Stuart (16 page)

Stuart started receiving anonymous phone calls: a man muffled and distorted–sharpening knives, biffing baseball bats–accused him of deliberately drugging her ‘so that I could have me wicked way with her. And all cos her clothes were ruffled. Parents never believe their child could do something wrong, do they? Their children couldn't have taken drugs because they fucking begged for them or slept with a dealer to make him give her some. There's got to be some nasty other person to blame.'

Two weeks after the anonymous threats began, Stuart marched into the pub where he knew Kayt's father and brothers drank every night, smashed the end off an empty pint glass in front of all the customers and shouted, ‘You want to fucking get me? Is that what you want? I'll do the fucking job for you!' Then he rammed what was left of the pint glass into his neck.

That's how he got his current flat. The council had to move him away from his old flat near the hospital ‘to a place what was stable and safe and over the fucking other side of town'.

Stuart frowns and takes on an expression of concentration. ‘I tell a lie. I did see Kayt one other time. It was last week. It was on the street.'

‘Did you speak to her?'

‘Yeah, only she reckons she wasn't Kayt. She reckons she was from Devon. The funny thing is that her name was Kayt, and if she wasn't Kayt then she was her fucking twin sister–same teeth, same way on her shoulders when she was walking.'

‘Well, did she recognise you or didn't she?'

‘She come up to speak to me, only she reckoned she'd never seen me before.'

There are times when the metaphysics of the street is beyond understanding.

17

‘You don't go quietly. I never did in them days. Didn't agree with going quietly. Gobbing off and spitting. As you do, as you do.'

Funny Days: Aged 15–21

The first time Stuart became homeless he was 15 and high on glue, not heroin.

Aged fifteen, full of zing. The streets were not exactly cosy, but they were not friendless either–a sort of home from home–they suited his temperament. He wanted to live. His brain wasn't fogbound by thoughts of death.

‘Where did you spend the first night?'

‘There wasn't a first night.'

‘But there must have been a night when you stopped being at home and started sleeping rough.'

‘That's what I'm saying, Alexander, no. I'd been running away since I was eleven.'

Half-sister Karen's first memory of Stuart ‘was I was in bed and they were all arguing downstairs. The next thing I remember is Stuart running into my bedroom, up on to the bed, and he had this old silver radio with a handle on it, and he was going out towards the window, to jump out the window, and my mum come behind him and grabbed him and they started scuffling in my bedroom.'

Weekends, schooldays, during the holidays, it didn't make any difference to Stuart. He'd balance on his window ledge and leap out into the garden. His legs might buckle into the flower bed and the pain of landing split his groin, but he recovered quickly. Contrary to what the doctors had said, Spaghetti Legs was getting stronger. ‘Fuck them if I didn't. Ever since I can remember, I thought of it like a war, me against the muscular dystrophy. I'd push meself and push meself. I'd show them I'd win! I wasn't going in no fucking wheelchair! Fuck them!'

He scrabbled up from the dirt, blundered as fast as his new bruises would allow down the incline to the estate road, past the air conditioner at the back of the Queen's Arms, the VG Stores, with their blue stickers advertising cheap fruit, and the aged quietude of Midston churchyard.

I have a great sense of Stuart and silence on these nights. The village, wrapped in sleep; owls glide between the yew trees, badgers poddle across the graves. Then Stuart, cleaving the peacefulness. All people, gone. No educational experts, medical specialists, bullies, policemen. His mother's disapproval, hot on his heels, runs out of breath after half a mile. It is Stuart and the earth, just those two.

He usually didn't reach the cars passing through the village in time. Their yellow lights rose and dipped among the hills, then somehow always swirled past in a bellow of noise just before he reached the crossroads. He'd push himself furiously along the country lane towards the night workers on the A10 clanging by in their vans: a crop-haired, foul-tongued, crippled boy.

Half an hour later, he'd be grabbing his way into a passenger seat.

‘Where you going, mate?'

‘Anywhere. You take me–I'll go.'

Or:

‘Hop in–going as far as Royston–that any good to you?'

‘I'll go far as China, mate. Got any baccy?'

Back in Midston, Stuart's older brother, Gavvy, who shared Stuart's room, slept on. His mother Judith: deep in dreams. Little sister Karen and the youngest, Marcus, dozed in the toddlers' quarters. Paul, Stuart's stepfather, was out on nightshift: he was an axle and cross-beam welder and laboured all night in a noisy car factory. He would whisper back in the morning.

