Stuart (24 page)

‘No, rear first. You have to keep your head turned away from the window.'

‘OK, rear first. Bkkoooowwww! I'm in the post office, boot in the rubble…'

‘Alexander, what are you like? You wouldn't ram-raid a post office neither.'

Disappointed, I let go of my imaginary steering wheel. ‘Why not? You did.'

‘No, I told you before. That was a crowbar.'

‘My mistake. What would you ram-raid then?'

‘Electrical shops, warehouses, little places. There's no point in ram-raiding a fucking post office, because there's never no money in the tills at night and there's nothing else to steal, is there? Take it from me,' he says wistfully, ‘gone are the days where a post office might get one big delivery a fortnight.'

An air of nasty stuffed-shirtery hangs over the cobbled squares of King's Lynn. As soon as the train clicks to a stop and the doors open, bundles of solicitors and barristers, displaced from Cambridge, clack down the terminus to the taxi rank. Behind them come the likely lads in shiny suits, surrounded by sallow girls and chain-smoking mums. They wander languidly to the bus stop. The lawyers will return in early afternoon, ciabatta in one hand, mobile in the other. Then the bus of likely lads will also reappear, but minus one or two of the members.

At the courthouse, Stuart's solicitor, the same pink-cheeked, pleasant boy we met in the last courtroom, takes him to a quiet hallway and whispers sternly.

From a distance, I watch Stuart frown, look shocked. My heart sinks. As Stuart's solicitor has often pointed out, it's a miracle that he has got bail at all, especially since his victim and principle witness are both still living in the area, alive and still stabbable. Now the judiciary must have come to its senses. They will snatch Stuart away on to remand and I will spend the rest of this book whispering to him in HMP visiting rooms while Alsatians sniff my underwear for heroin wraps.

For a second, I have a sense of ‘the System': a terrifying, clumsy, lumbering, inconstant, self-righteous, unself-critical, sloppy piece of state machinery. If it takes against you, you are never safe from it. If it can do what it did to Ruth and John, it can deliver the same outrage to anyone. It puts on a face of broad community concern. It wallows in baggy sanctimony, like American soldiers. It is always brutal in the details.

The police haven't given Stuart time even to put together a bag with his toothpaste and a change of clothes.

‘Everything's changed,' Stuart acknowledges, returning at last.

I nod with resignation.

‘What you looking so miserable about? We got the wrong idea. It's not the hearing today. It's just an affray charge, what the Old Bill want added, because of me threatening them on the night. They've still got to set a date for the proper trial. I'll have the summer, at least. It might be another six months yet.'

‘What about the attempted murder?'

‘Nah, that's been dropped. I ain't looking at life any more. It's six years again.'

‘So you're not about to go to prison?'

‘Course not. What are you on about? They can't go giving bail and taking it away just like that. Thought you'd know that by now, Alexander. This isn't Nazi Germany!'

We return in high spirits. Stuart banters with the woman in the station café and buys me a hot bacon and fried-egg sandwich–the first I've ever had–and a can of beer each, which we slurp on all the way back to Ely.

It is good, I tell myself, to step aside from Stuart once in a while. The homeless are not a real community. They are like a bunch of schoolkids, held together by proximity and pettiness and angst and the rules of tit-for-tat. Stuart's view of them is really no more than another view of Stuart. One needs to shuffle about among them to get a true view of homelessness. This is another advantage of my plan to investigate the claim that there are only nineteen people on the streets. It is not just an enjoyable desire to poke the city council in the eye but a love of truth that means I am now standing outside the city's drug-dealing public toilets at five minutes to midnight, waiting for a suicidal Glaswegian beggar who owns a £600 greyhound and claims to be an expert on Formula One sports car engines, in order that I can go around waking up all his fellow homeless psychopaths and say, ‘Hello, I'm here to count you.'

I am covered in layers of thin clothes and have a tape recorder squashed into my pocket. I feel like a deep-sea diver putting on his suit–a social diver, I tell myself.

Another reason for my research is that Ruth and John's hearing against their conviction is due in two months. The campaign has been rumbling on since their release, but it is time to up the pace again.

Jesus Green is bracketed by toilets. On the east side is a small car-park convenience, occupied by an old lady who cleans the floor and basins every day and wraps herself around one of the two lavatory bowls at night. On the west, a five-pissoir cottage, favoured by homosexuals, mentioned occasionally in indecency trials. Drug takers use the one I'm next to. It's neatly placed: across the river from the dole office, the Battered Women's Hostel, the Wintercomfort rough sleepers' day centre, the seventy-four-bed hostel on Victoria Road–it's the neighbourhood dispensary. It's shaped like a cricket pavilion. In the other direction, across the moon-lit park and beeches, towards the glow of the city centre, are the spires of St John's and Jesus Colleges. I stand in the lamplight to one side, looking as idiotically harmless as possible and glancing occasionally in the direction of the amicable crowd around the loos. Different events are going on at each of the entrances. ‘Women' is the hot spot. There are lots of ragged bundles shuffling near the entrance of that one, lots of laughter, cans being tossed around. ‘Men', on the other side, is dingier, colder–a hint of squalor. It is for the younger ragamuffin. ‘Wheelchair' is heavy duty. Every now and then someone emerges from this last cubicle and knits his way unsteadily down the ramp into the dark over the river. No time for a friendly ‘Fuck this', ‘Fuck that'–just straight off home.

Sam is five minutes late, ten minutes, fifteen minutes…then suddenly beside me. A thin, handsome man in his early twenties. ‘I'm taking a big risk, doing this.' He indicates the bog moths outside ‘Women'. ‘If they find out, I'm for it. Police do a raid any time in the next two/three weeks they'll put two and two together and make fucking eight hundred.' He checks my £30 and asks for £10 more.

