Stuart Read online

  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.

  The purple sauce burps and splatters. Stuart does not like hot food himself. The first time in his life he ever sat in a restaurant was when he and I and another campaigner, Cathy Hembry, went to Leeds to berate Keith Hellawell, the Labour Party’s ‘Drugs Tsar’. Stuart ordered a chicken tikka masala, which, he claimed, pushing the plate away and fanning his mouth, was ‘kuu-aaah, uneatable!’ That night in Leeds, he also stayed at his first ever hotel. Since then he has become an expert on Indian restaurants in Cambridge (non-spicy dishes only).

  The purple sauce burps and splatters.

  The Convict Curry is served late in the evening. Rich, hot, oily, profound, and infused with powerful flavour when cooked by a master–even if the accompanying rice tastes like builder’s slurry–the cheapo-chicken-shaped Eskimo chins become tender, beautifully moist and pull back reassuringly from the bone.

  Stuart picks up his plate and drops himself in his chair in front of the television. ‘There, where’s the remote?’ He takes a bite of mushroom and chews breathily.

  The Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky and Hutch, Knight Rider–these are his favourite programmes: anything with muted 1980s colour, an atrocious plotline and car chases.

  We watch The A-team for five minutes. Another car crash. George Peppard dropping watermelons from a helicopter onto Bad Guy’s windscreen, which promptly smashes, sending Bad Guy soaring off the side of the road. In the next shot–car midair, heading towards disaster–the windscreen is intact again. Stuart bursts out laughing. ‘That’s why I love it. It’s brilliant.’ The car flops into a shallow lake.

  ‘Let’s go, partner,’ mimics Stuart happily.

  A moment later he flicks through the channels again and finds what he really wants. ‘This is the best.’

  We settle down to watch a programme about archaeology.

  The last bus into Cambridge is the 11.10.

  ‘We’ll do some book tomorrow, yeah?’ says Stuart. ‘Get to see what your gaff is like, can’t I? Give it the third degree like you just done to mine.’ He pokes out his tongue in concentration and squashes his diary over his knee.

  In the dark alley out of the estate on to the main road, I discover that I have forgotten to bring enough cash for the bus driver. Stuart pushes a fiver into my hand.

  I protest and shove it back. I know that he’s been saving this money for a visit to a lock-up pub after I’m gone. ‘I can’t take your drink money. I’ll get a taxi and stop at the bank on the way.’

  ‘No, honestly, Alexander.’ Stuart forces it on me a second time. ‘I’ve had enough. You’ll be doing me a favour to stop me having any more. You’ll be doing society a favour.’

  Convict Curry–Recipe

  To feed four

  7 × economy chicken quarters. (‘There’s always someone what won’t want two.’)

  4 × onions.

  1 × jar of curry paste, ‘whatever sort they’ve got’. 2 × ‘cheap and cheering’ tins of tomatoes–Aldi, Sainsbury’s or Tesco.

  Mushrooms, sweetcorn, ‘anything like that’.

  Mixed spice.

  Ground cumin.

  Fry the onions and the jar of curry paste together ‘until you feel satisfied’. Throw in your two tins of tomatoes, mushrooms, sweetcorn, and chicken. Rinse out the curry jar and add the water, sprinkle in the mixed spice and cumin, stir, bring to a splattering boil, and simmer for two and a half hours.

  4

  ‘When and how did you become…’

  ‘This horrible little cunt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘We’ll get to that later.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  I check the tape recorder and discover I have to begin again anyway because I’ve forgotten to release the ‘pause’ button.

  ‘When and how…’

  Again we have to stop. This time my landlord interrupts. Stuart has come to my rooms today and sits, squashed between the arms of my comfy chair, his legs curved and folded like a cross between a cowboy and a grandmother. Landlord stomps up from downstairs and pokes his head around the door.

  ‘Hullo,’ he says, blankly.

  ‘Hello. Me name’s Stuart. Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Hullo.’