The phone call burst Judith's sleep. Before she knew where she was she was bolt upright, snapping on lights, address of the police station that had just found Stuart making whoopee on the streets snatched on to paper. Gavvy was put in charge of tiny ones, especially difficult daughter (another village nasty growing up there–thank God Gavvy knew how to control her, there was never a peep of trouble when
he
was in charge). Then Judith hurried out into the night to begin disturbing the neighbours with a car ignition that rasped and rasped and rasped and refused to start.

Not that it always was a police station that had got hold of Stuart. Sometimes the call came from a stranger whom Stuart had befriended or from Judith's mother's on the other side of Cambridge. Often, Judith would discover he had gone missing before she'd got to bed herself. Paul would rush back from work whenever he could and he and Judith would spend two hours or more searching the lanes for Stuart, but ‘it didn't matter how much you looked, you wouldn't find him'.

Judith sighs and shakes her head. ‘I was always totally amazed at people, because Stuart was a real little scrawny old kid. Getting lifts from all over the show. People who didn't want to know what a child was doing out and about at that time were actually giving him lifts in the middle of the night.'

Today, Judith is heavily lined, with a ready bronchitic laugh and cigarette permanently attached to her right hand. ‘Before he started running away he used to get frustrated with things but that was the muscular dystrophy. The boys all playing football: every time he swung his leg to kick he went over. And if the boys all ran off up the road Stuart couldn't keep up with them, he'd be angry with himself. But he was such a caring boy.'

She often marvelled to the police officers as she was standing in the lobby waiting for her son to be returned to her: ‘It was when he was eleven that it happened. Always such a caring boy, then all of a sudden, this sweet little boy who'd always been so caring become a little horror! Unbelievable. The change, to this little horror. The change in him was unbelievable!'

Stuart's favourite dosshole when he managed to avoid the police was a squat: a row of battered houses by the railway tracks. ‘The punks–they told me where it was, though I was a skinhead at the time, myself.' It was 1984. The year the Libyans shot WPC Yvonne Fletcher. There were still Victorians in old people's homes.

In Stuart's squat, the top ceiling was held in place with scaffolding. There were no boards or banisters on the lower floors; the doors and door frames were wrenched out ‘because when some of us needed to keep the fires going, we used to nick the coal off the railway line, if we could be bothered, or just burn whatever wood we could get in the squat. It stunk of piss and shit cos all the toilets and bathroom were blocked.' Then, one day, ‘the Old Bill come and hammered hardboard over the entrances'. Someone tried to start the squats up again, ‘ripped all the windows up and whacked all the bricks out the walls, but them squats were finished'.

Another time, ‘I was in a squat, which was a college house, and the students had left all their stuff in it because it was summer. You could guarantee that every couple of days the police would come and pay a visit at six o'clock in the morning looking for people on warrants or looking for runaways. So in the middle storey if you didn't know where you were going you fell right through the stairs. We'd made big booby traps on the stairs, big holes hidden in the steps. Even in the one by the railway, we left one door that hadn't been burnt at the top of the stairs, so at night when everyone was in, if people had been out robbing and there was nicked gear, then you just put a big lump of wood against the wall and on the door and the Old Bill couldn't push the door open. It would take some doing to get that door off.'

‘How long did you stay in the booby-trapped place?'

‘You know, to be honest, that sort of question don't mean nothing to a person like me. That's what you're going to find difficult to understand. You grew up with order so you're going to want order to explain things. Where, me, anything ordered was wrong. It weren't a part of my days. My life is so complicated it's hard for me to actually say what happened in them days let alone in what order.'

‘But some sense of time–you must have had that?'

‘Nah. Some minutes was long, other minutes was short. I know that. Sometimes I was in the park, sometimes I wasn't. Sometimes I was in a cell, sometimes I wasn't. Sometimes, which were supposed to be weeks and months–I don't think they happened at all. The one constant was, I hated the Old Bill. Anything for an argument with the Old Bill. Then, I hated going to jail, but I hated the Old Bill as well. Funny days, weren't they?'

Stuart squeezes his diary out of his jacket pocket, squashes it over his knee and writes with tongue-bitten concentration. All this talk of arrest and policemen has reminded him that he wants to speak to his MP.

During the day the fifteen-year-old Stuart rared through the streets, blind smashed, and dozed out the sunny afternoons on the green. Stuart was a glue-sniffer–as heavy as you can get at it without bypassing the rest of life and fixing yourself directly to a gravestone. He had perpetual headaches; his lungs started to give in. ‘I was at it eighteen hours a day. Three tins of glue a day. I was on death's door.'

‘Do you know anyone who's died from it?' I ask, rather shocked by my boldness.

‘Fellow called Nutty Norman. He'd tattooed his face up. That was part of his problem, that everyone was staring at him. From my experience, everybody I know who's tattooed their face up, they either end up in a nuthouse or they end up very volatile. In jail you see, like, some fellas, they've got swastikas tattooed on their forehead or on their cheek, so they get loads of shit off the blacks all the time. I know a fella who's got both cheeks tattooed, right across his forehead, tattooed here, teardrops, and he's paranoid to fuck. You know, 99.9 per cent of tattooists won't tattoo on your face, but there's always the one who will.' Nutty Norman hanged himself, high on glue, aged twenty.

Most of Stuart's tattoos were done at this time (including FUCK) using a pin. ‘Just put a bit of cotton wool round it soaked in Indian ink, and stab it in.' The five dots above his knuckles, arranged as on a dice, are the five Fs: Find 'em ('em being girls), Follow 'em, Finger 'em, Fuck 'em, Fling 'em. The tattoo I'd thought was a swastika when we first met, two years ago, is an ordinary cross with a pattern round it. A saint–a stick man with a halo above the head–is popular with home tattooists. Unfortunately, Stuart's version is decapitated. ‘I don't know why. I think I got disturbed or caught or something,' he says, peering round to look at the sorry sight on his left bicep. ‘Probably got caught,' he concludes. ‘Must have got the ink confiscated.'

Another of Stuart's friends died from sniffing Tipp-Ex. ‘Clogged his lungs up and he died. You pour Tipp-Ex on your cuff, then put your mouth over it and inhale it. They found traces of Tipp-Ex in his lungs. Fourteen, fifteen years of age, he was. He's gone to the chippy to buy the family's tea, and he never got home. I lost five friends through glue-sniffing, aerosol- and Tipp-Ex-sniffing, and every time I used to glue-sniff I was hoping it was my turn. For the amount of years I was doing it I don't know how I didn't die.'

Each winter Stuart gets minor bronchitis in his left lung because of the damage from solvents; part of the reason he had a bad memory, he thinks, is because of glue; it is possible that his black mists, his outbursts of rage, his love of knives and the severity of his crimes are to some degree related to the brain damage caused by toluene, the volatile substance that gives the high.

‘My favourite's Fix-a-fix, which come in a bright red and green tin, if I remember correct. It's like a paste. Timebond's a paste, but Timebond tastes uuuu-ughw. Evostick, in a red tin, you get a real heavy head after you've finished, where Fix-a-fix is the sweetest going.'

Stuart tried lighter fuel, ‘but just didn't like it. Some puncture-repair kits aren't too bad,' he muses.

Almost any household item containing volatiles can be used: nail varnish, clothing dyes, dry-cleaning fluid, windscreen deicer, hair fixative, car paint, aerosol painkillers. Some people spray lighter fuel into lager or Coca-Cola; others suck on fumes from rags soaked with petrol and paraffin (Australian Aborigines are particularly partial to this). According to research, the typical gluehead is an adolescent, lower-class male with low interest and motivation, whose father left or died when the child was young, who is excluded or rejected by his peers, and short of stature–i.e., Stuart to a T.

Stuart doesn't remember exactly when he started sniffing. ‘You're lucky if you can remember many instances of glue. The ones you normally remember are because you ended up getting arrested.' But after the age of fifteen most of his free time, and all of his artistry, was spent trying to find good places to get high. In a deserted house ‘all falling to bits', he hallucinated that he saw ‘cameras, a film set. Outside it was all overgrown grass and I believed that was an air bag. I ran and dropped straight out the window, landed on me back in a bramble bush on this heap of bricks and laid there all night. I fucking broke me back, couldn't move, until the next morning I managed to get away.'

Another time, he crept into a cemetery, ‘hoping to see ghosts come out of their graves'.

‘If you go and glue-sniff in woods, the trees come down and shake your hand. You see trees with mouths on 'em. It's mad. If you could paint what you see when you're glue-sniffing like me in the woods, tripping, it would make wicked art. Through hallucinogenics, I've been to Toyland, I've been in a movie as a stuntman, had conversations with bushes. Have you ever done acid?'