Stuart (2 page)

2

‘Gotta have shuume tea! Buncha cunts! I'll fuuughck-ing do you all in! Gimme me fuuughcking tea!'

Among the odds and ends of jobs I did during that year, after I first met Stuart begging by Sidney Sussex, was part-time fund-raising assistant at Wintercomfort, a rough sleepers' day centre in Cambridge. My brief was to find benefactors, make trust applications, write the lesser press releases and produce an erratic newsletter. This was not an altruistic job for me: I did it for the money. (£9 an hour, more than I have earned ever since.) I worked in an attic room, out of reach of the beer-sloshing rabble three floors below and, with a bit of luck, if I arrived early enough I could get through the gate, past the art group's paintings of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and up the stairs to my office without encountering a single one of the ‘clients'.

On this day, however, something was wrong.

‘Fuuuccking tosshhers, open up!' burbled the blotchy-faced drunk toppled against the front door. His face came attached to a grizzled beard; a finger jabbed at the reinforced glass. ‘What you fuccchking cloasshh-ed for? Gimme me fuucchhking tea!'

I slipped in the staff entrance and stared through to the dining hall. The man had a point. At this time of day it should have been open and full of fifty fellow smackheads, crackheads, psychotics, epileptics, schizophrenics, self-harmers, beggars, buskers, car thieves, sherry pushers, ciderheads, just-released-that-morning convicts, ex-army, ex-married-men-with-young-children-who'd-discovered-their-wife-in-bed-with-two-members-of-the-university-rowing-team-
at-the-same-time
. Out in the courtyard would be the merry sound of baying knee-high dogs with names like PayDay and Giro and Dregs.

Instead, the hall was empty. Blotchy was abusing a deserted room. I daringly let myself in and looked through to the blue glow of the kitchen; not even Sue, the indomitable cook, was at work. The industrial fridge and fly-killer tubes droned gently, like ship engines. The only human sound was the new secretary from North Dakota, tapping away in one of the upstairs rooms.

Wintercomfort was a good organisation. Set up in 1989 by a local businessman horrified at the number of people he saw sleeping in doorways when he walked back home from work, it was fresh and crusading and full of pep. Wintercomfort excelled at the job no one else wanted to do–acting as a last safety net for the worst street cases, calming the most violent, soothing the suicidal, comforting those about to be sectioned in the desolate wards of ‘Hospital Town', encouraging the hopeful and the full-of-plans and cleaning up Cambridge. By giving the homeless a supportive place to go during the day, it meant they were less frustrated, less bored, less desperate and hence less often blocking up the pavement and less anti-social.

But today everyone had vanished. I crept out of the dining hall as if I were the thief, and the intruder, and the pariah, and up the stairs.

The secretary, pale and shaken, not yet one month into the job, explained what had happened. Yesterday, the police had raided. Six cars and vans had banged to a stop on the pavement outside; six car- and vanloads of men and women in uniforms and crackling radios had shouldered their way in, spreading out through the dining hall, arresting left and right, then surging up to the admin and outreach and funding departments, separating staff into empty rooms, refusing to answer questions, demanding statements. Even she, with the breeze of North Dakota still in her hair, had had to give one.

That afternoon, the police had arrested the director, Ruth Wyner, on suspicion of ‘knowingly allowing' the supply of heroin.

A week later, they would take in her deputy John Brock as well.

For the last five months, among the roof tiles of Christ's College boathouse across the road–halfway down, and three feet in–a tiny surveillance camera poking through the tiles had been filming the charity premises. In the Wintercomfort forecourts, eight people had been clearly recorded selling each other £10 bags of heroin.

Downstairs, I could hear the drunk running out of steam. ‘Fuuaarkeeeen tttsssseeeee. Yoouh, fuuaarkeen gimmuuheee!' His lips slid up and down the glass in a smear of spittle, but he perked up when he saw me approaching. ‘Bout fuccking time! Where you been? It's me fucking right to have me tea! I exschpect you to stay open later now, to fucking make up for it!'

I wrenched open the door. Ruth and John were kind, good, thoughtful people, passionately concerned about the welfare of the impoverished and the disenfranchised.

‘Fuck off, pisshead!' I said.

The charity held an open meeting: wine in stemmed glasses, colourful things on crackers called–in the playful, roundy typeface of the poster–‘nibbles'. The charity governors, the charity's friends, the volunteers, neighbours. Everyone tinkled around the homeless dining hall.

