Stuart (23 page)

Yet, in maths: ‘Very pleasing work this year', ‘tremendous progress'. ‘A likeable lad, although he and trouble are not strangers!' writes the head teacher. Stuart was not a natural delinquent, he believed. ‘When he is good, he is very, very good…'

The following year, in English, he ‘tries hard'. His ‘effort has been inconsistent', but ‘I have been particularly pleased with his work on play-writing'. But now maths has collapsed:

There seemed, from the outside, even knowing about his discovery of violence, to be no rhyme or reason to the boy.

In fact, there was an explanation for this erratic behaviour, which is now recognised as symptomatic of a certain type of distress.

Between these two pieces of paper, Stuart's last two reports from the Roger Ascham school, his affectionate brother and his babysitter had begun to rape him.

22

Spring turns to summer. Things do not change. Stuart is given a fresh car and ‘wraps it through a roundabout'.

‘Truly. The fucking trees was poking out me head.'

He finds a girlfriend. ‘Walking back from the pub I was, and she 'twas on the other side,' he says blushingly, using oddly poetic speech. “Fancy a kiss, luv?” I says. And she says: “Yes,
please
!” Mad, in'it? Says she's been bang in love with me since she was a little 'un.'

‘What? Through all the troubles? Homelessness? Prison? Care? Is she all right in the head?'

‘Wondered that meself. Cor, big, healthy girl, if you know what I mean. She don't half wear me out.'

Mixing Viagra and Ecstasy, in proportions one to one and a half, he has discovered a cure for his premature ejaculation. It makes you ‘fucking blow off the walls'.

A second car is abandoned on the A14. He and I and his new girlfriend, who turns out to be a psychiatric nurse, amble across the fields to try to jump-start it, but the engine is dead. For several weeks I pass this car-shaped piece of metal on my way to visit Stuart at his mother and stepfather's pub, where he continues to be under police curfew. It sits untouched in the lay-by as if the owner has just stepped into the bushes for a pee. Then one night vandals set fire to the seats. For a few weeks longer it clings on, blackened, lopsided, aching with burns. Then it is gone. Nothing left behind except three smudges and a handful of windscreen safety glass, swept neatly into a pile by the kerb.

Stuart is sometimes full of balm during these months: the plaintiff in the knife attack case has gone missing, the secondary witness is reluctant to testify, Stuart's solicitor has discovered an inconsistency in the prosecution statements. At other periods he is back on the smack, ‘doing me nut in': two more witnesses have been found and his barrister has forgotten his name. He has been put on the temporary shortlist for a Crown Court appearance eight times, which means he must ring up the magistrates' office every night for two weeks to find out if tomorrow he will or will not get his day in front of the jury and be sent to prison for the rest of his life. Each time, the fortnight has passed without his case being picked, so he is taken off the shortlist and can relax for a month or two longer. The attempted murder claim has come up again. It looks again likely to be added to his charges.

Autumn approaches. ‘If I wanted to find out where the homeless sleep and count them,' I ask Stuart one day, ‘where would I go?'

‘No use asking me. What might be the place one week isn't used next week because the police have come down heavy on it, or there's building works or someone's upset somebody else and it's fucking madness tonight where it used to be really peaceful yesterday.'

I have an idea for an article, I explain. The city council housing department has done a street count of the Cambridge homeless and found only nineteen rough sleepers. Everybody knows this is nonsense–the figure is a lie, a fudge or an ineptitude. But a lot of reward depends on it. Keep the street count low and central government provides grant money and plaudits; lose it into the twenties and thirties, and central government, which operates according to a sort of Soviet Union-cum-Lewis Carroll logic, withdraws funding and gets nasty.
^*

Cambridge, the homeless, hints of corruption: with that combination I'll be able to sell a newspaper article and make a few bob out of the homeless myself.

Except for one trouble: to do the research I have to do a street count myself. I need to know where the homeless sleep, especially the better hidden places, where the city council might not bother to look.

‘Who else can I ask? I've tried the outreach workers. They'll lose their jobs. The hostel staff ditto. Everybody complains, nobody can afford to take part.' There is another reason Stuart doesn't feel able to help me personally: yesterday he tried to stab his stepfather and is feeling the worse for wear.

I have been to several of what are called ‘agency meetings' between local-government representatives and charity staff, which follow a sickeningly predictable pattern: preceded by chin-jutting resolutions by disaffected staff ‘to tell it as it is', concluded with angry walks back to the office muttering ‘and
that's
when I almost said to her…' and filled up in between by an hour and a half of toadying.

It is no wonder the government doesn't know what it is about–their control of statutory funding for charities means charities have to toe the political line and no one reveals the truth. Altogether I am at a loss. How can I find out where the homeless sleep?

‘Alexander, what are you like?' retorts Stuart. ‘Think again.'

I think again and am left with the same answer.

‘Ask somebody on the streets. Ask a homeless person.'

It is odd how, even in the depths of supposed concern, one forgets that these people are capable of usefulness.

It was at the courts in King's Lynn that Justice Jonathan Haworth (may the shame of it be inscribed forever upon his memory) directed the jury to convict Ruth and John. It is to the courts in King's Lynn that Stuart is finally to be taken to trial. The date is fixed, his appearance checked, verified, validated, confirmed, checked again.

The same people who decided that Ruth and John were guilty of ‘knowingly allowing the supply of a heroin on the premises'–despite Ruth and John arranging regular meetings with the police (which the police usually did not attend), producing a drugs policy that was sent to the police for approval (to which the police never replied), banning people for even suspicious conversations that might relate to drug purchases, and on a number of occasions calling the police to get them to remove suspected drug dealers from the premises (to which the police usually responded four hours later, or, once or twice, so long after the summons that the charity had closed for the day)–these same sorts of King's Lynn people will also make up Stuart's jury. It will be the same judge, too, awful in wig and robes.

We take the train up together.

The lime-green shirt of Stuart's magistrates' court appearance has been replaced with a conservative deep blue item, three sizes too large. His shoes, his smartest pair, are black Doc Martens with the scuff marks drowned in polish. Because the campaign's success in getting Ruth and John released so quickly has been a mighty slap in Mr Justice Howarth's face, we wonder if he might remember Stuart and decide to have him executed.

Yet Stuart is in good spirits. He is about to be convicted of a ghastly, violent offence after two previous convictions for ghastly violent offences, at a time when the Home Secretary, a man who shops his own son to the police, swaggers about with his baseball jargon policy of ‘Three Strikes and You're Out'. After the verdict, Stuart will have one last week of freedom before sentencing. The term is likely to be fifteen years, possibly longer. Yet he is treating the whole thing as if we're on a day trip to north Norfolk to play in the penny arcades. How can this high-strung, morbidly imaginative man remain sanguine?

The train jangles among the flat, black-rich fields of Cambridgeshire and we talk about ramming cars into brick walls.

Did I know, he says, that the best stolen cars are ‘rung'?

No. ‘Rung', as in a missed telephone call? ‘Wrung', as in what I did this morning to my towel after I'd dropped it in the bath?

‘Nah, r-u-n-g, when the identity's changed. Like, you'd get a car what's a write-off, and go and nick another car what isn't, and turn the write-off into a new one,' explains Stuart with the confident air that this expels all misunderstanding.

‘How can you turn the write-off into a new one?'

‘Right, insurance companies have auctions of cars what have been written off, cos dealers can buy them to break down for spares?'

I nod.

‘So you'd buy a smashed-up Ford Cosworth, go and nick a different car, change all the plates, change the numbers, give the nicked one a respray. If you know what you're doing, you can turn what looks an ultimate smashed-up never-driveable car again roadworthy.'

Clear as second-hand engine oil. Stuart's meaning is, I think, as follows: a) scrap dealers buy smashed-up, broken-down cars at insurance company auctions to use for spare parts; b) thieves can also buy these cars; c) to ‘ring' a car (is ‘ring' the present tense of ‘rung'?) thieves steal a good car from the roadside, take all the distinguishing marks off it and attach the marks to the smashed-up car; d) because the smashed-up, broken-down car with no windscreen and only two tyres now has the good car's identifying marks, you can drive it again.

Immediately, as Bertie Wooster would say, I put my finger on the flaw in the argument.

‘So, you've put all that effort in to turn a useless car with one set of numbers into another useless car with a different set of stolen numbers? Why not simply take the good car and change the numbers over to that one?'

‘How can you ring the good one? It's fucked.'

‘What? No! It's the other one that's fucked. The one you bought at auction.'

‘No.
That's
the good car. It's the one you nicked that's not good because it's not legit, is it? Good don't mean
good
as in good quality. Good means good as in will the police bang you up if they catch you in it?'

What a classy misunderstanding. This is what I love about my friendship with Stuart: even the simplest words can spring surprises. It has turned out that we don't understand each other's use of ‘good' and ‘bad'.

For the next ten minutes I am lost in happy thoughts. The train rolls into Ely then rumbles off again, over the level crossing, under the grumpy eye of the Cathedral, alongside a canal lined with silvery willows.

It's not just ‘good' and ‘bad' either. I see, when I think about it, that our notion of the word ‘car' is also different. If someone said to me, define a car, I'd find myself caught in a long physical description, cautiously philosophical, like Bitzer defining a horse for Mr Gradgrind in
Hard Times
: ‘Automotive vehicle, modest in size, carrying up to eight passengers (seated), and wheels, minimum three, not confined to tracks.' To Stuart, the answer is contained in one fact: a car is its numbers. The ‘bad' nicked car has been turned into a different, ‘good' car because the engine numbers have been changed, usually done by substituting the engine portions that have ‘bad' numbers impressed on them with similar portions from a smashed-up, auction-purchased legitimate ‘good' car. The hulk of legitimate metal, though it has wheels and an engine and may even still putter along, has now ceased to be a car at all.

Revelation comes with these misunderstandings. Stuart's life and way of thinking momentarily exposed. Like a break in the hedgerow during the country lane part of a journey. For an instant you glimpse scenery you haven't seen before–fields of poppy and cornflower, trees gnarled in the shape of demons. Then it is gone again. You press on, exhilarated.

‘What do you do with these rung cars, then?'

‘Sell them. Use them for getaways. Depends.'

‘How do you sell them? How do you advertise a rung (or is it “ringed”) car?'

‘Don't need to advertise. People just know. Posh people, cos they've got the money to buy them, don't they? Even people what have been brought up on a silver platter know about rung cars. They just hear about them on the estate, don't they?'

Stuart on top form–again. Posh people on council estates. People so posh they don't just get a silver spoon between their lips, they get carried around their four-bedroom semis on a silver salver like suckling pig.

The boy's a freak, surely.

No. He's not. People like Stuart–the lowest of the low on the streets, outcasts even among outcasts, the uneducated chaotic homeless, the real fuck-ups–people who've had their social and school training lopped off at twelve: they simply don't understand the way the big world works. They are as isolated from us normal, housed people as we are from them. If Stuart is a freak, then it is for opposite reasons: it is because he has had the superhuman strength not to be defeated by this isolation. It is because he has had the almost unbelievable social adroitness to be able to fit in smoothly with an educated, soft-skinned person like myself and
not
make me frightened half to death. If Stuart's a freak, I salute freaks.

‘So,' I begin again, slowly, ‘if I decided I want to ram-raid a place, where would I get a suitable car?'

‘You'd just go and steal one.'

‘By smashing in the driver's window and breaking the steering-wheel lock by twisting the wheel in opposite directions with my hands and feet.'

‘Well done, Alexander,' says Stuart, giving me a look of Gradgrind approval. ‘And if the street's too public to use a brick?'

‘Then a “jiggler” key. These are ordinary keys, which have been blunted, so instead of fitting into just one car they fit into lots of cars.'

‘Exactly. Not fit-fit, but almost fit. You only got to jiggle them a bit and it pops the lock. What if you haven't got a set of them?'

‘A slide stick,' I reply smoothly. ‘To make a slide stick, take a metal band from a pallet of bricks, cut down to eighteen inches, chop a big notch from one side and three smaller ones on the other. Slip into door panel.'

‘Yes, mate.'

‘But what if I wanted to get a car that's been rung?'

‘You wouldn't get a car what's been rung to go and do a ram-raid with. What's the point? You just go and nick one, cos you'll just set fire to it or you'll burn the engine out and it might get smashed up.'

‘I see. So, what next? I'm in the car, in the village, about to ram the…' I gesture at the window of our train carriage, imagining that it is the plate-glass shopfront that I'm about to accelerate into and behind it, among the Norfolk reeds and the River Ouse, lie bootloads of pinchable goodies. ‘Do I go in front first?'