  Twice winner of a Mathematics Olympiad Gold Medal, coauthor of The Atlas of Finite Groups, my landlord is a generous, mild man, as brilliant as the sun, but a fraction odd. Women have a habit of shrieking when they come upon him unexpectedly, waxen and quiet, standing on the other side of a door. His hair is wild, his trousers, torn. But one of Stuart’s most personable (and most annoying) qualities is his refusal to judge strangers until he knows them, especially if they’re peculiar. Even people who are positively half-witted, open to obvious snap assessments, he will refuse to summarise, suspecting that hidden behind their veneer of idiocy is some pathetic, convoluted tale of grief.

  Landlord stomps back downstairs again, tearing at his morning’s post.

  I reach out again to the tape recorder.

  ‘When and how…’

  ‘You ain’t got a hot drink, have you, Alexander?’

  Unwilling to leave Stuart alone in my room, I dash up to the kitchen, suppressing frustration. ‘Thank you,’ he calls. ‘Four sugars with tea or coffee, please, don’t matter which.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he shouts again when I yell down to find out if he wants milk.

  Although Stuart and I have met dozens of times now, this is his first visit to my house and I am worried. His wild life and humorous criminal anecdotes suddenly seem a little alarming. Perhaps he cannot help himself. Perhaps even now he is squeezing all my possessions into his enormous pockets. At his mother’s pub–in the village where he grew up, on the other side of Cambridge–Stuart says the women ‘blatantly’ hide their handbags when he comes into the lounge bar.

  ‘Which I don’t understand,’ he likes to observe. ‘I don’t do bag-snatching. Don’t approve of it.’

  What about wall decorations–does he ‘do’ them? My beautifully framed and glazed pink ostrich feather fan? Or the floral teacups on top of the piano? The Volterol (50 mg) in the bathroom medicine cabinet?

  I hurl slop out of mugs, plunge for a spoon in the washing-up bowl, swoop through cupboards in search of tea bags, and dart back down the stairs splashing hot water on the carpet.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says a third time as I step into the room again.

  There is no evidence that he has moved. Nothing appears disturbed. The only noticeable change is the brown blanket that has slipped off the back of the chair and fallen over his ear. A ponderous length of ash drops off his roll-up.

  ‘These books,’ he says, nodding at the shelves above my desk. ‘Have you read them all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Half?’

  ‘Not exactly.’


  He notes with surprise one on the floor near his chair: ‘The Hunting Wasp–a whole book just about them little summer things?’

  Leaning forward, he picks out another. ‘This one, Mauve: what’s that about?’

  ‘The colour mauve.’

  Stuart slowly shakes his head as he sits back again. ‘How’d he fucking get away with it?’

  ‘Right, ready? Right, you done? You’re doing me head in with that machine, Alexander. What’s that first question again, then?’

  ‘When and how did you become…’ I begin.

  But yet again there is a delay. How difficult can it be to get started on a person’s life? Stuart has accidentally knocked the microphone off its perch. I replace it on his knee.

  ‘And you’re sure that red light means it’s working?’ he checks. ‘Cos I know what you’re like, Alexander, with technology. It shouldn’t be green?’

  ‘Stuart, it’s a tape recorder, not a traffic light.’

  ‘Just checking. No offence. Bit nervous, I think. Me fucking life, you know. By the way, I’ve been thinking of a title. On the Edge of Madness. What do you think?’

  ‘I think it stinks.’

  ‘Right.’

  James Cormick, a linguist friend of mine, describes Stuart’s voice as ‘a light tenor with a slightly “old” timbre that makes him sound in some way tired or prematurely aged’. Ironically, the weakness in his voice is his strength as a speaker, which is why he does so well on our talks together. He is not a bully boy bragging about his exploits. He comes across as a bit of a weakling–a flimsy article, in fact, if you were to hear him only on tape–who has somehow survived, scoring points by timing and intelligence rather than noise. ‘He can describe things with absolute brutality,’ says Denis Hayes, the second of the two homelessness workers who most helped Stuart to get off the streets. ‘No matter how appalling whatever it was, he has this deadpan delivery. It’s disconcerting because the words coming out from this gently spoken person need Peter Cushing to be reading it. It is completely the wrong voice.’