A former Labour Cambridge mayor, a no-nonsense political bruiser, called the gathering to silence. ‘Order, order, ORDER! WILL YOU
PLEASE
BE QUIET!'

She then began the process that would end up taking the next year of my life: she started to turn us into a protest movement. I felt, everyone in that room of pretty wine glasses felt, appalled and personally affronted. The arrests of Ruth and John were no longer just a matter of helping the less fortunate. They had been an attack on Us. This was the closest most of us had come to feeling what it was like to be treated with public loathing. With shock, we realised we now had something in common with the homeless. How dare the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Home Office.

Indeed, their anti-drugs policy was regarded by many as a model of good practice. The judge himself, at the trial, had admitted there was no suggestion that Ruth or John or any other member of the Wintercomfort staff had in any way been involved in the deals that had been filmed. There was also no evidence to show that either Ruth or John had ever seen any deal and not immediately done something to stop it. In fact, when Ruth or John rang the police to get them to remove a suspected dealer from the premises, the police had often not even bothered to show up. They also did not turn up, though invited, to charity drugs policy meetings.

Ruth and John's crime was, in effect, twofold: first, that their anti-drugs policy had not been successful; second, that they had disagreed with the police about the best way to make it better. The second aspect centred around their policy of confidentiality towards their clients, a policy regarded as essential to getting these peculiar, suspicious and often violent people's trust so that they could be encouraged to face their addiction, take advantage of public services and come
off
drugs,
stop
begging,
give up
the streets and leave the rest of us law-abiders alone. Ruth and John–but particularly Ruth, as boss–had refused to give to the police the names of people they had banned from the premises for suspected drug use, which was often based on little more than an overheard conversation or a suspicious gesture near the downstairs toilets. This, the judge and jury, who never visited Wintercomfort, had dismissed as being nothing more than a deliberate scam to prevent police getting incriminating evidence.

The open meeting was being held today because yesterday Ruth and John had been sentenced.

John had been given four years in prison; Ruth, five.

A hundred wonderful ideas swirled around that meeting hall: demonstrations, vigils, international tribunals, questions for Parliament, a banner on Canary Wharf, a picket of homeless people outside the House of Commons, endless letters to
The Times
. Relieved by the purity of our purpose, we let rip.

‘Everyone running homeless charities must present themselves to the police and demand to be arrested,' announced one humorous man, who ran such a charity himself. ‘If Ruth and John are guilty then so is everyone else. It is a crime for us to remain free!'

‘That's elitist!' snapped back a Socialist Worker, dressed in solid black. ‘Why should you be allowed to get arrested when the rest of us can't?'

My two favourite ideas were sinking the Cambridge boat at the Oxford–Cambridge boat race and a march of homeless people on Number 10 (the big trouble with this, I realised, would be to keep the marchers from ambling off down irrelevant side streets, falling in the Thames, etc., but I figured you could probably coax them into a reasonable line by driving a vanload of Special Brew cans in front, just out of reach).

A lady with a silk headscarf observed wisely that as the undercover operation had also depended on two officers dressing up as tramps and buying heroin from dealers during lunch–a subsidised meal of spaghetti and meatballs, which, in order to lend verisimilitude to their plot, the officers had shared–the police could be sued for defrauding the charity.

The bursar of St John's College–lawyer, mathematician, former Conservative mayor of the city–wondered about sending writing paper to Ruth and John: was it better to put it in the post sealed, in bundles of three pads, or unsealed, in single sheets?

Another lady suggested throwing stones at the judge's windows. But each idea ended in the discovery that words are just words and jail bars are made of metal.

Everyone agreed that we must send Ruth and John dozens of books to keep them occupied until we got them out–as we
surely
would.

It was at this point that a soft voice, vaguely familiar to me, butted in from the front row.

‘Excuse me, but that won't work.'

The green bomber jacket struck a chord, too.

‘Why not?' demanded our chairwoman.

‘They won't fit in the box.'

‘Box?'

‘For the inmate's belongings. Alright, in Whitemoor and Long Lartin, in them top-security jails, you're also allowed a piece of carpet, what don't fit in the box, and a budgie or a canary, and obviously the cage ain't going to fit in the box. Books won't fit in the box. The screws'll chuck 'em out.'

It was Psycho. Knife Man Dan. Stuart Shorter. Wearing the same clothes as when I'd first seen him round the corner from Sainsbury's, a year before.

‘So each inmate has a box?' someone asked.

‘Two boxes. One in possession and one in reception. I'm not being funny, but you should know about boxes if you're going to have a campaign.'

The most important thing we could do, he persevered, was write letters, send stamps, and not expect to get replies. Letters go missing. Depression comes.

Stuart stood as he was talking. The chairwoman demanded it, and it appeared to cause him a little trouble to find his balance. He was about five foot six, bow-legged and anaemic. His hands he kept shoved in his jacket pockets like a man on the sidelines during a cold football match. He raised his voice for a few words when people at the back called out ‘Louder!' ‘Speak up!' then forgot himself and lapsed back into his regular murmur. But he would not stop talking. It was as though, having tasted at last what lack of diffidence was like, he was determined not to lose a single second of the pleasure.

‘Don't expect the visits to go well, neither. See, because visits is only two hours every two weeks, when you're a prisoner you build yourself up to such a pitch that when the visit comes it can't go right. It's not–' directing himself at John's wife–‘that he don't love you, it's just that visits is all what you live for when you're inside.'

‘Because if most men are true,' he observed a moment later, ‘when they go back to their cells that's when you know the loneliness. You can't take it. You know the loss.'

And about the stone throwing, Stuart was adamant. ‘I understand the old dear there is feeling rageous, but prison is all about having privileges and taking them away. If you break the judge's windows it's Ruth and John what will suffer.'

‘How can they suffer more?' an indignant man called out. ‘They've taken away their freedom and their dignity, what else is left?'

‘Their wages,' replied Stuart.

A silence.

Then a bemused female voice from the other side of the room: ‘Prisoners get
wages
?'

3

In the top drawer of Stuart's large office desk are his legal drugs.

‘Yeah, feel free,' he calls out from the kitchen, where he's dumped the sarnie plates into the sink among the tea mugs and is battling with a six-pack of Stella.

I hold up a grey plastic tube. All the substances he takes appear to cause him problems.

‘Chlorpromazine. Cabbages you. It's also called Largactil. Heard of it? No? The liquid cosh? Well, they gave it me a lot in the kids' homes. Used to put me in a wheelchair in them days.'

‘Why do you take it at all?' I wonder and place the tube back in his collection.

‘Nah–it's just another anti-psychotic. The side effects are that it leaves a nasty taste in your mouth.'

Stuart reels off the names of his medications like a classics scholar. ‘Ophenidrine. A mate of mine what was looking on the Internet said he found Saddam Hussein used it for tactical military weapons. Zopiclone, what calms you; I've also been on drugs like Mellaril, what are banned now, amitriptyline, painkiller, which
gives
you muscle spasms. Mad, in'it? At the minute I'm only on diazepam, which is Valium. It's a well-known fact that alcohol and diazepam don't mix, and they know I drink.'

‘They' is shorthand for doctors, social workers, drug advisers and policemen, although in this case it is balanced against one doctor in particular whom he is convinced is out to ignore his interests. One of the things that intrigues me about Stuart is his categorisation of his enemies. The biggest foe is ‘the System', the amorphous body of government-funded institutions that has chased him about like a bad rain cloud ever since he was twelve years old. All homeless people hate the System, even though many of its organisations–housing benefit, social security, the rough sleepers unit, dozens of charities–have been set up especially to make their lives easier. To Stuart these supportive bodies prove the essential duplicity of the System. What the person with a house might consider to be an admirable carrot-and-stick approach to making the homeless return to ‘mainstream' society (the encouragement of welfare payments, back-to-work schemes, subsidised housing, backed up, for those who don't cooperate, by the threat of the police and prison time) is looked at quite differently by Stuart. It is an approach that patronises you at one end and swipes you raw at the other. For many homeless, the reason they've ended up on the streets is precisely because this carrot-and-stick tactic has, in their case, got into a jumble. The government network of organisations that offers them dole cheques, a free health service and endless numbers of worried social workers, also puts them into a home with rampant paedophiles (unwittingly, maybe, but what does that signify when you're fourteen years old with ‘a grown man's dick down your throat'?) and then beats them up under the guise of ‘tough love' in quasi-military youth detention centres whenever they do something wrong themselves.

The System is to Stuart a bit like the Market is to economists: unpredictable, unreliable, ruthless, operating in a haze of sanctimonious self-justification, and almost human.

The closest Stuart gets to giving the System a face is through the doctors, drug advisers, housing support officers, and outreach workers with whom he deals directly. Although he is generally friendly to this little army of helpers, he respects almost none of them. When they are good, he talks about them as possible friends; when they are disappointing (which is frequently, because they are, after all, just people), they become another piece of evidence against the System.

Even one or two of the police he likes now and then.

At the moment Stuart is banging on about doctors. ‘Last Monday, my sister and me girlfriend were really worried because I'd gone doolally. Lost it. But my GP refused to even speak to them. They went up to him and said, “Look we're really concerned about his safety. He's got something tied round his neck, I'm not sure what it is, and he's got knives all over the bed.” But he refused to see me. I thought that was really fucking rude!'

Recently, I asked Linda Bendall, one of the homelessness workers who helped Stuart when he was sleeping outside, ‘Why Stuart? Why did he make it off the streets when so many others have tried and failed?'

‘He is one of the rare ones. When I first met him he was completely, totally beaten up, unrecognisable. He wasn't someone who wanted to live inside, because he felt he deserved to be out and deserved a hard time of it. But, ultimately, he had a belief in himself and he knew his limitations. If I offered him a room somewhere he would say, “I'm not going to cope with that now, I'm just going to go in and fail, I'd rather stay on the street.” His temper was like a devil on his back. He was scared of it. “I don't dare go there, to that accommodation, because I don't trust myself. I don't care how freezing it is out here.” He knew that he had to avoid the hostel cycle: get in a room, get involved in drugs, get thrown out, go in again, get in a row with one of the staff or one of the residents, get thrown out, and on and on and on and on. But he is a deep thinker. He's got everything weighed up, in a way. You tend to find that most people on the streets have a lot of time on their hands but, as a way of coping, either they fall into a mind-set that will perpetuate homelessness or they don't like to think too far because they reach painful things that have to be dealt with in order to move on. But Stuart was somebody who said, “Bring it on, bring the pain on, I want to face it.” '

The surface of the desk is covered with envelopes, pens and a pile of posters:

Stuart tells me that he has changed since he began working on the campaign. People have got friendlier. They've taken seriously what he has to say. When the open meeting at Wintercomfort was over he had asked for a role, and was immediately given one. ‘I was really surprised, to be honest,' he says. ‘I thought middle-class people had something wrong with them. But they're just ordinary. I was a bit shocked, to tell the truth.'

Stuart and I have given nine or ten talks together about the campaign since we began working together: in Birmingham, London, Oxford, in villages around Cambridge, to a hall full of university students at Anglia Polytechnic. We are the only people on the campaign who have the time to do it and we have developed a good pattern. I speak first, for twenty minutes, about the details of the case and push the petition or protest letter to the local MP or the forthcoming march in London, then Stuart gets up and knocks the audience out of its seat with a story of his life.

‘I am the sort of person these two dedicated charity workers were trying to help,' he says, in effect. ‘Do you see what a nightmare I was? Do you see how difficult it would have been to govern a person like me? Do you see now why we should have awarded Ruth and John medals for what they were doing rather than sending them to prison for what they could not control?'

Sometimes in his talk a stray ‘fuck' or ‘cunt' will slip past and then he'll blush or laugh, put a hand to his mouth in an unexpectedly girlish fashion and apologise for ‘me French'. He often ends by suggesting that the government kick out their current homelessness ‘tsar' and employ Ruth instead. ‘I really do honestly believe that.'

Clap! Clap! Clap!

More often than not, a standing ovation.

This speech and tactic are entirely Stuart's ideas. He does two things for the campaign: he folds letters and he exposes his soul.

‘Here, Alexander, you've missed the bus,' exclaims Stuart. He has startled me from my ruminations. ‘There isn't one for another two hours. Do you want to stay for supper?'

My heart sinks. More palm-shaped sarnies?

‘Me favourite–curry.'

I go out to the local shop and return with supplies. Bulgarian white for me; eight cans more of lager and a packet of tobacco for him.

‘What's that you're having? Wine? Ppwaaah!' Stuart sniffs the bottle. ‘Smells like sick. Have a Stella.'