A scrappy fellow stumbles up and demands £3.

‘Three pounds–it's just for
smack
–a bag costs a tenner,' sniffs Sam. ‘That's all they think about, tenners. I'll bet you he's only got seven.' To the man: ‘Got seven, have ya', mate?'

The other nods.

‘This bloke's a journalist, mate. Counting the homeless.'

The man accepts this as a ‘no' and clatters off across the footbridge.

‘What percentage on the street take drugs?' I ask.

‘Two-thirds. A lot of them become homeless because they're on it already. A lot of them start when they get homeless because of the cold. Someone says, “Here, have a toot of that. Warm you up.” '

‘A dealer?'

‘No. Just friendship. Friendship gets you on the smack more than dealers do.'

And boredom keeps you there. ‘That's the worst thing about the streets. It's so fucking boring. What else is there to do twenty-four/seven? Who will be your friend, tell you where the food and dossholes are, if you willna' associate with addicts? If you could get rid of the boredom of this life, a lot more people would give up drugs.'

It starts to drizzle. We squelch off across the park, stopping to check on the woman wrapped around the toilet bowl. ‘That's your first one. Fucking tragic. The council wanna kick her out, but she's the only one who keeps this place clean. Cleans it spotless every morning.'

Nevertheless, it occurs to me a bit unkindly, bad luck if anyone who's caught short and has to sit there with a female tramp under their bottom. ‘I have a friend who used to sleep in the toilets.'

‘Ooh, aye? What's his name?'

‘Stuart.'

‘Never heard of him.'

‘Psycho?'

Sam shakes his head.

‘Knife Man Dan?'

‘New one to me.'

‘That mad bastard on Level D?'

Sam pauses a moment, then walks on. ‘There's about fifty of them.'

It is while we're walking along Sidney Street that I spot the man himself, stalking ahead in the lamplit street, green puffa jacket, hands in pockets, the modern vision of Mr Hyde.

‘ 'Ere, mate,' Sam calls out.

But I cut him short–urgently–‘Shhh!'

We dart off down Green Street. ‘That was your second,' protests Sam. ‘He sleeps out.'

‘No, I know about him. That's Stuart. He's got a tenancy.'

‘I've seen him sleeping out.'

‘Where?'

‘Doorways and that.'

I feel annoyed. Almost jealous. Stuart should have told me. Why has he kept this a secret?

‘You must be mistaken,' I say firmly. ‘He's in a flat. Been there eighteen months, in Waterbeach. Away from Cambridge.'

Two incidents occurred that night that are important to record.

First, halfway down Green Street, Sam remembered that there was a sleeping spot in one of the buildings. We found the entrance in a dingy courtyard that smelt of vegetables. Inside was a brightly lit garage. Sam immediately began fiddling around the tables and boxes looking for ‘mementos' and I found the next entrance, into the half-empty office block above. Here we found a computer and dozens of party things: balloons, streamers, colourful hats, all cast off and lifeless under the light from the street lamp outside. In the corner, three syringes and tinfoil. What happened next frightened me so much that my memory has already become confused about it. We heard a security guard. In the nick of time we slipped back to the stairwell, down towards the garage–and discovered we were locked in. The exit door had been bolted. Sam battered at it with his shoulder. The footsteps of the guard clicked down the steps. Sam wrenched the door handle, saw another door, grabbed at that–locked, too–started kicking it. The guard's footsteps now reached the landing. Click, click, click. One more turn and he'd have us.

When I think that I have now known Stuart for three years, met his parents, sister, social workers, been out with his friends, and studied and thought as hard as I can about his life, in detail, for two and a half of them, it seems astonishing that there have been only a handful of occasions when I have had a genuine sense of what it is like to
be
Stuart. What's more, they are such apparently insignificant events: unexpected confusions about language, for example. This fright in the office block was another. Sam was terrified. He didn't know what to do. He cowered like a rat.

‘We'll have to bluff it,' I said.

‘Don't be fucking crazy.' He banged his hand against the door again. ‘We'll get six months, minimum.'

We bluffed it. I walked in front, met, at the top of the stairs, the guard, who turned out to be nothing of the sort, just a businessman working late, and asked in my calmest tone if he would open the front door for us. He obliged without a hesitation.

It never for a second occurred to Sam that we might get away with it. I have never felt before so strongly the fear of insignificance, and the power of a good accent.

In my recollection it was almost the middle of the day as we walked away, and the street full of people. But it wasn't. It was about 1 a.m. The town was empty. The pavement rang hollow. My memory has characterised my relief by filling it with crowds.

The second interesting incident took place half an hour later. Just as we were passing a large group of rough sleepers sprawled on the plastic seats at the bus station, they suddenly jumped up and started stumbling around, threatening to stab each other with hypodermic needles.

‘Where's me fucking bike? Gimme me fucking bike!' shrieked a man with a scraggy beard.

‘Stupid fucker!' This was Suze. I'd seen her before. She belongs to one of those weird families that are all homeless. Her father, her twin sister, her brother, her uncle: social nightmares, every one. Four foot six, wrapped in swathes of blanket, Suze danced about Whispy Beard as if there is nothing in the world to fear. ‘I ain't got your frigging bike! What'd I want your frigging bike for?'

‘It was 'ere a minute ago! Give it fucking back!'

‘In me pocket? Up me fanny? How can I give it back? Where'd I put it?'

‘Oh, fuck, this is all we need,' Sam kept saying. ‘Oh, he's got a gun, he's got a gun, he's a
Yardie
.'

Yardie? But he's white.

There were eight in that bus shelter altogether. Overcome with a sudden sense of ‘responsibility', Sam rushed into the fray and made it nine.