Stuart (22 page)

‘I saw a police officer outside the window. My head had already gone and I believe I had to burn the Devil out of me. It was then that I put the chip pan on. I was intending to harm myself and towards killing myself was going to pour the fat over my head. Before I could harm myself with the chip pan the electricity cut out. To self-harm I cut myself and started drinking my own blood and locked the door.'

Another question concerns Stuart's bail conditions, which require that he lives with his mother and stepfather, at the pub they run in Midston. The police are goggle-eyed that Stuart has got bail at all.

‘But you want to change them so you don't have to live with your parents all the time,' says Solicitor Boy, as if talking to someone very spoilt.

‘I can see why the prosecution's not happy about it,' agrees Stuart. ‘But, me being an alcoholic, it just don't seem sensible to make me stay in a pub.'

Solicitor Boy makes another tick, taps the clipboard thoughtfully, then gets up and strides back to rejoin the stream of fellow lawyers hurrying between doors, looking neither to right nor left. Stuart and I wander across to the allocation board, then into his assigned courtroom, which is not at all how I remember the place from my one experience in the dock. The room in my memory was a tawny, squeezed-up Tenniel drawing, and the magistrate, high up, had hung over me like a cloud. ‘Take your hands out of your pockets, young man,' he had boomed.

This room is spacious and light. The sun glances in from a spread of windows above and illuminates the considerate, friendly woman presiding at the pale wood bench in front. We are a few minutes early for Stuart's hearing, and are gestured by an usher to the back row of the visitors' seats, where we sit down and arrange our expressions into ones of respectful attentiveness. At times like this, each display of politeness seems like a reason to hope. The case before Stuart's is being finished off. It concerns a portly man, ‘widely respected in his community', who'd ‘uncharacteristically' punched a total stranger in the face in the toilets at Tesco's. He looks as though his usual method would be to use a sherry bottle. He gets three months' community service.

Half an hour later we are back outside, Stuart undoing his tie as if shaking off an insect. The magistrate has agreed that his case is outside her domain, and has asked that it be referred to the Crown Court as a matter of urgency, given the dangers of keeping a knife-wielding sociopathic alcoholic confined to a public house.

‘How long do you think you'll get?'

‘Depends on the judge on the day. If he's had an argument with his missus, he could hand me a ten.'

One of the dealers caught in the Ruth and John raid had been expecting seven years. It was his second offence. A class-A drug. The judge was a known hard man. But on the morning of the sentencing, the judge didn't show up. He had to have a hip operation. A softie court recorder took over, and the dealer got away with a three. I know it's a trite observation, but it always shocks me: there is very little connection between law and justice.

‘It's got to start at six,' Stuart reflects. ‘Six plus. Me last two were for five, and I still haven't learnt me lesson, have I?'

Cambridge Magistrates' Court is a hundred feet above street level, a vertiginous building on top of the city centre multi-storey car park. The lift back to street level smells of urine and ash. It is ironic that Level D, where the homeless sleep, is in the same car park, four storeys further down: the greatest source of prison fodder efficiently connected to the institution set up to put them there by a lift. We step outside. There is a clutter of grubby types nearby: one begging next the telephone box, another entangled in blankets and beer cans against the wall, a third playing the penny whistle–all considerately trying to save the police and judiciary the bother of having to go the extra four floors lower, to Level D.

Stuart nods at the penny-whistle player.

‘Funny, me and a mate was talking in the Man in the Moon the other night about what become of all the people we used to know when we was in care. So many of them ended up on the streets. Matt Starr, he become a junkie, I seen him gouched out on a bench last Saturday; Ali Crompton, junkie, six months for shoplifting, gets beaten up by her bloke reglier; Timmy what's his name, Harris, dead, a car crash, and his brother Mike, but a different car crash, after a burglary; Julie Dover, selling herself, to pay for a habit. Eight out of ten of them are junkies, done bird, or dead. Two brothers have been charged with murder. One's already done two fours for GBH–he got a reduced to manslaughter for someone on the park. The other's done little bits of bird, and he got a six-year for stabbing his wife eighteen times.'

‘Did you know which ones in care were going to pull through, sort themselves out, and which ones wouldn't? The man who stabbed his wife–did he, when you knew him, seem like the sort of man who'd end up doing that?'

‘No, but that's what I keep saying to you. I never looked at things in that way. That weren't how I lived. Because you've lived such a different, fucking straightforward life, you're asking me to think like you'd think, and put perspectives on things. I can't do that. I can't even say I knew of any purpose I had in life meself.'

