rumbles out of the potting shed at slightly above his motorway pace, me walking ahead, like one of those people with a red flag who used to lead cars a hundred years ago, while Stuart revs behind, cursing and apologising whenever he hits a rock or tree and the blades shriek as if they're wrenching the appendix out of an earth god.

Merrily, Stuart dispatches swathes of the tall grass, and vetch and dandelions, chickweed, fat hen, speedwell, elder, four nicely ripening Gardener's Delight tomato plants, hoary plantain, fumitory, horsetail, then back to grass. The lawns and meadow haven't been mown in months. While I lug the cuttings half a mile to the compost heap, he changes direction and slashes across towards the specimen trees. In the nick of time the art historian deflects him towards the giant hogweed. It is about to flower and this, despite their splendid lunar extraordinariness, is a bad thing. Stuart jumps up before he can be told and assaults one.

This afternoon is one of the few times I have seen Stuart unreservedly happy.

‘Lapsang shoe-pong? Ve-rry tasty.'

We are all having tea on the freshly skinned meadow. Stuart pokes his finger in his teacup. It is tepid: it is suitable. He sinks the lot and lies back in the grass.

‘Fucking amazing. A-
fucking
-One,' he says lazily. A moment later: ‘I don't believe she burnt them.'

‘Who? Burnt what?'

‘Princess Margaret. Her legs. It was given out the reason what she was in the wheelchair was because she scalded herself getting in the bath. But how you gonna get in a boiling bath with both feet–take a running jump? Do you know what I think? I reckon she might have tried to torch herself. Another cuppa? Yes please, ta, James.

‘What you reading, Reuben?
Hello!
So false, false tits is. I like a bit of natural bounce. If they're going to sag, they're going to sag. That's just the way it goes, in'it? See, women haven't got to impress the men. Women have the one thing that men always want: TLC. A cuddle. That's the thing a man misses. That physical contact is more important than the sex. Though,' Stuart adds reflectively, ‘I'm not saying the sex isn't important, because if a man don't get rid of it–either by hand shandy or by a quickie, it has to be done–his balls end up on the floor. See, me, I suffer from premature ejaculation meself. As soon as it's up, it spits. I'm mature enough now to say, well, that's just the way it is. Is it frustrating? Yeah. And if it's frustrating for me, think how much more frustrating it must be for the woman.'

In certain slivers of his personality Stuart is profoundly well balanced.

‘Once when I was begging late at night, three girls come up. They had Christmas hats on and shiny stuff. Pink tops. Short skirts. And I'm not lying, they started masturbating in front of me. Truly, lifted up their skirts.'

‘Bet you'd like some of this, wouldn't you?' they chanted at him, pushing back their underwear. ‘Yeah, looks good, don't it? Ooooh! Aaaah! Well, you can't have it! You can't have it!'

Then they danced off.

Stuart does not seem to be disturbed by this. ‘Giggling, they was,' he notes. ‘But some women are fucking vicious cows. Homeless women perticulier give as good as they get. There's one I come across, a crusty–you know, the smellies who don't shower and wander from one town to another. This one, if anyone tried it on with her, she'd claw their eyes out. Most women you find on the street aren't timid, they've got their body to use, and they're hard inside.'

In the evening, we move back inside the house, eat Convict Curry and lounge around the fire. Stuart the Yapper is still going strong. (‘Nah, James, you don't want to put that log there.') It is like a scene from Agatha Christie's
Thirteen Problems
. Everyone in the living room, cosy, entertained.

(‘Nah, not there, neither.')

Or a Boccaccio setting, after the population has fled Florence and keeps each other occupied by telling stories.

(‘James, what you like? You gotta stick that branch between them three logs, and those other twigs on top.')

Except in this case no one but Stuart can get a word in edgeways.

(‘Ooh. It's gone out.')

‘And the working classes?' he gabbles on. ‘That's the trouble about them. If you come up with anything rather than going and working for somebody, you was never encouraged to go and do it. But to be honest with you, if I'm pissed up and in one of my drunken, don't-give-a-fuck moods–you know how you get–and someone comes by who talks like they've got something stuck up their arse? You know, I say out loud, “Here comes a Nobby Cunt.” '

‘What! That person was just minding his own business. He didn't come up to you and say, “You sound like a yob.” '

‘That's where you're all wrong. The middle-upper class never spoke to the kids on the council estate, even though a lot of them went to the same comprehensive school. It was because you didn't have £50 trousers on, and your fucking shoes might have holes in, they'd just walk by sniggering and laughing.'

In Stuart's vision of the British class system, everyone from lower-middle class upwards is, at best, furtively upper class. From swells in bowler hats to oiks with two Fords on a herring-bone drive, all are Nobby Cunts. ‘Upper class' does not mean the highest level of non-aristocracy to Stuart, it refers to an entire social landscape, never quite in focus, of lost and unavailable chances.

‘Yeah. The other day, me and this friend of mine, we were saying, all the people we used to take the piss out of for being nobs and cunts and arse-lickers, the truth of it is, most of them now have got really nice houses, driving really nice cars, and here we are still sitting in a pub being angry and bitter about the class war. Who's ended up losing out?'

He mentions that lately he has been on TV, which brings up another odd fact about Stuart. He is on public record much more than ordinary citizens. It is true of so many chaotic people: they are far more likely to be given historical permanence than your average taxpaying citizen. Their exploits make headlines, their sleeping habits get annual weepy features in the local paper, they are interviewed for TV whenever the police do a crackdown on anti-social behaviour, their haircuts, tattoos, and facial piercings are photographed for postcards and people doing art-school assignments. By the time Stuart gets to front an eight-minute, nationwide documentary on BBC2 about homelessness and police bungling in Cambridge, he is so blasé with publicity that he almost forgets to mention it.

‘Quite funny, really. Last year, it was. Or was it the year before?'

The programme is called
Private Investigations
.

‘Stuart, why didn't you tell me this? Have you got a copy of the programme? I must see it!'

‘Sorry, Alexander, forgot to get a video. It's only TV. You musta been on TV before…
haven't
you?'

And so our evening continues. Stuart's gasbaggish mood never lets up, leaving us bemused and dazzled and furious and entertained and lectured and with tired ears.

‘You know what you lot want to do?' yawns Stuart at last, getting ready to go upstairs to bed. ‘Fix this place up. Rip them roses off the front of the house, cos they trap the damp. Turn the sheds into a youth club with them flats I was talking about. Seriously, I've got it all planned out–where the mower was, that'd be the disco. You'd earn a packet. Then the ponds. Know what you should do there? Fill 'em in. Then you could make that fieldy bit into a go-kart course and charge a fiver a go. It could be really lovely here.'

‘You fucking ponce, I'll rip your head off!'

He rushed for the door, kicked aside the table, squashed a window pane as he hit the wall, sliced his finger on a shard of glass.

‘Ring the fucking Old Bill on me, then, Alexander!' he hollared. ‘The fucking Old Bill know all about me! I'm gonna fucking tear your throat out!'

It was 8 a.m. in the morning. Everybody else asleep.

The bottles of beer and bowls of congealed Convict Curry stacked up by the inglenook–he scattered them across the floor.

‘Think you're fucking clever, eh? Think you can fucking talk down to me, eh? Eh? Eh?' He jammed me up against the broom-cupboard door, his fingers digging around my windpipe, squeezing sharply with every ‘eh': ‘Eh? Eh? Eh?' He sprayed spittle over my glasses. I tried to take them off. I jerked like a chicken.

‘Fucking stupid name, Alex-
and
er, fucking poncey name, Alex-
and
er, eh? Eh? Eh?'

Afterwards, I decided what I should have done: I should have reached down and stroked his thigh. That would have shocked the name-snob ponce-hater. Face wide with horror, I then would have jabbed my inkpen in his eyeball and flicked the jelly out. That would have made me happy.

I'm proud of myself for what I said next.

‘Go on, do it,' I gurgled. ‘Do it, do it, do it.'

‘Eh? Eh? Eh?'

Jerk, jerk, jerk.

‘Hit me, hit me, hit me.'

My memory about the rest of my stay at Fir Grove is in shreds.

Stuart, asleep upstairs throughout the uproar, was woken by silent blue lights flashing across the ceiling of his room and jumped out of bed and locked himself in the wardrobe.

With the arrival of seven policemen, shame set in on me. I wandered about the orchard and paddock at a distance from the officers, hands in pockets, worrying at my foolishness. Why had I tried to imitate Stuart? Who did I think I was? How embarrassing!

‘Right, officer,' my attacker was vociferating, ‘this fucking ponce…'

‘Now, sir, I don't think that's a helpful attitude.'

‘Right. This ponce…'

‘Let's try and calm down, shall we, sir?'

‘I am fucking calm! He was trying to stop my missus getting the things what's in this house.'

And why shouldn't I? The woman was an ex-tenant of Fir Grove who'd refused to pay the rent. She'd also tried to punch her landlady. I wasn't going to let them drive up and steal back a load of stuff they'd forfeited. All I'd said was the two numbskulls would have to sort the matter out with the owners before they could start grabbing whatever took their fancy. At that point the male of the two subspecies assaulted me.

‘Then you had fisticuffs?' said the officer, deadpan.

The subhuman jolted forth. He jabbed his finger in my direction. ‘He fucking provoked me!'

‘Provoked you, did he?' The policeman's interest perked up. ‘How did he do that?'

The man swelled his shoulders, his neck got thicker. ‘He took his fucking glasses off!'

‘Shut it, sunshine, or we'll nick you.'

I love the police. I wish we lived in a police state.

‘Lovely visit, that, thank you.'

We are driving back to Cambridge. A lady in a three-wheeler shoots past, then a scooter.

‘Not being funny, allowing for where the house is,' he muses, ‘you putting a padlock on the gate this morning might be a deterrent to them tenants in your own mind, but your padlock isn't going to stop nobody. It don't make no difference to a thief, a professional thief. We'd just climb over the fence…'

‘We're not talking about professional thieves,' I snap. I confess, I am slightly wounded that Stuart has not paid more attention to my brawl.

‘No, no! But it won't stop nobody. They'll just climb over and walk up.'

‘Of course it won't stop anybody if they're determined. The point is to stop them driving in. It's a small thing, but…'

‘But it's not. See, that's the difference between the way you and me think. Anybody who knows anything will tell you all you need is a screwdriver. As quick as it can be done is as quick as I can click my fingers. It's off.'

‘That
is
the point, because we're not talking about thieves. We're talking about two-bit losers. Just trying to stop them making a nuisance of themselves.'