Curry is ‘Convict Curry'. His mother's recipe. On very special occasions, he used to try to make it in the inmates' kitchen in HMP Littlehey, where he was serving five years for robbing £1,000 and a fistful of cheques from a post office.

‘Mushrooms?' A tin of buttons; Stuart tips the little foetuses in.

Then he opens a packet of no-label, super-economy frozen chicken quarters. Pallid and pockmarked, they look like bits of frosted chin, as if he did over a fat Eskimo last week. He extracts an onion from behind the toaster and begins hacking at it with one of his knives.

I finish my survey of his bedsit room.

The picture on the wall is of a place with mountains and a lazy blue lake. The plaster it covers is gashed down to the brickwork from one of his periodic bouts of ‘losing it', when he gets into a sort of maelstrom of fury and–highly private occasions, these, he does not like to think about them–takes it out on the furniture and fittings. On the floor beside the desk is an empty carton of Shake n' Vac, decorated in pink flowers.

‘Good stuff, that. Use it for anything. Like, see round the bed there? There should be a huge stain because I overdosed there last week. But just put Shake n' Vac down. All the spilt cans and vomit–cleaned it up really well. Leave it for a week first though, before you Hoover.'

The bills on the bedside cabinet are red.

No, Stuart does not mind if I rifle through them.

Cable: he has five extra channels, none of them sport, and no telephone. The reason homeless people use mobiles is because they're much cheaper than ordinary phones if you take only incoming calls. In fact, with pay as you go, they cost nothing. It's when the homeless start hanging around the public pay-phones that they're doing what ordinary people suspect them of doing on their mobiles: ringing their dealers. Stuart never uses anything but public phones for that sort of call.

Water: Stuart receives a hardship grant from his water company, and has a number of slow-paying arrangements that are taken off his dole cheque at source. As with Latinate medical names, he is an expert at these pathetic calculations–much more in control of them than I am of mine. They are part of what is unpleasantly termed ‘life skills'. Not unreasonably, a person sleeping rough must display ‘life skills' to his support workers if he is to be found a flat, otherwise he'll simply fall into arrears, annoy everybody and get evicted.

‘On the street you get the same money as you get on housing, but now it's half-grant, half-loan to furnish your flat,' he explains, and gives the curry an encouraging prod. ‘You could be £15 a fortnight down paying back the loan. So, instead of £102, it's now about £85. The water was fucking £26 a month before they remitted all me fines when I had the meter put in. And that was without electric and the gas and my TV licence. So out of £85 a fortnight I was paying £9 TV licence, £20 in electric because it was winter, £14 food minimum. Then you've got all your toiletries. I was making £49 outgoings go into £42.50. Even on pay day, your money don't do the bills because as soon as you cash your giro you just want to go out. So first thing you do if you've been on the street is fuck the bills. The only thing I made sure is that I had leccy. Spices?'

‘How can you live on that, even without the bills?'

‘That's the point. I don't.'

Stuart rattles through the shelves above his draining board: economy tomatoes, economy baked beans, economy corn flakes–everything, except the beer, in white packaging with blue lines. Economy raisins, economy powdered milk, economy spaghetti; finally, at the back, Sharwood's high-expense, in-a-glass-jar, multicoloured-label Five Spice, essential for Chinese cookery. He empties in all of it.

Court fines–imposed for drunkenness, driving offences, and refusal to pay previous fines–he disregards. ‘Just go back and get resentenced, won't I? Do three/four months inside to wipe them off. At the minute, me head's that off-key, I could actually do with going away for a bit.'

Stuart also has the ex-con's mathematical knack of immediately calculating release dates. ‘Alright, Ruth got a five,' he says, dipping his finger in the sauce and licking thoughtfully, ‘but it's John what I feel really sorry for because he got a four. Anything under four years and you only got to serve half before you automatically get released. If the judge had made it one day shorter–three years, 364 days–John could be out in two years. The extra day is the next bit up. It means he's only up for parole. He could get the full two-thirds: two years and ten months. Look, Alexander, if you want to do something useful, why don't you wash up some plates?'

His kitchen is a bombsite. Environmental health should close it down. I am committing an offence by not reporting it. The slats suspected of containing microphones are above the sink. The sink is invisible. Its rough location is marked by a swarm of dishes trying to escape down the plughole. Disgusting.