We walk on in silence, through the civic vulgarity of Lion Yard shopping centre, where ‘Topple' died, past the
Big Issue
seller who's called Sean and injects in his stomach, and the Baker's Oven bakery and tearooms, on the roof of which ‘Scouser' sleeps. This shop has good chocolate éclairs in its bins, which the homeless eat, although sometimes–if the manager's had a bad day, or one of the rough sleepers has been particularly untidy or abusive when rifling through–they are deliberately mixed with floor dust and glass.

‘Put it this way,' I say, ‘if you had to pick one thing only, one incident involving yourself that has made you become what you are, what would that be?'

‘The day I discovered violence.'

He always says it like that.

‘The day I discovered violence'–as if he had unearthed a great treasure.

21

‘A lot of the madness now does stem back from when I was ten, eleven, twelve.'

The Discovery of Violence: Aged 10–12

‘Stu Spag! Stu Spag! Stu Spag!'

‘Wobble Foot!'

‘Spaghetti Legs!'

Bobby and Johnny Grimes roaring out of the clouds, arms wide, balletic swoops across the street, shrieking like Stukas. Midston, 1979. Location: outside VG Stores.

‘Divvy alert, nine o'clock right.'

‘Looks like a bad 'un, Dad in nick 'un, has it up the bum 'un, spag on brain 'un, eliminate!'

‘Bandy Boy!'

‘Bendy Boy!'

‘Skeeeeaaaaahhhh…Divvy,
Paki,
divvy,
Paki,
divvy,
Paki
…'

‘Giiiimp-eee!'

‘Nnnngguuuoooo…
Vegy
bles,
vegy
bles,
vegy
bles…'

One day Stuart, when he was older, would learn that he could speed up his legs by stabbing them. ‘ “Live, legs, fucking live,” I says to them. Key, pen, whatever I've got in me pocket at the time. Just wound them and hurt them, to make them go. “
Live,
legs,
live
.” '

But on The Day He Discovered Violence they plodded.

‘Get him! Pull his hair! Break his nose!' cried these ghastly
Lord of the Flies
children. ‘Trip him! Kick him! Eat his eyes!'

Plod, plod, plod, went Stuart's legs. Yard after yard, minute by minute. Up Fore Street, North Street, Fenner's Green, the churchyard, Spense Road, the river, Castle Hill.

‘What do you call a bloke who's got no arms or legs who is floating in the sea?'

‘Bob!'

‘What do you call a bloke with no arms and legs who sits in a bath of boiling hot Bovril?'

‘STU!'

Plod, plod, plod, went Stuart's legs.

Outside the church gate, the Grimes' sister joined in and fluttered behind like a flag, throwing her polka-dot skirt as high as her shoulders with every skip.

Stuart battered through a hedge, down a path, across the park, the way behind bellowing with bloodlust.

‘Three women, all up the duff, right?' whispered Bobby, trotting now, two steps behind. ‘Buns in the oven? First one, she says, “I'm making this lovely pink sweater because I hope I'm gonna have a baby girl.” Second one, she says, “I'm making this lovely blue sweater, because I hope I'm gonna have a little baby boy.” But the third one, she holds up her sweater, and says, “Well, I hope I get a spastic, because I've fucked up these arms.” '

‘Stuuuuuaaarrrt…weee'rrrreee coming to kiiiii-llllll you,' whispered Johnny in his other ear. Soft and long and amorous.

Stepfather Paul was making tea when Stuart finally clattered into the kitchen.

Yet instead of giving sympathy, he also turned on the boy.

‘He told me that if I didn't go out and stick up for meself, he'd fucking belt us one,' recalls Stuart.

‘No,' protests Paul, ‘I never would have said that. I never would have said I'd hit him myself.'

1980: Larry Holmes knocked out Muhammad Ali; Henbit won the Grand National on only three sound legs.

Stuart Shorter, four foot three in his nylon socks, opened the kitchen door, walked up the garden path, and smashed his forehead into Bobby the bigger bully's face.

In Stuart's eyes, the whole of his life pivots on this incident. It was the unexpected moment at which he found some power, and the weakling became strong. In his ‘murder story' like ‘what Tom Clancy writes' the head-butting of Bobby is equivalent to the moment at which the timer on the anthrax bomb to serve up the president starts ticking down to zero, only Stuart's good character is not going to be saved. It is possible it still could be saved, if Stuart didn't have the luck of Job. But in this murder story the baddies have a few more tricks up their sleeves. Not the least of these is that Stuart is not sure, and never has been sure, whether or not he is one of the bad guys himself.

The next six months after his triumph over the Grimes boys were a feast of head-butts. ‘Honestly, I got X-rayed a year ago and they said I had a hairline fracture in me skull what had been there since I was ten, twelve years old.'

‘Doesn't it knock you out?' I ask. ‘If I hit my head against someone it'd knock me out.'

‘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: